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A Litmus Test for Humanistic Technology Critics

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Sacasas has a pair of posts on his blog on the possibilities of a humanistic critique of technology, both partly wrestling with Evgeny Morozov’s frustrations with critics who comment on such things as the dehumanizing effects of technology while ignoring fundamental political and economic questions that might lead them to adopt more radical political positions.

Morozov’s complaints about the sad state of technology criticism were part of a review of Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage, and so Carr became the front man for this tendency, which also includes other critics like Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen and Sherry Turkle. We shouldn’t ignore the fact that Morozov targeted himself and his earlier writings for the same tendency, but all the same, he made a seemingly outrageous claim about these other writers: “technology criticism, uncoupled from any radical project of social transformation, simply doesn’t have the goods.” Without an emancipatory vision, it is ineffective, conservative, superficial and irrelevant.

This was rather easily demolished by Carr by accusing him of dogmatism. Morozov appears to be demanding a litmus test where only criticism grounded in radical left politics is permitted. It’s a devastating allegation, and to my knowledge he has never responded. That Morozov’s argument is indefensible seems beyond dispute, so it is significant that Sacacas spends so much time engaging with it and trying to make space for a humanistic critique. Why not dismiss it as doctrinaire and move on?

It’s time for me to lay my cards on the table. I’m very much in agreement with Morozov’s point that all of the issues around technology that we debate are fundamentally political. I’d even go so far as to endorse the dreaded political litmus test, but in a kind of inverted way.

Let’s paraphrase his argument: “A true critic of technology is politically radical.” There are two possible meanings to this sentence. First, the litmus test: there are critics, and we can tell the true from the false by whether they are politically radical. The second possible interpretation is the way that I would read it: there are critics, and how can we tell if they are political radicals? By whether their critiques are true. Precisely because as Morozov says, economic and political questions undergird all technology issues, if a critic writes insightfully and exposes something fundamental about them, then they are engaged in a politically radical project even if they themselves are unaware of it.

One good example is perhaps Morozov himself. His leftist tendencies have only recently become clear. Working at the George Soros-funded non-profit Transitions Online and enthusiastic about the potential for technology to reform authoritarian governments, he had different, more mainstream liberal progressive views. What radicalized him? One suspects it was his growing awareness of the dangers of solutionism, internet centrism and cyber-utopianism. Nicholas Carr seems to have moved further to the left. As far as I know, Andrew Keen was quite right wing, but in listening to the debate Is Smart Technology Making Us Dumb? (a question that, admittedly, proves Morozov’s point about the superficiality of this style of critique), it became quite clear to me that his views have also changed.

Morozov’s outrageous litmus test can only be saved by inverting it and reading it through Slavoj Zizek’s maxim ‘class struggle is the Real’:

Class struggle is ‘real’ in the strict Lacanian sense: a ‘hitch’, an impediment which gives rise to ever-new symbolizations by means of which one endeavours to integrate and domesticate it (the corporatist translation-displacement of class struggle into the organic articulation of the ‘members’ of the ‘social body’, for example) but which simultaneously condemns these endeavours to ultimate failure. Class struggle is none other than the name for the unfathomable limit that cannot be objectivized, located within the social totality, since it is itself that limit which prevents us from conceiving society as a closed totality.

The thrust of the argument in Morozov’s review of The Glass Cage could be neatly summarized by paraphrasing Marx: a spectre is haunting technology critics—the spectre of radical politics. Technology criticism is haunted by the ghostly apparition of radical politics, and critics attempt to integrate and domesticate it through recourse to various ideological constructions—humanism, romanticism, conservatism, etc. But these are condemned to failure; they distort and mystify rather than getting at the root of the issue. Morozov denounces critics for this failure, but maybe he should be celebrating it because it indicates that they are still haunted by the unsymbolized spectre of radical politics.

The failure of The Glass Cage, as I noted in my review, is that Carr’s humanistic framework for analyzing the impacts of automation isn’t coherent. Carr claims that the design of automated systems to minimize the intervention of human users, leading to automation complacency and bias, is driven by a technofetishistic philosophy that privileges technology over humanity. It sounds plausible, but he doesn’t provide any evidence that this is in fact the rationale. Why not consider other motivations, like a profit-driven demand to reduce labor costs, or even a human-centered desire to relieve users of burdensome manual labor?

Morozov is right when he says:

“[critics] treat manufacturers of those objects as imaginary, theoretical constructs. They are “imaginary” and “theoretical” inasmuch as their rationale is imposed on them by the explanatory limitations of technology criticism rather than grasped ethnographically or analytically.

Sacacas falls into this trap in this paragraph:

A not insubstantial element within the culture that drives technological development is animated by what can only be described as a thoroughgoing disgust with the human condition, particularly its embodied nature. Whether we credit the wildest dreams of the Singulatarians, Extropians, and Post-humanists or not, their disdain as it finds expression in a posture toward technological power is reason enough for technology critics to strive for a humanist critique that acknowledges and celebrates the limitations inherent in our frail, yet wondrous humanity.

I’ve worked for over 10 years in the technology industry, including in Silicon Valley, and I’ve never worked with or even met a Singularitarian. There are many debates and disagreements about how to design the technologies we build, but I have yet to work with anyone who I felt was motivated by a disgust with the human condition.

What Sacacas describes as a “not insubstantial element within the culture that drives technological development” bears no resemblance to my experience of that culture. I might be missing something, but Sacacas doesn’t offer evidence or cite any sources for his claim. What I have found is that many software developers left to themselves will design overly complex, feature-packed systems that are poorly suited to users’ needs and contexts of use. Why do they do this? Not because they want to replace humanity with machines, but because they design for themselves and their own priorities. Technophilia manifests as a desire for control, mastery and understanding of technology; they want an Arduino, not an iPad.

It’s why the Internet of Things is about networked light bulbs and reading Twitter on your fridge—it’s about saying “Look what I can make it do” more than addressing a need or solving a problem that people have. At worst, they are uninterested in the social impact of the technologies they build. If technologists were truly motivated by a belief in the inferiority of humans, they would build things that demonstrate that. Instead, we get devices which tell you when your lawn needs to be mowed and apps that let you chat with your washing machine.

When they do try to remove human intervention from systems, it’s usually because they just think autonomous machines are cool, not because they disdain human frailty. But this is actually uncommon. A typical software developer is much more likely to offer too much flexibility, control and information rather than not enough, to the point of overtaxing and overwhelming people who don’t share their fascination with technology.

The irony of The Glass Cage is that Carr thinks his demand for greater human control and mastery over technology is a challenge to the technophilic worldview when in fact, it is an argument in its favor. He misconstrues his own position because he assumes from the outset that any negative consequences of technology come from some lack of appreciation for humanity.

Humanism and human-centric have thus become empty signifiers. A common humanistic critique says that when we are obliged to learn and master a machine, we become subordinated to its logic; we become machine-like and lose part of our humanity. Carr’s complaint is almost the opposite: when automation deprives us of integration with the machine, we lose part of our humanity. Both of these claims begin from reality: the factory assembly line enforces a kind of machine-like repetitiveness on human action; autopilot systems deskill human pilots. But elevating them into paradigmatic examples of a general antagonism between the Human and the Machine creates opposite claims, and this suggests that there is no underlying human or machinic essence on which to base a humanistic critique.

Political economy offers a simpler, more intellectually satisfying and coherent explanation for why technologies have developed in this way: using automation to eliminate labor costs is a time-honored method for improving profits. As Morozov points out, Carr’s humanistic approach mystifies and obscures the true causes. It also distorts Carr’s own thinking.

Sacacas describes technology critics in this way:

The libertarian critic, the Marxist critic, the Roman Catholic critic, the posthumanist critic, and so on — each advances their criticism of technology informed by their ethical commitments. Their criticism of technology flows from their loves. Each criticizes technology according to the larger moral and ethical framework implied by the movements, philosophies, and institutions that have shaped their identity.

Morozov confirms this analysis by setting his radical emancipatory politics in opposition to other critics’ romanticism and conservatism. It implies that we begin with ethical frameworks and by looking at technology through these various lenses, certain problems are exposed. But is that how it works? Morozov, Carr, Keen, Turkle and Lanier were all once enthusiastic about the potential of technology to positively transform society. It seems to me that the more common path was that these writers began to sense the problems, false promises, tensions and antagonisms around technology, and then began to search for or create frameworks through which their concerns could be expressed.

Thus, Morozov’s real frustration is not that he is against romanticism and conservatism because he is a committed radical. It is that radical left politics is the only option that works, the only framework that has any hope of getting to the root of the issue and challenging Silicon Valley’s power.

Sacacas gives us five principles for a humanistic critique of technology, but doesn’t really offer a plan for how these might be put into practice. This might be an unfair expectation for a blog post, but it isn’t for someone like Jaron Lanier. How do these humanistic ideals about technology carry forward to application? Writers in this genre seem to assume that they are engaging in a dialog with technologists. In my experience, no such dialog is occuring, despite all of the books, TED talks and editorials. These are ignored by the people they ostensibly challenge.

Perhaps this explains why Sacacas imagines Singularitarians and Posthumanists as his interlocuters. These are a group of people who do engage in the kind of deliberative, philosophical thinking about technology and may be open to hearing a humanistic critique. However, I would argue that their influence over the direction of modern technology is marginal. For those interested in a purely theoretical debate, that may not matter, and that’s fine.

In practice, technologists have little interest in listening to these ideas and are mostly unaware the issues are even being debated. But let’s suppose that somehow you could get them to listen. Sacasas treats these ideals as separable from political economy, but in fact the main obstacles to implementing them are financial, and the question of how to make sure these ideals aren’t trumped by the profit motive is left unanswered. A political critique of technology doesn’t suffer from these drawbacks. It has an audience and a means for implementing its ideas: political action.

