from Personal Panopticons, Real Life Magazine, L.M. Sacasas, Nov 5 2018
As it turns out, concerns about engineered determinism are no more novel than concerns about privacy. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, the unnamed narrator mocks proponents of a rational and utilitarian vision of the future, typified by 19th century Russian social critic and political activist Nikolay Chernyshevsky. For the Underground Man, these “gentlemen,” as he consistently calls them, believe “human action will automatically be computed according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, reaching to 108,000 and compiled in a directory,” and that human beings will assent to this regime because it will be shown to be in their best interest. If humanity’s best interest can be rationally determined with mathematical precision, the laws governing human affairs, like those governing the rest of the natural order, can be discovered. He imagines one of these men sarcastically asking, “Well, gentlemen, why don’t we get rid of all this good sense once and for all, give it a kick, throw it to the wind, just in order to send all these logarithms to hell so that we can once again live according to our own foolish will?” Free will as an illusion best cast aside in favor of a regime of predictive manipulation for the sake of the greatest, scientifically determined good.
Against this understanding of human nature, the Underground Man asserts his foolish will as a defining quality. A person’s greatest advantage, he claims, is “one’s own, independent, and free desire, one’s own, albeit wild caprice, one’s fantasy, sometimes provoked to the point of madness.” He, too, longs for freedom from engineered determinism. This assertion of will doesn’t make him a unique hero though — it is part of what makes him, in Dostoyevsky’s view, a type that “is bound to exist in our society, taking account the circumstances that have shaped our society.” That is, his stubborn refusal to adapt to the prospect of predictive control is as much a product of that order as the acquiescence of those who willingly or thoughtlessly adapt. And this entrapment perhaps explains the Underground Man’s wild emotional swings, his self-loathing, his paralysis, his anxieties about self-consciousness, his theoretical embrace of violence as a way of asserting his individuality, his bitterness, and his spite.
The Underground Man’s chief problem may be his unquestioning acceptance of an individualist framing of identity. It sunders him from any human-scaled networks of interdependence — i.e., communities — within which his individuality might have flourished. Instead he accepts his isolation and doubles down on its terms.
It would similarly be a mistake for us to respond to the prospect of techno-social engineering by doubling down on the privatization of privacy that has been one of the conditions of its emergence. We need a new story to make the value of privacy seem compelling again. It may be that the best reason for me to guard my privacy is my desire to protect your freedom. But we’re a long way, it seems to me, from this being a universally plausible account of privacy, much less an account from which public action will spring. Instead, as they purveyors of surveillance capitalism would have it, we careen toward engineered determinism down a path greased by our indifference and despair.