Having a compelling vision of living well with less, having a compelling vision of a different way to be in the world is lacking because advertising is'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week I have a pretty interesting conversation for you. My guest is Zach Kaiser. He is an associate professor of graphic

design and experience architecture at Michigan State University. He's also the author of

interfaces in us, user experience design and the making of the computable subject. Now, we've

talked on the show before about this proliferation

of smart or supposedly smart gadgets where everything that we use now seems to have a screen

or internet connectivity or voice control or something like that. And the commercial pressures

by major tech companies and, you know, other companies that we wouldn't even

generally consider tech companies in order to do that, right? In order to add all of these

technologies to, in many cases, pretty mundane things that probably don't need them in the first

place. But in Zach's book, he focuses on a bigger element of this, where the interfaces that

we use from these smart devices

to the apps to everything else kind of positions us in a particular way and makes us

understand ourselves in a particular way because of the way that data is collected on us and then

presented back to us as though it's an accurate reflection of the reality

and the world that we live in, when that is not necessarily the case.

Because these things do have to be translated through the particular sensors that pick

up this data in the first place.

But when we build our world in this way, when we have all of this data being collected

on us and the expectation

is that we shape ourselves in order to better reflect what the data wants us to be, that has

very serious impacts on how we think about addressing issues in the world, how we think about

addressing issues in our own lives, how we think

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