Sep 4, 2017 · 48m · y-combinator
Artist Lauren McCarthy Will Be Your Home's Brain · Y Combinator
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In this Y Combinator interview, artist and UCLA professor Lauren McCarthy discusses her interactive performance projects—including 'Social Turkers', 'p5.js', and 'Lauren'—which explore human intimacy, algorithmic manipulation, and surveillance. Through humor and participatory art, McCarthy offers an empathetic alternative to technological dystopianism while sharing advice for aspiring digital creators.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The partners as informed peer 2.7 Guest teaching 3.8 Guest disagreement 0.7 The partners pushing back 1.4
speaking balance: gold is the partners, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 36:02 Pushing back on binary future optimism
Lauren playfully rejects the simplistic question of whether she is optimistic or critical about technology, insisting the real answer is nuanced and context-dependent.
Hardest push from the partners ▶ 35:02 Probing comedic self-awarenessCraig directly challenges Lauren on whether she realized her early talks were funny or if audiences were unintentionally laughing at her social struggles.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 29:16 Correcting assumptions about automated laborLauren corrects the common Silicon Valley premise that basic labor is automated first, explaining that subtle emotional labor is far more difficult to replace than complex technical skills like driving.
The partners hold their own ▶ 37:27 The Onion's Flintstone vitamin conceptCraig contributes domain expertise from his time writing satire at The Onion to explain how humor packages deeper nutritional critique.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The partners as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The partners pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crowdsourced Date Coaching in Social Turkers Project | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Lauren explains the premise and psychological mechanics of her Social Turkers project. Craig asks curious, straightforward questions about how giving up control affected her dating life. | |
| MIT Experience and Creating Inclusive Tech with p5.js | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Lauren details the creation of p5.js and educating newcomers by designing codebases with accessible commenting. Craig expresses genuine novelty at this approach to open-source inclusivity. | |
| Exploring Algorithmic Manipulation with Facebook Mood Manipulator | 2 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Lauren explains the technical mechanism (LIWC) behind her Facebook Mood Manipulator browser extension. Craig engages collaboratively, asking whether an updated version could address post-2016 political polarization. | |
| Designing Interpersonal Software Tools and Physical Artifacts | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Craig points out the apparent paradox between Lauren's high emotional intelligence and her stated social anxiety. Lauren explains how physical artifacts like ConversaCube give users explicit permission to alter behavior. | |
| Commercial Expectations and Economics of Digital Art | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Craig explores the financial dynamics of digital art, contrasting painting sales with software distribution. Lauren elaborates on the conservative art market, maintainability contracts, and early blockchain experiments. | |
| Human Smart Home Performance in the Lauren Project | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Lauren introduces her performance art piece 'Lauren', acting as a human smart home assistant. When Craig suggests that repetitive tasks get automated, Lauren corrects the common wisdom by explaining that emotional labor is what actually resists automation. | |
| Livestream Surveillance in the Electric Objects Project | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Lauren outlines her surveillance livestream performance for Electric Objects, where she reviewed 1,000 backers' social accounts. Craig jokes about turning the surveillance into targeted ad sales. | |
| Balancing Dystopian Fear and Warmth Through Artistic Humor | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Craig probes whether Lauren was in on the comedy of her early presentations. Craig brings in his experience at The Onion to describe using humor as a 'Flintstone vitamin' to explore dystopian technology. | |
| Meeting Kyle McDonald and Collaborative Tech Projects | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Lauren recounts meeting her husband Kyle McDonald through her crowdsourced dating project. She describes his computational art projects with projection mapping and mirror balls. | |
| Practical Advice for Aspiring Digital Artists and Students | 3 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Lauren gives advice for students entering creative technology, emphasizing peer networks and asking questions without fear. Craig validates her point by sharing his own experience learning Python from mentors. | |
| Artistic, Literary, and Cinematic Influences | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Lauren discusses her primary artistic and narrative inspirations, including durational performance artist Tehching Hsieh and Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. |
Statements from this episode (13)
McCarthy crowdsourced live coaching for her blind dates via Mechanical Turk
“I went on a series of blind dates with people that I met on the internet, and then I sort of discreetly streamed the Video of the date to the web. And then I paid people through the service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, small amounts of money to watch the dat…”
McCarthy: Open source has worse diversity than the broader tech industry
“And not just tech, but, like, open source is even worse, like in terms of, like, the gender breakdown or minorities that are involved”
p5.js intentionally trades off code elegance so non-experts can contribute
“So taking some trade-offs in the code, like under the hood to make it easier for people that are not like expert developers to still be contributors to that code base. And so adding a lot more commenting in there and just doing things in slightly less Sort of …”
McCarthy: Facebook 2014 Study Proved News Feed Content Influences User Moods
“Facebook is like, did this study about mood manipulation where they were showing people either positive or more negative content, and then showing that this would cause the person themselves to make more positive or negative posts with the conclusion that they…”
McCarthy: Users Have Grown Accustomed to Algorithmic Mood Manipulation
“Cause I think now people are so used to that idea. Like, of course they're manipulating my mood. Of course. You know, they're filtering out certain things or targeting me.”
McCarthy: Users remember when algorithmic tools work and forget failures
“So it's like we remember these moments where it works for us, and we forget more often the times where it just doesn't work.”
Consensus pricing makes the traditional art market hostile to digital art
“I think part of the difficulty comes out of just, like, the market around buying and selling art is very conservative, because you're agreeing that this particular object has this value that, you know, and it's all kind of consensus-based, so there, it's very …”
McCarthy: Art world must adapt commercial models as artists adopt technology
“Every artist is starting to use technology now, like, seeing these, you know, I teach in a program that uses technology, but seeing the grad students in fine arts, like, they're all, like, making GIFs, and using computers, and using, like, three D software, so…”
McCarthy monitors participants' home cameras to act as a human Amazon Alexa
“I'm trying to become
like Amazon Alexa.
So, but I'm making a service, it's called Lauren.
and so the idea is that I will come into your home and set up all these devices and cameras
and then I'll watch you and, ah, you know, control your home for you and tr…”
Emotional labor is harder to automate than complex tasks like driving
“We like to think that, like, the things that get automated are the easy things, and the things that don't are the ones that require more education, or training, or higher level skills, but actually I think it's, it divides more, like, the more human, sort of, …”
McCarthy: Livestreamed browsing social media of 1,000 backers for art project
“So I asked them for all their social media handles that they wanted to give, and then for all, there were like a thousand backers total. I spent five minutes looking through all their social media, and so I set up this system where I'd just like queue them up,…”
McCarthy: Humor creates reflective spaces for tech critique without lecturing
“I find humor like a way to do that, because, you know, you laugh, and then you kind of, there's always some truth to every joke and some people it's less like, let me lecture you about this thing we should all think about, and we're like, here's something ridi…”
McCarthy met her husband when he participated in her livestreamed dating project
“I actually met my husband through one of these projects which is, I was, when I was doing the Social Turkus thing, he was actually happened to be one of the people watching and giving advice on, like, the last date And then like wrote to me afterwards and I wa…”