Digifesto

Category: philosophy

March 5, 2018

politics of business

This post is an attempt to articulate something that’s on the tip of my tongue, so bear with me.

Fraser has made the point that the politics of recognition and the politics of distribution are not the same. In her view, the conflict in the U.S. over recognition (i.e., or women, racial minorities, LGBTQ, etc. on the progressive side, and on the straight white male ‘majority’ on the reactionary side) has overshadowed the politics of distribution, which has been at a steady neoliberal status quo for some time.

First, it’s worth pointing out that in between these two political contests is a politics of representation, which may be more to the point. The claim here is that if a particular group is represented within a powerful organization–say, the government, or within a company with a lot of power such as a major financial institution or tech company–then that organization will use its power in a way that is responsive to the needs of the represented group.

Politics of representation are the link between recognition and distribution: the idea is that if “we” recognize a certain group, then through democratic or social processes members of that group will be lifted into positions of representative power, which then will lead to (re)distribution towards that group in the longer run.

I believe this is the implicit theory of social change at the heart of a lot of democratish movements today. It’s an interesting theory in part because it doesn’t seem to have any room for “good governance”, or broadly beneficial governance, or technocracy. There’s nothing deliberative about this form of democracy; it’s a tribal war-by-other-means. It is also not clear that this theory of social change based on demographic representation is any more effective at changing distributional outcomes than a pure politics of recognition, which we have reason to believhe is ineffectual.

Who do we expect to have power over distributional outcomes in our (and probably other) democracies? Realistically, it’s corporations. Businesses comprise most of the economic activity; businesses have the profits needed to reinvest in lobbying power for the sake of economic capture. So maybe if what we’re interested in is politics of distribution, we should stop trying to parse out the politics of recognition, with its deep dark rabbit hole of identity politics and the historical injustice and Jungian archetypal conflicts over the implications of the long arc of sexual maturity. These conversations do not seem to be getting anyone anywhere! It is, perhaps, fake news: not because the contents are fake, but because the idea that these issues are new is fake. They are perhaps just a lot of old issues stirred to conflagration by the feedback loops between social and traditional media.

If we are interested in the politics of distribution, let’s talk about something else, something that we all know must be more relevant, when it comes down to it, than the politics of recognition. I’m talking about the politics of business.

We have a rather complex economy with many competing business interests. Let’s assume that one of the things these businesses compete over is regulatory capture–their ability to influence economic policy in their favor.

When academics talk about neoliberal economic policy, they are often talking about those policies that benefit the financial sector and big businesses. But these big businesses are not always in agreement.

Take, for example, the steel tariff proposed by the Trump administration. There is no blunter example of a policy that benefits some business interests–U.S. steelmakers–and not others–U.S. manufacturers of steel-based products.

It’s important from the perspective of electoral politics to recognize that the U.S. steelmakers are a particular set of people who live in particular voting districts with certain demographics. That’s because, probably, if I am a U.S. steelworker, I will vote in the interest of my industry. Just as if I am a U.S. based urban information worker at an Internet company, I will vote in the interest of my company, which in my case would mean supporting net neutrality. If I worked for AT&T, I would vote against net neutrality, which today means I would vote Republican.

It’s an interesting fact that AT&T employs a lot more people than Google and (I believe this is the case, though I don’t know where to look up the data) that they are much more geographically distributed that Google because, you know, wires and towers and such. Which means that AT&T employees will be drawn from more rural, less diverse areas, giving them an additional allegiance to Republican identity politics.

You must see where I’m getting at. Assume that the main driver of U.S. politics is not popular will (which nobody really believes, right?) and is in fact corporate interests (which basically everybody admits, right?). In that case the politics of recognition will not be determining anything; rather it will be a symptom, an epiphenomenon, of an underlying politics of business. Immigration of high-talent foreigners then becomes a proxy issue for the economic battle between coastal tech companies and, say, old energy companies which have a much less geographically mobile labor base. Nationalism, or multinationalism, becomes a function of trade relations rather than a driving economic force in its own right. (Hence, Russia remains an enemy of the U.S. largely because Putin paid off all its debt to the U.S. and doesn’t owe it any money, unlike many of its other allies around the world.)

I would very much like to devote myself better to the understanding of politics of business because, as I’ve indicated, I think the politics of recognition have become a huge distraction.

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March 2, 2018

Moral individualism and race (Barabas, Gilman, Deenan)

One of my favorite articles presented at the recent FAT* 2018 conference was Barabas et al. on “Interventions over Predictions: Reframing the Ethical Debate for Actuarial Risk Assessment” (link). To me, this was the correct response to recent academic debate about the use of actuarial risk-assessment in determining criminal bail and parole rates. I had a position on this before the conference which I drafted up here; my main frustration with the debate had been that it had gone unquestioned why bail and parole rates are based on actuarial prediction of recidivism in the first place, given that rearrest rates are so contingent on social structural factors such as whether or not police are racist.

