Cyberfolk and The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for ? by Jose Carlos Cañizares

In this essay I address the moral significance of the telematic system of citizen reports of happiness and displease named Cyberfolk. Designed in the 70s by Anthony for Allende’s democratic and socialist government in , Cyberfolk was part of the national project of State informatization Cybersyn –where the acronym stands for “Cybernetic Synergy”-. The Chilean socialist endeavor was shortly lived, tragically ending after a coup d’etat in year 73, and Cyberfolk was one of the parts of Cybersyn that never entered into operation. Thus, it forever remained a mere prototype and, at most, a historical curiosity, which does not necessarily impede ethical analysis of the technology. Quite on the contrary, as we will see, by addressing Cyberfolk’s basic design we will disclose some remarkable properties that any such system would theoretically have. In turn, these properties will be shown to elicit peculiar sorts of ethical issues and discussions. It is possible, to be sure, to offer arguments in favor or against the desirability of Cyberfolk. These arguments should attend to properties of Cyberfolk such as those we are sought to discuss throughout the essay. However, both the special history of the technology and its remarkable properties suggest the priority and convenience of a preliminary analytical study. In consequence, instead of giving an outright answer to the question of whether Cyberfolk is a morally good or desirable technological system, my main goal in the following pages will be to characterize Cyberfolk’s morally salient features, and to suggest the problems and fields of ethical debate that could prove more fruitful for analyzing the system. My basic problem is, then, more one of frame than of content; and it is my contention that, if this preliminary enquiry is successful, then a further pursuit of more concrete questions of content would benefit greatly from this success.

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares

To reach the above indicated purpose, this essay goes through four sections. First I describe the main features of Cybersyn and Cyberfolk, and drawing in this analysis I discuss a few important methodological implications for the assessment of similar systems. In section two I discuss Stafford Beer’s unsatisfactory justification of the system in Aristotelian terms, and I make a second attempt to characterize it in utilitarian terms which, however, reveals insufficient too. I will suggest, then, the philosophical doctrine that provides, in my opinion, a better ground to discuss the technology. Building in the prior discussions, in section three I briefly mention four possible sources of criticism against Cyberfolk, all partly grounded in considerations of moral psychology. Though I have not been by any means exhaustive in this regard, I think that these criticisms help us gain an awareness as to the kind of ethical debates that the implementation of projects like Cyberfolk are likely to arise. I conclude by making a brief commentary on the research.

1. The place of Cyberfolk within the Chilean project of socialist democracy. Stafford Beer was a management scientist, philosopher and cybernetician whose most renowned published work is “Brain of the Firm” (1972). In this book, the author condenses his original application of the principles of to operational research. Beer is also famous, however, for having been a major agent in one of the most fascinating political projects of the last century, and perhaps of all the history of mankind: the project of “scientific” socialist democracy in Allende’s Chile (1970-1973). Beer was appointed by the Unidad Popular government for the huge task of informatizing the whole of Chilean economy in order to accomplish socialist goals, and he came up with Project Cybersyn. Some have recently recalled this system as an early political version of contemporary enterprises in the all-encompassing paradigm of Big Data (Morozov 2014). Now, this was not a traditional kind of national planning device. On the one hand, it reflected the cybernetic brand of management science of its designer. On the other, it was a centerpiece of the administration efforts to create a brand of that was less bureaucratic and more democratic than other “real socialism” projects existing back in the days, notably that of the . According to this spirit of , which, apparently, was taken very seriously by Allende himself, the worker had to have a greater participation (and therefore, greater responsibility) than usual in the control of production. Likewise, the citizen had to have a greater participation and responsibility in all government decisions than he had usually been granted in representative democracy. Let us consider, first, which are the main theoretical tenets and tools of cybernetic theory that profoundly conditioned the design of project Cybersyn.

