potlatch

Some reflections on cybernetics

I've been reading about cybernetics recently for the first time, for reasons to do with the research project on 'data dashboards' I'm working on with colleagues at Warwick. I can see that there are various ways in which my happiness book might have been written very differently, had I known more about cybernetics when I wrote it. In particular, Jevons was not simply a utilitarian, but an enthusiast for calculative machines (this piece by Simon Shaffer has lots of interesting details about the pre-history of cybernetics in Britain).

Along the way, I've had a few articles and a blogpost published, each of which is partly a reflection on cybernetics. I thought I'd post them here together:

• 'Mark Zuckerberg and the End of Language', The Atlantic
• 'How to give a damn about data', Reading Dashboards blog
• 'Silly Robots!', The Chronicle Review

who wants to know?

The great mystery of our present behaviorist-digital moment, with all of its attendent surveillance, constraints and cultural impoverishments, is the question of why we not only submit to it, but actively embrace it. Given that Western societies continue to conceive of themselves as 'liberal', in the sense of being founded on some sense of contract between free individuals and a coercive state (regardless of how plausible this characterisation is), the rush to a future of 'smart' objects and 'predictive' software would appear to contradict core tenets of who we consider ourselves to be.

I'm currently reading Cass Sunstein's Choosing Not to Choose. This is an important text in this context, not because it answers the question I've just posed, but because it demonstrates the various acts of theoretical chicanery and sociological self-delusion that are necessary to keep the idea of liberalism alive, in a society that is gleefully abandoning Enlightenment notions of subjective agency. Like Weimar liberals or contemporary neoliberals, Sunstein shields himself from his historical circumstances by clinging all the harder to that which must be true (in his case, the notion that choice is the a priori). I'll be publishing a review in due course.

I can think of two or three routes we should explore, when seeking to understand why we might embrace a post-liberal, always-on, high surveillance future.

The first is, as I explored in this New Inquiry essay, that relinquishing subjective agency or consumer sovereignty is experienced as a profound existential relief. There is comfort to be found in giving oneself over to analytical powers that one cannot comprehend, almost like a form of post-socialist melancholia. To be a citizen of the 'smart city' is to be integrated into a form of collective intelligence, where the individual no longer has to think or decide. The outsourcing of individual choice allows us to immerse ourselves back into society, and to abandon the burdensome requirement to take constant decisions.

The second related answer is that behaviorism reinstates quasi-bureaucratic norms, that we wrongly believe we have out-grown. The ideology of 'flexibility', 'creativity' and 'entrepreneurship' celebrates heroic, self-authored individuals, who act outside of any normative paradigm. Behaviorism, with the help of apps and nudges, allows us to maintain this collective self-delusion, while also ensuring that we retain some semblance of sanity (by constraining arbitrary freedom) and that society remains faintly governable.

If we were to drop the Schumpeterian-Nietzschean fantasy, of a society of constant self-transformation (a fantasy that really oughtn't to survive a short visit to any shopping mall or office, but somehow manages to), then we wouldn't need nudges and apps to provide us with - whisper it - rules for how to behave in practice. Instead, we might be able to debate normativity in a more honest and public fashion. That, however, seems impossible, hence the need for clandestine methodologies, interventions and half-remembered neuroscientific facts.

I have a third hypothesis, that I've been musing on a lot recently, partly inspired by reading Josh Cohen's The Private Life. This is that smart technologies and social media promise us what we most crave: a psychological mirror.

A whole essay, maybe even a book, could be written about the simple question with which facebook succeeds in conducting social research on several hundred million people, without so much as an incentive: "what's on your mind?" I wonder how much thought goes into that question, consideration of alternatives, whether it remains the right one, and why. After all, leaving algorithms aside, that's the question on which facebook's entire business depends. Get that question wrong, and nothing else quite works.

"What's in your mind?". "How are you?". "What's on your brain?". "What are you thinking?" (woh there, Descartes!). "What are you feeling?" (that's a bit more like it). "What's happening" (twitter's lawyers might have things to say about that). "What's going on?" (Marvin Gaye's lawyers might have things to say about that). And so on. But no: it has to be "what's on your mind".

The much-discussed rise of wearable technology, combined with 'quantified self' apps and habits, is clearly predicated on the idea that there is a 'truth' about oneself, and that self-surveillance is the way to discover it. One such product, Realifex, takes this to an almost romantic extent, where an app promises to reveal truths about oneself that nobody else could ever know, nor need ever know (problems of 'private language games' would arise, were it not for the fact that, of course, the data is not entirely private to the individual, but crunched by a company).

