2021-2023
Despite their lofty mission statements, today’s big social media platforms are centrally focused on one singular concept: more. These capitalistic software machines are designed to stoke a pervasive and ever-increasing cycle of production and consumption for the purposes of growth and profit. To accomplish this they leverage data and scale to produce signals and interface patterns that keep us engaged, promising connection and joy in exchange for increasing shares of our time and attention. But what if social media wasn’t engineered to serve capitalism’s need for growth? How might online collective community be different if our time and attention were treated as the limited and precious resources that they are? Minus is an experiment to ask these questions, a “finite social network” where users get only 100 posts—for life. Rather than the algorithmic feeds, visible “like” counts, noisy notifications, and infinite scrolls employed by the platforms to induce endless user engagement, Minus limits how much one posts to the feed, and foregrounds—as its only visible and dwindling metric—how few opportunities they have left. Though it may be disorienting at first to navigate an online social space devoid of the signals and patterns Silicon Valley uses to always push for more, Minus invites us to see what digital interaction feels like when a social platform is designed for less.
Ben Grosser
United States
Ben Grosser focuses on the cultural effects of software. Recent exhibitions include Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Barbican in London, SXSW in Austin, and the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. His projects have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El País, and Folha. Grosser is professor of new media at the University of Illinois and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.