Must-Read: Kieran Healy: The Moral Economy of Technology

Must-Read: When I think of the standard uses of “moral economy”, I think not of “fairness” and “justice” but rather of tradition and hierarchy. I think of the Odyssey, in which the fact that Laertes looks like a badly-treated garden slave rather than like a prince is a violation of the moral-economic order:

Indeed your face and figure have nothing of the slave about them, and proclaim you of noble birth. I should have said that you were one of those who should wash well, eat well, and lie soft at night…

The market can and very often does produce pressure for outcomes that violate “moral economy” understood as tradition and hierarchy, but they may or may not violate “moral economy” understood as reasonable and humane notions of justice and fairness. Indeed, Prometheus the fire-bringer’s and the disruptions he causes have an alternative and stronger claim to “moral economy”:

Kieran Healy: The Moral Economy of Technology: “‘moral economy’ refers to some kind of informal but forceful collective control over the market…

…justice over efficiency, fairness over freedom, and community expectations over individual opportunity…. Technologies are counting and classifying your actions constantly in an effort to make you a better person. Their promoters and investors constantly moralize about their products, too…. This kind of moral economy is not about justice or fairness. Instead it evangelizes social progress through technological disruption. This vision has deep historical roots that are uncomfortably entwined with the origins of the social sciences…. The Saint-Simonian vision became what Hayek called ‘the religion of the engineers’, full of faith in the power of rational expertise. That religion is very much still with us….

Consider two basic experiences of our new world of smart devices and internet-enabled things. The first is the nice one… the lives of people who live in Apple advertisements… a computer or device knows what you want it to do, or has anticipated a need that you have and acted on it in a pleasing way. It is a feeling of magic and delight, or at least a sense of ease and convenience…. The second basic experience is the bad one. I associate it with a parade of malfunctioning, misconceived or badly-designed software and smart devices…. Most recently I’ve experienced it with allegedly smart devices that pretend they can talk with and understand you, but which are really just verbal command lines operating on the narrowest of gauges. If you stray from the expected path at all, the illusion of both interactivity and smartness is destroyed….

Social theorists consistently underestimate the value of technology’s delightful aspects… want to say your Fitbit or Apple Watch is exercising a subtle form of control over you by encouraging you not just to meet your step count for the day but also encouraging you to value the act of meeting your step count for the day, and most perniciously by arranging things so that you experience your valuation of the act of meeting your step count for the day as a satisfying personal choice, rather than an instrument of neoliberal governmentality. Conversely, though, the same theorists also consistently overestimate how often software and hardware actually works properly…. They reverse left and right, so that cheerful hype becomes a harsh critique of the all-consuming power of technology. But… they do not reverse up and down. The technology is still assumed to work, even though it probably doesn’t, most of the time. It matters which technologies are going to work, and which ones are just going to be billion dollar cargo-cults…