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?

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.

the MBUOSM check-up

I've discovered a handy way of running a quick health-check on Western civilisation. Simply google the phrase 'make better use of social media' to receive an instant check-list of which of our beloved institutions are feeling a bit under the weather. High on the list, one discovers:

- governments

- government departments and the public sector

- journalists

- sporting organisations

- small businesses

- charities

- more government

I came across an article last week (which I now can't find) on how scientists can help Britain's economy return to growth. Recommendations included: be more innovative, spin-out more businesses and MBUOSM (as I shall now insist it's called). That's science sorted. Please send in the Catholic Church.

the advantage of nihilism

In her brilliant review of The Social Network, Zadie Smith makes an important observation regarding Mark Zuckerberg (or at the very least, his depiction in the film) - the mystery of his vocation.

If it’s not for money and it’s not for girls—what is it for? With Zuckerberg we have a real American mystery. Maybe it’s not mysterious and he’s just playing the long game, holding out: not a billion dollars but a hundred billion dollars. Or is it possible he just loves programming? No doubt the filmmakers considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming—if such a pleasure exists—in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible? Movies are notoriously bad at showing the pleasures and rigors of art-making, even when the medium is familiar.

It may indeed be that Facebook involves extending 'the hacker ethic' into everyday life, but mischievously divorcing that ethic from the technological domain which it initially accompanied. As I suggested in this post, the hacker ethic becomes especially disruptive, once no longer confined to coders (just as economics becomes most disruptive when no longer confined to the analysis of markets). But Smith's point is a good one nevertheless. Part of Zuckerberg and Facebook's power lies in refusing to inhabit any known 'vocation' (Weber), 'Sphere of justice' (Walzer), or 'order of worth' (Boltanski and Thevenot).

It strikes me that Britain's coalition government is doing something similar: promising to unleash chaos into public services, but without offering any justification for doing so. As I've argued before, this betrays a certain manic psychological element. But it may also be politically astute. George Osborne is a man entirely at ease with his own unpleasantness, thereby side-stepping Tony Blair's achilles heal, namely vanity. It was Osborne, as much as any Cameroon advisor, who suggested he remain sidelined in the run up to the 2010 election. He knows what the public thinks about him but doesn't care.

If Polly Toynbee is even half right in her assessment, we have a genuinely and frighteningly radical government on how hands. But to what end? With what justification? Driven by what vocation or sense of worth? Answers are few and far between, which must surely be considered a strategy. A government that justifies itself immediately establishes certain implicit limits for itself. It offers its critics a moral benchmark, which it itself has introduced. To justify is, therefore, to close down the scope for chaos, to set tramlines for the whirlwind of innovation. As David Stark argues in The Sense of Dissonance, innovation (as enacted by entrepreneurs) involves "keeping multiple evaluative principles in play", thereby preserving an element of uncertainty and maintaining respect for the power of contingency. Stark is writing about the economy, but transported to the realm of politics, this same principle sits at the heart of a Machiavellian or even Schmittian concept of realpolitik.

Zuckerberg's genius undoubtedly resides in refusing to adopt a single benchmark of success, as The Social Network well demonstrates. John Naughton wrote a nice piece a few weeks back about why the brutish Winklevoss twins would not be in Zuckerberg's position right now, had they retained control over Facebook - they were in it for the money. But Facebook seems, even more than Google, to succeed through a complete absence of moral rulebook, rather than a moral pluralism. The same is true of this increasingly disturbing government, which gives less and less account of itself, yet discretely unveils greater and greater policy ambition. To say that 'The Big Society' provides the moral vision behind the current NHS reforms is like saying that 'friendship' provides the moral vision behind a for-profit, privately-owned internet platform with half a billion users.

