An explanatory chapter selection from my ongoing book on big data: brief history of social control/engineering
A Brief History of Social Engineering: From Prediction to Prescription
The human all too human desire for controlling other human beings is one of the invariant features of the species. All that changes with the generations would be the refinement of the mechanisms by which other human beings can be controlled, the techniques for successful social engineering, and being able to better predict - or prescribe - desired outcomes.
The end product of millennia of focus - and more particularly the technics of social control in the past three centuries - can be located right where you may find yourself: at the computer or portable device, being given a choice from a set of restricted choices on a drop-down menu, set in a rigid and gridded digital environment that appeals to your sense of freedom of choice while at the same time limiting it.
Let us take the first arbitrary example: that patron saint of cybernetics as identified by cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener: Leibniz. Now, Leibniz’ theory of the monads - like little atomistic souls arranged in the most harmonious pattern according to some enclosing deity program - appears to suggest that command and control is built into the metaphysical system. Deviations are corrected, and can be done so through internal regulation. It would not be long until the Age of Enlightenment would privilege Reason, but also occupy itself with an interest in automata. We push through the folds of history and find ourselves on the eve of the industrial revolution, with the invention of the loom and the guillotine - both instruments that automate functions and have a technological determinist effect on human beings. Introduce the steam engine, develop a calculating machine, and it would not be long until entire human populations engage in a large migration from the fields to the factories. In those “satanic mills” is a new value, built on utilitarianism, which may be called “factory time.” Nothing better controls the motions of the human body better than subjugating it to the movements of the machine. We know this from Karl Marx. We also know that once we can control the physiological, it is but one step to control the psychological by simply applying similar techniques. Religion functioned as a convenient social backstop to ensure workers in deplorable conditions would accept these conditions as a down payment on their entrance to heaven. Know thy place in the social order was far more important than the Socratic know thyself. Marx speaks a great deal about the alienation of the worker from the products of his labour, from his fellow workers, and from the world at large. The factory is the world, and the product leading to profit the entire reality of that world.
Enter Taylorism to further mechanize labour processes, but also enter the rise of the social sciences - in itself not an innocuous pursuit, for it assumes that social behaviour in both the individual and the collective sense can be measured scientifically, which then provides the tools for others to control. We might turn to the birth of positivism in the person of Auguste Comte. The belief in the clockwork universe where all were simply working out the predestined history towards its complete perfection was already the dream of dialectical thinkers like Hegel, or as part of the thought experiment of Laplace who said that if we could know the state of all particles in the universe, we could predict every future state and thus the future itself.
But enter entropy, that mischievous wrecker. Entropy is the measure of relative disorder in a system. The social equivalent might be the masses, the horde, the irrational forces that occasionally erupt in strikes and revolutions. Social mass unrest was a good symbol of entropy, and so we might refer to an important book written in 1899 by Gustav le Bon entitled La psychologie des foules (translated as simply “Crowds”). A great deal of pessimism regarding the unpredictability of crowds was already manifest in the uneasy Balance of Power, in various violent uprisings, and eventually in the first world war. There had to be a way of optimizing the social system to bring it back to harmonious function, to correct for unpredictable deviations. A whole science of crowd phenomena had been born. Such a desire for mass control was already being employed by V.I. Lenin in the 1917 Russian Revolution, and it should be said that there are so few successful examples of social control in history than this experiment conducted over such a long period - yet it tended towards blunt means of social control in the form of purges, suppression, spot assassinations, sentences to the gulags, complete control over culture and media, and one of the most advanced spy networks ever devised matched by the most meticulous record-keeping prior to the Internet.
Crowd control takes so many forms, and in the salad days we could even point to the way cities are laid out to facilitate containment and capture. But let us turn specifically to the United States to witness how they dealt with their own crowd problems and solutions.