Cohen argues in The Private Life that, contrary to popular (and even some Foucauldian) conceptions of it, psychoanalysis is not a project of knowledge or of revelation of some inner truth. It is rather a process through which we learn to live with our own mysteries, frustrations and unknowable depths. In an age of crass empiricism, where everything must be 'mined', Cohen argues that some things will always remain 'in the dark'. Honesty would mean recognising this.

I guess we now live in a largely post-psychoanalytic age, where the inner reaches of the self are deemed knowable through fMRI or self-quantification. We no longer search for truth or explanations from therapy, but by donating more and more data to social media platforms, wearable technologies and smart objects. The Faustian pact appears to be this: if you are willing to give away liberal autonomy, in return you will be told the truth about yourself. The more freedom we relinquish, the more facts we will receive about our bodies, minds and behavior.

Leaving aside the severe epistemological problems in all of this, it poses a question that interested Nietzsche and Foucault (and, in a different way, Cohen): what is it you really want, when you say you are looking for self-knowledge or psychological truth? Are you paranoid that, as per the narrator in Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, you might fundamentally be something of a loser? And why would you want to 'know' that exactly? Psychoanalysis has one major advantage over neuroscience or behavioral interventions, in being able to reflect on why it is even worth doing in the first place, and the types of misunderstandings and follies that might have led people towards it.

I don't suggest that quantified-selfers or enthusiasts for smart technology do not reflect on what they are doing. Clearly they are not simply hamsters in a cage. But their narratives tend simply to reinforce the practice, to the effect that "I realise that I'm not drinking enough water, and that that effects my sleep, which is why I have this app which... etc" or "I was wondering if my commute was effecting my moods, and so I decided to find out.. etc" or, at best, "I know that I'm quite a lazy person, so I decided to download this app which... etc". The source of the will-to-know or will-to-change is not even noticed, let alone questioned.

The epistemological flaws in positivism have been explored endlessly. What I think need studying right now are its psychoanalytic seductions and disappointments, and the way in which purveyors of 'smart' technologies and data analytics carefully nurture this promise of self-disclosure. For the good of the industries behind these tools, every disappointment will be framed as a reason to mine even more data, to monitor even more behavior, as if the 'truth' of the self is only ever one more app away (just like neoliberal nirvana always needs just a bit more competition to be realised). But if this endlessly delayed gratification eventually runs out of steam, then a far more interesting question could come to the fore: who wants to know?

The Happiness Industry - out in May

For those blissfully absent from the twitter-sphere, I have a new book out in May (and since you're such twitter refuseniks, you're probably still neurologically capable of reading such things). It's called The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing. It'll be available in most book-shops, and online via non-tax-dodging-bastard websites such as Housmans Online.

I will be speaking about the book at a few events over the course and May and June, including one or two in the US. I'll stick the dates for these things, along with other articles about the book in the list on the top right of this blog. So watch that space!

new article: from cigarettes to smartphones

I have a new piece in openDemocracy, exploring cultural and economic transitions, via the shift from a society of cigarettes to one of smartphones. Here's a chunk:

...on a deeper psychological and cultural level, the difference between these two framing devices could scarcely be more profound. This touches on the malaise of anxiety that has become the dominant psychiatric disorder of our age. While smoking affirms the limits of time and space around us, smart phones do precisely the opposite. While one allows you to spend a finite chunk of time in a given space, as a break from the flux of work or travel, the other connects you to a more complex and fluid world beyond your immediate situation. 

As framing devices go, the smart phone suffers from the inherent problem that it is leaky. It is constantly connecting us to other times, other places, absent people, absent places, some in the future and some in the past. The selfie may seem narcissistic, but it is captured with the possibility of being seen by others who are not present (at least, not yet). If it is an expression of anything, it is one of paranoia: paranoia that human memory is no longer adequate for experiences, that one may be seen by others, that one may not be seen by others.

This is a restless condition. Where the cigarette allows us to (in the immortal words of Oasis's horrifically bombastic 1997 album) be here now, a smart phone allows us to do precisely the opposite. In this psychological sense, it is the very antithesis of a cigarette. The transition from the one object in our pocket to the other speaks of a more general shift in the character of capitalism.

