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Government by algorithm

Matthew B. Crawford’s lengthy essay in the latest number of American Affairs, “Algorithmic Governance and Political Legitimacy,” imposes heavy demands on the reader — it may require several cups of coffee, and it will certainly require setting aside your phone — but the slog is worth it.

The writer, a motorcycle mechanic who moonlights as a philosopher (or maybe it’s the other way around), unfolds a profound theory to explain, and to a certain degree defend, the populist revolts that have roiled politics around the world in recent years. He draws on many sources, but the most salient are interrelated developments in the technology sector and government. The argument, though very complex, might be summarized thusly: the technocratic effort to replace government by natural persuasion and consent, with government by rationalistic algorithm and nudge, has introduced a crisis of legitimacy, the resolution of which we cannot yet foresee.

Government by persuasion and consent, you see, results in an ineradicable untidiness. Persuasion may be conditional, consent may be refused; ornery men will stoneface the most perfect logical syllogism; the indecisive may withdraw consent at the most perfectly inopportune moment. The whole thing presents to the rationalistic mind an excruciating muddle. One does not often find deliberative assemblies — school boards, city councils, parliaments — filled up with trained engineers. One finds them filled up with lawyers; engineers often regard them as akin to torture.

The engineering mind, meanwhile, produced the algorithm. Therefore, government by algorithm is mechanistic, indeed automated. Its edicts emerge from behind an impenetrable veil of high-end mathematics backed by supreme computing power. As Crawford puts it, with sly understatement: “One reason why algorithms have become attractive to elites is that they can be used to install the automated enforcement of cut­ting‑edge social norms.”

But the emphasis rests decidedly on “cutting-edge” not “norms”:

Locating the authority of evolving social norms in a computer will serve to provide a sheen of objectivity, such that any reluctance to embrace newly announced norms appears, not as dissent, but as something irrational — as a psychological defect that requires some kind of therapeutic intervention. So the effect will be to gather yet more power to what Michel Foucault called “the minor civil servants of moral orthopedics.” (Note that Harvard University has over fifty Title IX administrators on staff.) And there will be no satisfying this beast, because it isn’t in fact “social norms” that will be enforced (that term suggests something settled and agreed-upon); rather it will be a state of permanent revolution in social norms. Whatever else it is, wokeness is a competitive status game played in the institutions that serve as gatekeepers of the meritocracy. The flanking maneuvers of institutional actors against one another, and the competition among victim groups for relative standing on the intersectional to­tem pole, make the bounds of acceptable opinion highly unstable. This very unsettledness, quite apart from the specific content of the norm of the month, makes for pliable subjects of power: one is not allowed to develop confidence in the rightness of one’s own judg­ments.

Crawford also makes an important point which may cause readers, who have so far been nodding along contentedly, to sit up rather straighter in their chairs.

To grasp the affinities between administrative governance and algorithmic governance, one must first get over that intellectually debilitating article of libertarian faith, namely that “the government” poses the only real threat to liberty. For what does Silicon Valley represent, if not a locus of quasi-governmental power untouched by either the democratic process or by those hard-won procedural liberties that are meant to secure us against abuses by the (actual, elected) government? If the governmental quality of rule by algo­rithms remains obscure to us, that is because we actively welcome it into our own lives under the rubric of convenience, the myth of free services, and ersatz forms of human connection — the new opiates of the masses.

To characterize this as the operation of “the free market” (as its spokespersons do) requires a display of intellectual agility that might be admirable if otherwise employed. The reality is that what has emerged is a new form of monopoly power made possible by the “network effect” of those platforms through which everyone must pass to conduct the business of life. These firms sit at informational bottlenecks, collecting data and then renting it out, whether for the purpose of targeted ads or for modeling the electoral success of a political platform. Mark Zuckerberg has said frankly that “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. . . . We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.”

It was early innovations that allowed the platform firms to take up their positions. But it is this positioning, and control of the data it allows them to gather, that accounts for the unprecedented rents they are able to collect. If those profits measure anything at all, it is the reach of a metastasizing grid of surveillance and social control.

