Quantified self as executive unfitness

Notes on Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988)

1. The effect of information technology and increasing mediation of personal interaction and communication in the workplace (and the social factory) is to make the "acting-with" skills of the executive function seem even more mystified and ineffable. Executive skills are defined by a negative theology; they are precisely everything that can't be quantified. As Zuboff puts it "the work of the executive has been, by definition, work that is not subject to rationalization." They are defined ex post as intuition or feel or comfort with authority or leadership. The executive function consists of the remainder after everything else has been rationalized. It is primarily a mode of distinction, not a tangible and transmittable set of skills. The transferability of other skills is what makes them non-executive. They are like all other information subject to digitization and redistribution: radically devalued.

2. In other words, information technology abets the process of purifying the executive function of its quantifiable components, leaving the perfectly mysterious executive, whose power can only be understood through a cult of personality, in terms of charisma. The boss operates on inscrutable hunches that can't really be challenged; these form the basis of the boss's authority.

3. When an individual's contributions to a productive process (and sociality is a productive process) are quantified, they can accrue no surplus. They lose the ability to negotiate for compensation on the basis of something arguable, intangible. ("Your tweets had a declining retweet rate of 24%, therefore your pay will be reduced accordingly.)

4. People who choose to self-quantify, who seek out ways to turn themselves into data, are in essence opting out of executive responsibilities, then. They are volunteering to be deskilled and controlled. The logic of their decisionmaking is not a matter of hunches but a matter of data, and thus a decision anyone could make for them, given the same data.

5. To put that in reversed form: the quantified self, the data self, is a means for excluding people from qualifying for executive decisionmaking. Because production is shifting to the social factory, and most people's social lives are being quantified in social media, that suggests that self-quantification is a way of extending the workplace hierarchy into the social sphere that once at least appeared to be sheltered from it. If your friendships are mediated and quantified, they are controlled; the network is stabilizing them and draining them of their potential for power or value creation independent of pre-existing systems of sociopolitical management. They are internal to the "System." Maybe sociality, identity, etc., are always internal to the System. But the quantification of sociality strengthens the prison bars. Sociality in everyday life ceases to be a resource for resistance to the system; it becomes a source of innovation for refining it, perfecting it, completing its totality. (Our destiny: Everything is subsumed.)

6. Maintaining the ineffability of social behavior becomes a primary form of resistance as well as a way to claim bureaucratically acknowledged power, since power in bureaucracy is distilled into ineffable, unquantified forms. That is, to maintain power in the social factory, one has to evade quantification and preserve the sense of being a subject of the social process more than its object. The more of your social life revolves around uncaptured face time, the more you are the executive of your own productive social life. The more your social life is captured in media, the more you are an employee in your own social life "acting-on" others rather than "acting-with" them, to adapt Zuboff's terminology. (Acting-on means you are a body transforming other objects through direct labor; acting-with means you coordinate, communicate, produce cooperation, do all that general-intellecty virtuosity stuff.) The quantification of the self implies the management by an outside force, even if the nature or identity of that outside force is known, or even if one believes it is oneself doing the managing. Self-quantification still limits one to instrumental tasks, even in the social realm, and prohibits one from assuming the power-accuring qualitative, charismatic tasks.

7. Leadership means refusing to be quantified.

8. Will Davies argues in this paper about the "Emerging neo-communitarianism" that neoliberalism is a technocratic means to guarantee liberalism's idea of freedom as rational choice. It's technocrtatic instrument is quantification to ensure efficiency, which verifies freedom in the way it understands liberalism.

Bureaucrats, teachers, social workers and so many other professionals are all ultimately trusted to take their own decisions in a neoliberal society, but only on the basis that their outputs are made explicit, so that this trust can be reviewed at regular intervals. The liberal faith in individual reason just about survives, but freedom is now located within carefully designed systems of audit and incentive management, which by the 1990s had become collectively referred to as ʻgovernanceʼ. The task of neoliberal government is to quantify the outcomes of social and economic behaviour, such that individuals are able to exercise choice in an informed way, whether inside or outside of markets.

