A Snake's Coils Are Even More Intricate Than a Mole's Burrow
The push to “reopen the economy” seems to rely on a denialist faith that the pandemic is somehow magically over, and no further measures need to be taken. It’s not as though a vaccine has been produced or an effective treatment has been developed. And it’s not as though testing for the virus or antibodies has become widely available or even reliable. Rather the point of the reopening drive is its defiant myopia — it expresses a refusal to be deterred by the medical consensus, which is treated as something that can be overcome through exercises of sheer economic will. It’s no accident that one high-profile stunt was staged outside a gym.
Co-existing with this heedlessness is a push for what appears, by contrast, to be enlightened vigilance: an insistence on more thorough surveillance, mediated by technology and through tech companies rather than medical professionals or state officials, that will supposedly help society to function again. If a total system that tracks every individual and traces every contact is somehow achieved, this will allow for individuals’ safe navigation of public space: Businesses will know just who to exclude. But again, absent reliable testing and the will to forcibly quarantine the sick, these are just confidence-boosting gestures in the face of insurmountable uncertainty — pandemic theater.
These two kinds of confidence games line up with two different approaches for managing the psychological aspects of capitalism in general, reproducing the willingness to engage in economic activity in the face of continual crisis. Most Americans currently want no part of either approach, but the incentives for pretending otherwise are strong — it's indeed justified by the same belief in the infinite malleability of confidence.
The denialist approach to "reopening" is a blunt assertion of Keynesian “animal spirits,” while the app-based contact tracing is an expression of what Tiqqun, in a 2001 text, called “the cybernetic hypothesis.” According to Tiqqun, the liberal view that enlightened self-interest was sufficient for “the invisible hand” to guide the economy was thrown into chaos by the downturn of the 1930s. As Keynes famously argued, the depression was a crisis of effective demand, hinging on a lack of investor confidence. “If the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die,” he wrote in the General Theory, “though fears of loss may have a basis no more reasonable than hopes of profit had before.”
Of course, the pandemic shutting down the service industry seems like a reasonable basis for fearing losses. But the lesson some have apparently drawn from Keynes is that animal spirits are most potent and most potentially lucrative when they are most irrational —that makes the risk-taking more “courageous,” which would seem to karmically justify the rewards being more lucrative.
But Tiqqun’s essay emphasizes a different solution to the problem of flagging demand and investor uncertainty. “To be afraid of risks is already to be seen as a risk to society oneself,” they argue. The individual owes society a certain toleration of uncertainty. I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear.
One solution is to find a means to bypass the individual’s subjective experience of risk and fabricate instead a system that runs not on “free choice” and entrepreneurial risk-taking so much as data-driven feedback loops and calibrated cycles of consumption. You don't need people with agency to make choices, you need people who can be programmed by infusions of information to make choices on schedule. “The sectors of control and communication develop because commodity valorization requires the organization of a closed loop of information circulation, parallel with the circulation of commodities, the production of a collective belief that is objectified in value,” Tiqqun writes. Information about goods — metadata about their circulation — is as important to their value as their usefulness. What they can signify, what flows they trace, are as important as what they are.
The industrial acceleration of production requires an industrial production of affect — a production of the emotional climate conducive to accelerating economic exchanges. The consumption rhythms for economic growth aren’t natural; they need to be nurtured and sustained through that “closed loop of information circulation.” In other words, economic activity need not presuppose any animal spirits in individuals or any natural desire for any use value in particular goods; instead information can be used to manufacture desire and make it sufficiently predictable to organize production and investment, as long as the system is sufficiently totalizing. If everybody’s behavior is observed and captured, the data can be used to project profit opportunities in the future, with consumers being reshaped by their data-saturated environment accordingly.
This is basically the idea of Shoshana Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism.” Tech companies have developed a surveillance apparatus that can close the cybernetic loop, anticipating and inculcating consumer desire through refinements of the existing system of demand production, i.e. advertising.
