Digital Sociality, Digital Control

On tech-oriented discussion lists I have noticed over and over these curious micro-managerial fantasies of control that pop up especially among the libertarian but also the liberal temperaments that gather there -- dreams of politics in which the terms of literally every interaction are somehow exhaustively contracted in advance, dreams of engineered languages re-invented from scratch to more perfectly say the way the world is, dreams of technical, cultural, political revolutions to make everything clean and new.

People speak with unexpected regularity to a hope that perhaps more fine-grained and flexible information and communication networks and technologies might make it possible for individuals to specify the terms on which they participate in public life to an unprecedented degree. I agree that there are lots of interesting things to think about here, and that what we mean by private life and public life will be transformed in very fundamental ways by emerging digital media and bioremedial networks.

But I suspect that in an important sense all of these dreams and desires originate in a deep misrecognition of the condition of ineradicable diversity and vulnerability at the heart of all public life. This diversity and vulnerability are not at all likely to vanish, nor do I think we can intelligibly want them to.

Forgive a momentary lapse into my more theoryheaded mode, but we are always already immersed in language, in law, in norms, in markets, in worlds constrained by code, by architecture, by design.

And it is because we are thrown into these changeable but also significantly durable worlds that precede us, exceed us, and likely will outlive us that it occurs to any of us to desire to consolidate this feeling of having and strengthening a faculty of "opting" in or out of sociality’s terms in the first place.

Pining for a more perfect, more willful agency that could somehow choose exhaustively the very terms in which it plays itself out in the world bespeaks one’s constitution as a being whose agency cannot be otherwise than it is: significantly interdependent, promising, vulnerable, accident-prone.

All of these dreams of a more perfect "private" control of public life seem to me like pathological expressions of the very systems against which they presumably are revolting.

Who, after all, would feel frustration at the law's exactions if the law hadn't first made them who they are? Before regulation limits choices it constitutes the horizon against which one intelligibly chooses anything. We can and must of course collaborate to improve the laws, reform the institutions, contribute new poetry to language. Law, language, and culture are transformed by our ongoing recourse to them.

But who could opt out of opting without becoming an altogether different sort of being than the one they imagine would be made happier by a more perfect "opting" of the terms on which they engage in sociality?

There can be no private languages. There can be no private laws. There can be no private values.

It's too late for that. To feel limited or threatened in the scope of one’s choice is to be already constituted as a being that chooses in this way, that feels the want of these things in the first place. The desire bespeaks its own belated incapacity to be otherwise.

We make our promises and we make our plans, and then we forgive as best we can the mistakes that must inevitably come after. As Hannah Arendt wrote, plurality is the law of the earth.