In its latest incarnation, behavioral modification comes to life as a global digital market architecture unfettered by geography, independent of constitutional constraints, and formally indifferent to the risks it poses to freedom, dignity, or the sustenance of the liberal order that Ervin’s subcommittee was determined to defend. This contrast is even more distressing in light of the fact that in the mid-twentieth century, the means of behavior modification were aimed at individuals and groups who were construed as “them”: military enemies, prisoners, and other captives of walled disciplinary regimes.
Today’s means of behavioral modification are aimed unabashedly at “us.” Everyone is swept up in this new market dragnet, including the psychodramas of ordinary, unsuspecting fourteen-year-olds approaching the weekend with anxiety. Every avenue of connectivity serves to bolster private power’s need to seize behavior for profit. Where is the hammer of democracy now, when the threat comes from your phone, your digital assistant, your Facebook login? Who will stand for freedom now, when Facebook threatens to retreat into the shadows if we dare to be the friction that disrupts economies of action that have been carefully, elaborately, and expensively constructed to exploit our natural empathy, elude our awareness, and circumvent our prospects for self-determination? If we fail to take notice now, how long before we are numb to this incursion and to all the incursions? How long until we notice nothing at all? How long before we forget who we were before they owned us, bent over the old texts of self-determination in the dim light, the shawl around our shoulders, magnifying glass in hand, as if deciphering ancient hieroglyphs?
Throughout these chapters we have returned to the essential questions that define the division of learning: Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides? As to who knows, we have seen the titanic agglomerations of knowledge about our behavior in the shadow text, from vast patterns across populations to the intimate detail of individual lives. These new information territories are private and privileged, known only to the machines, their priests, and the market participants who pay to play in these new spaces. Although it is obviously the case that we are excluded because the knowledge is not for us, these chapters have revealed a deeper structural basis for our exclusion. Now we know that surveillance capitalists’ ability to evade our awareness is an essential condition for knowledge production. We are excluded because we are friction that impedes the elaboration of the shadow text and with it surveillance capitalism’s knowledge dominance.
As to who decides, this division of learning has been decided by the declarations and incursions of the owners of private surveillance capital as another essential condition of accumulation, enabled by the reluctance of the state to assert democratic oversight in this secret realm. Finally, there is the question of who decides who decides. So far, it is the asymmetrical power of surveillance capital unencumbered by law that decides who decides.
The commodification of behavior under the conditions of surveillance capitalism pivots us toward a societal future in which an exclusive division of learning is protected by secrecy, indecipherability, and expertise. Even when knowledge derived from your behavior is fed back to you in the first text as a quid pro quo for participation, the parallel secret operations of the shadow text capture surplus for crafting into prediction products destined for other marketplaces that are about you rather than for you. These markets do not depend upon you except first as a source of raw material from which surplus is derived, and then as a target for guaranteed outcomes. We have no formal control because we are not essential to the market action. In this future we are exiles from our own behavior, denied access to or control over knowledge derived from our experience. Knowledge, authority, and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely “human natural resources.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE RIGHT TO THE FUTURE TENSE
But He had planned such future for this youth:
Surely, His duty now was to compel,
To count on time to bring true love of truth
And, with it, gratitude. His eagle fell.
—W. H. AUDEN
SONNETS FROM CHINA, IX
I. I Will to Will
I wake early. The day begins before I open my eyes. My mind is in motion. Words and sentences have streamed through my dreams, solving problems on yesterday’s pages. The first work of the day is to retrieve those words that lay open a puzzle. Only then am I ready to awaken my senses. I try to discern each birdcall in the symphony outside our windows: the phoebe, redwing, blue jay, mockingbird, woodpecker, finch, starling, and chickadee. Soaring above all their songs are the cries of geese over the lake. I splash warm water on my face, drink cool water to coax my body into alertness, and commune with our dog in the still-silent house. I make coffee and bring it into my study, where I settle into my desk chair, call up my screen, and begin. I think. I write these words, and I imagine you reading them. I do this every day of every week—as I have for several years—and it is likely that I will continue to do so for one or two years to come.
I watch the seasons from the windows above my desk: first green, then red and gold, then white, and then back to green again. When friends come to visit, they peek into my study. There are books and papers stacked on every surface and most of the floor. I know they feel overwhelmed at this sight, and sometimes I sense that they silently pity me for my obligation to this work and how it circumscribes my days. I do not think that they realize how free I am. In fact, I have never felt more free. How is this possible?
I made a promise to complete this work. This promise is my flag planted in the future tense. It represents my commitment to construct a future that cannot come into being should I abandon my promise. This future will not exist without my capacity first to imagine its facts and then to will them into being. I am an inchworm moving with determination and purpose across the distance between now and later. Each tiny increment of territory that I traverse is annexed to the known world, as my effort transforms uncertainty into fact. Should I renege on my promise, the world would not collapse. My publisher would survive the abrogation of our contract. You would find many other books to read. I would move on to other projects.