That analysis fits well with my contention that Facebook and other social media are neoliberal policy tools, or how I usually put it, that they prop up neoliberlist ideology and support/constitute neoliberal subjectivity. The point is that quantification is a modality of control more than of information; it is about auditing and not self-empowerment. If you think it is about self-empowerment, that is because you are mistaking self-auditing as not being in service of existing external authorities. Quantification is confessing yourself to the authorities. (Foucault's view of confession's function applies here.)

9. Quantifying the self is doing the neoliberal state's work for it; it's collaborating rather than resisting. It is making oneself subject to power, circumscribing the space in which one might be free to operate. Instead one inscribes oneself in the space delineated by incentives and targets and goals, all of which are subject to optimization not on the self's behalf but for the state or the firm.

10. A quantified self is a neoliberal self is a postauthentic self is a data self. (?) It is the sum of information that can be known about itself and processed; its goals are to more precisely quantify itself, elaborate its connections, and perhaps perfect its feedback mechanisms to achieve some short of ecstatic short circuit of self-reflexive identity. Information wants more information. It doesn't want to be free, it wants to replicate and proliferate. That is, the data self wants to broadcast richer and richer data sets of itself in an attempt to make life more meaningful. It can no longer find meaning through action; it can only be processed into meaning.

notes from Machine Dreams

Economics as the search for a meaningful definition of "rationality" -- the impact of computer science on economics has been to dissolve the illusion of the individual as the "rational subject" or agent, and to instead regard individuals as cellular automata of a larger "rational subject" that subsumes them. Rationality in the economic sense -- the sense of the most efficient distribution of resources, etc. -- is an aggregate phenomenon that exceeds the individual's grasp.

The market is then viewed as the "rational agent," as a cyborg entity that computes and wills outcomes and so on. Individual humans, with their limited and irrational self-directed goals, are subroutines to the market's higher functioning and purpose.

Mirowski cites a 1993 paper by Gode and Sunder that pits autonomous automata against one another in a double auction, revealing that this framework "had managed to induce 'aggregate rationality not only from individual rationality but also individual irrationality.' ... aggregate rationality had no relationship to anything the neoclassicals had been trumpeting as economic rationality for all these years." (554) The most idealized neoclassical market model "produces its hallowed results in experimental settings with severely impaired robots."

The individual's calculations, such as they are, need not be "rational" to yield rational macro outcomes. Motives at the individual level are ultimately inscrutable -- their logic cannot be inferred from outside analysis of achieved outcomes. Their unique rational choices not necessary to the larger outcome, which can be produced by AI agents operating on simple automatic imperatives. People have reasons for what they do but they can't be connected with economically rational outcomes.

(Mirowski argues -- I think -- for regarding multiple market forms themselves as automata in an evolutionary competitive process seeking an emergent "allocative efficiency." The scary thing is we are enmeshed in the process, though the "efficiency" it discovers may have nothing to do with our limited human notion of individual thriving or social justice, etc. We may be agents serving the flourishing and reproductions of markets for their sake and their incomprehensible ends.)

I think there is an analogy to spy fiction and the chaotic behavior of individual spies caught in the infinite regress of double-triple-quadruple agents and simulated opponents and disinformation and the rest. Personal agency is meaningless in this context; the game is on a whole other level, so to speak. Individual spies may have all sorts of complex reasoning to defend their acts, but it is all local rationalization, irrelevant to the broader outcome or bigger logic. They are just individualist ideology that demands the assumption that their choices are constitutive of outcomes, but really the logic of the rational outcome only comes when their choices are merged with reactions and choices of a host of other agents whose moves can't be anticipated or incorporated in the individual's thinking process. Spies (like individuals in markets) don't know how their acts shape the rules of the game they are playing; they think the rules are perhaps already fixed (their limited individual scope -- the mistake the way they are programmed in their subroutine for the entirety of the software) when the whole system is calculating something they don't understand or even know of. Like the humans on Earth in Douglas Adams's books, part of an organic computer program determining the question of meaning.

The rationality of the espionage system perhaps exists at the level of national goals, or perhaps nations are players, automata is a larger game/market of war that has its own agenda, its own equilibrium that has nothing to do with human thriving or human goals.

