Note on Collective Action Problems
September 26, 2020
I first encountered the rumour that Adam Smith’s formulation of the free market was cribbed from earlier Islamic scholars in David Graeber’s marvellous tome Debt: The First 5000 Years (Graeber, 2011, p. 279). The invisible hand of the market began its life—perhaps—as the hand of Allah. Except that in the original version, unlike in Margaret Thatcher’s, the market was not supposed to oppose and replace the social order—it would complement and harmonise with it. You didn’t get rich to realise your desires as an individual; you got rich to fulfil your duties to family and community. (An interesting observation Graeber makes is that this convergence of moral virtue and business acumen in the Caliphate was captured in the myth cycles of the time, in which the heroic figures—like Sinbad the Sailor—were often merchant adventurers. (Graeber, 2011, pp. 277-278))
According to this somewhat apocryphal tale, Smith’s main contribution was to change the inflection of the concept of liberty implicit in the notion of a free market, from a positive conception in which freedom is taken as the freedom to act in accordance with a higher principle, to a negative conception in which freedom is taken as freedom from constraints on the realisation of one’s desires. For these kind of reasons capitalism and individualism have always been inextricably linked in the West. (A link which no doubt explains why Chinese communist-capitalism has proved so baffling to Western onlookers; a bafflement far less tenable once the role of Confucian morality is taken into consideration as underwriting a positive concept of liberty.)
Anyway—so begins the very long and weird debate between classical economists and their critics about whether or not humans can be reliably modelled as rationally self-interested actors. It’s a weird debate because its tone has typically been essentialist, as if there were some fact of the matter about whether humans are self-interested rational actors or not, when presumably what is at stake in the economic question is not what we are in essence, or how we characterise ourselves in theory, but how we actually behave in practice. Which in most cases is dependent on context. We all behave as rationally self-interested actors when we’re playing chess. (If we don’t then we’re not playing chess.) Point being that if rational self-interest is context relative then it is not fixed but malleable, something that can in principle be produced, manipulated, or overcome.
Game theory has shed a lot of light on this. The tragedy of the commons scenario illustrates how a crisis of collective action arises out of rational self-interest: even when it’s in everyone’s interests to cooperate, if individuals stand to gain more by cheating on the cooperative when everyone else plays fair, then it is in their rational self-interest to do so. In this sense it provides a pretty concrete argument for why individualistic societies can’t solve a large class of collective problems, even when these are representable as positive sum games, i.e. when it is in everyone’s interest to work together. (This glosses over the whole question of iterated prisoner’s dilemmas, which I won’t talk about here—for the moment I’m considering the admittedly unrealistic case of a market big and liquid enough that most interactions can be assumed to be one-shots.)
This much is standard, but what I think is more interesting in the dilemma is that its analysis of why collective action fails illuminates the production of rationally self-interested subjectivity itself. Specifically, the reason a player cheats in the end is not because they can’t see that cooperation is a good idea–they cheat because they know that everyone else is going through the same decision process from the point of view of their own self-interest. Each player knows that other players can see the large pay-off in cheating, and since they know they are self-interested and rational it is irrational to trust them not to cheat themselves. So why risk cooperating and being cheated on, in which case you would get nothing? Ultimately, then, self-interested action is a product of the perception of potential collaborators as self-interested actors. You don’t cheat because you are greedy, you cheat because you (justifiably) don’t quite trust others not to be. And this is the case for everyone, so in the end everyone cheats and no-one gets much of anything.
The question of whether we are individualists or not is probably not one with an answer—in some situations we are, in others we are not. But one lesson we could take from the tragedy of the commons is that if you wanted to create a situation in which people actually do act exclusively from individualistic motives, it would probably be sufficient to create one in which everyone appears to each other to be doing so already. Which raises all sorts of questions about the media through which such appearances travel. After all, if we’ve learned anything from social critical theory in the last however many decades, it is surely that one of the primary mechanisms through which modern power is exercised is the systematic distortion of communication structures.
That social media platforms have interfaces and functions that systematically privilege certain kinds of content over others is a familiar point by now—unsearchable fast-moving timelines that emphasise short-form consumable content such as images; the relative absence of functionality for expressing negative as opposed to positive emotions; the emphasis on communicating value through seriality, e.g. how Instagram accounts are most consumable when the grid is unified through consistent filtering and framing, or the way that Medium’s consistent use of font and whitespace across authors conveys a phoney sense of quasi-institutional authority. Loads has been written on effect of this on, for example, the performance of identity on social media. Much less has been said, to my knowledge at least, about the effect of these “value filters” on the chains of signification that form the peculiar non-linearities in practical reason exemplified in the tragedy of the commons, and that seem crucial in making sense of the possibility of collective action.
The dilemma goes like this. You act on sincerely non-self-interested reasons, for example in the name of a collective political goal. Since collective action is, well, collective, it is meaningless for this action to exist in a vacuum— if it is not communicated then it cannot function in binding the collective will required to realise the collective goal. But your available communication channels present you with a dilemma: either you represent your action in a consumable, storified package that conforms to the platform’s value space, or you do not. If you do not render it consumable, then it effectively becomes invisible, and you might as well not have bothered. If you do, then from the point of view of its receivers the representation of your action is left ambiguous—since it is now represented in a consumable form, it looks exactly as it would had your original action not been sincere at all, and was just a disingenuous attempt to garner social capital by performing (rather than enacting) a collectively motivated action. The really sticky thing about this situation is that it makes no difference at all whether you are sincere or not. If you are then you probably do not want to spend energy making your action appear consumable. If however, you are determined—you tell yourself raising awareness is important—then the effect is just to make your action seem insincere anyway, even if it isn’t. From the point of view of someone who is consuming content on the platform, the net effect is that you only ever see content that is plausibly interpretable as motivated by self-interest, whether it actually is or not. Which, according to this line of thought, satisfies the condition required to produce individualist subjectivity in this context.