We ought not to have a litmus test that demands fealty to a particular political viewpoint. But if you have an intuition that technology is having a negative impact on society, by seeking out intellectually satisfying, consistent and coherent explanations that make an impact on the world, you will probably find yourself further to the left than where you started. The only litmus test needed is intellectual honesty, insight, coherence and a desire to get at the truth.

Mother Teresa's Ferrari

Sun, 28 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

What if Mother Teresa drove a Ferrari? That’s the premise of an essay by D. A. Wallach (“recording artist, investor, artist in residence @ Spotify”) to support his claim that compassionate capitalism is a scam. I’ve thought a great deal about compassionate capitalism and its many synonyms (social entrepreneurship, profit with a purpose, conscious capitalism, etc.), what it means and how we who are critical of it ought to respond. The possibility raised by the essay, that people are improperly playing up their association with charity to get rich, hadn’t escaped me. It’s obvious line of critique that undoubtably resonates with many readers.

For all the effort devoted to critical thinkpieces and takedowns across so many domains in society, politics, technology, culture and economy, a great deal of this writing seems to lack any new insights, frameworks for understanding or perspective. It’s tempting to chalk this up to lazy writers, but a more charitable possibility is that these writers just want to “have an impact”. And if your goal is to galvanize the public into action, to provoke them into opposition to, for example, compassionate capitalism, the surest way is to frame your argument to appeal to values that are widely held among your audience. If compassionate capitalism contravenes these values, it will presumably generate outrage, calls for reform, boycotts, and other forms of activism, and you as a writer can feel good knowing that you are making a difference.

However, if you as an opponent of compassionate capitalism can identify an obvious value among the public that would encourage their opposition, you can be fairly certain that proponents of compassionate capitalism have also identified it, and are well prepared with counter arguments. So although it might generate a great deal of activity and debate, the final outcome is foreordained.

For this reason, Wallach’s Mother Teresa’s Ferrari metaphor is at once persuasive and ineffective. On one hand, it resonates strongly. Researchers at Yale have demonstrated the so-called tainted-altruism effect: when someone performs an altruistic act from which they also profit, observers evaluate them more negatively than if they had acted purely out of self-interest. The researchers hypothesize that when someone raises money for the poor and then buys a Ferrari with a portion of it, it raises counterfactual questions. We tend to ask how much more they could have done had they bought more modest car. But these kinds of questions don’t arise if they got the money for the car by betting on the stock market.

The normative logic of altruism demands pure motivations. Mixed motivations are punished more harshly than selfishness. This is probably inherited from the Christian view that an individual’s acts of kindness and generosity are vehicles through which God expresses agape (unconditional love) for humanity. It follows that the encroachment of selfish motivations into altruistic acts can only be a corruption of the purity of God’s grace. However, the theological origin of Wallach’s argument is obscured and we’re left with a simple, gut-level, common sense argument: if Mother Teresa drove a Ferrari, it would bother us.

It’s compelling in its own way. The idea of a nun driving a luxury sports car seems quite strange, maybe the set up to some kind of absurd joke. But compassionate capitalists have a response at the ready: doesn’t this social convention limit the amount of good that can be done in the world? Does it really make sense to be more forgiving of someone who bought a Ferrari through stock market speculation than someone who did it by giving millions to the poor? Only a theologian would suggest otherwise.

It is certainly true, as Wallach claims, that the popularity of compassionate capitalism grew considerably after the reputation of the regular brand took a hit in the 2008 recession. Entrepreneurs and CEOs prefixed themselves with socially conscious adjectives to restore the moral legitimacy of their enterprises and let the public know they weren’t motivated by the greed and egotism that purportedly caused the crisis. But even before 2008, founders of non-profits debated whether they could scale their efforts and better achieve their social and environmental missions by doing what had hitherto been unthinkable: becoming for-profit companies and taking investments from venture capitalists, hedge funds, and the like.

The problem was how to prevent the profit imperatives from investors from crowding out or corrupting the altruistic mission. To address these pressures, the idea of mission-based business, social enterprise and the benefit corporation were created. This new way of thinking about non-profit work blurs the line between profit and altruism. It quantifies how much good a non-profit is doing, compares that with what they could do if they were a for-profit, and finds that Column B tends to be larger than Column A. But this consequentialist calculus favoring for-profit status is at odds with the public’s virtue-based approach that demands pure motivations.

The rhetoric of compassionate capitalism seeks to remove the traditional wall between altruism and egotism, allowing non-profits to become more like conventional businesses without hurting their “brand equity” as charitable endeavors. Former employees of non-profits can work for for-profit employers without feeling like they’re abandoning their idealism. But the concept permits movement in the opposite direction as well. For-profits now highlight their charitable efforts using language and marketing originally created to give moral cover to former non-profits.

What’s wrong with that? Criticism of charitable giving as a way of solving social problems inevitably runs into this objection: “But isn’t it better than doing nothing?” It’s not easy to dispute this logic. Wallach’s nun-driving-a-Ferrari scenario seems like a strong rebuke of what are effectively for-profit charities. However, it leads us into counterfactual thinking that quantifies the total amount of altruism, and this standard favors compassionate capitalism. You can probably get more “altruism” (or a reasonable facsimile) by incentivizing it.

Wallach points to an incongruity between the entrepreneur’s greed and excess compared with the deprivation of those he or she purports to help. But here, compassionate capitalists have an interesting response: profits aren’t used to satisfy greed, they’re reinvested to grow the business or to create new enterprises. What’s interesting about this is that it’s a generic statement about how capitalism works, but it’s invoked as if it’s a distinctive feature of compassionate capitalism.

Why does this happen? The critique of greed conjures up Wolf of Wall Street scenes of debauchery, excess and crime as its extreme manifestation. These are reliable sources of outrage, but as Marx knew, profits aren’t usually consumed in lavish parties. Instead, they are reinvested to produce more capital. The emphasis on greed mischaracterizes the nature of capitalism, and in an abstract debate about whether capitalism is good or not, it would be rejected by its defenders as inaccurate and unfair. But the socially conscious entrepreneur concedes this caricature and then claims “But I have created a new, more compassionate version!” And what is this new version? Simply capitalism as it has always been practiced, but now with an aura of virtue and progress for seeming to have reformed itself.

Charity, especially in its “impact-driven” mode, quantifies suffering and attempts to ameliorate it—this is a serious defect. If looking out at the world, we observe that there are many people in poverty, we should not respond by aiming for a little less. Even the goal of reducing the number to zero is suspect. The true long term objective is to make poverty impossible, even unthinkable, and to reconstruct society to make this so.

I’m not so cold-hearted as to disregard the real, quantifiable impact that charities have on people all around the world: diseases cured, meals served, wells dug, families lifted out of poverty. But non-profits (and compassionate capitalists) must also be measured by whether they are making progress towards the long-term strategic objective.

Non-profits typically don’t fare well when evaluated this way. In the US, 36% of charitable giving comes from families with a net worth under $1 million. The remainder comes from bequests, foundations, corporations and high net-worth families. Because their funding is so heavily dependent on powerful segments of society, charities avoid encouraging or supporting political activities which might threaten their wealthy benefactors. They often present social problems in ways that make elites feel good about doing a little something rather than pointing out how they are ultimately benefiting from them.

Non-profits often achieve short term quantifiable objectives that have an immediate impact—the ethical equivalent of the quarterly earnings report—but efforts toward achieving the long term objective have fallen short. In some cases, non-profits mystify and obscure the causes of the problems to avoid upsetting donors, so they may be even making things a little worse. “But isn’t it better than doing nothing?” Let’s concede that even if the strategic mission has been all but abandoned, at least they’re doing something.

But what about compassionate companies like Tom’s or Starbucks who donate a portion of their revenue to worthy causes? It’s doubtful that shifting a portion of our consumer spending to socially responsible companies who donate on our behalf will meaningful impact a problem like global poverty. Is it better than nothing? One could say that we have to start somewhere, every little bit counts and a journey of a thousand miles begins with a small step. This is the logic of quantification, where there are billions of people in poverty, and every reduction is good regardless of how it was achieved.

But the long term goal of reconstructing our world to make poverty impossible can’t be achieved that way. In fact, compassionate capitalism moves us backwards. By blurring the lines between altruism and self-interest, its advocates restore the moral legitimacy of capitalism and restore the public’s faith in it while in large part, it continues to distribute misery and suffering around the globe. Even if its philanthropic efforts are genuine and sincere, capitalism practiced out of compassion is worse than the self-interested version because it weakens our ability to address the root causes of pressing social problems.

Giving Offense: On Comedy & Political Correctness

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The renewed culture of political correctness is making us all watch our words—especially our jokes. Some liberals and many comedians see this trend as a descent into neurotic hypersensitivity, while others see it as a positive step toward making American culture more respectful and empathetic to marginalized groups. Having lived outside of the US for more than half of my life, my sense is that American culture—perhaps also Canadian culture—already stigmatizes jokes and offhand remarks related to ethnicity or gender, at least far more so than most other countries.

Relative to the rest of the world, we are one of the leaders in avoiding offending minorities, but this achievement hasn’t stopped us from tolerating high racial disparities in all sorts of important social and economic indicators in education, health, criminal justice, poverty, etc. So for me, the link between racial humor and negative outcomes for minorities intuitively doesn’t seem strong.

Outside the US, many people don’t appreciate racial humor, but it’s taken much less seriously and it’s not unusual to hear it in mainstream media outlets. South African comedian Trevor Noah discovered this cultural difference when some of his old ethnic and gender jokes were unearthed on Twitter shortly after he was named the new Daily Show host. For a US audience, these jokes were deeply offensive, racist, anti-semitic, misogynistic, etc.