My promise, though, is an anchor that girds me against the vagaries of my moods and temptations. It is the product of my will to will and a compass that steers my course toward a desired future that is not yet real. Events may originate in energy sources outside my will and abruptly alter my course in ways that I can neither predict nor control. Indeed, they have already done so. Despite this certain knowledge of uncertainty, I have no doubt that I am free. I can promise to create a future, and I can keep my promise. If the book that I have imagined is to exist in the future, it must be because I will to will it so. I live in an expansive landscape that already includes a future that only I can imagine and intend. In my world, this book I write already exists. In fulfilling my promise, I make it manifest. This act of will is my claim to the future tense.
To make a promise is to predict the future; to fulfill a promise through the exercise of will turns that prediction into fact. Our hearts pump our blood, our kidneys filter that blood, and our wills create the future in the patient discovery of each new sentence or step. This is how we claim our right to speak in the first person as the author of our futures. The philosopher Hannah Arendt devoted an entire volume to an examination of will as the “organ for the future” in the same way that memory is our mental organ for the past. The power of will lies in its unique ability to deal with things, “visibles and invisibles, that have never existed at all. Just as the past always presents itself to the mind in the guise of certainty, the future’s main characteristic is its basic uncertainty, no matter how high a degree of probability prediction may attain.” When we refer to the past, we see only objects, but the view to the future brings “projects,” things that are yet to be. With freedom of will we undertake action that is entirely contingent on our determination to see our project through. These are acts that
we could have “left undone” but for our commitment. “A will that is not free,” Arendt concludes, “is a contradiction in terms.”1
Will is the organ with which we summon our futures into existence. Arendt’s metaphor of will as the “mental organ of our future” suggests that it is something built into us: organic, intrinsic, inalienable. Moral philosophers have called this “free will” because it is the human counterpoint to the fear of uncertainty that suffocates original action. Arendt describes promises as “islands of predictability” and “guideposts of reliability” in an “ocean of uncertainty.” They are, she argues, the only alternative to a different kind of “mastery” that relies on “domination of one’s self and rule over others.”2
Centuries of debate have been levied on the notion of free will, but too often their effect has been to silence our own declarations of will, as if we are embarrassed to assert this most fundamental human fact. I recognize my direct experience of freedom as an inviolate truth that cannot be reduced to the behaviorists’ formulations of life as necessarily accidental and random, shaped by external stimuli beyond my knowledge or influence and haunted by irrational and untrustworthy mental processes that I can neither discern nor avoid.3
The American philosopher John Searle, whose work on the “declaration” we discussed in Chapter 6, comes to a similar conclusion in his examination of “free will.” He points to the “causal gap” between the reasons for our actions and their enactment. We may have good reasons to do something, he observes, but that does not necessarily mean it will be done. “The traditional name of this gap in philosophy is ‘the freedom of the will.’” In response to the “sordid history” of this concept, he reasons, “even if the gap is an illusion it is one we cannot shake off.… The notion of making and keeping promises presupposes the gap.… [It] requires consciousness and a sense of freedom on the part of the promise-making and promise-keeping agent.”4
The freedom of will is the existential bone structure that carries the moral flesh of every promise, and my insistence on its integrity is not an indulgence in nostalgia or a random privileging of the pre-digital human story as somehow more truly human. This is the only kind of freedom that we can guarantee ourselves, no matter the weight of entropy or inertia, and irrespective of the forces and fears that attempt to collapse time into an eternity of shadowboxing now, and now, and now. These bones are the necessary condition for the possibility of civilization as a “moral milieu” that favors the dignity of the individual and respects the distinctly human capacities for dialogue and problem solving. Any person, idea, or practice that breaks these bones and tears this flesh robs us of a self-authored and we-authored future.
These principles are not quaint accessories, as Hal Varian and others suggest. Rather, they are hard-won achievements that have crystallized over millennia of human contest and sacrifice. Our freedom flourishes only as we steadily will ourselves to close the gap between making promises and keeping them. Implicit in this action is an assertion that through my will I can influence the future. It does not imply total authority over the future, of course, only over my piece of it. In this way, the assertion of freedom of will also asserts the right to the future tense as a condition of a fully human life.
