We, the Profiles: The Machine and The Polity, 2018–2028 from THE REVIEW OF UNWRITTEN BOOKS

A friend without blog or web  site mailed me a hard copy of the July 24 Economist article, describing the meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and David Cameron, the UK’s newly elected Prime Minister, to discuss government,  governing and governance.  It brought to mind a book on this topic and, after some  rummaging around, I came up with the attached; it’s from a rececnt issue of the Review of Unwritten Books.  The full text is also immediately below.

We, the Profiles: The Machine and The Polity, 2018–2028
Len Ellis
Erewhon Books 2030 

Humans have a nasty history of trying to exclude each other from politics.  In the distant past the excluded have included women, blacks, immigrants and other others.  In our own day most countries with human clones have denied them the vote.  The concerns of We, the Profiles are the first stirrings of political activity by our profiles and avatars and the growing backlash against machine involvement in the polity.

The book begins by tracing how humans brought politics into machines with chapters on three events between 2018 and 2020.  The politicizing of Facebook is examined first.  Starting in 2016, the worldwide social network began deploying tools that enabled profile owners to participate in its governance.  The 2018 culmination, the first election for the Facebook parlia-ment is closely examined as is the use of voting bots that operated without direct supervision by the profile owners.

Welfare politics entered cyber-space after Linden Labs, as always seeking more members for Second Life, allowed its avatars to acquire reproductive and contraceptive applications. Two unexpected effects occurred: dramatic rises in virtual abortions and in abandoned avatar toddlers.  Linden Labs solved the former by funding virtual stem-cell research firms; they quickly outgrew the need for further aid. The harder problem was parentless tikes.  Although a new protocol required that in-world infants deactivate if they go without food, shelter and contact for four consecutive sessions, it could not be applied retroactively.  The persistence of the extant virtual orphans sparked the first demands for avatar rights and the first avatar protection societies.

The third key event was not explicitly political.  In 2019 V-ID Technologies, a U.K. developer of cyber-persona applications, launched an homophily plug-in for profile owners.  When“on,” the plug-in customized the profile to optimize its similarity to the profile(s) with which it was interacting.  Profiles customized to specific situations made them more life-like and made online sociability easier. Only later, when voting bots scanned them, did a problem emerge:  The profile no longer expressed its owner but its owner in a temporary and specific interaction.

The book’s second half is framed by the quadrennial elections of the 2020s but again focuses on certain events.  The well-known story of the unplanned birth of “profile preferences,” generally considered the first explicitly political act by the machine, is quickly retold.

In winter 2019 the profiles, detecting exponential growth in profile pages about politicians and political issues, began activating on their pages and distributing to other pages voting widgets, inspired by the Facebook tools but since tricked out by third-party developers into next-gen apps.  One, the Condorcet Engine allowed split votes—50% for Candidate A, 30% for Candidate B, etc.  Because Condorcet outputs so closely mirrored their inputs, the pro-files ranked them higher in authority, promoted them prominently on their own pages and linked to them elsewhere frequently.  Condorcet-based profile preferences quickly became ubiquitous and controversial. 

No one quite knew what to make of them and the chapter dives into the ensuing debate.  Ellis’ framework is simple (or simplistic).  He groups in one camp and calls “philosophes,” all those who resurrected, relied on and made explicit some version of the humanist tradition:  The individual is the atomic unit of society; the vote is a unitary action and indivisible.  He groups and labels as “positivists” all those who championed the informationalist goals of precision and reliable prediction, for which the divisible preference was a better input.  Debating the differences between voting and measuring has since petered out, unresolved, but the arguments will likely return.

The chapter on the 2024 election concerns the competing claims of collective intelligence providers about how to distill wisdom from crowds.  Caught flat-footed by the spontaneous genera-tion of profile preferences in 2020, they showed up for 2024 more fully featured.  Ellis speeds through the claims and efforts of the polling and survey houses, still committed to 19^th century methods, and a lot of time on recommendation engines (those using passive collabora-tive filtering) and on prediction markets.  Both of those solutions reliably produced accurate results, leading positivists to argue that they were more accurate than and should replace voting in determining the aggregate will.

