Too much paranoias

Notes on Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiberoptics, chapter one (pdf)

Was excited to read this, given my recent interest in paranoia as a social-media state of mind, but ended up disappointed by this chapter, and may not read the rest of the book. But a few things struck me as worth preserving here for future reference.

The gist of it seems derived from the Deleuze essay on "control societies," though with a dubious emphasis on sexuality as the chief basis of subjectivity. Social technologies implement the control society, which makes freedom less a matter of open-ended possibility (freedom to) and more a matter of safety (freedom from). The attractiveness of the predominance of "freedom from" hinges on generalized paranoia.

The end of the Cold War has not dispelled paranoia but rather spread it everywhere: invisibility and uncertainty—of the enemy, of technology—has invalidated deterrence and moved paranoia from the pathological to the logical. This twinning of control and freedom subverts the promise of freedom, turning it from a force that simultaneously breaks bonds and makes relation possible to the dream of a gated community writ large. 

The internet medium becomes the field in which these affective shifts can occur.

Is the Internet a tool of freedom or control? Does it enable greater self-control or surveillance?... These questions and their assumptions are not only misguided but also symptomatic of the increasingly normal paranoid response to and of power. This paranoia stems from the reduction of political problems into technological ones—a reduction that blinds us to the ways in which those very technologies operate and fail to operate

I bolded the part that seems key. The kind of paranoia social technologies instigate aren't political; they are personal. They don't prompt users to become suspicious of state or corporate power so much as present an illusion of radically decentralized power where all peers are potential enemies, and privacy is the preserve of the elite and the status aspiration of everyone else.

I'm most interested in Chun's suggestion that "the delusion of constant surveillance" is performing certain ideological work; she doesn't say this in the chapter, but this delusion is at once the fantasy of becoming a celebrity, of being worthy of being watched, as it is a paranoid fear. This is reminiscent of Althusser's classic interpellation theory, which holds that we are enjoy being singled out by institutional power (or "ideological state apparatuses") because it individuates us. When the advertisement, says "Hey, you," and we are flattered and impressed with our own importance. Individuation feels like a recognition of our autonomy, but it is a manifestation of the way we are controlled. (I suppose you could trace a lot of that back to Foucault as well.)

Every moment we are afraid for our privacy, we are thrilled by our celebrity. We can fantasize about people following our every move captured in social media, but that is not the point. Most shit we put up is ignored or vanishes from people's consciousnesses. What does matter though is the way the data persists and its context degrades, leaving it available to pop up in search queries and be put to whatever use the social-media companies or the state decide.

Chun argues that "Digital language makes control systems invisible: we no longer experience the visible yet unverifiable gaze but a network of nonvisualizable digital control." I think that sounds right, but I would modify that to speculate that we imagine control as gossipy neighbors spying (which diminishes its threat to a degree and makes it partly appealing), making us overlook how control is systemic and sustained by digital networks' ubiquitous data capture (regardless of whether any human ever reads all of it). The point is not that our privacy is invaded by this or that person; it's that no one is permitted to be private by default. It's a privilege of power.

Not only are we individuated by receiving attention on social media; we are also individuated by giving it. Chun notes that "Even when ‘lurking,’ you constantly send information. It is impossible to resist subjectivity by doing nothing (as Baudrillard once argued and encouraged) if we jack in or are jacked in." That seems like something we can easily overlook in an effort to use social media to our ends without having it warp our subjectivity.

Boundary work

From: "Anything But Heavy Metal": Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes" by Bethany Bryson, American Sociological Review, Vol. 61, No. 5. (Oct., 1996), pp. 884-899.

I have been thinking a lot lately about social exclusion and online social networks, and the idea of boundary work seems relevant to that. Not that I have any hard evidence for this (if there can be such a thing for ideological matters), but the ideology surrounding social media and the subjectivity we are supposed to experience in using them hinges on the illusion that we are performing boundary work but are not subject to it. This illusion relieves social anxiety and encourages a steady flow of data contributions that the platform owners can monetize. Ideally for social media companies, the exemption from boundary work would be predicated on the user's continual contribution: the more you post, the less you feel subject to judgment or vulnerable to exclusion.