Barabas et al. point out that there’s an implicit theory of crime behind the use of actuarial risk assessments. In that theory of crime, there are individual “bad people” and “good people”. “Bad people” are more likely to commit crimes because of their individual nature, and the goal of the criminal policing system is to keep bad people from committing crimes by putting them in prison. This is the sort of theory that, even if it is a little bit true, is also deeply wrong, and so we should probably reassess the whole criminal justice system as a result. Even leaving aside the important issue of whether “recidivism” is interpreted as reoffense or rearrest rate, it is socially quite dangerous to see probability of offense as due to the specific individual moral character of a person. One reason why this is dangerous is that if the conditions for offense are correlated with the conditions for some sort of unjust desperation, then we risk falsely justifying an injustice with the idea that the bad things are only happening to bad people.

I’d like to juxtapose this position with a couple others that may on the surface appear to be in tension with it.

Nils Gilman’s new piece on “The Collapse of Racial Liberalism” is a helpful account of how we got where we are as an American polity. True to the title, Gilman’s point is that there was a centrist consensus on ‘racial liberalism’ that it reached its apotheosis in the election of Obama and then collapsed under its one contradictions, getting us where we are today.

By racial liberalism, I mean the basic consensus that existed across the mainstream of both political parties since the 1970s, to the effect that, first, bigotry of any overt sort would not be tolerated, but second, that what was intolerable was only overt bigotry—in other words, white people’s definition of racism. Institutional or “structural” racism—that is, race-based exclusions that result from deep social habits such as where people live, who they know socially, what private organizations they belong to, and so on—were not to be addressed. The core ethic of the racial liberal consensus was colorblind individualism.

Bill Clinton was good at toeing the line of racial liberalism, and Obama, as a black meritocratic elected president, was its culmination. But:

“Obama’s election marked at once the high point and the end of a particular historical cycle: a moment when the realization of a particular ideal reveals the limits of that ideal.”

The limit of the ideal is, of course, that all the things not addressed–“race-based exclusions that result from deep social habits such as where people live, who they know socially, what private organizations they belong to, and so on”–matter, and result in, for example, innocent black guys getting shot disproportionately by police even when there is a black meritocratic sitting as president.

And interesting juxtaposition here is that in both cases discussed so far, we have a case of a system that is reaching its obsolescence due to the contradictions of individualism. In the case of actuarial policing (as it is done today; I think a properly sociological version of actuarial policing could be great), there’s the problem of considering criminals as individuals whose crimes are symptoms of their individual moral character. The solution to crime is to ostracize and contain the criminals by, e.g., putting them in prison. In the case of racial liberalism, there’s the problem of considering bigotry a symptom of individual moral character. The solution to the bigotry is to ostracize and contain the bigots by teaching them that it is socially unacceptable to express bigotry and keeping the worst bigots out of respectable organizations.

Could it be that our broken theories of both crime and bigotry both have the same problem, which is the commitment to moral individualism, by which I mean the theory that it’s individual moral character that is the cause of and solution to these problems? If a case of individual crime and individual bigotry is the result of, instead of an individual moral failing, a collective action problem, what then?

I still haven’t looked carefully into Deenan’s argument (see notes here), but I’m intrigued that his point may be that the crisis of liberalism may be, at its root, a crisis of individualism. Indeed, Kantian views of individual autonomy are really nice but they have not stood the test of time; I’d say the combined works of Haberams, Foucault, and Bourdieu have each from very different directions developed Kantian ideas into a more sociological frame. And that’s just on the continental grand theory side of the equation. I have not followed up on what Anglophone liberal theory has been doing, but I suspect that it has been going the same way.

I am wary, as I always am, of giving too much credit to theory. I know, as somebody who has read altogether too much of it, what little use it actually is. However, the notion of political and social consensus is one that tangibly effects my life these days. For this reason, it’s a topic of great personal interest.

One last point, that’s intended as constructive. It’s been argued that the appeal of individualism is due in part to the methodological individualism of rational choice theory and neoclassical economic theory. Because we can’t model economic interactions on anything but an individualistic level, we can’t design mechanisms or institutions that treat individual activity as a function of social form. This is another good reason to take seriously computational modeling of social forms.

References

Barabas, Chelsea, et al. “Interventions over Predictions: Reframing the Ethical Debate for Actuarial Risk Assessment.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.08238 (2017).

Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press, 2018.

Gilman, Nils. “The Collapse of Racial Liberalism.” The American Interest (2018).

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February 27, 2018

Notes on Deenan, “Why Liberalism Failed”, Foreward

I’ve begun reading the recently published book, Why Liberalism Failed (2018), by Patrick Deenan. It appears to be making some waves in the political theory commentary. The author claims that it was 10 years in the making but was finished three weeks before the 2016 presidential election, which suggests that the argument within it is prescient.

