The remainder of this chapter prepares the way. The first task is to develop our understanding of what instrumentarian power is not, so in the section that follows we briefly consider key elements of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Most important is the fact that, like instrumentarianism, totalitarian power was also unprecedented. It literally defied human comprehension. There is much that we can learn from the struggles and missteps of scholars, journalists, and citizens as they found themselves overwhelmed by a force that they could neither fathom nor resist. Once we have tackled these questions, we will be equipped to bear down on an exploration of instrumentarianism’s origins in a field of intellectual endeavor that came to be known as “radical behaviorism,” most notably championed by B. F. Skinner and his dream of a “technology of behavior.” In Chapter 13 we integrate our insights to consider the unique aims and strategies of instrumentarian power.
II. Totalitarianism as a New Species of Power
The word totalitarianism first appeared in the early-twentieth-century work of Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile and came into wider use later with Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism, cowritten in 1932 with Gentile, who was by then Italy’s premier philosopher of fascism.2 Italy had entered the twentieth century as a second-rate country, ignored on the world stage, nursing a sense of failure and humiliation, and unable to support its own population as millions emigrated in search of a better life. In the first decade of the twentieth century a new generation of intellectuals and avant-garde futurists began to weave the dream of a “new Italy.” Gentile dedicated his philosophical talents to this revival of nationalist zeal.
At the heart of Gentile’s political philosophy is the concept of the “total.”3 The state was to be understood as an inclusive organic unity that transcends individual lives. All separateness and difference are surrendered to the state for the sake of this superordinate totality. In 1932 Mussolini charged Gentile with writing the philosophical introduction to his book, while Mussolini authored the social and political principles that would define the fascist worldview.4 The Doctrine begins by declaring the fascist attitude as, above all, “a spiritual attitude” that penetrates the most intimate redoubt of each human participant:
To know men one must know man.… Fascism is totalitarian and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people.… [It] is an inwardly accepted standard and rule of conduct, a discipline of the whole person; it permeates the will no less than the intellect… sinking deep down into his personality; it dwells in the heart of the man of action and of the thinker, of the artist, and of the man of science: soul of the soul.… It aims at refashioning not only the forms of life but their content—man, his character, and his faith… entering into the soul and ruling with undisputed sway.5
That year, the refashioning of the soul as the hallmark of the totalitarian impulse was immortalized by Stalin on a glittering, champagne-soaked Moscow evening. The setting was an auspicious literary gathering hosted by a compliant Maxim Gorky in the sprawling mansion that Stalin had presented to the revered author upon his return to Russia from a self-imposed Italian exile. Stalin took the floor for a toast as the room fell silent. “Our tanks are worthless if the souls who must steer them are made of clay. This is why I say: The production of souls is more important than that of tanks.… Man is reshaped by life itself, and those of you here must assist in reshaping his soul. That is what is important, the production of human souls. And that is why I raise my glass to you, writers, to the engineers of the soul.”6 The authors assembled around Stalin that evening raised their glasses to his toast, persuaded perhaps by memories of less adaptive colleagues already exiled or executed, including the 1929 torture and murder of artists and writers in the Solovetsky Islands’ aptly named Church of the Beheading.7
By 1933, the term totalitarianism had begun to circulate widely in Germany. Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels adopted it, and German intellectuals declared the “turn to totalitarianism.” Nazism also shifted the doctrine in an important way, asserting the “movement,” not the “state,” as the spiritual center of German totalitarianism, a relationship summarized during Hitler’s first years as chancellor in National Socialism’s popular slogan “The movement gives orders to the state.”8
That totalitarianism was a new species of power had confounded its analysis from the start, as both its Russian and German variants swept through those societies, challenging the foundations of Western civilization. Although these totalitarian regimes began to take root years before World War II—first in Russia in 1929 with Stalin’s ascension to power and then in Germany in 1933 with Hitler’s installation as chancellor—they eluded systematic study until the end of the war. Analysis was impeded in part by the sheer mystery and perpetual movement of the whole enterprise: the secret plans executed by secret police, the silent complicities and hidden atrocities, the ceaseless transformation of who or what was up or down, the intentional torsion of facts into anti-facts accompanied by a perpetual deluge of propaganda, misinformation, euphemism, and mendacity. The authoritative leader, or “egocrat,” to use the French philosopher Claude Lefort’s term, displaces the rule of law and “common” sense to become the quixotic judge of what is just or unjust, truth or lie, at each moment.9
