• June 8: Chapter I-III (approx. 30 pages)

• June 15: Chapters IV-VI (approx. 40 pages)

• June 19: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

• June 22: Chapters VII-VIII (approx. 22 pages)

• June 29: Chapters IX-X (approx. 30 pages)

• July 5: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

I pushed the final Zoom call to July 5, as I’ll be in New York the last week of June for a workshop with the Marc Sanders Foundation.

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We also have a supplemental reading for this month: Wendell Berry’s ‘Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.’ I’ll send out a post about that essay the week of June 22.

One further note: you can listen to Taylor delivering these lectures for free on YouTube. Thanks to a reader for pointing out that a recording was available. (Note: there may be some differences between the lecture and the text.)

Charles Taylor opens The Ethics of Authenticity by identifying three sources of our modern malaises. These malaises, he writes, are ‘features of our contemporary culture and society that people experience as a loss or a decline, even as civilization “develops.”’ Taylor delivered the lectures that make up The Ethics of Authenticity in 1991, and his book was published in the same year, and yet thirty years later, readers coming to this text immediately recognize the point he is making. Nostalgia is rampant, and nostalgia is fueled by a sense that we have lost something that we can perhaps never recover — though in its more extreme and troubling forms, nostalgia is the longing for a past that never really existed. Even the way contemporary culture endlessly recycles hits and trends from the recent past – the Eighties were the thing when I was in high school, the Nineties had their moment, now I see young people longing for the turn of the century – reflects, I think, the widespread sense that we have lost something, along with the widespread desire to reclaim it. But Taylor is not a reactionary; he is not longing for a simple return to the past; he’s too sophisticated for that. What Taylor wants to do in these lectures is take the widespread malaises seriously, investigate their roots, and see if there is something that can be done about it.

You may have wondered while reading this why it was chosen for a year-long book club on the philosophy of technology. I hope to draw out certain connections between The Ethics of Authenticity and the texts that we have read so far, as Taylor provides a more robust philosophical analysis of the moral dimensions of our technological age than anyone we have read so far.

The three malaises Taylor identifies in Chapter I are:

1. Individualism.

2. The disenchantment of the world and the rise of instrumental reason.

3. The restriction of choice brought about by the institutions of an industrial-technological society.

First, individualism. Individualism can be understood by contrasting it with what came before. Here, some terminology from Moeller & D’Ambrosio (adapted from Lionel Trilling) is useful: sincerity. We learned that to be sincere meant that one lived up to his or her social role; by living out this role, one could derive a sense of significance or meaning. (I understand ‘significance’ and ‘meaning’ to be synonyms, roughly the same as a purpose.) These roles were not simply assigned — they were often justified by an appeal to a greater order, sometimes backed by metaphysical claims (e.g. ‘the great chain of Being.’) You could imagine yourself as a part of a larger organism, perhaps even the whole cosmos, the workings of which you might be ignorant, and as part of this larger organism your individual actions, however apparently insignificant, could be imbued with meaning. You were contributing to something larger than yourself. There was a purpose, believed in if not fully realized. A craftsperson, a parent, a teacher, a knight, a business executive, a day laborer—all of these were somehow involved in this larger project. Even the non-human world could be said to be involved in this. But sincerity was eventually replaced by authenticity, about which we will have much to say.

Individualism brings with it many benefits: ‘Modern freedom was won by breaking loose from older moral horizons…Modern freedom came about through the discrediting of such orders.’ This freedom is surely worth celebrating – this is something I appreciate about Taylor, his refusal to simply criticize or simply discredit some notion, but to properly consider it – but with this freedom came a loss, too: ‘People no longer have a sense of a higher purpose, of something worth dying for.’ This has been recognized by Kierkegaard, by the Romantics (perhaps, speaking very generally), and by Nietzsche. As we become more individualistic, we also narrow our vision. ‘The dark side of individualism is a centering of the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.’

Second, the disenchantment of the world and the rise of instrumental reason. Taylor defines instrumental reason: ‘the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most economical application of means to a given end. Maximum efficiency, the best cost-output ratio, is its measure of success.’ I do not think that Taylor is criticizing instrumental reason as such, but rather the way that instrumental reason has come to dominate other forms of rationality. To link this directly with technology, consider Heidegger’s comments from ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ where he gives us the concept of enframing. As nature becomes enframed, it becomes something to be used. Writing about the construction of a power plant on the Rhine, Heidegger wrote: ‘Even the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command…What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power plant.’ Given the presence of these technologies, we now view the world as something to be used. No, that is not strong enough: we come to only view the world as something to be used. Thus, the link between disenchantment and the rise of instrumental reason.

Taylor goes on to say:

The primacy of instrumental reason is also evident in the prestige and aura that surround technology, and makes us believe that we should seek technological solutions even when something different is called for…The dominant place of technology is also thought to have contributed to the narrowing and flattening of our lives…People have spoken of a loss of resonance, depth, or richness in our human surroundings.

Third, the restriction of choice brought about by the institutions of an industrial-technological society. These malaises seem to build on each other. The individualist, perhaps, must person his or her own self-interest, with no thought to a cosmic order or a large collective; this leads to the primacy of instrumental reason, as he or she is looking for some way to satisfy the individual’s desire; but if we value instrumental reason so highly, we naturally tend to defer to experts who can more fully understand the situation; society itself becomes a technological problem to be solved. As a consequence, ‘An individual life is also hard to sustain against the grain.’ The picture Taylor is painting is quite bleak here. What we are left with is an individualist culture where no one, truly, can be an individual.

Taylor’s focus in The Ethics of Authenticity is primarily the first source of our malaise, individualism. I believe this is a sound choice given the length of the text and given the structure of the problem. To understand (2) and (3), we must understand (1) in its complexities.

But where is Taylor going? He tells us on page 11, right at the end of Chapter I:

I will claim that the right path to take is neither that recommended by straight boosters nor that favoured by outright knockers. Nor will a simple trade-off between the advantages and costs of, say, individualism, technology, and bureaucratic management provide the answer…I want to claim that both boosters and knockers are right, bu in a way that can’t be done justice to by a simple trade-off between advantages and costs. There is in fact both much that is admirable and much that is debased and frightening in all the developments I have been describing, but to understand the relation between the two is to see that the issue is not how much of a price in consequences you have to pay for the positive fruits, but rather how to steer these developments towards their greatest promise and avoid the slide into debased forms.

We’ll see this in the following chapters.

Taylor takes a seemingly odd pivot in Chapter II, beginning with a discussion of Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and, in particular, Bloom’s observation that modern students have adopted ‘a rather facile relativism.’ As Taylor describes it, this relativism holds that ‘everybody has his or her own “values,” and about these it is impossible to argue.’ What is odd about this position is that it was held not as an epistemological position (‘we can never settle ethical debates’), but rather as a moral position (‘we ought to respect the values of others, to the point where we should not argue about them’).

In other words, the relativism was itself an offshort of a form of individualism, whose principle is something like this: everyone has a right to develop their own form of life, grounded in their own sense of what is really important or of value.

This is not the relativism that I used to consider when I was teaching ethics to undergraduates. It was typical for introductory ethics courses to start with debates about cultural relativism; we often assigned James Rachels’ short article on the subject. The assumption was that students were predisposed to a kind of relativism that said that there was no objectivity to ethics, except the local objectivity within a particular culture. There were many ethical systems, and the ‘right’ ethical system was the one the culture endorsed. We would then spend a few hours going through the problems with this view — a view, I would add, that seems to have no defenders in professional philosophy. (If you know of an exception, please let me know.) Which, if you think about it, is odd: an academic lecture on ethics beginning with a prolonged discussion of a view that no one seemed to seriously espouse. The only justification I can think of was that it was a kind of ground-clearing exercise, allowing us to get to the real issues. The assumption was that moral relativism was the default position of the American undergraduate. But Taylor’s target relativism is not cultural; it is individualistic. And there is something to this—he notes that it is grounded in a principle of mutual respect, and there is something like this idea in the history of liberalism. Taylor dubs this ‘the individualism of self-fulfillment.’ But another word for this would authenticity. Authenticity has become a moral ideal, which is ‘a picture of what a better or higher mode of life would be, where “better” and “higher” are defined not in terms of what we happen to desire or need, but offer a standard of what we ought to desire.’

Authenticity has many critics—Taylor mentions Lasch, Bell, and Lipovetsky. Taylor does not want to join these critics, however, because he notices the ‘moral force of the ideal of authenticity,’ which has sunk ‘to the level of an axiom, something one doesn’t challenge but also never expounds.’ Thus, Taylor dubs this chapter The Inarticulate Debate, and he later writes:

Critics of contemporary culture tend to disparage [authenticity] as an ideal, even to confound it with a non-moral desire to do what one wants without interference. The defenders of this culture are pushed into inarticulacy about it by their own outlook.

The defenders of authenticity, he is saying, cannot defend the ideal of authenticity because they use to ground a subjectivist system of ethics; if one is a subjectivist, you can’t go around trying to convince people about what’s right, because they already know what’s right for them; that’s the whole point of subjectivism. Taylor is stepping in to defend authenticity, which is:

An ideal that has degraded but that is very much worthwhile in itself, and indeed, I would like to say, unrepudiable by moderns…What we need is a work of retrieval, through which this ideal can help us restore our practice.

In other words, we need to retrieve the (authentic?) idea of authenticity. That is the project of the book.

But we don’t get much of it this week, as Chapter III is only a few pages. We’ll finish our discussion this week with Taylor’s exploration of the sources of authenticity.

While our understanding of authenticity has many precursors (Taylor names Descartes and Locke as individualist forerunners), this particular idea seems to originate from the Romantic period — which I was considering as a topic for next year’s book club, in fact. (If that sounds interesting or awful, please let me know.)1

It begins with the idea that ‘human beings are endowed with a moral sense, an intuitive feeling for what is right and wrong…Morality has, in a sense, a voice within.’2 But this idea shifts away from the idea that morality speaks to us through the conscience – I think this is a good approximation of what Taylor is saying here – and instead becomes an ideal where we need to be attuned to this inner voice. If we lack this attunement, we are not ‘true and full human beings.’ This marks a shift away from something external to us (God is the easy example) to something internal to us. This shift takes time. A rough chronology, adapted from Taylor: from Augustine’s idea that ‘the road to God [passes] through our own reflexive self-awareness of ourselves’ to Rousseau’s idea that ‘morality [is the issue of] following a voice of nature within us’ to the Romantic ideal found in Herder. We are given what I think will be an important term for the rest of our discussion: self-determining freedom. Here is Taylor’s description:

[Self-determining freedom] is the idea that I am free when I decide for myself what concerns me, rather than being shaped by external influences. It is a standard of freedom that obviously goes beyond what has been called negative liberty, where I am free to do what I want without interference by others because is compatible with my being shaped and influenced by society and its laws of conformity. Self-determining freedom demands that I break the hold of all such external impositions and decide for myself alone.