I’m not far in yet.

There is an intriguing forward from James Davison Hunter and John M. Owen IV, the editors. Their framing of the book is surprisingly continental:

  • They declare that liberalism has arrived at its “legitimacy crisis”, a Habermasian term.
  • They claim that the core contention of the book is a critique of the contradictions within Immanuel Kant’s view of individual autonomy.
  • They compare Deenan with other “radical” critics of liberalism, of which they name: Marx, the Frankfurt School, Foucault, Nietzsche, Schmitt, and the Catholic Church.

In search of a litmus-test like clue as to where in the political spectrum the book falls, I’ve found this passage in the Foreward:

Deneen’s book is disruptive not only for the way it links social maladies to liberalism’s first principles, but also because it is difficult to categorize along our conventional left-right spectrum. Much of what he writes will cheer social democrats and anger free-market advocates; much else will hearten traditionalists and alienate social progressives.

Well, well, well. If we are to fit Deenan’s book into the conceptual 2-by-2 provided in Fraser’s recent work, it appears that Deenan’s political theory is a form of reactionary populism, rejecting progressive neoliberalism. In other words, the Foreward evinces that Deenan’s book is a high-brow political theory contribution that weighs in favor of the kind of politics that has been heretofore only articulated by intellectual pariahs.

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January 1, 2018

Why I will blog more about math in 2018

One reason to study and write about political theory is what Habermas calls the emancipatory interest of human inquiry: to come to better understand the social world one lives in, unclouded by ideology, in order to be more free from those ideological expectations.

This is perhaps counterintuitive since what is perhaps most seductive about political theory is that it is the articulation of so many ideologies. Indeed, one can turn to political theory because one is looking for an ideology that suits them. Having a secure world view is comforting and can provide a sense of purpose. I know that personally I’ve struggled with one after another.

Looking back on my philosophical ‘work’ over the decade years (as opposed to my technical and scientific work) I’d like to declare it an emancipatory success for at least one person, myself. I am happier for it, though at the cost that comes from learning the hard way.

A problem with this blog is that it is too esoteric. It has not been written with a particular academic discipline in mind. It draws rather too heavily from certain big name thinkers that not enough people have read. I don’t provide background material in these thinkers, and so many find this inaccessible.

One day I may try to edit this material into a more accessible version of its arguments. I’m not sure who would find this useful, because much of what I’ve been doing in this work is arriving at the conclusion that actually, truly, mathematical science is the finest way of going about understanding sociotechnical systems. I believe this follows even from deep philosophical engagement with notable critics of this view–and I have truly tried to engage with the best and most notable of these critics. There will always be more of them, but I think at this point I have to make a decision to not seek them out any more. I have tested these views enough to build on them as a secure foundation.

What follows then is a harder but I think more rewarding task of building out the mathematical theory that reflects my philosophical conclusions. This is necessary for, for example, building a technical implementation that expresses the political values that I’ve arrived at. Arguably, until I do this, I’ll have just been beating around the bush.

I will admit to being sheepish about blogging on technical and mathematical topics. This is because in my understanding technical and mathematical writing is held to a higher standard that normal writing. Errors are more clear, and more permanent.

I recognize this now as a personal inhibition and a destructive one. If this blog has been valuable to me as a tool for reading, writing, and developing fluency in obscure philosophical literature, why shouldn’t it also be a tool for reading, writing, and developing fluency in obscure mathematical and technical literature? And to do the latter, shouldn’t I have to take the risk of writing with the same courage, if not abandon?

This is my wish for 2018: to blog more math. It’s a riskier project, but I think I have to in order to keep developing these ideas.

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December 10, 2017

Appearance, deed, and thing: meta-theory of the politics of technology

Flammarion engraving

Much is written today about the political and social consequences of technology. This writing often maintains that this inquiry into politics and society is distinct from the scientific understanding that informs the technology itself. This essay argues that this distinction is an error. Truly, there is only one science of technology and its politics.

Appearance, deed, and thing

There are worthwhile distinctions made between how our experience of the world feels to us directly (appearance), how we can best act strategically in the world (deed), and how the world is “in itself” or, in a sense, despite ourselves (individually) (thing).