Later on, Crawford lays out a detailed history of the shift in principle at Google, from its early days as a purely neutral search engine, excluding all ancillary considerations from that design, to its current form as a colossal corporation which imbeds many considerations, stated or unstated, into the search engine machinery. These considerations arise out of a distinctive worldview, a metaphysical conception of the nature of destiny and man, which I need not sketch out in any detail to readers of this blog. The place-names themselves function now as synecdoches for it. Silicon Valley. Cupertino. Menlo Park. San Francisco.

And the commercial outworking of this worldview amounts, indeed, to a very emphatic theory of government — algorithmic government.

The ideal being articulated in Mountain View is that we will inte­grate Google’s services into our lives so effortlessly, and the guiding presence of this beneficent entity in our lives will be so pervasive and unobtrusive, that the boundary between self and Google will blur. The firm will provide a kind of mental scaffold for us, guiding our intentions by shaping our informational context. This is to take the idea of trusteeship and install it in the infrastructure of thought.

Crawford summarizes the shift at Google this way:

On one hand, facilitating the free flow of information was Silicon Valley’s original ideal. But on the other hand, the control of information has become indispensable to prosecuting the forward march of history. This, in a nutshell, would seem to be the predicament that the platform firms of Silicon Valley find themselves in. The incoherence of their double mandate accounts for their stumbling, incoherent moves to suppress the kinds of speech that cultural progressives find threatening.

I’ll leave it there and let readers themselves wrestle with this dense and valuable essay.

Comments (9)

It seems to me that this is why, in litigating contexts, whatever benefits (protections against lawsuit, enshrined in positive law) have been granted to an organization *on the grounds that* it is acting merely as a content-neutral platform should be able to be *withdrawn* if the organization does not fulfill that role anymore and becomes a publisher de facto. Obviously whether or not a given protection applies to *you* (Google, Facebook) depends on the facts on the ground. That way of telling Facebook, Google, etc., that they cannot simultaneously have their cake and eat it in court seems to me to be the kind of approach that a libertarian can get behind.

"It was early innovations that allowed the platform firms to take up their positions. But it is this positioning, and control of the data it allows them to gather, that accounts for the unprecedented rents they are able to collect. If those profits measure anything at all, it is the reach of a metastasizing grid of surveillance and social control."

Shoshana Zuboff chronicles this at length and in great detail in her The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

"It seems to me that this is why, in litigating contexts, whatever benefits (protections against lawsuit, enshrined in positive law) have been granted to an organization *on the grounds that* it is acting merely as a content-neutral platform should be able to be *withdrawn* if the organization does not fulfill that role anymore and becomes a publisher de facto."

The problem is that these entities are a new thing, part neutral platform, part publisher rolled into one. The current laws regarding monopoly, publishing, etc., don't directly apply in many cases, and even conflict at some points, and thus would have to be modified considerably. The problem is, it's a tough job to do so and no one seems willing to take it on, especially as both parties know which side of their bread is buttered. The GOP cannot appear to be "anti-corporate," while the Dems know that these companies are "woke," and thus are allies of a sort on cultural issues.


Crawford makes some fantastic observations about the current state of affairs, and it well behooves us to realize the extent of the problem:

I mean “authori­ty” in the broadest sense, including our interactions with outsized commercial entities that play a quasi-governmental role in our lives.

Anyone on FB who ignores the authority of FB's rules finds out the hard way. And his reference to the difficulty of an ordinary joe to put his life back together again after one of the 3 credit rating agencies have made a mistake on his credit is very apt. It is a lot like a person putting his life together again after the government erroneously (but in complete procedural fairness) accuses him of murder - only more difficult.

Perhaps his scariest prophetic vision is of the "ideal" of the modern algorithmic control:

The ideal being articulated in Mountain View is that we will inte­grate Google’s services into our lives so effortlessly, and the guiding presence of this beneficent entity in our lives will be so pervasive and unobtrusive, that the boundary between self and Google will blur. The firm will provide a kind of mental scaffold for us, guiding our intentions by shaping our informational context. This is to take the idea of trusteeship and install it in the infrastructure of thought.

