Big Other finally enables the universal technology of behavior that, as Skinner, Stuart MacKay, Mark Weiser, and Joe Paradiso each insisted, accomplishes its aims quietly and persistently, using methods that intentionally bypass our awareness, disappearing into the background of all things. Recall that Alphabet/Google’s Eric Schmidt provoked uproar in 2015 when in response to a question on the future of the web, he said, “The internet will disappear.” What he really meant was that “The internet will disappear into Big Other.”
Thanks to Big Other’s capabilities, instrumentarian power aims for a condition of certainty without terror in the form of “guaranteed outcomes.” Because it does not claim our bodies for some grotesque regime of pain and murder, we are prone to undervalue its effects and lower our guard. Instead of death, torture, reeducation, or conversion, instrumentarianism effectively exiles us from our own behavior. It severs our insides from our outsides, our subjectivity and interiority from our observable actions. It lends credibility to the behavioral economists’ hypothesis of the frailty of human reason by making it so, as otherized behavior takes on a life of its own that delivers our futures to surveillance capitalism’s aims and interests.
In an instrumentarian utopia, Big Other simulates the vortex of stimuli, transforming “natural selection” into the “unnatural selection” of variation and reinforcement authored by market players and the competition for surveillance revenues. We may confuse Big Other with the behaviorist god of the vortex, but only because it effectively conceals the machinations of surveillance capital that are the wizard behind the digital curtain. The seductive voice crafted on the yonder side of this veil—Google, is that you?—gently nudges us along the path that coughs up the maximum of behavioral surplus and the closest approximation to certainty. Do not slumber in this opiated fog at the network’s edge. That knowing voice is underwritten by the aims and rules of the very place we once hoped to flee, with its commercialized rituals of competition, contempt, and humiliation. Take one wrong step, one deviation from the path of seamless frictionless predictability, and that same voice turns acid in an instant as it instructs “the vehicular monitoring system not to allow the car to be started.”
Under the regime of instrumentarian power, the mental agency and self-possession of the right to the future tense are gradually submerged beneath a new kind of automaticity: a lived experience of stimulus-response-reinforcement aggregated as the comings and goings of mere organisms. Our conformity is irrelevant to instrumentarianism’s success. There is no need for mass submission to social norms, no loss of self to the collective induced by terror and compulsion, no offers of acceptance and belonging as a reward for bending to the group. All of that is superseded by a digital order that thrives within things and bodies, transforming volition into reinforcement and action into conditioned response.
In this way instrumentarian power produces endlessly accruing knowledge for surveillance capitalists and endlessly diminishing freedom for us as it continuously renews surveillance capitalism’s domination of the division of learning in society. False consciousness is no longer produced by the hidden facts of class and their relation to production but rather by the hidden facts of instrumentarian power’s command over the division of learning in society as it usurps the rights to answer the essential questions: Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides? Power was once identified with the ownership of the means of production, but it is now identified with ownership of the means of behavioral modification that is Big Other.
II. A Market Project of Total Certainty
Big Other and the instrumentarian power that it enables fulfill Skinner’s vision for humankind. As early as 1948 in Walden Two, Skinner had pined for the new measurement and computational capabilities that would unlock the mysteries of the vortex of stimuli and illuminate those acts of ignorance that we foolishly value as free will. “I didn’t say that behavior is always predictable, any more than the weather is always predictable,” says Frazier, Walden Two’s protagonist. “There are often too many factors to be taken into account. We can’t measure them all accurately, and we couldn’t perform the mathematical operations needed to make a prediction if we had the measurements.”1
It was Skinner’s hard destiny to foresee the possibility of instrumentarian power and its operationalization in Big Other before the instruments existed to fulfill that vision. His lab had always been a fantasy world of engineering innovations for his behavioral experiments: mazes and boxes for animal conditioning, measurement tools, and recording devices. A fully operational technology of behavior was the prize that would elude Skinner in his lifetime, a source of frustration that was palpable in every article and lecture right to the end.
Though confident that science would eventually overcome the practical challenges of a behavioral technology, Skinner was more troubled by the cultural impediments to a human science of behavioral prediction and control founded on the viewpoint of the Other-One. He resented the friction produced by human beings in their stubborn attachment to the values and ideals of freedom inherited from the eighteenth-century philosophers, and he equally despised the existential project of the postwar philosophies that planted authenticity, free will, and autonomous action at the heart of second-modernity yearning.