Appearance

The world as we experience it has been given the name “phenomenon” (late Latin from Greek phainomenon ‘thing appearing to view’) and so “phenomenology” is the study of what we colloquially call today our “lived experience”. Some anthropological methods are a kind of social phenomenology, and some scholars will deny that there is anything beyond phenomenology. Those that claim to have a more effective strategy or truer picture of the world may have rhetorical power, powers that work on the lived experience of the more oppressed people because they have not been adequately debunked and shown to be situated, relativized. The solution to social and political problems, to these scholars, is more phenomenology.*

Deed

There are others that see things differently. A perhaps more normal attitude is that the outcomes of ones actions are more important that how the world feels. Things can feel one way now and another way tomorrow; does it much matter? If one holds some beliefs that don’t work when practically applied, one can correct oneself. The name for this philosophical attitude is pragmatism, (from Greek pragma, ‘deed’). There are many people, including some scholars, who find this approach entirely sufficient. The solution to social and political problems is more pragmatism. Sometimes this involves writing off impractical ideas and the people who hold them either useless or as mere pawns. It is their loss.

Thing

There are others that see things still differently. A perhaps diminishing portion of the population holds theories of how the world works that transcend both their own lived experience and individual practical applications. Scientific theories about the physical nature of the universe, though tested pragmatically and through the phenomena apparent to the scientists, are based in a higher claim about their value. As Bourdieu (2004) argues, the whole field of science depends on the accepted condition that scientists fairly contend for a “monopoly on the arbitration of the real”. Scientific theories are tested through contest, with a deliberate effort by all parties to prove their theory to be the greatest. These conditions of contest hold science to a more demanding standard than pragmatism, as results of applying a pragmatic attitude will depend on the local conditions of action. Scientific theories are, in principle, accountable to the real (from late Latin realis, from Latin res ‘thing’); these scientists may
be called ‘realists’ in general, though there are many flavors of realism as, appropriately, theories of what is real and how to discover reality have come and gone (see post-positivism and critical realism, for example).

Realists may or may not be concerned with social and political problems. Realists may ask: What is a social problem? What do solutions to these problems look like?

By this account, these three foci and their corresponding methodological approaches are not equivalent to each other. Phenomenology concerns itself with documenting the multiplicity of appearances. Pragmatism introduces something over and above this: a sorting or evaluation of appearances based on some goals or desired outcomes. Realism introduces something over and above pragmatism: an attempt at objectivity based on the contest of different theories across a wide range of goals. ‘Disinterested’ inquiry, or equivalently inquiry that is maximally inclusive of all interests, further refines the evaluation of which appearances are valid.

If this account sounds disparaging of phenomenology as merely a part of higher and more advanced forms of inquiry, that is truly how it is intended. However, it is equally notable that to live up to its own standard of disinterestedness, realism must include phenomenology fully within itself.

Nature and technology

It would be delightful if we could live forever in a world of appearances that takes the shape that we desire of it when we reason about it critically enough. But this is not how any but the luckiest live.

Rather, the world acts on us in ways that we do not anticipate. Things appear to us unbidden; they are born, and sometimes this is called ‘nature’ (from Latin natura ‘birth, nature, quality,’ from nat- ‘born’). The first snow of Winter comes as a surprise after a long warm Autumn. We did nothing to summon it, it was always there. For thousands of years humanity has worked to master nature through pragmatic deeds and realistic science. Now, very little of nature has been untouched by human hands. The stars are still things in themselves. Our planetary world is one we have made.

“Technology” (from Greek tekhnologia ‘systematic treatment,’ from tekhnē ‘art, craft’) is what we call those things that are made by skillful human deed. A glance out the window into a city, or at the device one uses to read this blog post, is all one needs to confirm that the world is full of technology. Sitting in the interior of an apartment now, literally everything in my field of vision except perhaps my own two hands and the potted plant are technological artifacts.

Science and technology studies: political appearances

According to one narrative, Winner (1980) famously asked the galling question “Do artifacts have politics?” and spawned a field of study** that questions the social consequences of technology. Science and Technology Studies (STS) is, purportedly, this field.
The insight this field claims as their own is that technology has social impact that is politically interesting, the specifics of this design determine these impacts, and that the social context of the design therefore influences the consequences of the technology. At its most ambitious, STS attempts to take the specifics of the technology out of the explanatory loop, showing instead how politics drives design and implementation to further political ends.

Anthropological methods are popular among STS scholars, who often commit themselves to revealing appearances that demonstrate the political origins and impacts of technology. The STS researcher might asked, rhetorically, “Did you know that this interactive console is designed and used for surveillance?”

We can nod sagely at these observations. Indeed, things appear to people in myriad ways, and critical analysis of those appearances does expose that there is a multiplicity of ways of looking at things. But what does one do with this picture?

The pragmatic turn back to realism

When one starts to ask the pragmatic question “What is to be done?”, one leaves the domain of mere appearances and begins to question the consequences of one’s deeds. This leads one to take actions and observe the unanticipated results. Suddenly, one is engaging in experimentation, and new kinds of knowledge are necessary. One needs to study organizational theory to understand the role of h technology within a firm, economics to understand how it interacts with the economy. One quickly leaves the field of study known as “science and technology studies” as soon as one begins to consider ones practical effects.

