Robots screwing Robots
America seems to be the land of abstractions, where numbers have taken on an existence of their own in phrases like "57 Varieties," "the 5 and 10," or "7 Up" and "behind the 8-ball." It figures. Perhaps this is a kind of echo of an industrial culture that depends heavily on prices, charts, and figures. Take 36-24-36. Numbers cannot become more sensuously tactile than when mumbled as the magic formula for the female figure while the haptic* hand sweeps the air.
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Marshall McLuhan, 1964
* The Greeks referred to the faculty of touch as the "haptic" sense.
Quantitative analysis is the foundation on which logic, science and reason stand. So great is our dependency on quantitative analysis that when something doesn't make sense we refer to the numbers. Numbers are seen as the unbiased validation of truth. Our faith in numbers is the basis of testing intelligence, of calculating progress, of creating economic models. The Number can tell you if you are happy or not, it can detect if you are lying or telling the truth. It can even pronounce you mentally insane. We strengthen our arguments by backing it up with numbers because everyone trusts the number. We measure success by numbers. And if the numbers don't add up, we attribute that to human error. The Supremacy of the Number even allows us to predict and control chaos and the unknown. It enables us to see into the future.
The abstract power of the Number is felt most tangibly in Economics. Today, Chaos Math and Game Theory are commonly applied to predict the Stock Market, the World Economy, Inflation, Employment, the GDP and even Poker Games (which a lot of people take quite seriously). In fact, Game Theory originated as a model to predict results in a Poker Game.
The first political applications of Game Theory are traced back to the paranoia of the Cold War years. In the late fifties it was used, at the Rand Corporation, to play out different scenarios of nuclear war and how to avert it. Simple quantitative models of human nature were drawn, based on radars that monitored Soviet activity, fed into a computer and then used by strategists to predict Soviet behavior and decide US policy. It was the first step to believing that we could incorporate the enemy into our own thinking. We could harness the power of the Number and mathematically predict how we and our enemy would play on a set of known and unknown rules.
But underlying Game Theory was a dark vision of human beings. That we were driven only by self-interest and constantly distrustful of those around us. One mathematician at Rand, John Nash (who entered pop culture through the film A Beautiful Mind) set out to show that this dark vision was not just applicable to the Cold War but could be used to create stability in all of Human Society. To prove his thesis, he invented a series of cruel games, the most famous of which he called "Fuck You Buddy".
The only way to win this game is to ruthlessly betray your game partner. The game assumes that all human behavior is exactly like that of a hostile, competitive cold war like situation. And he proved, with a series of equations, that a system driven by suspicion and selfishness did not necessarily lead to chaos. He won a Nobel prize for that.
But as Nash's ideas started penetrating society and economics, it helped create a strange kind of morality which is widely prevalent all around us, but does not seem human at all. That we only need focus on our self-interest and an equilibrium will follow. And this equilibrium is freedom. Kindness, altruism, compassion, sacrifice, passion for someone or something beyond yourself which are all legitimate human emotions become illegitimate. They are looked upon with suspicion and there is no room for them because they don't fit into this game model. In Frankensteinian horror the assumption of the model becomes the only reality that we project.
Yes, we are selfish, we are competitive but is that all we are? Are we just predictable, quantitative, robotic beings led by genes, numbers and mathematics out to screw each other for some larger unforeseen sense of equilibrium, which we often mistake for justice and liberty? This seems to be the morality of the "Free Market".
It has become the basis for Economic experiments like Shock Therapy, Trickle Down Effect. It has been the moral basis for maxims like "Let the Government take care of the Rich and the Rich will take care of the Poor." It has allowed corporations to project themselves as socially responsible, morally superior beings because they produce goods and services which they sell at a profit. This view of humanity has allowed privatization of most public and community services.
I just finished watching a fantastic 3 part documentary series by Adam Curtis called "The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom"? The film posits a disturbing idea of our present restraints on Freedom. It may allow us to buy things, go swimming, go shopping, go on a vacation etc. but we don't really stand for or mean anything. We are simply reduced to the presumptions of the economic model. The behaviorally predictable Economic Man reacting to incentives and targets. But the society we have created is suspicious, cynical and apathetic. In our attempt to get rid of tyranny using "Free Market" models what we have created instead is just a new kind of class structure with higher inequalities and lesser sympathy.
The film contains clippings and interviews with the most important intellectuals of our time from both Left and Right sides of the political spectrum. It addresses the ideas of positive and negative liberty as put forward by Isaiah Berlin. It has an amazing interview with John Nash about the Mathematical assumptions behind the "Humanist Businessman" where Nash doubts if that creature has any connection with the complexity of a real human being. Yet his models have formed the basis of real world experiments on real human beings from Russia to Sub-Saharan Africa, from Argentina to Indonesia.
It has archival interviews with Nobel prize winning economist Friedrich von Hayek, the father of neo-liberalism, whose ideas have influenced many world leaders including Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and even Manmohan Singh. It also features Nobel Prize winning economist James M. Buchanan who put forward the public choice theory.
It then takes you to the philosopher Frantz Fanon, who has been an inspiration to many anti-colonial and liberation movements especially led by Black leaders such as South Africa's Biko and Malcom X. It talks about the ideas of freedom as expressed by the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and how some of his ideas echo in Che Guevara, the Tamil Tigers as well as Islamic Revolutions.
If you are looking for an intelligent and sensible argument to question the state of things in the world and how we have fallen into this false sense of freedom, you will certainly enjoy every moment of this film. But be warned, you may not come out of it the same again.
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[...] Robots screwing Robots tags:absurdamericaconsumerismcultureeconomicsindiaposted on 07 Oct, 08 by Navneet [...]