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares

1.1. The cybernetic principles behind Cybersyn: a Viable System Model (VSM). Cybernetics, as created by thinkers such as Norbert Wiener or Ross Ashby, was originally conceived as the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine (Wiener 1965; Beer 1972). More exactly, we should say that this science dealt with self-adaptive systems capable of reaching stability in midst of a constantly changing environment. This sort of stability, which Ashby calls ultrastability, could only be reached with the aid of peculiar mechanisms of controlled internal change involving feedback loops. These mechanisms measured the outputs of the system; compared these outputs with an ideal, predefined, output; and use the resulting signal back as an input for further processes and actions (see Fig.1). For this reason, rather than dealing with control and communication, cybernetics can be said to deal with control through communication. In this sense, the guiding idea that a deep analogy Figure 1 – Basic Diagram of a Feedback Control existed between living systems and artificial self-regulating systems was very seriously taken by cyberneticians, and indeed foundational and absolutely taken for granted in their reflections and designs. Living systems were, for them, self-regulating systems capable of adjusting to a changing environment thanks to an internal configuration based in feedback loops integrated in complex ways. In fact, the nervous system of higher vertebrates was thought to be the greatest example of the validity of the approach. Cybernetics once bore the promise of unifying all the sciences, a program which is today largely out of fashion. However, fairly established and dynamic branches in engineering science, such as the theory of information or the theory of control, are built upon and have evolved out of cybernetic principles. After this exposition of the main commitments of cybernetic thinking, the contribution of Stafford Beer to the discipline can be more readily understood. It basically consisted in broadening the scope of the approach to management science by extending the analogy between a nervous system and self-regulating systems. Hence the title of his main work, “Brain of the Firm”, where the word brain stands not as much for the role of the manager, as for the organizational structure binding all the system components. Therefore, it should be no surprise that the Viable System Model (VSM), presented in the above cited work, and which constituted the operative abstract description underlying the implementation of Cybersyn, took itself an alike shape to that of a nervous system (see Fig.2, below). At this point, we ought to remember that the system not only had to be efficient, but that, in addition, it was aimed at fulfilling two basic socialist goals: first, worker- centeredness in the production system and, second, democratic participation beyond the

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares frame of the national economy. Let me note in passing that the idea that political life should exceed the mere framework of economic relations, is one that already has important consequences from the standpoint of political theory. In fact, and as the next subsection will make clear, both the Chilean administration and Beer himself took this second goal of citizen participation as the main reason to design a prototype for Cyberfolk, conceived as a project that would belong to Cybersyn, but nonetheless have an independent functioning. As to the worker-centeredness of the economy, the structure of the VSM already featured the possibility of building into Cybersyn this goal with no intrinsic additions at all. In fact, the

VSM required some such intensive participation Figure 2 - Viable System Model (VSM) of all agents across the production system. This can be easily seen if we examine the theory behind the VSM a bit more closely. In Ashby’s cybernetics, any complex self-regulating system can be thought of as a generator and absorber of variety (Beer 1972). With the concept of variety, cyberneticians want to address the existence of some number of possible states in a system, not all of which are conducive to stable behavior. The process by which the system is able to evolve only to those states that allow it continued existence is then called absorption of variety. Now, if our system is composed of many other subsystems, each of these will generate a variety of its own. This is a variety that has to be absorbed through communication across the relevant subsystems. Accordingly, the VSM describes a complex self-regulating system composed of further subsystems that integrate with each other in five nested levels (see Fig.2). This system is recursive, by which it is meant that any subsystem i includes its corresponding metasystem i as part of its own structure of operations. In the specific case of System 1 units (S1), this implies that every single S1 unit is defined with respect to its connections with System 2 or 3 (S2, S3), where S2 regulates conflicts and S3 coordinates joint actions between any two S1 units. In this regard, the pair S2-S3 is respectively intended to replicate the functions of the sympathethic and parasympathetic systems of the autonomic nervous system (Beer 1972). At some point, a S1’s metasystem (that is, S2 or S3, but also, eventually, S4 or S5) may need to intervene in the regulation; in such a case, S1 sends an algedonic alert to the upper instance, by which the latter is informed of some performance at the lower level or, more radically, is transferred the control of the relevant

