“If you want to become a millionaire, you have to solve a hundred-million-dollar problem” is Silicon Valley’s rule of thumb. What’s up for grabs are the as-yet-overlooked niches in the data business, the so-far-untried methods for analyzing data, and the ideas that no one has yet thought of. However, more important than solving a problem is convincing someone in the Valley that the product offered is the solution to a problem no one knew existed. The contrast between responsive solutions and proactive, enforced solutions is illustrated by the comparison between Farecast, an airline-ticket-pricing app, and the Hapifork, a fork that records the frequency with which it is put to the mouth. The supervision of eating habits—evoking warnings when eating too fast—is, according to the startup Hapilabs, the answer to digestive problems, heartburn, and above all obesity. Since one only feels satiated twenty minutes after eating, eating too fast means eating too much.1 Who would have thought that innovations were still possible in the fork market—the design of forks has always appeared to be as perfect as that of books! On the other hand, a fork is just a mindless piece of steel or plastic, and although the “intelligent fork” may have arrived too early for the taste of the masses, in the context of all the other tracking devices and smart things that measure and facilitate human existence, it could well be that soon we will find ourselves unable to live without it.
Of course, most of the money is still spent on solving real problems, even though, from the perspective of cultural philosophy, the solution itself might be the problem. A good example is the app Summly, which algorithmically recognizes the key terms of a text and distills its essence in four hundred characters. This is one way of responding positively to information overload: Instead of having to go on an information diet, one acquires a tool for processing even more information. Dieting is the solution for digital immigrants who would rather read less text with more accuracy. The impetus for digital natives is to process more texts faster, and that is why Summly has been so successful, making its programmer, Nick D’Aloisio, born in 1995, the richest teenager in the world after Yahoo bought the app in the spring of 2012 for thirty million dollars. The promise of the app is not only textual concision but also a method for learning more, faster because one doesn’t have to search for the core message of a text oneself.2 It is only possible to believe that Summly makes one smarter, as it suggests, if one translates “smart” not as “intelligent” but as “sly” or “crafty.” It is indeed crafty to outsource information processing, which represents actual intelligence, to computing capacity.
While Summly is one contemporary strategic solution to a current problem, other apps in data mining validate themselves through historical means. Reading, for instance, is shifting away from being an intimate cultural practice and becoming a social interaction, as when Kindle readers see the highlighting of other readers within a text and are able to add their own, or when an app like Readmill shares collective opinions on readers’ most beloved scenes. Social reading within digital media is reminiscent of book clubs in the later twentieth century and reading communities at the end of the eighteenth. The difference lies in the expansion and instrumentalization of the social aspect when one reads online, for now others too have access to the details of reading, others including those who may be uninterested in the books being read or in having any interaction with readers. These others’ sole interest lies in tracking current reading habits in order to optimize future books and marketing strategies for the products of publishing: what is being read when, how fast, and how often; what is being marked, what skipped, which words are looked up, which facts are being googled.
Social reading could be seen as a corrective for hyperreading, as a return to reading more accurately by way of collective discussion. However, it should be considered that beyond the opportunistic rhetoric of transparency and interaction, these transparent readers are chiefly the representatives of commercial interests and requirements. Under the banner of product improvement texts are to be made more pleasing so as to meet the expectations and needs of the reading public—and the same will be true for film and video, given that their media businesses mine the viewing habits of millions of Netflix users, for example.3 From the perspective of cultural philosophy, such market-driven customization is counterproductive. Here reading is also understood as a conflict between author and reader, or between director and viewer, for the predominance of a reality model. Readerships and audiences can only win this fight when they lose it, that is, when they learn to see reality from a different, from a new, perspective. This is not only true for the way in which one sees something but also for the way in which one describes it. Seen from the perspective of the Frankfurt School, this would translate to saying that the pleasing piece of art cheats the audience because it does not offer a resistance through which he or she is enabled to become more than he or she already is. The logic of this perspective claims that in the book or film market customer service should be aimed at denying short-term customer interests, that is, by not altering those passages that have proven to be resistant and obstinate in content or style but by reinforcing them.
However, this suggestion would not only violate big-data mining’s free-enterprise logic; it would also misapprehend the social status quo, whose central interest is hardly humanity’s exit from its self-imposed immaturity, as it may have been during the high point of the Enlightenment and bourgeois humanism or in the Marxist social model. In our current circumstances the book is hardly seen as a medium for individual emancipation, even by intellectuals.4 The claim that self-development is in the interest of improving the world has long lost its political and philosophical credibility. Indeed, this loss of credibility was initially disguised, in the 1990s, by an Internet that seemed to offer a place of utopian and heterotopian promise. But during the subsequent commercialization and disciplined reorganization of the formerly “anarchic” medium, this hope was also lost. Under the banner of data love what remains is only the promise of knowledge discovery in databases or, depending on how one sees it, the dystopia of greater control.
Once a utopia of the social degenerates before the ideal of absolute measurement and efficient social administration, the protagonists of social change also change. The social engineers of the twenty-first century are no longer hommes des lettres with humanist ambitions. There are no longer writers to whom a Stalin dictates how they should reform the minds of the people. There are no longer artists expressing political guidance, nor political intellectuals who broach the subjects that society goes on to discuss. The social engineers of today are the software programmers, the number crunchers, and the widget producers who are changing human life stealthily but thoroughly with their analyses and applications; they are the graduates and dropouts of the computer and engineering sciences who influence future social values with startups like Klout and apps like Summly; they are the developers who are either unwilling or unable to judge the cultural implications of their technical inventions both because of the characteristics of their profession or simply because of their age: being young, many engineers have much less experience with the complex structures of social life and the contradictory demands of human existence. Even if they were to have something to say about the consequences of their inventions, they take refuge in a calculated optimism that regards technology as, intrinsically, an amelioration of the human situation, something that makes the world a better place, as the Silicon Valley mantra goes, or they delegate responsibility to the users and politicians, claiming that technology is neutral. Or they show a steadfast enthusiasm for the technical unknown. They may admit that new technology is not only full of promise but also comes with its perils, but they insist that it is, in any case, exciting, fascinating, and fantastic.
This willingness to take on risks, this blind embrace of change, represents a shift from the wariness of intellectuals toward the curiosity of inventors and entrepreneurs. What Hamlet in his famous soliloquy admits as a problem for thinkers is not necessarily a problem for tinkerers:
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.5
Such a shift in power is not without its forerunner: Francis Bacon had already imagined it in his social utopia Nova Atlantis in 1627. Here it is no longer the philosopher occupying the center of the ideal state (as in Plato’s Republic, for example) but the scientist constructing social life on the basis of empiricism and rationalism. The data scientist and the programmer are the postmodern descendants of Bacon’s scientists; however, their only plan for the world is that it must be programmable. These are social engineers with no convictions or agendas beyond “computationalism” and the “softwarization” of society.6