None of this is to say that Mark Zuckerberg or George Osborne is actually a nihilist. I'm not sure I believe in the possibility of nihilism as a consistent philosophy, but only as lurking existential unease that cannot be articulated. Articulation is already an exit from nihilism of sorts. However, the condition of the modern individual, as Weber would see it, is for one's vocation or meaning or ethos, to be a painfully private one. At best, it is shared by a small community, but never by society or state at large. The Weberian individual pines for a re-enchanted world, filled with shared meaning for all, embodied in great public figures or works - but this is never realised. 

The Zuckerberg-Osborne strategy is the inverse - it is to refuse articulation, to keep one's personal vocation as private and mysterious as possible, to create an illusion that one has no justification for one's actions. It is a lie, of course, but one that then maximises room for manoeuvre. In practice, the nihilist is not quite without any morality, just without any confession of one; laughter is offered in place of explanation or justification. Twenty years ago, the Conservative government used to ban Sinn Fein's leaders from having their own voices broadcast, as a means of constraining their demands within the nihilistic category of 'terrorism'. Today, Tory politicians turn this same trick to their own advantage, by demanding that chaos sweeps through the public sector, but refusing to articulate why.

reigning cats and dogs

There was one telling feature of the BBC's online coverage of the Haitian disaster on Wednesday: the 'Most read' story, as of around 10am that day, reported on a dog that was learning Polish.

I've long wondered about animals and the internet. The most read stories on the BBC regularly feature dogs that have adopted kittens, sheep that have had sex with goats, cats that can water-ski. There was one story that frequently recurred in the top five, of a man who was forced to marry a farm animal that he'd been caught having sex with. Then there are those annoying 'I can haz' cat pictures that I've never understood. 

Why is this? Maybe this is just a variant on pornography. The animals are, after all, usually naked. Simon Critchley argues that the existential substrate of humour (as opposed to comedy) is the blurring of the distinction between human and animal. We all laugh when a human does something animalistic, or an animal does something human. His book on the topic offers a definitive case of a joke involving a man having sex with a bear, which is surely destined for the BBC's 'most read' list. 

There is universality in this, but it is the inverse of that promised by Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. To appreciate this, read Kant's Idea for a Universal History, whose third thesis runs: 

Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.

Kant's account of history sees the human species gradually heading towards a single, global civil society, in which discourse is rational and elevated above the animal and the parochial. Humanity's telos is to globalise, rationalise, de-nationalise and de-naturalise its condition. The anti-Enlightenment sneer of Nietzsche and his followers - especially John Gray today - stresses the gut over the head, the friend over the enemy, the irrational custom over the civilised debate, desire over rationality. Animality doesn't just rattle reason, but gobbles it up.

The Haitian disaster is both shockingly counter-Enlightenment - almost counter-civilisation - and potentially a condition of greater Enlightenment. The grizzly reports refer to the living amongst piled up corpses, and the dying left to die without care, let alone modern medicine. It's not just that humanity is overwhelmed by a natural disaster, or that humans are on the verge of sub-human conditions and behaviour, but that modern science, technology and politics are virtually helpless at present. The Lisbon earthquake had a profound effect on the formation of European Enlightenment, famously leading Voltaire to abandon his theological optimism. An earthquake reveals how thin the veneer of modernity ever is, though perhaps equally how much thicker we have to make it.

I heard Douglas Alexander on the radio yesterday morning declaring that nobody knew the number of dead. I kept wondering why this number was so important - was it just morbid fascination on an epic scale? - until he used the phrase "so we can't get our arms around the scale of the problem", and then realised that, as puny and as silly as they are, numbers are one of the main tools that contemporary humans use to try and save themselves. As the Latourians would tell you disparagingly, they're one of our best sticks for fending off nature and keeping it at bay. So, fair enough, Douglas Alexander - I'll let you off this time. When nature was this rampant, cavemen would employ every tool available to them.