As readers will recall, the last election was marked by the launch of We, the Sims, an ambitious and robust political hoax organized by the hacker-prankster syndicate www.secret.org.  Following a few flashbacks about their high jinks, the chapter dissects the mechanics and assumptions of two applications: the registration bots that enabled WtS to get on the ballot in 34% of Congressional districts in less than 3 weeks and the natural language, text processing tools used to sort candidates into ideological positions on three axes.  The latter used genetic algorithms, generating solutions by randomly mutating its own code.  The resulting 3D ideology map while highly accurate was also inexplicable, much to the consternation of everyone including the positivists.

Portraits of two new organizations that express the backlash against these developments provide the book’s conclusion.  Spooked by the spontaneous generation of profile preferences, the National Information Institute has created the Center for Meme Control, tasked with developing standards and protocols for self-propa-gating engines.  More dramatic is the formation of the Society Against Machine Evolution, a paradigm-busting alliance of the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Rifle Association and a splinter group of Computer Scientists for Social Responsibility.   Although both groups are young, Ellis lays out the directions each is likely to follow short term. 

More analyst than essayist, Ellis’ prose is terse and he hides his own point of view about these matters.  He was similarly elusive in his earlier work, Silicon Simulacra: Post-Humans of the Machine Worlds.  But his diffidence works to readers’ benefit.  The power of this non-argumentative history is its ability to stimulate thought rather than close it off, and, given the current events it chronicles, we need to think more often and harder about how machines are working their ways into our political life.

Imaginative Hedonism

Review:  Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism

This important book aspires to complement Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Specifically, just as Weber provided an historical account for the rise of “instrumental rationality” that drives the sphere of production, Campbell offers an historical account of the rise of “imaginative hedonism” that drives modern consumption.

His central theme is that pleasure itself was redefined in the 18th century. In former times, it was sought through the senses: food, sex, music, laughter. Thus, elites had banquets, harems, musicians, and clowns while the masses had carnivals, their annual taste of the same. The modern economy, according to Campbell, replaced the sensory experience of the body with the emotional experience of the imagination – daydreams of finer lifestyles, novel consumer goods, exotic experiences et al. Centrally important, these images are created or modified by the individual for self-consumption. In other words, it is not the buying, owning or consuming but the imagining – “the ability to create an illusion known to be false but felt to be true” – that pleasures us. Moderns became adept at what Campbell calls “autonomous imaginative hedonism” long before there was media or advertising; it’s not our wants but our wanting that is insatiable.

The book is organized in two parts. The first half is critical and dissects the inadequacies of economic explanations of wants and their origins in terms of increasing population, increasing standards of living and other macro trends and of sociological explanations that rely on emulation effects. The second half is historical. Like Weber Campbell anchors his account in the Calvinist strain of 17th century Protestantism but the legacy that he follows leads to the 18th century pietistic cults of sensibility and melancholy, then on to Sentimentalism (sensibility + Christian benevolence), culminating in 19th century Romanticism and finally democratizing as bohemianism in the early 20th century.

Densely argued and quite long, this is not an easy read. Moreover, those who prefer their historical explanations anchored in a society’s organization of power and wealth will not likely be convinced by a history of ideas based sermons, novels and philosophy. Finally, the scope is limited largely to Great Britain with some attention to France and Germany.

Those weaknesses pale when compared with this volume’s three important contributions. First, the argument makes room for the pursuit of pleasure along side the pursuit of wealth in understanding the evolution of modern society. Similarly, it makes room for emotion along side reason in that evolution. Second, it explains why we embrace rather than reject an everyday life diffused by the shimmers of advertising. Finally, it puts the consumer as the active and creative force at the center of consumerism.

The Pooping Philosopher

Classic collections one can pick up and put down.

