Go Rando (Logo)

In 2017, Ben Grosser released Go Rando, a browser extension that intercepts a user's click on Facebook’s “Like” button and randomly selects one of the platform’s reactions (“Haha”, “Sad”, “Wow”, “Angry”, “Love”, and others) in its place. By filling a user’s data profile with noise, the extension obfuscates emotional signals and disrupts the forms of emotional surveillance that translate feelings into data for advertising, content personalisation, and behavioural manipulation.

The project required a logo, so Grosser combined four of Facebook’s reaction emojis into a single face, creating a visual representation of what it can feel like to be a user of big tech platforms. The image soon took on a life of its own. Produced as a sticker, it was distributed, mailed, shared and attached to laptops, phones, helmets, water bottles, walls, windows and even potted plants. For many who display it, the sticker has become a symbol of resistance to platforms designed to shape emotional responses, as well as a sign of solidarity with others who reject profiling and control for profit.

While Grosser does not know how many Go Rando stickers have circulated over the years, he continues to encounter them in unexpected places. Their ongoing presence suggests that the desire for agency persists in a world increasingly shaped by corporate and state technologies. We never have to tell platforms how we really feel just because they ask. We can always Go Rando.

Ben Grosser

Ben Grosser investigates how the designs of platform interfaces – from social media to AI chatbots – shape human behaviour, desire and culture. Through tactics such as software recomposition, interface reduction and radical reimagination, his artworks expose software’s hidden politics and propose alternatives that restore user agency. Recent exhibitions include the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Barbican Centre in London, ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and the CCCB in Barcelona. Grosser’s projects have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. The Guardian (UK) declared that “when the history of the first decades of this century comes to be written, there will be few more telling artworks” than Grosser’s film ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, “a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.” RTÉ dubbed him an “antipreneur,” and Slate called his work “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” His artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Investigative Aesthetics, and Christiane Paul’s Digital Art. Grosser is a faculty associate (and former Fellow) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.