Meanwhile, another million people have watched the clip of the dog being taught Polish. As a space of communication, the internet hovers uncertainly between the promised global civil society that Kant believed would eventually arrive, and the sort of horror show that Nietzsche and Gray believe we are biologically wired to gawp at. The 'most read' section on the BBC website is a sort of barometer of the human condition, neither as elevated as the 'global civil society', nor as grotesque as nature's full awfulness. The watching world can't cope with Haiti from an Enlightenment perspective, for it can't get its 'arms around the scale of the problem' (which is not a bad definition of the Kantian sublime). But thankfully it can't cope with it from a Nietzschean perspective either, for some forms of awfulness are too much even for animals as sick as us. So we watch a dog learning Polish instead.

Pets sit mid-way between a global civil society and a global horror show. As Critchley indicates, human beings can't all partake in a single rational discourse about the nature of scientific progress, but they can all laugh at a cat that plays the clarinet. I saw the film of Disgrace at the weekend, and if there's one way that the film actually supplements the book, its with the constant canine imagery. I suspect that this is Coetzee's point, that between the sexual animal violence of the wild and the judicial order of the city lies the intermediary of the pet dog, representing both our connection to nature, and our miniscule distance from it. A cat or a dog turns out to be the most comforting thing to look at, for beings that can't work out if they're animals or not.

digital exuberance in space

Last week, I experienced two separate moments of bitterness regarding our contemporary cultural geography. Depending on your levels of Benjaminian pomposity, you might even call them moments of mourning for what capitalism discards unthinkingly.

The first occurred on a train from Birmingham to London, a journey of a mere 70 minutes. I am not one of those enviable people who find it easy to lose themselves in books (that's why I became an academic: to turn reading into a professional obligation), but I find that a combination of a train journey and super-ego provides the perfect opportunity to read. Across the aisle from me, a man of my age was fidgetting with his iphone. In between scrolling, clicking and browsing, he was ringing people up, for no discernible reason. His lack of mental peace started to infect me, until I experienced a Basil Fawlty-esque urge to lean over and offer him my newspaper. His 70 minute journey was spent scratching a technologically induced itch.

Mobile telecom companies, as I've argued before, are so culturally pernicious because they are effectively flogging language itself. In an age when there is scarcely any limit to what can be mediated, and where or when it can be distributed, there is no relationship or artefact that isn't on sale at your nearest Vodafone stockist. Your granny, Coldplay, BBC, work, dating are all part of the package. It's everything.

As the scarcity of Everything gradually wanes, the companies are becoming bolder in their branding of the infinite. T-Mobile now has an advert asking 'What would you do with limitless texts?' with a photo of a happy punter saying things like 'I'd text everyone I know and put together the world's greatest super-group!' (sorry??). Infinite opportunity to say, share, broadcast everything all the time anywhere has to be sold as a positive achievement, with a tangible result. But the truth was sitting across the aisle from me on the 15.03 from Birmingham: a restless child, pawing at a toy which promised everything and delivered scarcely anything. I had the gift of forty pages of a book. He had the gift of an anytime unlimited nothing. This isn't progress.

The second was when I found myself near the Astoria. I say the Astoria, I mean the crane in this picture.  I'd read about the Astoria being demolished and some of the protests being staged to defend it. But you don't experience the full sadness of 'all that is solid melting into air' until you witness this sort of vast, oppressive absence. Many others have written far more eloquently and knowledgeably about the creative destruction of the capitalist city than I can. What struck me, however, was - it being a venue, and a wonderful historic one at that - my overwhelming urge to start ranting, a la James Murphy, "But I was there! I was there at the Manic Street Preachers gig in December 1994! I was there in 1997 when etc etc!"

This is more than the impulsive reaction to seeing heritage destroyed. It's connected to my unfortunate co-passenger on the 15.03 from Birmingham. As James Murphy sees all too clearly, the age of the internet (and especially the mobile internet) has accelerated the development of William Mitchell's Economy of Presence, in which the most scarce form of communication (i.e. co-presence, such as gig) becomes the most valuable, and the most abundant (i.e. data sent over time and space, such as a text) drifts to worthlessness like spam.