Worse (!), the pragmatist quickly discovers that discovering the impact of ones deeds requires an analysis of probabilities and the difficulty techniques of sampling data and correcting for bias. These techniques have been proven through the vigorous contest of the realists, and the pragmatist discovers that many tools–technologies–have been invented and provisioned for them to make it easier to use these robust strategies. The pragmatist begins to use, without understanding them, all the fruits of science. Their successes are alienated from their narrow lived experience, which are not enough to account for the miracles the= world–one others have invented for them–performs for them every day.

The pragmatist must draw the following conclusions. The world is full of technology, is constituted by it. The world is also full of politics. Indeed, the world is both politics and technology; politics is a technology; technology is form of politics. The world that must be mastered, for pragmatic purposes, is this politico-technical*** world.

What is technical about the world is that it is a world of things created through deed. These things manifest themselves in appearances in myriad and often unpredictable ways.

What is political about the world is that it is a contest of interests. To the most naive student, it may be a shock that technology is part of this contest of interests, but truly this is the most extreme naivete. What adolescent is not exposed to some form of arms race, whether it be in sports equipment, cosmetics, transportation, recreation, etc. What adult does not encounter the reality of technology’s role in their own business or home, and the choice of what to procure and use.

The pragmatist must be struck by the sheer obviousness of the observation that artifacts “have” politics, though they must also acknowledge that “things” are different from the deeds that create them and the appearances they create. There are, after all, many mistakes in design. The effects of technology may as often be due to incompetence as they are to political intent. And to determine the difference, one must contest the designer of the technology on their own terms, in the engineering discourse that has attempted to prove which qualities of a thing survive scrutiny across all interests. The pragmatist engaging the politico-technical world has to ask: “What is real?”

The real thing

“What is real?” This is the scientific question. It has been asked again and again for thousands of years for reasons not unlike those traced in this essay. The scientific struggle is the political struggle for mastery over our own politico-technical world, over the reality that is being constantly reinvented as things through human deeds.

There are no short cuts to answering this question. There are only many ways to cop out. These steps take one backward into striving for ones local interest or, further, into mere appearance, with its potential for indulgence and delusion. This is the darkness of ignorance. Forward, far ahead, is a horizon, an opening, a strange new light.

* This narrow view of the ‘privilege of subjectivity’ is perhaps a cause of recent confusion over free speech on college campuses. Realism, as proposed in this essay, is a possible alternative to that.

** It has been claimed that this field of study does not exist, much to the annoyance of those working within it.

*** I believe this term is no uglier than the now commonly used “sociotechnical”.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. Science of science and reflexivity. Polity, 2004.

Winner, Langdon. “Do artifacts have politics?.” Daedalus (1980): 121-136.

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November 26, 2017

Recap

Sometimes traffic on this blog draws attention to an old post from years ago. This can be a reminder that I’ve been repeating myself, encountering the same themes over and over again. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because I hope to one day compile the ideas from this blog into a book. It’s nice to see what points keep resurfacing.

One of these points is that liberalism assumes equality, but this challenged by society’s need for control structures, which creates inequality, which then undermines liberalism. This post calls in Charles Taylor (writing about Hegel!) to make the point. This post makes the point more succinctly. I’ve been drawing on Beniger for the ‘society needs control to manage its own integration’ thesis. I’ve pointed to the term managerialism as referring to an alternative to liberalism based on the acknowledgement of this need for control structures. Managerialism looks a lot like liberalism, it turns out, but it justifies things on different grounds and does not get so confused. As an alternative, more Bourdieusian view of the problem, I consider the relationship between capital, democracy, and oligarchy here. There are some useful names for what happens when managerialism goes wrong and people seem disconnected from each other–anomie–or from the control structures–alienation.

A related point I’ve made repeatedly is the tension between procedural legitimacy and getting people the substantive results that they want. That post about Hegel goes into this. But it comes up again in very recent work on antidiscrimination law and machine learning. What this amounts to is that attempts to come up with a fair, legitimate procedure are going to divide up the “pie” of resources, or be perceived to divide up the pie of resources, somehow, and people are going to be upset about it, however the pie is sliced.

A related theme that comes up frequently is mathematics. My contention is that effective control is a technical accomplishment that is mathematically optimized and constrained. There are mathematical results that reveal necessary trade-offs between values. Data science has been misunderstood as positivism when in fact it is a means of power. Technical knowledge and technology are forms of capital (Bourdieu again). Perhaps precisely because it is a rare form of capital, science is politically distrusted.

To put it succinctly: lack of mathematics education, due to lack of opportunity or mathophobia, lead to alienation and anomie in an economy of control. This is partly reflected in the chaotic disciplinarity of the social sciences, especially as they react to computational social science, at the intersection of social sciences, statistics, and computer science.

