Beyond Freedom & Dignity 2.0

Ideas are like a virus; they go into remission, return, then mutate into something lethal

Print by Deborah Skinner Buzan, dated and numbered, 1972

I have a peculiar personal connection to one of the most infamous psychologists of the 20thcentury, the controversial though largely forgotten psychologist, B F Skinner, the father of Behaviorism. It’s a branch of psychology that fell out of fashion about half a century ago and for good reason. Unfortunately for us, his ideas about managing, herding and controlling the behaviour of humans without them noticing have returned in a technical mutation he would have loved.

Skinner is also the author of two controversial book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity and Walden Two. Some Harvard grad students hated the book so much they dubbed it Towards Slavery and Humiliation. Back in the day, Skinner’s mantra that humanity could only be saved via behavioural and scientific manipulation was considered beyond the pale. He died, lamenting that the technology he needed to save humanity from its ignorance had not been invented. But good news for all social engineers: it seems that the necessary technology is now here and working very well, thank you.

BF Skinner at Harvard

My relationship with the good professor, such as it was, came via his daughter, the artist Deborah Skinner Buzan, who sold me one of her works back in 1976. We met because she had submitted a print for publication in a special Women’s Year Edition of a literary magazine I was editing. Since I knew who her father was, I asked her if she had been raised in the dreadful ‘Skinner Box’, a contraption Skinner had invented for his experiments on animals. She laughed, but admitted that yes, she was raised in a heated, box-like thing that he had built just for her. Not to do experiments on her but simply for the purpose of keeping her warm and safe while giving her mother some time off. She said she was content in there; and grew out of the warm box at age two. I didn’t really buy this story, convinced that good old dad had a few other things in mind and that he was some version of the devil himself. But it wasn’t until half a century later during which time I hadn’t given Skinner much thought, that he surfaced again. When I began reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism  The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Dr Shoshana Zuboff, it turned out that she had been his student at Harvard during the mid seventies.

Professor Dr Shoshana Zuboff

Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and her writing style is as big and luxurious as her hair. I believe everyone should read her, but she is not for people looking for an easy mental fix. She demands that you think, and think hard.

As for Skinner, she absolutely disliked his ideas, admitting to having numerous, if futile, arguments with him about his theory of ‘operant conditioning’ among others. But she is getting her own back now by pointing to him as the intellectual father of what might be called digital operant conditioning. You’ve likely heard that ‘you are the product’ in Google’s world, but that misses the mark. You are the unwitting means to others’ ends, as Zuboff puts it. And it was the forgotten discipline of Skinner’s ‘radical behaviorism’ that gives it the necessary intellectual foundation without which no new system of power can establish itself.

According to her, we have come full circle: Skinner’s ideas no longer sound controversial and if he were alive today, he would be hanging out with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. He could even teach him a thing or two. If you’re already convinced that your freedom has been stolen by panicked politicians reacting to a virus; there’s more than that going on. We’re addicts of the digital kind, and we know it. But we’re still unclear about the underlying power and how it actually works. This too is done by design and reaches deep into the real world where we’re on the cusp of falling headlong into a surveillance society masquerading as ‘keeping you safe from Covid’ while throttling our hard-won democratic freedoms and human rights. China’s well known digital ‘social index’ is the model for our dear leaders in the west. I’m not sure if the CCP has read Skinner, but they don’t need to.

When Skinner published Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he unleashed a storm of controversy with his argument that old fashioned concepts like ‘freedom’ are just phantoms based on ignorance, waiting to be demolished by scientific progress. Freedom, being an experience you feel, falls into the category of things that can’t be measured ‘scientifically’ and therefore  we must get rid of it. What Skinner wanted was nothing less than absolute yet stealthy control of behaviour, via a process he called ‘operant conditioning’. This involved not just simple stimulus response models but crucially, reenforcement to shape specific behaviours, the whole thing called behaviour modification. Skinner spent the remainder of his career bemoaning the absence of the technology that would make it all possible. He was after social engineering and its ‘predictive outcomes’, and truly believed that by reducing individuals to ‘organisms’ to be herded, nudged and manipulated without their knowledge, humanity’s problems would at long last be over.