Facebook, Projective City, Post-authenticity, Data Self

material on abstract labor cut from Theorizing the Web presentation

Another way of understanding the dynamism of capitalism is through its continual need to produce a flow of “abstract labor” as well as opportunities for profit. Capitalism presupposes an ever expandable amount of needs to satisfy with commodities and thus an ever growing amount of potential work to produce those commodities. Thus it requires a general sense that work is fungible or “abstract”, measurable as a certain amount of money (a wage). And it requires a sense that any activity whatever on the part of a worker can be productive, as value inheres in human effort itself. In capitalism, the value of labor is not contextual and contingent, not dependent on traditions and secure, stable structure of productive relations (think the mythical precapitalist community, with little class mobility and hereditary rank and occupations), but is “liberated” to be deployable in whatever ways suit capital; capitalism thus remakes local, traditional arrangements in its image. Workers becomes nothing (no integral identity is given, in theory), but have the potential of making anything, and must make something of themselves. This is the source of capitalism’s power to bring novelty into the social world. The formation of social bonds becomes a source of value -- the power of cooperation, the creation of value that exceeds the independent effort of any one person.

Capitalism must be able to attract or codify this sort of “living labor” and render it “abstract labor” amenable to rationalization, measurement and control -- the sort of labor that can be the input to a profitable production process. Hence a fundamental problem for capitalism: how to maintain a supply of workers who are (a) flexible, creative, and motivated at the same time they are (b) manageable, controllable, and predictable.

Living labor can be understood as identity-making effort (in the absence of traditional prescriptions); it is the productivity of open-ended potentiality
Abstract labor is the quantification of the self, making that labor of self-creation and identity shaping productive by allowing it to conform to pre-existing measuring tools that allow for commodification. A matter of fitting oneself to the yardstick.

The capitalist development of technology has in part been driven by a need to render “living labor” into “abstract labor” without snuffing it out altogether. Put another way, it’s not only machines that embody technical knowledge to improve productivity, but also subjects, who are freed to produce new needs and hence new opportunities for profit. Subjectivity becomes a developed from of capital, with an enhanced productive potential. (We think to want more; we are determined to express ourselves in original ways; we are driven to discover ourselves rather than take our identity as given and fixed.) The development of machinery and now computer technology and augmentation nullifies inherent differences and particularities in users, leveling pre-existing human variety while producing an urgent need to manufacture new distinctions. It takes pre-existing qualities, makes the quantifiable and then uses those quantities to impel production.

Capitalism requires labor as such (abstract labor). But this prompts the critique that work is personally meaningless, alienating. To answer this critique, capitalism must make the process of valorization in production into a kind of self-production for workers at the same time. What enables this is the underlying ability to transform life experience (self-production, self-expression, relationship forming, etc.) into something abstract and redeployable behind the scenes by capitalist firms: data. Work (now becoming -- in ideology, if not in actual fact -- a matter of “immaterial labor” -- the filtering of production through lifestyles, branding, symbolic layering) can become meaningful and social and self-fulfilling because it is at the same time generating data. The data self is the sort of capitalist subject that experiences its “alienation” as liberation and an open-ended process of self-discovery; it experiences the quantification of life (once strictly a matter of reducing human effort into abstract labor power measured in wages) not as alienating and reductive but as positive, descriptive, self-defining, revealing.

All Facebook profiles in theory are born equal; they allow the same exact repertoire of actions to shape and improve them. It seems like an opportunity and a medium in which to develop the self, but it is also a way to contain and control those efforts, making sure they are producing value within capitalism (rather than liberation from it).

Social media extend the experience and range of applicability of living labor while simultaneously transforming it into “abstract labor” -- into fungible data. They attempt to control and capture the productive capital of subjectivity engendered by capitalism in liberating us from our stable place in traditional hierarchies and so on. They give shape to the emerging social factory, integrating it into existing ways of doing business, prompting investment flows, and harvesting and distributing profit.

Social media are part of the new spirit, part of network-driven capitalism’s effort to justify and limit itself to make sure it doesn’t become too immiserating to continue. Social media presuppose the conditions of their popularity (network capitalism) are permanent, present themselves as solution to what they are actually instrumental in causing and perpetuating. They ameliorate the ideological crisis that stems from the conflict between abstract and living labor.

Social media are ways to contain and recapture the productive and potentially disruptive energy of the cooperation engendered by the capitalist production process, which depends on bringing workers together, dividing labor among them, and generating/capturing the surplus that emerges from their effort to work together. Cooperative efforts are captured within social media and made into data -- that is, they are made fungible, abstract, countable. This data can set cooperative workers back into competition with one another, now competing over and in terms of measurable influence, attention, contribution, network links and so on.

