20/6/22, 16:52 Preemptive personalization – The New Inquiry

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Preemptive personalization
By ROB HORNING SEPTEMBER 11, 2014

Nicholas Carr’s forthcoming The Glass Cage, about the ethical dangers of
automation, inspired me to read George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937),
which contains a lengthy tirade against the notion of progress as efficiency and
convenience. Orwell declares that “the tendency of mechanical progress is to
make life safe and soft.” It assumes that a human being is “a kind of walking
stomach” that is interested only in passive pleasure rather than work: “whichever
way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of

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working — that is, of living.” Convenience is social control, and work, for Orwell
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at least, is the struggle to experience a singular life. But the human addiction to
machine-driven innovation and automation, he predicts, fueled apparently by a
fiendish inertia that demands progress for progress’s sake, will inevitably lead to
total disempowerment and dematerialization:

There is really no reason why a human being should do

more than eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and procreate;
everything else could be done for him by machinery.
Therefore the logical end of mechanical progress is to
reduce the human being to something resembling a
brain in a bottle.

Basically, he sees the Singularity coming and he despises it as a “frightful

subhuman depth of softness and helplessness.” And there is no opting-out:

In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned

foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine
guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc.,
etc.; and on the other hand there would be a
constant demand for the things the machine cannot
produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its
corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs
against it, but one goes on using it.

This “brain in the bottle” vision of our automated future, Orwell surmises, is why
people of the 1930s were wary of socialism, which he regards as being intimately
connected ideologically with the theme of inevitable progress. That connection
has of course been severed; socialism tends to be linked with nostalgia and tech’s
“thought leaders” tend to champion libertarianism and cut-throat competitive
practices abetted by technologically induced asymmetries, all in the name of
“innovation” and “disruption.”

Oddly, Orwell argues that the profit motive is an impediment to technological

development:

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Given a mechanical
THEcivilization the process of invention
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 and improvement will always continue, but the
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tendency of capitalism is to slow it down, because under

capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly
immediate profits is neglected; some, indeed, which
threaten to reduce profits are suppressed almost as
ruthlessly as the flexible glass mentioned by Petronius …
Establish Socialism—remove the profit principle—and
the inventor will have a free hand. The mechanization
of the world, already rapid enough, would be or at any
rate could be enormously accelerated.

Orwell seems to imagine a world with a fixed amount of needs, which

technology will allow to be fulfilled at the expense of less labor; he imagines
technology will make useful things more durable rather than making the utility
we seek more ephemeral. But technology, as directed by the profit motive,
makes obsolescence into a form of innovation; it generates new wants and
structures disposability as convenience rather than waste. Why maintain and
repair something when you can throw it away and shop for a replacement —
especially when shopping is accepted to be a fun leisure activity?

While Orwell is somewhat extreme in his romanticizing of hard work — he

sounds downright reactionary in his contempt for “laziness,” and can’t conceive
of something as banal as shopping as a rewarding, self-defining effort for anyone
— people today seem anything but wary about technological convenience, even
though it is always paired with intensified surveillance. (The bathetic coverage of
Apple’s marketing events seems to reflect an almost desperate enthusiasm for
whatever “magical” new efficiencies the company will offer.) Socialism would be
far more popular if people really thought it was about making life easier.

Orwell associated automation with socialism’s utopian dreams, and thought the
flabbiness of those dreams would drive people to fascism. Looking back, it seems
more plausible to argue that automation has become a kind of gilded fascism
that justifies itself and its barbarities with the efficiencies machines enable.
Though we sometimes still complain about machines deskilling us, we have
nonetheless embraced once unimaginable forms of automation, permitting it to

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be extended into how we formTHE

a conception of ourselves, how we come toSUBSCRIBE
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anything at all.

One might make this case for automation’s insidious infiltration into our lives:
First, technology deskilled work, making us machine monitors rather than craft
workers; then it deskilled consumption, prompting us to prefer “tinned food” to
some presumably more organic alternative. Now, with the tools of data
collection and algorithmic processing, it deskills self-reflection and the
formation of desire. We get preemptive personalization, as when sites like
Facebook and Google customize your results without your input.
“Personalization” gets stretched to the point where it leaves out the will of the
actual person involved. How convenient! So glad that designers and engineers
are making it easier for me to want things without having to make the effort of
actually thinking to want them. Desire is hard.