Self-determining freedom, Taylor says, developed in tandem with authenticity. Here we see Herder, who held that ‘each of us has an original way of being human.’ This becomes a moral ideal:

I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me.

I have emphasized ‘to be true to myself’ in this passage. With Herder, we find a conception of the individual as radically unique, and with that conception of the individual, we find a new moral command: be true to oneself. I’ll end with Taylor’s final words:

Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own. This is the background understanding to the modern ideal of authenticity, and to the goals of self-fulfillment or self-realiziation in which it is usually couched. This is the background that gives moral force to the culture of authenticity, including its most degraded, absurd, or trivialized forms. It is what gives sense to the idea of “doing your own thing” or “finding your own fulfillment.”

As I was drifting off to sleep last night, an idea came to me. I’ve asked people to share their favorite books or what they’re reading in threads and comments sections before, but I’ve never had a way to look at the answers in aggregate. Today, I’d like to ask you to answer a few questions in an informal poll.

You can find the poll on Google Forms. The poll will not collect your email, so you can remain relatively anonymous. Responses will be accepted until noon on Friday.

There are five questions. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete. Those questions are:

1. The genres you typically read

2. Your favorite works of fiction

3. Your least favorite works of fiction

4. Your favorite works of nonfiction

5. Your least favorite works of nonfiction

I’ll share the results sometime next week.

You may be wondering: why ask? Especially since we just read The Score, you might think I’m trying to produce an objective ranking of some kind. But that’s not my intention. What I’ve found over the last few years is that I can get a sense of what this community likes to read, but it’s always fragmentary. While I don’t expect all 48,000 readers of Commonplace Philosophy to respond to the poll, I hope this gives me a fuller picture of what my readership likes.

And, as I argued in a recent piece, making these lists is fun if you take it as a way to have more interesting conversations about books.

A few things to keep in mind:

1. I’m asking for your favorite books. Don’t worry about what anyone else thinks is ‘best.’

2. Don’t explain your choices. That will make it more difficult to clean and analyze the data.

3. I’m also asking about your least favorite books. Don’t worry about what anyone else thinks is ‘worst.’

On Sunday, we had our Q&A session with C. Thi Nguyen on The Score. Here’s the recording.

I tried to ask as many of the submitted questions as I could, but I couldn’t get to all of them—time was not on our side.

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Our next book for the philosophy of technology book club will be The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor. Here is the reading schedule

• June 8: Chapter I-III (approx. 30 pages)

• June 15: Chapters IV-VI (approx. 40 pages)

• June 19: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

• June 22: Chapters VII-VIII (approx. 22 pages)

• June 29: Chapters IX-X (approx. 30 pages)

• July 5: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

I pushed the final Zoom call to July 5, as I’ll be in New York the last week of June for a workshop with the Marc Sanders Foundation.

You’ll also see that we’re not going to have a post on June 1. That’s to give you time to read the first selection.

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Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher who is now a professor emeritus at McGill University. Taylor is perhaps best known for his books A Secular Age and The Sources of the Self. The book I’ve chosen for our book club, The Ethics of Authenticity, is substantially smaller than those books – it is a mere 140 pages – and so should be manageable to read in one month.

We’ve explored the idea of authenticity in our technological age primarily through reading You & Your Profile. I included Taylor’s book, which is not strictly speaking about technology, to serve as a more philosophically robust treatment of authenticity; I think it is going to serve us well by building on some of the readings we’ve done so far. If you thought You & Your Profile didn’t give sufficient credit to the idea of authenticity, then The Ethics of Authenticity may satisfy you.

Fair warning: Taylor is a dense writer and a subtle thinker. Most of our weekly readings are no more than thirty pages, and that is by design. This is a book that will reward careful attention.

I’m looking forward to reading this with all of you.

Next month, we’ll be reading The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor. I’ll be sending a schedule out tomorrow. We won’t have a post on June 1, so you have some time to do the first reading.

On Sunday at 3 PM Eastern, we have a members-only Zoom call. Nguyen will be joining us to discuss The Score.

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We’re now done with our reading of The Score. The final chapters offer a bit of final elaboration on Nguyen’s views of games and metrics, but if you’ve read the rest of the book closely, I don’t think you’ll find anything in these final chapters that will revolutionize your understanding or change your view on the book as a whole.

Though there are some new additions to the theory. Let’s talk about one of those, from Chapter 25. In that chapter, Nguyen draws a connection his theory of metrics and Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice. A bit of a disclaimer here: I read Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice closely, but I read it in the fall of 2015 for a graduate seminar. I didn’t have an opportunity to refresh myself this week – I’m in the middle of copyediting my forthcoming book – so I can’t provide much in-depth analysis. Take what I say here with a grain of salt and read Fricker for yourself for more.

Fricker’s book provided a new vocabulary for analytic philosophers to make sense of the ethical dimensions of knowing. She focused largely on the issue of testimonial injustice, in which individuals (usually as members of certain groups) had their testimony discounted, so they were unable to participate in the social practices of sharing and receiving knowledge. Near the end of the book, she introduces hermeneutical injustice, which is comparatively underexplored in the book and substantially more interesting. Fricker proposes that to make sense of the world, we need concepts, and in some cases we lack the concepts to make sense of our world. This is a rough characterization of what is meant by ‘hermeneutical injustice.’ To overcome hermeneutical injustice, we have to develop new concepts.

Her example is sexual harassment, which Nguyen outlines in Chapter 25. This is a concept that needed to be invented in order to distinguish, say, harmless workplace flirting and real ethical violations, like your boss implying that you need to sleep with him in order to keep your job. This is the most striking part of Fricker’s proposal by my lights. We sometimes need to invent new concepts and introduce new vocabulary to understand what the problem is.

Here’s a way to understand Nguyen’s book in light of this: he is inventing new concepts to make sense of our mechanical scoring world. Thus, the concepts of value capture, value collapse, etc.

Nguyen makes a bold claim in Chapter 25: ‘Metrics create hermeneutical injustice.’1 They do this by depriving us of certain concepts that might better make sense of our experience and by presenting the metric-supported concepts as the only way to interpret the world.

Nguyen’s claim here is underspecified. Notice how the claim is phrased. The first word is a bare plural, and the sentence is sometimes called a generic.2 I almost wrote my dissertation on generics, because they are some of the slipperiest sentences in English. Consider the difference between:

1. Mosquitos carry West Nile virus.

2. All mosquitos carry West Nile virus.

These look similar, but they’re different. (1) is a generic and is often judged to be true, and (2) is a universal statement and simply false. (I believe only some species of mosquito carry the virus, and only the females of that species can transmit it.) Consider these sentences as well:

3. Lions have manes.

4. Lions give live birth.

Both generics, again, and the fact that we say both are true is very weird, since only male lions have manes and only female lions give live birth. The literature on generics is vast, and almost all of it is concerned with the strange fact that generic sentences are tolerant of exceptions. Some generics are extremely tolerant of exceptions, and you only need a few individuals to satisfy the description for speakers of English to judge them as true.

My theory – admittedly a minority view, and I abandoned this paper when I left academia – is that generics are intentionally underspecified, and so they are ambiguous between a wide variety of readings: ‘some,’ ‘all,’ ‘many,’ ‘a few,’ etc. We use generics when we either cannot or do not want to be more precise. And this made me suspicious of Nguyen’s claim: ‘Metrics create hermeneutical injustice.’

I would want to know if Nguyen means all, most, or some metrics create hermeneutical injustice. Is it really the case that any time metrics are introduced hermeneutical injustice is the consequence? I don’t think so, and I think he’d deny it. (I plan to ask about this on Sunday.) But then we would need to ask another question: which sorts of metrics give rise to hermeneutical injustice, and under what conditions? For now, I don’t think the claim has been adequately defended, and I found Chapter 25 to be a weak point in the book.

Which now has me looking back to the rest of the book, wondering where else Nguyen might have been slippery about his two subjects: games and metrics. If I were going to write something more robust about The Score, this would be a reason to revisit the text and find every instance of a generic and see if the same slipperiness applies to the analysis.

By the end of the book, we’re left with a general outlook on games and metrics. Games allow us to wear our values lightly, to move between rule-and-value-sets, and to find a place of repose in the world, because we temporarily set aside our troubles and focus only on what the game tells us to care about. Metrics don’t have this opt-out clause, and we tend to hold to these values quite tightly, at the cost of our rich and subtle values. There is some truth to this—but as I finished the book this time (my second read, and much more thorough than my first), I am left wanting more.

This might mean that I need to read Games: Agency as Art, which is Nguyen’s explicitly academic work on games. His analysis has been modified in The Score (he says this in the acknowledgments), but I still want to see the more robust treatment of games in that book.

I’ve also become…ambivalent about metrics. I know how metrics can go wrong in my own life. I’ve talked before about needing to stop worrying about things like YouTube metrics as a measure of my work’s value, so I didn’t need to be convinced about value capture. But I also know that I cannot entirely ignore metrics, because they do approximate something about my audience, and when you make content on the internet you have to keep the audience in mind. What I don’t have currently is a clear path forward.

Which may be asking too much of the book—I don’t expect Nguyen to give me a theory of everything, nor a guide to living well. He can’t solve all of my problems. But given that I live and work in a metrics-heavy environment, I think that I expected some clearer sense of resolution upon finishing The Score.

That ambivalence is not unique to me. I think Nguyen feels it too. When he wrote the final chapter, he chose to write two endings, and he says that we can choose the ending that we want. The book becomes a game. But I suppose I want to ask: C. Thi Nguyen, which ending is your ending?

Here are some of my favorite comments from Monday’s post.

From Kyle:

I found this portion of Nguyen’s work to be where the aims and angst of his argument and interest began to shine through. I don’t know that I buy that “games” are the deliverer he thinks they might be, but I agree with him that we need places beyond the convergence of publicly praised “signals” where what is truly valuable can be cultivated.

