What if social media wasn’t engineered to serve capitalism’s need for growth and profit, its endless pursuit for more? How might online communication 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 you get 100 posts—for life. While you can reply to a post as often as you like, every time you add to the feed, it subtracts from your lifetime total. When you reach 0 posts left, that’s it. No exceptions. How disorienting will it be to interact on a platform that doesn’t try to induce endless engagement from your every waking second? What will you say—or make—when freed from infinite demand? Just like life, Minus has limits. Try it and see what online interaction feels like on a social network designed for less.
Ben Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that examine the cultural,
social, and political effects of software. Recent exhibition venues include the Barbican Centre in
London, Museum Kesselhaus in Berlin, Museu das Comunicações in Lisbon, and Galerie Charlot in
Paris. His works have been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, The Guardian, The Washington Post,
El País, Libération and Der Spiegel. The Chicago Tribune called him the “unrivaled king of ominous
gibberish.” Slate referred to his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” Grosser’s
artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age
of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, and Facebook Society, as well as volumes centered on
computational art practices such as Electronic Literature, The New Aesthetic and Art, and Digital Art.
Grosser is an associate professor of new media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
USA.