It would be easy to overemphasise social media, but it is really just the tip of a much larger iceberg that could perhaps best be summarised as “the commodification of the public sphere”, and which was already being described by people like Walter Benjamin in the 1930’s. As such the emergence of social media doesn’t represent any fundamental change in the signifying logic of the public sphere so much as its codification in the functionality of technical objects and consequent expansion into areas previously under the remit of the private. The price of public sphere visibility is conformity to norms of consumability, which has the effect of making everything available to the public gaze appear potentially self-interested. Everything becomes subjected to a logic of transactionality. Something like this is behind the post-truth phenomenon, in which there is a failure of trust in institutions that claim to provide accurate narratives of events due to perception that reporting is motivated by money or influence rather than truth. To which the institutions respond that they have to be at least partially motivated by money or influence, otherwise they would have no platform to promote truth. Thing is that everyone is right—the problem is neither on the side of consumption nor production, but in the mediating term between them.
To recap, the argument I’m considering is that there is a direct link between the collective action problem and the commodification of the public sphere. The link has four stages:
- The commodification of the public sphere places constraints on the form of its content—namely, it systematically amplifies anything in a storified form and buries anything that isn’t. This no less true of ideas, ethical acts, products of creative processes, subversions, etc., than it is of regular goods.
- The consumability acheived through storification creates exchange value—the consumability of a content is ultimately measured by what it exchanges for: likes, comments, money, social capital, etc. The net effect is that whatever is visible has become so only by successfully establishing its exchange value.
- This makes the production of all public sphere content appear to be at least potentially motivated by self-interest.
- The appearance of self-interest produces real self-interest, via a mechanism not dissimilar to guerrilla marketing. Rather than your desire for a product being manufactured via an illusion that everyone else already desires it, your rational self-interest is manufactured through the illusion that everyone is already acting in kind. The question of whether we are an individualistic society in essence ceases to be meaningful, since reality is actively being reproduced from a distorted representation of itself.
- This creates a kind of global tragedy of the commons, which undermines the possibility of collective action.
Across history and cultures, rituals and customs that aim at tapping into collective forms of consciousness typically involve the public performance of acts of individual sacrifice, self-effacement or humiliation. The reasons for this are fairly clear: collective will collapses with the suspicion of individual self-interest. An effective way to block this is the public performance of self-disinterest.
A lesson to draw from this is that in order to bind collective will, it is not sufficient that people are prepared to act on principles that transcend their own desires. It is also necessary that potential participants in the collective will are connected via communication channels in which self-disinterested acts are able to unambiguously signify as self-disinterested. It is this second requirement that the commodification of the public sphere undermines.
Addendum: This is Not a Spiritual Problem
There’s a certain school of thought which conveys the collective action problem as arising from something like a spiritual problem, as if we were all just walking around with the wrong story in our heads. (A good example is Charles Eisenstein’s The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, a book which has proved popular in certain activist circles.) So when you enter Tescos with noble intentions but leave with nothing but profiteroles and plastic, your inability to do the Right Thing stems from some deep misunderstanding in your foundational metaphysics. Somewhere deep down your unconscious is saying to itself: ultimately it’s all just atoms crashing together anyway, so who cares?
I don’t think this is right. It seems much more likely to me that what is happening is something more like a mini tragedy of the commons. You know that it is completely pointless to deny yourself small pleasures and conveniences in the name of a higher principle unless you are confident that others will act in kind. This confidence is blocked by the systematic distortion of communication structures, specifically the commodification of public representation at all levels. It is not a failure of will produced by cynical metaphysics, but a failure of trust produced by the hazing of sincerity that occurs when the space of reasons itself is mediated by the market.
To convey the problem as a spiritual one is ultimately to see its solution in individual transformation. Such a transformation is typically pitched in a collectivist key: by undoing all the conditioning and uncovering the false desires planted inside us by external factors, we can eventually form an unmediated relationship to our authentic selves as fundamentally entwined and interconnected, i.e. as collective in essence. Collective will would presumably fall out of this more or less directly.
The thing about this view is that while being cosmically collectivist at the level of belief, it licenses individualism at the level of action. Ultimately, it rationalises, the transformation of belief will lead to a transformation of action, but on the way to that goal action remains primarily self-directed—it is you who has to do the practices, read the books, go on the retreats, buy the workshops, etc.
The problematic idea underlying all this is that of unmediated self-consciousness—the idea that coming into contact with your authentic desires is a question of clearing out all the junk in your head that has been put there by other people. This is a chimera, in my view. Self-consciousness is essentially mediated via the consciousness it implicitly attributes to the other. Desire is always to some extent a product of the perception of other people’s desire (in fact advertising relies on this). There is no authentic layer that can be reached by stripping away all the mediations.
If this is the case then the spiritualist road to perdition is a dead end—the self-directed action will in fact continue forever, stripping away each layer of conditioning to discover what it hopes is the real self, only to discover that it is just another layer of conditioning, and that it is in fact conditioning all the way down. In the limit, the temporary self-directed action on the path to collective consciousness just blends into self-directed action forever, which just is the individualism it was supposed to overcome.
References
- Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5000 Years. Melville House.