Aesop, The Complete Fables (Penguin Classics)
Clever, caustic, often cruel

Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Vol I (Loeb Classical No. 184)
0% philosophy, 100% anecdotes, often LOL

Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
Niccolo Machiavelli meets Dale Carnegie

Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims (Oxford Classics)
Wit from modernity’s infancy

Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (Penguin Classics)
Acid commentaries on a broad range of topics

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books (NYRB Classics)
Pricks pretensions, esp. learning, sometimes disconcerting, often LOL

Giacomo Leopardi, Thoughts (Hesperus Classics)
Cutting observations, occasional stark emptiness, beautiful prose

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Bite-size nuggets plus poems and songs, often LOL, sometimes hilarious

Humans Inside Machines

Review:  Mark Poster, The Mode of Information:  Post-Structuralism and Social Context

Everyone who wants to understand how subjectivity, the “in here” of each of us, is shaped in the late modern age must read two chapters of this book. What McLuhan did for media, Poster does for information; he explains how databases and computer science set us up and bring us forth in their own distinctive ways. Saying he “explains” is perhaps too strong; the shaping of our “in here” is an elusive matter. But if you’re looking to understand critics who complain that our everyday life is “informatized” and that the self is “multiplied by databases,” these chapters are superior to anything I’ve read eleswhere, especially given their brevity. The remainder –an introduction to post-industrial society and chapters on TV commercials and electronic writing–are excellent and will be useful to many.

Poster’s perspective is commonly known as “post-modern,” and he enlists four seminal thinkers to do the heavy lifting: Jean Baudrillard (TV commercials), Michel Foucault (databases), Jacques Derrida (electronic writing) and Francois Lyotard (computer science). Readers who are not familiar with this perspective or these authors may find themselves befuddled. Poster doesn’t do much handholding; the book is a terse 150+ pages. To remedy this situation, readers may want to bone up with Robert Hollinger Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: A Thematic Approach (Contemporary Social Theory) and/or Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences.

Once you’re up to speed, anyone thinking hard about how the self, the hero of modernism, emerges within post-modern or more modestly late modern conditions will find Poster’s slender volume an important contribution.

Three Cheers for Cyber-sociology

Review: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (New York: Penguin, 2008)

Three virtues–sociological, political and historical–make this book important.

For part of the 19^th and most of the 20^th centuries, the role of groups in our collective life has been on the wane.  Modernism is anchored in individuality; consumerism is centered in self-expression; privatism promotes social isolation.  Books such as The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Bowling Alone (2000) have ably documented this situation.   Clay Shirky argues that digital media counter-balance this historical trend because they enable groups to organize easily and autonomously and for both short and long term goals.  IMHO that is the big picture import of this book: it’s a pioneering sociological exploration of this empowerment.

Shirky thinks that the resulting groups will in general improve our lives if only because these groups form autonomously around their own members’ goals.  There’s logic but not necessity in that view, as Shirky knows.  Each group will have its own impacts—greater and lesser benefits as well as unintended consequences, positive and/or negative—that could, moreover, extend beyond its members.  Only time will tell where this empowerment nets out at the societal level.  Still, his politics lean in a power-to-the-people direction and the book’s second virtue is to present this potential as an opportunity available to all today with some leanings en passant about how to leverage it.

Decades from now, this book will be important for an historical reason: it’s an eyewitness account of a dynamic situation.  Shirky does propose basic principles that underlie successful group formation and they have practical “how to” value. But he does not serve up some neat and tidy model.  Quite the contrary, he describes with enthusiasm the diversity—on many dimensions—of the groups being formed today via this empowerment.  This first-hand account by an informed observer, conscious of his biases and comfortable with the messiness of reality, has value on that score alone.

In short, three cheers for three virtues.

Neo-Con Riff: P.J. O’Rourke’s On The Wealth of Nations

 

 

Neo-Con Con Exposed: A Comment on P.J. O’Rourke, On The Wealth of Nations (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007). 

 

You don’t have to read P. J. O’Rourke’s On The Wealth of Nations because you already know the contents—a libertarian rant from a neocon wiseacre.  But, seriously, folks, you shouldn’t read it because it misrepresents Adam Smith and misleads readers. Fortunately, most of the book’s flaws can be traced to one cheap trick at the very outset.

