Facebook, social media in general—these are environments engineered to induce and exaggerate this homing to the human herd, particularly among the young. We are lured to the social mirror, our attention riveted by its dark charms of social comparison, social pressure, social influence. “Online all day,” “online almost all day.” As we fixate on the crowd, the technologically equipped commercial harvesters circle quietly and cast their nets. This artificial intensification of homing to the herd can only complicate, delay, or impede the hard psychological bargain of the self-other balance. When we multiply this effect by hundreds of millions and distribute it across the globe, what might it portend for the prospects of human and societal development?
Facebook is the crucible of this new dark science. It aims to perfect the relentless stimulation of social comparison in which natural empathy is manipulated and instrumentalized to modify behavior toward others’ ends. This synthetic hive is a devilish pact for a young person. In terms of sheer everyday effectiveness—contact, logistics, transactions, communications—turn away, and you are lost. And if you simply crave the fusion juice that is proof of life at a certain age and stage—turn away, and you are extinguished.
It is a new phenomenon to live continuously in the milieu of the gaze of others, to be followed by hundreds or thousands of eyes, augmented by Big Other’s devices, sensors, beams, and waves rendering, recording, analyzing, and actuating. The unceasing pace, density, and volume of the gaze deliver a perpetual stream of evaluative metrics that raise or lower one’s social currency with each click. In China, these rankings are public territory, shiny badges of honor and scarlet letters that open or shut every door. In the West, we have “likes,” “friends,” “followers,” and hundreds of other secret rankings that invisibly pattern our lives.
The extension and depth of exposure include every data point but necessarily omit the latency within each person, precisely because it cannot be observed and measured. This is the latency of a possible self that awaits ignition from that one spark caused by the caring attention of another embodied human being. It is in that clash of oxygen and ember that the latent is perceived, comprehended, and yanked forward into existence. This is real life: fleshy, soft, uncertain, and replete with silence, risk, and, when fortune smiles, genuine intimacy.
Facebook entered the world bypassing old institutional boundaries, offering us freedom to connect and express ourselves at will. It is impossible to say what the Facebook experience might have been had the company chosen a path that did not depend upon surveillance revenues. Instead, we confront the sudden accretion of an instrumentarian power that spins our society in an unanticipated direction. Facebook’s applied utopistics are a prototype of an instrumentarian future, showcasing feats of behavioral engineering that groom populations for the rigors of instrumentarianism’s coercive harmonies. Its operations are designed to exploit the human inclination toward empathy, belonging, and acceptance. The system tunes the pitch of our behavior with the rewards and punishments of social pressure, herding the human heart toward confluence as a means to others’ commercial ends.
From this vantage point, we see that the full scope of the Facebook operation constitutes a vast experiment in behavior modification designed not only to test the specific capabilities of its tuning mechanisms, as in its official “large-scale experiments,” but also to do so on the broadest possible social and psychological canvas. Most significantly, the applied utopistics of social pressure, its flywheel of social comparison, and the closed loops that bind each user to the group system vividly confirm Pentland’s theoretical rendering of the case. Instrumentarian social principles are evident here, not as hypotheses but as facts, the facts that currently constitute the spaces where our children are meant to “grow up.”
What we witness here is a bet-the-farm commitment to the socialization and normalization of instrumentarian power for the sake of surveillance revenues. Just as Pentland stipulated, these closed loops are imposed outside the realm of politics and individual volition. They move in stealth, crafting their effects at the level of automatic psychological responses and tipping the self-other balance toward the pseudo-harmonies of the hive mind. In this process, the inwardness that is the necessary source of autonomous action and moral judgment suffers and suffocates. These are the preparatory steps toward the death of individuality that Pentland advocates.
In fact, this death devours centuries of individualities: (1) the eighteenth century’s political ideal of the individual as the repository of inalienable dignity, rights, and obligations; (2) the early twentieth century’s individualized human being called into existence by history, embarking on Machado’s road because she must, destined to create “a life of one’s own” in a world of ever-intensifying social complexity and receding traditions; and (3) the late twentieth century’s psychologically autonomous individual whose inner resources and capacity for moral judgment rise to the challenges of self-authorship that history demands and act as a bulwark against the predations of power. The self-authorship toward which young people strive carries forward these histories, strengthening, protecting, and rejuvenating each era’s claims to the sanctity and sovereignty of the individual person.
What we have seen in Facebook is a living example of the third modernity that instrumentarianism proffers, defined by a new collectivism owned and operated by surveillance capital. The God view drives the computations. The computations enable tuning. Tuning replaces private governance and public politics, without which individuality is merely vestigial. And just as the uncontract bypasses social mistrust rather than healing it, the post-political societal processes that bind the hive rely on social comparison and social pressure for their durability and predictive certainty, eliminating the need for trust. Rights to the future tense, their expression in the will to will, and their sanctification in promises are drawn into the fortress of surveillance capital. On the strength of that expropriation, the tuners tighten their grasp, and the system flourishes.