"when you find yourself in the thick of it..."

A few years ago, while sitting in Euphorium bakery on Upper Street, I observed a couple of Islington characters, possibly undercover lawyers, enter the cafe and sit down at the table next to mine. Both were 30-something men in uniform wacky glasses, sleeveless puffer jackets and ill-fitting jeans. "So how's it going, Simon?" asked one, with more enthusiasm than I could stomach. "Great", replied the other, "I've just started writing a book!". Oh no, please, no. "What's it about?" asked Simon's mini-me. Pausing in search of suspense, Simon eventually replied, "It's about what it's like being a dad".

For the love of god, what is it that you people don't understand? Do you honestly think that the world isn't satisfied with your splurges of human reproduction, that it also needs it publicly documenting?? Haven't we finished with that whole Nick Hornby thing yet??? These are the same people who email in to Radio 6 to let the world know that they once saw a Pixies gig.

All I can say in my hypocritical defence is that I am still of the opinion that other parents are the worst advertisement for parenthood that is out there. Because in answer to the (mysteriously unasked) question 'who has destroyed potlatch for these past three months?', the answer is - she has, Martha Prior Davies, born 31st October 2012.

So I had an idea. From now on potlatch is going to be a baby and parenting blog, dedicated to questions such as "Is it ok to play Wagner to your little one, even though he was rightwing?" and "How to ask the barista nicely whether their babyccinos are made with milk from hand-stroked cows?".

OK, maybe not. But, as Charlie Brooker and Jonathan Freedland both found, with the best will in the world, it's difficult not to discover some public significance in this event. Certainly there is existential and personal significance, though whether people need to hear about that is another matter (Simon). Is there intellectual significance? It's a great pleasure to say 'not that much'. Wittgenstein urged his philosophy students to tackle the painful linguistic misunderstanding on which philosophy is based, by quitting the university and taking a job in Woolworths. He might have added: when a small thigh is so beautifully round and pudgy, that you find yourself having to stretch the skin to wipe the poo out of the creases, then you have truly escaped the curse of theory. And yet...

The existentialism is unavoidable. Maybe that's because most babies, our's included, arrive in hospitals, where suffering and loss might lurk around any corner. In a hospital, every arm around a shoulder might signal mourning. One feels almost guilty - mistaken? - to be swimming against this tide by introducing new life into such a situation. But the morbidity of having a child struck me much earlier. Crossing the Marylebone Road the day I found out I would be a father, I hesitated before running across the path of a juggernaut that was still five or ten seconds away. What if I slipped? What if I had mis-calculated its speed? From now on, life would be a series of pedestrian crossings. Thanks, Martha. That rock'n'roll suicide that I'd had up my sleeve, in case sociology turned out not to be a source of glamourous danger after all, would also have to be shelved.

And still there was more morbidity! As we carried her out into the world on the second day of her life, I had a strange feeling of suddenly understanding the Israel-Palestine conflict. She was so tiny, so fundamentally illogical and so beautiful, that if someone were to harm her, then I could only feasibly respond using violence. I would also never be able to forget that they'd done it. Something about the mismatch between her tiny capabilities and the intensity of emotion brought on a form of paranoia. If, say, the army accidentally killed her with a mis-directed shell, then waging permanent war on the British army would feel like a plausible reaction. When trying to make sense of conflicts in Northern Ireland or the Middle East, we focus on tangible, 'cultural' phenomena of territory and 'religion' - but perhaps human beings can gradually forget about the loss of land and the slow dissolution of ritual. Maybe it's the loss of their children that they simply have no capacity to forgive.

Luc Boltanski writes in Love and Justice as Competencies that what love and violence share is a refusal of equivalence. Where the grammar of justice is to treat people equally with a measure, both love and violence refuse this equality and this measure. They refuse proportionality or uniformity. Hence, Boltanski argues, it is probably fruitless to try and understand how politics descends into violence, purely by focusing on the failures of law. Misdeeds made within a system of justice can be 'repaid' or punished with proportionality. But injuries experienced within the order of love have no proportionate response. This report from Gaza came a few weeks after Martha was born, and made me reflect that the political consequences of such an event will be literally unquantifiable.