If you can recall the planet of the fat people from Wall-E, I think you can recognize the worry here.

However, it would be a lot better if Crawford happened to understand any of the root principles of anything that precedes, say, 1630. Because he seems to be almost wholly innocent of knowledge of pre-modern society. For instance, he says:

Our readiness to acquiesce in the conceit of authorless control is surely due in part to our ideal of procedural fairness, which de­mands that individual discretion exercised by those in power should be replaced with rules whenever possible, because authority will inevitably be abused. This is the original core of liberalism, dating from the English Revolution.

Sorry, but he seems to be denigrating the notion of "rule of law". The problem is that rule of law has its roots a LOT earlier than the English Revolution and modern liberal democracies. The Romans had it: Cicero noted that "We are all servants of the laws in order to be free." Actually, even the Greeks paid tribute to the idea so some degree; Aristotle said

It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens: upon the same principle, if it is advantageous to place the supreme power in some particular persons, they should be appointed to be only guardians, and the servants of the laws.

Medieval times had kings subject to all sorts of laws. The phrase in English dates back to 1500, which I think we can agree happened before the English Revolution or the advent of liberal democracy (taking place only 9 years after Henry VIII came to the throne). In response to a complaint by James I in 1607, the great English jurist Sir Edward Coke quoted Henri de Bracton (13th century) saying "The King himself should be under no man, but under God and the Law."

Nor is his observation that humans tend to abuse power the root principle of liberalism. First of all, it was well recognized long before liberal democracy came about: Thomas Aquinas praised the method of dividing up the powers of ruling among different parts of government because of the tendency of rulers to abuse their power - he noted that this plan mimics the plan set forth by Moses (at God's direction) in Deuteronomy. Far more critical to the conception of liberal theory is Locke's claim

The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule. The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it.

Of course, Locke was wrong here, in that he denies any principle of natural law (just for starters.)

Nor is Crawford right in assigning the difference between power and authority:

Now, we need to be careful here. Our cognition emerges from lower-level biological processes that are utterly inaccessible to us. Further, human beings confabulate, reach for rationalizations that obscure more than they reveal, are subject to self-deception, etc. All this we know. But giving an account is an indispensable element of democratic politics. Further, it is not only legislative bodies that observe this scruple.

When a court issues a decision, the judge writes an opinion, typically running to many pages, in which he explains his reasoning. He grounds the decision in law, precedent, common sense, and prin­ciples that he feels obliged to articulate and defend. This is what transforms the decision from mere fiat into something that is polit­ically legitimate, capable of securing the assent of a free people. It constitutes the difference between simple power and authority.

One can note that he appears to think that our reason is at root fully explainable by mechanistic, biological processes, but let's pass over this modernist assumption: it is not necessary for his further point. What I object to more is his liberal assumption that it is the giving an account that transforms a dictate of a judge from an exercise of power into an exercise of authority. By this premise, God's authoritative dietary decrees to Moses are per se non-authoritative: God didn't explain his decrees.

Closer to home, the authority of a father over his children cannot rest on his giving an understandable account of why his commands are good and reasonable - it would be impossible, because children by definition must be directed before they are capable of reason. It is not of the essence of authority to GIVE reason, it is of the essence of authority to HAVE a reason. Indeed, St. Thomas makes this part of the very definition of law (in which he includes eternal and divine law):

Thus from the four preceding articles, the definition of law may be gathered; and it is nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.

Wherein he sets out the formal, material, agent and final causes of law.

I also would dispute Crawford's claim here:

“Children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined.” Thus did Tocqueville marvel at Americans’ habit of self-government, and the temperament it both required and encouraged from a young age. “The same spirit,” he said, “pervades every act of social life.”