In the second sentence, O’Rourke transforms Smith’s economic principles—the pursuit of self-interest, the division of labor and free trade—into “practical truths” (never defined), timeless and universal.  Elevating them out of history is what enables O’Rourke to wield them as slogans in bludgeoning his usual bugbears—politicians, liberals, reporters et al.

One example—his treatment of the “pursuit of self-interest’—suffices to illustrate this systemic problem.  First, the “self” to which Smith referred was a new phenomenon.  Of course, some form of self is intrinsic to being human: the human mind is aware of itself.  What emerged in the 17^th century and flowered in the next, however, was the self as a legitimate social agent.  Rather than address the appearance of individuality, autonomy and personal fulfillment, O’Rourke assumes these facets of the modern self were there all along, had been repressed and were now unleashed, and moves quickly to one of his many ahistorical platitudes.  In this case “[S]elf-interest makes the world go round…since the world began going around—a little secret everyone knows.” 

Almost as important, Smith did not champion just any definition of self-interest but a Franklin-esque version that emphasized emotional control and rational calculation, that stood in sharp contrast to the unruly passions of aristocratic traditions and that would in theory produce certain social virtues.  Either ignorant of or ignoring the historical context and its content, O’Rourke just rushes about waving the banner of “natural liberty” (never defined)—the “practical truth” that corresponds to the pursuit of self interest.

He uses the same sleight of hand with Smith’s two other principles—the division of labor and free trade.

No one expects logic from comics.  Hyperbole and jarring juxtaposition are their stock in trade, and at these O’Rourke’s book excels.  But as a guide to the seminal work of an 18^th century political economist for literate 21^st century readers, this book insults both.

Puffery and Propaganda

Review:  David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

Don’t be bamboozled. This book is puffery on the outside and propaganda within.

A booster of Internet-enabled consumer-generated content, Weinberger hails all its new modes—social networks, tagging, folksonomies, wikis, mash-ups etc.—to argue that the Internet enables new bottom-up ways of organizing and creating knowledge. His two theses are irrefutable. First, information is getting chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. Second, the organization of information has escaped physical world constraints and control by experts and their institutions. The net result: any one can now organize information any way one wants to suit one’s own purposes and do so at any time for one’s immediate use. From this potential Weinberger foresees though rose-colored glasses an ever-changing array of “useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world.” Excuse me but such a view has huge problems.

As Weinberger points out, the best grouping and sorting of information into knowledge is done by small groups not only online but also offline, as his own examples demonstrate. The Internet brings nothing special to this process. To be sure, the Internet does make it much easier to form groups and very much easier to form groups that include strangers and groups devoted to narrow topics. But a vast increase in quantity does not necessarily yield any improvement in quality, and although Weinberger is always careful to label such an outcome as “potential,” I’ve yet to see any marked change in our ability to make sense of the world.

Nor is the appetite and aptitude for this activity suited to all. As any teacher who ever graded term papers will confirm, the ability to cut-and-paste information and turn it into knowledge is not innate. Even after some schooling, such a rudimentary skill is very far from universal. It is essential for the new occupational stratum of Information Age employees who manipulate words and numbers for their livings, but such “knowledge workers” are not Everyman. Presenting the abilities and interests of this or any other elite as those of everyone is the essence of ideology and shouldn’t fool anyone.

Nor should anyone accept, much less applaud, Weinberger’s cavalier dismissal of discipline and authority. He argues that knowledge should not have any shape and that deciding what to believe is now our burden. His laissez-faire alternative would have John and Jane Doe fend for themselves, finding and creating meaning from and among each other—link by link, tag by tag. Fortunately, this cannot happen because humans can only make sense of things, especially disconnected facts, through the frameworks of our inherited arts and sciences. Nor should it happen. The casual indifference to several millennia of human efforts to make sense of the world only leaves John and Jane in the post-modern void, unarmed and aimless.

There’s a lot to be said in favor of user-generated content but to suggest that the fragmentation of knowledge and the cacophony of cyberspace will improve our ability to make sense and meaning of life is cybertopian bunkum.