 

On the cheerier side of things, I can happily report that babies are conclusive proof of the fantasy of the Cartesian ego. Cogito ergo sum should actually read vomito ergo sum. Did Descartes have children? I know Kant didn't, which shows. I wish someone with children had told me this before I tried to plough through the Critique of Pure Reason. No, it turns out that there is no a priori, transcendental or ontologically separate thing called a 'subject', 'cogito' or 'consciousness', that exists prior to or in parallel to the material world. Before everything else, there is a system of organs to be constantly tended like a very loud and exhausting Tamagotchi. David Hume, on the other hand, clearly did have children: I watch Martha gradually working out that when she smacks herself in the face, the resulting pain is caused by the hand waving around in front of her. What we call 'reason' is really just the learned piecing together of cause and effect. (One day she may even work out that the hand in question is 'hers', but everything in good time).

Visitors coo over Martha in the same way that tourists gasp in awe at Manhattan. They point to the skyscrapers, central park and the delis, as if the island were a self-sufficient paradise. They show no interest in the stream of trucks that pours over bridges in the early morning, bringing fresh produce for ungrateful Manhattanites to consume, and pours back over bridges at night carrying thousands of tonnes of putrid garbage. As Freud understood, it's really not obvious where the baby ends and the parent begins. Babies, like Manhattan, demonstrate the truth of Bruno Latour's 'actor-network' theory. They are individual human actors, yet they only exist thanks to a network of constantly supportive human and non-human actors. Next time you go and visit someone's new-born, ask to see where the real action is: maybe it's time to bounce the breast-pump on your knee or get your photo taken with the bucket of Napisan.

The wonderful aspects of having a child would be difficult for me to describe without sounding trite (pay attention, Simon), and are not what my miserabilist blog is for. The tiresome aspects are too tedious to report. But all I can say is that they're better when people don't harp on about them (Simon!). "The first six weeks are the worst!" someone told my partner, who on the contrary was happily savouring nearly every moment of them. "Your life will be unrecognisable", various friends with children warned me darkly - something which is also true after the death of loved-ones, but you don't hear repeated ad nauseam at funerals.

Tiredness is difficult, but it isn't dangerous and it isn't terminal. I picked up Mark Rice-Oxley's 'depression memoir' recently (which I'm afraid I put down as soon as I came across the apparently unselfconscious line "my heart was racing like a hamster in an experiment"). With all sympathy for his or anyone's mental distress, one passage in a chapter entitled 'Is Dad all there is?' just appeared self-destructive:

Fatherhood is a watershed. The pram in the hallway is the enemy of promise. It depletes. People with small children don't generally distinguish themselves... Look at Beckham, Flintoff, Pietersen, Rooney. Look at Bowie, McCartney, Lennon. Don't tell me any of them were greater at their thing after they became fathers.

This poses the question: if parenthood turns out to be in conflict with an already bipolar culture of performance anxiety, where to turn one's ire? Towards the pram in the hallway, or the Red Bull-swilling sporting icons of neoliberalism? If one's sense of self is rooted in some myth of limitless potential and time, then, yes, a child will do serious damage to that. Time suddenly feels finite, both in a mortal sense and in a practical, managerial sense of how to carry on getting things done. That is a reality that has long preceded the post-68 culture of individual optimisation, which - Alain Ehrenberg's superb book would suggest - deserves far more blame for depression than the arrival of a baby.

One fear that I did hold, before Martha's arrival, was that parenthood would make me rightwing. I wondered if I'd suddenly start to worry about the stock market or crime-rates, in a way that I never had done previously. Maybe I'd go on anti-paedophile marches! But on the contrary, I only feel all the more resentful towards this country's elites, for robbing us of so many possible futures without care. I resent even more the managerialist nonsense that divides people into achievers and non-achievers, leaving me with the only hope that my daughter falls into the former category, and the Newspeak of an education system that uses the term 'excellent' to mean 'acceptable', and the term 'acceptable' to mean 'non-acceptable'. And this is quite aside from the massive NHS-love-in that accompanies child-birth.

That's enough about babies now. We shall enjoy Martha, privately (unless you happen to be friends with me on facebook, in which case you'll have learnt to stand well back), and I shall henceforth get back to blogging about what ads on the tube tell us about the crisis of capitalism and stuff, perhaps with just a tinge less anger.

