Digital modernity

Zuckerberg’s cave: smartness and discipline in digital modernity

Dariusz Brzezinsky, Kamil Filipek, Kuba Piwowar & Malgorzata Winiarska-Brodowska (eds.), Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and Beyond: Theorizing Society and Culture of the 21st Century, 72-88

2024

Themes: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Digital modernity

Category: Book chapter, Peer reviewed

This chapter discusses some of the narratives or imaginaries that help structure our experience of, and the development of, the technological suite that mediates the affordances of social life in wealthy Western societies (and increasingly in less wealthy ones, and elsewhere than the West) in the 2020s. It argues that, far from society having transcended modernity to become postmodern, modernity has evolved, from the ‘high’ or ‘reflexive’ modernity of the late 20th century to a characteristic digital modernity. The chapter draws out some of its consequences, sketching its four institutional dimensions. Its disciplinary stance towards individuals gives rise to a myth which is termed Zuckerberg’s Cave, which is compared to the pre-modern cave of Plato, as well as analogous myths of modernity. The realistic prospects of digital modernity are assessed, setting out both its practical risks and its attractions to citizens and policymakers alike.

Personalisation and digital modernity: deconstructing the myths of the subjunctive world

Utal Kohl & Jacob Eisler (eds.), Data-Driven Personalisation in Markets, Politics and Law, 37-54

2021

Themes: Computing/The Internet, Digital modernity

Category: Book chapter, Open access, Peer reviewed

In this chapter, I discuss the role of personalisation in a wider narrative of the development of democratic societies, in terms of digital modernity, driven by a vision of data-driven innovation over networked structures facilitating socio-environmental control. This chapter deals with narratives of how modernity plays out and is implemented by institutions and technologies, which are inevitably partial, and selective in what they foreground and ignore. It begins with a discussion of digital modernity, showing how data-driven personalisation is central to it, and how privacy not only loses its traditional role as a support for individuality, but becomes a blocker for the technologies that will realise the digitally modern vision. The chapter develops the concept of the subjunctive world, in which individuals’ choices are replaced by what they would have chosen if only they had sufficient data and insight. Furthermore, the notions of what is harmful for the individual, and the remedies that can be applied to these, become detached from the individual’s lived experience, and reconnected, in the policy space, to the behaviour and evolution of models of the individual and his or her environment.

Big data, consequentialism and privacy

Kevin Macnish & Jai Galliott (eds.), Big Data and Democracy, 13-26

2020

Themes: Digital modernity

Category: Book chapter, Peer reviewed

This chapter applies a Weberian analysis to developments in big data. O’Hara argues that just as Weber noted a move from the pre-modern to the modern with the advent of bureaucracy, so we are now entering a time of digital modernity. The focus in digital modernity is less the present (what is happening now) as the subjunctive (what could happen), governed by data. This, he argues, gives data a central role in governing for both good and ill.

Data-driven government: the triumph of Thatcherism or the revenge of society?

Antony Mullen, Stephen Farrall & David Jeffery (eds), Thatcherism in the 21st Century: The Social and Cultural Legacy, 55-73

2020

Themes: Conservatism, Digital modernity

Category: Book chapter, Peer reviewed

Margaret Thatcher’s statement that ‘there is no such thing as society’ has overshadowed Conservative Party politics since the 1980s, and has been the subject of exegesis and attempts at repudiation ever since. This chapter considers the statement in the context of Angus Maude’s critique of ‘society’ as a statistical abstraction, which comes, erroneously, to be taken as an agent in its own right, able to take on the responsibilities of individuals to their communities and ‘little platoons’, and ultimately to become the end of policy itself. This digital modernity, nascent in Maude’s and Thatcher’s day, is becoming increasingly influential, thanks to data-based policy and data-driven agency. The chapter argues that Maude’s subtler analysis still yields a conservative critique of digital modernity, whereas the less nuanced neoliberal individualism valorised by Thatcher may be seen as one of its enablers.

The conservative reaction to data-driven agency

Mireille Hildebrandt & Kieron O'Hara (eds.), Life and the Law in the Era of Data-Driven Agency, 175-193

2020

Co-authors: Mark Garnett

Themes: Conservatism, Digital modernity

Category: Book chapter, Peer reviewed

Political issues pertaining to data-driven agency and the use of ‘big data’ to make decisions about people’s lives are usually seen through the lens of liberalism. A conservative examination of data-driven agency requires a different lens. This chapter adopts the perspective of evolving modernity. It considers the philosophy of three major conservative thinkers, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Michael Oakeshott, in the context of the problematisation of big data contained in Mireille Hildebrandt’s Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law. Present-day conservatives need to rethink their traditional antipathy to the state, reverting to a Burkean understanding of the public-private distinction, and also to revise views of individual agency in the face of the facilitation of collective agency by networked digital technology.

Pity the poor engineer: review of Ragnedda & Muschert, Theorizing Digital Divides, and Ekbia & Nardi, Heteromation

European Journal of Communication, 33(3), 338-343

2018

Themes: Computing/The Internet, Digital modernity

Category: Book review, Open access

Review of two books, different in tone and intended audience, pour cold water on the optimism of the engineering project of using digital technologies to enable networks to develop and flourish at scale. Theorizing Digital Divides punctures the positive narrative of inclusion, while Heteromation problematises the whole idea.

The contradictions of digital modernity

AI & Society, 35(1), 197-208

2018

Themes: Computing/The Internet, Digital modernity

Category: Journal article, Open access, Peer reviewed

This paper explores the concept of digital modernity, the extension of narratives of modernity with the special affordances of digital networked technology. Digital modernity produces a new narrative which can be taken in many ways: to be descriptive of reality; a teleological account of an inexorable process; or a normative account of an ideal sociotechnical state. However, it is understood that narratives of digital modernity help shape reality via commercial and political decision-makers, and examples are given from the politics and society of the United Kingdom. The paper argues that digital modernity has two dimensions, of progression through time and progression through space, and these two dimensions can be in contradiction. Contradictions can also be found between ideas of digital modernity and modernity itself, and also between digital modernity and some of the basic pre-modern concepts that underlie the whole technology industry. Therefore, digital modernity may not be a sustainable goal for technology development.

Data, legibility, creativity … and power

IEEE Internet Computing, 19(2), 88-91

2015

Themes: Digital modernity

Category: Journal article, Open access, The Digital Citizen

In a world where data crunching has the potential to crunch out the individual, how can people respond? Kieron O’Hara discusses the dangers and downfalls of conflating people with data, without a balance in feedback between algorithms and individuals.