Mirowski As Critic of the Digital

David Golumbia Virginia Commonwealth University boundary 2 symposium, “Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski” University of Pittsburgh March 16-17, 2017 Mirowski as Critic of the Digital Although Philip Mirowski’s work has been profoundly influential in fields as diverse as economics, history of science, political science, and even literary studies, it is somewhat surprisingly less well-known in the emerging complex of fields which are sometimes referred to as “Digital Studies,” meaning all the fields that directly analyze the social, cultural, and political- economic impacts of the computer. This is unfortunate enough from the perspective of political economy, since Mirowski’s writings on neoliberalism resonate strongly with some of the most incisive political-economic work in Digital Studies, and since Mirowski frequently writes directly about digital technology. At the same time, Mirowski’s work cuts against the grain of some of the myths that circulate not just around Silicon Valley and other industry promoters of digital technology, but among the rather large part—it may even be the majority—of Digital Studies scholars who choose not to interrogate critically the sources and functions of technology and the culture surrounding it. In addition to the intersection of Mirowski’s work with Digital Studies, I will also occasionally refer in what follow to Digital Humanities, the sub-discipline or para-discipline of English and History (among other fields) that purports to focus on the use of Mirowski as Critic of the Digital - 2 what it calls “digital tools” in the service of humanities scholarship, and that is even more prone to an uncritical adoption of digital industry and cyberlibertarian truisms, but my main focus will be on Digital Studies taken as the critical analysis, or at least the analysis, of the effects of digital technology on culture. Even in these formulations it is hard to be as precise as one would like, not least since “the digital” in all respects is a constantly-moving target, something Mirowski’s work is particularly sensitive to, as I’ll try to mention as I go along. I’m going to approach Mirowski’s work on the digital in four parts: to begin with, two longer parts focusing on Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste and Mirowski’s 2002 opus, Machine Dreams; and then I’ll conclude with two brief sections on Mirowski’s concept of “market automata” and his recent work on how concepts of information function in economics.1 i. Neoliberalism and the Digital The aspect of Mirowski’s work that is touched on at least occasionally in Digital Studies is the one on which this symposium focuses, namely neoliberalism in its various political, institutional and intellectual forms. Despite this influence, it remains remarkable how often Mirowski’s 1 I use page numbers along with these abbreviations in what follows for references to the following works by Mirowski: IE: “Information in Economics” (2016) MCTB: “Markets Come to Bits” (2007a) MD: Machine Dreams (2002) NLCW: Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (2013) Mirowski as Critic of the Digital - 3 arguments are either misunderstood or deliberately misconstrued in Digital Studies, sometimes along lines that he specifically guards against. Computers and digital media do not figure centrally in Mirowski’s key work on neoliberalism, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, but they do come up fairly regularly. One important idea, that comes up in other works of his as well, is that at the heart of neoliberal economic doctrine is the notion of the market as computer—or more specifically “information processor”—that is at once both the apotheosis of human cognition (but only because humans participate in the market) and the thing that renders human cognition nearly useless: the marketplace is deemed to be a superior information processor, so therefore all human knowledge can be used to its fullest only if it is comprehensively owned and priced. This was deployed in a myriad of ways to suggest what might seem a string of strident non sequiturs: for instance, some neoliberals actually maintained that the solution to perceived problems in derivatives and securitization was redoubled “innovation” in derivatives and securitization, and not their curtailment. (65-6) This leads to a host of paradoxes with deep resonance for digital culture, perhaps chief among them that “a society dedicated to rational discourse about a market conceived as a superior information processor ended up praising and promoting ignorance” (70); it famously leads Mirowski to observe that the “the major ambition of the Neoliberal Thought Collective is to sow doubt and ignorance among the populace, because it helps foster the ‘spontaneous order’ that is Mirowski as Critic of the Digital - 4 the object of all their endeavors” (224).One place this can be seen in recent technology is in Bitcoin and the blockchain: I have argued (Golumbia 2016), following Mirowski, that these are assemblages of software