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares operation. Otherwise, the lower level system (S1) is left alone to the task of handling the variety generated in its level, and is then able to remain in autonomous operation. This explanation could be taken much further, but a lesson of interest can already be drawn: if the VSM is intended to build enduring stability out of variety, and if the lower levels of operation (S1) are identified with its operators, that is, the workers; then, the autonomy of subsystems S1 can be conceptualized as some sort of freedom of the workers. Accordingly, the VSM would be apt for addressing socialist ideals if its concrete physical implementation was designed to always optimize the autonomy of subsystems at the lowest possible level of recursivity. But, how could this really match the national needs of Chile? Well, the main goal of Cybersyn was to plan a sustainable Chilean economy at various levels; while the higher levels of decision would provide stability and coordination when necessary, the lower levels would be granted the maximum autonomy the rest of the time. On the other hand, in order to do this, Cybersyn needed to keep track of economic events in a regular basis, and this tracking should ideally be as close as possible to real-time. In consequence, Cybersyn needed much more than a mere provision of autonomy of the lower levels of its ; it needed their ongoing and intensive engagement. This could only be done by motivating workers, bosses and planners alike to constantly provide data reports to the system. The system would, in turn, analyze its own behavior and generate possible future scenarios that could feedback planning decisions at the required level. Needless to say, Allende’s government needed a lot of courage and support from Chilean workers if Cybersyn’s requirements were to be met. Finally, it is worth mentioning that all the data collected throughout the country’s industries were sent to two central computers in , aggregated there, and then formatted by graphic designers who would draw fancy summarizing diagrams to be displayed in the operations room. This operations room was a place of integration of all the country’s relevant data, as well as a peculiar sort of decision board. For, as we shall see next, not only this was the site where urgent decisions of the highest level (S5) would be taken: it was also the site where many -ideally, all- of these decisions would be broadcast to the citizen, so that he gave his, or her, informed consent or dissent about them. In fact, this was the nexus between Cybersyn, taken as a whole, and Cyberfolk, regarded as the device concerned with democratizing national processes more broadly.

1.2. The Algedonic Meter and Project Cyberfolk. The previous pages have prepared the reader to fully appreciate the role of Cyberfolk as a part of project of much larger scope. In particular, Cyberfolk’s main intended function was to make the citizens’ voice heard much louder and frequently than could possibly be afforded by traditional mechanisms of representative democracy, that is, presidential votes and public referenda. To that effect, Cyberfolk had a very basic structure, which can be

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares

seen in Fig. 3 below. The diagram almost speaks by itself, so that its underlying idea hardly needs any explanation. Therefore, I will be very concise. The system aggregates individual reports of happiness and displease (or, pleasure/pain), monitors the results of this aggregation and broadcasts them to every citizen through the TV. The logic of the system is already familiar to us: feedback loops provide an interconnection between the relevant subsystems in order to absorb the variety that each subsystem generates. Thus, in the one hand, the people’s opinion about the government’s decisions constitutes a variety to the government; while on the other hand, not only the government’s decisions constitute a variety to the people; also the general state of public opinion is, to the individual citizen, a variety that he or she

Figure 3 – Diagram of Cyberfolk, featuring the algedonic meter should ideally be able to absorb. as the most basic and essential operative unit of the system. The drawing is of Stafford Beer’s himself. In A. Pickering, “The People-to-government variety can be Cybernetic Brain: Sketches From Another Future” (2010) absorbed by collecting and aggregating all the individual reports received in a central station, the results of which are displayed in screens directly accessible by the government. These individual reports are marks of varying degrees of “pleasure” and “pain”, which is why their name is algedonic inputs. This part of the system involves four stages with the corresponding devices: one algedonic meter in every household; a communication channel; a summation machine; and a room with screens or displays. Beer took to Chile a simple and cheap analogue voltmeter as a prototype of the algedonic meter; the summation machine was not hard to implement; the communication would run through the TV circuitry; and the operations room was equipped with the required screens. So much for the “people-to-government” channel, whereby the former would inform the latter of its reactions to every single political decision. Then, on the other hand, we have another channel of communication running in the opposite direction, that is, from the government to the people. The government creates a variety of information in form of measures, law enforcements and so on, which they announce, explain and justify through TV broadcast. The public’s absorption of this variety would be facilitated by Cyberfolk thus: broadcasts would be made directly (and real-time) from the operations room; and, together with the government’s speeches, the operations room display featuring the timely level of “public happiness” would be broadcasted too. In

