[p2p-research] Fwd: <nettime> Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 7:59 PM
Subject: Fwd: <nettime> Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>




---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Felix Stalder <felix at openflows.com>
Date: Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 1:16 PM
Subject: <nettime> Autonomy and Control in the Era of Post-Privacy
To: nettime-l at kein.org




[This is my contribution to the current issue (#19) of 'open. Cahier on Art
and the Public Domain.' which focuses on 'Beyond Privacy. New Notions of
the Private and Public Domains.' In this text, I try to analyze why the
notion of privacy seems to be loosing its capacity to function as a
political category, despite all the privacy commissioners and NGOs fighting
to protext privacy. Felix]


http://www.skor.nl/artefact-4808-en.html


One way to characterize Western modernity, the period we are just leaving,
is by its particular structure of control and autonomy. It emerged as the
result of two historic developments – one leading to large, hierarchic
bureaucracies as the dominant form of organization, the other to the
(bourgeois, male) citizen as the main political subject. Privacy played a
key role in maintaining a balance between the two. Today, this arrangement
is unraveling. In the process, privacy loses (some of) its social
functions. Post-privacy, then, points to a transformation in how people
create autonomy and how control permeates their lives.


Bureaucracies and Citizens, 1700-1950
--------------------------------------

The first of these developments was the expansion of large-scale
institutions, first state bureaucracies, then, since the late nineteenth
century, commercial corporations.1 Their attempts to organize social
processes on a previously unimaginable scale – in terms of space, time and
complexity – required vast amounts of information about the world, most
importantly about the subjects in their domain. In 1686, the Marquis de
Vauban proposed to Louis XIV a yearly census of the entire population, so
that the king would be ‘able, in his own office, to review in an hour’s
time the present and past condition of a great realm of which he is the
head, and be able himself to know with certitude in what consists his
grandeur, his wealth, and his strengths.’2 At the time, such an endeavour
could not be conducted for practical reasons, but the vision spawned an
entire range of new theoretical approaches to render the world available in
such a way. In 1749, the German political scientist Gottfried Achenwall
(1719-1772) brought them together under the term ‘statistics’, defined as
the ‘science dealing with data about the condition of a state or
community’. Yet, handling such data became ever more difficult as the drive
to collect intensified. In the late nineteenth century, the US census, held
once a decade, reached a critical juncture when the processing of the data
amassed could not be finished before the next census was to be held. The
historian James Beniger put this ‘control crisis’ at the beginning of the
computer revolution and the information age enabled by it.3 Without the
systematic gathering of standardized information and its processing into
actionable knowledge, none of the functions of the modern state, or the
modern economy, could have developed, beginning with centralized taxation,
standing armies, social welfare provisions, or international trade and
production of complex goods and services. Thus, modernity, and particularly
high modernity, was characterized by an expansion of control by large
bureaucracies based on massive amounts of information, conceptualizing
people as standardized data-points to be manipulated for their own, or
someone else’s, good. But as long as life was lived in a largely analogue
environment, the comprehensive gathering of data remained such an extremely
labour-intensive affair that only massive bureaucracies were capable of
conducting it, and even highly developed states could do it only once every
ten years. Under such conditions of limited information processing capacity
(as we can see now), the drive to scale up these bureaucracies created
strategies to radically reduce complexity, rendering them rigid and
impersonal.

Yet, during the same period of expanding centralized control, new spaces of
autonomy were created. People, or, more precisely, educated townsmen,
forged a new type of subjectivity. They began to think of themselves less
as members of larger collectives (the guild, the church) and more as
persons individually endowed with capacities, self-responsibility and,
thus, a certain freedom from these collective entities. Central to this new
sense of individuality was the secular notion of an inner life.4 It was
characterized by the innate capacity to reflect and reason. This is,
perhaps, the central notion of the enlightenment which celebrated the
ability ‘to use one’s understanding without guidance from another’, to use
Immanuel Kant’s famous definition (1784). While these capacities were
located in the inner world of the individual, the enlightenment thought of
them as universal. In principle, every man (though not necessarily women)
should reach the same reasoned conclusion, if presented with the same
evidence. Based on this universality of reason, the subject could
justifiably contradict authority and tradition.