and hardware as well as discourse one of whose main purposes is to sow a deeply dogmatic and even conspiratorial kind of ignorance about many philosophical and political matters in favor of the “wisdom” of a “radically decentralized” market. One of the phenomena this line of thinking helps to illuminate, and here I will echo Mirowski’s talk from yesterday a bit, is the otherwise-unaccountable insistence among digital advocates that knowledge needs to be “democratized” and that the way to achieve this democratization is to remove what digital enthusiasts call “gatekeepers” or even “elites” who are said to maintain illegitimate control over the dissemination of knowledge. Many of the most vocal pundits of the digital revolution have made good livings by selling the public on the view that journalism and academic research are being inevitably disrupted by the supposedly inexorable digital revolution. These pundits specialize in telling us that on the one hand they rank intellectual inquiry and responsible investigative journalism as among the most important characteristics of a free society, and that on the other hand we just have to deal with the fact that the roles of those who specialize in these activities are being decimated by the “democratization” of the internet. Quite a few of these pundits don’t also tell us that they very literally sell this dogma to the most “disruptive” of Silicon Valley capitalists, while continuing to take advantage of academic institutions that appear only too happy to let them portray themselves as Mirowski as Critic of the Digital - 5 disinterested observers of the contemporary scene. It is no stretch to see in this work a distinct echo of the core NTC doctrine of ignorance, here framed as a kind of superior crowd-based knowledge that improves on any form of prior expertise, without any grounding for such claims—in fact, if anything, with plenty of reason to doubt it. This should not be taken to imply that Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis and others of their ilk are consciously deceiving their audiences (although I would not rule this out entirely either, especially for the pundits who also work as industry consultants), or that they recognize in any deep way the degree to which they rely on something like Hayekian epistemology. Rather, another of the ideas Mirowski introduces in Never Let a Serious Crisis serves us in good stead here, the idea we heard mentioned yesterday of a “special structure of intellectual discourse” Mirowski calls the “’Russian doll’ approach to the integration of research and praxis in the modern world” (NLCW 43). The point of this analysis is to suggest that there are layers to neoliberal doctrine, and that as we progress from layer to layer—from doll to larger doll, or as he often calls them, from shell to larger shell—the doctrine may appear in translated or altered form. As Mirowski explains it, the innermost doll was (or is) the Mont Pelerin Society itself, “constituted as a closed, private members-only debating society whose participants were hand- picked (originally primarily by Hayek, but later through a closed nomination procedure) and which consciously sought to remain out of the public eye” (NLCW 43). Some MPS members were academics but some were not; “One then might regard specific academic departments Mirowski as Critic of the Digital - 6 where the neoliberals came to dominate before 1980…as the next outer layer” of the Matryoshka doll, “one emergent public face of the thought collective—although one rarely publicly acknowledging links to the MPS” (NLCW 44); another shell includes “special-purpose foundations for the education and promotion of neoliberal doctrines” (NLCW 44); “the next shell would consist of general-purpose ‘think tanks’ … and satellite organizations… that sheltered neoliberals, who themselves might or might not also be members in good standing of various academic disciplines and universities” (NLCW 44). The point of referring to these groups and others as shells or Matryoshka dolls is to emphasize that they are not a uniform bloc espousing a unitary neoliberal doctrine as handed down from on high, but rather that with each increasing layer of the dolls we get an increasingly diffuse and plausibly deniable connection to the innermost circles, even if this means that on some issues—typically more peripheral to the deepest concerns of the MPS—the outer shells may recommend positions that do not entirely jibe with theirs. Mirowski’s conception of Matryoshka Dolls proves incredibly useful for analyzing the phenomenon that I and other scholars refer to as “cyberlibertarianism.” Despite the way the word sounds, we use it to point not (just) at the presence of political libertarians in Silicon Valley and the rest of digital culture, but instead the often-blind adoption of “libertarian”—in the vaguest and most general sense possible—principles, ideas, and definitions even among those who claim, and may earnestly believe, that they aren’t libertarians at all.

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