We could turn to some of the pioneers of both public opinion and public relations, respectively, for how this would work out in practical terms. The much celebrated pioneer of the study of public opinion, Walter Lippmann, is fairly blunt in his appraisal of the masses: they are stupid, gullible, easily persuaded, and so must be directed by an elite few in the media to ensure social harmony. It meant simplifying issues to mere binaries so that opinion would not have to contend with unnerving shades of grey. Or, we may turn to that father of public relations, Edward Bernays, who also held that the masses were ignorant and unpredictable, and so needed to be guided. He ransacked his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious and found the pecuniary hook to shift the economy from necessity to desire. He had located the perfect channel for the bubbling ferment of the unconscious: shopping. Imbuing all sorts of objects with psychoanalytic significance, he was able to get women to smoke, transformed unpopular politicians into more likable figures, popularized otherwise more high-brow entertainment for a mid-brow audience who craved status but also generally reacted negatively to higher cultural forms because of inborn social inferiority, and created many of the fictions that live on today, such as the need for the big breakfast. To list his “accomplishments” is worthy of its own special treatment.
Let us take just one lateral step to consider another American who was critical of the social world and where it was headed: the sociologist Thorstein Veblen. If anyone was puzzled why he seemed so misanthropic, disagreeably brusque, and impatient with others, one has only to read his works which paint an unflattering picture of human beings as progressing in one sense, but stubbornly invariant in another. That is, even with all the great developments in institutions and technologies, human beings were little changed from their primitive days of conspicuous status-chasing behaviours linked to power and domination, and in abiding by absurd rituals and ceremonial behaviours that were entirely superfluous. Judge for yourself why you might select the silver flatware over the steel variety when the former is far less durable than the latter. Or, perhaps you might consider attending a university’s convocation where the assembled don the medieval garb and engage in a ceremony that has little to do with education or what it means today.
The unchecked irrationality of capitalism and the promotion of regular citizens - soon to be redefined as consumers - to participate in the stock market (another Bernays intervention) would eventually recreate the economic bubbles of yesteryear (do read Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and specifically the chapters dealing with tulipomania and the South Seas Bubble - Mackay would have got on famously with Veblen). And so the stock market crash.
And the rise of fascism in Italy, its contagion spreading to Germany. The irrational forces of love (for the leader) and hate (of the “other”) gave the unconscious its sustenance. The merger of the nazi mysticism and industrialized technological apparatus had shown itself to be remarkably adept at social engineering and control. The German technical focus on precision and meticulous record-keeping was perhaps even more sophisticated than the Soviets.
At the conclusion of the war with its twin nuclear finale, the need for social control became ever more urgent. Normalization was the watchword of the period. So, in the US, just as the women had been encouraged en masse to labour in the factories under the illusion of empowerment, they had to be shuffled out and back into the domestic home to make way for the returning soldiers. Democracy had to be vigorously promoted, and this was achieved through several means. The bubbling up of the Cold War also meant a need to divide the world into a useful binary that would regulate geopolitics and the individuals themselves. Normalization continued through the use of educational films on proper behaviours at home, in school, to despise difference, to embrace homogeneity and consumerism, and to be diligent patriots. As the suburbs yawned their way across the landscape, the automobile was king. The threat of nuclear annihilation was mitigated in part by stealing from Joseph Goebbel’s propaganda playbook: to optimize anxiety so that there was just enough fear to keep people vigilant, but not so much that it would be paralyzing.
But it is 1948 when Norbert Wiener publishes his book, Cybernetics: Command and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. This was a watershed year as Claude E. Shannon published his famous paper “The Theory of Mathematical Communication.” Of course, let it be known that the math and engineering Cold War hawks like Weaver and Neumann applied Shannon’s theory in ways that caused the author to retreat from the world. So begins the birth of the computer age and predictability, the creation of feedback systems to better control outcomes, the development of models that might apply to fields as diverse as economics, engineering, linguistics, anthropology, and even literary criticism. Cybernetics became the flavour of the month, an interdisciplinary approach to deferring entropy and optimizing order.