Independent article on happiness

I had this article in The Independent magazine on Saturday, offering some explanations for the turn towards happiness, as an object of statistics and government. It mainly summarises things I've written elsewhere in openDemocracy and The New Left Review. The piece concludes:

So much technocratic interest in our minds, brains and selves may sound frightful. In 1816, Samuel Coleridge accused utilitarian philosophers of recognising "no duties which it could not reduce into debtor and creditor accounts on the ledgers of self-love". But the science of happiness may have a more culturally transformative role: as we now know all too well, British living standards are going into reverse, at least for the next five years – and who knows what will happen after that? If GDP growth represents national 'progress', then this nation has stopped moving.

This poses crucial questions about how best to exploit a shrinking supply of income, jobs and public spending – which research on happiness can help answer. The same pound can have very different psychological pay-offs. As [Geoff] Mulgan explains: "The less money there is to go around the more important it is that each pound achieves the greatest possible effect, and some of the policies that would have the biggest impact on happiness won't actually cost much...".

But economic stagnation also poses serious philosophical questions about how else we can imagine our society's direction of travel, once the assumption of economic growth no longer holds. Modern societies need a sense that the future will be better than the past. If capitalism can no longer make such a promise, then forms of non-economic growth might have to. The ONS's figure of '7.4' could be the start of a whole new approach to social and economic change.

happiness summary

I've written a concluding article for the OpenDemocracy happiness debate, that I've been editing since the beginning of the year, which summarises the contributions and reflects on the recent ONS announcement of the happiness indicators. You can read it here.

the political economy of unhappiness

Continuing from the debate on happiness for OpenDemocracy, I have an article in the current New Left Review, entitled 'The Political Economy of Unhappiness'. This stems from a curiosity I've had for some time, of how it is that economists and statisticians have come to grapple with issues that were once the preserve of Frankfurt School Marxists, namely suffering and the paradoxes of 'progress'. I argue:

As the recent statistical interest in social and economic ‘progress’ suggests, the neo-classical discourse surrounding happiness and unhappiness invariably strays into ethical, then teleological, and then critical terrain. On the one hand this leads to an instrumentalization of critical, ethical and Enlightenment concerns (as the measurement of historical progress would suggest); but on the other, the contradictions and injuries of neo-liberal capitalism start to show up within the very positivist bodies of knowledge that are intended to regulate and sustain it. If the ‘need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth’, perhaps liberal economics is on the verge of uncovering truths that it never previously imagined.

I might add that this piece is rumoured to be the first ever New Left Review article to cite The Daily Mail.

the personalisation of the public interest

I have a new piece in the Open Democracy 'happiness debate', looking at how 'wellbeing' statistics are being designed and presented in ways that purport to represent what each of us feels and values. I term this the 'personalisation of the public interest'. As I argue:

Once experts accept that individuals are authorised to evaluate their own lives, rather than have them evaluated by professionals, it quickly follows that they gain the right to evaluate national performance too. This is not quite the post-modern babble of talk radio and BBC message boards, but nor is it the classically modern pronouncement of hard, professionally-endorsed fact. Feelings and impressions now help to constitute who and how we are as a nation.

As with the personalisation of public services, this ‘personalisation of the public interest’ is driven initially by fear on the part of policy elites. Blairites feared that unless public services caught up with the ethos and techniques of the private sector, that individuals could turn against the public sector altogether. Similarly, the motivation for the OECD’s work, and the Sarkozy-commissioned ‘Stiglitz enquiry’ - , was a fear that individuals no longer believed what ‘official statistics’ were telling them. In particular, the introduction of the Euro in 2002 meant that ‘official’ inflation rates became out of kilter with how individuals felt about their own purchasing power. In this sense, ‘wellbeing’ is a rearguard concession to the media and opinion-formers, who demand the right to describe how society is really doing.

As ever, if you'd like to comment on the article itself, please do so underneath the Open Democracy article itself.

interview with Geoff Mulgan on happiness

The Open Democracy Happiness Debate continues, with an interview I did with Geoff Mulgan following the launch of Action for Happiness, of which he was one of the founders. I tried to press him on some of the philosophical and political weaknesses of the happiness agenda, as currently constituted, and he rebuffed the challenges fairly effectively. One of Mulgan's many great skills as a public intellectual, perhaps honed in the corridors of power, is to shift an argument onto positivist, evidence-oriented grounds when it suits him, while always remaining far smarter and theoretically aware than any outright positivist. Still, he remains a fascinating intellectual-entrepreneur-wonk or whatever the hell he is.

If you'd like to comment on the interview, please do so underneath the article itself.