That sounds paradoxical at best, since the more you say, the more you can be judged for. But the accretion of information has a defensive purpose; posting more can be pre-emptive. It can make users into elusive chameleons, or convey the impression that one is merely playing with identity rather than evincing some essential truth about oneself in social media. The more we say in social media, then, the less pinned-down our identity becomes. Further disclosures are meant to raise more questions, and require further elaborations, which provide more self-protection and actual obfuscation under the guise of clarifying one's self-presentation.

So while the ability to post at will lets users think they can post their way into inclusion within ever-shifting social environments, the network controls that social media place in users' hands provide them the means of exclusion and at least the fantasy that these controls can be operated with autonomy and impunity.

The implication of this is that the kind of status policing that once depended on taste can now depend on other network mappings of social space — the social graph. Its tangibility makes taste displays less significant, less determining. The boundary exists without the taste display to draw it; the online social networks can preserve it independent of the repeated demonstration of superior cultural capital. Social networks are like banks of cultural capital that way; the influence accrued can be manifest and stored in them, freeing users to behave otherwise in other contexts. It is not necessary to dislike cultural proxies in order to establish cultural capital and one's belonging to an elite group. The stakes just aren't that high with any particular cultural self-presentation or taste display.

Not only does the social hierarchy inhere in online cultural-capital banks and social graphs, but social media record so many self-presentations that they are all diminished in ultimate importance. Social media flatten the sense of occasion (a parallel to Benjamin's notion of an art work's aura); all events are equally sharable and capturable. Moments at which we experience a heightened publicity are vanishing; all moments are in theory equally public, equally an occasion; so there is no sense focusing on how one comes across in any given special moment.

I also think there is a useful distinction in the passage above between behavior and attitudes. Social media make a great deal of effort of capturing our attitudes as behavior and collapsing the difference between the two, thereby eliminating (perhaps inadvertently) the work we need and expect to perform to translate one into the other, to make symbolic exclusion have social-exclusion effects. But social-media capture may just make users conscious of a different level of "attitudes" that can elude capture yet express or contain the sentiment necessary to perform the offstage, impolite, antisocial acts of exclusion that ultimately sustain a given social order.

There is probably a more straightforward way of expressing this. Social-media use may elide the step we are accustomed to taking of translating the exclusionary attitude (the cultural capital) we want to show off into the identity performance we think we have to make to show it off. This is, in part, because there are no particular optimal occasions to show off, as everything is theoretically recordable and important. (It takes more collective effort to establish an "occasion." They are rarer as life becomes more easily digitizable and transmissible.)

So the boundary work, which you would think would become more explicit on social media, actually becomes more obscure, retreating to some as-yet-uncaptured region of everyday life and behavior. The cultural displays online are not boundary work at all, though we might pretend they are; the boundary work is already coded at the level of the network links. Lower status people can try to cultural-work their way to more links and influence, but higher status people are under no obligation to tip their hand about what cultural displays earn status, and can risk silly cultural displays with less fear of losing status.

And to take that further, the network that is hard-coded online may be a distraction from the uncoded networks in which real power circulates; the "secret societies" of the "power elite" that are guarded and kept private and so on. These are not given to Facebook to trace.

In short: social media sell us the idea that we can perform boundary work (develop our tastes so as to improve our status at others' expense) without being subject to it (we always get another chance to defend our tastes when they seem to lead to our being excluded). This is all very profitable for social-media companies, and it distracts us all from the real arenas of power, the networks that are defined by their ability to escape social-media capture, to transcend it.

Notes from Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces

I took these notes when I read the book seven or eight years ago. 