In parallel to these considerations was the new crop of Austrian and Chicago school economists who - against psychoanalysis, empirical verification, or actual observation - claimed that human beings were fundamentally rational beings who made rational choices as a means of seeking advantage. Mix this absurd axiomatic view of human nature with the philosophy of Ayn Rand who champions individualism over compassion, and rational instrumentalism over all other modes of thought, and you create the perfect conditions of neoliberal economic theory with its belief in the mysticism of technology, progress, borderless trade, deindustrialization, the service economy, dismantling unions and the Keynesian welfare state (or: socialism for the corporations and capitalism for the rest of us), the triumph of the calculating and disloyal narcissist, mercenary entrepreneurialism, so-called “small government,” and widespread deregulation, all in the belief that the market shall decide, and that it can be controlled with the use of prediction modeling. That, as we have learned, has failed.
The failure of the youth mobilization movements of the 1960s was brought about through targeted commodification and a pop culture feedback system (or, perhaps akin to what Frankfurt School sociologist Theodor Adorno called the “culture industry”). The 1970s saw both a trumpeting of selfishness and a fundamental change in how exchange rates operated. The rise of populist neoliberals and neoconservatives was in full flower, partially thanks to the rabid, screeching minority of fundamentalist evangelicals who hijacked the political process.
How can we forget one of the other means of social control that also came into being in the 1980s - a far more material, programmatic, and profitable venture in the form of the pharmaceutical industry. Rather than simply seeing the therapist, which in itself is too prone to error, why not regulate human emotions by applying a clinical label that makes humans feel special (“I have x disorder”), followed by a simple solution in the form of a pill? The mind and all its problems, real or fabricated, was little more than a chemical engineering problem, and a profitable solution was at hand. It was no longer socially acceptable to be sad, to be anxious, to have any feelings that may interrupt the flow of consumption.
We enter now into the Internet age proper, the much feted and fetishized “information age” or the hyperbole of the “information revolution.” See here how the culmination of social control and engineering can be mediated through devices that we are obliged to consume and dispose of in a rapid cycle that keeps a sector of the economy afloat. Note the invitation to volunteer personal data online without having to be compelled to do so, all under the false promise of free expression. Note the fixation on one’s infinite potentiality, but how one is channeled into a system whereby it is the hosts and providers who profit by your free labour in ranking objects and humans (the same thing), in being ever more “connected” to more individuals, but losing all social skills. Everyone is merely a node attached to a wallet. It is here that prediction makes its transformation into prescription.
And how is this done? If all you know of this world is what is permitted to be shown online, and all choices are restricted, then we have the makings of a perfect control set. None will deviate from the choices provided since no others are offered. You will believe in the airy myths of progress, speed, efficiency, and connectivity, and will labour ever more within your digital prison while the unseen bots harvest all the data you happily surrender, making you either the target of marketing or government spy agencies. You are geolocated and tagged. Your entire perception of the world is now through the filter of the gadgets that transform space into commercial place, the augmentation of the real itself as you navigate a world through the products and services you can buy, or the unpaid labour you perform for the system and its meta-regulation. While you are told that you control your destiny, you become the controlled - a market segment, a bloc of consumers, a data set of demographic details. Swipe and click all you like, for it does not bring down the walls of the oligopolistic digital system, but instead empowers it.
And so is also resurrected the old game theory ideals, the prisoners dilemma, but you are blind to it as you seek your own advantage, to become the online celebrity, to become the web-based entrepreneur, to embrace the illusion and ephemerality of online popularity as you chase after abstract nothings like social capital, or attempt to increase your share of the equally abstract nothing of the attention economy. In fact, your entire social being is nothing more than an economical unit, your individuality a monotonous pseudo-uniqueness of frivolous self-expression (feeding the commodity system) and mundane events and conspicuous self-presentation as you upload pictures of yourself on vacation to increase your illusory status (as you treat the world as composed of checklist items so that you can say you’ve been there and done that). It is nothing but a game from which you do not prosper, and because the choices are rigged in advance, your behaviour becomes a prescribed one.
The tyranny of the model obtains here, for if we live in model homes, in model communities (offline and online), under a model economy with a model government, and purchase the same model goods and services, we become imprisoned within a kind of diorama where our options are limited by the restricted variables and choices that are available. Feel free to be the libertarian hero starring in your own distilled zombie epic, for your moves are restricted to the length and breadth of the chess board, and the finite number of moves are prescribed in advance - and they are finite no matter how large the number may be.