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares this manner, the very same channels of communication that had been open in the people- to-government direction are hereby exploited by the addition of further feedback loops, thus establishing a closed system of bilateral communication between all the agents involved. What is more: not only the government absorbs “citizen variety” and, vice versa, citizens absorb the government-generated variety; both citizens and the government have a window to the consequences of their own performances, and thus they are provided with information that might be essential for their respective adjustments to a changing reality. This window is constituted by the pair “government broadcast” plus “display-of-public- happiness broadcast”. In Beer’s words:

You can see it. The nation can see it. You know that the nation can see it. The nation knows that you know… (Beer 1974, 17)

A little reflection on the characteristics of Cyberfolk reveals very interesting epistemic properties. In particular, the system seems to be a close embodiment to the sort of functional setting that would promote Pareto-optimality in a distributed decision-making system. In game theory, Pareto-optimality is the state of a (, bargaining) game where no improvement in resource allocation is possible for any individual, such that no one else would be worse off than before. To reach any such state, it is a precondition of the system that all individuals have a perfect state of information available. As these authors explain in their application of game-theoretic notions to distributed control modelling:

In general, cooperation is needed to obtain a Pareto optimal solution (instead of a Nash equilibrium), and distributed architectures have to be designed carefully [8]. Several works in the literature assume that each agent has access to the model of the full system. For example, in [8], it was proven that through multiple communications between distributed controllers and using system- wide control objective functions, stability of the closed-loop system can be guaranteed. (Maestre et al. 2009; highlights are mine)

Now, Cyberfolk’s total publicity of the system’s communication rules and procedures, as well as the transparency of the many different notions of pleasure and happiness involved (individual, corporate, public) seems to provide each agent with a reliable “access to the model of the full system”. Likewise, Cyberfolk features an objective function of happiness or, at least, a provisional, arguable and improvable basis of some such function. Of course, one can argue that Pareto-optimality is too abstract a criterion to accounting for the complexities of human desires and needs or the epistemic component that grounds, arouses and guides the accomplishment of those desires more generally. Moreover, one could ask: what kind of knowledge do agents really have in system like Cyberfolk? Does this knowledge count as knowledge of public happiness, or of the activity of the system’s components in reaction of that public happiness, or…?

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares

2. A conceptualization of Cyberfolk in ethical terms.

2.1. The empirical approach to technology and its problems. A brief metaethical remark is convenient here before we proceed to the properly ethical analysis of Cyberfolk. In this connection, the first thing that must be noted from our exposition is that the above diagram does not describe a technology that ever came to regular functioning. Nor is that diagram a proper prototype, although the voltmeter and the summation machine that Beer took to Chile were supposed to serve as components of a testable prototype. Cyberfolk is, in rigor, no more than a model supported by a theoretical background and designed according to the two goals of fitting the larger the design of Cybersyn, and suiting a specific aim within this larger system. Therefore, the system does not seem to elicit an analysis in terms of what has been called the “empirical approach” to technology. According to this approach, philosophers of technology make a big mistake by reducing technology to its conditions of possibility (Verbeek 2005, 109- 112). The suggestions seems to be then, that instead of investigating the more general and abstract conditions of development of technology, we should consider a very specific technology and discuss its most peculiar features; at the same time, we should abstract from everything that might relate that technology to the larger social or industrial system in which it is developed, the theoretical ideas or assumptions that bind that technology to other technologies, and so on. Somewhere else I have called attention to a few potential problems that empirical approaches to technology and society might have in case that they really abstract from the relevant structural aspects of technology (Cañizares 2015b). Here I can only summarize my criticisms insofar as they apply to our case in point. First, Cyberfolk shows us that we find a unity of logical structure and intended functions in diagrammatic designs, and possibly also in flexible prototypes. This unity contrasts deeply with the diversity of implementations that the particular system may find later on, when it has been applied in real-world, practical scenarios. Second, it follows from this remark that technological families have generic-specific properties and features that are shared by all its possible physical realizations, that is, properties that derive not from the specific physical realization but rather from the ideal design, whose properties can then be embodied by this or that set of physical devices. This line of reasoning seems to apply, for instance, when discussing the different properties that any implementation of Central Model Predictive Control (CMPC) may have with respect to any system of Distributed Model Predictive Control (DMPC). In particular, the former includes a central controller while the latter achieves control through decentralized, public and objective processes; while the first class seems more suited to technocratic and authoritarian organization, the second promotes more autonomy for low-level systems. Of course, Beer seems to be quite aware of these differences, as can be inferred from his remarks on the relations between types of design and goals of decentralization (Beer 1974, 5)1. Finally, we must

