Jeremy Viny
By Heidi Biggs
Jeremy Viny hails from the Midwest, joining the University of Washington shortly after completing a degree in economics with an art minor from Ohio State University. How did an economics major become a designer? Jeremy explained he was looking at MFA programs but thought perhaps a design degree would be less of a “total free fall.” He now admits that a design thesis — or any creative endeavor — requires the earnest practitioner to take a leap of faith. In his thesis, he embraced the jump-off-the-cliff feeling of the design process and developed a wonderfully poetic artifact called The Desktop Odometer, which serves as a discursive “wedge” capable of prying open opaque technology infrastructures and exposing their inner working for discussion.
The Desktop Odometer began as a playful way to externalize and quantify the vast distances information travels through the internet (yes, the internet is material, data goes real places, and infrastructures support the journey). The Odometer looks a little bit like a digital alarm clock made of cardboard. It connects to a user’s computer and, using a browser extension, it calculates the distance someone’s queries travel as they browse the internet; The Odometer then displays the miles data has traveled on an LCD screen, operating much like the odometer of a car. It is designed to be discursive — a provocation — meaning The Desktop Odometer doesn’t solve a problem, it prompts reflection and discussion. While initially only intended to make information infrastructures visible, after creating and productizing The Desktop Odometer, Jeremy decided to sell it on Amazon.com and to use customer reviews as a platform for user feedback and co-design. On Amazon.com, the Odometer became an insider informant, allowing Jeremy to observe how a discursive artifact behaves, or more accurately, misbehaves and causes mischief in a sanctioned online marketplace, opening a second line of inquiry about privacy and commercial infrastructures.
The Desktop Odometer (and its ensuant journey through online marketplaces) started as a reflection on Seattle’s own shifting infrastructure. In 2019, a major historical roadway, the Alaskan Way Viaduct, was torn down for new development. The loss of this major thoroughfare in a city already struggling with horrendous traffic caused some local businesses to suggest employees who could do so should work remotely. The Odometer was created as a way to show that working from home still, in its own way, requires travel — but through the opaque infrastructure of the internet. Seeing the number of miles information travels on the Odometer invites a user to imagine those distances and the cables that span them — grounding the infrastructure of the internet.
Exposing physical infrastructures of information — often characterized as ineffable, immaterial, and instantaneous — is important. This narrative of immateriality obscures how the internet is, in fact, a real, material infrastructure of cables that run around the world. Consequently, it is also plagued with access imbalances that mirror other critiques of infrastructure noted by critical infrastructure theorists who argue, “infrastructure provides a site in which . . . power and inequality are reproduced or destabilized” (1). To give an example, Jeremy cited how in New York City, high-speed cable is much more common in richer neighborhoods like Manhattan than poorer neighborhoods, exposing how infrastructures of the internet might reinforce class differences by giving or hindering access to more “premium” amenities.
An unexpected second wave of research and discovery began as Jeremy put The Desktop Odometer up for sale on Amazon.com. He initially did this as a way to encourage co-design and user feedback for the Odometer since customer reviews are an established mode of interaction between products and their users. This part of his research was quite rich — reviewers of the odometer got creative: writing parody reviews, photoshopping images to suggest possible “improvements,” and creating painfully (and hilariously) long unboxing videos.
However, putting the Odometer on Amazon also exposed the ambiguity of Amazon’s privacy agreement. The Odometer was taken down several times for various reasons like Jeremy changing the price or responding “thanks, mom” to a positive review left by his mother. In one especially unsettling encounter, Amazon took down the Odometer because they informed him he had sent “too many” personal emails to the people reviewing the Odometer. He asked Amazon how they read his emails and they cryptically responded, “we can’t tell you how, but, we did.” It turns out there is a clause in the Amazon’s privacy agreement that grants Amazon access to all of a seller’s contacts. For Jeremy, this encounter exposed how privacy agreements, which are often long and vague, are designed in ways that encourage people to (a) not really read them and (b) compromise their privacy for convenience. Agreeing to Amazon’s privacy agreement in turn gave them power to disrupt or manage the way Jeremy communicated with his customers.
The Desktop Odometer also requires a browser extension to track the distances information travels, which Jeremy tried to make available through the Google play store. However, regardless of addressing many of the concerns Google had about his software (including writing his own privacy policy), the extension was never accepted to the store. Jeremy supposes this is because the Odometer runs on open source software and isn’t patented. Not getting into the Play store made Jeremy reflect on how being in this store gives an app or browser extension a seal of approval and exposure that validates the reliability and “realness” of a product. As most connected devices use companion apps, he realized that Google’s ability to approve or deny software enforces a curated (and somewhat homogenous) vision of connected devices, limiting “outsider” voices or interventions. Without the experience of trying to productize the Desktop Odometer, Jeremy wouldn’t have encountered the resistance his non-traditional artifact experienced in these marketplaces.
The Desktop Odometer took Jeremy on an unexpected journey exposing opaque infrastructures of information, privacy, and digital marketplaces. Jeremy’s thesis shows how material artifacts can discursively engage material systems. In Where are the Missing Masses: Sociology of a few mundane artefacts, Bruno Latour discusses how “scripts” are embedded into technologies that run silently and seamlessly, enforcing the norms and actions prescribed by their designers. To “read” these material texts, it seems one must generate a material artifact to intersect with them, which is exactly what the Desktop Odometer achieves as it shines light on the material infrastructures of data and information as well as industry’s subtle shaping of privacy and commerce.
(1) The Promise of Infrastructure, ed. by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, Technology and Culture (Duke University Press, 2018), LX, p. 12.