Lest this all seem like an argument for the mathematical certitude of totalitarianism, I have elsewhere considered and rejected this possibility of ‘instrumentality run amok‘. I’ve summarized these arguments here, though this appears to have left a number of people unconvinced. I’ve argued this further, and think there’s more to this story (a formalization of Scott’s arguments from Seeing Like a State, perhaps), but I must admit I don’t have a convincing solution to the “control problem” yet. However, it must be noted that the answer to the control problem is an empirical or scientific prediction, not a political inclination. Whether or not it is the most interesting or important question regarding technological control has been debated to a stalemate, as far as I can tell.

As I don’t believe singleton control is a likely or interesting scenario, I’m more interested in practical ways of offering legitimacy or resistance to control structures. I used to think the “right” political solution was a kind of “hacker class consciousness“; I don’t believe this any more. However, I still think there’s a lot to the idea of recursive publics as actually existing alternative power structures. Platform coops are interesting for the same reason.

All this leads me to admit my interest in the disruptive technology du jour, the blockchain.

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November 6, 2017

Why managerialism: it acknowledges political role of internal corporate policies

One modern difficulty with political theory in contemporary times is the confusion between government and corporate policy. This is due in no small part to the extent to which large corporations now mediate social life. Telecommunications, the Internet, mobile phones, and social media all depend on layers and layers of operating organizations. The search engine, which didn’t exist thirty years ago, now is arguably an essential cultural and political facility (Pasquale, 2011), which sharpens the concerns that have been raised about their politics (Introna and Nissenbaum, 2000; Bracha and Pasquale, 2007).

Corporate policies influence customers when those policies drive product design or are put into contractual agreements. They can also govern employees and shape corporate culture. Sometimes these two kinds of policies are not easily demarcated. For example, Uber has an internal privacy policy about who can access which users’ information, like most companies with a lot of user data. The privacy features that Uber implicitly guarantees to their customers are part of their service. But their ability to provide this service is only as good as their company culture is reliable.

Classically, there are states, which may or may not be corrupt, and there are markets, which may or may not be competitive. With competitive markets, corporate policies are part of what make firms succeed or fail. One point of success is a company’s ability to attract and maintain customers. This should in principle drive companies to improve their policies.

An interesting point made recently by Robert Post is that in some cases, corporate policies can adopt positions that would be endorsed by some legal scholars even if the actual laws state otherwise. His particular example was a case enforcing the right to be forgotten in Spain against Google.

Since European law is statute driven, the judgments of its courts are not amenable to creative legal reasoning as they are in the United States. Post’s criticism of the EU’s judgment in this case is because of their rigid interpetation of data protection directives. Post argues a different legal perspective on privacy is better at balancing other social interests. But putting aside the particulars of the law, Post makes the point that Google’s internal policy matches his own legal and philosophical framework (which prefers dignitary privacy over data privacy) more than EU statutes do.

One could argue that we should not trust the market to make Google’s policies just. But we could also argue that Google’s market share, which is significant, depends so much on its reputation and users trust that in fact it is under great pressure to adjucate disputes with its users wisely. It is a company that must set its own policies, which do have political significance. It has the benefits of more direct control over the way these policies get interpreted and enforced in the state, faster feedback on whether the policies are successful, and a less chaotic legislative process for establishing policy in the first place.

Political liberals would dismiss this kind of corporate control as just one commercial service among many, or else wring their hands with concern over a company coming to have such power over the public sphere. But managerialists would see the emergence of search engines as an organization among others, comparable to other private entities that have been part of the public sphere, such as newspapers.

But a sound analysis of the politics of search engines need not depend on analogies with past technologies. This is a function of legal reasoning. Managerialism, which is perhaps more a descendent of business reasoning, would ask how, in fact, search engines make policy decisions and how does this affect political outcomes. It does not prima facie assume that a powerful or important corporate policy is wrong. It does ask what the best corporate policy is, given a particular sector.

References

Bracha, Oren, and Frank Pasquale. “Federal Search Commission-Access, Fairness, and Accountability in the Law of Search.” Cornell L. Rev. 93 (2007): 1149.

Introna, Lucas D., and Helen Nissenbaum. “Shaping the Web: Why the politics of search engines matters.” The information society 16.3 (2000): 169-185.

Pasquale, Frank A. “Dominant search engines: an essential cultural & political facility.” (2011).

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November 5, 2017

Why managerialism: it’s tolerant and meritocratic

In my last post, I argued that we should take managerialism seriously as a political philosophy. A key idea in managerialism (as I’m trying to define it) is that it acknowledges that sociotechnical organizations are relevant units of political power, and is concerned with the relationship between these organizations. These organizations can be functionally specific. They can have hierarchical, non-democratic control in limited, not totalitarian ways. They check and balance each other, probably. Managerialism tends to think that organizations can be managed well, and that good management matters, politically.