In a non-US context, they probably would have been read as irreverent or insolent at worst, and that creates a lot of complications when trying to answer questions about moral objectivity, whether Trevor Noah is a bigot, whether he did anything wrong, and whether he ought to apologize. I won’t try to answer these, or try to argue that we should or should not be offended by racial humor. The purpose of this article is to show how prohibitions against giving offense are deeply ambiguous. There is a dialectical relationship between prohibitions and what they purport to prevent: on one hand, they create negative social consequences for being disrespectful, but at the same time, disrespect is only possible because of them.

Words that give offense often can’t be directly translated. Some vivid examples come from Quebec French, where words related to Catholicism are used as profanities. If a Quebecois called you un tabarnak, you’d probably be more confused than offended, and knowing that the word means a tabernacle would bring you no closer to understanding how the speaker feels about you.

The English system of profanity is largely rooted in bodily functions, so Quebecois insults with religious associations like tabernacle, baptism, sacrament, Calvary, etc. sound innocuous to our ears. We react viscerally and automatically to offensive words in our own language, so it can even be hard to believe that these words could ever carry an offensive connotation.

In contrast, we have no trouble believing that the word un vélo means a bicycle to a French speaker because it conforms to our commonsense understanding of a word as an arbitrary set of syllables which point to an underlying meaning. If both bike and bicycle can refer to the same thing, why not also vélo? But unlike these conventional words, profanities are not interchangeable with their ostensible synonyms, as in shit, poop and feces which differ in the degree of offensiveness even though they all refer to the same thing.

So profanities are not treated as arbitrary signifiers pointing at something disgusting or reprehensible. For a given word, a particular set of letters (or syllables) in a particular configuration is offensive in and of itself. That is why words that become substitutes for profanities share the same sound or spelling, but not their meaning—e.g. shiz, fudge, gosh, darn, heck, etc.

One could almost say that profanities get their synonyms from the dictionary rather than the thesaurus—you simply take the word that follows the profanity alphabetically. This logic can be observed most clearly in controversies over the use of the word niggardly (“adj. not generous; stingy”) which is sometimes understood as the much more offense word which immediately follows it in the dictionary.

Other substitions like n-word and f-word which effectively mean the word that begins with n/f further demonstrate the point: prohibitions against offensive words aren’t aimed at particular meanings or intentions, but surprisingly, operate at a more basic level. Politeness in fact prohibits specific letter combinations or sounds, much as Jewish and Christian traditions prohibit writing or pronouncing the name of God.

In What Did You Call Me? Slurs as Prohibited Words, philosophers of language Luvell Anderson and Ernie Lapore reverse the commonsense belief that slurs are prohibited because they are offensive. They argue to the contrary that slurs are offensive because they are prohibited, a move which evokes the Lacanian link between the Law and its transgression. Far from simply repressing what it prohibits, the Law solicits its own transgression. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan quotes this passage from Paul in the Book of Romans:

I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead.

So the prohibition on the use of ethnic slurs and other kinds of profanity exists precisely so that we may derogate others, not to prevent us from doing so. A slur is hurtful because it implies that the target is undeserving of the dignity and protection of polite treatment, and yet this harm would be impossible without the existence of such protections. The more strictly the prohibition is observed, the more exceptional and humiliating is its violation.

Such logic is clearly at work in the development of Quebecois profanities, which began to be used in the 19th century during a period of oppression by the Catholic Church. Contrary to intuition, these words weren’t created when church authorities prohibited the use of certain phrases and rebellious Quebecois disobeyed as a sign of their disrespect. In France and other francophone countries, these words have no obscene connotations. They’re perfectly acceptable in polite conversation and formal religious ceremonies. They are only considered vulgar by Quebecois, but clearly the prohibition on uttering them in polite company is not intended to protect the dignity of the Catholic religion—just the opposite.

Put differently, those who use prohibited words give offense, but those who are careful to avoid using prohibited words are also complicit. By respecting the boundary between polite and impolite speech, they create the conditions needed to cause offense. Words become degrading, disrespectful and dehumanizing precisely because of our desire to be virtuous and avoid using those words.

Since the prohibition against giving offense produces what it purports to outlaw, it suggests that in countries where racial, ethnic and gender humor are more acceptable, these forms of humor are less hurtful to minorities. It also suggests that the progressive approach to fighting prejudice, bigotry and intolerance is deeply and fatally flawed. These social problems are implicitly treated as ignorant or backwards, as forms of primitive barbarism and savagery that good, kind, enlightened people must suppress with social stigmas, rules and punishments for transgressions.

Although conservatives attempt to tie political correctness to “cultural Marxism”, by linking social problems to our “base, primitive instincts” which must be controlled and civilized through repression, its intellectual heritage can be more easily traced to the 19th century, to the social purity movement, the social hygiene movement, the racial hygiene movement, scientific racism and degeneration theory. In Western countries, much of the thinking of the era was gripped by fears of social decline and descent into barbarism. Many were convinced that progress was achieved through suppression of various forms of savagery, and although there were many different interpretations of what was “savage”, a wide variety of ideas were articulated within this basic template including Nazism, colonialism and eugenics.

Comedy has a long association as a primitive art form going back to the ancient Greeks. Plato believed that it should be reserved only for slaves and outsiders. No wonder that it has become a target for reformers who view it as a sphere where the public indulges in transgressive, barbaric forms of enjoyment. For these reformers, the truth of humanity is that we are primitive animals except for the saving graces of civilized society, which disciplines, corrects and instructs us in the ways of proper behavior. Dignity, humanity, civilization—these are polite fictions which conceal an ugly truth, but the fiction must be maintained if it is to be effective as a form of social control.

Comedians typically have a different view of society, humanity and the truth. They see themselves as truth-tellers, pointing out corruption which society is not willing to admit to. “You Laugh But Its True” is the title of the documentary about Trevor Noah. For social reformers, progress is achieved by suppressing transgression, a self-defeating effort which only produces more transgression. For comedians, is it just the opposite.

What Critics Misunderstand About Overparenting

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Compared to the way that kids were raised in decades past, it is far less common for today’s parents to allow their children the freedom to wander the neighborhood or use public transit unsupervised. Many commentators account for this new norm by reflexively blaming the media for stoking parents’ fears with sensationalist accounts of children in peril. But in their search for causes, critics of this phenomenon have failed consider the impact of the social and legal scrutiny that parents face.

Critics charge that children are spoiled, sheltered, showered them with unearned praise, protected from every source of pain and discomfort to the point that they never get the chance to experience any challenges and develop self-reliance and independence. They believe that children should be given the chance to climb trees, walk home alone from school, take public transit unattended and otherwise take risks, make mistakes and encounter small amounts of danger in life.

Who could possibly disagree? It’s true that American society tends to view children as profoundly vulnerable and in need of protection, and for many critics, this tendency is exemplified by parents’ exaggerated fears of stranger abductions. But even a cursory review of the legal and governmental infrastructure dedicated to child welfare reveals a society that overwhelmingly believes that the primary threat to children is their parents.

With the exception of drug users, parents are one of the few groups that has local, state and federal agencies dedicated to monitoring and controlling their behavior inside their homes. And when the US ratifies the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, parental actions will also fall under the supervision of international law the moment they welcome their bundles of joy into the world.

The modern child welfare legal regime begins with the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act which created a federal mandate for states to establish child protective services agencies. This legislation emerged after an explosion of public interest and media of the issue of child neglect and abuse in the 1960s, driven partly by reports physicians who treated children for ailments that could only be explained as the result of abuse by parents and caregivers.

In reaction to what has been portrayed as an epidemic, members of the general public are hypervigilant to any possible hint that parents are abusive and eager to do their civic duty by reporting parents to child protective services. According to statistics kept by the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau, of the 498,000 reports of suspected child maltreatment made by non-professional reporters in 2003, only 22% were substantiated by child protection agencies. (The substantiation rate for reporters like education, medical, mental health, social services and law enforcement personnel was higher, at 37%).

The evidentiary standards to substantiate findings of child maltreatment should also be noted. According to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, 15 states require a “preponderance of evidence” to substantiate a report, a standard which is satisifed if there is a 50% or greater chance that the claim is true. In 15 other states, the standard is even lower.

The moral case for aggressively combatting child maltreatment is obviously compelling, and collectively, we have decided that the benefit of rescuing children from abuse is worth the trade-off of some false accusations and parents incorrectly judged to be neglectful.

Many social workers believe that prevention of child neglect through adequate mental health services and poverty relief is more effective than punishment, but let’s assume for the time being that we have judged well.

In a society ever watchful for traces of their abuse and neglect, we shouldn’t be surprised if parents absorb the message and learn to reflect this same hypervigilance. If parents worry over child predators and abduction, it is not so much because the media exaggerates stranger danger, although that plays some role. It is because the intense public and legal scrutiny of parents’ behavior has established the principle that paranoia is the gold standard of guardianship.

Some parents may agree that this principle is sound. Others, like free range parents, may not. But all must obey it, or risk the scarlet letter of neglect and the intervention of police and child protective services.

The problems of so-called overparenting are frequently portrayed as a kind of harm done to children. Some critics even view it as a form of child abuse—there’s a deep perversity to these claims. Overparenting is a product of a society that demands from parents excessive demonstrations of concern for child welfare to prove they aren’t a danger to their children. But now with these critiques of so-called overparenting, these very same demonstrations are turned into indicators of parental pathology and evidence of child abuse. By making parents into the primary actors driving this phenomenon, critics of overparenting inadvertently feed the very paranoia they claim to oppose.

Altruism, or: The Ultimate Asshole Move

Thu, 12 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Long-time friend of the blog Duff McDuffee wrote a post for the spirituality journal Elephant on the way that ethical principles are advertised by highlighting the supposed instrumental benefits of following them. For example, “compassion and altruism are the key to low inflammation and even a longer life.”