Preemptive personalization is seductive only because of the pressure we

experience to make our identities unique — to win the game of having a self by
being “more original” than other people. That goal stems in part from the social
media battlefield, which itself reflects a neoliberal emphasis on
entrepreneurializing the self, regarding oneself as leading an enterprise, not
living a life. If “becoming yourself” was ever a countercultural goal, it isn’t
anymore. (That’s why Gap can build an ad campaign around the proposition
“Dress Normal.” Trying to be distinctive has lost its distinction.) It’s mandatory
that we have a robust self to express, that we create value by innovating on that
front. Otherwise we run the risk of becoming economic leftovers.

Yet becoming “more unique” is an impossible, nonsensical goal for self-

actualization: self-knowledge probably involves coming to terms with how
generic our wants and needs and thoughts are, and how dependent they are on
the social groups within which we come to know ourselves, as opposed to some
procedure of uncovering their pure idiosyncrasy. The idea that self-becoming or
self-knowledge is something we’d want to make more “convenient” seems
counterproductive. The effort to be a self is its own end. That is what Orwell
seemed to think: “The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the
human need for effort and creation.”

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But since Orwell’s time, the mechanization process has increasingly become
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mediatization/digitization process that can be rationalized as an expansion of

humans’ ability to create and express themselves. Technological development
has emphasized customization and personalization, allowing us to use consumer
goods as language above and beyond their mere functionality. (I’ll take my
iWatch in matte gray please!) Social media are the farthest iteration of this, a
personalized infosphere in which our interaction shapes the reality we see and
our voice can directly reach potentially vast audiences.

But this seeming expansion of our capacity to express ourselves in in the service
of data-capture and surveillance; we embed ourselves in communication
platforms that allow our expression to be used to curtail our horizons.
Preemptive personalization operates under the presumption we are eager to
express ourselves only so that we may be done with the trouble of it once and for
all, once what we would or should say can be automated and we can simply reap
the social benefits of our automatic speech.

Social media trap us in a tautological loop, in which we express ourselves to be

ourselves to express ourselves, trying to claim better attention shares from the
people we are ostensibly “connecting” with. Once we are trying to “win” the
game of selfhood on the scoreboard of attention, any pretense of expressing an
“inner truth” (which probably doesn’t exist anyway) about ourselves becomes lost
in the rush to churn out and absorb content. It doesn’t matter what we say, or if
we came up with it, when all that matters is the level of response. In this system,
we don’t express our true self in search of attention and confirmation; instead
attention posits the true self as a node in a dynamic network, and the more
connections that run through it, the more complete and “expressed” that self is.

When we start measure the self, concretely, in quantified attention and the
density of network connectivity rather than in terms of the nebulous concept of
“effort,” it begins to make sense to accept algorithmic personalization, which
reports the self to us as something we can consume. The algorithm takes the data
and spits out a statistically unique self for us, that lets us consume our
uniqueness as as a kind of one-of-a-kind delicacy. It masks from us the way our
direct relations with other people shape who are, preserving the fantasy we are
sui generis. It protects us not only from the work of being somebody — all that

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tiring self-generated desire — THE

but more
NEWinsidiously
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acknowledging and respecting the ways our actions have consequences for other
people at very fundamental levels of their being. Automated selfhood frees us
from recognizing and coping with our interdependency, outsourcing it to an
algorithm.

The point of “being unique” has broadened; it is a consumer pleasure as well as a

pseudo-accomplishment of self-actualization. So all at once, “uniqueness” (1)
motivates content production for social-media platforms, (2) excuses intensified
surveillance, and (3) allows filter bubbles to be imposed as a kind of flattery
(which ultimately isolates us and prevents self-knowledge, or knowledge of our
social relations). Uniqueness is as much a mechanism of control as an apparent
expression of our distinctiveness. No wonder it’s been automated.

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