Bataille’s notion that humanity wants to act with no end in mind, to commit free acts of “destruction” not linked to civilized utility. Humans, instinctively wanting to act destructive, are made by a civilized society to feel alone in their destructive impulses, but others share this repressed urge, which expresses itself in society’s dark vices: gambling, incest, prostitution, drug addiction, wasted potential of all kinds. The bourgeoisie have forfeited this kind of open pleasure (which once formed the potlatch, the humiliation that can’t be returned). Marcus sees punk as a kind of potlatch, an eagerness to destroy for no reason, and assert a primal sense of being alive as opposed to dead, rationalized bourgeois culture. (395)

Isou: “Let youth cease to serve as a commodity merely to become the consumer of its own elan.” (271)

Postwar project: “To prove that real life was back, and to restrict the definition of real life to the pleasurable consumption of material goods within a system of male supremacy and corporate hegemony.” (258). This goes hand in hand with the “reality principle” or the quasi-Hegelian notion of accepting the limits of reality, of seeing reality as compromise of one’s ideals. To be realistic is to accept the hegemony and seek circumscribed happiness there (which is always just not quite attained, the unquenchable thirst is what the hegemony instills)

From a leftist book in 1984: “ The sixties is merely the name we give to a disruption of late-capitalist ideological and political hegemony, to a disruption of the bourgeois dream of unproblematic production, of everyday life as the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.” Were the radical movements of the sixties products of capitalism overreaching itself, succeeding too well? “Too many people had too much of everything that was on the market, and so they had the leisure to think about what else they might want.” (133)

Good quote from Arendt: “The transformation of the family man from a respectable member of society, interested in all public affairs to a ‘bourgeois’ concerned only with his private existence and knowing no civic virtue, is an international modern phenomenon… Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect, it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of a hangman.” This is the effect of bogus private life and pseudo-individuality divorced from social interaction, and the consequences of man lacking meaningful work.

The 190s perverted 1960s rhetoric about risk, adventure and personal fulfillment and freedom as an individual to underwrite dog-eat-dog capitalism without an ounce of civic decency or common empathy among citizens.

The “popular” must be fashioned, must be produced as a rabble, and are thus made to be constitutively unstable. Popular culture creates this unstable rabble. The rabble doesn’t precede the junk culture made for it, made to make it. (149)

The idea of being “blackmailed by utility,” that one can’t criticize something that functions even if it demeans. Since it works, it must be accepted, must be accepted as “real” as in the “reality principle” of compromise.

Life lived as spontaneous art, as a utopian realization of pure freedom, with no moment continuous from the previous one, a commitment to perpetual reinvention at every instant -- who wants this as a permanent state, even as an ideal? Isn’t this better experienced convulsively, in carnivalesque fits that surprise us, or are even planned -- it may be that this is all we can tolerate, that to live like that is insane.

           

Ads conjure a desire for this kind of unknowable spontaneous freedom, this kind of eternal retransformation at every instant in the name of maximum happiness, and diverts it to take solace in goods when we realize that it can’t be fulfilled, that we can’t live up to the daring of our own dreams (planted by the ads, of course, but we don’t recognize it). So we blame ourselves and not the ads for the impossible desires we come to possess, and consume the ads even more eagerly as wish fulfillment dramas for those dreams of metamorphosis.

Capitalist value and cool

This line of thought occurred to me while I was in the dentist's chair having my teeth scraped. Why do I worry so much about being cool? This feels like an alien imperative, yet it cuts to the core of my social being. It seems like an objective necessity that benefits no one in particular; it's something I just seem to owe to my particular slice of the society. Cool would seem to have no practical relevance whatsoever (things are cool because they somehow exceed functionality -- they express style, purity, etc.) yet it feels like an inescapable compulsion. I am saddled with a subjectivity that responds to cool, that is structured by it, even when I struggle to reject it, evade it.

Whenever I am worried about being "cool," I am caught up in the capitalist configuration of social relations and turning my consumption, my efforts to sustain and "reproduce" myself, and even my efforts to concretize and express my identity into labor on capitalism's terms. I am regarding social relations as intrinsically competitive with the reward being not reciprocation in the abstract but validation as a zero-sum thing -- I win the exchange when I am seen as cool relative to someone else, who is less cool. And the cool I have produced in my person, through my mediation of my everyday existence, will extend the tyranny of cool over social life that much further (I've enhanced the "value" of other commodities in symbolic terms, in terms of their coolness); in exchange I get to feel a little more secure in my status. I get to feel a little better about myself by feeling better than someone else.