The human all too human desire for controlling other human beings is one of the invariant features of the species. All that changes with the generations would be the refinement of the mechanisms by which other human beings can be controlled, the techniques for successful social engineering, and being able to better predict - or prescribe - desired outcomes.
The end product of millennia of focus - and more particularly the technics of social control in the past three centuries - can be located right where you may find yourself: at the computer or portable device, being given a choice from a set of restricted choices on a drop-down menu, set in a rigid and gridded digital environment that appeals to your sense of freedom of choice while at the same time limiting it.
Let us take the first arbitrary example: that patron saint of cybernetics as identified by cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener: Leibniz. Now, Leibniz’ theory of the monads - like little atomistic souls arranged in the most harmonious pattern according to some enclosing deity program - appears to suggest that command and control is built into the metaphysical system. Deviations are corrected, and can be done so through internal regulation. It would not be long until the Age of Enlightenment would privilege Reason, but also occupy itself with an interest in automata. We push through the folds of history and find ourselves on the eve of the industrial revolution, with the invention of the loom and the guillotine - both instruments that automate functions and have a technological determinist effect on human beings. Introduce the steam engine, develop a calculating machine, and it would not be long until entire human populations engage in a large migration from the fields to the factories. In those “satanic mills” is a new value, built on utilitarianism, which may be called “factory time.” Nothing better controls the motions of the human body better than subjugating it to the movements of the machine. We know this from Karl Marx. We also know that once we can control the physiological, it is but one step to control the psychological by simply applying similar techniques. Religion functioned as a convenient social backstop to ensure workers in deplorable conditions would accept these conditions as a down payment on their entrance to heaven. Know thy place in the social order was far more important than the Socratic know thyself. Marx speaks a great deal about the alienation of the worker from the products of his labour, from his fellow workers, and from the world at large. The factory is the world, and the product leading to profit the entire reality of that world.
Enter Taylorism to further mechanize labour processes, but also enter the rise of the social sciences - in itself not an innocuous pursuit, for it assumes that social behaviour in both the individual and the collective sense can be measured scientifically, which then provides the tools for others to control. We might turn to the birth of positivism in the person of Auguste Comte. The belief in the clockwork universe where all were simply working out the predestined history towards its complete perfection was already the dream of dialectical thinkers like Hegel, or as part of the thought experiment of Laplace who said that if we could know the state of all particles in the universe, we could predict every future state and thus the future itself.
But enter entropy, that mischievous wrecker. Entropy is the measure of relative disorder in a system. The social equivalent might be the masses, the horde, the irrational forces that occasionally erupt in strikes and revolutions. Social mass unrest was a good symbol of entropy, and so we might refer to an important book written in 1899 by Gustav le Bon entitled La psychologie des foules (translated as simply “Crowds”). A great deal of pessimism regarding the unpredictability of crowds was already manifest in the uneasy Balance of Power, in various violent uprisings, and eventually in the first world war. There had to be a way of optimizing the social system to bring it back to harmonious function, to correct for unpredictable deviations. A whole science of crowd phenomena had been born. Such a desire for mass control was already being employed by V.I. Lenin in the 1917 Russian Revolution, and it should be said that there are so few successful examples of social control in history than this experiment conducted over such a long period - yet it tended towards blunt means of social control in the form of purges, suppression, spot assassinations, sentences to the gulags, complete control over culture and media, and one of the most advanced spy networks ever devised matched by the most meticulous record-keeping prior to the Internet.
Crowd control takes so many forms, and in the salad days we could even point to the way cities are laid out to facilitate containment and capture. But let us turn specifically to the United States to witness how they dealt with their own crowd problems and solutions.
