When apps are driven by the market, there’s only one winner. It’s not you …
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Version 0 of 1. America’s three obsessions – technology, fitness and finance – have finally converged in FitCoin, a new app that allows users to monetise their visits to the gym. The mechanism is simple: by integrating with popular activity trackers and wearables, the app converts our heartbeats into a digital currency. FitCoin’s founders hope that, much like its older sibling, bitcoin, this currency can be used to buy exclusive goods from partners such as Adidas and lower your insurance payments. FitCoin might fail but the principle behind it is indicative of the broader transformation of social life under conditions of permanent connectivity and instant commodification: what was previously done for pleasure or merely to conform to social norms is now firmly guided by the logic of the market. The other logics don’t disappear but they become secondary to the monetary incentive. The ability to measure all our activities remotely is opening up new avenues for speculation, as anyone – from corporations to insurance firms to governments – can now design sly compensatory schemes to elicit desired behaviour from consumers chasing a quick buck. As a result, even the most mundane of daily activities can be linked to global financial markets. Eventually, we’ll all be trading in derivatives that link our entitlement to receive specific medical services to our physical behaviour. This is how fitness and health are gradually subsumed by the realm of money and finance. Similar transformations are happening in other domains, many of them driven by the ability to gather and act on information in real time. Consider parking, where a series of apps such as Haystack and MonkeyParking have allowed drivers, armed with nothing but smartphones, to auction off public parking spaces to fellow drivers looking for spots. Haystack even had a Make Me Move feature, allowing those lucky enough to have found a spot to auction it off to the highest bidder. Of course, the parking spots still remain public; what’s changing hands is information about their occupancy. But their formal public status means very little, for the black market in information slyly turns them into private goods. The restaurant industry has seen a flurry of similar apps. Instead of trying to book tables at a trendy restaurant, why not simply bid for them at an online auction? Here, the logic of the market also replaces the previous fairness doctrine and the first-come, first-served principle. Users of apps such as Shout can book tables under false names with the sole purpose of reselling them to other users. And it doesn’t only have to be restaurants: you might sell your spot in the queue for the latest iPhone as well. Of course, the old system wasn’t perfect – VIPs rarely had difficulties getting reservations – so there’s some truth to the emancipatory, democracy-extolling rhetoric espoused by the creators of such apps: they do move us from hierarchies partially based on non-monetary forms of power (fame, connections, reputation) to those that are grounded in money alone. In the past, you had to be rich and famous to find a table in a fancy restaurant; now, you just have to be rich. But one advantage of the old system was that it did occasionally allow those without money and fame to make a reservation – hence its claims to justice and fairness. The new system makes no such exceptions: it knows only the laws of supply and demand. The transformations happening in all these mundane venues –the gym, the parking lot, the restaurant – reveal that, once an informational layer is added on top of them, they might lose other layers and especially those of non-utilitarian, purely aesthetic enjoyment, solidarity and fairness. It could be that the worst excesses of capitalism were manageable, at least on a psychic level, precisely because we could occasionally shelter ourselves in various hermetic zones that did not bend to the logic of supply and demand. These zones, impervious to the rhythms of globalisation, reassured us that a personal autonomy outside the market bubble was a feasible objective. Thus we could always find solace in art, sport, food, urbanism: those domains, we would tell ourselves, were either driven by aesthetic, artisanal considerations or they featured enough cooperation and solidarity to make up for the occasional brutality of the market relations that they couldn’t escape. After all, there was something uplifting and reassuring about the fact that a hedge fund manager had to spend as much time as a janitor looking for a parking spot. Ten years ago, this presumed equality between the two was a fact of life that seemed unalterable; today, it’s merely a technological imperfection that could be easily corrected with a smartphone. Our lives have been made livable by such imperfections; many of our institutions thrived on them. Newspapers, blessed not to know how unpopular some of their articles were, could take the risk of placing boring but publicly relevant stories on their front page. Now, when every click is measured and predicted in advance, such risk-taking is out of the question: even editorial decisions have to be made with a view towards the logic of the market. Likewise, book lovers had no means to check if the bookshop they were in offered the best deal on a book they were holding. They would often take the risk, overpay, and support the bookshop. Now, armed with their always-on smartphones, such risk-taking is also mostly out of the question: Amazon’s price-comparison tools are always here to help. Consumers, undoubtedly, win – but a strong and vibrant book culture, which presupposes the existence of bookshops, suffers as a result. At a time when values such as solidarity, fairness and diversity are under constant attack, the ability to incorporate more information into our decision-making is only hastening their demise. Ignorance can, in fact, be bliss – especially if what awaits us on the side of knowledge is the imperative to become more efficient, competitive and profitable. In the absence of other radical projects to challenge the status quo, ignorance – or, rather, the informed refusal to know – can be a powerful antidote to the efforts to reduce everything to a knowable price whose very existence already formats citizens into consumers. The reason why the tales told to us by American hi-tech entrepreneurs sound so sweet is because they always present knowledge as something apolitical and existing outside contemporary struggles between citizens and governments or citizens and corporations. In the dream world of Silicon Valley, ordinary citizens wield as much power as insurance companies: thus, they reason, information about our activity will surely be equally empowering to both? From this perspective, the efforts to link up everyone and everything into an internet of things (“Next frontier for ‘internet of things’: babies” reads a recent headline on the business site, CNBC) could only mean that the spaces of imperfection that have temporarily allowed us to delay the triumph of market logic in all other domains of social life would shrink even further. And, if permanent connectivity is essential for that logic to exercise control over our lives, then the only autonomy worth fighting for – both for individuals and institutions – would be an autonomy that thrives on opacity, ignorance and disconnection. A right to connect is important – so is the right to disconnect. |