Book review: The Dark Side of Reason
Justin E.H. Smith - Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason
Reviewed by William Davies
This new fascination with irrational decision-making coincided with the global financial crisis. Gurus such as Ariely, Thaler and Sunstein helped to modify a free-market ideology according to which consumers and investors are smart enough (smarter than regulators, at least) to calculate risks for themselves. But this sort of thinking also gained popularity just as the combination of social media and smartphones was first ensnaring hundreds of millions of people into an unremitting system of data capture and feedback. The extent to which we are predictably irrational is conditioned by how much of our behaviour the predictor is privy to. And since the launch of the iPhone and the lift-off of Facebook in 2007, the quantity of human irrationality available to be scrutinised and exploited has grown exponentially.
Reviewed by William Davies
This new fascination with irrational decision-making coincided with the global financial crisis. Gurus such as Ariely, Thaler and Sunstein helped to modify a free-market ideology according to which consumers and investors are smart enough (smarter than regulators, at least) to calculate risks for themselves. But this sort of thinking also gained popularity just as the combination of social media and smartphones was first ensnaring hundreds of millions of people into an unremitting system of data capture and feedback. The extent to which we are predictably irrational is conditioned by how much of our behaviour the predictor is privy to. And since the launch of the iPhone and the lift-off of Facebook in 2007, the quantity of human irrationality available to be scrutinised and exploited has grown exponentially.
Given this vast and
lucrative psycho-industrial complex, you might think that the human mind could
hold few surprises for business and policy elites. It has become something of
an orthodoxy in these circles that our behaviour is rarely governed by rational
self-interest, but is swayed by norms, habits, instincts and emotions. Yet when
such irrational forces, combined with techniques of psychological
experimentation and influence of the sort used by nudgers on social media
platforms, disrupted the democratic arena in 2016, it was as if Dionysus
himself had hurtled dancing into the room. Irrationality is predictable, maybe,
but not to the point of putting Donald Trump in the White House.
The myopia of the
nudgers is in their assumption that irrationality is a ‘behaviour’ like any
other, which can be tracked and controlled – that is, rationalised. It’s true
that the relation between rationality and irrationality is ultimately one of
power: which part of society (or the self) is able to boss the other? But
Trump’s election demonstrated the naivety of assuming that in the end reason
will always come out on top. Perhaps with sufficient surveillance, the logic of
our present madness can be divined; maybe Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon
(presently earning $75,000 every thirty seconds), with his global network of
household sensors and consumer tracking, is the real rationalist now. But if
Silicon Valley (not, say, the university) is now the seat of objectivity and
reason, that puts rationality out of sight and out of mind for the vast
majority of us. The anxiety provoked by the use of Facebook to influence
elections isn’t so much that the platform is all-powerful, but that we have no
way of knowing what its true capabilities are. Paranoia is the rational
response to a system whose rules and goals are shrouded in secrecy.
The new dominance of
such giant technology platforms as Facebook and Google represents a distinctive
threat to the status of reason in society. These are businesses that make money
by collecting data about our behaviour, then exploiting the intelligence that
results: what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as ‘surveillance capitalism’. But as we
know from controversies over ‘fake news’ circulating on Facebook and extreme
content on YouTube, the platforms have no interest in establishing norms of
behaviour, only in maximising engagement with the platforms themselves. As far
as Mark Zuckerberg’s business interests are concerned, it doesn’t matter how
absurd, stupid, dangerous or mendacious a post is, just so long as it takes
place on Facebook....