This is as opposed to liberalism, which is grounded in rights of the individual, which then becomes a foundation for democracy. It’s also opposed to communitarianism, which holds the political unit of interest to be a family unit or other small community. I’m positioning managerialism as a more cybernetic political idea, as well as one more adapted to present economic conditions.

It may sound odd to hear somebody argue in favor of managerialism. I’ll admit that I am doing so tentatively, to see what works and what doesn’t. Given that a significant percentage of American political thought now is considering such baroque alternatives to liberalism as feudalism and ethnic tribalism, perhaps because liberalism everywhere has been hijacked by plutocracy, it may not be crazy to discuss alternatives.

One reason why somebody might be attracted to managerialism is that it is (I’d argue) essentially tolerant and meritocratic. Sociotechnical organizations that are organized efficiently to perform their main function need not make a lot of demands of their members besides whatever protocols are necessary for the functioning of the whole. In many cases, this should lead to a basic indifference to race, gender, and class background, from the internal perspective of the organization. As there’s good research indicating that diversity leads to greater collective intelligence in organizations, there’s a good case for tolerant policies in managerial institutions. Merit, defined relative to the needs of the particular organization, would be the privileged personal characteristic here.

I’d like to distinguish managerialism from technocracy in the following sense, which may be a matter of my own terminological invention. Technocracy is the belief that experts should run the state. It offers an expansion of centralized power. Managerialism is, I want to argue, not compatible with centralized state control. Rather, it recognizes many different spheres of life that nevertheless need to be organized to be effective. These spheres or sectors will be individually managed, perhaps by competing organizations, but regulate each other more than they require central regulation.

The way these organizations can regulate each other is Exit, in Hirschman’s sense. While the ideas of Exit, Loyalty, and Voice are most commonly used to discuss how individuals can affect the organizations they are a part of, similar ideas can function at higher scales of analysis, as organizations interact with each other. Think about international trade agreements, and sanctions.

The main reason to support managerialism is not that it is particularly just or elegant. It’s that it is more or less the case that the political structures in place now are some assemblage of sociotechnical organizations interacting with each other. Those people who have power are those with power within one or more of these organizations. And to whatever extent there is a shared ideological commitment among people, it is likely because a sociotechnical organization has been turned to the effect of spreading that ideology. This is a somewhat abstract way of saying what lots of people say in a straightforward way all the time: that certain media institutions are used to propagate certain ideologies. This managerialist framing is just intended to abstract away from the particulars in order to develop a political theory.

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November 5, 2017

Managerialism as political philosophy

Technologically mediated spaces and organizations are frequently described by their proponents as alternatives to the state. From David Clark’s maxim of Internet architecture, “We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code”, to cyberanarchist efforts to bypass the state via blockchain technology, to the claims that Google and Facebook, as they mediate between billions of users, are relevant non-state actor in international affairs, to Lessig’s (1999) ever prescient claim that “Code is Law”, there is undoubtedly something going on with technology’s relationship to the state which is worth paying attention to.

There is an intellectual temptation (one that I myself am prone to) to take seriously the possibility of a fully autonomous technological alternative to the state. Something like a constitution written in source code has an appeal: it would be clear, precise, and presumably based on something like a consensus of those who participate in its creation. It is also an idea that can be frightening (Give up all control to the machines?) or ridiculous. The example of The DAO, the Ethereum ‘distributed autonomous organization’ that raised millions of dollars only to have them stolen in a technical hack, demonstrates the value of traditional legal institutions which protect the parties that enter contracts with processes that ensure fairness in their interpretation and enforcement.

It is more sociologically accurate, in any case, to consider software, hardware, and data collection not as autonomous actors but as parts of a sociotechnical system that maintains and modifies it. This is obvious to practitioners, who spend their lives negotiating the social systems that create technology. For those for whom it is not obvious, there’s reams of literature on the social embededness of “algorithms” (Gillespie, 2014; Kitchin, 2017). These themes are recited again in recent critical work on Artificial Intelligence; there are those that wisely point out that a functioning artificially intelligent system depends on a lot of labor (those who created and cleaned data, those who built the systems they are implemented on, those that monitor the system as it operates) (Kelkar, 2017). So rather than discussing the role of particular technologies as alternatives to the state, we should shift our focus to the great variety of sociotechnical organizations.

One thing that is apparent, when taking this view, is that states, as traditionally conceived, are themselves sociotechnical organizations. This is, again, an obvious point well illustrated in economic histories such as (Beniger, 1986). Communications infrastructure is necessary for the control and integration of society, let alone effective military logistics. The relationship between those industrial actors developing this infrastructure, whether it be building roads, running a postal service, laying rail or telegram wires, telephone wires, satellites, Internet protocols, and now social media–and the state has always been interesting and a story of great fortunes and shifts in power.

