Digifesto

Tag: cultural values

December 7, 2015

Bourdieu and Horkheimer; towards an economy of control

It occurred to me as I looked over my earliest notes on Horkheimer (almost a year ago!) that Bourdieu’s concept of science as being a social field that formalizes and automates knowledge is Horkheimer’s idea of hell.

The danger Horkheimer (and so many others) saw in capitalist, instrumentalized, scientific society was that it would alienate and overwhelm the individual.

It is possible that society would alienate the individual anyway, though. For example, in the household of antiquity, were slaves unalienated? The privilege of autonomy is one that has always been rare but disproportionately articulated as normal, even a right. In a sense Western Democracies and Republics exist to guarantee autonomy to their citizens. In late modern democracies, autonomy is variable depending on role in society, which is tied to (economic, social, symbolic, etc.) capital.

So maybe the horror of Horkheimer, alienated by scientific advance, is the horror of one whose capital was being devalued by science. His scholarship, his erudition, were isolated and deemed irrelevant by the formal reasoners who had come to power.

As I write this, I am painfully aware that I have spent a lot of time in graduate school reading books and writing about them when I could have been practicing programming and learning more mathematics. My aspirations are to be a scientist, and I am well aware that that requires one to mathematically formalize ones findings–or, equivalently, to program them into a computer. (It goes without saying that computer programming is formalism, is automation, and so its central role in contemporary science or ‘data science’ is almost given to it by definition. It could not have been otherwise.)

Somehow I have been provoked into investing myself in a weaker form of capital, the benefit of which is the understanding that I write here, now.

Theoretically, the point of doing all this work is to be able to identify a societal value and formalize it so that it can be capture in a technical design. Perhaps autonomy is this value. Another might call it freedom. So once again I am reminded of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of science, which has been correct all along.

But perhaps de Beauvoir was naive about the political implications of technology. Science discloses possibilities, the opportunities are distributed unequally because science is socially situated. Inequality leads to more alienation, not less, for all but the scientists. Meanwhile autonomy is not universally valued–some would prefer the comforts of society, of family structure. If free from society, they would choose to reenter it. Much of ones preferences must come from habitus, no?

I am indeed reaching the limits of my ability to consider the problem discursively. The field is too multidimensional, too dynamic. The proper next step is computer simulation.

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October 10, 2015

cultural values in design

As much as I would like to put aside the problem of technology criticism and focus on my empirical work, I find myself unable to avoid the topic. Today I was discussing work with a friend and collaborator who comes from a ‘critical’ perspective. We were talking about ‘values in design’, a subject that we both care about, despite our different backgrounds.

I suggested that one way to think about values in design is to think of a number of agents and their utility functions. Their utility functions capture their values; the design of an artifact can have greater or less utility for the agents in question. They may intentionally or unintentionally design artifacts that serve some but not others. And so on.

Of course, thinking in terms of ‘utility functions’ is common among engineers, economists, cognitive scientists, rational choice theorists in political science, and elsewhere. It is shunned by the critically trained. My friend and colleague was open minded in his consideration of utility functions, but was more concerned with how cultural values might sneak into or be expressed in design.

I asked him to define a cultural value. We debated the term for some time. We reached a reasonable conclusion.

With such a consensus to work with, we began to talk about how such a concept would be applied. He brought up the example of an algorithm claimed by its creators to be objective. But, he asked, could the algorithm have a bias? Would we not expect that it would express, secretly, cultural values?

I confessed that I aspire to design and implement just such algorithms. I think it would be a fine future if we designed algorithms to fairly and objectively arbitrate our political disputes. We have good reasons to think that an algorithm could be more objective than a system of human bureaucracy. While human decision-makers are limited by the partiality of their perspective, we can build infrastructure that accesses and processes data that are beyond an individual’s comprehension. The challenge is to design the system so that it operates kindly and fairly despite its operations being beyond the scope a single person’s judgment. This will require an abstracted understanding of fairness that is not grounded in the politics of partiality.

Suppose a team of people were to design and implement such a program. On what basis would the critics–and there would inevitably be critics–accuse it of being a biased design with embedded cultural values? Besides the obvious but empty criticism that valuing unbiased results is a cultural value, why wouldn’t the reasoned process of design reduce bias?

We resumed our work peacefully.

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