Duff rightly points out that appealing to such selfish motives for doing good is self-contradictory. Compassion and altruism are good because they demonstrate a concern with the well-being of others. Emphasizing how one can personally benefit from compassion fails to challenge the primacy of self-interest as a guide for action, perhaps leading to a society of selfishness and moral decay even while encouraging an ersatz concern for others.

I found this passage quite striking:

Bizarrely, people are more comfortable in our society claiming that the good they do is for their own benefit than admitting the truth—that they actually care about others and want to live a good and noble life.

Peter Singer notes this in his book The Life You Can Save when he talks about individuals who live incredibly selfless lives. One man, when asked why he does his heroic deeds says that’s it’s just “how he gets his kicks,” as if his heroism is morally equivalent to watching television, just something he does for entertainment. But his sacrifices clearly indicate that this is not true: this man’s motivations for helping others ceaselessly cannot possibly be primarily for his own benefit.

The truth is, it is uncool to care.

It is so uncool to care that people who have dedicated their lives to caring for others will actually lie about their selfless motives, as if to protect themselves from being nailed to a cross if word got out. Selfish motives on the other hand are 100% socially acceptable.

Duff’s post is fundamentally about the relationship between egoism and altruism. People who say that altruism is the key to low inflammation are arguing that there’s no conflict between selflessness and selfishness. In my reading, Duff believes that they can’t fully be reconciled. Even if there are situations when the two coincide, at some point, concern for others requires us to sacrifice our self-interest.

This all seems persuasive as far as it goes, but I think the bizzare scenario Duff mentions, of refusing to admit that one is acting out of altruism, somewhat complicates the picture he paints of society. Although I agree in general that we live in a society that prizes egoism, individualism and self-interest, I think its inaccurate to say that members of society are basically immoral and unconcerned with the well-being of others. I would argue instead that the case of individuals refusing to admit to altruism suggests that, in an egoistic society, the way that we understand care for others is modulated by egoistic assumptions.

In general, we follow the principle of moral impartiality: if you act altruistically towards me, then you can expect me to act altruistically towards you. So your altruistic act imposes a social duty on me: out of fairness, I am obliged to return your kindness, or I risk being seen as exploiting you.

Some people don’t want that obligation. Although it sounds strange, we must entertain the idea that some people don’t want to be treated with very much altruism because they don’t want the social duty that comes with it. A selfish (but fair) person not only refuses to act altruistically—they also refuse to receive altruism.

Furthermore, it could be argued that your altruistic acts are ultimately coercive. In order to treat you fairly, I’m forced to give up my self-interest—so aren’t you basically being an asshole by being so compassionate? As Duff points out, selfishness is socially acceptable, which suggests that unselfishness is socially unacceptable. I’d only add that it can even seen as socially transgressive.

This problem is resolved by claiming that your kindness is really out of self-interest. The principle of impartiality implies that I should also follow my self-interest. You get your kicks by being a good person, I might get them by being a selfish person, and that’s fine—your ethical choice doesn’t impose a duty on me to respond the same way.

In an egoistic society, ethics and even altruism still exists: as respect for the other’s right to selfishness. By acting selfishly yourself (or at least claiming to), you free others of social duties which limit their selfishness. Today’s ethical choice is whether to be a compassionate asshole or a selfish good person. This paradox is the result of a mundane fact: that the social order and any moral system never perfectly coincide.

True Sharing

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

One distinctive feature of the sharing economy is its communitarian marketing. Startups claim they support community, create genuine friendships, overcome social alienation, foster intimacy among strangers and so on. Some critics view these as lies or illusions, but although I see many harms associated with the sharing economy, I don’t share their worry that it fails to deliver on these communitarian promises. As I wrote in my essay on Douglas Atkin’s book on cult branding, I’m more concerned that brand communities do provide powerful, authentic communal experiences which can be used to mobilize the community to achieve the company’s political objectives. I wonder if denying the communitarian features of the sharing economy does more harm than good, and in this essay I’ll try to make that argument.

What’s at stake in denying that the sharing economy fosters a communal spirit among consumers? Rob Horning is one critic who makes that case—see The “Sharing” Economy, “Sharing” Economy and Self-Exploitation and most recently Authentic sharing. Horning often writes about the atomizing and individualizing impact of social media on our psychology and communities and he applies a similar analysis to the sharing economy:

Though the sharing economy appropriates a language of progressive change and collectivity (e.g., “collaborative consumption”) to proselytize for their apps and business models, their effect is to more thoroughly atomize individuals…

In Authentic sharing, he cites a study that found that Zipcar customers have ordinary utilitarian motivations for using the service and don’t develop the sense of reciprocal obligation that we associate with sharing. The authors agree: “when ‘sharing’ is market-mediated… it is no longer sharing at all.”

The problem is that this study doesn’t really address the claims made by sharing economy advocates. As I understand Rachel Botsman’s argument, the shift from access to ownership means that consumers must interact with another person to be able to use a product. If I own a car, I can use it whenever I want without having to ask anyone, but if I rely on ride-hailing app, I have to interact with a driver. Furthermore, the sharing economy worker is an “ordinary person,” a real human being. This claim is a little obscure: surely an Airbnb host is just as human as a hotel clerk? The meaning is that sharing economy workers are free from standardized corporate scripts that micromanage employees’ customer service interactions to conform to the company brand—e.g. Disneyland employees who are taught to point with an open palm or two fingers, never one. Taken together, these two features of sharing services are believed to be helpful in sustaining more authentic human interactions and ultimately community¹.

Obviously, rating systems are also forms of control, enforcing a different kind of affective discipline on workers, but this is bottom-up control from customers, not top-down prescriptions from management. The abstract numerical rating stipulates that workers should behave in some manner that would garner a 5-star rating from each customer, but the specifics are left up to the worker. Botsman’s argument assumes that mangement wants artificial, brand-conformant behavior but customers want community and authentic human interactions, so customer-driven rating systems of independent workers are productive of the latter.

Unlike Lyft and Airbnb, there are no human interactions or rating systems when accessing a Zipcar. Customers scan a card reader on the windshield and unlock the car via a mobile phone app. The cars themselves are owned by Zipcar, not other customers. So the finding that Zipcar customers don’t develop a sense of community doesn’t disprove Botsman’s argument—the service doesn’t fulfill her requirements.

For Horning, sharing implies a pure gift, so it is self-evident that market-mediated “sharing” is not sharing at all. There are abundant examples of the term being used to describe market-mediated activity (vacation timeshares, shared web hosting, shared housing, owning a share in a business, etc.), but even if we concede that this is a misuse of the term, at best it’s a terminological quibble and there are many synonyms to take its place—Botsman herself prefers “collaborative economy.”

But there is a more substantive criticism that Horning wants to make. As I understand it, it is something along these lines: the communitarian ethos co-opted by sharing economy companies really does challenge the norms of the market, but because the interactions they encourage are still mediated by market exchange, the promises of community will never come to fruition. There is no risk of a repeat of the corporate appropriation of radical, countercutural ideals because the norms of the market and of the community are radically disjoint. The market implies anonymity, individualism, atomism, competition, exploitation, distrust, self-promotion and self-interest, while the community signifies altruism, reciprocity, solidarity, caring and “true” sharing. Botsman’s prediction will fail because it doesn’t take into account that these two are like oil and water.

Horning’s view of the relation between market norms and social norms could be fairly described as following the neoclassical economic model, assuming that social relations are an impediment to perfect competition. To act rationally on the market, transactions are ideally anonymous and atomized, there are no enduring social links established among market participants. The idea is famously embodied in Adam Smith’s observation that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Of course, Horning opposes the extension of market norms into social life, but he relies on the neoclassical understanding of their relationship to motivate opposition to capitalism. This becomes problematic in view of the last 30 years of research in the field of economic sociology. A key text is Granovetter’s landmark Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness where he argues that the economic and the social are embedded with each other. Contrary to the neoclassical view of the market actor whose behavior is free of the influence of social relations, Granovetter finds that “the anonymous market of neoclassical models is virtually nonexistent in economic life and that transactions of all kinds are rife with the social connections”.

If we accept the findings of economic sociology (and I think we should), there are several implications. First, it means that Horning takes aim at the economist’s version of the spherical cow: an abstraction that only exists in theoretical models of economists, and therefore a caricature of actual economic life. Second, even if the sharing economy genuinely produces social benefits despite its commercial character in no way suggests that it represents a transformation of capitalism.

Finally, the perception that the sharing economy is transforming capitalism is largely due to (what I have argued is) a theoretic misapprehension of the nature of capitalism, i.e. that it follows the neoclassical model. Insofar as we buy into this neoclassical disjunction between market norms and social norms that Horning argues for, the sharing economy gains a faux-radical potential. Thus, Horning’s critique is easily appropriated and generates the veneer of anti-capitalism coveted by their marketing departments.

Community is viewed as a good in itself, but also tied to the supposed environmental benefits of the sharing economy. Some activists like Juliet Schor seem to believe that the call to reduce our environmental footprint is received by the public as a threat to our consumer enjoyment. Community is figured as an alternative form of enjoyment, and offered as compensation for the enjoyment of consumer goods that will presumptively be lost in a move to a sustainable economy. It allows environmentalists to present themselves as being in favor of enjoyment, not against it, although in a superficial way. Schor ultimately shares the conventional view of consumerism as an excessive mode of enjoyment that threatens the environment and must be subjected to a prohibitory limit, the castrating 'no', the Name-of-the-Father. ↩

The Symbols of the Corporate Saints: On Ethical Consumerism

Sun, 01 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

You’re awakened by the ring of your smart phone beside you. You open your eyes and smile, secure in the knowledge that the manufacturer made a sincere effort to minimize the use of conflict minerals during its construction. You opted into your local power utility’s green program, so the electricity powering your device comes from more costly, but renewable sources.

You rise from your pillow and pull back the organic cotton sheets. You slept on an organic mattress that’s free of flame retardant chemicals. It cost four thousand dollars, but you care about what comes in contact with your body.