Today, half a century later, we need not worry—paradise with digital characteristics is already here. Zuboff cites an unnamed chief data scientist for a famous Silicon Valley education company thus: Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behaviour’, he says. Zuboff summarizes his other comments: ‘smartphones, wearable devices and the larger assembly of alwys-on networked nodes allow his company to modify and manage a substantial swath of its users’ behaviour. As the Digital signals monitor ad track a person’s daily activities, the company gradually masters the schedule of reinforcements—rewards, recognition or praise that can reliably produce the specific user behaviours that the company selects for dominance’.

This is the essence of what Zuboff terms ‘Behavioural Surplus’ and its monetization by the big tech companies. Here she explains what it is:

Surveillance Capitalism begins with the discovery of behavioural surplus. More behavioural data are rendered than required for service improvements. This surplus feeds machine intelligence—the new mens of production—that fabricates predictions of user behaviour. These products are sold to business customers in new behavioural futures markets.

And because no human mind can grasp ‘machine intelligence’ we literally do not know exactly how this is done. However, there is a select group of insiders who know much more than anyone else. Like high priests of technology, they design and interpret the machine logic that now runs our lives. And they own it. You do not; you’re radically stupid in that world. Just like illiterate serfs, in fact.

But make no mistake; this serfdom does not feel coercive; indeed, it feels good because you are under the illusion that Alexa is ‘helping’ you when in fact, she is helping herself to your data and monetizing it without you noticing. Same goes for smart homes, smart cities, and all kinds of gadgets smarter than you are. We love them because they promise an easier life. God knows, life is tough and we could all use a break. But it’s all a big experiment and you are the mouse. Here is Zuboff describing one of the key intellectuals behind the entire digital extractive edifice, the Google economist Hal (what a perfect name for him!) Varian: Varian awards surveillance capitalists the privilege of the experimenter’s role, and this is presented as another casual fait accompli. In fact, it reflects the final critical step in surveillance capitalists’ radical self dealing of new rights. In this phase of the prediction imperative, surveillance capitalists declare their right to modify others’ behaviour for profit according to methods that bypass human awareness, individual decisions rights, and the entire complex of self regulatory processes that we summarize with terms such as autonomy and self-determination.

What it means is this: our freedom is under attack not only from our benighted politicians but also, the big, private, all powerful tech giants who have resurrected behaviourism and are happy as pigs in conditioned shit. If we allow them to continue on their way, our lives will turn to shit as well.

Let me conclude with a couple of favourite Zuboff quotes. After reading that, I hope you feel adequate to the task ahead; which is nothing less than being a free person with free will in a world increasingly eager to take it away from you.

Here is Zuboff on Arendt: the philosopher Hannah Arendt devoted an entire volume to an examination of will as the ‘organ for the future’ in the same way that memory is our mental organ for the past. the power of will lies in its unique ability to del with things, ‘visible and invisibles’, that have never existed at all. Just as the past always presents itself to the mind in the guise of certainty, the future’s main characteristic is its basic uncertainty, no matter how high a degree of probability prediction may attain.”

In a world where you, your data and your very life is being auctioned to the highest bidder in futures markets that demand and deliver certainty of outcomes, the operation of individual will, it seems to me, becomes the only guarantee of any sort of freedom. As Zuboff says, we have to ask ourselves these basic questions: who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?

Zuboff gets the last word:

If democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades, it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us. In this I do not mean our ‘personal information’. What is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one’s own life and authorship of one’s own experience. What is at stake is the inward experience from which we form the will to will and the public spaces to act on that will. What is at stake is the dominant principle of social ordering in an information civilization and our rights as individuals and societies to ask questions.

I reject inevitablity, and it is my hope that as a result of our journey together, you will too. We are at the beginning of this story, not the end. If we engage the oldest questions now, there is still time to take the reigns and redirect the action toward a human future that we can call home.