No Solutions II: Forgetting Our Social Selves, Research Time, 06/02/2017

What does this have to do with efficiency? In a way, it’s an expression of the stereotypical engineer’s mentality – I can figure out a solution to everything.

Here’s an example Evgeni Morozov talks about. Obesity is a serious public health problem in American society. So how does a Silicon Valley engineer and businessperson do some kind of civic duty and fix it?

Another problem with using personal smartphone apps to curb obesity
is that a lot of people who suffer most from obesity do so not because
of a personal failing that a tech fix can repair, but because of a social
cause – like living stuck in an urban food desert, or poverty in
general. In our society, the big projects like space exploration have
been left to the good mad scientists. Our government, which is
supposed to look after the public good, has been rendered incapable.

Because Silicon Valley consists, for the most part, in people who want to become billionaire businesspeople improving their society with technology. For all the examples of petulant man-children or mad scientists, most leaders and workers in Silicon Valley really want to make the world a better place.

It’s messed up, I know. But one thing I’ve learned after working in the business world is that even though it’s all hype, a remarkable number of people actually believe their own hype. So okay, you’re making the world a better place. By doing what?

Create a business that encourages people to become healthier – eat better, exercise. Social networking business ideas – ideas that work in the Facebook economy, essentially, whether in their app ecology or that take it as a model – use data and tracking to achieve their goals.

So self-tracking devices on your phones can let you monitor your consumption and exercise. Then they make a game out of tracking all this data. Earn badges for cutting down on carbs and processed foods, bonus points for eating free-range meat.

The healthy eating app is an efficient way to get people to improve their health. You just do what the game tells you when you play it. Arguing, reasoning, long sessions of training to improve your habits aren’t nearly as effective, because you have to work through them in a long, difficult process of personal growth.

Who wants that shit? Self-tracking apps become a way to replace your dietician here, parking enforcement cops there, maybe even your therapist too.

I think sometimes that when Ted Kaczynski, the radical anti-technology
terrorist, looks at the growing disaster of our planet, he smiles. As if
he was right. Morozov isn't anti-technology, and neither am I. We just
have very critical attitudes about how our technology has developed.
I'm especially upset at the ecological harm that our civilization causes,
which Morozov's beef is the moral erosion of an ideology of arch-
individuality and efficiency. There'll be some projects involving Ted
in the future. They're shaping up to be more than a little terrifying to
the human soul.

This is just one summary of examples of real businesses and apps that Morozov describes throughout To Save Everything Click Here. They all unfold in essentially the same way.

The Silicon Valley method is to develop the most efficient routes to changing human behaviour they can. That efficiency is based on manipulating behaviour, bypassing all the deliberation, self-conscious effort, and personal ethical searching that actually shapes and defines a human’s individual subjectivity.

Here’s Morozov’s whole argument in a few sentences. I mean, I had fun reading his 400+ page book, but the underlying point was remarkably simple. He discovered a lot of different perspectives on this basic idea through all his analyses of various parts of the industry.

So all that detail – how the apps encouraging the erosion of privacy interact with self-tracking approaches to civil service, public health, and education, for example – is useful in letting us see the many facets of the whole affair.

But it all revolves around one central insight: When you prioritize the most efficient way to solve problems above all else, you atrophy our moral senses of responsibility to wider society. You forget that humanity is a society fundamentally.

Ironically, you use social networking platforms to encourage people to think of themselves as disconnected individuals instead of an interdependent network. Ends up treating us as less than human.

No Solutions I: Stripping Ourselves to One Line, Research Time, 03/02/2017

I don’t know if I’d say this is continued from yesterday’s post, as much as it’s another turn around the same idea. Appropriate for a post that follows Groundhog Day.

Set the stage. So Evgeni Morozov wrote a book called To Save Everything Click Here. Steve Fuller sent me a copy, and I’ve finally got around to reading it.

An aesthetic issue. I find his writing style a little too polemic for my liking personally, as it sometimes makes him sound more like a technophobe than he really is. Because it’s clear from reading the whole book that he’s in favour of a technological society – he only has a problem with some influential business ideologies.

With the government having been systematically defunded over the last
decades since the late 1970s, it's left to private industry to build the
brighter tomorrow we all dreamed of. And it sometimes feels like
everyone except Elon Musk would prefer to build a health tracking
app they can sell to Facebook for $1-billion.

The problem ideology. Solutionism. It’s the ideology that pervades Silicon Valley culture – people as different as Travis Kalanick, Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel all think as solutionists.

What is Solutionism? In its simplest form, it’s the notion that any difficulty people encounter is to be smoothed away with the algorithmic and analytic powers of contemporary data technology.

That could come from self-monitoring, the dynamics of ubiquitous social media sharing, data analysis, or actually modifying the environment to restrict human choices from inefficient or destructive activities.

I mean it about that last issue. One of the ideas Morozov discusses to encourage people to follow the law is installing rotating cage doors in subways instead of waist-high wickets to prevent queue jumping.

