Digifesto

Tag: alienation

November 14, 2015

Is the opacity of governance natural? cf @FrankPasquale

I’ve begun reading Frank Pasquale’s The Black Box Society on the recommendation that it’s a good place to start if I’m looking to focus a defense of the role of algorithms in governance.

I’ve barely started and already found lots of juicy material. For example:

Gaps in knowledge, putative and real, have powerful implications, as do the uses that are made of them. Alan Greenspan, once the most powerful central banker in the world, claimed that today’s markets are driven by an “unredeemably opaque” version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” and that no one (including regulators) can ever get “more than a glimpse at the internal workings of the simplest of modern financial systems.” If this is true, libertarian policy would seem to be the only reasonable response. Friedrich von Hayek, a preeminent theorist of laissez-faire, called the “knowledge problem” an insuperable barrier to benevolent government intervention in the economy.

But what if the “knowledge problem” is not an intrinsic aspect of the market, but rather is deliberately encouraged by certain businesses? What if financiers keep their doings opaque on purpose, precisely to avoid and confound regulation? That would imply something very different about the merits of deregulation.

The challenge of the “knowledge problem” is just one example of a general truth: What we do and don’t know about the social (as opposed to the natural) world is not inherent in its nature, but is itself a function of social constructs. Much of what we can find out about companies, governments, or even one another, is governed by law. Laws of privacy, trade secrecy, the so-called Freedom of Information Act–all set limits to inquiry. They rule certain investigations out of the question before they can even begin. We need to ask: To whose benefit?

There are a lot of ideas here. Trying to break them down:

  1. Markets are opaque.
  2. If markets are naturally opaque, that is a reason for libertarian policy.
  3. If markets are not naturally opaque, then they are opaque on purpose, then that’s a reason to regulate in favor of transparency.
  4. As a general social truth, the social world is not naturally opaque but rather opaque or transparent because of social constructs such as law.

We are meant to conclude that markets should be regulated for transparency.

The most interesting claim to me is what I’ve listed as the fourth one, as it conveys a worldview that is both disputable and which carries with it the professional biases we would expect of the author, a Professor of Law. While there are certainly many respects in which this claim is true, I don’t yet believe it has the force necessary to carry the whole logic of this argument. I will be particularly attentive to this point as I read on.

The danger I’m on the lookout for is one where the complexity of the integration of society, which following Beniger I believe to be a natural phenomenon, is treated as a politically motivated social construct and therefore something that should be changed. It is really only the part after the “and therefore” which I’m contesting. It is possible for politically motivated social constructs to be natural phenomena. All institutions have winners and losers relative to their power. Who would a change in policy towards transparency in the market benefit? If opacity is natural, it would shift the opacity to some other part of society, empowering a different group of people. (Possibly lawyers).

If opacity is necessary, then perhaps we could read The Black Box Society as an expression of the general problem of alienation. It is way premature for me to attribute this motivation to Pasquale, but it is a guiding hypothesis that I will bring with me as I read the book.

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October 30, 2015

cross-cultural links between rebellion and alienation

In my last post I noted that the contemporary American problem that the legitimacy of the state is called into question by distributional inequality is a specifically liberal concern based on certain assumptions about society: that it is a free association of producers who are otherwise autonomous.

Looking back to Arendt, we can find the roots of modern liberalism in the polis of antiquity, where democracy was based on free association of landholding men whose estates gave them autonomy from each other. Since the economics, the science that once concerned itself with managing the household (oikos, house + nomos, managing), has elevated to the primary concern of the state and the organizational principle of society. One way to see the conflict between liberalism and social inequality is as the tension between the ideal of freely associating citizens that together accomplish deeds and the reality of societal integration with its impositions on personal freedom and unequal functional differentiation.

Historically, material autonomy was a condition for citizenship. The promise of liberalism is universal citizenship, or political agency. At first blush, to accomplish this, either material autonomy must be guaranteed for all, or citizenship must be decoupled from material conditions altogether.

The problem with this model is that societal agency, as opposed to political agency, is always conditioned both materially and by society (Does this distinction need to be made?). The progressive political drive has recognized this with its unmasking and contestation of social privilege. The populist right wing political drive has recognized this with its accusations that the formal political apparatus has been captured by elite politicians. Those aspects of citizenship that are guaranteed as universal–the vote and certain liberties–are insufficient for the effective social agency on which political power truly depends. And everybody knows it.

This narrative is grounded in the experience of the United States and, going back, to the history of “The West”. It appears to be a perennial problem over cultural time. There is some evidence that it is also a problem across cultural space. Hanah Arendt argues in On Violence (1969) that the attraction of using violence against a ruling bureaucracy (which is political hypostatization of societal alienation more generally) is cross-cultural.

“[T]he greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have tyranny without a tyrant. The crucial feature of the student rebellions around the world is that they are directed everywhere against the ruling bureaucracy. This explains what at first glance seems so disturbing–that the rebellions in the East demand precisely those freedoms of speech and thought that the young rebels in the West say they despise as irrelevant. On the level of ideologies, the whole thing is confusing: it is much less so if we start from the obvious fact that the huge party machines have succeeded everywhere in overruling the voice of citizens, even in countries where freedom of speech and association is still intact.”

The argument here is that the moral instability resulting from alienation from politics and society is a universal problem of modernity that transcends ideology.

This is a big problem if we keep turning over decision-making authority over to algorithms.

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