In technological terms, the Economy of Presence looks something like the table on the left. The mobile phone company's task is to convince us that moving more of our lives into the column entitled 'Different place' is a form of liberation (the clue is in the word 'telecom'). This isn't to say that they wage war on face-to-face communication, only that they don't typically extract any surpluses from it either. As for the empty space above it, nobody has discovered many cultural forms that sit neatly in that box (one example I can think of is the BFI Mediatheque, which is limited by place presumably as part of a copyright deal on their archive).

And yet, the regrettable impact of all this digital mediation creates the forms of pathology in the box on the right. Consumers have developed their own unfortunate behaviour to sit in that troublesome empty box (Vodafone must be delighted!), namely the drifting out of conversations, and into text messaging and email. As far as the 'different place' column is concerned, my co-passenger on the 15.03 was certainly eating up his free minutes like a good boy, but I wonder if he was enriched by this experience in any way. I wonder if he felt liberated, or actually vaguely oppressed. As Zizek argues, contemporary capitalism replaces the moral imperative 'thou shalt' with a new permissive imperative 'thou may', which is no less burdensome. (Zizek also defined neo-liberalism as 'you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves shopping'. There is a variant of it which says 'you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves an iPhone').

Which brings us to the bottom right hand box. My nostalgia for the Astoria was partly nostalgia for an age in which cultural production was simpler, less ubiquitous and more value-able, just as people now treat vinyl records as sort of tombstones for their more cherished music. The 'But I was there!' plea is an attempt to cling to something that cannot be watered down and rendered worthless by over-production.

What is more appalling about the marketing strategies of contemporary telecom companies is that they see this, and then seek to control this form of presence too. O2 are currently leading the way, with their Priority tickets campaign, in which they grant their customers early access to tickets at their growing network of venues. As I discuss here, the contemporary marketer loathes the notion that cash alone might grant someone access to something as rare as a concert, so much so that they'd almost rather make it free and exclusive than priced and inclusive. Evidently aware that their customers increasingly cherish live music (in an age when other forms of music have been reduced to frigging ring-tones, I wonder who's responsible for that), they have staged a landgrab on the 'same place' column, offering proxi-communication as part of their telecommunication packages. 

Having removed all constraints on the 'where' and the 'when, they discover to their horror that people actually liked many of those constraints, just as I liked being stuck on a train with my book for 70 minutes. Not tolerating this, they then move on the individual in a pincer movement, offering cultural immediacy as part of their sales pitch for cultural mediacy (thought: the words 'media' and 'mediocre' both stem from the same word, 'medium').

A few years back, I argued something along these lines in an article for Prospect, entitled Digital Exuberance [pdf here], in which I argued that we need an 'ethic of inconvenience'. This was partly inspired by the Marshal Berman-esque critique of capitalist urban churn, in which the past is constantly sacrificed for the future. One spin-off from the modernist critique of modernity is the Jane Jacobs defence of slowness and social complexity, which I think can contribute to a defence of co-presence, un-packaged by telecoms. I asked what might be the equivalent of a speed-hump for the digital age.

Now I'm wondering if the two forms of critique need to be fused in some way. With telecoms inter-woven with everyday social life, be it long distance or otherwise, all varieties of space are being marketed. We're cajoled to relinquish our enjoyment of just being there, and when we refuse, we're sold a new package which allows us to shout 'but I was there!' It's suffocating.

Clay Shirky, Ronald Coase and, err, me

Clay Shirky is a Coasian, and a very smart one at that. His analysis of emerging, internet-enabled social structures is based on the economic theory of transaction costs. My report on the nature and future of the firm is also Coasian up to a point, and yet I'm eager to take an exit from neo-classical economics, and to enter political sociology instead.

What I'm trying to stress, which I don't pick up from Shirky's work (and certainly not from the freakonomic Chicago-based followers of Coase), is that if non-market structures can be more efficient than market ones, then this makes political questions of authority, legitimacy, power and democracy (even more) unavoidable. The liberal economic attempt to entirely bracket questions of efficiency falters, once the very concept of efficiency becomes entangled with coercive or co-operative industrial structures.

