Thoughts that arose as a surplus of sorts from a piece I’ve been working on over the last couple of weeks:

1. There seems to be a trajectory implicit in documenting technology that we might gloss in this way: First to remember, then to express. The thought occurred to me, when thinking about how we have come to use photography over the last fifteen years or so. I was recently going through a box of old photographs taken during the 1980s and early 90s. The point of these photographs, almost without exception, was simply to record or document a moment. It’s true that we still snap images to document our lives, but this function of image-taking seems to be eclipsed by the degree to which our images are also means of self-expression, self-marketing, or simply acts of mundane communication. Instagram, it seems to me, is not chiefly a platform we use merely to document our lives for memory’s sake. The threshold is crossed, it seems, when the apparatus of documentation becomes cheap, accessible, and, consequently, ubiquitous. Compare the costs and limitations of 35-mm photography with digital photography.
2. My old photographs had a vanishingly small audience. It is hard to overstate the consequences of having an audience in our pockets all the time. It’s hard to turn anything toward the work of self-expression if there will be no audience to receive it.
3. Benjamin famously theorized how the work of art lost its aura in the age of its mechanical reproducibility. But the photograph, one of those means of mechanical reproducibility still retained an aura of sorts. Think of Barthes’s refusal to display a particularly personal photograph of his mother. The digital image retains no aura of that sort. Breaking free of the aura appears to be a prerequisite for becoming a means of self-expression.
4. Of course, there is fine if not porous line between documenting and expressing, perhaps it’s simply a matter of emphasis. There have always been artists who have turned the tools of documentation toward imaginative creation and expression. When the media of documentation and expression become ubiquitous, one’s life becomes the work of art.

Read along, if you will, as I tell a little story of sorts through a series of excerpts. It is essentially a story about the links among prevalent trends involving surveillance, data, security, self-documentation, and happiness.

Jeremy Bentham in Deontology, or The Science of Morality:

It were to be wished that every man’s name were written upon his forehead as well as engraved upon his door. It were to be wished that no such thing as secrecy existed that every man’s house were made of glass …

The more men live in public, the more amenable they are to the moral sanction. The greater dependence men are in to the public, that is, the more equality there is among them, the clearer the evidence comes out, the more it has of certainty in its results. The liberty of the press throws all men into the public presence. The liberty of the press is the greatest co-adjutor of the moral sanction. Under such influence, it were strange if men grew not every day more virtuous than on the former day. I am satisfied they do ….

A whole kingdom, the great globe itself, will become a gymnasium, in which every man exercises himself before the eyes of every other man. Every gesture, every turn of limb or feature, in those whose motions have a visible influence on the general happiness, will be noticed and marked down.

Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine:

“In the end, no action, no conversation, and possibly in time no dream or thought would escape the wakeful and relentless eye of this deity: every manifestation of life would be processed into the computer and brought under its all-pervading system of control. This would mean, not just the invasion of privacy, but the total destruction of autonomy: indeed the dissolution of the human soul.”

Stephen Wolfram, Seeking the Productive Life:

I have systems that keep all sorts of data, including every keystroke I type, every step I take and what my computer screen looks like every minute (sadly, the movie of this is very dull). I also have a whole variety of medical and environmental sensors, as well as data from devices and systems that I interact with.

It’s interesting every so often to pick up those Wolfram Data Drop databins and use them to do some data science on my life. And, yes, in broad terms I find that I am extremely consistent and habitual—yet every day there are different things that happen, that make my “productivity” (as measured in a variety of ways) bounce around, often seemingly randomly …

Perhaps all that data I’ve collected on myself will one day let one basically just built a “bot of me”. Having seen so many of my emails—and being able to look at all my files and personal analytics—maybe it’s actually possible to predict how I’d respond to any particular question.

Hugo Huijer, Engineering a Happiness Prediction Model:

Over the last 5 years, I’ve tracked my happiness every single day. I’ve now used this data to build a happiness prediction model. That’s right. I’ve built a model that can accurately predict how happy I will be on a scale from 1 to 10, based on what I plan to do that day.

