Engagement Metrics Laundering Cycle

2025 December #009. In economies where every glance extracts value, what rituals might we develop to protect the unprofitable act of lingering? This investigation began by asking what material culture would emerge from resistance movements against attention capture. Rather than depicting noble refusal or digital detox aesthetics, I pursued something more ambiguous: the literal mechanics of laundering engagement, rendering metrics meaningless through industrial-scale processing. The washing machine becomes a perfect metaphor not for cleansing ourselves of social media, but for the cyclical futility of engagement itself. Those colorful tokens tumbling endlessly mirror the dopamine loops we inhabit, while the gold chain draped across machinery suggests how we've decorated our own capture with symbols of achievement. The dingy institutional setting matters because genuine resistance rarely looks heroic. It happens in fluorescent-lit spaces where someone waits, bored and distracted, for their cycle to complete. What resonates here is the refusal of both techno-utopianism and simplistic critique. This isn't celebrating disconnection or condemning connection. It's acknowledging that we've built elaborate systems to generate noise around what might otherwise be genuine experience, and those systems have their own absurd material reality. The detergent bottle, the metric counters, the scattered debris of digital life become archaeological evidence of our present moment. The work succeeds through its commitment to the mundane rather than the spectacular. Beauty competes for attention by refusing to be beautiful in expected ways, instead offering the strange satisfaction of seeing our collective predicament rendered as banal infrastructure. Sometimes the most honest way to examine how we've commodified consciousness is to show the machinery in its least flattering light.