That leads to another aesthetic issue. This book is too long. I mean that in the sense that it’s longer than it needs to be. Morozov’s style of exploring long lists of examples ultimately drags the book out much longer than it needs to be.

As a philosophical argument, you only need enough examples to demonstrate the point. Morozov seems to list enough examples to prove the absolute ubiquity of these ridiculous solutionist ideas all over the entire business class of the tech industry. And the examples – there being so many of them – tend to bury the core concepts of his argument, which are most important.

Do you seriously think your parking meter can help save your city from
being underfunded and disorganized? Then Evgeni Morozov will hector
you.

To Save Everything Click Here is about a moral inversion that Silicon Valley’s ideology perpetuates. And it’s a problematic ideology – the replacement of responsibility with efficiency.

Here’s how I lay it out, and the best way Morozov himself lays it out. He returns, in several contexts throughout the book, to an approach to business ideas common in Silicon Valley culture – gamification.

Literally, you solve problems by making a game of them. Creating a set of incentives and rewards for civil public behaviour – recycling, improving energy use, improving personal health. You earn these rewards as you carry out the activities we want you to. With each item you recycle, you earn points in the game, and those points translate into real rewards.

This interplay of incentives and rewards makes activity that has previously been a moral responsibility – we work to improve the environment because we’re good citizens with duties to do so – into a prize. Instead of recycling to help our society become healthier and more sustainable, you recycle to earn direct material rewards.

The presumption underlying making civic responsibility a game: that everyone acts only for their own self-interest. Morozov never says so, but it’s that sketchy libertarian principle underlying so much of Silicon Valley culture.

The veneration of self-interest as humanity’s central drive pervades the culture. That’s true for folks all over Silicon Valley whether their explicit political beliefs are as progressive and futurist as Elon Musk or as demented and retrograde as Peter Thiel.

Is self-interest humanity’s primary drive? No. No it isn’t. Morozov cites a few solid psychological experiments demonstrating such. But that’s not how you disprove a purely conceptual question like that.

No, you disprove it in the conceptual realm. Which means you have to point out that moral motivations – drives to act in the name of benevolence – have always been real. If we were only ever truly acting in our self-interest, we never would have developed moral principles in the first place.

We never would have developed concepts of our responsibilities to others if we didn’t perceive that responsibility in our ordinary, everyday social relations. Our moral obligations to each other are real – we experience them in our social relations every day, providing we don’t have something medically wrong with us.

Through understanding the strength and interdependence of our social obligations to each other, we see self-interest as one of many possible motives in the dense network of those obligations. So if you think self-interest is the only drive of humanity, you’re cutting away a lot of human experience.

Now, what does this have to do with efficiency? . . . To be continued

The Skeptic and the Snark, Research Time, 02/02/2017

The Skeptic and the Snark are, of course, the same person. But they don’t have to be.

I’m talking about another book I’ve started reading lately, To Save Everything Click Here by the Stanford researcher Evgeni Morozov. Steve Fuller sent me a copy last year, and I’m only getting around to it now.

Morozov is a theorist of contemporary technology, and he’s written a nicely thick, comprehensive, critical, but accessibly written book about the Silicon Valley messiah complex.

There’s plenty to criticize in Silicon Valley, of course. But at the heart of all the specific idiocies and crimes of the culture is its pervasive arrogance and egotism. Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley is probably the best skewer in the comedy world. And Morozov’s book strives for the same insight in philosophical rhetoric.

Evgeni Morozov

Click Here offers a pretty comprehensive catalogue of contemporary literature boosting Silicon Valley culture’s core idealism – that a better life is a more efficient life, and that algorithmic, data-based analytics technology can build that better life.

The core of his own argument isn’t necessarily to offer a new alternative. And it isn’t to be a total techno-phobe either.* Morozov presumes to speak for the mainstream cultural instinct – that you can’t reduce humanity’s ethical existence and power of moral judgement to quantitative data analysis or technological controls.

* Even though he’s often so snarky toward his targets that he could easily be mistaken for a militant anti-technologist. Yet Ted Kaczynski himself writes with a chilling, calm frankness.

He identifies the ethical flaw of Silicon Valley’s utopianism of a perfectly efficient world as an undeserved arrogance in prescribing an entirely different moral principle to organize human society. Replacing responsibility with efficiency.

I think I may hammer out these thoughts in a little more detail tomorrow. At the moment, I’ve had a long day, and I’m too tired to get into the complexity of this idea. And it’s very complex.

Different examples Morozov explores in the book describe different aspects of this moral switch. And Morozov’s overall theme is two-fold.

First: Efficiency is a practically worse moral principle for people to adopt than our traditional morality of personal responsibility for yourself. Second: Silicon Valley utopians don’t deserve the power over the core principles of popular morality.

And I think you can reverse the order of those principles with no change in the effect. More detail tomorrow.