In the late 1960s, shortly before his death, Theodor W. Adorno* wrote a lengthy article describing some of his experiences as a speculative philosopher and sociologist during his exile in the United States. There he confessed that during this entire period, which lasted from 1938 to 1949, he could not shed his European habits, although he had received from everywhere, even from among his own emigrant companions, the slogan that he had adapt, himself surrender to adaptation. Although the American experience saved him from death, the truth is that, on the other hand, it added to the trauma of fleeing Germany in a particular way, fueling a sense of alienation that was heightened by news of war in Europe and the genocide to the Jews helped negatively change their view of the world and showed them a different side of popular culture that, while funny, was nonetheless particularly spooky. Some of his best books, such as Minimum moraleor his collaboration with Max Horkheimer in this profound and devastating text that is Dialectic of Enlightenmenthe worked it out in this state of mind that combined confusion, fear and despair.
Adorno also dedicated a few words to the memory of his participation in the project Princeton Radio Research, directed by communication theorist Paul Lazarsfeld, and to narrate the way in which his intellectual and academic habits were enforced by the way in which the research project seemed to be settled without any mania in the service of show business. Here surprising observations alternated, such as the fact that the project devoted a section solely to the study of likes and dislikes, or the success or failure of a program, and somber confusion, such as that arising from viewing administrative research as a legitimate branch of scientific research. In a specific passage, in which he thinks of radio, cinema and the press, Adorno reflects on the language of these media and what is known as the reification of consciousness. He points out that the way the mass media came into being and spread cannot be separated from the transformation of their products into consumer goods. In his opinion, this is an unfortunate result, since such a transformation is consistent with a deplorable spiritual situation, namely one that “corresponds to a reified consciousness almost incapable of spontaneous experience and inherently manipulable”.
It is tempting to imagine what Adorno would have said or written today about the mass self-communicating world of the Internet and the development of algorithms that use millions of data points with the ostensible aim of improving our personal and collective decisions. It would not be an exaggeration to formulate the hypothesis that he would have insisted how the empire of algorithms, platforms and social networks, despite all the preaching of its evangelists for diversity, effective management and accurate predictions, exacerbates some of the tendencies of mass culture, which in his view potentially and irrevocably aligned with fascism: standardization, the substitution of words for slogans, their displacement by images, the refined repetition of creative schemas, the impoverishment of experience, the reduction of identities to predetermined roles, the promotion of a new social conformity – in in this case combined with the compulsive, organizational, productive and defensive use of the mobile phone – and ultimately the lack of a freedom that could be considered significant.
In other words, it is reasonable to assume that Adorno would indicate that we are entering a new phase in the development of the reification of consciousness, equally mangled to spontaneity and easily mastered. At least certain dispositions and stylizations of existence seem to agree with him. There is no adventure on the first date because beforehand we know almost everything about the other person via Instagram. Personalized and unverified mass messages via social networks result in elections being won or the institutions of representative democracy being taken by storm. An algorithm managing a casual hookup application is raising the flag of objectification because it asks you to indicate what part of your body you’re most proud of. Certain behaviors of young and not-so-young people stereotypically reproduce the influencer’s attitude of self-sufficiency, sarcasm and detachment. In all of these cases, a reification of digital-linked consciousness would be revealed that is content with mass labeling, similar to the power of images that seem to be self-explanatory and evolve from ongoing connection with the supposedly authentic life—itself when it is mediated through screens and trapped in the particular echo chambers created by the personalization of searches –. In short, it would be a reified consciousness perfectly adapted to the use of big data, not only as a tool for social engineering, but also as a mechanism for controlling populations.
Big data must reduce the variety of experiences to a set of analyzable data, and in the process largely perceives subjectivity as ghostly. In that sense it is the manner of the old positivism, which incidentally was also the object of the ire of Adorno and other prominent thinkers of critical theory. The subsequent reduction of data on labels is done to form patterns and use them to identify anticipated needs: commercial, biomedical, security, etc. It cannot be said that this operation does not bring tangible benefits in disease detection or air traffic control may have. But the analysis of the data reduced to labels does not confirm our identity, but rather gives us an identification: it turns us into a token, a series of elements, a point that can be inserted into a graph along with millions of points. We can exercise our sovereignty as subjects through identity, since we can check our intentions, but not through artificially generated identification. And we can’t do that because we have now become socially what the algorithm has categorized. The danger is that such categorization biases not only the behavior of institutions and individuals toward us, but also our own behavior and perception of ourselves, and leading us to determine, on the basis of what we have not expressly decided to who we are. This is despite the fact that we have routinely agreed to the transmission of our data in the usual standard tab.
So we are marked. And we are because the algorithm requires it. If I may force the idea a bit, I would say that the algorithm can only benefit us by labeling us in its stated goal of improving our lives. As is the case with any mathematical function, replace the “x” with any manageable or quantifiable characterization—whatever seems compatible with what we’re supposed to be—and then the algorithm’s powerful mechanism gets to work going to tell us through this intimate and personal information, although already codified, qualified or reified, what we want, what we like and what we can really achieve. So we are accurately identified, but it is done by subverting our imprecise but valuable identity. And the price we pay, apart from the purely monetary price we pay for things as trivial as Internet connectivity or an application’s premium services, is that we transform our identity into irrelevant privacy with no exchange value in digital social traffic. On the other hand, our personal or cultural wealth, our nuances and peculiarities, our looks or our gestures, our freckles and scars, our smell and our tiredness, in short, what makes each of us a different and unique individual, can only be shown in what seems to generate more and more fear and rejection: face-to-face interaction, the intersection of gazes and bodies, the offline encounter where we expose ourselves outside of image filters, soothing labels and posts that supposedly tell us perfectly.
Some authors have long warned about the ethical and political problems associated with digital labeling. On the criticism of Evgeny Morozov in To save everything, Click here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (2017) and by Shoshana Zuboff in The era of surveillance capitalism (2020) the wonderful book by the American political scientist Virginia Eubanks can now be added: The automation of inequality (2021). Essentially, the critique shared by all of these positions is that algorithms can decide for us, but shouldn’t. If we delegate our decisions to them and there is ethical damage or distortion of the political process, then it is difficult to assign the appropriate responsibilities and to remedy these injustices. It is clear that big data requires human oversight, but it is also clear that it is a set of processes capable of processing a quantity of information of such magnitude that it escapes normal human controls, which are usually precarious, finite and impermanent. Recent warnings from experts and organizations about the dangers of artificial intelligence, which frequently and intensively uses huge amounts of data, and the call for strict regulation and supervision from an ethical and legal point of view show that once again in the history of technological development we have become sorcerers’ apprentices.
Knowing that the ethical, social, and political implications of big data are enormous and difficult to solve requires that we stop this race and try to understand at least some of its most risky and dangerous implications. Adorno could help us with this task. And perhaps not so much because of the validity of his reasons, which are already widely discussed in alternative cultural theories today, but rather because of the experiential attitude typical of his condition as an exile, which we gathered at the beginning of these notes. In the United States, in order to preserve his identity, Adorno resisted the new stimuli, wary of the uncontrollable dynamics and questioning the seeming benefits. Likewise, the new algorithmic normal should imply neither committed enthusiasm nor uncritical acceptance. On the other hand. A necessary exercise of responsibility should move us toward a particular form of resistance: resistance to conformity.
*Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund ornament: German philosopher of Jewish origin who also wrote about sociology, communicology, psychology and musicology. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the Frankfurt School and Marxist-inspired critical theory.
Taken from CTXT