This would then lead to a critique of Shirky, that I'd love to develop properly at some point. The seeds of it are actually contained in my Demos work. The section which the geekier amongst you may find interesting is entitled 'the future of co-operation?' and begins on p. 54. I take the following economic premise:

One might say that where mutuals have their value locked in to them, open networked collaboration practices make sure that value remains locked out of any private hands or organisation. If most firms seek to defend their intangible assets as a ‘private good’, and mutual societies do so as a ‘club good’, then open networked collaboration does so as a ‘public good’.

So far so Coasian. But then the political critique:

The problem these associations have is that they struggle to appoint decision makers or to overcome their defining feature, which is the freedom for people to exit and enter from one moment to the next. A mutual establishes a set of democratic rules that everyone then consents to. Power becomes centralised, but on the understanding that it is used within a constitutional structure. Open collaborative networks, on the other hand, have certain individuals who are more powerful than others (the highly connected, the initiators, the brokers) but little sense of legitimacy surrounding these individuals, and therefore little obligation for others to obey them. The bodies providing the ‘constitutions’ of the new associations tend to be private companies – Facebook, Google, Zopa etc – and their rules are currently established as they please. If a new democratic mutualism is to arise from any of this, and not merely a new informational mutualism, then this problem will have to be overcome.

My full Weberian rewrite of Here Comes Everybody will have to wait for another day.

what's politically worthwhile?

How do we judge the worth of a person? Philosophically this is a question almost too vast to address, leading beyond morality into much headier questions about existence, death etc. But sociologically, it can be much easier to take a bite out of. The economic sociology of Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thevenot and David Stark broadens the analysis of worth beyond narrow economic categories of value or efficiency to highlight the fact that such categories are parasitical upon larger, foundational accounts of what is morally valuable. On a technical level, Lucy Kimbell has explored the techniques of human evaluation in various artistic projects. And then there are those such as Kevin Kelly who are looking at this issue of self-auditting. If a philosophical defence of this sociology of moral pluralism is required, it is provided by Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice.

Times of economic and political upheaval offer an opportunity to move from one evaluative framework to another. Boltanski and Chiapello's New Spirit of Capitalism is an outstanding exposition of how this can occur, focusing mainly on the moral-economic transitions that followed '68. This recent report on 'Prosperity Without Growth' shows a canny understanding of the possibilities to reinvent our economic evaluations, after the present crisis.

In line with some of my recent postings, and this thoughtlet about moral bragging, I keep coming back to this one question: why is it that 'citizens' seize social media to portray an optimal cultural representation of themselves, while avoiding any moral representation, but politicians seize mass media to do the reverse? As the two forms of media begin slowly to merge with one another, the issue starts to become even more striking.

Imagine, for a moment, that the state is just one organisation amongst many, simply with larger, more complex responsibilities for socio-economic coordination and investment (this shouldn't be too hard: it's what the neo-classical 'market failure' brigade and the Shirky-influenced politics2.0 crowd already appear to believe. This excessively economistic worldview is ultimately only able to distinguish between a nuclear warhead and an e-petition in the language of price). Then also imagine that a citizen is already a politician, just with a smaller remit and fewer people to represent. The convergence of broadcast and social media makes this easier to do on both fronts - after all, we're constantly told by Jeff Jarvis et al that a newspaper is just a blog with higher overheads, so why not view the state as a facebook group with prisons?

From this perspective, might we say the following: that in the age of a decentralised, network society, where people demand autonomy - primarily as consumers, but that could change - the problem politicians face is how to be more like 'us' and the problem 'we' face is how to be more like politicians. Matthew Taylor writes regularly on this latter issue of how to enable people to take active, collective responsibility for the world around them. 