This model features over 80 happiness factors. Below is a sneak peek of these happiness factors. This shows how much certain factors – like running, my job and my relationship with my girlfriend – influence my happiness.

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I first came across Ursula Le Guin’s well-known short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” in an anthology of readings in ethical theory. It was included in the section on utilitarianism or consequentialism. The story, as many of you will know, is about a city called Omelas that is a citadel of peace, prosperity, and happiness without artificiality. But, we soon learn, all of this is somehow connected to the suffering of a lone individual, who is kept isolated in a dark, putrid cell, his human faculties barely developed. At a certain age, everyone who lives in Omelas must witness the condition of this individual and so come to terms with the cost of their happiness. The title of the story, of course, tells us about the choice at least some of the citizens of Omelas make. You should read the story, this summary obviously does not do it justice.

I bring the story to mind, however, as a way of framing this last piece: “The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America.”  It is an account of a the kind of work that poorly compensated Facebook moderators do in an effort to keep Facebook’s newsfeed relatively pleasant and devoid of the very worst of what human beings are capable of doing to themselves and to one another.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

She spent the past three and a half weeks in training, trying to harden herself against the daily onslaught of disturbing posts: the hate speech, the violent attacks, the graphic pornography. In a few more days, she will become a full-time Facebook content moderator, or what the company she works for, a professional services vendor named Cognizant, opaquely calls a “process executive.”

For this portion of her education, Chloe will have to moderate a Facebook post in front of her fellow trainees. When it’s her turn, she walks to the front of the room, where a monitor displays a video that has been posted to the world’s largest social network. None of the trainees have seen it before, Chloe included. She presses play.

The video depicts a man being murdered. Someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life. Chloe’s job is to tell the room whether this post should be removed. She knows that section 13 of the Facebook community standards prohibits videos that depict the murder of one or more people. When Chloe explains this to the class, she hears her voice shaking.

Returning to her seat, Chloe feels an overpowering urge to sob. Another trainee has gone up to review the next post, but Chloe cannot concentrate. She leaves the room, and begins to cry so hard that she has trouble breathing.

No one tries to comfort her. This is the job she was hired to do. And for the 1,000 people like Chloe moderating content for Facebook at the Phoenix site, and for 15,000 content reviewers around the world, today is just another day at the office.

If you are not keen on reading at even greater depth and detail about the work these “process executives” do out of sight for the sake of Facebook’s user experience, there is a sidebar near the top of the piece with bullet-pointed summary of key points. At least glance at those.

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H/t to Neil Turkewitz for the Mumford quote.

Writing in the Times, Kevin Roose describes how he recently arrived at a better working relationship with his smartphone. It is not unlike similar narratives that you might have read at some point in the last few years. Roose realizes that he is spending way too much time checking his smartphone, and he recognizes that it’s taking a toll on him. A series of unambitious measures—using grayscale, installing app-blockers, etc.—can’t quite get the job done, so he turns to Catherine Price, the author of “How to Break Up With Your Phone,” a 30-day guide to getting a better grip on your phone use.

You can read the piece to find out how things go for him. I’m just going to make two or three observations.

First, it’s always interesting to me to note the preemptive framings such pieces feel they must deploy. They reveal a lot about their rhetorical context. For example, “I confess that entering phone rehab feels clichéd, like getting really into healing crystals or Peloton.” Or, more pointedly, this:  “Sadly, there is no way to talk about the benefits of digital disconnection without sounding like a Goop subscriber or a neo-Luddite. Performative wellness is obnoxious, as is reflexive technophobia.”

The implicit fear that commending tech temperance might earn one the label of neo-Luddite is especially telling. Of course, the fear itself already cedes too much ground to the Luddite bashers and to the Borgs, who use the term as an a-historical slur.

Preemptive framings notwithstanding, there’s still some fodder for another, socio-economic strand of criticism:  taking recourse and gaining access to a life-coach of sorts, pottery classes, an unplugged weekend in the Catskills framed as a Waldenesque experience.

