Welcome to Ethan’s Turtles - I’m Ethan (spoiler) and I write this newsletter to explore the relationship between digital design and culture.
Thanks so much for reading - if you’d like to explore my research for this article and other stuff I’m reading / working on, I have it all collated on my platform, Clusta. Check it out, and sign up if you’d like to try it yourself!
We have all had moments like these. Picture it -
Your shoulders raised. Fingertips slip ever so slightly on the keyboard, as you feel a cold sweat take hold of you.
Your whole body is tense. Time is moving so slowly, yet you can’t escape an overwhelming feeling that time is running out. You think to yourself:
“Where am I?”
Perhaps you clicked the wrong button. Perhaps you don’t know what button you clicked.
Why is the screen black? Why is the screen blue?
Have I paid? Did it work?
That isn’t what’s meant to happen when you scroll???
It is truly a special kind of neurosis - this feeling that we feel when we are ‘lost’ in a digital space. Something hasn’t worked like it’s meant to - you are the one-in-a-billion who found the tiny chink in the armour of legions of Google product managers, who check and test every edge case in the user experience.
I couldn’t tell you what spurred this, but I was recently thinking about how extreme our reactions can be to this situation - and it led me to consider how absent the concept of ‘being lost’ is in the digital space.
Dérive
The term dérive, a French word, literally translates to ‘drifting’ - it is not explicitly to do with getting lost, as I have implied in the headline.
The term was coined originally by Guy Debord in his aptly titled essay Theory of the Dérive. He explains that for someone to perform the act of dérive, they must walk through an urban space “and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” (62)
This doesn’t sound particularly radical on the surface. So let us consider what it is not meant to be.
Dérive is not taking in the scenery on the way to work. It is not observing other people on public transport on the way to a specific destination.
Dérive is the act of exploring an urban landscape with specifically no destination, other than the immediate destination created by ‘the attractions of the terrain and the encounters [you] find there’.
At the time, Debord was already outspoken on his criticism of urban landscapes - a physical landscape that has been designed explicitly to enable its inhabitants to participate in the ‘society of the spectacle’ - Debord’s most ubiquitous concept.
There is a great deal of material to read on the society of the spectacle, so for those who are unfamiliar I will keep my definition brief - the society of the spectacle is Debord’s definition for the societal structure that we currently live under, which seeks to turn citizens into passive consumers of commodities through the attention-diverting creation of ‘spectacles’ that utilise aesthetics to achieve their purpose.
Think Times Square, New York - probably the most obvious and literal example of the spectacle. There is little that better encapsulates a spectacle than the gigantic billboards with flashing advertisements. This is why Debord was particularly focused on criticism of urban landscapes, where this kind of landscape design was, and is still, most prominent.
But what has this got to do with dérive?
Dérive is meant to reject the urban landscape’s inclination toward the spectacle, by moving around an urban environment in such a way that the ‘drifter’ will eventually participate in ‘situations’.
These situations, from which the ‘Situationists’ derive their name, are meant to be moments of lived engagement that excite, entertain and enrich their participants, but that fall outside the clutch of any spectacle, due to their unplanned, unexpected creation.
Digital Dérive
I hope you stuck with me through nearly four-hundred words of non-digital theory, but perhaps you can see where I’m going with this:
There is a great deal of comparison to be made between the urban landscapes that receive Debord’s criticism, and the digital spaces we occupy today.
Like urban landscapes, digital spaces are almost entirely artificially constructed ‘spectacles’. Beautiful, sleek design that inspires, shocks, and provides seamless experience. So beautiful you can’t stop looking. So shocking you can’t stop looking. So ___ you can’t stop looking.
The only difference? The digital has no Guy Debord. The digital has no theory of the digital dérive.
There is so much discussion, that seems to only get louder, about the lack of agency and endless harvesting of every moment for profit that we all experience engaging with digital spaces.
Even the counter-culture of this prevailing digital culture, that promotes being ‘trustworthy’ or ‘ethical’ or ‘responsible’ still take out the same advertisements, still implement the same principles of design in order to attract customers.
It has gotten to the point where we are unable to separate someone claiming to be trustworthy from someone utilising the aesthetic of trustworthiness in order to sell to a particular market.
What the practice of dérive offers is a way for us to get off this hamster-wheel of madness.
By participating in a digital dérive, where we explore the internet with intention, and not passivity, we open ourselves to the possibility of participating in situations.
These situations will be moments that excite, that fascinate, that enrich our lived experience in that exact moment.
And those experiences will be ours. They are not artificially constructed, they do not have ulterior motives. They are truly beyond the reach of the spectacle because they are not planned, they are not expected. They sit outside the reach of probability, and are instead utterly, authentically unique.
What’s the easiest way to begin? Stop scrolling, start clicking.
A further suggestion
Before you say it - I appreciate the irony here. But, whilst I usually keep mention of this under wraps in my articles, I feel compelled to share my work, Clusta, as it relates so directly to this concept of digital dérive.
Would you like to experience being lost in a digital space, right now? I use my own platform, Clusta, to create structures of writing that are deliberately made to allow you to get lost.
My dream for Clusta, one day, is for people to see it as a form of written communication in its own right.
That, one day, a writer will decide to write, and they will ask themselves ‘will this be a book, a poem, or a collection?’
That to write a collection is to write sentences that can be read in opposite directions. That to write a collection is to write a text with no start and no end. That to write a collection is to create infinite pathways for the reader from a finite number of words.
That to write a collection is to write, so a reader may drift.
Drift through my collection here, at your leisure.
Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research - for this article, and beyond…
I haven't seen anyone using Debord in digital design before. Click not scroll. Love this!
This is a great and thought-provoking post. I guess I want to view the internet as a utility ("the administration of things") that is stripped of its nefarious addictive entertainment/weird virtue signalling with strangers in order that culture and human interaction can happen away from screens. How far I want to wander in digital space I'm not sure and there is already perhaps too much to wander through. I do like the idea that a definition of utility can include intellectual utility and in that sense we should definitely be sharing ideas. That could be a powerful way to view what content is worthwhile creating and how it is presented/shared. Looks like Clusta is well suited to that use case :)