The new auctoritas and its truth: non-belonging

In the previous text of this series we commented on the first characteristics that Shoshana Zuboff attributes to instrumentarianism https://medium.com/@fabiodeoliveiraribeiro/instrumentarianism-as-power-and-as-auctoritas-2b65a386b238. In chapter 13 of the book, the author continues to explore this form of power that, according to her, is unprecedented. It is in this chapter that she introduces the concept of the Big Other, which according to her is the sensible, computational and connected puppet that processes, monitors, calculates and modifies human behavior.

“Instrumentarianism power cultivates an unusual ‘way of knowing’ that combinates the ‘formal indiference’ of neoliberal worldview with the observational perspective of radical behaviorism. Thanks to Big Other’s capabilities, instrumentarian power reduces human experience to measurable obsesrvable behavior while remaining steadfastly indifferent to the meaning of that experience. I call this new way of knowing radical indiference. It is a form of observation without witness that yields the observe of an intimate violent political religion and bears an uttlerly different signature of havoc: the remote and abstracted contempt of impenetraby complex systems and the interests that author them, carrying individual on a fast-moving currente to the fufillment of other’s ends. What passes for social relations and economic exchange now occur across the medium of this robotized veil of abstraction.

Instrumentarianism’s radical indifference is operationalized in Big Other’s dehumanized methods of evaluation that produce equivalent without equality. These methods reduce individuais to the lowest commom denominator of sameness – an organism among organisms – despite all the vital ways in which we are not the same.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019, p. 376/377)

A little further on, Zuboff clarifies that:

“Thanks to Big Other’s capabilities, instrumentarian power aims for a condition of certainty without terror in a form of ‘guaranteed outcomes’. Because it does no 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 serves our insides from our outsides, our subjectivity and interiority from our observable actions. It lends credibility to the behavioral economist’s hypotesis of the frailty of human reason by making it só, as otherized behavior takes on a life of its own that delivers futures to surveillance capitalism’s aims and interests.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019, p. 378)

The Big Other was not created to impose mass submission to predetermined norms of behavior. Nor does it offer any kind of retribution due to belonging to the group.

“In this way instrumentarian power produces endlessly accruing knowledge for surveillance capitalists and endlessly diminishing freedon for us as it continuously renews surveillance capitalim’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 question: Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides? Power was once indentified with the owner ship of means of production, but it is now identified with ownership of the means of behavioral modification that is Big Other.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019, p. 379)

After reporting how the birth and consolidation of surveillance capitalism occurred just in the historical period when people began to distrust more and more of state authorities, the author of the book explains how instrumentarianism was summoned to bridge the gap between weakened governments and volatile societies to ensure state stability. Then it shows how China and the United States did the same thing in different ways.

“In the US, local law enforcement has joined the queue of institutions seeking access to instrumentariam power. Surveillance-as-a-service companies eagerly sell their wares to local police departaments also determined to find a shortcut to certainty. On startup, Geofeedia, specializes in detailed location tracking of activists and protesters, such as Greenpeace members or union organizers, and the computation of individualized ‘threat scores’ using data drawn from social media; Law-enforcement agencies have been among Geofeeedia’s most proeminet clients. When Boston Police Departament annouced its interest in joing this roster in 2016, the city’s police commissioner described to the Boston Globe his belief in machine certainty as the antidote to social breakdown: ‘The attack… in the Ohio State University campus is just the latest illustration of why local law-enforcement authorities need every tool they can muster to stop terrorism and other violence before it starts’. An ACLU attorney countered that the government is using tech companies ‘to build massive dossiers on people’ based on nothing more than their constitutionally protected speech. Another, more prominent surveillance-as-a-service company, Palantir, once touted by Bloomberg Businessweek as ‘the war on terror’s secret weapon’, was found to be in a secret collaboration with the New Orleans Police Departament to test its ‘predictive policing’ technology. Palantir’s software not only identified gang members but also ‘traced people’s ties to other gang members, outined criminal histories, analyzed social media, and predicted the likehood that individuals woud commit violence or become a victim’.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019, p. 387/388)

In the USA, state agencies are willing to buy the services of private companies that have built a new type of power by expropriating and analyzing behavioral surplus. In China, the State is more inclined to incorporate the attributes of instrumentarianism using private systems of rewarding and punishing consumers created by surveillance capitalists.