Who has the time and resources for such measures? And, of course, this is the point of the socio-economic critique of testimonials of this sort:  it’s a luxury experience available to very few. Mind you, Roose himself notes the even more luxurious variants:  multi-thousand dollar getaways at luxury detox destinations, etc.

This line of criticism is understandable. The point-scoring, out-of-hand, performative dismissals are less so, of course. The unfortunate result of all of this is that in certain quarters it is difficult to speak about the problems associated with digital devices without getting some serious blowback. We must all, to some degree, necessarily speak out of our own experience, and this requires a measure of humility not only in the speaking but also in the hearing. Neither is particularly encouraged by the structures of social media.

Secondly, I was reminded about a post I wrote back in 2011 about the possible virtues of what I then called digital asceticism. I used Google to find the post with “digital asceticism” as my search term. I expected to have to wade through a few pages to find my post, but I was surprised to discover that it was, at least for me, the third result. The first result was a blog titled “Digital Ascetics,” which appears to have been launch and abandoned in 2009 (practicing what it preached, I suppose). I was surprised by this because I was sure that in the eight or so years since I wrote the post, especially in light of the rolling tech backlash over the last couple of years, there would be plenty of references to digital asceticism. Apparently not.

It seems like an obvious framing for the wide variety of efforts that we deploy to get at least a semblance of control over our use of digital devices. It’s even suggested by some of the language we use to talk about such measures: fasts and Sabbaths, for example. Frankly, I find that it may be a better option than the more popular alternative: the clinical language of addiction.

Part of what the language of asceticism captures is the aspect of self-denial that is necessarily involved, at least for many who would practice it. We won’t really be able to grapple with the personal consequences of digital devices unless we recognize that doing without them now entails what is experienced as real deprivation. Indeed, the connection between the word privation and privacy is suggestive on this score. Privacy in the world of digital media is privation; the measures we might take to achieve privacy require privations we find barely tolerable. The self-denial entailed by digital asceticism also takes on a slightly different hue:  it is not simply a matter of denying certain experiences to the self, it is denying the self the very experiences by which it is constituted in the present psycho-social technical milieu.

It is also useful to consider that asceticism is never properly for its own sake. It is for the sake of some greater good than that which we deny ourselves. But this valuation is itself dependent on the psycho-social milieu. What higher goods do we find plausible or compelling? The answer to this question is already informed by the structures within which the self takes shape. Such goods are always a product of what Charles Taylor has called a social imaginary, and we might think of media as the material scaffolding of the social imaginary. We might expect, then, that the pursuit of alternative goods to those sustained by the dominant media structures will always appear renegade, deviant, or, at best, quixotic. Yet another reason why we might feel pressured to preemptively hedge our decision to pursue them.

Lastly, I can’t quite keep from echoing Pascalian notes whenever I encounter them. “Mostly,” Roose observed, “I became aware of how profoundly uncomfortable I am with stillness.” “It’s an unnerving sensation,” he added, “being alone with your thoughts in the year 2019. Catherine had warned me that I might feel existential malaise when I wasn’t distracting myself with my phone.”

“All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing,” Pascal noted in the 17th century, “which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” “Nothing,” he wrote, “could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.” Or, more to the point still,

“Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things …. What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us.”

Has there ever been a more perfect instrument of what Pascal called diversion than the smartphone? I’m hard pressed to think of a counter example.

It occurs to me that these three observations are not unrelated. The difficulty in speaking earnestly about digital asceticism involves the erosion of a social imaginary that would render the goods for the sake of which such asceticism might be undertaken plausible or desirable. Instead we are left with the less satisfying and less compelling language of wellness with which to speak about such things. But this itself reminds us that whatever the dominant social imaginary may tell us about the virtues and wonders of the preternaturally connected life, there is a world against which such visions rub up and in this world the recalcitrance of our bodies signals to us the inadequacy of the vision. Then, it may be that, heeding the challenge of the body, we undertake the practices of digital asceticism and as a consequence stumble upon these signs of an alternative, possibly disconcerting understanding of our situation, as Pascal suggested. And we might even find that we really are better for it and that wellness, as we imagined it, had, finally, very little to do with it.