Western publics, especially in the US, were genuinely unable to grasp the enormity of what was underway. It literally boggled minds. This intellectual paralysis is immortalized in the pages of a cultural icon of that era, Look magazine. Its August 15, 1939, issue featured an article titled “What’s Going On in Russia?” written by New York Times former Moscow bureau chief and Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty.10 The piece appeared just months after the conclusion of the Great Terror, when, between 1937 and 1938, Stalin ordered the murders of whole sectors of the Soviet population, from poets to diplomats, generals to political loyalists. According to Soviet historian Robert Conquest, that two-year period saw seven million arrests, one million executions, two million deaths in labor camps, one million people imprisoned, and another seven million people still in camps by the end of 1938.11
Despite the immediacy of catastrophic evil, Duranty’s article describes the Constitution of the USSR as one of the “the most democratic in the world… a foundation on which a future democracy may be built.” In addition to praiseworthy descriptions of the Red Army, free education and medical care, communal housing, and equality of the sexes, there is an upbeat commentary in which the “great purge” is breezily described as “one of the periodic cleansings of the Communist Party.” Duranty reports that this “cleansing” is “now over,” and people are “repairing the damage,” as if the country were tidying up after a particularly nasty winter storm. In fact, the Stalinist pattern of violence, imprisonment, exile, and execution merely shifted its focus with a swift and terrifying ferocity to the Baltic and eastern Poland. Among the many atrocities between 1939 and 1941, hundreds of thousands of Poles were marched to northern labor camps,12 and tens of thousands of members of the Polish Communist Party were murdered.13 Just one week after Duranty’s article, Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler, attacked Poland in September, and in November the Red Army invaded Finland.14 In 1940 Stalin ordered the massacre of 15,000 Polish nationalists taken as prisoners of war in the 1939 attack.15
The most startling feature of Duranty’s essay is its characterization of Stalin himself. There, sandwiched between a celebratory feature on a newly released film called The Wizard of Oz and a lengthy spread on embarrassing celebrity pictures, such as the famed ventriloquist’s dummy Charlie McCarthy with a cigarette in his wooden mouth, is a photo of a handsome smiling Joseph Stalin captioned “Stalin, chairman of the inner circle of the Communist Party… does not lay down the law as Lenin did. Stalin prefers to hear the views of his associates before he makes his own decision.”16 Stalin’s 1939 lionization in Look as an exemplar of participatory management was followed a few months later with h
is ascension to Time magazine’s cover as “Man of the Year.” Indeed, between 1930 and his death in 1953, Stalin made a total of ten appearances on the cover of Time. All of this provides some sense of totalitarianism’s elaboration and institutionalization long before it was identified and analyzed as a coherent new form of power that, as many scholars would conclude, posed history’s greatest threat to civilization.17
With a few important exceptions, it was only after the Nazi defeat that the program of naming began in earnest. “Plenty of information was available contradicting the official picture,” writes Conquest. He asks why “journalists, sociologists, and other visitors” were taken in by the Soviet regime’s lies. One reason is that the Soviet government went to a great deal of trouble to present a false picture, including “model prisons” that betrayed no trace of the immense state machinery of torture and death. Another reason was the credulity of the observers themselves. In some cases, like Duranty’s, they were blinded by an ideological allegiance to the idea of a socialist state.18
The most compelling reason of all is that in most of these cases, journalists, scholars, and Western governments had a difficult time reckoning the full weight of totalitarianism’s monstrous achievements because the actual facts were so “improbable” that it was difficult even for specialists to grasp their truth. “The Stalin epoch,” writes Conquest, “is replete with what appear as improbabilities to minds unfitted to deal with the phenomena.”19 This failure of comprehension has immediate significance for us as we learn to reckon with surveillance capitalism and its new instrumentarian power.
The confrontation with totalitarianism’s impossibility is reflected in the moving accounts of the first scholars determined to lift the veil on that era’s gruesome truths. Nearly every intellectual who turned to this project in the period immediately following the war cites the feeling of astonishment at the suddenness with which, as Harvard political scientist Carl Friedrich put it, totalitarianism had “burst upon mankind… unexpected and unannounced.”20 Its manifestations were so novel and unanticipated, so shocking, rapid, and unparalleled, that all of it eluded language, challenging every tradition, norm, value, and legitimate form of action. The systematic accretion of violence and complicity that engulfed whole populations at extreme velocity invoked a kind of bewilderment that ended in paralysis, even for many of the greatest minds of the twentieth century.
