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Flusser's Apparatus: The Functionary and the Menu That Becomes the Self · Philosopheasy Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: So a friend sent me a screenshot at 11.40 at night.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: No message attached, just the image it was a chatbot answer.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: She had asked whether she should leave her job.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: The reply came back as five paths forward,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: numbered, balanced, each with a short list of pros and a short list of cons.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was, honestly, a very good answer.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Clear.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Considerate.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: The kind of thing a wise friend might say if a wise friend could type at 300 words a second.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Underneath it, she had written one line.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is so helpful.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I called her the next morning and we reconstructed the day.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because the chatbot was not where it started.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was where it ended.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: It started at around 2 in the afternoon with a horoscope app.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Not because she believes in astrology.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: She is very clear about that.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: But because the notification arrived and it said something about a threshold
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: and she read it twice.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Then a subreddit, people in her industry, describing their exits.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Then about 40 minutes on a salary comparison site where she typed her job title into
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: a box and watched a bar chart tell her she was underpaid by 11%.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Then a feed, just scrolling.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: But the feed, having noticed, began serving her videos about burnout and quiet quitting.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And one very calm man explaining the concept of the golden handcuffs.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then at eleven at night, the chat bought five paths.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Pros and cons.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Nine hours.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Four platforms.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: One decision.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And here is the detail that stayed with me.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: When I asked her what she actually wanted,
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: she went quiet for a long moment, and then she said, I still don't know.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Nine hours of intense, Focused, genuinely effortful thinking about her own life.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of it, she could not locate her own preference.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Look, I want to be careful here because the easy version of this story is a scolding.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Put down your phone.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Think for yourself.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: That version is useless.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also wrong because she was thinking hard all day.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: The real thing that happened is strangers.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: In nine hours, she never once asked the question in her own words.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Every version of it had been pre-shaped by whatever she typed it into.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: The horoscope app asked, What does the moment require of you?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: The subreddit asked, What did other people in your position do?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: The salary tool asked, Are you being paid correctly?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: The feed asked, Are you burnt out?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: The chatbot asked, Which of these five paths?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Five different questions, none of them hers.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is the thread running through everything we've looked at this week,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: the machinery that shapes wanting before wanting arrives.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And there is one thinker who described this machinery more precisely than anyone,
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: and almost nobody reads him, Wilhelm Flusser.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Cech Born wrote in four languages, spent a large part of his life thinking about photography.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And through photography, about us.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Here is the observation that starts everything.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Flusser looked at a person holding a camera and noticed something uncomfortable.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: The camera contains a finite number of possible photographs,
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: enormous effectively inexhaustible in one human lifetime, but finite.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Every image that camera will ever produce is already inside it as a possibility
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: before anyone lifts it to their eye.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So the photographer walks around feeling like a creator,
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: choosing angles, composing, making decisions all day.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Flusser says gently, you are not creating, you are exhausting.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: You are working through a set of options, the box already contained, and calling it expression.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: He had a word for the person who does this, not victim, not prisoner, functionary.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: A functionary is someone who plays inside a program with real skill,
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: real intelligence,
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: real freedom of movement, and never once touches the edges of the box.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the box, in Flusser's language, is the apparatus.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: It is black.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Not because it hides things from you, because you never think to look inside.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And my friend,
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: at eleven forty at night,
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: holding five beautifully reasoned paths forward, was a functionary.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: She was playing the apparatus brilliantly.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: That screenshot was a good move in the game.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when I realized the thing nobody talks about with the apparatus is
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: that it doesn't take your freedom away.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: It gives you more of it than you can possibly use.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's the mechanism.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole trick.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's why it never trips any alarm in us.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: We are trained to detect restriction.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Someone tells you no.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Someone closes a door.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Someone limits your options.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: You feel it immediately in the body.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's the shape of unfreedom we were taught to look for.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: The apparatus never does that.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: The apparatus is generous.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: It offers five paths when you could only manage two.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: It offers 10,000 photographs on a weekend trip.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: It offers more options than any human being could ever exhaust,
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: which means you will spend your entire life inside it and never once reach a wall.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And a box with no reachable wall does not feel like a box.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like the world.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: So here is the distinction I keep coming back to, and I think it's the useful one.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: There is selecting, and there is choosing.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: We use the words interchangeably, and they are not the same act.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Selecting presupposes a menu.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Someone else assembled the options.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And your work, your genuine, effortful, intelligent work, is to pick well among them.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Selecting can be done brilliantly.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: It can take nine hours.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: It can feel exactly like deliberation.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Choosing means generating the option.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: It means the thing you land on was not on any list.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because no list contained it.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because you made it.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we have enormous practice at the first one.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: We are, as a culture, extraordinarily skilled selectors.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we have almost no practice at the second.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Very little.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Some people go years.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And here's where it gets personal,