What is apparent after a serious look at this history is that political theory, especially liberal political theory as it developed in the 1700’s an onward as a theory of the relationship between individuals bound by social contract emerging from nature to develop a just state, leaves out essential scientific facts of the matter of how society has ever been governed. Control of communications and control infrastructure has never been equally dispersed and has always been a source of power. Late modern rearticulations of liberal theory and reactions against it (Rawls and Nozick, both) leave out technical constraints on the possibility of governance and even the constitution of the subject on which a theory of justice would have its ground.

Were political theory to begin from a more realistic foundation, it would need to acknowledge the existence of sociotechnical organizations as a political unit. There is a term for this view, “managerialism“, which, as far as I can tell is used somewhat pejoratively, like “neoliberalism”. As an “-ism”, it’s implied that managerialism is an ideology. When we talk about ideologies, what we are doing is looking from an external position onto an interdependent set of beliefs in their social context and identifying, through genealogical method or logical analysis, how those beliefs are symptoms of underlying causes that are not precisely as represented within those beliefs themselves. For example, one critiques neoliberal ideology, which purports that markets are the best way to allocate resources and advocates for the expansion of market logic into more domains of social and political life, but pointing out that markets are great for reallocating resources to capitalists, who bankroll neoliberal ideologues, but that many people who are subject to neoliberal policies do not benefit from them. While this is a bit of a parody of both neoliberalism and the critiques of it, you’ll catch my meaning.

We might avoid the pitfalls of an ideological managerialism (I’m not sure what those would be, exactly, having not read the critiques) by taking from it, to begin with, only the urgency of describing social reality in terms of organization and management without assuming any particular normative stake. It will be argued that this is not a neutral stance because to posit that there is organization, and that there is management, is to offend certain kinds of (mainly academic) thinkers. I get the sense that this offendedness is similar to the offense taken by certain critical scholars to the idea that there is such a thing as scientific knowledge, especially social scientific knowledge. Namely, it is an offense taken to the idea that a patently obvious fact entails ones own ignorance of otherwise very important expertise. This is encouraged by the institutional incentives of social science research. Social scientists are required to maintain an aura of expertise even when their particular sub-discipline excludes from its analysis the very systems of bureaucratic and technical management that its university depends on. University bureaucracies are, strangely, in the business of hiding their managerialist reality from their own faculty, as alternative avenues of research inquiry are of course compelling in their own right. When managerialism cannot be contested on epistemic grounds (because the bluff has been called), it can be rejected on aesthetic grounds: managerialism is not “interesting” to a discipline, perhaps because it does not engage with the personal and political motivations that constitute it.

What sets managerialism aside from other ideologies, however, is that when we examine its roots in social context, we do not discover a contradiction. Managerialism is not, as far as I can tell, successful as a popular ideology. Managerialism is attractive only to that rare segment of the population that work closely with bureaucratic management. It is here that the technical constraints of information flow and its potential uses, the limits of autonomy especially as it confronts the autonomies of others, the persistence of hierarchy despite the purported flattening of social relations, and so on become unavoidable features of life. And though one discovers in these situations plenty of managerial incompetence, one also comes to terms with why that incompetence is a necessary feature of the organizations that maintain it.

Little of what I am saying here is new, of course. It is only new in relation to more popular or appealing forms of criticism of the relationship between technology, organizations, power, and ethics. So often the political theory implicit in these critiques is a form of naive egalitarianism that sees a differential in power as an ethical red flag. Since technology can give organizations a lot of power, this generates a lot of heat around technology ethics. Starting from the perspective of an ethicist, one sees an uphill battle against an increasingly inscrutable and unaccountable sociotechnical apparatus. What I am proposing is that we look at things a different way. If we start from general principles about technology its role in organizations–the kinds of principles one would get from an analysis of microeconomic theory, artificial intelligence as a mathematical discipline, and so on–one can try to formulate managerial constraints that truly confront society. These constraints are part of how subjects are constituted and should inform what we see as “ethical”. If we can broker between these hard constraints and the societal values at stake, we might come up with a principle of justice that, if unpopular, may at least be realistic. This would be a contribution, at the end of the day, to political theory, not as an ideology, but as a philosophical advance.

References

Beniger, James R. “The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the.” Information Society (1986).

Bird, Sarah, et al. “Exploring or Exploiting? Social and Ethical Implications of Autonomous Experimentation in AI.” (2016).

Gillespie, Tarleton. “The relevance of algorithms.” Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society 167 (2014).

Kelkar, Shreeharsh. “How (Not) to Talk about AI.” Platypus, 12 Apr. 2017, blog.castac.org/2017/04/how-not-to-talk-about-ai/.

Kitchin, Rob. “Thinking critically about and researching algorithms.” Information, Communication & Society 20.1 (2017): 14-29.

Lessig, Lawrence. “Code is law.” The Industry Standard 18 (1999).

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