We could turn to some of the pioneers of both public opinion and public relations, respectively, for how this would work out in practical terms. The much celebrated pioneer of the study of public opinion, Walter Lippmann, is fairly blunt in his appraisal of the masses: they are stupid, gullible, easily persuaded, and so must be directed by an elite few in the media to ensure social harmony. It meant simplifying issues to mere binaries so that opinion would not have to contend with unnerving shades of grey. Or, we may turn to that father of public relations, Edward Bernays, who also held that the masses were ignorant and unpredictable, and so needed to be guided. He ransacked his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious and found the pecuniary hook to shift the economy from necessity to desire. He had located the perfect channel for the bubbling ferment of the unconscious: shopping. Imbuing all sorts of objects with psychoanalytic significance, he was able to get women to smoke, transformed unpopular politicians into more likable figures, popularized otherwise more high-brow entertainment for a mid-brow audience who craved status but also generally reacted negatively to higher cultural forms because of inborn social inferiority, and created many of the fictions that live on today, such as the need for the big breakfast. To list his “accomplishments” is worthy of its own special treatment.
Let us take just one lateral step to consider another American who was critical of the social world and where it was headed: the sociologist Thorstein Veblen. If anyone was puzzled why he seemed so misanthropic, disagreeably brusque, and impatient with others, one has only to read his works which paint an unflattering picture of human beings as progressing in one sense, but stubbornly invariant in another. That is, even with all the great developments in institutions and technologies, human beings were little changed from their primitive days of conspicuous status-chasing behaviours linked to power and domination, and in abiding by absurd rituals and ceremonial behaviours that were entirely superfluous. Judge for yourself why you might select the silver flatware over the steel variety when the former is far less durable than the latter. Or, perhaps you might consider attending a university’s convocation where the assembled don the medieval garb and engage in a ceremony that has little to do with education or what it means today.
The unchecked irrationality of capitalism and the promotion of regular citizens - soon to be redefined as consumers - to participate in the stock market (another Bernays intervention) would eventually recreate the economic bubbles of yesteryear (do read Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and specifically the chapters dealing with tulipomania and the South Seas Bubble - Mackay would have got on famously with Veblen). And so the stock market crash.
And the rise of fascism in Italy, its contagion spreading to Germany. The irrational forces of love (for the leader) and hate (of the “other”) gave the unconscious its sustenance. The merger of the nazi mysticism and industrialized technological apparatus had shown itself to be remarkably adept at social engineering and control. The German technical focus on precision and meticulous record-keeping was perhaps even more sophisticated than the Soviets.
At the conclusion of the war with its twin nuclear finale, the need for social control became ever more urgent. Normalization was the watchword of the period. So, in the US, just as the women had been encouraged en masse to labour in the factories under the illusion of empowerment, they had to be shuffled out and back into the domestic home to make way for the returning soldiers. Democracy had to be vigorously promoted, and this was achieved through several means. The bubbling up of the Cold War also meant a need to divide the world into a useful binary that would regulate geopolitics and the individuals themselves. Normalization continued through the use of educational films on proper behaviours at home, in school, to despise difference, to embrace homogeneity and consumerism, and to be diligent patriots. As the suburbs yawned their way across the landscape, the automobile was king. The threat of nuclear annihilation was mitigated in part by stealing from Joseph Goebbel’s propaganda playbook: to optimize anxiety so that there was just enough fear to keep people vigilant, but not so much that it would be paralyzing.
But it is 1948 when Norbert Wiener publishes his book, Cybernetics: Command and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. This was a watershed year as Claude E. Shannon published his famous paper “The Theory of Mathematical Communication.” Of course, let it be known that the math and engineering Cold War hawks like Weaver and Neumann applied Shannon’s theory in ways that caused the author to retreat from the world. So begins the birth of the computer age and predictability, the creation of feedback systems to better control outcomes, the development of models that might apply to fields as diverse as economics, engineering, linguistics, anthropology, and even literary criticism. Cybernetics became the flavour of the month, an interdisciplinary approach to deferring entropy and optimizing order.
