How did we come to believe the phone knows best? When cultural and economic historians look back on the early 21st century, they will be faced with the riddle of how, in little more than a decade, vast populations came to accept so much quantification and surveillance with so little overt coercion or economic reward. The consequences of this, from the Edward Snowden revelations to the transformation of urban governance, are plain, yet the cultural and psychic preconditions remain something of a mystery. What is going on when people hand over their thoughts, selves, sentiments, and bodies to a data grid that is incomprehensible to them?
The liberal philosophical tradition explains this sort of surrender in terms of conscious and deliberate trade-offs. Our autonomy is a piece of personal property that we can exchange for various guarantees. We accept various personal “costs” for certain political or economic “benefits.” For Thomas Hobbes, relinquishing the personal use of force and granting the state a monopoly on violence is a prerequisite to any legal rights at all: “Freedom” is traded for “security.” In more utilitarian traditions, autonomy is traded for some form of economic benefit, be it pleasure, money, or satisfaction. What both accounts share is the presumption that no set of power relations could persist if individuals could not reasonably consent to it.
Does that fit with the quantified, mass-surveilled society? It works fine as a post-hoc justification: “Yes,” the liberal will argue, “people sacrifice some autonomy, some privacy — but they only do so because they value convenience, efficiency, pleasure, or security even more highly.” This suggests, as per rational-choice theory, that social media and smart technologies, like the Google Now “dashboard” that constantly feeds the user information on fastest travel routes and relevant weather information in real time, are simply driving cost savings into everyday life, cutting out time-consuming processes and delivering outcomes more efficiently, much as e-government contractors once promised to do for the state. Dating apps, such as Tinder, pride themselves on allowing people to connect to those who are nearest and most desirable and to block out everyone else.
Leaving aside the unattractiveness of this as a vision of friendship, romance, or society, there are several other problems with it. First, it’s not clear that a utilitarian explanation works even on its own limited terms to justify our surrender to technology. It does not help people do what they want: Today, people hunt desperately for ways of escaping the grid of interactivity, precisely so as to get stuff done. Apps such as Freedom (which blocks all internet connectivity from a laptop) and Anti-Social (which blocks social media specifically) are sold as productivity-enhancing. The rise of “mindfulness,” “digital detox,” and sleep gurus in the contemporary business world testifies to this. Preserving human capital in full working order is something that now involves carefully managed forms of rest and meditation, away from the flickering of data.
Second, the assumption that if individuals do something uncoerced, then it was because it was worth doing rests on a tightly circular argument that assumes that the autonomous, calculating self precedes and transcends whatever social situation it finds itself in. Such a strong theory of the self is scarcely tenable in the context for which it was invented, namely, the market. The mere existence of advertising demonstrates that few businesses are prepared to rely on mathematical forces of supply and demand to determine how many of their goods are consumed. Outside the market realm, its descriptive power falls to pieces entirely, especially given “smart” environments designed to pre-empt decision-making.
The theory of the rational-calculating self has been under quiet but persistent attack within the field of economics since the 1970s, resulting in the development of behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. Rather than postulate that humans never make mistakes about what is in their best interest, these new fields use laboratory experiments, field experiments, and brain scanners to investigate exactly how good humans are at pursuing their self-interest (as economists define it, anyway). They have become a small industry for producing explanations of why we really behave as we do and what our brains are really doing behind our backs.
From a cultural perspective, behavioral economics and neuroeconomics are less interesting for their truth value (which, after all, would have surprised few behavioral psychologists of the past century) but their public and political reception. The fields have been met with predictable gripes from libertarians, who argue that the critique of individual rationality is an implicit sanction for the nanny state to act on our behalf. Nonetheless, celebrity behaviorists such as Robert Cialdini and Richard Thaler have found an enthusiastic audience, not only among marketers, managers, and policymakers who are professionally tasked with altering behavior, but also the nonfiction-reading public, tapping into a far more pervasive fascination with biological selfhood and a hunger for social explanations that relieve individuals of responsibility for their actions.
The establishment of a Behavioural Insights Team within the British government in 2010 (and since privatized) is a case in point of this surprising new appetite for nonliberal or postliberal theories of individual decision making. Set against the prosaic nature of the team’s actual achievements, which have mainly involved slightly faster processing of tax and paperwork, the level of intrigue that surrounds it, and the political uses of behaviorism in general, seems disproportionate. The unit attracted some state-phobic critiques, but these have been far outnumbered by a half-mystical, half-technocratic media fascination with the idea of policymakers manipulating individual decisions. This poses the question of whether behavior change from above is attractive not in spite of its alleged paternalism but because of it.
Likewise, the notorious Facebook experiment on “emotional contagion” was understandably controversial. But would it be implausible to suggest that people were also enchanted by it? Was there not also a mystical seduction at work, precisely because it suggested some higher power, invisible to the naked eye? We assume, rationally, that the presence of such a power is dangerous. But it is no contradiction to suggest that it might also be comforting or mesmerizing. To feel part of some grand technocratic plan, even one that is never made public, has the allure of immersing the self in a collective, in a manner that had seemed to have been left on the political scrapheap of the 20th century.