In the bathroom, you’ve done the research. You clean your teeth with a non-petroleum BPA-free plastic toothbrush from a company that offers a recycling program. Your toothpaste is free of chemicals like triclosan, fluoride or sodium lauryl sulfate. Government agencies may claim they’re safe, but you’ve read some websites that disagree and you’d rather be safe.

For breakfast, there’s a choice of organic fair trade coffee, GMO-free cereal or pasture-raised, antibiotic and hormone free eggs you bought at the farmer’s market at eight dollars per dozen. But you’ve already done six socially responsible things this morning. Why not round it off with breakfast at the café down the street that specializes in local, organic, sustainable food? It’s expensive, but as the saying goes, you eat like you give a damn. You get in your hybrid vehicle that you’re thinking of trading in for a seventy thousand dollar fully electric Tesla, and get on with the rest of your day.

It’s never been easier for the socially responsible consumer to shop her way to a better world, even after breakfast. For each of the hundreds or even thousands of consumer products and services we might use in a day, there are often several brands competing for the ethical dollar.

On their ethical smartphones, consumers can download apps that help them make the right choices. One app lets users scan in barcodes of products to ensure their money isn’t going to companies they oppose, or to learn why other users might be boycotting a brand. Another helps users find and purchase over ten thousand Fair Trade Certified products available in the United States. Good Guide offers a vast catalog of over 250,000 products, each given a score between zero and ten rating the product by its impact on society, human health and the environment.

The history of consumer activism in the United States is long and varied. It includes colonial boycotts of British goods during the Revolutionary War, the abolitionist free produce movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and consumer boycotts organized by the United Farm Workers in the 1960s and 70s. These events were often closely coordinated with other activities aimed at change, from lobbying, lawsuits, strikes and picketing up to civil disobedience, rioting, civil war and political revolution.

This form of consumer activism is usually short term, a collective act by a group of people with shared concerns to pressure a company into making specific changes. By contrast, today’s ethical consumerism encourages us to make long-term shifts in purchasing choices. Specific companies are rarely singled out. Instead, individuals are asked to evaluate all of their consumption habits in light of their political preferences, personal values, tolerance for risk, and income, then choose more ethical, socially responsible, less toxic or environmentally friendly brands.

We are not simply asked to withdraw support for certain company by refusing to purchase their products. The emphasis is equally on the so-called buycott, the act of rewarding companies with our business for operating ethically. Such an act is undertaken under the assumption that as customers we have a large degree of influence over the actions of companies we buy from, making us ultimately responsible for them. We are asked to vote with our wallets because, as one ethical consumption guide puts it, “Buying cheap clothes which have been made in sweatshops is a vote for worker exploitation. Buying a gas guzzling 4X4, especially if you are a city dweller, is a vote for climate change.”

The shopping mall and the farmers’ market have become the new ballot box, and as a result, brands and companies in this sector have proliferated, eager to attract the growing segment of socially responsible consumers. According to GoodGuide, there are now 290 kinds of socially responsible shampoo, 130 ethical laundry detergents, 366 virtuous dishwashers, over one thousand morally pure breakfast cereals, and more in dozens of other categories.

Consumers across the world are eager to shop for these brands. In 2012, Edelman, the world’s largest public relations firm, launched its Business and Social Purpose division to help multinational clients like Pepsi, Starbucks and Unilever reach the growing category of “citizen consumers,” a group it describes as “vocal, empowered and poised to act whether via the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, or aligning with purposeful brands through purchases, praise, or advocacy.” Its surveys show that over 70% of global consumers are willing to promote brands associated with good causes, and a growing majority rank social purpose as an important factor when selecting a brand.

Other large global advertising and PR agencies are getting involved, like Saatchi & Saatchi S (“making sustainability irresistible”), OgilvyEarth (“sustainability is the growth opportunity of the 21st century”) and WeberShandwick’s Social Impact division. These agencies work with multinational brands to associate them in the public mind with good causes. Unilever’s Sunlight Project fights global hunger and promotes sustainable living and access to clean drinking water. Bank of America partnered with Vital Voices to mentor women leaders in developing countries. The Pepsi Refresh Project awarded $20 million in grants to individuals with ideas for helping their community.

Through philanthropy, sustainable supply chains and ethical manufacturing practices, corporate leaders anticipate and respond to varied critiques of capitalism. In 2007, PepsiCo CEO Indra Noori inaugurated a new philosophy to guide the company called Performance with a Purpose, a strategy based in the belief that doing good and making a profit aren’t in conflict. In an interview, Noori explained the impetus for these reforms: “I watched the incredible melt down of the global economies because there was a singular flaw in capitalism: capitalism lost its conscience. There was a maniacal focus on today; there was a maniacal focus on twenty-four hours out. People forgot what the consequences of each of their decisions would be for society at large.”

But these corporate initiatives find themselves plagued by distrust from some quarters. In the mid–1990s, the term “greenwashing” was coined after ethical consumerism pioneer The Body Shop was exposed for failing to live up to its marketing promises of environmental protection, philanthropy and fair trade sourcing. Since then, the principal concern about socially responsible capitalism has been the gap between image and reality. Skeptics often question whether these companies are truly operating in a socially responsible or environmentally friendly manner. In response, private organizations have created dozens auditing and certification programs like Benefit Corporation certification, Green Business Certification, Marine Stewardship Council, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and many others to assure us that the claims to corporate responsibility are genuine.

But there is an important problem with ethical consumerism that has gained less attention. With the growing faith that capitalism can be a force for good in the world, how will this transform our politics? What are the consequences of reframing the market as a site of democratic action? To answer these questions, let us consider two otherwise unrelated efforts to remake capitalism along more ethical principles by sincere, politically progressive individuals whose politics have shifted in unexpected directions.

Sandor Katz is a culinary author and self-described fermentation revivalist. He is best known for The Art of Fermentation, an award-winning book blessed with a foreword by the high priest of food activism Michael Pollan.

Katz is an activist in his own right. His book The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved is a manifesto denouncing the corporate food system for its heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and for producing unhealthy, environmentally unsustainable food. But there is an alternative. He celebrates what he calls the underground food movement, groups who practice alternative forms of food production and distribution like organic farming, food co-ops and urban gardening.

Much like PepsiCo’s CEO and executives at global advertising firms, Katz too believes that capitalism can be a force for good. The challengers to the corporate food system described in the book are other businesses, and his strategy for change is free market competition and consumer choice.

But nonetheless, he believes these practices are part of a social movement empowering consumers to reject the industrial food system and build an alternative from the bottom up by making the right purchasing decisions. He draws inspiration from radical left wing political movement, seeing his movement as part of anti-globalization protests against the World Trade Organization and World Economic Forum, the anti-war movement, the fight for control of indigenous lands, economic justice and environmentalism.

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved is partly a travelogue. Katz interviews business owners in the underground food movement from around the United States, viewing them as subversives and revolutionaries. We meet an underground baker who sells his wares in an illicit “bread club” to avoid the hassle of building a kitchen that would pass government health and safety regulations, a strategy that Katz describes as an act of civil disobedience. In North Carolina’s Earthaven Ecovillage, we meet Cailen Campbell. He’s demonstrating his wooden cider press, but can only accept donations because local health authorities quite reasonably insist that he pasteurize or irradiate his cider before selling it, a process that Campbell believes would destroy important nutrients and enzymes.

The FDA created this rule after a batch of juice tainted with E. coli sickened 66 people and killed an infant. But Katz believes it’s unnecessary. He says,

Without minimizing the death of that baby, we have to assess the risk as a relative phenomenon. We live with a certain level of risk every time we get into a car. We live with the risk of crime, violence, and bites from venomous creatures. We live with the risk of heart disease and cancer. We may do things that limit our risk, but then again, we may not. That decision is generally regarded as the prerogative of the individual.

His leftist sympathies notwithstanding, this argument could have come from the US Chamber of Commerce. He invokes a set of ideas we’re more used to hearing from the right: that individual choice and personal responsibility trump government regulations. One might fairly object that Katz only intends to support small producers. But the definition of “small” shifts as he turns his attention to the semi-legal world of unpasteurized milk production. In this chapter, the proverbial little guy oppressed by government regulations is Organic Pastures of Fresno, California, the largest raw milk dairy farm in the United States with over $10 million in annual sales.

Raw milk enthusiasts like Katz often claim that pasteurization is unnecessary, unhealthy and destroys nutritious enzymes, and that unpasteurized milk contains harmless bacteria that protect it from developing dangerous pathogens. Instead of relying on industrial food safety techniques overseen by government regulations, they argue that the best way for consumers to ensure their milk is safe is by developing a personal relationship with their dairy farmer. Katz bolsters these claims with a quote from Organic Pastures’ CEO Mark McAffee who prides himself on his company’s safety record: “Twenty-four million servings and zero reported illnesses!”

That was true when the book was published in 2006. Since then, the California Department of Food and Agriculture has on four occasions ordered the recall of Organic Pastures’ products from store shelves after they sickened and hospitalized consumers due to the presence of E. Coli and Campylobacter bacteria.

In most cases, symptoms of infection are relatively mild: abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea. But up to 15% patients will develop a serious, potentially deadly condition called hemolytic uremic syndrome that requires extensive medical treatment. Seven-year old Chris Martin developed this condition after consuming raw Organic Pastures milk that his parents bought for him because they were told it would cure his allergies. He was airlifted to a local hospital where he suffered renal failure, pancreatitis, seizures and permanent kidney damage. His family incurred over $450,000 in medical bills.

Due to dangers like these, retail sale of raw milk for human consumption is illegal in most states. But it’s legal in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut and in the free-spirited western states of Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington and California. The milk that boy drank came with a warning label intended to allow consumers to make a personal judgment of risk about consuming unpasteurized milk. Katz approves of this regulatory compromise that preserves individual liberty and personal responsibility, but it’s difficult to see how it adequately protected the rights of a seven year old boy who will likely need a kidney transplant in his lifetime.

