Break out of your box

You are unique, irreducible

Welcome to Ethan’s Turtles - I’m Ethan (spoiler) and I write this newsletter to explore the connection between digital design and critical theory.

I use this newsletter to explore the ideas that drive my own platform, called Clusta, for developing new ideas. If you’d like to see how I use Clusta, here’s how I developed this article. If you’d like to try it yourself, you’re very welcome to sign up.

“but let there be no mistake: objects work as categories of objects which, in the most tyrannical fashion, define categories of people.”

Baudrillard, The System of Objects

I remember the day I first googled ‘CRM’ - short for Customer Relationship Management. Here’s the definition given when I searched the same question today:

“Customer relationship management is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.”

Wikipedia

That’s essentially what I read when I first searched for it too, about three years ago. I remember thinking then: what does that mean?

You may have come across the term CRM. But you, like me back then, may not know what it is, or how it impacts a majority of your daily life.

The more human-friendly definition of CRM is this: as a business, you have a ‘relationship’ with your customers which goes through different stages. For example, someone has visited your website once, and may be a potential customer, whilst someone else has been subscribed to your service for over five years, and is a brand ambassador. A CRM aims to track the stages of the relationship between a business and a customer, and how that relationship changes over time.

CRM has become much more than this. You can build websites, take payments, manage grant programmes, pretty much anything that began as tracking the relationship between you and a ‘customer’ of some kind has billowed out into different products and offerings from CRM companies.

The value of this relationship tracking is segmentation. If you can segment your customers and/or potential customers, you can advertise and communicate to them in a more targeted way. Netflix, for example, can use viewing history to advertise different films to subscribers. But Netflix can also use age, location, gender, and other personal attributes to do this too. It is this kind of data which is the bread and butter of CRM.

Today, every company has a CRM. When you sign up for something, even visit a website, a record of you is updated or created, to be added to and padded out, and create the most comprehensive picture of ‘you’ that they can.

That’s more than enough on CRM, back to Baudrillard.

Henry Ford’s Goldilocks

The System of Objects is a wonderful evisceration of the advertising industry, and an excellent explanation of how it arose from industrialisation.

In Henry Ford’s assembly line, you had the car-door-making-machine, that comes after the car-body-making-machine, and after that the wheel-fitting-machine. It doesn’t matter that the aluminium for the car door could be melted and moulded and turned into a sculpture, or an armchair. It’s a car door, that’s what it is. Once it’s done being a car door, it will be thrown in a landfill, because it can only be a car door, and if it can’t be that, then it’s trash.

But the assembly line doesn’t stop when the car is built. Now the car needs to slot into its correct place in the world. It needs to find the person who wants it, who slots into the driver’s seat just right. A Goldilocks, if you will.

Who needs a Ford? A man, in his forties, mid-career with disposable income. He has a wife and kids, a dog too. Let’s get more specific. He lives in Ontario, he’s got an old Ford model currently, he works in the finance industry. His name is David.

David is like the car door. He is a part of the assembly line. He sits in the segment of ‘people who will buy a Ford’ - if he can’t be that, then he’s trash.

And this relationship goes both ways. Not only do Ford sell their car, but the Ford David buys becomes a representation of his own identity. Owning a Ford means David is part of the segment of people who ‘should’ own a Ford. People who have disposable income in their mid-forties, who need the extra space in the boot for the dog, the extra seat for the kids. David is a success. David is winning.

Baudrillard’s quote goes on from what is written at the beginning of this article - he says next: “they [objects] police social meaning.” David’s identity being defined by his ownership of a Ford is exactly what Baudrillard means by this.

Our world is built on the image of the assembly line. The ecological movement already recognises the inherent challenge this creates with objects and materials themselves, with the single-use and non-recyclable nature of this system creating the climate crisis we currently find ourselves in.

What is talked about less today, and why Baudrillard’s work is so relevant, is that this same effect applies to people too.

To sit on the assembly line requires you to be single-use. The car, and the car buyer. But, like the objects we buy, we are not single use. Not only can we change, but we can be multiple things at once.

Today, in the digital world, it is CRM systems which uphold the authoritarian assembly-line image of the world, and keep us locked into a single-use vision of our identity. The ads you see on Instagram, the recommendations you see on Netflix, the posts promoted on social media, these are all based on the single-use description of your identity which has been reduced to a row on a spreadsheet, with multiple-choice columns set to define your very essence.

You are irreducible

Each time I update my LinkedIn profile, I feel this strain against the rigidity of the questions it asks me:

What do you do?

When did you start this job?

When did you finish?

What skills did you use?

Which certificates do you have?

Can’t I be multiple things at once? Can’t I do nothing? Can’t I do something which isn’t quite this, but isn’t quite that either?

I have worked as a CRM manager for three years, and I can tell you for a fact that updating your LinkedIn profile is no different to updating the record of an individual in a CRM system.

I feel this strain because I am not simply my job title. I am a researcher, a writer, a film-maker, a community manager, a web developer, an artist. These do not feel disparate to me, and I do not want to choose between them. I want to live, and work, with the ability to pursue all of these and more. I do not want to do some simply as hobbies, because I believe they are all expressions of values that I hold, and goals I want to achieve.

Something I have been wanting to do for a long time is explain how I use my own platform, Clusta, to bring all these seemingly disparate parts of my life into a single place.

The ‘home page’ of Rhizome on Clusta.

I have a Collection on Clusta, called Rhizome. The name is inspired by Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome, which explores a system of information which does not conform to categorisation, inspired by mycorrhizal root systems of mycelium (mushrooms!)

You can explore my collection here - but before you do, read on for some thoughts of how best to interpret the space.

You will arrive at the ‘home page’ of the collection - I have pinned eight cards here, where you will see titles for film-making, writing, coding, research, my work on Clusta itself, and more.

Where to go? Where to start? That is up to you. Click on the card that best aligns with your intention, your intuition.

The card you click on will become the centre of the screen. You will find more cards connected around it. Apply the same process again when considering where to click next.

From here, you can begin exploring. Read what I’ve written, click links to webpages, view the images I’ve attached.

You may find, after some exploring, that you find another of my titled cards from the home page connected to a card you have centred. This is how Clusta supports me to be many things at once: information is not segmented away into one specific branch, it can be connected to multiple cards at once, and as the connection is bi-directional, you can take these meandering, circular journeys between parts of your work that were once disparate, but are no longer.

Here’s the link to my collection again, if you’re now ready to explore.

The message in the medium

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes “don’t just look at the way things are being expressed, look at how the way things are expressed determines what’s actually expressible.” On LinkedIn, you simply cannot express yourself as an individual with multitudes. On Clusta, you can.

The information you enter into Clusta lives in a system that liberates it from categorisation. There is no hierarchy to information, only bi-directional connections between these small chunks within the cards. The meaning of any card is defined by the relationships it has with the cards it is connected to, and these connections can shift and change as you, the user, shift and change.

It is such an immense struggle to live in a way that lets you explore multiple fields, interests and professions. Terms such as multidisciplinary and generalist are quietly picking up steam, but there is a certainty to the world of the assembly line that is so tempting to be drawn back into.

I believe that we might make this jump, to truly be our unique, irreducible selves, if we can see new systems created in the image of a world that works for people, and where people no longer work for products. Clusta is built in this image, maybe it will inspire you.

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