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Occasional reminder that tips are welcome.

“As it ponders important social choices that involves the application of new technology,” Langdon Winner wrote in 1992, “contemporary moral philosophy works within a vacuum.”

“The vacuum,” he goes on to say, “is a social as well as an intellectual one. Often there are no persons or organizations with clear authority to make the decisions that matter. In fact, there may be no clearly defined social channels in which important moral issues can be addressed at all.”

Instead we get “jerrybuilt policies” that emerge out of a jumble of competing private and public interests. “But given the number of points at which technologies generate significant social stress and conflict,” Winner concluded, “this familiar pattern is increasingly unsatisfactory.” (Again, remember Winner was writing in 1992.)

Cue the philosophers who specialize in ethical matters and are eager to deploy their expertise. Unfortunately, in Winner’s view, they “may find themselves involved in an exercise that is essentially technocratic.” At a certain point in the design process, they are called in as “values experts” to “provide ‘solutions’ to the kind of ‘problems’ whose features are ethical rather than solely technical … ‘Everything else looks good. What are the results from the ethics lab?'”

Winner understands that “philosophers sometimes find it tempting to play along with these expectations, gratifying to find that anyone cares about what they think, exhilarating to notice that their ideas might actually have some effect.”

But, he wonders, “Is it wise to don the mantle of the values expert?”

After they have preformed all of their intellectual labor and applied their expertise, “there remains the embarrassing question: Who in the world are we talking to? Where is the community in which our wisdom will be welcome?”

Citing two passages from then-recent articles advancing ethical claims about emerging technologies, Winner notes the frequent deployment of the rhetorical we. Acknowledging that he, too, has been guilty of using the first person plural pronoun whose antecedents are always vague and ill-defined, Winner correctly notes, “What matters here is that this lovely ‘we’ suggests the presence of a moral community that may not, in fact, exist at all, at least not in any coherent, self-conscious form.”

The important “first task” for ethics of technology, Winner suggested, would be to ask “what is the identity and character of the moral communities that will make the crucial, world-altering judgments and take appropriate action as a result?”

Winner believed this was a question about “politics and political philosophy rather than a question for ethics considered solely as a matter of right and wrong in individual conduct.” (I appreciated the qualifier solely in Winner’s claim. More on that momentarily.) As “technological things” increasingly become “central features in widely shared arrangements and conditions of life,” Winner argued, it is urgent that they be considered in a “political light.” Rather than continue in the technocratic and mostly ineffective “values expert” pattern, Winner believes “todays thinkers would do better to reexamine the role of the public in matters of this kind.” The question they should be asking is this: “How can and should democratic citizenry participate in decision making about technology?”

It seems to me that not much has changed in the 28 or so years since Winner published these reflections; we have learned very little and the challenges have become more complex, consequential, and urgent. Indeed, what strikes me about this article is that it could be re-published today without substantive changes and it would appear to be speaking directly to our situation.

In his article, Winner went on to survey ancient and modern attitudes toward the relationship between techne and politics. According to Winner, “the Western tradition of moral and political philosophy has … almost nothing to say about the ways in which persons in their role as citizens might be involved in making choices about the development, deployment, and use of new technology.” Indeed, the chief feature of both classical and modern political reflection regarding technology has been the tendency to compartmentalize the political and the technological, although for different reasons.

Wrapping up his overview of both traditions, Winner concludes:

“If one compares liberal ideology about politics and technology with its classical precursors, an interesting irony emerges. In modern thought the ancient pessimism about techne is eventually replaced by all-out enthusiasm for technological advance. At the same time basic conceptions of politics and political membership are reformulated in ways that help create new contexts for the exercise of power and authority. Despite the radical thrust of these intellectual developments, however, the classical separation between the political and the technical spheres is strongly preserved, but for entirely new reasons. Technology is still isolated from public life in both principle and practice. Citizens are strongly encouraged to become involved in improving modern material culture, but only in the market or other highly privatized settings. There is no moral community or public space in which technological issues are topics for deliberation, debate, and shared action.”