The notion of privacy protected this inner world (and by extension, the
home and the family life) from interference by authorities and thus
protected the ability of the person to come to reasoned opinions about the
world. In the liberal conception, this protected inner world provided the
foundation of the ability of each man to form his own opinions to be
exchanged in the public sphere in a rational deliberation of public
affairs.5 This capacity for reasoning, in turn, provided the legitimacy for
the inclusion of these reasoned men (and later women), elevated to the
status of citizens, in governing the state. Indeed, this claim to power was
increasingly regarded as the only legitimate one, superseding tradition as
the main source of authority. Much of the concerns about the loss of
privacy today stems from a commitment to this tradition of liberal
democracy.6

Starting in the late nineteenth century, however, the conception of the
inner world changed radically. With the emergence of consumer capitalism,
personal identity became a project and a problem with an urgency previously
unknown. Inner life was no longer viewed as comprised of a relatively
narrow set of coherent universals, but as an infinite expanse of
conflicting drives and influences, forming a dynamic pattern unique to each
person. Sigmund Freud, as the historian of psychoanalysis Eli Zaretsky
argues, became the leading interpreter of the psychological tensions
triggered by the consumer society.7 The inner world came now to be seen as
the ground on which individual identity (rather than universal reason) was
anchored. Privacy protected the complex, and potentially dangerous
exploration conducted by the individual as he or she tried to come to terms
with the pressures and desires at the core of individuality. If we follow
Zaretsky’s approach of charting the transformation of subjectivities (and
of psychoanalysis as the conceptual framework to articulate one type of it)
alongside the transformations of capitalism, the type of subjectivity
described by Freud started to lose its dominance in the 1960s.

New social movements began to react to the pressures and opportunities
created by yet another transformation, towards what was then called the
post-industrial society and is now called, more accurately, the network
society. Rather than focusing on introspection, the new social movements
promoted a new type of subjectivity emphasizing expressiveness,
communication and connection. At the same time, feminists began to develop
a sustained critique of privacy, understanding family relations not as the
counteracting force to capitalism, but rather as its continuation. Thus,
privacy would not shield from domination, but transfer it from the field of
economics to that of gender relations.8 However, despite the emergence of
these freedom-oriented social movements, hierarchical bureaucracies
remained the dominant form of social organization, and despite the feminist
critique of privacy, it could still function as an important concept to
shield people against the grip of these institutions. In Germany, for
example, popular resistance against the national census (Volkszählung)
arose in the mid 1980s, mainly on grounds of privacy protection against the
preying eyes of the state.


Networked Individualism and Personalized Institutions
-----------------------------------------------------

Fast forward 30 years. Many countries, including Germany, no longer conduct
national censuses because the data has already been collected and can be
aggregated flexibly from the various databases at the heart of government.
An ever growing number of people is willing to actively publish vast
amounts of information about themselves online for everyone to see and is
happily using services that collect very fine-grained data about very
personal affairs. While people still claim to be concerned about privacy
when asked in surveys, their practices seem to indicate that such concerns
have largely vanished in daily life. What happened? Here, I want to focus
on two pieces of this puzzle. The first concerns the transformation of
subjectivity on a mass scale. The second the changing relationships between
individuals and institutions concerning the delivery of personalized,
rather than standardized services.9

First, subjectivity. The values of the social movements of the 1960s,
severed from their political roots, have spread throughout society. They
are now dominant. Flexibility, creativity and expressiveness are regarded
today as generally desirable personal traits, necessary for social success,
and, increasingly, seen as corresponding to the ‘true nature’ of human
beings. As traditional institutions are losing their ability to organize
people’s lives (think of the decline of life-long employment, for example),
people are left to find their own orientation, for better or worse. While
this has often been seen as primarily a negative process of atomization,10
we can now also see new forms of sociability emerge on a mass scale. These
are based on the new infrastructures of communication and (relatively)
cheap transportation to which vast amounts of people have gained access.
But the sociability in this new environment is starkly different from
earlier forms, based largely on physical co-presence. In order to create
sociability in the space of flows people first have to make themselves
visible, that is, they have to create their representation through
expressive acts of communication. In order to connect within such a
network, a person has to be, at the same time, suitably different, that is
creative in some recognizable fashion, and abide by the social conventions
that hold a particular network together. There are both negative and
positive drivers to making oneself visible in such a way: there is the
threat of being invisible, ignored and bypassed, on the one hand, and the
promise of creating a social network really expressing one’s own
individuality, on the other. This creates a particular type of subjectivity
that sociologists have come to call networked individualism. ‘Individuals,’
Manuel Castells notes, ‘do not withdraw into the isolation of virtual
reality. On the contrary, they expand their sociability by using the wealth
of communication networks at their disposal, but they do so selectively,
constructing their cultural worlds in terms of their preferences and
projects, and modifying it according to their personal interests and
values.’11 Since these networks of sociability are horizontal forms of
organization, based on self-selected, voluntary associations, they require
some degree of trust among the people involved. While trust deepens over
the course of interaction, as it always does, there needs to be a minimum
of trust in order to start interacting in the first place. What could be a
chicken-and-egg problem is in practice solved by the availability of the
track record of interests and projects that each person creates by
publishing – as an individual and voluntarily – information about
him/herself, what he or she is interest in, passionate about, and investing
time in. In other words, being expressive – about anything – is the
precondition of creating sociability over communication networks, which, in
turn, come to define people and their ability to create or participate in
projects that reflect their personality.12 This need to express one’s
desires and passions in order to enter into a sociability that creates
one’s identity slowly but surely erodes the distinction between the inner
and outer world, so central to the modern subjectivity, forged in the
Gutenberg Galaxy. Subjectivity is being based on interaction, rather than
introspection. Privacy in the networked context entails less the
possibility to retreat to the core of one’s personality, to the true self,
but more the danger of disconnection from a world in which sociability is
tenuous and needs to be actively maintained all of the time. Otherwise, the
network simply reconfigures itself, depriving one of the ability to develop
one’s personality and life.