Throughout the book, Katz claims that food safety rules are unnecessary and anti-competitive. He believes they were created by agribusiness lobbyists colluding with government to keep small producers and farmers—a group broad enough to include $10 million businesses like Organic Pastures—from selling fresh, wholesome and nutrient-dense foods. But in fact, his reasons for opposing food regulations are identical to the arguments of agribusiness lobbyists like The Center for Consumer Freedom, an organization funded by The Coca-Cola Company and multinational meat packing giant Tyson Foods that advocates for personal responsibility and protecting consumer choices against what it describes as meddling government bureaucrats.

Conflicts between public and private interest have also come to Silicon Valley, where the brightest minds have long been energized by faith in the benevolent powers of technocapitalism. Their belief has only grown stronger with the rise of the so-called sharing economy, a broad and somewhat amorphous category of startups positioned as marketplaces that help individuals rent out their underutilized property.

If you have a spare room or vacation home, Airbnb will take a percentage of the transaction to connect you with travelers in need of short-term accommodations. If you have extra space in your car on the way to work, competing transportation companies like Lyft and Uber offer apps to link you with commuters in need of a ride. Investors have showered these three companies with billions of dollars at massive valuations, and there are thousands of smaller services around the world offering the chance to share unused clothes, bikes, tools, kitchen appliances, office space and so on.

Investors hope to reap significant profits from these ventures as with all their investments, but promoters of the sharing economy nonetheless claim it isn’t just business as usual. In marketing materials, books and lectures, advocates highlight problems of capitalism, and position the industry as a harbinger of revolution, simultaneously transforming the economy and our relationships to one other.

According to Airbnb executive Douglas Atkin:

We literally stand on the brink of a new, better kind of economic system that delivers social as well as economic benefits. The old system centralizes production, wealth and control… the peer sharing economy is a new model that distributes wealth, power and control to everyone else. Best of all, the very things that have become the casualties of the old economy—things like economic independence, entrepreneurialism, community, individuality, happiness—it’s actually built into the very structure of this new economy.

Prominent investor and author Rachel Botsman says of the sharing economy:

At its core, it’s about empowerment. It’s about empowering people to make meaningful connections, connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness that we’ve lost somewhere along the way, by engaging in marketplaces like Airbnb, like Kickstarter, like Etsy, that are built on personal relationships versus empty transactions.

TaskRabbit, the sharing economy equivalent of a short-term, low-wage job placement agency, bills itself as “neighbors helping neighbors” and an alternative to cold, impersonal economic calculation.

Etsy is an online marketplace for vintage and hand made goods with over $1.3 billion in sales in 2013. Its mission statement: “to re-imagine commerce in ways that build a more fulfilling and lasting world… a new kind of company that uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.”

In promotional videos for Lyft, riders and drivers expound on the company’s values of supporting genuine interpersonal contact over bureaucratic formality: “Instead of just having a company come and pick you up, you’re having a person come pick you up,” says one. “There’s something about getting a Lyft that just puts you at ease—because [the driver] is a person that’s just like you,” says another. “You’re not just driving them around, you’re a friend first,” agrees a driver.

These companies have seized upon a widespread discontent with the alienating effects of economic logic insinuating itself into every aspect of contemporary life. They claim to oppose rampant individualism, greed and self-interest, and reject what Marx called “the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

We’re led to believe that as consumers and suppliers for these services, we’re supporting ethical values of kindness, community-building and trust between strangers; living more sustainably by sharing unused property; building community wealth; reducing the power of centralized corporations by transacting directly with each other; and developing a new economic model which will solve global poverty.

This progressive sounding anti-corporate rhetoric has translated into political action on behalf of these companies. In 2013, a non-profit advocacy and lobbying organization called Peers was founded with a mission of promoting the sharing economy around the world. With over 250,000 members, it claims to be a grassroots organization driven by ordinary users of these services, but because it draws funding from startup executives and investors, there are reasons to suspect this might not be the whole truth.

Peers was founded by a group of young progressive activists who previously held positions at prominent liberal organizations like MoveOn.org, Organizing For America, the Democratic National Committee, the Obama Whitehouse and a host of other community and sustainability organizations. But despite their progressive sounding rhetoric and impeccable credentials, these liberal minded critics of capitalist alienation and ecological destruction have chosen to direct their energy towards overcoming regulatory threats to the business models of their largest patrons.

The real politics of the sharing economy are far from progressive. In New York, San Francisco and cities across the United States, local officials, tenants rights groups, labor unions and housing activists have opposed the growth of the sharing economy. They charge that Airbnb violates short term rental laws that are intended to protect tenants from neighbors running illegal hotels, and displaces low income residents by raising property rates and converting affordable rental units into high priced accommodations for tourists. Peers ignored these concerns and mobilized its members to sign petitions and write letters to city council members in support of business friendly regulations.

Transportation startups Uber, Lyft and Sidecar have faced legal action in California, Texas and Washington for violating for-hire transportation rules, failing to conduct proper background checks and allowing drivers on the road without commercial insurance. In Seattle, taxi driver unions and immigrant community groups mobilized to prevent the legalization of these sharing economy startups. Without the expense of commercial drivers’ insurance, Lyft and Uber can charge rates that undercut taxis, significantly affecting taxi drivers’ ability to earn a living.

Peers found itself on the opposite side of these debates, pushing for rules that harm the interests of working people to line the pockets of Silicon Valley investors. And while claiming to be a grassroots organization representing the interests of sharing economy workers, it has taken no action on growing conflicts with management, remaining silent while drivers have filed class action lawsuits and begun to unionize to protect themselves from arbitrary suspensions, unfair rating systems and fare reductions.

Leaders of socially responsible corporations claim to want to do good in the world. They’re eager to talk about the myriad social, environmental and economic problems facing our world, and promise consumers that they are part of the solution. Progressive academics like Juliet Schor believe in the promise of the ethical consumerism movement. Against critics like Andrew Szasz who believe that it is an individualistic phenomenon that signals a retreat from collective political action, Schor finds that ethical consumer behavior is correlated with political activism. That may well be true, but a question still remains: what politics?

Despite their borrowed left wing political ideas, some advocates have found allies in unlikely places: Fox News host John Stossel, the Cato Institute and Republican operative Grover Norquist, all who praise “ethical” startups for challenging government regulation as a restraint on competition and free market innovation.

The libertarian law firm Institute For Justice supports the unpasteurized milk movement, as does Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, who introduced the Milk Freedom Act seeking to roll back FDA regulations against interstate sales of unpasteurized milk. “Personal choices as basic as ‘what we feed our families’ should not be limited by the federal government,” says Massie, a belief that would no doubt be endorsed by food activists on the left like Sandor Katz.

Why do progressives find themselves making common cause with allies from the right? It’s tempting to chalk this up to insincerity or bad faith, and easy to suspect sinister motives. But there’s no reason to suppose they have anything but the best of intentions.

Ethical consumerism directs our attention to products and the business practices behind them, asking us to decide which brand is more or less ethical, sustainable or socially responsible. These are valid points of evaluation. Leaving aside the question of whether they truly solve any problems, it’s difficult to assail the logic that, for example, a slightly less poisonous laundry soap is slightly better.

But while we comparison shop, the interests behind these products—whether large or small—continue to intervene in public life and try to influence government. When consumers are viewed as voting with their wallets and the shopping mall becomes the ballot box, business arrogates to itself the role of representative of the people.

The profitability of the company and the will of the people become conflated, a result which consumers who purchase ethical and sustainable products and services may not be expecting. Surely this demands a system of warning labels that would inform consumers that use of ethical products may produce side effects, like increasing corporate power and whiplash-inducing political transformations.

Progressive advocates for ethical capitalism are seduced by right wing ideas because they’re a natural extension of the logic of ethical consumerism: if capitalism can be a force for good, then whatever impedes the progress of this noble project is wrong and must be defeated, including checks on the financial interests behind these efforts.

We often worry that socially responsible corporations who claim to do good in the world are frauds cooked up by marketers to deceive the public. This is a valid concern. But perhaps it is more dangerous when they aren’t frauds. The more they live up to their promises, the more authentic and heartfelt their commitment to the good, the more their progressive advocates feel justified in resisting and undermining restraints on private economic power.

No Dream of the Gift of Idle Hours

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My review of Nicholas Carr’s latest book The Glass Cage is up on Boundary2 Digital Studies. It raises many vital points about the possible negative impact of automation on users of technology, and it’s an important book for everyone to read, but perhaps especially for user experience designers because it targets some of the fundamental premises of the profession in an interesting way.

The article is less of a review than a response. As much as he raises really important questions, I thought the framing was slightly wrong. Carr tends to assume that the source of the problems he identifies is engineers’ techno-fetishism, perhaps their failure to appreciate human dimensions of life. But designers are just as guilty (if not more so), despite our nominal role of championing the human perspective—not because we have failed, but because we have succeeded at designing under a flawed set of assumptions. The irony of the book is that, in the internal debate about technology between designers and engineers, Carr is more on the side of the engineer even though he thinks of the book as a challenge to them.

There are also some Lacanian digressions about the difference between desire and drive. These are a comment on the beautiful epilogue to the book about the joy and satisfaction found in challenge and flow, pleasures which are undermined by overly automated technologies and alleged to be a crucial part of being human. My purpose in making the analytical distinction between desire and drive is to show how the issues Carr identifies have a much broader relevance. If there’s a critical point in there, it is that the abstract concern with what technology is doing to our humanity misses far more urgent social and political consequences of which our inability to derive satisfaction in struggle is symptomatic.