The degree to which one accepts cool as a legitimate positive value, as something that enhances life, is also the degree to which one has bought into capitalism in its current stage. This is why I'm often puzzled when writers talk about something being cool without any shade of irony or apology; they are taking cool at face value as something that is making society better and not worse. Such people (Tiqqun calls them "Young Girls" in some allegedly nongendered way), I imagine, can shop at Urban Outfitters without a moment of hesitation because they actually respect what that company does in its cool hunting. It gathers the "valuable" things of culture in one place and distributes them to a broader base. Democratization!

But pursuing cool is always the pursuit of self-alienation as self-realization. It's accepting the purpose of self-actualization as winning approval in terms of the relative value of commodities one can display (or become). It's mistaking value (a specifically capitalist mediation) for wealth (a transhistorical value attuned to some more basic pleasure of existence). I'm deriving this distinction from Moishe Postone's analysis of value in Time, Labor and Social Domination, which is largely about how capitalism generates a confusion between value and wealth so that our energy is directed toward reproducing capitalism and its categories and social hierarchies rather than, say, ending poverty in the midst of plenty. All labor within consumer capitalism only seems to make useful things; in fact its main purpose is to make "value" -- what I'm calling cool. I just think passages like these from Postone make a lot more sense when you understand "value" as "cool" -- this weird social category of value that has nothing to do with use value but absorbs a great deal of effort and seems objectively important nonetheless:

Marx argues that what characterizes capitalist production is that the transformation of matter by labor is simply a means toward the creation of the social form constituted by labor (value). To say that the goal of production is (surplus-)value is to say that that goal is the social mediation itself.

This makes a lot more sense if you think about it in terms of "immaterial labor" as Virno and Lazzaurato describe it -- the enhancement of commodity values through our virtuosic consumption or deployment of them. When I'm posting a Faceook update, I'm creating value/cool via the work on my personal brand, and that is objectively relevent in capital though totally useless as a form of collective material wealth. I haven't added anything to the pile of stuff we need as a species, really, but I have produced value, I've made something that can circulate and add cool/value to other things. The point of posting to Facebook is "social mediation itself" -- the premise that doing so is a valuable thing to do, that we should all recognize it as such. That we should all acknowledge "cool" as value, whether or not our striving for it in any given attempt is totally successful. In other words, "surplus value" is another way of saying "cool" in consumer capitalism; its "surplus" because it has no basis in labor as such -- in the material transformation of stuff -- but in the way social relations are transformed by the work we do (on stuff, on ourselves, in communicating, etc.).

Postone argues that

The goal of the expenditure of labor power no longer is bound intrinsically to the specific nature of that labor; rather, this goal, despite appearances, is independent of the qualitative character of the labor expended — it is the objectification of labor time itself. That is to say, the expenditure of labor power is not a means to another end, but, as a means, has itself become an "end." This goal is given by the alienated structures constituted by (abstract) labor itself. As a goal, it is very singular; it is not only extrinsic to the specificity of (concrete) labor but also is posited independently of the social actors' wills.

Again, I think this is far less cryptic and implausible if you think of it in terms of making things "cool"  -- not that all work is about cool, but "cool" work is paradigmatic -- also "Cool" is what value is called perhaps in my hipster corner of the world; it might have some other name elsewhere, but would be describing the same phenomenon, the same capitalistic social relation. Anyway, the point of work is make "value" in the form of cool (value in the form of "value"), which then justifies the effort spent on it. Such "value" is limitless, not bound by material restraints, and thus suits capitalism's need for perpetual growth and the fantasy that wealth (personal and social) can be infinite. If we are measuring the worth of what we do in cool, we can never stop doing more to get more of it (and the distribution of this social "product" will never really be geared toward alleviating human suffering or mitigating inequality).