Second, large institutions. One of the progressive promises of the modern
liberal state, and modern bureaucratic institutions in general, was to do
away with privilege and treat everyone equally, based on the premise that
no one is above (or below) the law and that all decisions are taken in
accordance to the law (or, more generally, written procedure). Rigidity and
impersonality have long been defined as core features of bureaucracies. Max
Weber, at the beginning of the twentieth century when bureaucracies grew to
an unprecedented scale, famously feared that their superior rationality
would force society into an iron cage. Today, such impersonality is seen
neither as a liberation from the injustices of privilege nor as rational,
but as the dead hand of bureaucracy. Because, neoliberal ideology holds, we
are not equal, but each unique. This creates both a push and a pull
profoundly transforming the relationships between institutions and
individuals. Even very large institutions are faced with demands to treat
everyone individually. This is best visible in new institutions that have
had to contend with these demands since their inception. The corporations
that make up Web 2.0 are all about personalization, recommendations and
individualized results. For that, they demand vast amounts of personal
data, either directly provided by the user (by filling out registration
forms, uploading personal contact lists and calendars, designating
favourites and exchange partners) or indirectly collected (through log-
analysis, processing of user histories, etcetera). Google, of course, is
the most ambitious in this area, but in principle, it’s not different from
other Internet companies.13 But this is not an isolated development in one
sector, but symptomatic for the uneven transformation of the economy as a
whole. On the level of manufacturing, this is expressed in the shift from
the Fordist model of standardized mass production to a networked model of
highly flexible production for precisely defined niches, all the way down
to the size of one. On the level of services, this is expressed in the
shift towards the delivery of personalized services. Virtually all
consumer-oriented industries and services are today employing customer-
relationship management (CRM) vastly increasing the amounts of personal
data collected across the board, allowing the delivery of highly targeted
products and services. Of course, there is also a very strong pull by the
corporations themselves to learn as much as possible about their
customers/users, in order to fine-tune each relationship to maximize
profit. There seems to be an implicit deal, accepted by the vast majority
of consumers/users: in exchange for personal data, one receives personal
service, assuming that personalized is better than standardized. In order
to succeed in such an environment, bureaucracies, even large-scale ones,
strive to become less hierarchical, more flexible and highly personal,
entering into intimate relationships with the people they deal with.


Autonomy and Control
--------------------

The old balance between autonomy and control, represented by the figures of
the citizen and the large bureaucracy, sustained by privacy, is in the
process of disappearing. Autonomy is increasingly created within
(semi)public networks, held together by mass self-communication and more or
less frequent physical encounters.14 New projects to increase autonomy –
that is the ability for people to lead their own lives according to their
own plans – are being created on all scales and with the greatest variety
of definitions of what autonomy actually looks like. What is characteristic
to all of them is that the condition for autonomy is no longer understood
as being rooted in the inner world, withdrawn from the social world, but in
networked projects deeply engaged in the social world. Such projects range
from the global justice campaigns, to the resurgence of local identities,
from loosely coordinated political pressure campaigns to support groups
that help people cope with personal traumas. They can be left-wing or
right-wing, destructive or nurturing. Engagement in such projects is
voluntary and they are held together by common protocols of communication
and based on trust among their participants. Trust, in turn, is enabled by
the horizontal availability of personal information about each other. In
some ways, the dynamics of traditional offline communities – where everyone
knows everyone – are being transported, transformed and scaled-up to new
communities based on online communication. Of course, what ‘knowing a
person’ means is rather different, and often distributed communities are
too large to even superficially ‘know’ or count as a ‘friend’ everyone
involved. Yet, if need be, everyone can be looked up and become suitably
known very quickly, because everyone, voluntarily or involuntarily, leaves
personal traces than can be accessed in real time or after the fact with
great ease. While this, in itself, is not an entirely unproblematic
condition – what about the freedom to have certain acts fade from memory?15
– it provides the basis for the rise of new voluntary associations. This
can help to increase real autonomy of people, because it is focused on
creating inter-personal worlds in which autonomy can be lived on a daily
basis, even if its extends only to some fraction of one’s life.