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: because this is the part that actually unsettled me after that phone call.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us don't know what we want.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: By consulting some inner reservoir of desire, we find out what we want by watching what we pick.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's the honest mechanism preference is reconstructed backwards from behavior.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: You look at what you chose and you conclude, I must be someone who wants that.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Which means, and this is the uncomfortable part, the menu doesn't just constrain the decision.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: The menu becomes the evidence for the self.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: If the box hands you five paths and you pick path three,
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: you don't just get path three, you get a new belief about who you are.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: You are now a person who chose Path 3 over Paths 1, 2, 4, and 5.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: That is a fact about you now.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: It will go into the file.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the file was written from a menu you didn't compose.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Plooser saw something else, too.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the angle I haven't been able to shake all week.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: The apparatus does not punish incompetence.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: It rewards it out of existence.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: It rewards mastery.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: The better you get at operating inside it,
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: The smoother it becomes, the more it opens, the more it offers.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Which means the deepest functionary is not the lazy user.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's the expert, the person who knows exactly which prompt to write.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: The person with the perfect research method, the comparison spreadsheet, the decision framework.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: The person who is genuinely, impressively good at this.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Skill inside the box does not move you toward the edge of the box.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Skill moves you deeper into the center,
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: where the options are richest and the walls are furthest away.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: So what did Flusser think you should do about it?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not smash the camera.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: He was very clear about that, and it matters.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: He never asked anyone to renounce anything.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't think that was possible, and he didn't think it was interesting.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Play against the apparatus.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Not with it.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Against it.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Deliberately seek the image the program did not anticipate.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Force the box to produce something it was not designed to produce.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Look for the improbable, and he meant that word technically.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: For Flusser, information is the improbable.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Anything highly likely carries almost nothing.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: The predictable image, the reasonable path, the well-ranked option, these are not information.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: They are the box breathing normally.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: The improbable choice is the only one that tells you anything you didn't already have.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: But here is the truth about playing against the apparatus that I don't think gets said.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the reason so few people do it.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: The improbable choice does not feel like freedom.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like error.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: It arrives in the body as a mistake, as embarrassment.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: As the sense that you will not be able to explain this to anyone,
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: not to your parents, not to the group chat,
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because the apparatus does not only supply the options, it supplies the justification format.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Five paths, pros and cons.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: That is a shape you can show people.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: That is a decision that comes with its own defense attached.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: The improbable choice has no attached defense.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's no screenshot,
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: no bar chart,
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: no calm man on a feed confirming that this is a recognized thing people do.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: You just did it, and it sits there, unranked, illegible, yours.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And being illegible is genuinely unpleasant.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: That is the actual price.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: And nobody mentions it, because it doesn't sound like liberation.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds like being slightly unwell.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: So the practical hinge.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because I do think there is one.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's small.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's not deleting the apps.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: My friend, deleting four apps changes nothing.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: She'd have reconstructed the same nine hours inside, too.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: The hinge is the moment the tool offers to formulate the question for you.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: That exact moment the cursor, blinking in the box.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: The empty search field.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: The prompt window opening with its polite invitation.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: In that half second, the question is still yours.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: It is unformatted.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: It has no shape yet.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the discipline.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: The whole discipline is to keep it unformatted for one hour longer than is comfortable.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: To write it down in your own bad,
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: imprecise,
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: embarrassing words before any system gets to tidy it into something answerable.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because my friend's real question was, never should I leave this job.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: That was the apparatus-compatible version.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's the version with five paths.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Her real question,
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: which took us about 40 minutes on the phone to reach, was something much worse.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: How long have I been treating my life as a problem to be optimized?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And when did I stop noticing?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: No tool ranks that.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: No feed serves it.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: It has no pros and cons column, and it does not resolve in nine hours.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it is hers.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: It came out of her.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it is the first thing in that entire day that qualified Influcer's sense as information.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: So here is what I want you to sit with before Monday.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's one question, and I'll warn you that it is more difficult than it sounds.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Name one decision you made this month that no system suggested to you.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Not one you made alone.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Not one nobody watched.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Those are easy, and they don't count.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: The apparatus doesn't need to be watching to have already supplied the menu.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean a decision where the option itself did not come from a feed,
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: a recommendation,
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: a search result,
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: a colleague repeating something they'd absorbed from a feed,
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: or the ambient sense of what people like you tend to do.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: One, this month.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: And notice the length of the pause before you answer.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Notice how quickly you want to reach for something that only technically qualifies.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Notice how strong the urge is to defend the last thing you chose.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: That pause is the size of the box,
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: and if you find one,
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: an actual one, I'd want to know what it cost you, because it cost you something.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's how you'll know it was real.