In parallel to these considerations was the new crop of Austrian and Chicago school economists who - against psychoanalysis, empirical verification, or actual observation - claimed that human beings were fundamentally rational beings who made rational choices as a means of seeking advantage. Mix this absurd axiomatic view of human nature with the philosophy of Ayn Rand who champions individualism over compassion, and rational instrumentalism over all other modes of thought, and you create the perfect conditions of neoliberal economic theory with its belief in the mysticism of technology, progress, borderless trade, deindustrialization, the service economy, dismantling unions and the Keynesian welfare state (or: socialism for the corporations and capitalism for the rest of us), the triumph of the calculating and disloyal narcissist, mercenary entrepreneurialism, so-called “small government,” and widespread deregulation, all in the belief that the market shall decide, and that it can be controlled with the use of prediction modeling. That, as we have learned, has failed.
The failure of the youth mobilization movements of the 1960s was brought about through targeted commodification and a pop culture feedback system (or, perhaps akin to what Frankfurt School sociologist Theodor Adorno called the “culture industry”). The 1970s saw both a trumpeting of selfishness and a fundamental change in how exchange rates operated. The rise of populist neoliberals and neoconservatives was in full flower, partially thanks to the rabid, screeching minority of fundamentalist evangelicals who hijacked the political process.
How can we forget one of the other means of social control that also came into being in the 1980s - a far more material, programmatic, and profitable venture in the form of the pharmaceutical industry. Rather than simply seeing the therapist, which in itself is too prone to error, why not regulate human emotions by applying a clinical label that makes humans feel special (“I have x disorder”), followed by a simple solution in the form of a pill? The mind and all its problems, real or fabricated, was little more than a chemical engineering problem, and a profitable solution was at hand. It was no longer socially acceptable to be sad, to be anxious, to have any feelings that may interrupt the flow of consumption.
We enter now into the Internet age proper, the much feted and fetishized “information age” or the hyperbole of the “information revolution.” See here how the culmination of social control and engineering can be mediated through devices that we are obliged to consume and dispose of in a rapid cycle that keeps a sector of the economy afloat. Note the invitation to volunteer personal data online without having to be compelled to do so, all under the false promise of free expression. Note the fixation on one’s infinite potentiality, but how one is channeled into a system whereby it is the hosts and providers who profit by your free labour in ranking objects and humans (the same thing), in being ever more “connected” to more individuals, but losing all social skills. Everyone is merely a node attached to a wallet. It is here that prediction makes its transformation into prescription.
And how is this done? If all you know of this world is what is permitted to be shown online, and all choices are restricted, then we have the makings of a perfect control set. None will deviate from the choices provided since no others are offered. You will believe in the airy myths of progress, speed, efficiency, and connectivity, and will labour ever more within your digital prison while the unseen bots harvest all the data you happily surrender, making you either the target of marketing or government spy agencies. You are geolocated and tagged. Your entire perception of the world is now through the filter of the gadgets that transform space into commercial place, the augmentation of the real itself as you navigate a world through the products and services you can buy, or the unpaid labour you perform for the system and its meta-regulation. While you are told that you control your destiny, you become the controlled - a market segment, a bloc of consumers, a data set of demographic details. Swipe and click all you like, for it does not bring down the walls of the oligopolistic digital system, but instead empowers it.
And so is also resurrected the old game theory ideals, the prisoners dilemma, but you are blind to it as you seek your own advantage, to become the online celebrity, to become the web-based entrepreneur, to embrace the illusion and ephemerality of online popularity as you chase after abstract nothings like social capital, or attempt to increase your share of the equally abstract nothing of the attention economy. In fact, your entire social being is nothing more than an economical unit, your individuality a monotonous pseudo-uniqueness of frivolous self-expression (feeding the commodity system) and mundane events and conspicuous self-presentation as you upload pictures of yourself on vacation to increase your illusory status (as you treat the world as composed of checklist items so that you can say you’ve been there and done that). It is nothing but a game from which you do not prosper, and because the choices are rigged in advance, your behaviour becomes a prescribed one.
The tyranny of the model obtains here, for if we live in model homes, in model communities (offline and online), under a model economy with a model government, and purchase the same model goods and services, we become imprisoned within a kind of diorama where our options are limited by the restricted variables and choices that are available. Feel free to be the libertarian hero starring in your own distilled zombie epic, for your moves are restricted to the length and breadth of the chess board, and the finite number of moves are prescribed in advance - and they are finite no matter how large the number may be.
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