On the False Freedom of Choice and Soft Power Under Cloud-Capitalism
The transition from the feudal Middle Ages to capitalist modernity (cca. the 18th century) was the period in which oppression started to become masked as freedom. A certain relationship between freedom and power has shifted such as to mask the effects of power upon the subject. Whereas before the shift, power was direct and in plain visibility (and freedom from the master’s power was more clearly distinguished), after the shift, power upon individuals or groups happened in indirect, ‘soft’ or invisible ways.
This is not to be viewed in a strictly pessimistic lens: conditions have clearly improved. We could make an analogy in which an object gradually becomes smaller and smaller until it becomes harder to see with the naked eye. In the same vein we can conceptualize power: conditions for the oppressed, weak and vulnerable have certainly improved since the Middle Ages and continue to improve in such a way that it was before possible to observe their oppression and subservience ‘with the naked eye’, and after that needing a lens to do it, and after even more years a microscope. Nevertheless, even though the way in which the strong and powerful rule over the weak and helpless is less immediately visible, power is still here to stay, and a careful analysis is helpful in illuminating the ways in which is works.
Power can mainly be understood in two different ways: positive or negative. A negative power is a power that inhibits, prohibits or represses, a “no!” that tells you what not to do. A positive power is a power that incentivizes, produces or encourages certain behavior, it directly or indirectly tells you what to do. Negative power is immediately more visible than positive power. As the modern-day ‘slaves’, the weak and helpless, lose themselves from the grips of the chains of negative power, they remain caught under the effects of positive power. Ideology’s role in this is to mask positive power as freedom of choice.
According to Byung-Chul Han, today “power is assuming increasingly permissive forms. In its permissivity — indeed, in its friendliness — power is shedding its negativity and presenting itself as freedom”¹. Now the subjugated subject is not even aware of their own subjugation. We think we are free because we cannot see the cage. Power is presented to us by ideology in a positive form in order to hide its inherent negative shadow side. In this way, we are given the illusion of freedom of choice: we are always presented with an alternative to the current mode of being without being notified about how this alternative is not much different. This gives rise to the phenomenon of false choices.
We will start with false choices in the labor market, the market that had its genesis as the same time as capitalism. The ideological false consciousness would have us believe that wage-slavery is not a problem under capitalism since the employee always has the ‘freedom’ to quit their job and find another place to work if they don’t like their current salary or working conditions. The only caveat is that quitting their job has a number of severe consequences for the life of the worker: being able to live without a job until you find a new one in the absence of social safety nets, as well as the consequences marked by the addition of the new job in case they are successful. For many people, all possible job opportunities are horrible, so the false choice lies in how they have the freedom to choose between multiple horrible options: if you don’t like how your boss treats you, quit your job and find another job with an even shittier boss! In other words, the slave is free because they always have the freedom to choose their master.
As I said, in the absence of strong social safety nets (and sometimes even in their presence) a person cannot refuse a certain unsatisfying job opportunity. There are severe consequences to not having a job for a few months, some which can be even fatal. When the consequence of not engaging in an action is death or something close to death, you are not free to refuse engaging in that action. Otherwise, one could easily argue that a slave is free since they can always refuse to work for their master as long as they accept the consequence of being sentenced to death for it.
For this reason, when pondering about freedom, instead of asking whether a person is free or not to do an action, we should instead ask about the consequences of not engaging in a certain action. In other words, freedom means freedom from a certain set of consequences. This is a popular topic in the debate over freedom of speech. To have freedom of any kind, including freedom of speech, would mean to be free of a certain set of more or less severe consequences upon one’s own life. But since no action is without consequences we can reasonably posit that every decision one makes has been made in both free and unfree ways. The real question here being not whether an action was free or not, but from what was it free (from what consequence). This is an argument both in favor and against free speech at the same time: on one hand, absolute freedom of speech is impossible since any utterance will inevitably have consequences upon one’s life, hence one not being able to be fully free from all consequences (unless no one hears your uttering, at which point it is no longer communication but just talking to oneself). But on the other hand, we must make sure that all less ‘visible’ consequences of an action are to be taken into consideration in order to reveal the indirect and ‘soft’ ways in which power acts nowadays.
