The Project of the Technocracy Is the Automation of the Human Intellect

Eugene McCarraher, “You’re a Slave to Money, Then You Die”

This lecture was hosted on February 6, 2020 by the Church Life Journal, an office within the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.

It took me multiple sessions to finish watching this talk, as it is dense in terms of both content and vocabulary. It is an academic paper delivered as a talk. The below is from the end of the long talk, and as such misses the historic and conceptual context of the first almost 55 minutes. I intend it to whet the appetite of someone who might be reading this blog, incentivizing them to go watch the entire thing…eventually.

Facebook, for instance, is an exemplary neoliberal technology. It’s an extremely successful business that instructs its users in the fabrication of entrepreneurial identities. It requires the user to create a profile from a limited repertoire of stereotypes which in turn are supposed to attract friends and hits to your pages. It employs algorithms that force users to periodically change their profiles and thus destabilize their identities. An education, in other words, in market personhood.

…Intellect is increasingly seen as a thoroughly instrumental faculty and ensemble of skill sets to be assembled and utilized for monetary and technological ends. The world that this intellect seeks to apprehend is considered utterly transparent and ultimately manageable. All problems can be defined and resolved with the correct application of credentialed expertise. Mystery is either an insufficiency of data or it’s just the twaddle of humanist romanticism. Modeled implicitly after data processing, the life of the mind becomes the province of problem solvers, innovators, and–God I hate this stupid word–“thought leaders”.

Creativity almost always means problem-solving. Usually for the purpose of designing or marketing ever cooler gadgets and services. With the mechanization of production as its implicit model, the cognitive project of neoliberal technocracy is the automation of the human intellect–the rewiring of the mind to work with the speedy and unreflective precision of algorithms.

…The ideal of the entrepreneurial self serves a fundamentally disciplinary function, reinforcing the precarious nature of work in today’s digitalized, low wage, careously employed, and increasingly automated capitalism. One in which you are casually expendable and which places a premium on everlasting metamorphosis. Upgrade your skills, your profile, your resume.

But don’t worry, complain or, God help you, call a union. Losing your job or seeing your skill set rendered [obsolete] is an opportunity for “growth”, “creativity”, “empowerment”. Watch every single one of those words when they’re used, head for the hills. When your own exploitation can be recast as a project rather than a problem or an injustice, a source of fulfillment rather than an indignity, then solidarity with others can be vilified as conformism–the herd instinct of losers, the last refuge of mediocrities. And what happens to those losers and to those mediocrities, especially the new class of unfortunates who populate the food pantries and homeless shelters?

Inoculated against empathy by the regnant business culture, we’re enjoying [adopting] the haughty, insuciant, and dismissive perspective of the boss, to revel in his or her ostentatious contempt for the incompetent and the unsuccessful. As Maraski has observed incisively, neoliberal culture exhibits a punitive sado-moralism toward the poor and the weak. “The Apprentice”, “Shark Tank”, “Undercover Boss” comprise a veritable theater of cruelty. Witness well, the increasingly militaristic and gladiatorial ambience of our fitness programs, where the casual barbarism of reality television, in which everything…becomes…[a] contest of wills, in which cruelty and humiliation await the weak. Such as the psychopathology of the neoliberal moral imagination.

Now perhaps we’re waking up to how awful this neoliberal hegemony has really become. Given the political atmosphere of the last decade, the acquiescence may be dissipating, to reveal betrayal, anger, and resentment, all of which may intensify as Americans realize that their way of life is neither exceptional nor blessed nor imperishable.

The American Empire is neither happy nor noble and it’s decline will be one of the pivotal episodes of the 21st century. What will Americans do when they begin to doubt their divine and nohinkment and a scatological mission? What will they do when they conclude that they never enjoyed the mandate of heaven? They might redouble their efforts in denial, unwilling to relinquish or even temper their faith in the enchanting varieties of the market.

If they hanker to the delusions of nativeist populism, they’ll exacerbate racial animosity while also entrenching the power of our mercenary overlords. If they affirm a renovated neoliberalism, they may attempt to prolong their economic and geopolitical imperium.¹

Yet their victory will be brief and it will be Pyrrhic. For they will have purchased their temporary reprieve in the currency of fear and recrimination and death.

Or Americans could actually embrace the decline of their empire as a liberating moment of possibility, accepting it with gratitude and even jubilation at the prospect of a better and lovely country. Once relieved of the burden of empire and dispeled of the illusion that the world simply can’t survive without our own vanguardious superintendents, we would surely be weaker, but we would also be wiser, freeer to assess and rearrange our affairs by true or saner and more generous standards than productivity or technological innovation.

To create that second future, we will need some kind of revitalized moral and political imagination.

As Frederick Jameson once ruefully observed, it seems easier now to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. The ubiquitous but unavowed despair many, who long for something different, is camouflaged rhetorically by calls for subversion, transgression, or resistance, none of which amount to a clear and convincing project of social and political transformation. At some point you have to be for something, not simply and rightly against something horrible.

But it’s the very capacity to imagine alternatives that neoliberalism seems to have effectively paralyzed. What was and is still called the left was marked in part by faith in the ability of human beings to collectively construct a world in which all of us could live and flourish, but it’s precisely that ability that neoliberalism’s capitulation to the market has so successfully called into question.

So perhaps the thing most needful right now is imagination, not resistance, or perhaps better, the imagination of a future in terms of which resistance makes sense.

As in eros so in politics, you are what you desire. Right now, I think that too many of our desires are not strong enough. They’re not large enough. They’re not bold and generous enough. And they’re not strong and large and bold because we seem to have forgotten who we are.

But let C.S. Lewis be kind enough to remind you, in that magnificent last paragraph of his essay, The Weight of Glory:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

…It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.

…your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

In other words, like Howard Beale, you have seen the face of God. The spirit of that paragraph is the basis of the most radical critique you can make of neoliberalism and it should send all of us out marching against every injustice and indignity in the world.

It demolishes every idol of progress, every shibboleth of productivity, and every banality about value and innovation. And it is the spirit from which any alternative to neoliberalism must in the end draw its imagination.