1 Also, the reader can try to make himself the thought experiment of removing some of the feedback loops from Cyberfolk’s design template. He will immediately notice how, from such

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares

ask whether there is any theoretical loss in detaching Cyberfolk from the totality in which it is embedded. That is: can we fully understand the ethical implications of this system without any reference to Cybersyn and the Chilean project? Or should we conceptualize Cyberfolk as a piece of some larger sociotechnical system (Vermaas et al. 2011) -that is, Cybersyn- whose emergent properties might be essential to understand those of some of its subsystems -in this case Cyberfolk’s? In light of the above, it can be argued, I think, that a more comprehensive study of Cyberfolk might benefit from considering it as a general and abstract design (thus, with generic-specific properties) which is embedded in a larger system (thus, with given constraints and functions that are dependent on, or subordinate to, those of the bigger whole). Such a study might enjoy some additional benefits. Let us, for instance, classify Cyberfolk as a telematic system that processes individual reports. A careful study of Cyberfolk’s properties might then help us see what sorts of ethical issues are generally at stake in any telematic system that provides open channels of public participation, and, in particular, in telematic systems that use individual reports as data that feedback the system itself, thus making it self-adjusting and responsive to the collected reports. In my opinion, there are many contemporary communication systems that satisfy the given description. What we learn from Cyberfolk might then serve as a general framework that facilitated our comprehension of those contemporary systems.

2.2. Stafford Beer’s Aristotelian account of Cyberfolk. Stafford Beer was perfectly aware of the advent of information society. He noticed, for instance, that there was a growing time-scope conflict between democratic elections and societal dynamics; while many television programs had already enabled channels of public participation through phone votes and similar initiatives, representative democracy still limited its mechanisms of citizen participation to elections every four years and, perhaps, occasional referenda. The main consequence of this was, according to Beer, that the power of media to direct public opinion was growing disproportionately. Moreover, Beer thought that voting was basically a mechanism where one votes less for the favorite candidate than for the “least bad” one (Beer 1974). As such, the vote is a merely algesic report: its significance can be interpreted only as an expression of pain. Summing up, democratic voting was both too infrequent, and scarcely representative of the subtleties of the opinions and feelings of citizens. Beer thought that the main function of the algedonic meter was to overcome these two defects of representative democracy, which, he thought, threatened to destroy democracy as such in the long run. These two goals, the algedonic meter would attain by providing the citizens with the opportunity to send the government continuous and real-time reports. In this manner, public engagement would increase at the same time that the government would have open, frequent and reliable information removal, specific potential consequences follow. For instance: if we do not broadcast the display of public happiness, citizens will lose a precious piece of information about the consequences of their own choices, as well as about the general state of public opinion (as represented by the indicator of aggregated happiness) and, thus, a window into the neighbor’s reactions to government’s policy.

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares

about the nation’s state, thus becoming more adaptive and sensitive to the needs of their citizens. On the other hand, Beer thought of Cyberfolk as a channel for democratic participation which would complement Cybersyn by giving citizens a political voice that informed itself. Cybersyn was, in fact, a project which revealed an almost obsessive focus in economic management but, taken in itself, it left very little space to political decision and, generally, democratic procedures. Cyberfolk was aimed at transcending this technocratic tendency, which Beer had regarded to be intrinsic to the “utilitarian” paradigm of development economy (Beer 1974). This paradigm was the dominant one in development economics at the time and, according to Beer, it had the consequence that economic and political efforts became almost exclusively concerned with unlimited economic growth, as measured by GNP levels. Thus, a developing country basically had to attain ever higher levels of GNP, despite this indicator disposed with many important considerations of justice and public welfare. In fact, the indicator has been widely criticized for concealing inequality, as well as other aspects which are thought to be pillars of a healthy democratic nation (Max-Neef et al. 2001). It was, perhaps, in order to highlight this contrast with the utilitarian paradigm that he was criticizing, that Beer looked back at Aristotle as someone who had provided a better guide to what he was now aiming to do with Cyberfolk. Beer then claimed that the algedonic meter should be understood as a device for measuring eudemony or “social happiness”. In his own words:

For this kind of social happiness which is quite different from inward spiritual joy, I use Aristotle’s word eudemony. (Beer 1974, 17; highlights are mine)

However, Beer’s claim that Cyberfolk can be a measure of Aristotelian eudemony faces very serious conceptual problems. First of all, Aristotle rejected the idea that numbers could be of any philosophical use, be it in guiding our understanding of nature, let alone our moral life. It makes little sense, thus, to claim that any measurable variable can reflect the classic Aristotelian notion of eudemony2. There are other reasons why one could be entitled to argue that Aristotle’s ideas clash strongly with this technology. Aristotelian eudemony is, importantly, not a state of society but a state to which the individual strives, and that he reaches only in becoming virtuous. That is, eudemony is an individual state stemming from individual virtue. To be sure, one can only attain eudemony in society. In fact, one learns about virtue and moral behavior after observing the actions of the virtuous elders. Now, if virtuous elders constitute the models of virtue for the young to imitate, then tradition and the preservation of social relations is essential for attaining virtue as such. On the other hand, this emphasis in continuity and stability also pertains to the individual character; for Aristotle, one can be virtuous only if he has a stable character to begin with, while any movement or action that disturbs the virtuous individual, or inclines him to move away from his stable and virtuous character, can be

2 A personal communication from Prof. Johnny Søraker led me to take this important problem into account.

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares

regarded as an sheer act of violence upon him. In line with this reasoning, somewhere else (Cañizares 2015a) I have defended the plausible idea that Aristotelian ethics is too conservative and difficult to adapt to the moral analysis of technology3. As I have tried to show, Aristotle’s moral theory does not seem to be appropriate for analyzing Cyberfolk. In my opinion, this technology rather asks for a utilitarian analysis, as Beer’s identification of “eudemony” with “social happiness” suggests. Therefore, I will try to conceptualize Cyberfolk from the standpoint of utilitarianism.

2.3. Cyberfolk from a utilitarian perspective. In principle, Cyberfolk is a system where individual pleasures and pains can be measured and quantified. In fact, the system calculates the consequences that singular decisions might have on public happiness and provides a measure of public happiness (operations room) as a result of those decisions. What is more, the system provides information that allows the identification of the relevant agent and a relative attribution of responsibilities with respect to any decision and its consequences. In particular, and as the design template suggests, the higher the metasystem that generates a given decision, the greater will be the impact of that decision on public happiness. These properties make of Cyberfolk a device that calls for utilitarian analysis and, more importantly, a device that is itself a realization of some ideals of utilitarianism, as I have described them more in detail somewhere else (Cañizares 2015a). On the other hand, these features seem to go beyond, and even subvert, some of the demands and concerns of classic utilitarianism. In particular, technocratic readings of utilitarianism seem to be perfectly fine with -and even favor- impersonal measures of happiness, such as physiological reactions. In contrast, individual self-reports, and even any consideration of individual happiness, seem to be secondary a priori for the utilitarian. This is the reason why the future described in the famous novel Brave New World comes handy as a faithful depiction of a utilitarian dystopia. Furthermore, and as Michel Foucault makes clear in his analysis of Bentham’s panóptikon, the utilitarian completely disregards the locus as well as the agent of calculation, that is, he is not concerned with the moral permissibility or significance of the distribution of power that