Interestingly enough, I can’t help but think of “sabbath.” The practice of sabbath rest, whether Jewish or Christian, is a practice that exists to create what Nguyen might call “regular exposure of what’s important outside the monoculture.”

In “sabbath” practice, the individual steps outside of instrumentality in order to “be,” particularly to embrace their limitedness with and among others. You might consider “sabbath” a game of sorts: it’s bounded, it’s there to activate human agency, it’s meant for enjoyment and communion, and it’s deliberately non-achievement oriented.

Additionally, I can’t stop making connections with Nguyen’s “societal value collapse” theory and the opening to MacIntyre’s “After Virtue.”

What do you do when the signals are no longer tethered to the real?

‘What do you do when the signals are no tethered to the real?’ is a very good question. There is always going to be a gap; if there weren’t a gap, we wouldn’t need metrics in the first place. We wouldn’t need a map—we could just look at the territory. What we need, and maybe this is the key to making this an even stronger book, is a theory of tethering.

This is from David F., who was responding to a lengthy (and good) comment from Louis:

Metrics, as a concept, are incredibly valuable. I can’t imagine not using them.

The issue is value capture, and the resulting impulse to artificially manipulate the metric (e.g. the law school rating example).

Value capture is not an attribute of the metric, it is an attribute of the user of the metric. Focusing on weight while excluding the bigger picture of health is a failure of the user of the metric (could be an individual, or a compound metric or model). Weight itself just is - it exists whether you measure it or not.

For me, the core idea of this book is the title of chapter 1 - “Is this the game you want to be playing?” Using a bunch of health metrics to measure your life is a choice you can make, you are not required to. If your goal is to win a race, your approach to these metrics should be much different than if your goal is to be healthy, not to mention if your goal is maximize pleasure in the short term.

David’s comment may get at the heart of the matter. Nguyen’s first question – ‘Is this the game you want to be playing?’ – is a good one, and finding out why we end up playing games we don’t want to play has been helpful. But I think that Nguyen’s skepticism about metrics has perhaps been overextended and undersupported.

On Sunday at 3 PM Eastern, we’ll have our Q&A session with C. Thi Nguyen. As usual, the invitation for the call will be sent out to paid subscribers a few hours before the call, and after the call, I’ll update the invitation post to include the recording—that way, even if you can’t attend, you can hear what Thi has to say.

Some of you won’t be able to ma…

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In May, we’re reading The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. Here’s the reading schedule for that book:

• May 4: Chapters 1-4

• May 11: Chapters 5-11

• May 15: Paid Subscriber Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern (recording available)

• May 18: Chapters 12-18

• May 25: Chapters 19-24

• May 29: Chapters 25-29

• May 31: Paid Subscriber Q&A with C. Thi Nguyen, 3 PM Eastern

Notice that the final post is on Friday, May 29. That’s to give us a little more time to finish discussing the book by breaking up that week’s reading and having an additional post. Notice also that we’ll be joined by C. Thi Nguyen on May 31, where you’ll be able to ask him questions about the book directly.

In June, we’ll be reading The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor, and in July, we’ll be reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

Paraphrasing the scholar of play Johan Huizinga, Nguyen writes that: ‘Play is a magic circle—a space segregated from the rest of the world.’ When we play, we enter an island of meaning. This is a place without consequences. How we behave, what our actions mean, is somehow segregated from the rest of the world, or, as Nguyen puts it on the next page, ‘The meanings of what happens in the game are quarantined from the rest of life.’ He uses a few other words to characterize this phenomenon, calling games ‘tightly bound’ and appealing to the fact that there are many games for many purposes—so, when we choose to play a game, we are choosing to temporarily inhabit one of these islands of meaning, where our actions taction on new significance, and what we do on one of these islands does not bleed out into the rest of the world.

It was in this chapter that I became skeptical of some of Nguyen’s claims, more skeptical than I’ve been throughout reading The Score. Chapter 19 is a short chapter and a romantic one, giving us an idyllic look into how Nguyen sees games from a highly personal point of view. And I think we can fairly say that games are romantic for Nguyen. They are little havens where he can adopt a new personality and a new set of values. They are a place of repose. But where I became skeptical is when Nguyen appeals back to his distinction between the striving player and the achieving player to explain how this quarantining works.

Let’s look to one of Nguyen’s examples here to work through my worries. Nguyen tells us that he often spends an evening playing a board game with his wife after their children have been put to bed. More dramatically: ‘We spend the rest of the night trying to kill each other. We play a board game.’ He’s taken by the fact that within the game, they can be fiercely competitive, while outside of the game, they can be nothing but friendly, even making drinks for each other. They can do this because they are both striving players, and within the struggle they can both get what they want, so in fact by trying to ‘kill’ each other they are playing the game better—they’re having more fun. The achievement player can’t do this, because all the achievement player enjoys is winning.

But I am not sure that the distinction is particularly explanatory here. Suppose Alice and Bob both like to struggle when they play; they’re really into striving play, just as Nguyen wants them to be. Suppose further they are playing the sort of board game that relies on duplicity, some sort of game where the point is to deceive your opponent. And let’s say that Alice is really good at it. I can imagine scenarios where Bob is troubled by the behavior that Alice displays through this gameplay. She’s just a little too good at lying, he starts to think. Even though Alice is playing by the rules of the game – she’s not revealing Bob’s most embarrassing secrets, she’s not stomping on his toes – Bob might be troubled by it. The quarantining is far from perfect, even when both are committed to striving play.

Here’s an embarrassing example taken from my own life. Over a decade ago, I lived in Boston when I was attending Boston University. A few friends of mine moved to Boston to attend graduate programs at other schools. One of them – I’ll call him A. – had just moved to the area to attend Harvard Divinity School, where he was going to train as a secular humanist chaplain. While he was in Boston and his family was in Texas, his mother died. We got together to drink and play games to make him feel better. We are all millennials, so forgive the cringe for a moment: we played Cards Against Humanity. The point of Cards Against Humanity is to be offensive and funny. It’s to push boundaries. We were all playing it well. But I was dealt a card that I didn’t know what to do with: Dead Parents. I didn’t know what to do, but I was a bit drunk (we all were), and I played that card. The action in the game, which was in line with the rules and the spirit of the game, broke us out of this little island of meaning, and I knew I had hurt A.

I later apologized, saying it was thoughtless—and it was. To his credit, A. forgave me.

What broke the quarantine of the game wasn’t that we were achievement players. There’s no point in being an achievement player in Cards Against Humanity. It barely requires any skill, and it doesn’t even require a sense of humor. We broke quarantine for, I suspect, two reasons: i) it reminded A. of something he was trying to forget, and (ii) I inadvertently revealed something dark about myself. I’ve known that my sense of humor can be mean—I’ve hurt people with jokes before. I didn’t know I’d make a joke about somebody’s recently deceased mother.

And I wouldn’t have made it if we weren’t in the game. I think that within the game, I saw it as a way to get us to laugh at tragedy, which is my preferred response. But it was too much and too soon, and it broke us out of the game.

I think we played Settlers of Catan after that, which helped the night go better.

Games are special, Nguyen will tell us, because they allow us to inhabit these islands of meaning, but these islands are apparently quite fragile ecosystems, and I’d like to have a fuller explanation of the limits and boundaries of games.

Metrics, on the other hand, ‘are an unbounded scoring system.’ While in games we can mostly freely adopt and freely discard these new rules and values, in an institutional mechanical scoring system, we find that we are always playing. Your credit score is a metric. It’s a number you probably want to make go up. While ‘games are a space where meanings can wander free,’ institutional mechanical scoring systems are games we can’t escape.

What happens when we want to use these metrics to make sense of the world? Nguyen uses the work of James C. Scott, particularly his book Seeing Like a State, to explain this.

When states as we understand them today, which are highly bureaucratic, centralized entities, emerged, they faced a problem. In order to exercise some control over a domain, you need to understand it. So, states began processes of gathering information, and they found that to better process information, it helped to simplify the domain.

Simplifications are useful. In Chapter 22, Nguyen briefly mentions that scientific explanations rely on simplified models in order to explain the world. A model that included all of the information about the domain would not be a good model; it would be too cumbersome to use, but it would also lack predictive power. (I am not a philosopher of science, so I am sure there is a more substantive story to tell about model-building in science; it has been years since I read on the subject.) But statecraft didn’t just build simpler models; states wanted to simplify the domain.

We all know the phrase ‘The map is not the territory.’ The model isn’t the domain, and you should never confuse them. But in early modern statecraft, Scott says, a centralizing force would try to re-render the domain so that it better reflects an easily processed model. The keyword here is legibility. Scott writes in his book:

Legibility is a condition of manipulation…Whatever the units being manipulated, they must be organized in a manner that permits them to be identified, observed, recorded, counted, aggregated, and monitored. (Seeing Like a State, pg. 183)

So, states found ways to better organize the units in the domain. One paraphrased example from Scott helps here. A Welshman appearing in an English court was asked to identify himself, and he did as he always had, using the patronymic prefix ap. Your ‘last name’ is your father’s name after an ap in this example, and you can string them together: Owen ap Arthur ap Llewelyn ap… Through a series of these clauses, the Welshman could uniquely identify himself while also telling his ancestral story. In his village or town, this is an information-rich description, but it makes for cumbersome processing. The English court gave him a standardized surname. States around the world had to standardize practices like measurement and naming to better process the units. They also found that in order to better process/understand agricultural production, monocropping was preferred over polycropping. In forestry, if you want to estimate timber yields, it would be convenient for the forest to have only one sort of tree—so some states went about ‘standardizing’ the trees in their forests. Suddenly, the domain was more easily understood, and you could ‘score’ forests based on timber yields, but in order for this to happen, you had to change the forest.

We are the forest in this example. Through standardized metrics, our values are simplified: better able to travel across contexts, better able to be ranked and compared. But we lose something; we’ve explored this over and over in the book. As Nguyen writes: ‘Value capture is monocropping for the soul.’

Before we move on to the question of what we do about it, which Nguyen gets to in the final few chapters of this week’s reading, let me raise one other concern about the argument. I’ve found that as Nguyen has continued to return to his exploration of games, he’s said some things that he does not adequately defend.

