Zu lesen:
Henry Farrell & Marion Fourcade (2023): The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism. In: Daedalus 152 (1), S. 225–235.
Abstract:
While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we call “high-tech modernism”– the application of machine learning algorithms to organize our social, economic, and political life-has a dual logic. On the one hand, like traditional bureaucracy, it is an engine of classification, even if it categorizes people and things very differently. On the other, like the market, it provides a means of self-adjusting allocation, though its feedback loops work differently from the price system. Perhaps the most important consequence of high-tech modernism for the contemporary moral political economy is how it weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people’s own true wishes.
Zitat:
At the end of the day, the relationship between high modernism and high-tech modernism is a struggle between two elites: a new elite of coders, who claim to mediate the wisdom of crowds, and an older elite who based their claims to legitimacy on specialized professional, scientific, or bureaucratic knowledge. [*] Both elites draw on rhetorical resources to justify their positions; neither is disinterested. The robust offense and disbelief that many people feel about algorithmic judgments suggests that the old high modernist moral political economy, faults and all, is not quite dead. The new moral political economy that will replace it has not yet matured, but is being bred from within. Articulated by technologists and their financial backers, it feeds in a kind of matriphagy on the enfeebled body (and the critique) of its progenitor. Just as high modernist bureaucracies did before, high-tech modernist tools and their designers categorize and order things, people, and situations. But they do so in distinctive ways. By embedding surveillance into everything, they have made us stop worrying about it, and perhaps even come to love it. [**] By producing incomprehensible bespoke categorizations, they have made it harder for people to identify their common fate. By relying on opaque and automated feedback loops, they have reshaped the possible pathways to political reaction and resistance. By increasing the efficiency of online coordination, they have made mobilization more emotional, ad hoc, and collectively unstable. And by insisting on market fairness and the wisdom of crowds as organizing social concepts, they have fundamentally transformed our moral intuitions about authority, truth, objectivity, and deservingness.
Literaturangaben:
[*] William Davies, “Elite Power Under Advanced Neoliberalism,” Theory, Culture and Society 34 (5–6) (2017): 227–250; and Jenna Burrell and Marion Fourcade, “The Society of Algorithms,” Annual Review of Sociology 47 (2021): 213–237.
[**] Nitsan Chorev, “The Virus and the Vessel, or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance,” Socio-Economic Review 19 (4) (2021): 1497–1513.
Anmerkungen:
Kann jemand den Eliten-Begriff nochmal ordnen? Doch »it’s all over now, baby blue«. (Bob Dylan: Nobelpreis, passim) Quasi »So gehen die Weberschiffchen des Geschickes aneinander vorbei, und ›was er webt, das weiß kein Weber!‹« (Gottfried Keller: Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, 1855/56) »Das Schiffchen fliegt, der Webstuhl kracht, / Wir weben emsig Tag und Nacht – / Altdeutschland, wir weben Dein Leichentuch, / Wir weben hinein den dreifachen Fluch, / Wir weben, wir weben!« (Heinrich Heine: Die schlesischen Weber, 1847) So war’s: »Jahre kommen und vergehen – / In dem Webstuhl läuft geschäftig / Schnurrend hin und her die Spule – / Was er webt, das weiß kein Weber.« (Heinrich Heine: Romanzero / Jehuda Ben Halevy, 1851)
