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that are necessary to keep the idea of liberalism alive in a society that is gleefully abandoning enlightenment notions of subjective agency like weimar liberals or contemporary neoliberals sunstein shields himself from his historical circumstances by clinging all the harder to that which must be true in his case the notion that choice is the a priori i ll be publishing a review in due course i can think of two or three routes we should explore when seeking to understand why we might embrace a post liberal always on high surveillance future the first is as i explored in this new inquiry essay that relinquishing subjective agency or consumer sovereignty is experienced as a profound existential relief there is comfort to be found in giving oneself over to analytical powers that one cannot comprehend almost like a form of post socialist melancholia to be a citizen of the smart city is to be integrated into a form of collective intelligence where the individual no longer has to think or decide the outsourcing of individual choice allows us to immerse ourselves back into society and to abandon the burdensome requirement to take constant decisions the second related answer is that behaviorism reinstates quasi bureaucratic norms that we wrongly believe we have out grown the ideology of flexibility creativity and entrepreneurship celebrates heroic self authored individuals who act outside of any normative paradigm behaviorism with the help of apps and nudges allows us to maintain this collective self delusion while also ensuring that we retain some semblance of sanity by constraining arbitrary freedom and that society remains faintly governable if we were to drop the schumpeterian nietzschean fantasy of a society of constant self transformation a fantasy that really oughtn t to survive a short visit to any shopping mall or office but somehow manages to then we wouldn t need nudges and apps to provide us with whisper it rules for how to behave in practice instead we might be able to debate normativity in a more honest and public fashion that however seems impossible hence the need for clandestine methodologies interventions and half remembered neuroscientific facts i have a third hypothesis that i ve been musing on a lot recently partly inspired by reading josh cohen s the private life this is that smart technologies and social media promise us what we most crave a psychological mirror a whole essay maybe even a book could be written about the simple question with which facebook succeeds in conducting social research on several hundred million people without so much as an incentive what s on your mind i wonder how much thought goes into that question consideration of alternatives whether it remains the right one and why after all leaving algorithms aside that s the question on which facebook s entire business depends get that question wrong and nothing else quite works what s in your mind how are you what s on your brain what are you thinking woh there descartes what are you feeling that s a bit more like it what s happening twitter s lawyers might have things to say about that what s going on marvin gaye s lawyers might have things to say about that and so on but no it has to be what s on your mind the much discussed rise of wearable technology combined with quantified self apps and habits is clearly predicated on the idea that there is a truth about oneself and that self surveillance is the way to discover it one such product realifex takes this to an almost romantic extent where an app promises to reveal truths about oneself that nobody else could ever know nor need ever know problems of private language games would arise were it not for the fact that of course the data is not entirely private to the individual but crunched by a company cohen argues in the private life that contrary to popular and even some foucauldian conceptions of it psychoanalysis is not a project of knowledge or of revelation of some inner truth it is rather a process through which we learn to live with our own mysteries frustrations and unknowable depths in an age of crass empiricism where everything must be mined cohen argues that some things will always remain in the dark honesty would mean recognising this i guess we now live in a largely post psychoanalytic age where the inner reaches of the self are deemed knowable through fmri or self quantification we no longer search for truth or explanations from therapy but by donating more and more data to social media platforms wearable technologies and smart objects the faustian pact appears to be this if you are willing to give away liberal autonomy in return you will be told the truth about yourself the more freedom we relinquish the more facts we will receive about our bodies minds and behavior leaving aside the severe epistemological problems in all of this it poses a question that interested nietzsche and foucault and in a different way cohen what is it you really want when you say you are looking for self knowledge or psychological truth are you paranoid that as per the narrator in julian barnes the sense of an ending you might fundamentally be something of a loser and why would you want to know that exactly psychoanalysis has one major advantage over neuroscience or behavioral interventions in being able to reflect on why it is even worth doing in the first place and the types of misunderstandings and follies that might have led people towards it i don t suggest that quantified selfers or enthusiasts for smart technology do not reflect on what they are doing clearly they are not simply hamsters in a cage but their narratives tend simply to reinforce the practice to the effect that i realise that i m not drinking enough water and that that effects my sleep which is why i have this app which etc or i was wondering if my commute was effecting my moods and so i decided to find out etc or at best i know that i m quite a lazy person so i decided to download this app which etc the source of the will to know or will to change is not even noticed let alone questioned the epistemological flaws in positivism have been explored endlessly what i think need studying right now are its psychoanalytic seductions and disappointments and the way in which purveyors of smart technologies and data analytics carefully nurture this promise of self disclosure for the good of the industries behind these tools every disappointment will be framed as a reason to mine even more data to monitor even more behavior as if the truth of the self is only ever one more app away just like neoliberal nirvana always needs just a bit more competition to be realised but if this endlessly delayed gratification eventually runs out of steam then a far more interesting question could come to the fore who wants to know june 30 2015 in happiness internet sociology philosophy permalink comments 5 april 21 2015 discussing the happiness industry in nyc philadelphia i m going to be in the us for the first week of june for a few events where i ll be discussing my forthcoming book the happiness industry all the details of where and when are on the verso website here drop me a line if you d like to know more or meet up while i m over april 21 2015 permalink comments 0 april 02 2015 the happiness industry out in may for those blissfully absent from the twitter sphere i have a new book out in may and since you re such twitter refuseniks you re probably still neurologically