I thought this especially when Nguyen discusses the rules skeptic on pages 240-241. He describes this person as being unwilling to enter new worlds – these are social worlds, which I think we can say are partly constituted by the rules governing them – and calls them ‘stodgy’ and ‘unwilling to try anything new.’ He even says that rules skeptic won’t try new hobbies or arts. I’m really not so sure—and it was only through interacting with people during this book club that I came to be skeptical.

Adam is a regular commenter on Commonplace Philosophy, and a few weeks ago he wrote that he does not enjoy games. I posited last week that this is because he is particularly sensitive to being manipulated. There’s no need to stress the negative connotation of ‘manipulation’ here—often it means being controlled in a duplicitous manner, but it doesn’t have to be. You manipulate dials on a radio, and in medical contexts, ‘manipulate’ means something like ‘treating a condition using only your hands.’ I think that some people are highly resistant to this sort of manipulation, even when it isn’t duplicitous; that’s why Adam doesn’t enjoy games. Perhaps he has this sense that when playing a game his desires are not his own. You could even say that this stems from a valuing of authenticity. But I’d like to think Adam is still able to be exploratory and creative—he just doesn’t want to do it via games. (Adam told me in our last Zoom call that he quite likes hiking.)

Which makes me think that Nguyen hasn’t adequately explored why it is that some people are so resistant, and his proposed explanation verges on a misdiagnosis.

Let’s turn to the question of ‘What do we do?’ Nguyen gives us three options:

1. Build better metrics. We could call this optimization.

2. Give up on metrics and their attendant centralizing institutions. Let’s call this decentralization.

3. Embrace more pluralism and try our best to keep metrics in their proper place. Nguyen calls this value federalism.

Nguyen’s preferred path is (3). He argues for this largely in the negative—(1) seems doomed to the same value capture cycle, and (2) involves embracing a radical statelessness that would doom many people, like Nguyen himself due to chronic health conditions. We want the virtues of large, powerful institutions without selling our souls to them and their metrics. Thus, value federalism.

Why is (1) doomed to fail? It helps to skip ahead to Chapters 23 and 24 before returning to value federalism.

Metrics have a way of presenting themselves as objective and clear. Nguyen calls the former objectivity laundering and the latter he describes as the seduction of clarity. Metrics are objectivity laundering, Nguyen says, when value-laden decisions are being obscured; these value-laden decisions are often made in the decisions of what to measure or in the swapping out of a fuzzier value for the more precise value. His example of weight and health is a good one. ‘Health’ is a fuzzy term, and it can be sensitive to our interests. Health also always involves tradeoffs, too; you can only optimize for one thing at a time, and you have to choose want to optimize for; reasonable people will make different optimization decisions. A swimmer will prioritize leanness in a way a rock-climber might not. Some people want to optimize for years lived, while others want to focus on the fuzzier value of quality of life. But it is all too common for being healthy to be practically equated with losing weight. You don’t have to be a radical to see why this is misleading. One, you can lose too much weight and make yourself quite ill. Second, maintaining a healthy weight is only one component of living a healthy lifestyle. But we often think that the number on the scale is the measure of our health.

I lost a lot of weight in the last few years. And I found that as I lost weight, I didn’t really care about the number on the scale. I cared about things like being able to play with my son for longer periods of time, or not having to buy new jeans so often. I did care about a new number, though: blood pressure. Every man on both sides of my family has high blood pressure, and for the first time in years I’m in the normal range. I care about that because I don’t want to die of a heart attack in my fifties. But blood pressure isn’t only improved by losing weight—that’s why I do more cardio now, too. What has happened as I’ve come to have a healthier view of my body is that my values are multi-layered and more subtle, and this better reflects the domain. That’s true even though these values aren’t so clear, and thus aren’t so easily turned into metrics. But as Nguyen says: ‘Sometimes vague language is better because it expresses the truth that things are unclear or unsettled.’

Now back to value federalism. It helps to remember what metrics are for. Metrics enable cross-domain communication. They also allow us to outsource for practicality’s sake: we outsource because ‘we just don’t have enough time to think about everything.’ Metrics allow domain-specific experts to give us an easily understood judgment about a domain, and often we do need to defer to those. I mentioned it before, but I always check something like Wirecutter if I need to buy a new appliance. Why? Because I don’t want to buy four vacuum cleaners, test them, and then figure out which one really suits my needs. Wirecutter does that for me, and so I outsource (part of) my decision-making to them. What we want to avoid is outsourcing our whole souls. When we defer to others, though, we are putting ourselves in a vulnerable position—but that vulnerability is part of trusting someone else.

So, under value federalism, we outsource that which is appropriate to outsource to centralizing forces, and we outsource nothing else.

I was thinking about the practical upshot of this, and one simple idea came to mind. Next time you need to make a low-stakes decision, try to do it without using metrics. Pick a restaurant without looking at the reviews. Pick a book without looking at Goodreads. Ask a friend for a recommendation, or pick up a book based on what it says on the back cover. It’s a little way of not outsourcing our values.

Here are some of my favorite comments from last week.

Given that we returned to value-ladenness this week, I want to highlight Jordan’s comment:

I found the example on pg. 210 about value-laden standards particularly illuminating:

“Diurnal time and standardized clock time serve deeply different purposes and ways of life. This is why the choice of timing systems is value-laden.”

Standards like this produce a convergence that I’m often not aware of. It feels like a neutral system, yet there is clearly a worldview promoted and facilitated by our agreement on that standard. It’s been fascinating to unpack some of those assumptions, like the mapping sound quality example he gives on pg. 212.

Nguyen gave me another example in conversation. Think about maps you would use to navigate American highways. These are information-rich, but they leave out so much. They do not, for instance, have a way of representing beautiful views; I don’t think any of them represent something as nebulous as the pleasure of the drive or the quality of the roads. There are reasons for these decisions—and we have to remember that they are decisions.

And this, from The Alchemist of Life:

The line about scoring systems producing convergence, not merely discovering it, feels important far beyond games. Once we decide what counts, people start bending themselves toward being countable.

You can see it in fitness, business, social media, even self-improvement. The metric begins as a tool, then quietly becomes the definition of success. Steps become health. Revenue becomes value. Likes become impact. None of those are useless, but they flatten the thing they were supposed to illuminate.

Maybe the question is not “are metrics bad?” but “what part of the human experience does this metric make harder to see?”

This theme is continued in Nguyen’s remarks on ‘outsourcing the soul.’ And I think the final suggestion of that comment is on the right track. I’d also ask: ‘What part of the human experience do we wish to keep fuzzy?’

I’ll admit I found this comment from Artie funny, so here it is:

I love sorting and categorizing immensely, possibly more than playing games. I am thankful to Thi and this book for making me feel safe/validated in wanting to explore why I love and hate games, and love and hate tracking and metrics.

For example, a few months ago I decided to find every game I own on PC (or for which I hold a temporary license, à la Steam/Epic) and categorize them into discrete categories, so that I could stop complaining that “I have nothing to play.” I started with very clear-cut tags, like “Completed”, for games I had completed all the way through, and “Games with Friends”, for games that are co-op or multiplayer only (like Left 4 Dead 2); but soon I ran into a roadblock. How could I compare an unplayed deckbuilder that I could play for 300 hours, and an unplayed puzzle game that might last only 10? If the goal of this was to find games to play, I had to make tags that reflected my purposes.

So, I resorted to less measurable, but much more valuable categories: things like, “I want to play this”, for games I am actually excited at the prospect of playing, and “I’ve had my fill”, for games I’ve played a bit, and I’m not interested in returning to. I ended up with 9 categories: some were discrete and rigid, others were much more qualitative and subtle.

I probably worked on this for a week or two, with ferocious intensity. I would get home from work, put on some music, and crank out a bunch of games. It was such a blast, to know I was making something so helpful to myself, and putting everything into nice, neat boxes.

Since then, I’ve played maybe... 3 games from the “I want to play this” category, in as many months. I haven’t even finished one game! I’m curious as to why I pursued the sorting with such vigour, yet I couldn’t muster the same energy to play the games themselves!

We don’t limit these lists to vacuum cleaners and household appliances, however. We also like to rank various forms of media. Thus, on YouTube, you will find videos like ‘The 10 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time’, or ‘Ranking the Best Detective Novels,’ or ‘The 17 Greatest Romantasy Novels with Dark Academia Tropes.’ I have made a few of these videos myself, though I tended to prefer the phrase ‘My Favorite’ over ‘The Best’ in my titles.

Recently, The Guardian released their own list, which was described as ‘the greatest literature ever published in English.’1 You can browse the list for yourself, and I think you’ll find that every book on there is good, perhaps even great. You can also find their list of judges and see the 10 books each judge chose. (I assume the final list was based on aggregate scores—though I didn’t see a methodology section in the article.) I spent some time browsing the various judges’ picks, and I found those lists to be considerably more interesting than The Guardian’s final list, for reasons I’ll explore below.

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What is the point of an exercise like this? I don’t think it’s an indefensible project—at the very least, it gives you something approximating the critical consensus of the (primarily) British literary elite. But when you get down to it, the list ends up being fairly boring.

Consider the top ten books:

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot

2. Beloved by Toni Morrison

3. Ulysses by James Joyce

4. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

5. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

6. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

7. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

10. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Austen, etc. You expect to see a list like this. While it is surprising that Tolstoy made it to the top ten twice, the inclusion of both War and Peace and Anna Karenina isn’t. Judging from the conversation, the biggest surprise of the list was that Morrison’s Beloved made it #2.2 But generally, the list you get from The Guardian is precisely the sort of list that you expect to get from The Guardian.

Consider a very different sort of list: the 1998 Modern Library online poll, which seems to have been overtaken by fans of Ayn Rand.3 This was their Top Ten that year:

While I disagree with this entire list, there’s something substantially more interesting about the list, because it speaks to the values of the sort of people who were online at a very particular time. (Remember: the internet in the 90’s was mostly weirdos with niche obsessions. It’s still full of weirdos now, but with more pedestrian interests.) It’s a snapshot of a weird subculture that does not get much recognition, the sort of thing that can easily be lost to history. But even then, the list ends up being a little bit boring, because it isn’t shocking that a bunch of Randians love the novels of Ayn Rand, The Lord of the Rings, and Orwell’s 1984.4

That’s probably because it’s an aggregated list.