In his penultimate essay, written in 1990, barely three years before his death, Skinner mourned the prospects of behavioral prediction as the foundation of a new society built on scientific certainty: “To say that a person is simply a place in which something happens seems even more threatening when it raises questions about what we are likely to do rather than what we have done.”2 In those last years he seemed more resigned to the tenacity of human friction and its stubborn allegiance to something like free will, his voice less outrageous and aggressive than the author of Beyond Freedom & Dignity, two decades earlier. Anger and contempt had shaded into weariness and despair with his final reflections:
It may be said that this is a discouraging view of human behavior and that we shall be more likely to do something about the future if we continue to believe that our destiny is in our hands. That belief has survived for many centuries and has led to remarkable achievements, but the achievements were only the immediate consequences of what was done. We now know that other consequences have followed and that they are threatening our future. What we have done with our destiny may not be a testament we wish to leave to the world.3
In our time of surveillance exceptionalism, as astonishment succumbs to helplessness and resignation, the resistance that Skinner lamented appears to be waning. The belief that we can choose our destiny is under siege, and, in a dramatic reversal, the dream of a technology of behavioral prediction and control—for which Skinner had endured such public scorn—is now a flourishing fact. This prize now attracts immense capital, human genius, scientific elaboration, governmental protection, ecosystems of institutionalization, and the glamour that always has and always will attach to power.
The rise of instrumentarianism follows the path of “illuminating events” that, as Hannah Arendt writes, reveal “a beginning in the past which had hitherto been hidden.”4 It is in the nature of instrumentarian power to operate remotely and move in stealth. It does not grow through terror, murder, the suspension of democratic institutions, massacre, or expulsion. Instead, it grows through declaration, self-authorization, rhetorical misdirection, euphemism, and the quiet, audacious backstage moves specifically crafted to elude awareness as it replaces individual freedom with others’ knowledge and replaces society with certainty. It does not confront democracy but rather erodes it from within, eating away at the human capabilities and self-understanding required to sustain a democratic life.
The narratives of Facebook’s experimental maneuvers, Pokémon Go’s prototype of a behavioral-futures-market–dominated society, and the endless examples of digital innovation crushed under the heel of the surveillance creed may be as close as we get to a public announcement of history-illuminating change that moves
through us and among us, irreversibly altering life as we have known it. There is no violence here, only the steady displacement of the will to will that has been embodied in self-determination, expressed in the first-person voice, and nourished in the kind of sanctuary that depends upon the possibility of private life and the promise of public freedom.
Instrumentarian power, like Goethe’s Faust, is morally agnostic. The only moral imperative here is distilled from the point of view of a thin utopian gruel. If there is sin, it is the sin of autonomy: the audacity to reject the flows that herd us all toward predictability. Friction is the only evil. Obstruction in law, action, or rhetoric is simply reactionary. The norm is submission to the supposed iron laws of technological inevitability that brook no impediment. It is deemed only rational to surrender and rejoice in new conveniences and harmonies, to wrap ourselves in the first text and embrace a violent ignorance of its shadow.
Totalitarianism was a transformation of the state into a project of total possession. Instrumentarianism and Big Other signal the transformation of the market into a project of total certainty, an undertaking that is unimaginable outside the digital milieu, but also unimaginable outside the logic of accumulation that is surveillance capitalism. This new power is the spawn of an unprecedented convergence: the surveillance and actuation capabilities of Big Other in combination with the discovery and monetization of behavioral surplus. It is only in the context of this convergence that we can imagine economic principles that instrumentalize and control human experience to systematically and predictably shape behavior toward others’ profitable ends.
Instrumentarian power operates from the vantage point of the Other-One to reduce human persons to the mere animal condition of behavior shorn of reflective meaning. It sees only organisms bent to serve the new laws of capital now imposed on all behavior. Arendt anticipated the destructive potential of behaviorism decades ago when she lamented the devolution of our conception of “thought” to something that is accomplished by a “brain” and is therefore transferable to “electronic instruments”:
The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the still individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed, “tranquilized,” functional type of behavior.
The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualization of certain obvious trends in modern society. It is quite conceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.5
Is this to be our home: the automation of the self as the necessary condition of the automation of society, and all for the sake of others’ guaranteed outcomes?
III. This Century’s Curse
One place to begin our reckoning with this question is in Arendt’s “Concluding Remarks” in the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, words that have haunted me since I first read them many years ago. They were written at a time when totalitarianism had been defeated in Europe but remained unchallenged in Stalin’s USSR. It was a time when much of the world was united in the urgency of understanding and remembering, not only as testament but also as a vaccine against future terror.
Arendt’s reflections summarize not only totalitarianism’s “futility” and “ludicrousness” but also her sense of the “disturbing relevance of totalitarian regimes.” She warned that totalitarianism could not be written off as an accidental turn toward tragedy but rather that it must be seen as “deeply connected with the crisis of this century.” She concluded, “The fact is that the true problems of our time cannot be understood, let alone solved, without acknowledgement that totalitarianism became this century’s curse only because it so terrifyingly took care of its problems.”6
Now imagine, decades hence, another thinker meditating on the “disturbing relevance” of instrumentarian power, observing that “the true problems of our time cannot be understood, let alone solved, without acknowledgement that instrumentarianism became this century’s curse only because it so terrifyingly took care of its problems.”
