Google and the Production of Curiosity (1 Feb 2012)

On Twitter, PJ Rey resurrected this August 2010 op-ed by William Gibson that has new currency given the hullaballoo about Google's privacy-policy changes. Gibson argues that Google is an unanticipated form of artificial intelligence, "a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products." But this description sounds less like artificial intelligence and more like Marx's notion of the general intellect. Anticipating the intensification of technology, Marx claimed that machines would eventually subsume "the process of social life" and integrate it as a form of productivity.

The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

This is pretty obscure even by Marx's standards, but autonomist Marxists (Negri, Lazzaurato, Virno) have extrapolated from this a definition of general intellect that embraces, as Virno puts it, "formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and ‘language games’." Because of the membranous nature of the general intellect, when harnessed and integrated with capital, it can recuperate all social behavior as "immaterial" production -- enriching the valence of signs, producing affects, etc. -- it means that "even the greater ‘power to enjoy’ is always on the verge of being turned into labouring task." That is, our consumption, especially of information, is a mode of production. The general intellect is the sum of all that information circulation.

Google, then, is the reification of the general intellect. It manages to take human curiosity and turn it into capital.

The consequences of that are profound. Our curiosity is no longer a sign of our leisure; it's an enormously important economic factor. To a degree this has always been true. Our willingness to pay attention to things is at the root of consumer demand. But it is now far more productive of informational goods in and of itself, thanks to ubiquitous online surveillance and data-storage capabilities. Much of the way we express our human curiosity can now be recorded and fed into algorithms and plotted on graphs of connections to generate more information, stimulate more curiosity, produce more demand. That's why, as Gibson points out, Google's Eric Schmidt claimed that people "want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." Google doesn't end lines of inquiry; it gives users momentum. The point of Google is to try to keep you Googling. Not only does that make their ad space more valuable, but it adds value to their search products; it thickens the membrane. As Gibson notes, "In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory."

What that means is that Google's instantiation of the general intellect captures not merely human cooperation and collaboration, as the theorists tend to emphasize when discussing post-Fordist production and the productivity of interpersonal "virtuosity". It also captures and perhaps even emphasizes the lateral surveillance aspect of sociality -- each implementing control on everyone else, recording what they do and annotating it. Human curiosity is intensified and directed at one another. The general intellect becomes a giant spying machine. (Facebook is probably a more explicit example of that than Google, but Google seems more powerful as the received source of answers, the index of approved information.)

Gibson notes how Google makes personal identity a productive factor, a kind of capital it owns. This makes it something we are therefore stuck with. What we have done and would like to have forgotten is part of Google's "fixed capital" that they are loath to relinquish, despite Schmidt's suggestion that teens be issued fresh identities when they become adults. (Gibson ridicules "the prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs.") Instead we must adapt our understanding of who we are and what identity consists of. In The New Spirit of Capitalism, before launching into a discussion of the ideological usefulness of the term network, Boltanski and Chiapello discuss our demand for the intelligibility of shared social values.

Young cadres in particular feel a need clearly to identify the new forms of success and the new rules of the game in the economic world, in order to know how to conduct themselves and prepare their children. This demand for intelligibility exerts significant pressure for greater explanation and formalization of the rules of conduct, which will then guide action. In fact, the people tend to conform to these emergent new rules, if only because they confer meaning on what would otherwise merely seem like an arbitrary proliferation of ad hoc mechanisms and locally convenient improvisations.

I don't know about that being a "fact," but it seems plausible that social media have taught us all something about "locally convenient improvisations," for good and ill. And the explosion of Facebook and Google into our lives has disrupted the old version of intelligibility -- prompting new rules that are consistent with the new form of capitalism these media are driving.

So our common sense understanding of what it means to have a self is changing under this pressure. We no longer have the luxury of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals who make themselves as an expression of their iron internal will. Now we have our identities explicitly shaped (or maybe even dictated) by our contingent place in social networks and we can't hide that fact from ourselves. We have to relieve the dissonance of our data trail by surrendering the prerogative of claiming to be self-created and learn to love the self the data tells us we are or should be at any particular moment. We let Google tell us what to do next.

Data Self redux (30 Jan 2012)

Nathan Jurgenson has some good constructive criticism of my data self posts from last week. He points out that it is not enough to talk about how social media captures some preexisting self but also "how the individual, in all of their offline experience, behavior and existence, is simultaneously being created by this very online data."

Since I often tend to depict identity as a residual experiential illusion left over after capitalism subjectivizes us, I was admittedly surprised to see Jurgenson cite me as an example of what he calls "agentic bias" -- "the tendency to conceptually grant too much power to individuals to create their online Profiles by neglecting the ways in which individuals are simultaneously being created by their digital presence." Social media doesn't simply capture what we do online, it shapes what we do and also what we do offline -- as Jurgenson has argued elsewhere, once social media makes you aware of the ability to document your life as it is happening, it changes what you experience; you begin directing your life as if it were a documentary, choosing what to do in part on the basis of how it can be represented later.

My dialectics certainly need sharpening, but I definitely agree with Jurgenson that social media shape identity rather than merely expressing it. If I underplay the degree to which this is true, it may be because I take it for granted too much in my thinking: of course it's true that having media at one's disposal to share things renders those things subordinate to the process of sharing. Once we have a channel, we live so as to fill it with content, and that content is more self-consciously molded to suit desired audiences and enhance one's watchability -- it's "curated" with an eye to make oneself more followable. more relevant. Once you have Spotify, you have to groom what you listen to and what others see you listening to, and that reflexive grooming cancels out any preceding “innocent” or “authentic” listening behavior. Basically, the ongoing fretting about “authenticity” is a reflection of an ideologically induced blindness to our own agentic bias with regards to ourselves.