It was Sebastian Castillo – author of Fresh Green Life – who put my feelings into words. I said above that I enjoyed the individual judges’ lists substantially more than I enjoyed The Guardian’s aggregated list, and this is why. The individual lists tended to reflect the idiosyncrasies of the writers polled, and I find those idiosyncrasies expressed through their lists substantially more interesting than the flattened results you get when you pile all their lists into one giant list.5

That’s how you find out that Ian McEwan thinks that Rabbit at Rest by John Updike is the tenth best novel published in English—I have never in my life met someone who thinks this! And since some of his other picks are surprising – I don’t know many people who say Our Mutual Friend is the best Dickens, and he included The Plague, which didn’t make the final list – thinking through why McEwan likes those books so much is an interesting exercise. Is Camus, perhaps, more influential on McEwan’s writing than I have previously thought? I’m not sure—but now, next time I pick up a McEwan book, I have something to think about.

That sort of thing adds a new layer of enjoyment to reading his books.

RF Kuang – who primarily writes fantasy novels – doesn’t list any fantasy novels in her top ten, but she does have the good sense to mention Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which made it to #34 on the final list. This raises all sorts of questions about Kuang and her work. She’s a fantasy writer, but she doesn’t think any fantasy books are in her personal top ten. Is this an admission that she thinks the genre is lesser, or is it that she wants to draw on writers like Hugo, Rodoreda, and Mann when writing? Does any of this appear in her own work?

Stephen King has the (correct) opinion that the best book published in English is Melville’s Moby-Dick. I never expected King and me to agree! The rest of his list isn’t too surprising: McTeague is about a dentist whose life falls into ruin after winning the lottery, and since I read On Writing years ago I can recall the unpublished story ‘Happy Stamps’ by King, which he described in §15:

The hero of my story was your classic Poor Schmuck, a guy named Roger who had done jail time twice for counterfeiting money—one more bust would make him a threetime loser. Instead of money, he began to counterfeit Happy Stamps . . . except, he discovered, the design of Happy Stamps was so moronically simple that he wasn’t really counterfeiting at all; he was creating reams of the actual article. In a funny scene—probably the first really competent scene I ever wrote—Roger sits in the living room with his old mom, the two of them mooning over the Happy Stamps catalogue while the printing press runs downstairs, ejecting bale after bale of those same trading stamps. “Great Scott!” Mom says. “According to the fine print, you can get anything with Happy Stamps, Roger—you tell them what you want, and they figure out how many books you need to get it. Why, for six or seven million books, we could probably get a Happy Stamps house in the suburbs!” Roger discovers, however, that although the stamps are perfect, the glue is defective. If you lap the stamps and stick them in the book they’re fine, but if you send them through a mechanical licker, the pink Happy Stamps turn blue. At the end of the story, Roger is in the basement, standing in front of a mirror. Behind him, on the table, are roughly ninety books of Happy Stamps, each book filled with individually licked sheets of stamps. Our hero’s lips are pink. He runs out his tongue; that’s even pinker. Even his teeth are turning pink. Mom calls cheerily down the stairs, saying she has just gotten off the phone with the Happy Stamps National Redemption Center in Terre Haute, and the lady said they could probably get a nice Tudor home in Weston for only eleven million, six hundred thousand books of Happy Stamps.

“That’s nice, Mom,” Roger says. He looks at himself a moment longer in the mirror, lips pink and eyes bleak, then slowly returns to the table. Behind him, billions of Happy Stamps are stuffed into basement storage bins. Slowly, our hero opens a fresh stamp-book, then begins to lick sheets and stick them in. Only eleven million, five hundred and ninety thousand books to go, he thinks as the story ends, and Mom can have her Tudor.

Was King thinking of McTeague when writing this? He doesn’t say, and I cannot say for sure, but that’s the sort of parallel I love finding.

While these judges were likely trying to answer the question ‘What is the best book?’, their individual responses naturally reflect their own preferences and histories. We read their individual lists as telling us something about themselves—but when we read a list like The Guardian’s, what do we learn? Not much, I suspect.

And this is yet another case of how culture is flattened online. The books I’ve been reading this year for our philosophy of technology book club have helped clarify my thinking in this regard. Two in particular seem relevant here.

First, the insight from You & Your Profile regarding the ‘General Peer.’ The General Peer is something like an aggregated personality, an audience we perform to that really doesn’t exist. It’s a fiction we indulge in when we think of ‘the audience’—or, in this case, ‘the literary critic.’ While Moeller & D’Ambrosio are reluctant to criticize what they call ‘profilicity’ and its relationship to the General Peer, it seems to me that the sort of list we got from The Guardian is a natural consequence of our profilic age, and now we can refer back to their list to tell us what the General Peer thinks about literature. And in this case, the General Peer likes good books, but their preferences aren’t interesting or revealing. The General Peer likes the books that everybody agrees are good.

Second, this has an important relationship to C. Thi Nguyen’s writing on metrics in The Score. The Guardian’s list gives us a singular verdict: it turns out that Middlemarch is the best book. Yet, in the metrification of criticism, we lose out on any of the rich and subtle discussions we might be able to have about qualities found in any of those books. We’re given a list, with no justification for that list other than the aggregate votes. We lose all context, all depth, all the fun of arguing about what the best book is.

And that is key. Nobody who takes literature seriously spends their time obsessing over their Top Ten list. The only reason we do it, I think, is that it is very, very fun to argue with other people about the lists. It’s a nice way to engage in book chat with our fellows who also take literature seriously.

But we’ll have more interesting conversations about books, I think, if we just admit that most of the time when we’re making these lists, we’re doing it to tell a story about ourselves.

The Guardian didn’t ask me for my ten favorite books in the English language, but if they had, I would have given them a very strange list. I would have gone in knowing that very few of my novels would make it into the aggregated list, for one. But I like to think it would make for an interesting conversation. If you asked me about each of these books, I’d tell you a story about how it influenced me, what it meant to me when I read it, how it shifted some part of my life or craft.

Nobody asked for it, but I’ll give it to you anyway:

1. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

2. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

3. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carré

4. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin

5. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

6. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

7. Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

8. Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

9. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

10. Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Even now, looking at this, I want to argue with myself. Why not Williams’ Augustus? Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway? Infinite Jest, My Struggle, or Savage Detectives? Should Wodehouse make the list? I imagine if I made the list a year from now, or even just in a month or so, it would look very, very different. That’s part of the fun, too.

If you’ve made it this far, I’d love to know what your own Top Ten might and why each book made it onto the list. Or perhaps you’re someone who objects to this sort of ranking on principle—I’d love to hear about that, too.

In May, we’re reading The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. Here’s the reading schedule for that book:

• May 4: Chapters 1-4

• May 11: Chapters 5-11

• May 15: Paid Subscriber Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern (recording available)

• May 18: Chapters 12-18

• May 25: Chapters 19-24

• May 29: Chapters 25-29

• May 31: Paid Subscriber Q&A with C. Thi Nguyen, 3 PM Eastern

Notice that the final post is on Friday, May 29. That’s to give us a little more time to finish discussing the book by breaking up that week’s reading and having an additional post. Notice also that we’ll be joined by C. Thi Nguyen on May 31, where you’ll be able to ask him questions about the book directly.

In June, we’ll be reading The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor, and in July, we’ll be reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

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One of the most important passages from The Score so far is found on page 127:

Scoring systems don’t just discover a convergence that was already there. They produce convergence. Like courts of law, they take messy, complex situations and produce singular clear judgments—which we put into the official record, so that we can all move on with the matter publicly setted.

This convergence depends on the way that scoring systems can affect our motivational states—to refresh yourself on that, consult the early posts on Parts I and II of The Score. While ‘people naturally tend to diverge and disagree,’ introducing a scoring system into some domain will naturally tend toward convergence.

Nguyen gives us many examples of this from the book: his experience at an aggressive yoga studio, house-flipping, fly-fishing, and skateboarding. In fact, we’ve seen this convergence point on page 56:

Convergence doesn’t appear magically. It requires that we seriously muck around with what we’re evaluating. When sakeboarding went professional…it started to change focus. Skateboarding in the tournament environment became less about flow, grace, and steeze, and emphasized the kind of achivements that are more obvious and countable: how high you can get and how many midair spins you can do.

Skateboarding went from an amateur activity – even being a pro usually meant that you were sponsored, not necessarily that you were competing on ESPN – to a professional one, and in that institutionalized context, scoring systems were needed to produce singular verdicts. You need those if you want to have a competition, but their introduction means that the style of skateboarding is going to change. (Nguyen is also fond of the example of yo-yoing, which became much more technical when the competition scene became larger.)

Throughout the book, Nguyen will return to this note, and there’s always a sense of loss in those passages—something didn’t just change, something was lost. In the Zoom call on Friday, this was the point of some contention: a few readers find Nguyen to be unfair to metrics writ large, while others are more sympathetic to his general line. This conversation is worth continuing, especially down in the comments.

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To score something, we usually need to count, and to count we need to sort. Nguyen’s example: to count the number of adults and children in the room, I need to sort each individual into the Adult and Child categories. He borrows Lorraine Daston’s taxonomy of rules to explicate this:

1. Principles: these are general abstract statements about what to do, but they admit of exceptions. A principle needs to be applied with judgment and care, and recognizing exceptions requires understanding the reason behind the rule. Example: the maxim ‘show, don’t tell’ in creative writing.

2. Models: these are exemplars or ideals, models for emulation. Example: The Rule of St. Benedict, where following the Rule really entails modeling Benedict of Nursia.

3. Algorithms: these are rules that are meant to be applied mechanically. No care or judgment is required. The algorithmic rule is the model of rules for the modern mind, but they are a recent invention.

Let’s go back to the counting adults/children example. If you need to sort the individuals, you’re likely going to rely on either (1) or (2). If you have the principle rule model in mind, you’ll have some general ideas about what makes someone an adult, but you’ll apply discretion, relying on your judgment about each individual. One 18-year-old might still get counted as a child, while his 16-year-old sister might get counted as an adult, as they each exhibit some but not all of the features of adulthood, and you’ll have to make a judgment call. But if we’re making judgment calls, then we also have to tolerate that reasonable people will sometimes make different judgment calls. Thus, two people counting the number of adults/children in a room may share the same total, but they might have different verdicts about the ratio of adults to children—even though they’re both looking at the same evidence. If you rely on (2), however, you’ll get a singular verdict. Most likely, you’ll rely on age. If you’re 18, you’re an adult, and everyone else is a child.