What problems? I have argued that surveillance capitalism and its instrumentarian power feed on the volatile “conditions of existence” that I summarize as the “collision.” Surveillance capitalism offers solutions to individuals in the form of social connection, access to information, time-saving convenience, and, too often, the illusion of support. These are the resources of the first text. More significantly, it offers solutions to institutions in the form of omniscience, control, and certainty. The idea here is not to heal instability—the corrosion of social trust and its broken bonds of reciprocity, dangerous extremes of inequality, regimes of exclusion—but rather to exploit the vulnerabilities produced by these conditions.
It is useful to note that despite the much-touted social advantages of always-on connection, social trust in the US declined precipitously during the same period that surveillance capitalism flourished. According to the US General Social Survey’s continuous measurement of “interpersonal trust attitudes,” the percentage of Americans who “think that most people can be trusted” remained relatively steady between 1972 and 1985. Despite some fluctuations, 46 percent of Americans registered high levels of interpersonal trust in 1972 and nearly 50 percent in 1985. As the neoliberal disciplines began to bite, that percentage steadily declined to 34 percent in 1995, just as the public internet went live. The late 1990s through 2014 saw another period of steady and decisive decline to only 30 percent.7
Societies that display low levels of interpersonal trust also tend to display low levels of trust toward legitimate authority; indeed, levels of trust toward the government have also declined substantially in the US, especially during the decade and a half of growing connectivity and the spread of surveillance capitalism. More than 75 percent of Americans said that they trusted the government most or all of the time in 1958, about 45 percent in 1985, close to 20 percent in 2015, and down to 18 percent in 2017.8 Social trust is highly correlated with peaceful collective decision making and civic engagement. In its absence, the authority of shared values and mutual obligations slips away. The void that remains is a loud signal of societal vulnerability. Confusion, uncertainty, and distrust enable power to fill the social void. Indeed, they welcome it.
In the age of surveillance capitalism it is instrumentarian power that fills the void, substituting machines for social relations, which amounts to the substitution of certainty for society. In this imagined collective life, freedom is forfeit to others’ knowledge, an achievement that is only possible with the resources of the shadow text.
The private institutions of capital led the way in this ambitious reformation of collective life and individual experience, but they found necessary support from public institutions, especially as the declaration of a “war on terror” legitimated every inclination to enshrine machine-produced certainty as the ultimate solution to societal uncertainty. These mutual affinities assured that instrumentarian power would not be a stepchild but rather an equal partner or even, with increasing regularity, the lord and master upon whom the state depends in its quest for “total awareness.”
That instrumentarian power is regarded as the certain solution to uncertain societal conditions is evident in the ways in which it is called into action by the state. The varied and complex institutional patterns produced by these interactions are a crucial frontier for study and democratic debate. My aim right now is simply to point out a few examples that illustrate the state’s continuous demands for the intensification of surveillance capitalism’s production of instrumentarian power—expressed in the growth and elaboration
of Big Other—as the preferred solution to social breakdown, mistrust, and uncertainty. Although we have become desensitized to a seemingly endless train of such examples, it is important to recognize that in these entanglements, state and market institutions demonstrate a shared commitment to a relentless drive toward guaranteed outcomes. Their mutual affinities can help us define the problem that threatens to make instrumentarian power our century’s curse.
Unsurprisingly, instrumentarian power is consistently called into action as a solution, if not the solution, to the threat of terrorism. Acts of terror reject the authority of civilizational norms and reveal the impossibility of society without mutual trust. Governments now turn to instrumentarian power as the solution to this new source of societal uncertainty, demanding the certainty machines that promise direct, reliable means of detection, prediction, and even the automatic actuation of countermeasures.
During the sixteen years of the Bush and Obama administrations, “progress in information technology” was understood as the “most effective response” to threat. Peter Swire observes that public officials “know that the private sector is developing many new techniques for collecting and processing data and making decisions based on that data.” The consequence is “a large and ongoing shift toward information-intensive strategies” that avail themselves of these market capabilities.9
This status quo was interrupted in 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed the hidden complicity between state security agencies and the tech companies. In the backlash that followed, surveillance capitalists confronted new public relations challenges in what they portrayed as an uneasy or even unwilling alliance between private power and state security needs. Nevertheless, new terrorist threats invariably orient public officials toward the intensification and deployment of Big Other and the instrumentarian power it signifies. However, their ability to access this immense power is fraught with tension. It is not simply theirs to command. They must work, at least in part, through the surveillance capitalists.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 47