To recover that focus, one must draw the psychoanalytic distinction between plaisir and jouissance. I’m tempted to argue that the concern with the abstract question marks a certain kind of failure, as if Carr and other who write like this sense the need for these values without knowing exactly why, and so must resort to musing about the nature of humanity when a much more pointed social critique could be made.

Here’s a taste of the review:

The Glass Cage calls for a fundamental shift in how we understand error. Under the current regime, an error is an inefficiency or an inconvenience, to be avoided at all costs. As defined by Carr, a human-centered approach to design treats error differently, viewing it as an opportunity for learning. He illustrates this with a personal experience of repeatedly failing a difficult mission in the video game Red Dead Redemption, and points to the satisfaction of finally winning a difficult game as an example of what is lost when technology is designed to be too easy. He offers video games as a model for the kinds of technologies he would like to see: tools that engage us in difficult challenges, that encourage us to develop expertise and to experience flow states.

But Carr has an idiosyncratic definition of human-centered design which becomes apparent when he counterposes his position against the prominent design consultant Peter Merholz. Echoing premises almost universally adopted by designers, Merholz calls for simple, frictionless interfaces and devices that don’t require a great deal of skill, memorization or effort to operate. Carr objects that that eliminates learning, skill building and mental engagement—perhaps a valid criticism, but it’s strange to suggest that this reflects a misanthropic technology-centered approach.

The Man Who Loved His Laptop: A Review of Spike Jonze' Her

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m told by my sister, who is married to a French man, that the French don’t say “I love you”—or at least they don’t say it often. Perhaps they think the words are superfluous and it’s the behavior of the person you are in a relationship with tells you everything. Americans, on the other hand, say it to everyone—lovers, spouses, friends, parents, grandparents, children, pets—and as often as possible, as if quantity matters most. The declaration is also an event. For two Americans beginning a relationship, it marks a turning point, a new stage in the relationship.

If you aren’t American, you may not have realized that relationships have stages. In America, they do. It’s complicated. First there are the three main thresholds of commitment: Dating, Exclusive Dating, then of course Marriage. There are three lesser pre-Dating stages: Just Talking, Hooking Up and Friends with Benefits; and one minor stage between Dating and Exclusive called Pretty Much Exclusive. Within Dating, there are several minor substages: number of dates (often counted up to the third date) and increments of physical intimacy denoted according to the well-known baseball metaphor of first, second, third and home base.

There are also a number of rituals that indicate progress: updating of Facebook relationship statuses; leaving a toothbrush at each other’s houses; the aforementioned exchange of I-love-you’s; taking a vacation together; meeting the parents; exchange of house keys; and so on. When people, especially unmarried people talk about relationships, often the first questions are about these stages and rituals. In France, the system is apparently much less codified, but one rule is that a man will invite a woman to go for a walk, and this is understood as romantic interest.

The point is two-fold: first, although Americans admire and often think of French culture as holding up a standard for what romance ought to be, Americans act nothing like the French in relationships and in fact know very little about how they work in France. Second and more importantly, in American culture love is widely understood as spontaneous and unpredictable, and yet there is also an opposite and often unacknowledged expectation that relationships follow well-defined rules and rituals.

This contradiction explains the great public clamor over romance apps like Romantimatic and BroApp that automatically send your significant other romantic messages, either predefined or your own creation, at regular intervals—what Evan Selinger calls (and not without justification) apps that outsource our humanity.

Reviewers of these apps were unanimous in their disapproval, disagreeing only on where to locate them on a spectrum between pretty bad and sociopathic. But I think one reason for the outcry is that they expose how easily romance can be automated. Something we believe is so intimate is exposed as routine and predictable. What does it say about our relationship needs that the right time to send a loving message to your significant other can be reduced to an algorithm?

The routinization of American relationships first struck me in the context of this little-known fact about how seldom French people say “I love you.” If you had to launch one of these romance apps in France, it wouldn’t be enough to just translate the prewritten phrases into French. You’d have to research French romantic relationships and discover what are the most common phrases—if there are any—and how frequently text messages are used for this purpose. It’s possible that French people are too unpredictable, or never use text messages for romantic purposes, so the app is just not feasible in France.

Romance is culturally determined. That American romance can be so easily automated reveals how standardized and even scheduled relationships already are. The argument that automated romance undermines our humanity has some merit, but why stop with apps? Why not address the problem at a more fundamental level and critique the standardized courtship system that regulates romance. Doesn’t this also outsource our humanity?

The best-selling relationship advice book The 5 Love Languages claims that everyone understands one of five love “languages” and the key to a happy relationship for each partner to learn to express love in the correct language. Should we be surprised if the more technically minded among us concludes that the problem of love can be solved with technology? Why not try to determine the precise syntax and semantics of these love languages, and attempt to express them rigorously and unambiguously in the same way that computer languages and communications protocols are? Can love be reduced to grammar?

Spike Jonze’s Her tells the story of Theodore Twombly, a soon-to-be divorced writer who falls in love with Samantha, an AI operating system who far exceeds the abilities of today’s natural language assistants like Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana. Samantha is not only hyper-intelligent, she’s also capable of laughter, telling jokes, picking up on subtle unspoken interpersonal cues, feeling and communicating her own emotions, and so on. Theodore falls in love with her, but there is no sense that their relationship is deficient because she’s not human. She is as emotionally expressive as any human partner, at least on film.

Theodore works for a company called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com as a professional Cyrano de Bergerac (or perhaps a human Romantimatic), ghostwriting heartfelt “handwritten” letters on behalf of this clients. It’s an ironic twist: Samantha is his simulated girlfriend, a role which he himself adopts at work by simulating the feelings of his clients. The film opens with Theodore at his desk at work, narrating a letter from a wife to her husband on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. He is a master of the conventions of the love letter. Later in the film, his work is discovered by a literary agent, and he gets an offer to have book published of his best work.

But for all his (alleged) expertise as a romantic writer, Theodore is lonely, emotionally stunted, ambivalent towards the women in his life, and—at least before meeting Samantha—apparently incapable of maintaining relationships since he separated from his ex-wife Catherine. Highly sensitive, he is disturbed by encounters with women that go off the script: a phone sex encounter goes awry when the woman demands that he enact her bizarre fantasy of being choked with a dead cat; and on a date with a woman one night, she exposes a little too much vulnerability and drunkenly expresses her fear that he won’t call her. He abruptly and awkwardly ends the date.

Theodore wanders aimlessly through the high tech city as if it is empty. With headphones always on, he’s withdrawn, cocooned in a private sonic bubble. He interacts with his device through voice, asking it to play melancholy songs and skipping angry messages from his attorney demanding that he sign the divorce papers already. At times, he daydreams of happier times when he and his ex-wife were together and tells Samantha how much he liked being married.

At first it seems that Catherine left him. We wonder if he withdrew from the pain of his heartbreak. But soon a different picture emerges. When they finally meet to sign the divorce papers over lunch, Catherine accuses him of not being able to handle her emotions and reveals that he tried to get her on Prozac. She says to him “I always felt like you wished I could just be a happy, light, everything’s great, bouncy L.A. wife. But that’s not me.”

So Theodore’s avoidance of real challenges and emotions in relationships turns out to be an ongoing problem: the cause, not the consequence, of his divorce. Starting a relationship with his operating systems Samantha is his latest retreat from reality—not from physical reality, but from the virtual reality of authentic intersubjective contact.

Unlike his other relationships, Samantha is perfectly customized to his needs. She speaks his “love language.” Today we personalize our operating system and fill out online dating profile specifying exactly what kind of person we’re looking for. When Theodore installs Samantha on his computer for the first time, the two operations are combined with a single question. The system asks him how he would describe his relationship with his mother. He begins to reply with psychological banalities about how she is insufficiently attuned to his needs, and it quickly stops him, already knowing what he’s about. And so do we.

That Theodore is selfish doesn’t mean that he is unfeeling, unkind, insensitive, conceited or uninterested in his new partners thoughts, feelings and goals. His selfishness is the kind that’s approved and even encouraged today, the ethically consistent selfishness that respects the right of others to be equally selfish. What he wants most of all is to be comfortable, to feel good, and that requires a partner who speaks his love language and nothing else, someone who says nothing that would veer off-script and reveal too many disturbing details. More precisely, Theodore wants someone who speaks what Lacan called empty speech: speech that obstructs the revelation of the subject’s traumatic desire.

Objectification is a traditional problem between men and women. Men reduce women to mere bodies or body parts that exist only for sexual gratification, treating them as sex objects rather than people. The dichotomy is between the physical as the domain of materiality, animality and sex on one hand, and the spiritual realm of subjectivity, personality, agency and the soul on the other. If objectification eliminates the soul, then Theodore engages in something like the opposite, a subjectification which eradicates the body. Samantha is just a personality.

Nicholas Carr’s soon-to-be-published book The Glass Cage will investigate the ways that automation and artificial intelligence dull our cognitive capacities. Her can be read as a speculative treatment of the same idea as it relates to emotion. What if the difficulty of relationships could be automated away? The film’s brilliant provocation is that it shows us a lonely, hollow world mediated through technology but nonetheless awash in sentimentality. It thwarts our expectations that algorithmically-generated emotion would be as stilted and artificial as today’s speech synthesizers. Samantha’s voice is warm, soulful, relatable and expressive. She’s real, and the feelings she triggers in Theodore are real.

But real feelings with real sensations can also be shallow. As others have noted, Theodore is an awful writer, at least by today’s standards. Here’s the kind of prose that wins him accolades from everyone around him:

I remember when I first started to fall in love with you like it was last night. Lying naked beside you in that tiny apartment, it suddenly hit me that I was part of this whole larger thing, just like our parents, and our parents’ parents. Before that I was just living my life like I knew everything, and suddenly this bright light hit me and woke me up. That light was you.