The important thing to realize is that adopting an algorithmic rule is a trade-off—but so is adopting a principle or a model. Algorithms produce consensus and exportable justifiability; their logic should be explicable. Principles and models naturally tend toward divergence and opaqueness. And, given what Nguyen says about games throughout (but see especially pages 151-153, where he points out that ‘strict rules can sometimes make us more playful and more exploratory’), he also thinks that algorithmic mechanical scoring can produce some good outcomes—though most of his focus is how they produce good outcomes in games.

Sometimes, however, we’d want mechanical scoring outside of games. We may not want to evaluate hospitals exclusively on certain mechanical scores, like mortality rates, but when choosing a hospital, it’s good to have some of this information. When my wife and I were choosing a hospital in which she would give birth, we had a number of metrics we relied upon:

• Figures about maternal health and infant mortality

• Distance from our home

• Availability of doctors

And that’s just one example.

Nguyen’s major concern about mechanical rules outside of games might be best summarized on 164:

My worry is that we are starting to automatically reach for the mechanical rule, abdicating discretionary judgment even when the context calls for it. And this is what we are doing when we let ourselves be value-captured by a mechanical value. We are accepting into our hearts a procedure for evaluating ourselves and the world around us that meets the highest standard of accessibility, at the cost of adaptability and sensitivity. We are choosing consistency of procedure over sensitivity to the particulars.

Later in the book, Nguyen calls the flexibility of our values reflective control. We can choose games and their attendant values voluntarily based on our desires, beliefs, and values. But metrics, he says, discourage reflective control.1

Metrics make you an offer: If you accept this prefabricated, public value system into your heart, you will become instantly comprehensible. You will gain access to a whole world of ready-made justifications. Your successes will become clear and inarguable. Metrics make values mechanically clear…Metrics discourage reflective control, because their central promise…requires that we submit ourselves to an external, rigid system of values.2

Nguyen even gives us a nice phrase for this in Chapter 16: values hidden in the machine. With the rise of metrics, we have experienced the standardization of our values.3

Life, Nguyen says, becomes a bit more like a factory.

Here are some of my favorite comments from last week.

EG made a connection to our previous readings:

I’m also going to add a point I didn’t get a chance to make in the Zoom call but that was the most interesting aspect to me of the second section of the book: finally after the last two books, we are presented with a solid exploration of the difference between transparency and trust and the tension between the two and the impact of technological and bureaucratic forces’ obsession with always needing more of the former and claiming that transparency always makes everything better.

This really fascinated me because I do think that the surveillance state and the age of hyper-transparency has been sold to us as a path towards a more trusting society, and yet the opposite seems to be true in practice. And Nguyen’s argument that public transparency metrics are contributing to the death of the expert was a terrific aspect of this that I hadn’t thought about before and such a necessary consideration.

This is a nice point, as it draws a line between Moeller & D’Ambrosio’s You & Your Profile, Pressly’s The Right to Oblivion, and David Eggers’ The Circle. (Apologies to Han’s Non-things.) Metrification and transparency seem to go hand in hand—but I think Nguyen is the one who has explored the loss most acutely. You could imagine that as we all build our profiles for ‘The General Peer,’ we get the same sort of convergence Nguyen describes.

Adam (who also brought up this point on the Zoom call) shared his own experience with games:

ince I was a child I have found playing games to be EXCRUCIATINGLY BORING. This applies to almost all types of games: sports, board games, role-playing games, video games, puzzles. I want to be clear I don’t think games are a waste of time out of some kind of snobishness or mania for productivity. I would love to be the sort of person who plays chess. But I can’t because chess bores me to death.

When I was a kid, I always preferred the “let’s pretend to be pirates” kind of play which had no goal, no way to win, and was more about trying to tell a fun story together. I also used to love playing Calvinball with my friends (the nonsense sport from Calvin and Hobbes where anyone can make up any rule they want at any point, a lampoon of a normal game). I’ve always preferred flights of imagination, and the rigid rules which the goals of games make difficult. When I’m forced to play games, I’m interested for about twenty minutes, the time it takes to figure out how the game works and what a winning strategy might be. From that point on, the game becomes a punishing grind.

Ever since Jared mentioned this book months ago, I’ve been looking forward to reading it. I’ve always considered not liking games to be a personality quirk with no significance. Learning that there was a philosopher who tackled games made me wonder if my dislike of games wasn’t connected to my attitude toward technology. So I’ve been approaching this book as an opportunity for self-discovery. This has proved difficult because Nguyen’s bias that games are good -- an assertion he doesn’t at any time try to support, he simply assumes it’s self-evident because everyone enjoys games as much as he does.

My favorite part of the book up to this point was Nguyen’s distinction between principles and algorithms. For me, this really shed some light on my difficulty. For me, games do not create “beautiful action,” they create algorithmic action. They control the inputs and the conditions in a way that I find exceedingly unpleasant. In real life, we act based on principles and models. This is also true of pure imagination, like storytelling or daydreaming -- yes, stories have structure but the structure is based on principles. Games, by contrast, force our actions into predefined algorithms, the same way that mechanical measurements do in the world of metrics. In my experience, this feels equally horrible, whether I’m operating within a value-captured bureaucracy or playing a soul-crushing game of Apples to Apples at a party to be polite.

We talked about this more in the call, but he joked about my immediate question: isn’t there some game that you enjoy? No, he told me, there really isn’t. I’ve been thinking about this, and I wonder if it is – sorry to psychoanalyze you – a particular sensitivity to feeling like your agency is being manipulated, even by something as benign as a game? I wouldn’t call this pathological—just a different way of being.

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All in-person examinations at Princeton will be proctored starting July 1, representing the most significant change to the honor system since it was established in 1893…The historic vote was the culmination of months of deliberation within the administration and student governing bodies about how to address increasing concerns over academic integrity violations, including the proliferation of AI usage.

This is just one example of how universities, and the humanities in particular, are going to be very different places soon.

There are two dangers to writing an essay like this, both of which I want to avoid.

First, this can be yet another brow-beating piece about AI and its negative social consequences. I’ll be honest: I’ve given up on this. These technologies are being widely adopted, and instead of lamenting this development, we would do better to ask questions about what comes next.

Second, there is a tendency to treat Ivy League universities, along with other elite institutions, like a microcosm for American culture. In one major piece on AI-assisted cheating, the first people interviewed were students at Columbia University; in a piece in The Atlantic on university students’ reading abilities, the primary subjects were students at that same institution. When controversy raged about anti-genocide/pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, it was again Ivies that attracted most of the attention—actually, it was Columbia again that seemed to make the most headlines. But these institutions are weird, even by American standards. The students are often wealthy strivers whose lives will look very different from most of the roughly 40% of Americans who earn a bachelor’s degree, and when compared to the many Americans who did not attend college it will be as if they lived in different worlds.

So, while the Princeton story does seem to reflect some development in culture, and one worth taking seriously, it would be a mistake to make this about AI or the Ivy League. We need to take a broader view.

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Many of the people I went to high school with stopped attending regular classes in their junior year and instead attended Laurel Oaks, the career campus in a nearby town, to gain job skills so they could work as welders, dental assistants, or auto techs. I grew up in a rural part of Ohio, an hour away from the nearest real city, and for many of my peers, a place like Laurel Oaks was the best path for them to achieve something approximating a middle-class income. I’m not sure how many of us went to college, but I would estimate about a third did. But our guidance counselors told us that there were really only two paths for us: get ready to go to college, or go to Laurel Oaks to learn job skills.

But fundamentally, the question of why we would go to either had the same answer: you went to college or to Laurel Oaks so that you could pick up skills that would make you employable. So, most of the guidance we received was really about what sort of career you’d like to have. We sorted ourselves fairly quickly. A lot of the football team went to Laurel Oaks to become masons and welders; most of my tribe, the band kids, planned to go to college, and I think that if you polled us, the top career choice would have been to become a teacher. That was what I wanted to be at first: a high school English teacher. For all of us, education was, again, about securing a career.

We were very traditional American students in that way—we didn’t know it at the time, but we were thinking about our education in the same way that the United States government has always thought about it.

The United States doesn’t have the most BA holders per capita – that honor goes to Canada – but we are in the top 10. 43% of American adults, at least in the states (and so not including our various territories), have bachelor’s degrees. We achieved this, in part, through a massive increase in public education funding. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States began founding land-grant universities; there are now 106 of these institutions. This was the sort of initiative that allowed many large state universities to exist: Ohio State, the University of Connecticut, Purdue, and the like. These universities were practical from their founding. The act of Congress includes this description of each university’s mission:

[Each] State which may take and claim the benefit of this subchapter, to the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.1

The point being that when we decided to take education seriously as a public good, we had in mind highly practical fields of study; the idea that these would primarily be liberal arts institutions seems to have come later. We, of course, kept funding public education after the initial land grants, often, again, for practical ends. The threat of the Soviets didn’t hurt, either: ‘federal funding during the Cold War for research of all types grew in constant dollars from US$ 13 billion in 1953 to US$ 104 in 1990, an increase of 700 percent.’2 The United States government is often ruthlessly practical in orientation; we were funding these institutions because we wanted to beat the Reds.

This is very different from how people like me like to think about education. While I briefly flirted with majoring in physics in high school, I was always destined for the humanities; I entered college as a dual major in English and Philosophy, and I never regretted it. I was there to read and write. So, it is no surprise that I’m attracted to a vision of education that emphasizes the liberal arts in a more classical mode, where liberal here is importantly linked to liberty. The point of a liberal education is to be formed into a free human being.

And from this standpoint, I’ve criticized the turn in American universities toward more practical ends—but now, looking a little more closely at its history, I’ve started to think that this is really a return to American form. We’re shutting down humanities and language departments around the country, at both public and private universities; hell, we’re even shutting down math and physics at some universities, because it’s too abstract and difficult to make practical.

I started this piece by discussing Princeton’s honor code and the rise of AI-assisted cheating. Then I made you read a few hundred words about the United States’ propensity for practical education. You’re probably wondering what these two have to do with each other.

When we’re evaluating a new technology, the best question we can ask is, ‘What does it make difficult, and what does it make easy?’ The point of this question is to get beyond asking what is merely possible and to focus on how human beings are likely to use it. When a new technology makes something easier, human beings are likely to take the easy path.