James Raven's Judging New Wealth; contradictions in the commodity form of the book

Raven examines the British book business in the second half of the 18th century, explaining how the book became more of an everyday commodity as the reading public expanded. The growing market led to a streamlined product to meet it, which in turn grew the market further. With books, this meant genre formulas were refined and generalized so audiences would know what they were getting. Critics of the period recognized this; one likened fiction to a "drug" engineered to be addictive through its standardized tropes and stereotypes.

But Raven's main concern, as the title suggests, is the prominence of stories about the nouveau riche, the demand for which was inexhaustible in the period -- unsurprisingly given the middle class makeup of the new reading public. The fiction of the era catered to a need in readers to disavow their own dubious origins and established a different means for establishing character than bloodlines, namely the sensibility to appreciate fiction and respond emotionally to it.

Part of what happens is that taste stops meaning aristocratic discrimination and starts meaning the ability to be ahead of the fashion curve. Those are often the same thing in practice, if you think fashions emerge from hierarchical emulation. But the shift in emphasis indicates a shift in imagined possibilities -- the new commodities allow one to believe that taste can be achieved. No longer a matter of blood but a matter of wise consumer choices. The book market is microcosm of the larger democratization of taste through open markets in fashionable goods. This has destabilizing effects throughout the class hierarchy, prompting an acceleration in the cycling through of signifiers of status. This acceleration with urgently spun as freedom by capitalism's ideologues, and who knows? Maybe they were right. We can't project backward and know whether we would have enjoyed the "ontological security" of being consigned for life to a particular social caste. Perhaps Gilles Lipovetsky is right and fashion is a small price to pay for social mobility (even uneven and imperfect mobility). But this is certainly an important basis of emerging consumerist ideology — the right to have Meaningful Taste and to find life's purpose in it rather than upholding one's place in the Great Chain of Being.

In 18th century England, the "new definition of social awkwardness" promulgated by novels of manners, Raven argues, drove an impulse for a standardization in fashionable objects, an orderly process for their passage through fashionability. This helps allow for the emulation that preserves the status hierarchy by making it legible. Commodities as a form, as a symbolizing medium, become a stable ground or field within which status can be derived and measured. (Books are just one salient example of this process of making goods, creating markets for them, and tolerably embedding those markets into existing social relations.)

Raven notes the apparent contradiction in the substance of commoditized books: They promise to inculcate proper social conduct, but their form is engineered to teach one simply to become addicted to reading more books. The form says "consume more," regardless of content -- this is basically true of all commercial media products. The worship of novelty is built in, so the allegedly permanent, always true ethical advice or aesthetic taste these early books could offer was always compromised. They offered the experience of having learned the "last word" about some moral or aesthetic question as something you could consume again and again -- moral certitude as a commodity. Experiencing morality (or connoisseurship) vicariously as entertainment replaces the need to act morally in the world to demonstrate that one has learned and understood some precept.

The new reader's yearning for permanence is leveraged into an appreciation for the exhilarating experience of ephemerality. This is how commoditized books, commercial fiction reproduce their market, making these contradictory desires cohere, coexist. Media consumption in general perhaps performs this work, manufacturing a necessary illusion for capitalism, that one can consume one's way to solidity, that one can experience stability serially, as a string of vicarious consumption experiences.

Francesca Woodman notes

Preliminary ideas

Francesca Woodman is definitely the sort of artist whose work is overshadowed by her life. I'm forced to wonder if I ever would have seen her photographs if not for her life story, and it tempts to think that I would have been among those who were aesthetically insightful enough to recognize her genius, while the rest of the dopes need a human interest story to draw them in and imbue with "authenticity" and "real feeling" -- what the middlebrow art consumer is looking for in works rather than some higher-order formal achievement. They need to view art through biography to give it meaning, while I have some higher poetic power to discover meaning qua meaning in the abstract.

So Woodman's work occasions a temptation to a particular snobbery, a particular fantasy about possessing a particular special insight, which ironically enough is probably what Woodman must have felt pressured to feel herself, an isolating superiority, a terror of being pleased by what pleases the vulgar crowd, a horror of discovering that there is nothing special in the way you see things, that you have no eye that elevates you to distinction.

social graph vs. social class

I've hated the term social graph since Facebook first seized upon it to try to legitimate and intellectualize their project of subsuming people's social lives. But it turns out the term may be useful in drawing a distinction between the concepts of social organization that social media serve to reinforce and the class-based analyses they work to prevent.