When debating freedom of speech, it is popular to only take into consideration legal consequences, which represent a much more direct and visible form of power. To have freedom of speech in this sense means to be able to say whatever one wants without getting legally punished. But there are reasons that a certain limited sense of freedom should be allowed in other contexts, such as privately owned platforms. The monopolization of Big Tech is a worrying trend in regards to freedom of speech. Even if one has legal freedom, being banned from all social media over what someone says is the equivalent of being banned from entering town square a few decades ago. As the ownership of social media platforms concentrates in the hands of a small elite, they can censor voices against the rule of the establishment. Again, here their power over us is hidden by being presented with an alternative: we are told that if we don’t like Twitter or Reddit’s terms of service we are always ‘free’ to make our own website with our own rules. But this freedom is only theoretical and not practical, in the same way that an employee only in theory has the freedom to quit their job and find a better one when in reality the alternatives might be very hard to impossible to bring into actuality.
In this example, social media platforms are characterized by what is known in economics as the network effect, which “is the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products”². In other words, social media platforms, ride-sharing apps like Uber, and others only work insofar as many people use them. An infinite feedback loop enters the picture: I can’t quit Reddit and join another social media platform because no one uses that new platform, and no one uses that new platform because there are very few active users already on there (which renders it useless as a social media platform), and there are very few active users already on there because nobody uses it, and so on to infinity. This is why we keep using the same social media platforms, streaming platforms like Youtube or e-commerce platforms like Amazon simply because everyone else already uses them. We use them because other people use them, and other people use them because we use them. This is why right-wing economists are wrong to postulate that the competitor that wins on the market is always the one with the best product at the cheapest price. Platforms like Youtube are platforms that had, in the past the best product at the cheapest price when the market was in its infancy, and then we just continued using them out of inertia. Because of their inherent social nature, social media platforms and other similar apps and websites only work through a large collective audience, which is why it is possible that a competitor may have a better product yet we continuing to use the old one simply because no one uses the new one (and no one uses the new one because everyone else uses the old one, and so on…).
This makes it very hard to find a solution considering that in situations like these, the state must step in to act as an agent that stands in for the collective, in a way that represents everyone on a platform deciding to collectively switch to a new competitor at the same time. But since social media platforms are immaterial, “cloud”-based and not tied in to a single nation, this task becomes impossible to handle at a national level, and designing a world government just for this single problem bears with it a whole new set of issues (can you imagine the corruption of such a trans-national centralized power structure?).
This is the birth of cloud capitalism, or what Yanis Varoufakis labels “techno-feudalism”: According to Varoufakis, the old logic of competition between corporations is rapidly being replaced by the economy of platforms. Digital platforms are websites or applications that function like markets owned by one single individual. On a platform, individuals or corporations join and compete with each other, the owner of the platform extracting a rent from them. The logic of one single marketplace owned by no one in which multiple corporations compete has been replaced by the logic of multiple digital marketplaces that are monopolizing various markets, each marketplace being owned by one single individual who has indirect control over everything. “The moment you enter Amazon, you exit capitalism.” It is the metaphorical equivalent of walking down a mall and one single individual controlling who is able to buy, who is able to sell, what prices are charged, and even what your eyes see. Everything is dictated by the algorithm of one person.
We can thus observe how the genesis of the internet under the environment of a capitalist framework has given rise to a new form of soft power in which our most fundamental civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, are being threatened under this new layer of invisible power hidden under the guise of ‘freedom’. We are told that we are theoretically free to quit all social media and create our own platforms if we don’t agree to their rules (that no one will use simply because everyone else is already on the old ones). And the irony here is how the demise of the Soviet Union happened around the same time as the availability of the internet and thus the genesis of this new cloud era of capitalism, in which the very centrally planned nature of the Soviet Union has been transposed into the structure of the internet. Every digital platform is run like a mini-Soviet Union in which one single person(‘s algorithm) centrally plans its entire activity.