Writing, for instance, makes recollection very easy—and, as Plato taught us long ago, makes memorization more difficult, because memorization is no longer necessary. Plato predicted that the rise of literacy would be accompanied by a decline in memorization, and he was exactly right. We no longer needed to memorize information as we could now rely on written records, and this meant our ability to memorize atrophied (or was never developed in the first place).

Currently, AI technologies make it very easy to:

• Produce large amounts of text in seconds, with very little prompting or guidance.

• Summarize long, difficult texts.

• Solve problems in science and mathematics.

Unfortunately, these are the sorts of things that college students spend most of their time doing—so I don’t think it is all that surprising that students use AI to make their lives easier. Sure, they are robbing themselves of an education in the process, and they shouldn’t do it, but that’s a separate issue from it being surprising.

But here’s the next question that we need to ask. If AI makes it so easy to do most, and maybe even all, college coursework, what does that mean for the function of a college degree? What I’ve been intimating above is that the real function of a college degree, at least in the United States, is to serve as a credential that signals you are capable of performing certain jobs. Even humanities degrees have come to be viewed in this way. Thus, the emphasis on ‘critical thinking skills’ seen on nearly every college website.

If AI lets you cheat your way through college, however, degrees can no longer serve this signaling function. The procurement of a college degree and the development of job skills may never have been strongly correlated, but that correlation will become less and less significant. In short, having a college degree doesn’t mean you learned anything that will make you more valuable to a future employer.

If your model of education is American, where you emphasize the acquisition and development of job skills, then this is a troublesome development. I would not be surprised if state legislatures started to grow more and more skeptical of universities, progressively slashing budgets and perhaps phasing out all but the biggest institutions. After all, if the education spending does not have a meaningful economic return, then they are going to start thinking that the money could be better spent on something else.

While the current funding cuts seem to impact the humanities more than business and engineering schools, I wonder if those practical degrees will actually be more degraded by the rise of AI. If you’re hiring an English major to become a product manager at a mid-sized tech company, you might not be concerned that he didn’t read Middlemarch. If you’re hiring a structural engineer, you really want to be sure that she knows how to do calculus.

And this is why I said at the top that it was important to think about institutions other than Princeton, Columbia, and their peers. Yes, those institutions do have practical degrees—but a large part of the value of an elite education is in the social connections you gain from living in a dorm with other children of the world elite. For a school like Ohio State, the devaluing of a degree is a much bigger deal.

But all of this leaves me with another question: what happens to the humanities? Since this is the world I was trained in, and the world I still live in, it’s the thing I’m most worried about.

Let’s focus on philosophy for a moment. A philosophy degree is not particularly useful for finding an entry-level job. You know that going in—if you decide to major in philosophy, you’re doing it for other reasons. While the ‘philosophy major serving you fries at McDonald’s’ is a tired joke (and one that does not reflect reality), the kernel of truth it relies upon is that being able to discuss Plato, Liebniz, or Judith Butler isn’t the sort of thing you list as job skills on a resumé. Even before the rise of AI, departments like philosophy and English always existed uncomfortably in the American university system, especially at state institutions, because we’ve had such a practical emphasis for so long.

Let’s grant the point. Let’s say that philosophy and other humanities degrees really are useless in an economic sense. Let’s cede all the ground for the argument’s sake.

Importantly, this doesn’t mean that studying them is without value. If we really do believe in the promises of a liberal education, then studying things like philosophy, literature, and history is an important component of human flourishing. We need to find some way of preserving these disciplines, and I think this means we need to find ways for these disciplines to thrive outside of the university.

I am, after all, a proponent of autodidacticism. As I put in a piece last year, I wrote: ‘Your education continues well after your school days, so long as you’re willing to take it into your own hands.’ And I really do believe that. The future of the humanities is, in part, the future of autodidacticism.

But this isn’t enough. Autodidacts have previously been able to rely on universities to produce and curate scholarship that they can then study. Autodidacts are not independent; they have always relied on universities. This is why I am skeptical of claims that the future of the humanities will only be autodidactism—if that’s the future we’re building toward, then we’re going to be in serious trouble.

How do we, then, preserve humanities scholarship if it isn’t going to survive in the university system? That’s the pressing question. And the only answer I can think of, really, is that the future of the humanities looks less like the modern university and more like secular monasteries, communities of self-selecting individuals who live very strange lives isolated from much of the world, enabling them to teach and research.

This would be a very different vision of humanities scholarship than we’ve seen for a very long time. For one, humanities scholars would be a lot poorer; they wouldn’t be able to rely on state funding nearly as much, if at all. As a consequence, things like academic conferences, where researchers fly across the world to present their papers to each other, might become a thing of the past. It may also require adapting the old Benedictine motto Ora et Labora for these new institutions. Instead of ‘prayer and labor,’ it might be ‘research and labor’—but the point being that labor, meaning the daily work that it takes to sustain a community, might have to be a regular part of these scholars’ days. Benedictines would farm or brew beer to sustain their monastery, because they had to find some way to sustain themselves so they could get back to praying. Maybe future humanities scholars will have to do the same sort of work so they can have the time to read The Republic and write about it.

Above all, scholarship would look a lot less professional. When I was in graduate school, ‘professionalization’ was an important word. We were not only being taught how to teach and do research; we were taught to be members of the profession. This meant going to conferences, in part, but a large part of professionalization was teaching us how to write papers in a narrow, targeted way so that they could be published in quality journals, which would then help us get academic jobs. But this was always a farce. Many of the people I went to graduate school with published in a lot of journals, but they still ended up leaving academia, because there aren’t enough jobs in ‘the profession’ for all of us. And in our drive to publish as quickly as possible, I think our scholarship suffered—we followed trends, tried to write on the smallest of small debates, and we didn’t give ourselves the time to let our ideas simmer. This affects everyone, not just graduate students. Professors are increasingly asked to be more productive, but this productivity is almost always measured by how many articles they publish in high-impact journals. The quality and depth of ideas didn’t matter at all — after all, those are hard to quantify.

Losing the emphasis on professionalization would, I think, be a very good development.

I don’t know if that’s an attractive vision to anyone else. I don’t know if most or even many humanities scholars would think this is plausible or desirable. You lose some of the romanticism of the university, which, despite its pathologies, has trained generations of humanities scholars. But I think it might be a way to keep the humanities alive.

In May, we’re reading The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. Here’s the reading schedule for that book:

• May 4: Chapters 1-4

• May 11: Chapters 5-11

• May 15: Paid Subscriber Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

• May 18: Chapters 12-18

• May 25: Chapters 19-24

• May 29: Chapters 25-29

• May 31: Paid Subscriber Q&A with C. Thi Nguyen, 3 PM Eastern

Notice that the final post is on Friday, May 29. That’s to give us a little more time to finish discussing the book by breaking up that week’s reading and having an additional post. Notice also that we’ll be joined by C. Thi Nguyen on May 31, where you’ll be able to ask him questions about the book directly.

In June, we’ll be reading The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor, and in July, we’ll be reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

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‘What’s magical about games – what’s different from so many art forms – is that in games, you act.’1 Games are, according to Nguyen, a form of art, but where, say, painters use brushes and pigments to create art objects, game designers use rules to create beautiful actions. Every artwork – here Nguyen is drawing from John Dewey – ‘takes some piece of ordinary piece of life and crystallizes it:’

Fiction takes the ordinary act of telling what happened to you and sharpens it—finds unified stories with coherence and meaning. Painting takes the ordinary act of looking and concentrates it. And games take ordinary, day-to-day, practical action – making decisions and doing stuff – and refines it.2

Games do this through the creation of rules that place seemingly arbitrary restrictions on our actions. In fact, it is in the restrictions that we find the joy and beauty of playing games. In the first chapter of this week’s reading, Nguyen gives us a definition of playing games, which is taken from Bernard Suit’s The Grasshopper:

To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to make possible the activity of struggling to overcome them.

So, we have some goal, and we place some restrictions on ourselves as we try to achieve that goal. Consider running a marathon, which is an example Nguyen uses. The goal of a marathon is to get from the start to the finish. There are many ways to reach this goal, but only by getting from start to finish in a particular way can you be said to be running a marathon. You cannot ride a bike or a car; you cannot take a shortcut; you cannot hop on someone’s back and ask them to carry you part of the way. You have to start, run the intended circuit, and reach the finish on your own. It is easy to overlook these restrictions because they are a part of what it means to run a marathon. But the restrictions matter; they make the game what it is.

Nguyen is very fond of rock climbing, as am I, and he uses examples from this world very often. I was always a boulderer; in bouldering, all you do is climb a route (usually a boulder or a gym wall) without any ropes. (You usually aren’t climbing so high that you need ropes to make it safe to fall.) There is a goal: reach the top. And there are restrictions: reach the top without using any equipment. Except, as Nguyen points out, we do use equipment. We use special shoes which force our feet into the optimal shape—the point of this is that it allows us to move our bodies in new and more interesting ways. We use chalk, too, which reduces slippage on certain holds. Everything else is ‘aid.’ You’ll often hear climbers joking about what counts as aid: chalk is aid, feet are aid, being a kid is aid.3 The hokes rely on the background assumption that there are restrictions on what counts as really bouldering.

Reading this portion of the book, I was reminded of why I love climbing so much and why I love games in general. Climbing taught me things about my body, which I had always felt alienated from; before I started to climb, I would have just called myself clumsy, uncoordinated, graceless. What climbing showed me was that these were not fixed states: I could change my relationship to my body, and I could move in beautiful ways. Other games can teach us similar lessons, but about very different parts of ourselves.

And of course, many games have another component: they have scores.

You might have noticed that this section alternates between discussions of games and discussions of metrics. There is a bit of tonal whiplash between these chapters — the games chapters are celebrations and curious explorations, while the metrics chapters are more negative. I think this is a nice bit of structural design on Nguyen’s part, because it makes the reader look at the same issue – mechanical scoring – in two very different ways.

Here’s a question: why do we want metrics? Nguyen gives several answers to this question when he discusses the function of metrics in various spheres of life.

First, metrics seemingly give us transparency. Nguyen uses the example of Charity Navigator to illustrate this point. Charity Navigator uses a simple metric to evaluate charitable organizations: the overhead ratio. I remember when Charity Navigator first entered the scene; it promised to help us find the actually effective charities so we could better direct our charitable giving. The metrics allowed us to ‘look inside’ the operations of charities and figure out which ones did the most good in the world.