Industrial capitalism depended upon the exploitation and control of nature, with catastrophic consequences that we only now recognize. Surveillance capitalism, I have suggested, depends instead upon the exploitation and control of human nature. The market reduces us to our behavior, transformed into another fictional commodity and packaged for others’ consumption. In the social principles of instrumentarian society, already brought to life in the experiences of our young, we can see more clearly how this novel capitalism aims to reshape our natures for the sake of its success. We are to be monitored and telestimulated like MacKay’s herds and flocks, Pentland’s beavers and bees, and Nadella’s machines. We are to live in the hive: a life that is naturally challenging and often painful, as any adolescent can attest, but the hive life in store for us is not a natural one. “Men made it.” Surveillance capitalists made it.
The young people we have considered in this chapter are the spirits of a Christmas Yet to Come. They live on the frontier of a new form of power that declares the end of a human future, with its antique allegiances to individuals, democracy, and the human agency necessary for moral judgment. Should we awaken from distraction, resignation, and psychic numbing with Scrooge’s determination, it is a future that we may still avert.
VI. No Exit
When Samuel Bentham, brother of philosopher Jeremy, first designed the panopticon as a means of overseeing unruly serfs on the estate of Prince Potemkin in the late eighteenth century, he drew inspiration from the architecture of the Russian Orthodox churches that dotted the countryside. Typically, these structures were built around a central dome from which a portrait of an all-powerful “Christ Pantokrator” stared down at the congregation and, by implication, all humanity. There was to be no exit from this line of sight. This is the meaning of the hand and glove. The closed loop and the tight fit are meant to create the conditions of no exit. Once, it was no exit from God’s total knowledge and power. Today, it is no exit from the others, from Big Other, and from the surv
eillance capitalists who decide. This condition of no exit creeps on slippered feet. First we do not even have to look away, and later we cannot.
In the closing lines of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential drama No Exit, the character Garcin arrives at his famous realization, “Hell is other people.” This was not intended as a statement of misanthropy but rather a recognition that the self-other balance can never be adequately struck as long as the “others” are constantly “watching.” Another mid-century social psychologist, Erving Goffman, took up these themes in his immortal The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman developed the idea of the “backstage” as the region in which the self retreats from the performative demands of social life.
The language of backstage and onstage, inspired by observations of the theater, became a metaphor for the universal need for a place of retreat in which we can “be ourselves.” Backstage is where the “impression fostered by performance is knowingly contradicted” along with its “illusions and impressions.” Devices such as the telephone are “sequestered” for “private” use. Conversation is “relaxed,” “truthful.” It is the place where “vital secrets” can be visible. Goffman observed that in work as in life, “control of the backstage” allows individuals “to buffer themselves from the deterministic demands that surround them.” Backstage, the language is one of reciprocity, familiarity, intimacy, humor. It offers the seclusion in which one can surrender to the “uncomposed” face in sleep, defecation, sex, “whistling, chewing, nibbling, belching, and flatulence.” Perhaps most of all, it is an opportunity for “regression,” in which we don’t have to be “nice”: “The surest sign of backstage solidarity is to feel that it is safe to lapse into an asociable mood of sullen, silent irritability.” In the absence of such respite where a “real” self can incubate and grow, Sartre’s idea of hell begins to make sense.62
In a classroom of undergraduates, students discuss their strategies of self-presentation on Facebook. Scholars refer to these as “chilling effects”: the continuous “curation” of one’s photos, comments, and profile with deletions, additions, and modifications, all of it geared to the maximization of “likes” as the signal of one’s value in this existential marketplace.63 I ask if this twenty-first-century work of self-presentation is really that much different from what Goffman had described: have we just traded the real world for the virtual in constructing and performing our personas? There is a lull as the students reflect, and then a young woman speaks:
The difference is that Goffman assumed a backstage where you could be your true self. For us, the backstage is shrinking. There is almost no place left where I can be my true self. Even when I am walking by myself, and I think I am backstage, something happens—an ad appears on my phone or someone takes a photo, and, I discover that I am onstage, and everything changes.64
The “everything” that changes is the sudden cognizance, part realization and part reminder, that Big Other knows no boundaries. Experience is seamlessly rendered across the once-reliable borders of the virtual and real worlds. This accrues to the immediate benefit of surveillance capital—“Welcome to McDonald’s!” “Buy this jacket!”—but any worldly experience can just as immediately be delivered to the hive: a post here, a photo there. Ubiquitous connection means that the audience is never far, and this fact brings all the pressures of the hive into the world and the body.
Recent research has begun to turn to this dour fact that a team of British researchers describes as the “extended chilling effect.”65 The idea here is that people—especially, though not exclusively, young people—now censor and curate their real-world behavior in consideration of their own online networks as well as the larger prospect of the internet masses. The researchers conclude that participation in social media “is profoundly intertwined with the knowledge that information about our offline activities may be communicated online, and that the thought of displeasing ‘imagined audiences’ alters our ‘real-life’ behavior.”