So yes, this is a product of my privilege that I can think of it this way, but I see the difference between "value" and "material wealth" as mirroring the difference between walking out the door full of anxiety over whether or not one is dressed in such a way as to be noticed positively (and then feeling reassured or depressed depending on what sort of attention one gets) or walking out the door and feeling immersed in the processes and abundance of life. When I am thinking about being cool, I am worried about producing value; when I manage to forget about it and stop worrying about being "productive" with my time, I am much closer to experiencing and perceiving the material value of being alive.

That probably sounds a little bogus and spiritualized. Mainly I am thinking of the difference between perpetual self-consciousness (which is an effect of capitalism requiring everyone to always self-commoditize, whether as a wage worker as a prosumer) and being able to see the world beyond oneself and not through that instrumental filter, looking for "value" everywhere.

Social media, etc., obviously makes this harder to avoid, extending the anxiety of leaving the house insufficiently cool into a full-time mode of existence, since every time you check Facebook, Twitter, etc., you are metaphorically walking out the door, worrying about how cool you are seeming. I've generally been afraid of going to Brooklyn because I am not nearly cool enough and the environment makes it hard for me to forget it, to see past that game, to escape that construct of value. Social media means Brooklyn everywhere.

Cool is a ramification of communication as commodity; social media are merely the latest means for capitalism to extend its form of value into everyday life and leave fewer spaces for respite from it. This is why social media represents "real subsumption" -- reshaping life to suit capitalism's functioning (rather than the adoption of precapitalist, transhistorical forms of life to capitalism's ends). Social media would not exist in a noncapitalist society; communication as mode of expressing "value" would not exist.

Anders Ramsay makes a similar point about value here. (I quoted this is a previous post; I added the bolding.)

As Heinrich states, "Value does not arise somewhere to then be 'there'." Value is not a thing but rather a social relationship. It emerges neither through production nor through exchange, but presupposes both. It is a property something is assigned in relation to other things, which then gives the appearance of possessing it quite apart from such a relationship. As Marx insists on repeatedly, value is a ghostly or over-sensual property, not a substantial one. The conception of a commodity possessing its value objectivity independent of these relations is a semblance that transforms a social property into what is taken to be a natural one.
...

The same situation applies to Pierre Bourdieu's non-economic concept of capital. One must both work for one's capital, get an education, practice, and produce something which is recognised by the field of science or art in order to become a scientist or an artist, or else one becomes neither, regardless of what one has produced for the drawer or the hard disc. Similarly, the value-relation does not arise in exchange without a labour process, but without exchange, concrete labour would never be reduced to abstract labour either, and thus, no value would emerge. One might also bring to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein's by now famous, and to modern social sciences so significant statement, that one cannot have a private language. The same thing applies to the value, one cannot decide it on one's own.

Cool is a damaged capitalist form of that shared social value. But it has the virtue of being social, at least, and there is no way backward from it. The point is to turn the self-consciousness cool induces into something that doesn't posit anxiety-inducing hierarchies and doesn't make us feel enslaved by notions of what is important that seem entirely alien and uncontrollable. The goal is to make self-consciousness and social presence not merely compatible but indistinguishable.

potentially useful quote from Lazzarato on immaterial labor, de-consumerizing

This is quoted in Coté and Pybus's article for Ephemera 7:

The activation, both of productive cooperation and of the social relationship with the consumer, is materialised within and by the process of communication. It is immaterial labour which continually innovates the form and the conditions of communication (and thus of work and of consumption). It gives form and materializes needs, images, the tastes of consumers and these products become in their turn powerful producers of needs, of images and of tastes. The
particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labour (seeing that its essential use value is given by its value contained, informational and cultural) consists in the fact that this is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but enlarges, transforms, creates the ‘ideological’ and cultural environment of the consumer. This does not produce the physical capacity of the workforce, it transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labour produces first of all a ‘social relationship’ (a relationship of innovation, of production, of consumption); and only if it succeeds in this production does its activity have an economic value. This activity shows immediately that which material production ‘hid’: in other words, labour produces not only commodities, but first and foremost the capital relationship. (Lazzarato, 2001)

Immaterial labor produces certain sorts of measurable, value-generating social relations. And like all labor, it reproduces capitalism as a set of relations revolving around commodities.