The liberal philosophical tradition explains this sort of surrender in terms of conscious and deliberate trade-offs. Our autonomy is a piece of personal property that we can exchange for various guarantees. We accept various personal “costs” for certain political or economic “benefits.” For Thomas Hobbes, relinquishing the personal use of force and granting the state a monopoly on violence is a prerequisite to any legal rights at all: “Freedom” is traded for “security.” In more utilitarian traditions, autonomy is traded for some form of economic benefit, be it pleasure, money, or satisfaction. What both accounts share is the presumption that no set of power relations could persist if individuals could not reasonably consent to it.Does that fit with the quantified, mass-surveilled society? It works fine as a post-hoc justification: “Yes,” the liberal will argue, “people sacrifice some autonomy, some privacy — but they only do so because they value convenience, efficiency, pleasure, or security even more highly.” This suggests, as per rational-choice theory, that social media and smart technologies, like the Google Now “dashboard” that constantly feeds the user information on fastest travel routes and relevant weather information in real time, are simply driving cost savings into everyday life, cutting out time-consuming processes and delivering outcomes more efficiently, much as e-government contractors once promised to do for the state. Dating apps, such as Tinder, pride themselves on allowing people to connect to those who are nearest and most desirable and to block out everyone else.
Leaving aside the unattractiveness of this as a vision of friendship, romance, or society, there are several other problems with it. First, it’s not clear that a utilitarian explanation works even on its own limited terms to justify our surrender to technology. It does not help people do what they want: Today, people hunt desperately for ways of escaping the grid of interactivity, precisely so as to get stuff done. Apps such as Freedom (which blocks all internet connectivity from a laptop) and Anti-Social (which blocks social media specifically) are sold as productivity-enhancing. The rise of “mindfulness,” “digital detox,” and sleep gurus in the contemporary business world testifies to this. Preserving human capital in full working order is something that now involves carefully managed forms of rest and meditation, away from the flickering of data.
Second, the assumption that if individuals do something uncoerced, then it was because it was worth doing rests on a tightly circular argument that assumes that the autonomous, calculating self precedes and transcends whatever social situation it finds itself in. Such a strong theory of the self is scarcely tenable in the context for which it was invented, namely, the market. The mere existence of advertising demonstrates that few businesses are prepared to rely on mathematical forces of supply and demand to determine how many of their goods are consumed. Outside the market realm, its descriptive power falls to pieces entirely, especially given “smart” environments designed to pre-empt decision-making.
The theory of the rational-calculating self has been under quiet but persistent attack within the field of economics since the 1970s, resulting in the development of behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. Rather than postulate that humans never make mistakes about what is in their best interest, these new fields use laboratory experiments, field experiments, and brain scanners to investigate exactly how good humans are at pursuing their self-interest (as economists define it, anyway). They have become a small industry for producing explanations of why we really behave as we do and what our brains are really doing behind our backs.
From a cultural perspective, behavioral economics and neuroeconomics are less interesting for their truth value (which, after all, would have surprised few behavioral psychologists of the past century) but their public and political reception. The fields have been met with predictable gripes from libertarians, who argue that the critique of individual rationality is an implicit sanction for the nanny state to act on our behalf. Nonetheless, celebrity behaviorists such as Robert Cialdini and Richard Thaler have found an enthusiastic audience, not only among marketers, managers, and policymakers who are professionally tasked with altering behavior, but also the nonfiction-reading public, tapping into a far more pervasive fascination with biological selfhood and a hunger for social explanations that relieve individuals of responsibility for their actions.
The establishment of a Behavioural Insights Team within the British government in 2010 (and since privatized) is a case in point of this surprising new appetite for nonliberal or postliberal theories of individual decision making. Set against the prosaic nature of the team’s actual achievements, which have mainly involved slightly faster processing of tax and paperwork, the level of intrigue that surrounds it, and the political uses of behaviorism in general, seems disproportionate. The unit attracted some state-phobic critiques, but these have been far outnumbered by a half-mystical, half-technocratic media fascination with the idea of policymakers manipulating individual decisions. This poses the question of whether behavior change from above is attractive not in spite of its alleged paternalism but because of it.
Likewise, the notorious Facebook experiment on “emotional contagion” was understandably controversial. But would it be implausible to suggest that people were also enchanted by it? Was there not also a mystical seduction at work, precisely because it suggested some higher power, invisible to the naked eye? We assume, rationally, that the presence of such a power is dangerous. But it is no contradiction to suggest that it might also be comforting or mesmerizing. To feel part of some grand technocratic plan, even one that is never made public, has the allure of immersing the self in a collective, in a manner that had seemed to have been left on the political scrapheap of the 20th century.
by William Davies, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