When I catch myself wanting to cheer the students who are anguished by connection and terrified of its loss, I consider the meaning of “no exit” as recounted in a personal recollection of the social psychologist Stanley Milgram regarding an experiment that demonstrated “the power of immediate circumstances on feelings and behavior.”66
Milgram’s class was studying the force with which social norms control behavior. He had the idea of examining the real-life phenomenon by having his students approach a person on the subway and, without providing any justification, simply look the person in the eye and ask for his or her seat. One afternoon, Milgram himself boarded the subway ready to make his contribution. Despite his years of observing and theorizing disturbing patterns of human behavior, it turned out that he was unprepared for his own moment of social confrontation. Assuming that it would be an “easy” caper, Milgram approached a passenger and was about to utter the “magical phrase” when “the words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge. I stood there frozen, then retreated… I was overwhelmed by paralyzing inhibition.” The psychologist eventually hectored himself into trying again. He recounts what occurred when he finally approached a passenger and “choked out” his request:
“Excuse me, sir, may I have your seat?” A moment of stark anomic panic overcame me. But the man got right up and gave me the seat.… Taking the man’s seat, I was overwhelmed by the need to behave in a way that would justify my request. My head sank between my knees, and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish.
Moments later the train pulled into the next station, and Milgram exited. He was surprised to discover that as soon as he left the train, “all the tension disappeared.” Milgram left the subway, where he vibrated in tune with the “others,” and that exit enabled a return to his “self.”
Milgram identified three key themes in the subway experiment as he and his students debriefed their experiences. The first was a new sense of gravitas toward “the enormous inhibitory anxiety that ordinarily prevents us from breaching social norms.” Second was that the reactions of the “breacher” are not an expression of individual personality but rather are “a compelled playing out of the logic of social relations.” The intense “anxiety” that Milgram and others experienced in confronting a social norm “forms a powerful barrier that must be surmounted, whether one’s action is consequential—disobeying an authority—or trivial, asking for a seat on the subway.… Embarrassment and the fear of violating apparently trivial norms often lock us into intolerable predicaments.… These are not minor regulatory forces in social life, but basic ones.”
Finally, Milgram understood that any confrontation of social norms crucially depends upon the ability to escape. It was not an adolescent who boarded the subway that day. Milgram was an erudite adult and an expert on human behavior, especially the mechanisms entailed in obedience to authority, social influence, and conformity. The subway was just an ordinary slice of life, not a capital-intensive architecture of surveillance and behavior modification, not a “personalized reward device.” Still, Milgram could not fight off the anxiety of the situation. The only thing that made it tolerable was the possibility of an exit.
Unlike Milgram, we face an intolerable situation. Like the gamblers in their machine wombs, we are meant to fuse with the system and play to extinction: not the extinction of our funds but rather the extinction of our selves. Extinction is a design feature formalized in the conditions of no exit. The aim of the tuners is to contain us within “the power of immediate circumstances” as we are compelled by the “logic of social relations” in the hive to bow to social pressure exerted in calculated patterns that exploit our natural empathy. Continuously tightening feedback loops cut off the means of exit, creating impossible levels of anxiety that further drive the loops toward confluence. What is to be killed here is the inner impulse toward autonomy and the arduous, exciting elaboration of the autonomous self as a source of moral judgment and authorit
y capable of asking for a subway seat or standing against rogue power.
Inside the hive, it is easy to forget that every exit is an entrance. To exit the hive means to enter that territory beyond, where one finds refuge from the artificially tuned-up social pressure of the others. Exit leaves behind the point of view of the Other-One in favor of entering a space in which one’s gaze can finally settle inward. To exit means to enter the place where a self can be birthed and nurtured. History has a name for that kind of place: sanctuary.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE RIGHT TO SANCTUARY
Refuge and prospect are opposites: refuge is small and dark;
prospect is expansive and bright.… We need them both
and we need them together.
—GRANT HILDEBRAND
“FINDING A GOOD HOME”
ORIGINS OF ARCHITECTURAL PLEASURE
I. Big Other Outruns Society
That summer night when our home was destroyed by a lightning strike, we watched in the driving rain as the gables and rambling porches exploded in fire. Within hours a smoldering field of black ash covered the ground where home had been. In the months and years that followed, my recollections of the house took an unexpected shape, less rooms and objects than shadow, light, and fragrance. I conjured in perfect clarity the rush of my mother’s scent when I opened the drawer filled with her once-cherished scarves. I closed my eyes and saw the late-afternoon sun slicing through the velvety air by the bedroom fireplace with its ancient sloping mantle where our treasures were on display: a photo of my father and me, heads tilted toward each other, blending our two shocks of curly black hair; the miniature painted enamel boxes, discovered in a Parisian flea market years before the thought of motherhood, which later became the shelter for our children’s milk teeth huddled like secret caches of seed pearls. It was impossible to explain the quality of this sadness and longing: how our selves and the life of our family had evolved symbiotically with those spaces that we called home. How our attachments transformed a house into a hallowed place of love, meaning, and commemoration.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 58