Might this issue about aesthetic vs moral reputation be part of the problem, and hence part of the solution? Gordon Brown's central problem is that he conveys endless moralism, duty and calling, while failing entirely to communicate who he is. The civic deficit, on the other hand, is that people aspire to optimal identities, tastes and fashions, but only rarely gauge themselves in terms of 'the good life'. The politician measures worth in ethical terms while the citizen does so in aesthetic terms. Now that we all have equal access to the means of media production and can organise without organisations (still disregarding the substantive distinction between a nuclear warhead and an e-petition), politics has become a pro-am pursuit, but where the 'pros' are trading in social capital and the 'ams' in cultural capital. 

When politicians do start trading in cultural accounts of worth, we need to remain vigilent. At best it involves Tony Blair inviting Noel Gallagher to Downing Street, and at worst it involves something much more troubling, as we saw in the European election results. I wonder if we'll miss Gordon Brown's rather dreary, 1950s promises to 'do his duty'. In some ways it is rather comforting to be governed by politicians who are 'out of touch' as it relieves the citizenry of responsibility for the state of things. But anyone who is committed to the 'radical' devolution of power, to autonomy, to organising without organisations, grass-roots democracy and so on might seriously want to consider what a new moral economy might look like. How will ugliness, blandness, tastelessness be trumped in the future by virtue and participation? Or is the challenge simply to make ethics 'cool'? So how then is that different from the marketing strategies and 'reputation management' of ethically dubious companies? There must be a limit to how neatly ethics can be collapsed into aesthetics.

In the realm of consumption, optimists argue that ethical accounts of worth are beginning to fight back against aesthetic ones. In time, this may occur with use of media and mySociety-type initiatives may become a dominant force. But until then, the risk is that social media makes us spin doctors of our own lives, tweaking our cultural identities, where democracy in fact requires the opposite. As uncomfortable as it makes the British (not the Americans), perhaps virtue needs audiences and platforms for celebration.

One of Lucy Kimbell's evaluation projects, 'Pindices', looked at this issue of how to evaluate an individual's democratic worth. On the face of it, the project is absurd, beyond the realms of how we imagine ourselves living, but that poses the question 'why?'. I've noticed that people 'donate' their facebook statuses to a given cause, but 'moral bragging' is still taboo in comparison to 'cultural bragging'. I have no deep desire to see this reversed, but suspect that it signifies something about the challenges involved in creating the type of decentralised society that most of us purport to want.

social brutalism

In shockingly Germanic fashion, Facebook has gifted an entirely new verb to the English-speaking world. What do you do if you choose to 'like' someone's comment, link, photo or whatever, and then change your mind? Of course: you opt to unlike it. (Facebook doesn't grant you the chance to go as far as disliking it, but then I guess you simply opt to hide people you don't want to see).

It strikes me that we will need many such new verbs in the future. How else will we prevent our society gradually moving towards the ultimate synoptical inter-connection of every digital node in the world? How to tackle all the social pollution that's arising? Hence we need more mechanisms and norms to untag, unfriend, unlike, unsend, unreceive, untwitter...

You could look at this as just another example of privacy technologies in action. I've long believed that breaks in informational networks are just as valuable as links (I mean that culturally and politically, but if you prefer an economic explanation read Ronald Burt's paper [pdf] on this). Privacy is one way of understanding the value of disconnects. But things are more complicated than that now. 'Private' sits in opposition to 'public', in parallel to how 'economic' sits in opposition to 'political'. But can all efforts to unconnect really be understood in terms of this opposition? The problem of spam, for instance, doesn't really feel like a privacy deficit. Efforts to opt out of information networks aren't necessarily motivated by privacy.

Instead, the spirit of unconnection is fuelled by the Miesian aesthetic, 'less is more'. Unliking, unfriending, unconnecting will one day emerge as acts of social brutalism, analogous to architectural brutalism. They won't seek to alienate or criticise anyone, simply to minimise and cleanse. We have the phenomenon of undesign in web design, which I assume shares a similar aesthetic principle. The problem is that we're not talking about objects, buildings or pixels on this occasion, we're talking about people. It's all very well being a modernist when it comes to non-human actors, but what about where non-non-human ones are concerned? At some point we'll need it to be OK to say "it's not that I dislike you, it's just that I unlike you..."