Writing recently in the Atlantic, Yoni Appelbaum notes the sheer bulk of voluntary associations that once took up the hours and days of Americans, from labor unions and trade associations to mutual insurers, fraternal organizations, and volunteer fire departments. Many of these “mirrored the federal government in form: Local chapters elected representatives to state-level gatherings, which sent delegates to national assemblies. . . . Executive officers were accountable to legislative assemblies; independent judiciaries ensured that both complied with rules.” Toward the end of the twentieth centu­ry, however, this way of life more or less collapsed, as Robert Put­nam documented in Bowling Alone. We still have voluntary associa­tions, but they are now typically run by salaried professionals, not the members themselves, Appelbaum points out. This is part of the broader shift toward what has been called “managerialism.”

This is part of a larger thesis of his, that of administrationism rather than governance by law.

In The Administrative Threat, Columbia law professor Philip Ham­burger writes that, in contrast to executive power proper, “ad­ministrative power involves not just force but legal obligation.” This is an important distinction, and in the blurring of it lies great mis­chief against the Constitution, which invested “the power to bind—that is, to create legal obligation” not in the executive branch but in Congress and in the courts. Administrative power “thereby side­steps most of the Constitution’s procedural freedoms.” It is funda­mentally an “evasion of governance through law.”

Maybe there is a point to this, but I don't think he has quite managed to locate it properly. For one thing, I would argue that the executive power executed by a tariff official in 1795 to tell a ship-owner "under the law, you owe $25 in fees because ...blah blah blah wool blah...etc is different from an IRS agent telling a taxpayer "No, you have to use form 8863 to take the education credit, not just reduce your tax by $2500 on line 18" as a matter of DEGREE, not of kind. Anyone who has actually read parts of the tax law knows that Congress legislatively runs the show. The point is that both the tariff man and the income tax man bind by "legal obligation" (his phrase) because they bind by moral obligation when they carry out the law, just as do the police in carrying out the executive power to apprehend a criminal and put him in jail.
If a charged prisoner were then to kill a guard to escape, he would be violating both a legal and moral obligation because the police power binds when it carries out the law, it is nonsense to urge that the "administration" of the law is something other than the executive function and not binding in the same way the police power is. Still and all, this issue is one of his lesser problem areas, especially compared to the ones above.

"The problem is that rule of law has its roots a LOT earlier than the English Revolution and modern liberal democracies."

I read Crawford differently here. To me it sounds like he's saying that it's the rule of law's "role" as the core of liberalism that dates from the English Revolution, not the rule of law per se.

"What I object to more is his liberal assumption that it is the giving an account that transforms a dictate of a judge from an exercise of power into an exercise of authority."

Again, I read him differently. He doesn't mention God's law-giving, but it's clear that God has both ultimate power and ultimate authority, making Him literally sui generis. Man can have both, and in varying proportions, so to speak. Del Noce argues somewhere that in modernity power and authority have become conflated, to the detriment of the latter, because the loss of the belief in objective truth has necessarily resulted in a gaggle of mere rival subjectivisms. An entity with true authority then, should be able to give a valid account of its dictates, whereas one which has simply assumed it based on power would not. Perhaps my reading of Del Noce and others has colored my perception on this issue, but it seems that this is what Crawford's getting at.


Del Noce argues somewhere that in modernity power and authority have become conflated, to the detriment of the latter, because the loss of the belief in objective truth has necessarily resulted in a gaggle of mere rival subjectivisms.

I haven't read Del Noce, so I am at a disadvantage here, but while I agree that power and authority have been confused, I think it is in the minds of confused political science majors that it has been conflated through bad theory. Everyone agrees (more or less) that the power of a brand new general who is taking over by coup and a gun in your face is not the same as authority. And going back to my example, everyone (more or less, other than shrieking feminists) agrees that a father's authority over his kids is distinct from his power over them, even if they have trouble explaining why.

An entity with true authority then, should be able to give a valid account of its dictates, whereas one which has simply assumed it based on power would not.

Perhaps, but can you imagine a slightly below-average IQ father in 17th century Germany being able to "give an account" of why his 11 year old son ought to help out on the farm that penetrates much deeper than "because I said so, and I will tan your hide if you don't", or better yet, why his son should obey his orders about going to church on Sunday, that didn't depend on "because I said so" or "because the Church said so" or "you'll go to Hell" (which are all effectively side-stepping a reasoned account and rooted in threat of force)? Does that unravel his authority to demand compliance?