I guess I would argue that immaterial labor fashions a commodity in the form of relationship that veils the value that can be harvested in its "circulation," which has to be understood not as a transfer of property by as networked communication. "Immaterial" commodities mask the process of commodification and value extraction precisely because there is not tangible property involved, but instead a proprietary claim to communication flows. Immaterial labor is another way of saying the commodification of communication. It allows companies to extract a rent from meaning-making and symbolic exchange. Because it involves a relation and communication, it foregrounds the ways in which consumption is productive. It's "labor" insofar as it produces harvestable value, but it doesn't make the consumer a laborer; rather it hides the value that consumers create because their value creation doesn't appear to them as labor. This is why the critique is to stress consumer's productivity, and to try to strip the pleasure from this kind of production only so that consumer-producers will make an effort to disentangle their consumption from the reproduction of capitalist forms. We mustn't be distracted by how we are paid in affect for immaterial/communictive/consumeristic labor from the ways in which this labor reproduces capitalism. The question becomes how to withdraw affect from this circuit, how to extinguish its value in the process of consumption instead of producing it in a recirculatable way (i.e. in social networks). The trend is running in the other direction: we are being subjectivized to only experience pleasure (or positive affect) when our affect is captured in networks and "shared." It's only real feeling if it is mediated, preserved, not "destroyed." Pics or it didn't happen, even for yourself.

Not sure if that is theoretically coherent. Basically, consumerism reproduces capitalist relations because the consuming process makes capitalist value. Only the consumer can intervene and de-consumerize their consumption (I wonder) through a consciousness of the value they are producing and then ... what? An effort to destroy it or deny it or claim its value for themselves?

The authoritarian commodity

This manifesto from Tiqqun, "Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl"makes a lot more sense to me if you replace "Young-Girl" with "hipster." The idea of using "young-girl," which the authors insist is a "not a gendered concept," is apparently to suggest something about the sort of power this new cultural type generated at this stage of consumer capitalism can exercise through apparent vulnerability and submissiveness to fashion and peer pressure. Updating Marcuse's notion of repressive tolerance, Tiqqun suggests that social control is administered through the coercive appeal of youthful fun and permissiveness, through flattery and seduction, through transforming liberalist autonomy into debilitating desire and tractable envy:

The function of the Young-Girl is to transform the promise of liberty contained in the achievement of Western civilization into a surplus of alienation, a deepening of the consumer order, new servitudes, a political status quo. The Young-Girl lives in the same horizon as Technology: that of a formal spiritualization of the world.

I can't figure out what that last sentence is supposed to mean, but I agree that technology is a prime culprit in lodging a higher degree of sensitivity to fashion deeper into our subjectivity. New communication technology -- smartphones, etc. -- allow for more self-surveillance and more access to the reassuring judgments of others. It amplifies our self-consciousness and our sense of the self as a performance. Identity doesn't drive our behavior but is the end result of it, a product. The "young-girl" epitomizes this, serving as a model (the "authoritarian commodity") that can direct the endless self-fashioning and give meaning to all the opportunities we now have to declare what we are.

"What we are" becomes a problem only when technology allows for it: Once we can mediate identity, we become aware of identity as a malleable, manageable thing, which of course makes our sense of self far more insecure. Tiqqun, I think, is using "young-girl" as shorthand for all the ways in which our sense of self is rendered more insecure in the social networks that are becoming more material, surveillable and elaborated. Subjectivity has insecurity built into it: "In the world of the authoritarian marketplace, the living recognize, in their alienated desires, a demonstration of power that has been made inside them by the enemy."