3 Actually, according to the above, any technology that forces or promotes deep changes in social relations, such as those that Cyberfolk could plausibly operate, is a technology that distorts tradition and makes impossible the continuity, paucity and preservation of the social processes necessary for virtue to be significant in society, i.e. publicly recognized and transmittable from the elders to the young. In any case, Aristotle’s philosophy does not seem fully appropriate for dealing with the moral side of technology, and this for many reasons. For instance, mediation theory shows us that technologies constitute both our perception and agency and that, therefore, any talk of virtue or stable characters which disregards the technological relations constitutive of subjectivity is ultimately misguided (Verbeek 2005). Aristotle indeed thought that a dedication to some specific techné shaped the artisan’s character, as well as, of course, his skills; but his ethical theory does not conceive technical work from an ethical dimension, given that his ethical dimension belonged to the rational life of theoria or, at most, to military acts of command –both of which, in Ancient Greece, opposed fundamentally to the manual activity, or work, from artisans and mere soldiers. These factors, and others that I indicated in my (Cañizares 2015a), lead me to think that we can indeed learn a lot from Aristotle’s classical ethical theory, but we cannot use it directly in our reflections on technology unless that we abandon some of Aristotle’s crucial concerns and ideas.

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares

manipulates the system of calculation. Now, our analysis in the first section -and particularly the subsection devoted to clarifying Cyberfolk’s properties- should suffice to show that these issues were precisely the central concerns for Beer in his design of Cyberfolk’s. Indeed, these features are built in as goals that the system should achieve: as it promotes citizen participation and provides channels to it, a central role is given to individual beliefs and feelings. As it makes all the relevant information public and transparent, the system escapes a centralized and opaque control; likewise, social conflict is made visible and modulated through the objective procedures inscribed in Cyberfolk’s intended functioning. In doing so, Cyberfolk, transcends the more technocratic versions of utilitarianism and gives everyone the opportunity to act as some sort of utilitarian philosopher in the assessment of society, the government and even its own behavior. In his unforgettable critical study of the panóptikon, Michel Foucault had said about that famous building that it ought not to be “understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form” (Foucault 1977, 205). Allowing for the differences, I want to look at Cyberfolk in similar terms: rather than demanding a utilitarian analysis, Cyberfolk embodies this philosophy. However, in doing so, Cyberfolk takes utilitarian logic to such an extreme that this seems no longer the only operative logic underlying the functioning of the device. Cyberfolk is a reversible panóptikon; but, is a reversible and ubiquitous panóptikon still a panóptikon? Through the use of Cyberfolk, everybody would become a utilitarian philosopher; but, is utilitarianism still the moral philosophy that they would be practicing thereby? In this brief essay, I have already taken too much for the sake of expounding both the theoretical background, and the properties of Cyberfolk that follow from its basic design and intended goals. Therefore, I cannot provide a definite answer as to the question of what kind of ethical framework suits this technology best. This answer would require a rigorous treatment of many theories, which I feel as yet unable to provide. However, I would like to hint at the convenience of developing this subject in the light of modern theories of justice and liberal democracy. Martha Nussbaum’s achievements in modernizing Aristotle’s ethical vision are well known, as it is her interest in providing theoretical justification to the ideal of a participative democracy. In such a democracy, one central concern would be to provide socialized channels and opportunities for self- expression and open litigation. However, not only would this help us to press consent and dissent on others in order to obtain some ideological or material victory; it would also help us to exercise empathy and to rationalize social conflict. Nussbaum’s theory, which in this point also follows Rawls’ (and therefore Kant’s too4) is an important reference to anyone willing to discuss ways to overcome the paradigm defined by the Welfare State and a technocratic representative democracy where consent is largely fabricated by media

4 This ideal of deliberative, intellectualist democracy seems to promote both a progressive generalization of perspectives and a growing awareness of the limits of one’s own universal judgments. These conditions, if taken together, seem to both constitute and improve the formal conditions in which a Kantian-like conception of ethics could flourish.

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares

through opaque techniques. Against this background, the fact that Cyberfolk seems to be an open, objective and transparent indicator of public opinion, if not happiness; and one which is, moreover, open to revision and further perfection; constitutes a sufficient justification to pursue an expanded treatment in terms of Nussbaum’s theory of justice. However, one may wonder whether the intended goals of Cyberfolk are desirable, and even psychologically realistic. In fact, let me turn now to a brief exposition of some doubts and criticisms that any such system could legitimately arise.