capable of reading such things it s called the happiness industry how the government and big business sold us wellbeing it ll be available in most book shops and online via non tax dodging bastard websites such as housmans online i will be speaking about the book at a few events over the course and may and june including one or two in the us i ll stick the dates for these things along with other articles about the book in the list on the top right of this blog so watch that space april 02 2015 in happiness my work permalink comments 0 march 26 2015 the society of exit if death used to be a great career move for rockstars if only that were still the case it is hard to escape the sense that being axed is now a great career move for the mega celebrities who occupy the intermediary space between the secretive private jets of the billionaires and the spectacles of broadcast media and major sports in the uk jonathan ross and kevin pietersen are two examples of this jeremy clarkson is clearly another these individuals represent a particular class of celebrity hugely rich talented in the sense of willing to be themselves in front of very large numbers of people the opposite of how a great actor is talented famous for going slightly too far and constantly maybe deliberately flirting with the possibility of being booted out their very identity as public icons resides in the fact that they pose a challenge to the primacy of institutions over individuals goading institutions to assert themselves in the sneaking suspicion that they lack the authority any longer behind them lurk a risible bunch of courtiers louise mensch piers morgan keith allen types who are principally known as disciples of talent and go around demanding that their chosen uberman be granted even more adoration alastair campbell s new book sounds like an addition to this always side with the big guy vacuous philosophy in my book now in paperback i suggest that our present political condition is one of institutionalised anti institutionalism manifest for example in the normality of elite fraud along with errant investment bankers clarkson et al are the ideological symbols of this asking us to imagine a society in which the authority of the self were greater than that of any institution institutions the bbc the fsa the ecb have little choice to act in response if only to prove that they still exist at all however they rarely come out of such confrontations with any greater authority indeed the opposite is usually the case given how much dirt is spilled in the process never mud wrestle a pig etc but i also wonder whether things like the clarkson saga tap into our society s lurking fetish of exit according to hirschman s famous tripartite analysis there are three types of mutually understood power that exist within socio economic relations exit where a party asserts power through the right to cancel a social relation as manifest in the norms of the market it is understood and accepted that i can constantly seek a better deal elsewhere voice where a party asserts power through dialogue and participation as manifest in industrial relations or corporate governance and loyalty which determines the extent to which individuals choose exit or voice e g a loyal customer could opt to voice a complaint rather than exit in search of a better deal as markets become more powerful so the ethos of exit becomes more dominant figures who are perceived to have the latent capacity to leave the super rich star footballers productive and mobile industries talent end up being granted greater voice for fear that they may otherwise push off they certainly end up being granted greater remuneration so powerful has this ethic become especially with regard to the ghostly notion of capital flight that few of these figures ever have to pull the trigger and even if they pretend to think of wayne rooney s move to manchester city which resulted in his income going up by a few more million a year it s usually possible to pull back from the brink one of the great fears of the mega celebrity is presumably that they will leave and end up worse off but for those who are given the boot this is rarely the case this tedious game theoretical choreography is now a spectacle in its own right think of theo walcott s pathetic triannual negotiations over his arsenal contract think of how the risible disciples try to keep the drama alive as in piers morgan s bringbackkp campaign for some reason the news media plays along with it powerless to understand or challenge the fact that this is simply a case of the big brother house expanded to a multi platform scale beyond the limits of any individual show the phrase you re fired uttered from the mouth of alan sugar successfully converted enforced exit into something intriguing spectacular fun who s next who deserves to go if even clarkson can be axed then presumably it could be any of us how exciting central to the drama of these individuals being axed as opposed to leaving is that it pushes authorities to the limits of their own market nihilism the behaviour of clarkson or for that matter investment banks poses the question to institutions what else is there other than money how else to regulate if not in pursuit of filthy lucre the axed celebrity typically makes more money elsewhere and becomes more famous in the process hence the whole event is really a cruder televised playing out of michael sandel s philosophical debates regarding the moral limits to markets can the bbc really afford to lose clarkson what s the trade off between punching someone and tens of millions of pounds maybe the treasury green book can help for the most part exit resides as a type of metaphysics like the constant possibility of death the existential facticity of our own deaths which we either face up to or not becomes the economic possibility of eventually cutting one s ties or having them cut and where religious rituals involve the playing out of death via forms of sacrifice so the spectacle of clarkson kp et al becomes a communal way of facing up to the inevitability of being dumped or doing the dumping there is a catharsis going on how else to explain the fascination with a borish middle aged man being sacked for gross misconduct wasn t he the guy who used to drone on about how many miles to the gallon you can get out of a ford focus what all of this ignores including hirschman s analysis are the forms of exit which are silent unseen and unjustified i m a privileged academic but have a visceral memory of being marched off a site i once worked on as an agency worker during an undergraduate holiday by security staff who decided i d stolen something the managers all had their hands in the till so picked off agency workers when it became too obvious it was an exit of sorts but it was a violent one unjustified unacceptable based on lies with no opportunity to contest the charge one thing i remember about the experience was the silence as the security guard and i walked from the manager s office to the gate it wasn t exit in hirschman s normative sense but expulsion i ve no doubt that this sense of unpredictable threat is a common feature of working life for millions in our new condition of contingent neoliberalism in which norms of fair competition can no longer be upheld this is the sort of violent settlement that is being increasingly relied on punishment is becoming a normalised form of management and governance and the question of justified or unjusti...