I think this is the legacy of the hipster, regardless of whatever new term comes into fashion to discuss them. The hipster is the authoritarian commodity that uses only soft power, regulating all who come into contact with it by inspiring feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, envy, boredom, etc. The effective hipster/young-girl signifies a plenitude of cool that it cannot actually possess but that nonetheless inspires a kind of hopelessness that you yourself will never measure up or be seen enough for what you are. The hipster/young-girl was the bellwether for the sort of subject that only understands itself through surveillance, through the assumption that its every desire is being judged, and that desire is pointless unless it can be displayed and surveyed. "Social" technology has made this sort of anxiety commonplace, the feeling that it's, say, pointless to read something if you are not going to Tweet out the highlights, or pointless to listen to something if Spotify won't notify everyone in your social network. I want to blame hipsterism for this, but they were merely the first victims of this more aggressive phase of the society of the spectacle. They were the first to see no alternative to seeing themselves as a commodity among commodities and to try to find the advantages of that, the pleasures.

Managers not to blame for capitalism

The main thing I am taking away from In the Age of the Smart Machine is Zuboff's effort to view technology as a possible way to save capitalism from itself and resolve the tension between capital and labor. If only information technology was used correctly, managers would share authority and all workers would become well-respected knowledge workers who are not alienated but enhanced and fulfilled by their working life. Authority would never again be a matter of exploiting anyone but instead would become a way of collectively negotiating the best way to seize the "innovative" possibilities that ubiquitous data about work processes make possible.

Zuboff never ceases to be amazed that managers would make the apparently petty decisions to use technology to spy on workers and shift blame and protect their prerogatives and power rather than to seize opportunities to "informate" the workplace and develop the skills of blue-collar "operators." She likens the belief in managerial authority to a spiritual faith, a sort of false consciousness holding back cooperation and the general intellect. "The informating process sets knowledge and authority on a collision course," she claims, but what that means in practice is that middle managers are getting proletarianized, having their managerial leverage eroded by automation.

As long as organizational members are unwilling to critically examine their faith in this system, individuals at every level will remain like weeds in the wind, able to do only as much as their roles prescribe, seeking the psychological equivalent of the graveyard shift in order to test one's wings, only to be pulled back daily by the requirements of the faith.

Capitalism is premised on those prescribed roles. They are not a flaw in the system but its essence. Capitalism is a way of organizing production precisely so that individuals become "reeds in the wind" without sufficient agency to redirect the system toward a goal other than profit (like, say, empowering or enriching the lives of all workers and not merely the managing elite or property owners). They are brought to be dependent on the system and generally have incentive only to protect their own interests. The system invests them in the existing hierarchy and precludes alternatives. It's not a failure of the individual imagination that such alternatives don't appear to workers and managers; it's a failure to organize, a failure to believe in a collective imagination worth fighting for. The alternative is to embrace class struggle.

Without a capacity to imagine an alternative, it is likely that our work organizations will continue to reproduce relationships that impede a powerful understanding of the economic and social potential of new technology.

Yes, that is capitalism's purpose — to reproduce its necessary relations, which are ones in which managers (representing capital) maximally exploit workers. Workers must organize resistance to this; they can't count on technology to resolve the struggle with better data and managers' sudden beneficent desire to communicate better. If communication is "improved" by management, it is in service of extending exploitive opportunities and subsuming more of workers' capacities to capital, to the production of surplus value. The "powerful understanding" of technology's potential involves undoing capitalism, so it's useless to expect capitalist managers to recognize it and nurture it. The extent to which they see it, they will thwart it in their institutional capacity. They have to operate outside or against the firm to nurture it.

Technology is neutral, but authority is necessary to exploitation, which is necessary to maximizing profit and justifying patently unfair distribution of the surplus. Technology, that is, doesn't automatically solve exploitive relations in capitalism but merely exacerbates them, moves then to a higher and deeper level, absent the sort of deliberate politics to prevent such deepening. Politics solves capitalism's inhumanity, not technology.