More problematic is the shift towards personalized institutions. With the
rising complexity of the services delivered, personalization does have its
benefits and the dead hand of bureaucratic formalism often can be, indeed,
rather deadly. Yet, personalization also increases the power and control
that such institutions can exercise, rather than the opposite. All the
knowledge that goes into framing the character of the personalization
resides at the end of the corporation that gets an ever increasing range of
tools to fine-tune each relationship to optimize the pursuit of its own
interests (usually profit maximization). As long as the actions of the
user/customer are aligned with those of the corporation, they are supported
and amplified through the granting of privileges, such as discounts, extra
features and opportunities, faster delivery, and so on. However, as soon as
the actions are no longer aligned (because they are hostile or not
profitable), personalization turns into discrimination, based on whatever
mechanisms are programmed into the underlying algorithms.16 For the user,
confronted with subtle, entirely opaque and unaccountable decision-making
mechanisms, it is nearly impossible to tell if one is being privileged or
discriminated. There is no more standard against which this can be
measured.

Thus, the possibilities to create meaningful autonomy are being expanded
through voluntary, horizontal associations that directly express their
members’ interests and desires. At the same time and through the same
infrastructure, the return of privileges and discrimination expands the
ability of institutions to subtly or overtly shape other people’s lives
according to their agendas. Thus, we can observe a structural
transformation of the conditions for autonomy as well as the practices of
control. Privacy no longer serves to mediate between them. What should
replace it are two things. New strategies for connective opacity extending
both horizontally – modulating what those outside a particular network can
see of what is going on inside – and vertically – modulating what the
providers of the infrastructure can see of the sociability they enable. In
a way, this can be seen as privacy 2.0, but it takes as its unit not the
individual, but an entire social network. But that is not enough. We also
need mandatory transparency of the protocols, algorithms and procedures
that personalize the behaviour of these newly flexible bureaucracies, so
that the conditions of discrimination can be contested.


1. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in
American Business (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1977).

2. Quoted in: James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale: Yale University Press,
1998), 11.

3. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic
Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1986).

4. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

5. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger
with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989
*).

6. See, for example, Wolfgang Sofsky, Privacy: A Manifesto, translated by
Steven Rendall (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008),
or, if you read German, Beate Rössler, Der Wert des Privaten (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2002).

7. Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of
Psychoanalysis (New York: Vintage, 2005).

8. Catherine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

9. I have addressed the role of the preventive security regimes elsewhere.
Felix Stalder, ‘Bourgeois Anarchism and Authoritarian Democracies’, First
Monday, vol. 13 (2008) no. 7 (July).

10. The classic here is: Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and
Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster,
2000). A recent addition to this perspective: Jacqueline Olds and Richard
S. Schwartz, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first
Century (New York: Beacon Press, 2009).

11. Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 121.

12. Christophe Aguiton and Dominique Cardon, ‘The Strength of Weak
Cooperation: An Attempt to Understand the Meaning of Web 2.0’,
Communications & Strategies, no. 65 (2007).

13. For an analysis of Google’s comprehensive data-gathering strategy, see
Felix Stalder and Christine Mayer, ‘The Second Index: Search Engines,
Personalization and Surveillance’, in: Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder
(eds.), Deep Search: The Politics of Search beyond Google (Innsbruck/New
Jersey: Studienverlag/Transaction Publishers, 2009), 98-116.

14. For the relationship between communication and travel, see Jonas
Larsen, John Urry and Kay Axhausen, Mobilities, Networks, Geographies
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

15. Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the
Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

16. David Lyon (ed.), Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and
Automated Discrimination (London/New York: Routledge, 2003).


-> http://felix.openflows.com/node/143









--- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------- books out now:
*|Deep Search.The Politics of Search Beyond Google.Studienverlag 2009
*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005


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