“According to a report in China Daily, debtors on the list were automatically prevented from flying 6.15 million times since the blacklist was launched in 2013. Those in contempt of court were denied sales of high-speed train tickets 2.22 million times. Some 71,000 defaulters have missed out on executive positions at enterprises as a result ot their debts. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China said it had refused loans worth more than 6.97 billion yuan ($ 1,01 billion) to debtors on the list. No one is sent to a reeducation camp, but they may not be allowed to purchase lusury goods. According to the director of the Institute of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, ‘Given this inconveniense, 10 percent of people on the list started to pay bank the money they owed spontaneously. This shows the system is starting to work. Economies of action were perfoming to plan.

For the 400 million users of Sesame Credit, the fusion os instrumentariam and state power bites hard. Those who might find thenselves on the balcklist discover that the credit system is designe to thrust their scores into an inexorable downward spiral: ‘First your score drops. Then your friends hear you are on the blacklist and, fearful that their scores might be affected, quietly drop you as a contact. The algorithm notices, and your score plummets further’.

The Chinese government’s vision may be impossibly ambitious: the big dream of total awareness and perfect certainty mediated by algorithms that filter a perpetual flood of data flows from private and public supples, including online and offline experience culled from every domain and able to ricochet back into the individual lives of 1.5 billion people, automating social behavior as the algorithms reward, punish, and shape action right down to the latest bus ticket. So far the project is fragmented acroos many pilots, not only in the tech companies but also in cities and regions, só there is no real test of the scale that the government envisions. There are plenty of experts who belive that a single system of that scale and complexity will be difficult if not impossible to achieve.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019, p. 391/392)

No social control system needs to have total capillarity. Not all Germans were Nazis, but the overwhelming majority of them supported Nazism. Many because they realized that their lives had improved. Others because they hated Jews and Communists. And some for the simple fact that they did not want to be seen as different people in a society that became more and more homogeneous as the totalitarian project took shape, rewarding adhesion and cruelly punishing any non-conformity.

Shoshana Zuboff clearly says that instrumentarianism does not require and does not need people’s conformity. Because of the characteristics of the Big Other, people are doomed to continue using the internet, to provide behavioral surplus that will be used by others to make a profit by shaping individual consumption behaviors (case of the USA) or imposing collective patterns of behavior (case of China ). In one country or another, with greater or lesser intensity, instrumentarianism can be used for police and political purposes.

At this point I return to what was said about ‘auctoritas’ in the previous text of this series.

“Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem”.

Hannah Arendt made a subtle distinction between power and authority. The first is characterized by the forced imposition of decisions, something that presupposes an evident distinction between who governs and who is governed. Authority exists when compliance with decisions is voluntary and no distinction is made between who is governed and who is government.

Power hierarchizes society. Authority enables governance based on a deep sense of belonging.

Shoshana Zuboff ends this chapter by saying that there is a fork in the road. If we follow one of them, the one that leads to the limitation of the power gained by surveillance capitalists, democracy can be strengthened. If the other is followed, the result will be an anti-democratic modernity in which certainty will be achieved without violence, but with an evident loss of political autonomy, human dignity and personal freedom.

Instrumentarianism is being called upon to become the only source of authority in a world in which popular confidence in state institutions is rapidly decreasing. But this ‘auctoritas’ built in the virtual world and exercised in the real world is based on “non-belonging”.

Chinese, Americans, Brazilians, etc., all internet users do not belong to the select and small group of entrepreneurs in a position to expropriate behavioral surpluses and to exercise this new form of “auctoritas”, sharing it with a profit or giving it away partially to their respective States. Interestingly, the “non-belonging” that internet users have been condemned to is not perceived as unpleasant. This is one side of the problem.

The other is the impossibility of combating a new form of governance that has managed to hack both the imagination of Western capitalists and that of Chinese communists. There is only one way for people not to submit to the whims of the new ‘auctoritas’: turning off computers and not using Smartphones that instrumentalize “non-belonging”. However, this is not possible. Almost everything we do outside the internet is already represented in it in some way.