By the reporter
In his book Minority Report, adapted into a 2002 film by Steven Spielberg, written by American novelist Philip K. Dick envisioned a dystopian society in which potential murderers were arrested and tried before murder. This premonition is the secret of Justice: The Mutants Premonition.
In the absence of such mutants, more and more police forces around the world are turning to methods that analyze massive amounts of data to identify “red boxes” – areas where crime is likely to occur, where police can prevent it by early intervention. Currently, young people, often mixed race and working class, are arrested for crimes they may commit. Dystopia has become a reality.
For Canadian economists Jonathan Durand Folco and Jonathan Martino, this phenomenon is a sign of the arrival of an “algorithmic society”, whose birth and characteristics they analyze in their book. Algorithmic capital.
Capitalism's New Eldorado
This community emerged after two decades of accumulation of “algorithmic capital”. Many articles consider artificial intelligence (AI), social media, and algorithmic technologies such as facial recognition. Regardless of the context in which they were created, the two authors never separated them from the economic system that produced them: capitalism, at its core.
These technologies are based on a new type of raw material: data. Capitalism's new Eldorado, data, is both a material that can be extracted — through quantitative analysis of human behavior — and a commodity that can be sold. Algorithmic capitalism rests on two pillars. The first is the massive dissection of what American sociologist Shoshana Zuboff calls for in her book The age of surveillance capitalism (Shulma, 2018), “behavioral surplus”, that is, the capture of “surplus value” from work, transformed into digital data; Second, predict, thanks to this data, user behavior.
The first method capitalists – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, the famous “Kuffams” – became the champions of this new era of capitalism after the economic crisis of 2007-2008. The book's authors refer to the period's shift from neoliberalism to algorithmic capitalism. Gafam rose to power in the decade following the financial crisis, making it one of the most publicly traded companies today, thanks to many innovations (smartphones, laptops, a large number of sensors, etc.). At the same time, traditional economic agents have integrated methods into their own work processes. The Covid-19 pandemic and continued lockdowns have acted as accelerators of an underlying global trend – such as a “great digital leap”.
However, algorithmic capitalists did not build their empires solely on the efficiency of their technologies. At the same time as productivity has increased, work has degraded and devalued in all sectors. Disguised wage workers (Uber, Deliveroo, etc.), micro-working (“Click Farms”, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, etc.), outsourcing to countries in the Global South (ChatGPT training by low-wage Kenyan workers with OpenAI) or even exploiting users’ free labor ( Ratings given to this or that company on Google, Yelp, Airbnb, etc.): Sites are unimaginative when it comes to fragmenting and controlling the workers who design their methods… and increase your profits accordingly.
Desired dystopia
How was such a dystopia born, which was being built for everyone to see for twenty years? This is one of the strong theses of Jonathan Durand Folco and Jonathan Martino's 22: algorithmic society can evolve at will. And above all by governments. Instead of controlling American Gafam or Chinese BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi), governments want to ally with them to create a new “algorithmic government” that is incompatible with the use of democracy.
Using the power of mechanisms to determine and direct incentives within complex societies, contemporary states “turn information into a policy tool that encourages different actors to act in certain ways rather than others.” Algorithms have been introduced in almost all areas of public authority: the police, but justice – in the US, algorithms recommend judgments and judges determine appropriate sentences -, prisons – Taiwan “jails without guards” – and even quota. Social programs according to opaque criteria even from the point of view of public authorities.
Despite the monstrous nature of this surveillance capitalism promoted by governments and multinationals, a large part of the world's population seems to have accepted this state of affairs. Recent theses Algorithmic capital Explore the reasons for this ambiguous social acceptance. If many people have a smart bed connected to their smart home, a refrigerator that automatically orders milk when they run out, a smart bed that monitors sleep quality, and other tech gadgets, it's because they see it as a way to relieve themselves of some household chores. These companies are well aware that they are opening a window of their domestic privacy.
Exploitation of privacy can go even further. In addition to intelligent sex toys and blow-up dolls, the industry is now developing “erobots,” typically replica-like chatbots that users need to interact with humans to create friendships or virtual mates. Thus the circle is complete: faced with the human vacuum it creates, capitalism offers technological solutions… that only serve to further isolate the helpless. A new form of subjectivity emerges; In the era of so-called “social” networks, a “connected self” emerges, the height of social narcissism, which exposes its private life to the public and derives pleasure from it.
“Technosophers”
Despite everything, a ray of hope emerges in the dark picture of the world painted by the two Jonathans. According to him, algorithms are not fundamentally bad because it depends on how they are used. In an approach they claim to be “techno-moderate” and not “technocracy,” these Canadians imagine methods taken from capitalism and put them at the service of democracy, with the goal of their best practice, which involves the most difficult and complex processes. Should be automated to reduce working time and increase leisure time of its members.
Taking into account the catastrophic environmental costs of the digital sector, which economists analyze in detail, such a proposal is still unproven in the long run and, above all, raises questions about its relevance: should we really automate anything? Should we wait until algorithms learn to fairly share our work and its benefits?
Source: Reporter.
Selected article by Carlos Valmaceda Misc Salvador Lopez Arnal
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