The Road to Selfdom

Marion and I have an essay in Aeon today:

What is happening here is more than an abstract flow of information. It is more than a means of surveillance. It is more than a price mechanism. Rather, it’s as if the air traffic control and insurance commission functions of the IBM 650 have been fused, shrunk, and wholly generalised. This is the real computing revolution. Much of what we do is immediately authenticated as we do it, stored as data, classified or scored on some sort of scale, and deployed in real time to modulate some outcome of interest – usually, the behaviour of a person, or a machine, or an organisation. … Because of this transformation, our sense of who we are is assembled in a strange and tangled fashion. The machinery of ordinalisation attends carefully to individuals rather than coarse classes or groups. By doing so, it appears to liberate people from the constraints of social affiliations and to judge them for their distinctive qualities and contributions. It promises incorporation for the excluded, recognition for the creative, and just rewards for the entrepreneurial. And yet this emancipatory promise is delivered through systems that classify, sort and, above all, rank people with ever-greater precision and on a previously unimaginable scale. The resulting social order is a sort of paradox, characterised by constant tensions between personal freedom and social control, between the subjective elan of inner authenticity and the objective forces of external authentication. It gives rise to a certain way of being, a new kind of self, whose experiences are defined by the push for personal autonomy and the pull of platform dependency.

You should go check it out.