Just so.

Again, nearly three decades later, it seems the problems, on all counts, are both more acute and more vexing.

I was, in fact, reminded of a striking observation Winner made in an even earlier work, Autonomous Technology published in 1977:

Different ideas of social and political life entail different technologies for their realization. One can create systems of production, energy, transportation, information handling, and so forth that are compatible with the growth of autonomous, self-determining individuals in a democratic polity. Or one can build, perhaps unwittingly, technical forms that are incompatible with this end and then wonder how things went strangely wrong. The possibilities for matching political ideas with technological configurations appropriate to them are, it would seem, almost endless. If, for example, some perverse spirit set out deliberately to design a collection of systems to increase the general feeling of powerlessness, enhance the prospects for the dominance of technical elites, create the belief that politics is nothing more than a remote spectacle to be experienced vicariously, and thereby diminish the chance that anyone would take democratic citizenship seriously, what better plan to suggest than that we simply keep the systems we already have?

“There is, of course, hope that we may decide to do better than that,” Winner added. A necessary hope that is nonetheless difficult to sustain. Critically, though, Winner concluded this line of thought by reminding readers (in 1977!) that “the notion that technical forms are merely neutral … is a myth that no longer merits the least respect.”

And yet the idea that technical forms are merely neutral has proven hard to shake. For a very long time, it has been a cornerstone principle of our thinking about technology and society. Or, more to the point, we have taken it for granted and have consequently done very little thinking about technology with regards to society.

I’ll note in passing that the liberal democratic structures of modern political culture and the development of technology are deeply intertwined, and they have both depended upon the presumption of their ostensible neutrality. I tempted to think that our present crisis is a function of a growing realization that neither our political structures nor our technologies are, in fact, merely neutral instruments.

Making our way back to Winner’s claim about the absence of moral-political communities within which technological ethics can be enacted, our political structures (or better our political-economic structures) and our technologies have, as one function of their non-neutrality, made such communities very difficult to sustain. It has rendered them implausible.

We are, at present, stuck in an unhelpful tendency to imagine that our only options with regard to how we govern technology are, on the one hand, individual choices and, on the other, regulation by the state. What’s worse, we’ve also tended to oppose these to one another. But this way of conceptualizing our situation is both a symptom of the deepest consequences of modern technology and part of the reason why it is so difficult to make any progress.

Technology operates at different scales and effective mechanisms of governance need to correspond to the challenges that arise at each scale. Mechanism of governance that makes sense at one end of the spectrum will be ineffective at the other end and vice versa.

Our problem is basically this: technologies that operate at the macro-level cannot be effectively governed by micro-level mechanisms, which basically amount to individual choices. At the macro-level, however, governance is limited by the degree to which we can arrive at public consensus, and the available tools of governance at the macro-level cannot address all of the ways technologies impact individuals. What is required is a cocktail of strategies that address the consequences of technology as they manifest themselves across the spectrum of scale.

The problem, of course, as Winner diagnosed long ago, is that the further up the scale we move, the more unlikely we are to find a relevant moral community with either the prerequisite coherence or authority to effectively grapple with the problems we face. We lack those communities, in part, because of the moral and political consequences of existing technology, so it would seem that we are stuck in a vicious cycle of sorts.

I have no solution for this, of course. I think it would be helpful, though, if whatever moral communities we have left that occupy the broad space between the individual on the one hand and the state on the other would take up the challenge of thinking critically about the morally formative consequences of technology and see their way to leveraging their existing structures of deliberation and practice with a view to helping their members better navigate the challenges posed by emerging technologies. If we need some model of what this might look like, we could do worse than consider the Amish.

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[Caveat lector: More so than usual, the following is an exercise in thinking out loud. I send it out into the ether to be battered into shape.]