The rival subjectivisms come in under various assorted "Studies" in universities as an attempt to explain authority, without having much connection with reality. After centuries of successful intrusion by liberalism's political concepts, we have a hard time countenancing terminology that purports to account for authority other than by "consent" which naturally hinges strongly on some kind of (sometimes implicit) persuasion / rationale. My point is that this model of authority is itself based on liberal assumption that does not successfully account even today for some recognized authority (and not God's, which is sui generis). It may seem that my counterexample is found only in the one natural community that is pre-political and tat my point cannot be extended to the political arena, but consider what account could have been given in 1750 among 99.999% of the subjects for why Austrians "should" obey the emperor, that could manage to avoid a purely ad hoc reliance on "because HIS father took the throne".

"Everyone agrees (more or less) that the power of a brand new general who is taking over by coup and a gun in your face is not the same as authority."

I'm not so sure about that. A lot of left-liberals and progressives seem to have this idea that authority reduces to power, so that "questioning authority" and "speaking truth to power" amount to roughly the same thing.

I largely agree with your second point, and should have said "late modernity" rather than just "modernity." It's clear in Del Noce that he's talking mainly about post-60's liberalism, which chimes with what you say about contemporary "Studies."

I'm not so sure about that. A lot of left-liberals and progressives seem to have this idea that authority reduces to power, so that "questioning authority" and "speaking truth to power" amount to roughly the same thing.

NM, I suppose that there maybe liberals who say that, but I doubt that any of them actually think it is true in practice. That is, they will act as if there are situations where a person who comes into power through nefarious means implies that their power is less legitimate than one who comes into power through "normal channels" like a fair election. Indeed, "fair" would cease to be meaningful about elections, if they really thought there was no distinction between power and authority, there would only be "successful" or "unsuccessful", and "playing by the rules" would be nonsense. (Yes, I know that plenty of people DON'T play by the rules, but lots of liberals who have drunk the Kool-Aid THINK people ought to play by the rules.)

I agree, but that's not quite what I'm getting at. It has more to do with their shifting back and forth between the two, as if there's no difference between them unless they are the ones who see it.
The movement between power and authority ceases to be procedural and becomes ideological, so to speak. A procedure, even if backed by the rule of law, becomes suspect because it produces results not in line with the progressive narrative. In short, it seems that there's an awful lot of "goalpost moving" in left-liberal rhetoric. Power is bad when non-progressives wield it, but when they are in control, or if it is used in opposition to authority, it magically ceases to be mere power and becomes valid.

"I know that plenty of people DON'T play by the rules, but lots of liberals who have drunk the Kool-Aid THINK people ought to play by the rules."

Again I agree, but it seems that among the liberal left, "the rules" don't command the same deference that they do on the right and among old-style liberals. If the rules don't result in the desired outcome they are suspect, regardless of their lawful authority and procedural validity. For instance, I think the desire among progressives to scrap the Electoral College is evidence of this mentality.


A procedure, even if backed by the rule of law, becomes suspect because it produces results not in line with the progressive narrative. In short, it seems that there's an awful lot of "goalpost moving" in left-liberal rhetoric. Power is bad when non-progressives wield it, but when they are in control, or if it is used in opposition to authority, it magically ceases to be mere power and becomes valid.

Ahh, now I see what you are saying. Yes, that's a good point. One wonders about the sort of mind that lies behind the belief that if an act of authority doesn't achieve good results (defined by the progressive standards), then it could not have been valid authority to begin with. It is (in effect) little short of saying that the end justifies the means, but prettied up a bit, I guess.

For instance, I think the desire among progressives to scrap the Electoral College is evidence of this mentality.

I keep hearing about the "problem" with the Electoral College, as if it were a major impediment to good government, but the arguments seem all hollow. The argument I have seen most often is that it was there expressly for the sake of slave states, and while there is some plausibility to the thesis, it doesn't explain why it is bad today. Given that there aren't any slave states anymore.

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