Social media support, obviously, a view of society as a network of individual nodes that define themselves by their difference from other nodes; each individual's value lies in establishing and expressing that difference, finding comparative advantage relative to other nodes. Connections to other people serve to spread that message of difference, the existence of that differential value, meaning that relations charted in that network (aka the social graph) are lines of competition of well as mere affiliation. It means also that individuals in the network are faced with an ongoing tactical situation, under pressure to constant innovate the nature of their identity in the network to find new advantages, invent new differences, propagate new bases for judgment and new implied hierarchies to dominate (e.g. "I'm the person with the coolest Deep Purple bootleg blog"; "I'm the quickest to retweet that Teju Cole post"; "I invented a meme that combines Deleuze passages with pictures of Rihanna"; etc.).

This interpretation of how society is organized precludes an interpretation that sees the possibility of class, of concrete groups with shared interests that they work to construct and then use as the basis for forcing concessions from capital. The social graph traces intricate constellations that are always becoming ever more complex and require massive computer power and elaborate algorithms to interpret and trace out underlying patterns of significance. Generally, only capital has the resources to summon such power, so the commonalities called into being through such analysis of network data are commercial ones. But to forge a social class, a different sort of work is required, called forth by a different conception of society, based on antagonisms between blocs (and ongoing fights that require long-term strategies) not antagonisms between individuals (whose spontaneous skirmishes require more or less ad hoc tactics).

The social graph purports to passively record social arrangements that emerge organically and thus reflect some sort of true and undistorted account of how society works. That conception discourages the possibility of those plotted on the graph from making a social class. Social media users don't take advantage of their connectedness to undertake the work of finding the bases by which they can see their concerns as being shared, being in some way equivalent. Instead, their connectedness drives them to preen for attention and personal brand enhancement. One must work against social media's grain to use it to develop lasting, convincing political groupings.

I'm deriving this network vs. class scheme from chapter 5 of Boltanski and Chiapello's New Spirit of Capitalism, "Undermining the Defenses of the World of Work," which mainly traces how neoliberalism's ideological propositions about flexibility and autonomy brought on deunionization and crippled the force of critique. Boltanski and Chiapello argue that in the crises capitalism faced from 1968 to the early 1980s the "artistic critique" (emphasizing worker autonomy and on-job creativity) won out over the "social critique" (emphasizing justice and mitigating inequality), leading to the acceptance of neoliberalist reforms as potentially liberating, as defensible progress (and not dismantling of norms of economic security). The once legitimate artistic critique was rehabilitated by the new spirit of capitalism, and those who persisted in pursuing the tenets of the artistic critique (Boltanski and Chiapello list autonomy, authenticity, creativity, liberation) became hipsters rather than social critics. That mode of resistance became instead an entrepreneurial mode of personal branding. The space it opened for conflict was reclaimed.

That is how neoliberalism has generally proceeded. It tries to disguise antagonism, the existence of conflictual classes. We are freed to think or everybody as basically being middle class by default, obviating the work that went into building solidarity, "establishing equivalence" among disparate people so they could participate in common struggles. Instead, we got to be unique idiosyncratic selves with special unique talents, and the main political problem was getting that specialness properly recognized. And accordingly, we all need to negotiate our wages on an individual basis; no reason to be unionized.

The result of all that?

The opportunities offered for the flourishing of the self went together with the exclusion of those individuals or groups that did not possess the requisite resources to seize those opportunities and, consequently, with an increase in poverty and inequality.

I think that's what Freddie deBoer is trying to get at from a far more personal angle in this post.

Like neoliberalist ideology and post-Fordist management techniques, social media work to "restore the salience of particularities" and "construct a world sensitive to differences," to use Boltanski and Chiapello's phrases. This yields a "confused, fragmented universe, composed solely of a juxtaposition of individual destinies." We all flounder to get ahead personally but never unite in a meaningfully political way. The 99% dissolves and all that's shared is statuses, photos, and tweets. And everything remains fucked up and bullshit.