Friedrich was among the first scholars of totalitarianism to address this experience of improbability, writing in 1954 that “virtually no one before 1914 anticipated the course of development which has overtaken Western civilization since then… none of the outstanding scholars in history, law, and the social sciences discerned what was ahead… which culminated in totalitarianism. To this failure to foresee corresponds a difficulty in comprehending.”21 Not even the most farsighted of the early-century interpreters of industrial society, thinkers such as Durkheim and Weber, had anticipated this murderous turn. Hannah Arendt described the defeat of Nazi Germany as “the first chance to try to tell and to understand what had happened… still in grief and sorrow and… a tendency to lament, but no longer in speechless outrage and impotent horror.”22
Ultimately, a courageous and brilliant body of scholarship would evolve to meet the challenge of comprehension. It yielded different models and schools of thought, each with distinct emphasis and insights, but these shared common purpose in finally naming the great evil. “Totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within,” wrote Arendt, the German-born philosopher who would spend the six years after World War II writing her extraordinary study of totalitarian power, published in 1951 as The Origins of Totalitarianism.23
Arendt’s was a detailed disclosure and a pioneering attempt to theorize what had just occurred. “Comprehension,” she said, is the necessary response to the “truly radical nature of Evil” disclosed by totalitarianism. “It means… examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us—neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight.” Totalitarianism was bent on the “destruction of humanity” and “the essence of man,” and, she insisted, “to turn our backs on the destructive forces of the century is of little avail.”24 Essential to totalitarianism was the deletion of all ties and sources of meaning other than “the movement”: “Total loyalty—the psychological basis for domination—can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.”25
Mid-century scholars such as Friedrich, Adorno, Gurian, Brzezinski, and Aron added to these themes, recognizing totalitarianism’s insistence on domination of the human soul.26 To command populations right down to their souls requires unimaginable effort, which was one reason why totalitarianism was unimaginable. It requires henchmen, and their henchmen, and their henchmen, all willing to roll up both sleeves and thrust both hands into the blood and shit of actual living persons whose bodies stink and sweat and cry out in terror, grief, and pain.27 It measures success at the cellular level, penetrating to the quick, where it subverts and commands each unspoken yearning in pursuit of the genocidal vision that historian Richard Shorten calls “the experiment in reshaping humanity.”28
The destruction and reconstruction of society and the purification of the human species were prosecuted in the name of “class” in Stalin’s Soviet Union and “race” in Hitler’s Germany. Each regime invented “out-groups” slated for murder—the Jewish people, Romanies, homosexuals, and revolutionaries in Germany and Eastern Europe, whole segments of the population in Stalin’s Russia—and “in-groups” required to submit body and soul to the regime.29 In this way totalitarian regimes could achieve their fantastical aim of the “People-as-one,” as Claude Lefort describes it: “Social unanimity corresponds to inner unanimity, held in place by hatred activated toward the ‘enemies of the people.’”30
Totalitarian power cannot succeed by remote control. Mere conformity is insufficient. Each individual inner life must be claimed and transformed by the perpetual threat of punishment without crime. Mass murder warrants economies of scale—the camps, massacres, and gulags—but for the rest it would be a handmade terror that aims to remake every aspect of the individual from the inside out: heart, mind, sexuality, personality, and spirit. This craftwork requires the detailed orchestration of isolation, anxiety, fear, persuasion, fantasy, longing, inspiration, torture, dread, and surveillance. Arendt describes the relentless process of “atomization” and fusion in which terror destroys the ordinary human bonds of law, norms, trust, and affection, “which provide the living space for the freedom of the individual.” The “iron band” of terror “mercilessly presses men… against each other so that the very space of free action… disappears.” Terror “fabricates the oneness of all men.”31
III. An Opposite Horizon
Instrumentarian power moves differently and toward an opposite horizon. Totalitarianism operated through the means of violence, but instrumentarian power operates through the means of behavioral modification, and this is where our focus must shift. Instrumentarian power has no interest in our souls or any principle to instruct. There is no training or transformation for spiritual salvation, no ideology against which to judge our actions. It does not demand possession of each person from the inside out. It has no interest in exterminating or disfiguring our bodies and minds in the name of pure devotion. It welcomes data on the behavior of our blood and shit, but it has no interest in soiling itself with our excretions. It has no appetite for our grief, pain, or terror, although it eagerly welcomes the behavioral surplus that leaches from our anguish. It is profoundly and infinitely indifferent to our meanings and motives. Trained on measurable action, it only cares that whatever we do is accessible to its ever-evolving operations of rendition, calculation, modification, monetization, and cont
rol.
Although it is not murderous, instrumentarianism is as startling, incomprehensible, and new to the human story as totalitarianism was to its witnesses and victims. Our encounter with unprecedented power helps to explain why it has been difficult to name and know this new species of coercion, shaped in secret, camouflaged by technology and technical complexity, and obfuscated by endearing rhetoric. Totalitarianism was a political project that converged with economics to overwhelm society. Instrumentarianism is a market project that converges with the digital to achieve its own unique brand of social domination.
It is not surprising, therefore, that instrumentarianism’s specific “viewpoint of observation” was forged in the controversial intellectual domain known as “radical behaviorism” and its antecedents in turn-of-the-century theoretical physics. In the remainder of this chapter, our examination of power in the time of surveillance capitalism pivots to this point of origin far from totalitarianism’s murder and mayhem. It takes us to laboratories and classrooms and the realms of thought spun by men who regarded freedom as a synonym for ignorance and human beings as distant organisms imprisoned in patterns of behavior beyond their own comprehension or control, such as ants, bees, or Stuart MacKay’s herds of elk.
IV. The Other-One
In a 1971 cover story, Time magazine described Burrhus Frederic “B. F.” Skinner as “an institution at Harvard… the most influential of living American psychologists, and the most controversial contemporary figure in the science of human behavior, adored as a messiah and abhorred as a menace.”32 Skinner spent most of his career in the Psychology Department at Harvard University, and some of my most vivid memories of graduate school are the times I spent with him in close debate. I admit that those conversations did little to alter our respective views, but they left me with an indelible sense of fascination with a way of construing human life that was—and is—fundamentally different from my own.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 44