3. Some criticisms from moral psychology. There are preferential lines of criticism for a system as ambitious as Cyberfolk. Here I will only outline which are, to me, the main ones. First, an author of libertarian sensibility, such as was, for instance, Friedrich Hayek, would be completely against any system where politics took a central place in public life, as it takes in Cyberfolk. Hayek’s theory deserves a separate treatment that we are not able to offer here. However, suffice to note that his theory of knowledge implied that political economy was both impossible and undesirable. In consequence, the presence of the state had to be minimal and people are better off left to their business, which, in any case, provides them with a knowledge that no central mechanism of government (no matter how “distributed” and guarantor of “autonomy”) could capture or understand. What is more: for Hayek, the effects of full transparency and open conflict may be counterproductive and even socially catastrophic. The second criticism comes directly from moral psychology, and it addresses the epistemological status, and methodological validity, of the algedonic meter as a device that supposedly collects reliable reports. In fact, many psychologists and philosophers throughout history have doubted either the possibility of self-knowledge, or the reliability of self-expression, or both. These psychological positions –see, for instance (Baumeister et al. 2007; Nisbett & Wilson 1977) can normally draw in a skeptic sensibility that, of course, should be carefully circumscribed to contexts with given properties. The knowledge that the individual has of his own biases is, of course, an important factor here; for, as Nisbett and Wilson themselves remind us (and Spinoza had told us long ago), an affection that is recognized is an affection that the individual may strive to avoid. All in all, it remains the doubt as to whether the algedonic meter is a reliable device for measuring reports of pleasure or, perhaps, it is a very different sort of thing; a device that, for instance, modifies our very notions of pleasure and pain, being even capable of generating yet unknown sorts of psychological problems in the user. Finally, I would like to highlight the fact that Aristotle’s moral psychology still has a lot to tell us and that it provides a plausible line of critique to Cyberfolk, which should, of course, be pursued by consulting further investigations in modern psychology. I am referring to Aristotle’s central tenet that we learn our moral behavior from socially relevant figures such as leaders, icons and so on. To this remark I would add that we also forge our moral framework out of stereotypes, canonic gestures or identitarian narratives

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares

that guide our thinking and our decision. This is what modern works in psychology like Kahneman and Tversky’s also seem to conclude. For me, the importance of these factors means that, contrary to what many contemporary political theorists would like, there is a psychological basis to representative democracy that is completely uneliminable, at least if we take seriously these insights from moral psychologists. However, Cyberfolk does not take the role of socially relevant figures, heroes and so on into account, and it seems that this greatly interferes with a proper treatment of the social roots of decision-making. In short: because it disregards the role of icons or stereotypes in the formation of public opinion, a system like Cyberfolk might be unable to realize the goals that had motivated some of the central features of its design.

4. Conclusion. Nowadays, many technologies can be said to belong to the same general class of telematic systems to which Cyberfolk also belongs. A classic example would be any sort of system of electronic vote, but Twitter, Change.org and quantified-self technologies also have aspects in common with Cyberfolk. These systems can also be complemented with features that allow participation to configure the system’s behavior itself, such as it occurs with Uber’s algorithms and, more generally, with any technology which is capable of mining personal data and using these data to make the technology itself evolve. Also, algorithms and programs running in virtual networks that fall within the Big Data paradigm are presumably of this kind. An expanded, attentive to detail, ethical analysis of Cyberfolk could provide us insight into the sort of ethical issues involved in the use of these contemporary technologies. The above discussion and criticisms show that there are many features in Cyberfolk that are complex, difficult to conceptualize, and even morally disturbing. They appeal to the reliability of our acts of expression, the convenience of creating objective and public mechanisms of decision, and the desirability of promoting –let alone demanding- explicit participation among the users of the system. However, as I have argued, these features are present also in contemporary technologies that are similar to Cyberfolk, but that do not necessarily have the socialist and democratic inspiration, or the transparency and openness, that Cyberfolk does seem to have. We should ask ourselves, in fact, whether our present scenario is any less disturbing than anyone that Cyberfolk could have promoted, even if the worst possible consequences had not been imagined by its creators.

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Cyberfolk & The Algedonic Meter. A philosophical instrument for socialist democracy? – Jose C. Cañizares

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