Near the close of my last post, I wrote, “The arc of digital media is bending toward epistemic nihilism.”

It’s a line to which I frequently resort as a way of addressing a variety of developments in the sphere of digital media that have, as I see it, eroded our confidence in the possibility of public knowledge. I’m using the phrase public knowledge to get at what we believe together that is also of public consequence. This is an imperfect distinction worth teasing out, but I’m just going to let it go at that right now.

When I use that line about the arc of digital media, I have in mind phenomena like the facility with which digital media can be manipulated and, more recently, the facility with which realistic digital media can be fabricated. I’m thinking as well of the hyper-pluralism that is a function of the way digital media connect us, bringing conflicting claims, beliefs, and narratives into close proximity. “The global village,” McLuhan told us, “is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.”

It occurs to me, though, that it might be worth making a clarification:  digital media does not create the conditions out of which the problem arises.

I’ve thought now and again about how we are recapitulating certain aspects of the early modern history of Europe. At some point last year I shot off an off the cuff tweet to this effect: “Thesis: If the digital revolution is analogous to the print revolution, then we’re entering our Wars of Religion phase.”

Although the story is more complicated than this, there is something to be said for framing the emergence of the modern world as a response to an epistemic crisis occasioned by the dissolution of the what we might think of as the medieval world picture (see Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, for example).

The path that emerged as a way toward a solution to that crisis amounted to a quest certainty that took objectivity, abstraction, and neutrality as methodological pre-conditions for both the progress of science and politics, that is for re-emergence of public knowledge. The right method, the proper degree of alienation from the particulars of our situation, translations observable phenomena into the realm mathematical abstraction—these would lead us away from the uncertainty and often violent contentiousness that characterized the dissolution of the premodern world picture. The idea was to reconstitute the conditions for the emergence of public truth and, hence, public order.

Technology (or, better, technologies) plays an essential role in this story, but the role that it plays varies and shifts over time. Early on, for example, in the form of the printing press it accelerates the crisis of public knowledge, generating the pluralism of truth claims that undermine the old consensus. The same technology also comes to play a critical role in creating the conditions under which modern forms of public knowledge can emerge by sustaining the plausibility of a realm of cool, detached reason.

Consider as well how we impute to certain technologies the very characteristics we believe essential to public knowledge in the modern world (objectivity, neutrality, etc.). Think of photography, for example, and the degree to which we tend to believe that a photographic image is an objective and thus trustworthy representation of the truth of things. More recently, algorithms have been burdened with similar assumptions. Because they are cutting edge technologies feeding off of “raw data” some believe that they will necessarily yield unbiased and objectively true results. The problems with this view are, of course, well documented (here and here, for example).

The general progression has been to increasingly turn to technologies in order to better achieve the conditions under which we came to believe public knowledge could exist. Our crisis stems from the growing realization that our technologies themselves are not neutral or objective arbiters of public knowledge and, what’s more, that they may now actually be used to undermine the possibility of public knowledge.

The point, then, is this:  It’s not that digital media necessarily leads to epistemic nihilism, it’s that digital media leads to epistemic nihilism given the conditions for public knowledge that have held sway in the modern world. Seen in this light, digital media, like print before it, is helping dissolve an older intellectual and political order. It is doing so because the trajectory we set out on 400 years ago or so has more or less played itself out.

One last thought for now. According to Arendt, “The trouble is that factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. The modes of thought and communication that deal with truth, if seen from the political perspective, are necessarily domineering; they don’t take into account other people’s opinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking.”

In other words, what if the technocratic strain within modern political culture, the drive to ground politics in truth (or facts) is actually the drive to transcend the political altogether? What if the age of electronic/mass media, the brief interregnum between the high water mark of the age of literacy and the digital age, was in some ways merely a momentary deviation from the norm during which politics could appear to be about consensus rather than struggle? In this light the political consequences of digital media might simply be characterized as the revenge of politics, although in a different and often disconcerting mode.

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