In spite of this, we’re led to believe that Theodore is some kind of literary genius. Various people in his life compliment him on his skill and the editor of the publishing company who wants to publish his work emails to tell him how moved he and his wife were when they read them. What kind of society would treat such pedestrian writing as unusual, profound or impressive? And what is the average person’s writing like if Theodore’s services are worth paying for?

Recall the cult favorite Idiocracy, a science fiction satire set in a futuristic dystopia where anti-intellectualism is rampant and society has descended into stupidity. We can’t help but conclude that Her offers a glimpse into a society that has undergone a similar devolution into both emotional and literary idiocy.

Empathy is the Ultimate Neutrality

Sun, 14 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today there are those who believe that empathy is a solution to our social problems. They tell us that the indignities suffered by minorities and oppressed groups could be resolved if only we in the majority would empathize more, and in their vision of a better society, there would be abundance of caring and kindness between its members.

How could you disagree? The cognitive scientist Paul Bloom will soon publish a book that looks at the consequences of empathy and concludes that reason is a better guide for social policy. Empathy turns out to have some undesirable side effects, like a desire for retribution on behalf of victims without regard for long-term consequences. Or the identifiable victim effect, which causes us to react to the plight of individuals more strongly than to the suffering of vast numbers. There are some other concerns, but on the whole, they are pragmatic considerations that ask whether empathy is effective or not. But another kind of critique is possible.

Zizek tells a joke about a Jewish Ukrainian who applies to emigrate from the Soviet Union. The emigration office bureaucrat asks him why he wants to leave and he replies “I have two reasons. First, I’m afraid the communist regime will fail and the next power will blame the Jews for communist crimes.” The bureaucrat replies, “That’s ridiculous, the communist regime will last forever!” The Ukrainian replies “Yes, and that’s my second reason.”

It’s possible to critique the advocacy of empathy along similar lines. Before one even begins a critique, the immediate reaction is “How could you possibly find fault with empathy?” As Bloom says, “Most people see the benefits of empathy as too obvious to require justification.” That empathy is a self-evident virtue can be transformed from an objection to criticism to a criticism in itself.

To understand this, we must first take account of our political situation with this striking observation from political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s essay Why the left needs a political adversary not a moral enemy:

Today social theorists like Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck argue that with the demise of communism and the socio-economic transformation of society linked to the advent of the information society and to the phenomenon of globalisation, the adversarial model of politics has become obsolete and that what we need is a politics “beyond left and right”, a politics not any more structured around social division and without the us/them opposition.

This “post-political” discourse is accompanied by the promotion of humanitarian crusades, ethically correct good causes and the increasing reliance on the judiciary to deal with political issues. What this signifies is the triumph of a moralizing liberalism which pretends that the political has been eradicated and that society can now be ruled through rational moral procedures and conflicts resolved by impartial tribunals. It is the culmination of a tendency inscribed at the very core of liberalism which, because of its constitutive incapacity to think in truly political terms, always has to resort to another type of discourse: economic, moral or juridical.

However the liberal incapacity to acknowledge political antagonisms does not make them disappear. Despites the fact that the key words today are those of “good governance” and “partisan-free democracy” no politics is possible without defining frontiers. The democratic consensus proclaimed by all those who celebrate the “centre” cannot exist without defining an exterior which by its very exclusion secures its identity and its coherence. Hence the necessity of defining a “them” whose existence will provide the unity of the democratic “we”. But since one cannot think of politics in adversarial terms, this “them” cannot be envisaged as a political adversary any more. It is therefore on the moral terrain that the frontier is drawn. This is why the “extreme right”—a rather undifferenciated and unexamined entity—is increasingly presented as the personnification of the “evil them” against which all the good democrats should unite.

Clearly, what we are witnessing is not the disappearance of the political antagonism but a new mode of its manifestation. Given that it cannot be articulated in terms of a confrontation of hegemonic socio-economic projects, this antagonism now expresses itself in the moral register. What is at stake is still a political conflict but disguised as a moral opposition between “good” and “bad”. On one side the good democrats who respect universal values and on the other side the representatives of evil, the racist and xenophobic right with whom no discussion is permitted and which has to be eradicated through moral condemnation.

After the killing of Michael Brown and the outrage and protests which followed, polling revealed stark differences in the interpretation of those events between white and black Americans. A majority of whites believe that the police are handling the protests appropriately, the killing didn’t raise racial issues and that the investigation will be run fairly—some argue that it indicates a lack of empathy.

There are obvious benefits to advocating for more empathy. It’s a position that purports to transcend traditional divisions between Left and Right, a serious and respectable idea that centrist politicians like Obama are able to promote without offending anyone. And who could possibly object to something so obviously good as the idea that we need more empathy?

Empathy is able to cross political lines because it’s seen as a physical and thus non-political sensation. Advocates like Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Empathic Civilization, makes use of neuroscience to argue for a society based on our supposed empathic “wiring”, our innate, universal ability to experience others’ feelings which he believes has been repressed and subverted by merely cultural phenomena like blood ties, religious, ideological and national identifications which restrict our ability to empathize with those outside of those spheres.

In adopting these views, we end up abandoning political struggle that aims to wrest control of institutions. Instead, we are directed towards strategies of moral improvement of society. Non-profits press city councils to issue public proclamations affirming the value of compassion, and sponsor classroom programs and seminars. Media strategies are developed to promote and model empathy for an impressionable public, and neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists develop workshops and training exercises that are supposed to enhance our capacity for empathy.

Today, moral condemnation is the tool of choice among activists. Public shaming, confession, repentance, penance and redemption are now routine. These are celebrated as successful actions furthering the cause because public exposure of individuals’ moral failings are viewed as the linchpin of progress.

The necessary correlative to empathy is the figure of the victim to whom it is directed. Similar to empathy, the idea that victims are owed moral consideration is taken as too obvious to require justification, which is is precisely why the strategy of representing those who experience injustice as victims is so wildly popular. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call this the sine qua non of contemporary leftist activism. Exposing one’s deep emotional sensitivity to the plight of the unfortunate is a taken as a sign of authentic commitment to their struggle.

If the intent is simply to draw attention to suffering, there might not be any problems. But the way that empathy works is quite different. Proponents reminds us that empathy (ideally) leads to altruistic action, which sets up a dichotomy between passive victims and active empathizers which is quite different from a traditional political view. Those who struggle against injustice are the active parties, the proletariat, the agents of history fighting to overthrow a corrupt system.

Empathy is part of a broader humanitarian frame where victims are viewed as traumatized and disabled by their victimization. Far from being agents of historical change, some social justice activists routinely claim that educating and changing society is not their job, strangely insisting that the responsibility for creating a just and egalitarian society lies with the existing one. Furthermore, to be treated as the agent of change is taken as yet another victimization, another burden placed on them by an unjust society.

If empathy engenders passivity in victims, it also demands moral innocence. Is there any stronger empathetic response than the outpouring of support for the innocent victim? What can open our hearts like the immaculate, unblemished lamb at the slaughter? In his essay The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed, Bertrand Russell pointed out the perverse logic of this idealization that connects innocence and passivity: “The idealizing of the victim is useful for a time: if virtue is the greatest of goods, and if subjection makes people virtuous, it is kind to refuse them power, since it would destroy their virtue.”

In the wake of Ferguson, the hegemony of the empathy ideal was revealed, along with its limitations. The New York Times published what they surely thought of as a balanced profile of Michael Brown that was intended to show “both problems and promise in his young life.” The author John Eligon described him as “no angel” and included details like his dabbling with drugs and alcohol. The article provoked accusations of bias and racism and massive outrage online and in the media because it was perceived to undermine public support for the protests.

Everyone agreed that the New York Times should have never used those words. And this is very revealing. It demonstrates how the success of a social justice movements depends on idealizing victims, and portraying them as unrealistically moral and good. When this perfect image fails—as it always does because no one is that good—so does the movement. In Michael Brown’s case, all it took was the revelation of his perfectly ordinary imperfections to create an emergency situation. Protesters accused the newspaper of racism for portraying him as anything less than angelic. Perversely, this reaction only strengthens the already impossible requirement for innocent victims.

Chantal Mouffe points out that simply transposing political antagonisms into a moral register doesn’t make those antagonisms disappear. Psychological research studies have shown that we don’t spontaneously experience empathy for everyone in equal measure. We perceive black people as feeling less pain than white people. At first glance, this appears to confirm the claims of Rifkin and others who say that racial and other identifications narrow our circle of compassion to exclude people of different races. But it turns out that this finding holds for black participants as well as whites. The researchers hypothesize that regardless of our racial identity, we tend to perceive those who face greater hardship in life as tougher and less sensitive to pain.

Our spontaneous empathetic abilities do not transcend ideology or political antagonisms as so many hope they do. In fact, they seem to be strongly affected by the social hierarchies of the society we live in. It might even be possible to argue that empathy is the problem here, not the solution. Advocates get around this criticism by emphasizing that what they want is universal empathy, and most people will require special training.

But even so, political questions are not dissolved. One could empathetically extend benefits to help the unemployed pay their bills, or empathetically remove them on the theory that it teaches helplessness. One could vote to legalize abortion to empathize with mothers, or vote to ban it empathizing with fetuses. Empathy could lead you to wage war to liberate the Iraqi people from a dictator, or to oppose that war.

Universal empathy might encourage us to see the world as others see it, but doesn’t help us decide how to handle conflicting perspectives. In many cases, it’s not even clear that extending empathy to everyone is a good idea. If we met a slave-owner who was distraught over being forced to give up his slave, it doesn’t seem that extending empathy to both of them and trying to find a middle ground would lead us in the right direction, nor should we empathize equally with a Nazi and a Jew. Many people express reluctance to prosecute rape cases out of empathy for the perpetrator.

When it comes to questions of gross injustice, there can be no middle ground. One is forced to take a side, either for or against. Justice is one-sided. Empathy is the ultimate neutrality.