Identity has long worked in our particular ideological climate by masking its constructed origins, making it seem as though the profile (our self-directed identity, in Jurgenson's terms) is always making the Profile (the online representation). The stake is our status as a unique individual; other people may be products of the system but not us; we are self-created. So when the Profile begins to change my way of perceiving the world — when I begin to shape my behavior in terms of what social media captures or what I can share — I strive also to disavow that change. I think some of the disavowal is built into the services and the rhetoric of personal sharing they are bathed in. (Apparently, if Jurgenson is right, it has colored my own rhetoric as well.) We don't want to admit that we are being determined to a degree by our media use, so we instead struggle to do the impossible and deliberately communicate authenticity, try to communicate in such a way -- communicate something so genuine and real and uncompromising perhaps -- that can make ourselves believe that it's not totally obvious that we are posing for the cameras we've pointed at ourselves. Because if we admit to and foreground our "inauthentic" curatorial impulses -- doing things just to tweet them -- then we surrender the old ideal of our having a self-actualized identity, a unique internal self that we discover inside ourselves and then share with the world.

Social media has laid siege to that concept of identity, and the assumptions of privacy it relies on. It is trying to obviate that private self's pleasures and make pleasure derive instead from sharing, from comparing our data with others', from seeing what sort of quantifiable influence we can have as we build out networks. This is what I was calling the "data self," which may not make a whole lot of sense as a term, but there it is. With this self-concept in place, we don't worry about that disavowal of our constructedness so much; perhaps we think we can outrun it with further sharing, reaping further rewards. If we keep screaming out our attempts to self-brand, it still seems like we are controlling the process. I think this helps explain that particular desperate urgency of social-media use; we have to monitor and control the spin about ourselves before any of the many facets of our network come to own the narrative about us. That pleasant Pavolovian buzz of seeing that someone has responded to something I have posted somewhere is not merely pleasure at having gained some attention; it is also a moment that feels like control over an identity that has slipped away into the permanently public realm.

Anyway, that shift is what I was trying to get at in those posts about the “data self” -- that changes were happening at the level of the institutions that determine our concept of who we are, teach us what sort of things go into that. Capitalist subjectivity was once anchored in consumerist “authenticity” — consumerism allows us to discover the unique individual we really are and express it. But social media and smart-phone conduits are changing what anchors capitalist subjectivity to something outlined by data profiling and “sharing.” That is, the pleasures of identity are less about discovering, owning, and operating a particular unique self (as they were, mainly, under consumerism pre-social media); they are becoming more about mircoaffirmations available through social-media use: we are matched with the people who can affirm us, we see a reflection of ourselves in the data that makes us feel recognized, we are told what to want in a way that assures us we will be doing what is right and normal if we follow automated yet socially derived recommendations, etc. The data self knows itself only to the degree that it shares data and exists within media that can guide it toward various satisfying experiences and allow it to display its satisfactions dependably in formatted and readily circulatable ways. The data self doesn't really exist until social media use has gotten well under way. What may start as a yearning to express the authentic interior self in some new way ends up, as Jurgenson is arguing, obliterating the plausibility and satisfaction of having in interior self. Of course, for people who have had no sense of self that precedes social media, this analysis may make no sense. They can't conceive of authenticity as anything but a rumor.

The threat to this new “data self” sort of subjectivity is not inauthenticity -- the threat that tends to afflict people my age (phoniness as a moral category) -- but lack of access. The threat is being disconnected, having the information flow disrupted. And that threat stems from an underlying terror at the possibility that there's something crucial about our lives that can’t actually be expressed -- integral things about which we can say nothing, as Wittgenstein says. The danger to our identity is not that it will be exposed as a fake, but that endless sharing of it will make it feel increasingly inexpressible, that the key thing is escaping our attempts to tell all.

But I also think that Interaction with Facebook, etc., reshapes subjectivity to make reject the possibility of that inexpressibility. We are only what we express and share; the possibility that something could be meaningful and unshared becomes unthinkable, unfeelable. What measures the "real" about ourselves is not some internal ability to think or feel something but the ability to externalize it as processable data. Social media becomes the media of identity -- not recording it but constituting it. The data self is not just a matter of the data we supply (actively or passively), but also the data and metadata the social-media companies return to us. We increasingly stabilize our self-concept in terms of what social media makes possible, what sorts of rewards it can supply, and what garners those rewards.

I think the logical extension of the data self -- the self that is secure with itself only to the extent that it is constituted in social media as manipulatable data -- will be for Twitter to come preloaded with plausible friends, Facebook preloaded with life experiences, or at least preordained slots of experiences a user is supposed to have. Our self-recording vision of ourselves, as shaped by social media, may not alienate us from some "genuine" experience we would have otherwise had, but it is also not autonomous either, not freed of the ideological dispositions companies have built into their platforms. As much as we may come to see our lives as documentaries that we are always in the process of making, we still are typically reliant on someone else's storyboard.

(Note to self: Remember that the work of identity construction for any given individual is always collective. One's identity is not the product of the identity-bearer's labor only, but is also the product of those whose work sustains institutions and expressive codes and everything else that contributes to substantiating and expressing identity.)