It is this permissivity that marks this new era of soft power: we are always free to completely isolate ourselves from the world as long as we bear the radical consequences of this profound alienation. As cloud capital is increasingly being gathered in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of elites, social power itself is centralized in the hands of the few, and any hierarchical power structure in which an elite few make decisions for the powerless many is tyrannical and leads to corruption. The only difference is that the earlier we go through history, the more visible and obvious such power structures were, whereas now the average lay person is not even aware that they live under it.
According to Yanis Varoufakis, what distinguishes ‘traditional’ capital from this new cloud capital is that the former was a produced means of production (fixed assets used in the production of commodities: factories, machinery, etc.), the latter is a produced means of behavioral modification: “Cloud capital’s third nature straddles three types of algorithmic behaviour modification. One strand commands consumers to reproduce cloud capital (i.e. turns them into cloud serfs). A second strand commands waged labour to work harder (i.e. turns proletarians and members of the precariat into cloud proles). And a third strand replaces markets with cloud fiefs. In a sense, cloud capital’s third nature grants its owners (the cloudalists) a great brand-new power to extract surplus value produced in the traditional capitalist sector”³.
The owners of cloud capital use AI algorithms in order to incite billions of non-waged people (cloud serfs) to work for free (and often unconsciously) at replenishing cloud capital’s own stock through writing social media posts, uploading videos on TikTok, commenting on Instagram or leaving reviews on Google Maps, all without getting paid for it. “Recall that it is the same algorithm which, via Alexa, has trained us to train it to manufacture our desires. The same algorithm that we help train in real time to know us inside out, both modifies our preferences and administers the selection and delivery of commodities that will satisfy these preferences”⁴.
In the sphere of cloud capitalism, negative power that prohibits and represses is replaced by positive power which activates and motivates, such that people subordinate themselves to power relations on their own, as Byung-Chul Han notes: “Power that is smart and friendly does not operate frontally — i.e., against the will of those who are subject to it. It says ‘yes’ more often than ‘no’; it operates seductively, not repressively. Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent.”⁵.
The same logic of positive power is transposed not only in the labor market but onto the consumers as well. As Slavoj Zizek often likes to joke: today we have too many choices — we can choose between Cola and Pepsi, between a corrupt political party and an even more corrupt political party, between 20 brands of shampoo that are all the same. These are fake choices and a false sense of freedom. As Zizek notes, true freedom is not going to the supermarket and being free to buy whatever you want, but being free to choose what is on the shelves in the first place. Soft power and its ideological illusions work by giving us the sense that we are free to choose whatever we want from those shelves while someone else chooses what is on the shelves for us in the first place. All of this happens while someone else owns what is on the shelves in the first place.
This is how power works under capitalism: if I have food and you don’t while you are starving then I have power over you, I can make you do things in exchange of food while you can’t do the same to me. As wealth and capital concentrate in the hands of few people, power itself concentrates in the hands of an elite. And with the rise of cloud capital, an even less visible form of power concentrates in the new techno-feudal lords who own the means to manipulate behavior at the most unconscious level. This is what Byung-Chul Han names the rise of Psycho-Politics:
“For human beings to be able to act freely, the future must be open. However, Big Data is making it possible to predict human behaviour. This means that the future is becoming calculable and controllable. Digital psychopolitics transforms the negativity of freely made decisions into the positivity of factual states. Indeed, persons are being positivized into things, which can be quantified, measured and steered. (…) Now, immaterial and non-physical forms of production are what determine the course of capitalism. What gets produced are not material objects, but immaterial ones — for instance, information and programs. The body no longer represents a central force of production, as it formerly did in biopolitical, disciplinary society. Now, productivity is not to be enhanced by overcoming physical resistance so much as by optimizing psychic or mental processes.”⁶
SOURCES:
1: Byung-Chul Han — “Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the new technologies of power”, p. 13
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
3: Yanis Varoufakis — “Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism”, p. 199
4: ibid., p. 81
5: Byung-Chul Han — “Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and the new technologies of power”
6: ibid.