Zuboff works hard to make this sound as sinister as possible, as though having your freedom of consumer choice abrogated was equivalent to some sort of social death. But in practice, it seems as though consumers don’t experience this system as oppression but a flattering quasi-liberation: Its algorithms substantiate their identity in consumption, recognizing their consumer behavior as massively significant. It depicts us as worth targeting, making us feel chosen as the destined recipients of some specific news. It frees us from the labor of wanting things; it does the desiring and enjoying for us, as Žižek used to argue.
This kind of surveillance is not prohibitive; it is permissive — the panopticon turned inside out. The more we are watched and tracked, the more we can be catered to and stimulated. What the system is capable of predicting for us is our perpetual desire for more, beyond the limits of “use value” or rationality. “Recommendation engine” is an apt term for this.
But if that is how surveillance was broadly experienced (by the privileged, at least) before the pandemic, now the perception may be shifting. Under the guise of quarantine triage, systematic surveillance is threatening to again appear not in its commercial form — producing desire, provoking economic activity, anchoring consumer identity — but in its repressive form, threatening exclusion, the denial of access, the prohibition of desire. It will prevent people from getting what they have been taught to want rather than shape their rhythm of wanting in the first place.
Contact-tracing apps thus appear as a kind of tech betrayal: Tech companies promised that being watched would feel like attention and seduction, but contract tracing is more like suspicion and persecution — it circumscribes rather than opens up your horizons. We are used to engaging with cybernetic, algorithmic systems that confirm a sense of ourselves as individuated subjects (even as they funnel agency into prescribed channels); pandemic surveillance instead imposes on us a higher social prerogative, lumping us back into a mass, demanding we take part in a collective health process.
For consumers to consent to surveillance that might inhibit them rather than goad them on, they would need to be sold on tracking as a form of “opening the economy.” Still it’s inescapably clear that this "opening" is for some and not others; the process makes the forms of discrimination and preferential treatment already operating in the consumer economy (having “status”; being a “preferred customer”; getting a better price; etc.) much more explicit.
In this Vice interview, bioethicist Brent Mittelstadt describes why some people might refuse to use contact-tracing apps:
If you're talking about making it mandatory as a way to basically limit people's access to society, to employment, we're talking about things that are connected to fundamental human rights. To suddenly turn around and use the pandemic as a excuse to severely limit people's ability to exercise their rights, to me that would require a completely different sort of justification, one that would not be accepted certainly within Europe, that I would hope in the U.S. as well, though I take nothing for granted in the U.S. in terms of politics. This is sort of a complete authoritarian turn, where you're saying, okay, we're not just going to handle it by trying to detect cases early, we're actually going to prevent new cases by locking people down in their houses or preventing them from essentially participating in the economy and society.
In a situation where the government seeks to take no responsibility for the health of its citizens, preferring to extend the long-established approach of dismantling social safety nets and having everyone fend for themselves, contract-tracing apps can only appear as authoritarian if they are state-sponsored. The state has already demonstrated it doesn’t help people, as a matter of principle. So instead, the apps are being pitched as coming from Silicon Valley, as though they were part of the “sharing economy” by which one bootstraps their way to health through scrappy diligence and savvy strategies of participation. It is your business alone if you use these apps, your responsibility to figure out how to let them empower you.
Contract-tracing apps can then be made to conform to the picture Tiqqun painted of “cybernetic capitalism”: “The dismantling of the systems of social protection … aims consequently at restoring everyone’s sense of responsibility by making them all bear the ‘risks’ that capitalists alone impose on the whole ‘social body.’” We should understand that capitalist-imposed risk as the premature and unnecessary “reopening of the economy,” an opportunity that the virus has created.
“In the last analysis,” Tiqqun continues, “it’s a matter of instilling the point of view of social reproduction in each individual, who should no longer expect anything from society but sacrifice everything to it.” That is, individuals must be compelled to see participation in the consumer economy as the only meaningful possible society, the market the only framework that can give their lives meaning. “Because the social regulation of catastrophes and of the unforeseen can no longer be managed, as it was in the Middle Ages, solely by social exclusion, scapegoating, restraints, and enclosure,” Tiqqun argues. We can only quarantine for so long without breaking open the closed feedback loops. Surveillance will be depicted as the solution to confinement, even as it serves as the means for enforcing it.