Why should an experience as elemental as this claim on the future tense be cast as a human right? The short answer is that it is only necessary now because it is imperiled. Searle argues that such elemental “features of human life” rights are crystallized as formal human rights only at that moment in history when they come under systematic threat. So, for example, the ability to speak is elemental. The concept of “freedom of speech” as a formal right emerged only when society evolved to a degree of political complexity that the freedom to speak came under threat. The philosopher observes that speech is not more elemental to human life than breathing or being able to move one’s body. No one has declared a “right to breathe” or a “right to bodily movement” because these elemental rights have not come under attack and therefore do not require formal protection. What counts as a basic right, Searle argues, is both “historically contingent” and “pragmatic.”5
I suggest that we now face the moment in history when the elemental right to the future tense is endangered by a panvasive digital architecture of behavior modification owned and operated by surveillance capital, necessitated by its economic imperatives, and driven by its laws of motion, all for the sake of its guaranteed outcomes.
II. We Will to Will
Most simply put, there is no freedom without uncertainty; it is the medium in which human will is expressed in promises. Of course, we do not only make promises to ourselves; we also make promises to one another. When we join our wills and our promises, we create the possibility of collective action toward a shared future, linked in determination to make our vision real in the world. This is the origin of the institution we call “contract,” beginning with the ancient Romans.6
Contracts originated as shared “islands of predictability” intended to mitigate uncertainty for the human community, and they still retain this meaning. “The simplest way to state the point of contract law is that it supports and shapes the social practice of making and keeping promises and agreements,” concludes one eminent scholar. “Contract law focuses on problems of cooperation,” summarizes another. “Contract law… reflects a moral ideal of equal respect for persons. This fact explains why contract law can produce genuine legal obligations and is not just a system of coercion,” observes a third.7
It is in this context that the destructiveness of the uncontract is most clearly revealed. Recall Varian’s assertion that if someone stops making monthly car payments, “Nowadays it’s a lot easier just to instruct the vehicular monitoring system not to allow the car to be started and to signal the location where it can be picked up.” Varian calls this new capability a “new contract form,” when in reality the uncontract abandons the human world of legally binding promises and substitutes instead the positivist calculations of automated machine processes.8 Without so much as a tip of the cap and a “fare-thee-well,” Varian’s uncontract disposes of several millennia of societal evolution during which Western civilization institutionalized the contract as a grand achievement of shared will.
It is no secret that the institution of the contract has been twisted and abused in every age, from the Requirimiento to the “slave contract,” as incumbent power imposes painful inequalities that drain the meaning, and indeed the very possibility, of mutual promising.9 For example, Max Weber warned that the great achievements of contractual freedom create opportunities to exploit property ownership as a means to “the achievement of power over others.”10
However, today’s uncontracts are unprecedented in their ability to impose unilateral power. They leverage the apparatus to combine pervasive monitoring and remote actuation for an internet-enabled “new economics” that bypasses human promises and social engagement.11 The uncontract aims instead for a condition that the economist Oliver Williamson describes as “contract utopia”: a state of perfect information known to perfectly rational people who always perform exactly as promised.12 The problem is, as Williamson writes, “All complex contracts are unavoidably incomplete… parties will be confronted with the need to adapt to unanticipated disturbances that arise by reason of gaps, errors and omissions in the original contract.”13
If you have ever seen a house built according to architectural plans, then you have a good idea of what Williamson means. There is no blueprint that sufficiently details everything needed to convert drawings and specifications into an actual house. No plan anticipates every problem that might arise, and most do not come close. The builders’ skills are a function of how they collaborate to invent the actions that fulfill the intention of the drawings as they solve the unexpected but inevitable complications that arise along the way. They work together to construct a reality from the uncertainty of the plan.
Like builders, people in contractual agreements undertake t
his kind of collaboration. It’s not simply finding the way through a maze to an already agreed-upon end point, but rather the continuous refinement and clarification of ends and means in the face of unanticipated obstacles. This sociality of contract may entail conflict, frustration, oppression, or anger, but it can also produce trust, cooperation, cohesion, and adaptation as the means through which human beings confront an unknowable future.
Were “contract utopia” to exist, Williamson says, it would best be described as a “plan” that, like other “utopian modes,” requires “deep commitment to collective purposes” and “personal subordination.” Subordination to what? To the plan. Contract in this context of perfect rationality is what Williamson describes as “a world of planning.” Such planning was the basic institution of socialist economics, where the “new man” was idealized as possessing “a high level of cognitive competence” and therefore, it was espoused, could design highly effective plans.14 Varian deftly swaps out socialism’s “new man” and installs instead a market defined by surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives, expressed through a ubiquitous computational architecture, the machine intelligence capabilities to which data are continuously supplied, the analytics that discern patterns, and the algorithms that convert them into rules. This is the essence of the uncontract, which transforms the human, legal, and economic risks of contracts into plans constructed, monitored, and maintained by private firms for the sake of guaranteed outcomes: less contract utopia than uncontract dystopia.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 41