But it turns out that their selected metric is not particularly good at measuring success. Sometimes, maybe even often, charities need to spend a lot of money internally in order to do the most good. Explaining why this is can be difficult, because most of us lack the expertise to evaluate individual charities and their expenses. The metrics may give us a transparent view of these organizations, but we lose quite a bit when we view them in this way. Nguyen: ‘Many transparency metrics look good to us outsiders, but only because we have a shallow understanding of the terrain.’4 Nguyen uses many other examples to illustrate the point, including building houses and fighting sex trafficking. And there is another downside to these metrics: ‘[It] will be even worse if the experts are value-captured by the transparency metric.’5

Second, metrics travel well. This is, I think, the strongest allure of metrics. When we agree on one mechanical scoring system, we can easily compare – to keep using this example – charities, and we can provide a way to rank them. Metrics are built to travel from context to context without significant loss of information. This means that you do not have to have a fleshed-out, on-the-ground understanding of a given organization in order to evaluate it.

But this has its problems as well. Qualitative evaluations can be rich and subtle, and they can speak to the particularities of a given situation; quantitative evaluations are by their nature lacking in richness and subtleties, and they do not attend to the specifics of each and every case. If we value the quantified metrics too much, we lose out on an entirely different way of viewing things—and we miss things. We see less. One of the key sentences in the book is found in the discussion of this problem: ‘easy countability automatically wins out over actual importance.’6 Many things that matter – Nguyen mentions the joys of eating fondue with friends – are not so easily quantified, and we can forget that these are real goods as well.

Remember the big question from Part I of our discussion:

Why is it that mechanical scoring systems are, in games, the site of so much joy and fluidity and play? And why, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything?

We have part of our answer now. In games, mechanical scoring systems contribute to the building of fun, interesting experiences because of the complex ways in which scoring systems (along with rules) allow us to shape our desires and enjoy the struggle. But in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, scoring systems lead to value-capture, lead us to ignore that which is not easily quantified, and cause us to miss out on more rich and subtle ways of viewing some domain.

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Here are some of my favorite comments from last week’s discussion.

Mitch draws a connection between Nguyen and Pressly:

I think The Score builds off of The Right to Oblivion in a very interesting and constructive way. To me, it feels like they’re arguing for something very similar, Pressly just describes it in the positive (what is gained or benefits us by accepting oblivion) while Nguyen does in the negative (what is lost or harms us in pursuing precise, quantified information). We gain meaning and fulfillment by resting in the potentiality of oblivion, and we lose something when we obsess over the fixity of precise, quantified knowledge (scoring, gamification).

Of course the books are very different in their objective, but I can’t let go of how similar these descriptions seem to be. Pressly taught us when and how the fixity of knowledge can be harmful. Quantified scoring is one of the most precise and fixed forms of knowledge there is, and we’re already seeing how Nguyen describes scoring systems to abandon many of the nuances and beauties of human activity for the sake of knowledge and consensus. I see the next section discusses agency, another subject highly relevant to Pressly’s book as well, and can’t wait to see if there are more parallels between the two books!

Also, viewed in this way, games could be seen as a relaxed way to sate our desire for exact knowledge in an environment where such activity doesn’t have the same drawbacks of trying to precisely quantify every aspect of our real lives.

Another possible connection (which I don’t think Nguyen explores) is that sense of repose a game can invite you into. I used to think of games as mindless – and there are mindless games! – but isn’t there something beautiful about temporarily letting yourself play?

David gave some examples of perverse scoring systems:

I think his point about convergence is worth discussing. Scoring reduces complex activities to a single number. But this forces everything into a single dimension, which is often a bad thing.

For a long time, I have been resisting the labels “good” or “bad” when applied to matters of taste (e.g. food, beer, etc.), and striving to replace these with “I liked” or “I didn’t like”, realizing that other people have different tastes than I do, and even I have different tastes at different time (profilicity?)

An egregious example of this are in “best restaurant” ratings - whatever could that even mean? - Michelin 3 star vs a local pizzeria - different things for different times, but our societal need to rank things in lists, or apply a star rating, is overwhelming.

It happens with books too. People say this book is bad, when mostly they mean they did not like it. Maybe the plot was full of holes, maybe it didn’t make enough obscure references to other well regarded books, maybe the vocabulary was not sophisticated, or the characters not fleshed out, or even all of the above. But that does not make it bad, just not to a given readers taste. The author almost certainly thought it wasn’t bad.

There was recently a YouTube video by someone saying that current literary fiction was bad because it focused overly on “woke” themes. Pretty controversial. If she had said - I’m not really interested in those themes, rather than the books are bad, it would have been fine. It probably would not have attracted as many views, giving her a lower score, which circles back nicely to our current book.

I’ve complained about this in the case of books for a very long time. If you look at Goodreads, you can answer the question ‘Which book is best?’ by finding the top-rated books (say, with over 1,000 ratings). But that’s not a very interesting question to want to answer; assessing literary quality is much more complicated and subtle. And while I would like to defend some form of realism about aesthetic value (so I do want to say there are some good books and bad books), one thing that is often lost in these discussions is the varying standards of the genres. Dostoevsky is doing something very different from Philip K. Dick; it makes little sense to measure them on the same scale.

Davis left a few comments, but I’ll highlight this one:

Final comment, I promise. I worked at a university that was *very* bad at this. Everything the professors did was based on metrics. And, guess what, they completely *devalued* anything in the humanities. You got points based on how many articles you got published and their Scopus score, as well as for teaching responsibilities and serving on committees, etc. You had to get 16 points each year, which very few people in the humanities side of my department did. The university didn't care if you were working on a long monograph on a topic, they wanted short term results, rated against Scopus. The head of school had to write letters for most faculty each year explaining that, indeed, they *were* doing quality research but humanities research in a niche language (Irish), just doesn't rank as 'impactful' on international databases in the same way STEM and business publications do. It really really turned me off academia (at least at that university). Again, it goes back to my first comment with the metric establishing one manner or way of 'thinking' as better - at the expense of many other things. A colonialism of thought.

Yes, this is one of the major problems with institutional metrics in higher education. Things like studying Irish – were you working for an Irish university? – are going to be seen as less impactful, especially when compared with STEM (and assessed, often, with measures designed for the STEM subjects anyway). It used to be very common for humanities scholars to publish very few articles, for instance, and focus on longer works—broad articles, often resulting in books. That’s becoming less and less common now, as one way to secure tenure is to consistently publish in ‘high-impact’ journals.

And the delightfully named Live From The Tokyo Dome, 2001:

Something consonant with the value capture idea which I have been thinking about for a few years is how the ability to use your imagination to develop desire and wanting is something which has to be trained and used in order for you to be able to do it. I made the acquaintance of a guy just graduating from undergrad and he would constantly be giving mini-presentations on the job market and what he thinks he should maybe be trying to do. We would always ask him, what do you want to do? What do you like? It’s not always a place a job seeker can start from but he was completely frozen in place and unable to try or commit to anything that would limit his horizons. All he could do was contemplate those horizons.

I realized that I actually could not identify with him. I’ve had my share of time locked in stasis due to wanting to keep my options open even if I never made use of any of the options, but I couldn’t relate to not having cultivated love for things. But I also grew up in a very different world. I can remember late nights sitting in my Dad’s work truck while he was on the job site after school playing Dragon Quest III on my Gameboy just idly roaming around the world and imagining different scenarios and stories to overlay on the game screen I was looking at, or reading a strategy guide for a video game I couldn’t afford and looking at the pictures and imagining the world that they dimly indicated and what it must be like. My life had many moments of boredom and wonder as a child and I grew to figure out what I liked. It could at least be the raw material for life later. But what is life like if you have mostly been exposed to things that don’t give you the space to imagine or the time to be unoccupied?

You would end up in a place where value capture would be a euphoric relief, because there was not actually much in the way of subtle values for them to displace. There was actually a gnawing void that you desperately needed to be filled by some form of tyranny which could tell you who you are and what you do. Moments where you might interpose into your own life your own goals and wants are now filled with things telling you how you are doing and what you should be shooting for. It could be an Apple watch or Youtube influencers or porn.

People feel comfortable with “metrics” because the very form of the numbers and lines on flat surfaces to them = authority. But its not their authority, they don’t have to take responsibility for it. They did not make the judgement, it’s merely the numbers, which they don’t understand. But they will use them accordingly. Finally, I can act. Because the numbers told me I can do so. Someone who has knowledge of statistics and probability and understood exactly what these models are modeling and how they are constructed won’t have this relationship to metrics, but those people are very few compared to the number of people who gladly welcome the tyranny of numbers whose true character about which I am ignorant but I know that they are correct and the rule by which I measure. The scariest thing about the value displacement is that a lot of the time people actively want it, because it brings the comfort of the relief of responsibility.

This is very good, and I don’t have much to add. I simply want to flag your usage of ‘develop desire.’ This is an important point: desire is something that is developed over time. If we outsource the hard questions to externally defined metrics, we’re training ourselves to value something new, even if it doesn’t feel like that.

In May, we’re reading The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. Here’s the reading schedule for that book:

• May 4: Chapters 1-4

• May 11: Chapters 5-11

• May 15: Paid Subscriber Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

• May 18: Chapters 12-18

• May 25: Chapters 19-24

• May 29: Chapters 25-29

• May 31: Paid Subscriber Q&A with C. Thi Nguyen, 3 PM Eastern

Notice that the final post is on Friday, May 29. That’s to give us a little more time to finish discussing the book by breaking up that week’s reading and having an additional post. Notice also that we’ll be joined by C. Thi Nguyen on May 31, where you’ll be able to ask him questions about the book directly.

In June, we’ll be reading The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor, and in July, we’ll be reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

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The Score is, very broadly, a book about games and metrics. It is not, however, a book about gamification.

When I interviewed C. Thi Nguyen for The Honest Broker, I asked Nguyen about this, and he told me the origin story of The Score. After publishing his book Games: Agency as Art, Nguyen was often asked what he thought about gamification. The assumption behind these questions, he said, was that as someone who loves games, he would also love gamification—after all, that is just turning more of life into a game. It should be great, right? It should take a bit of drudgery from the ordinary world and, at the very least, make it fun. But this was not Nguyen’s view of gamification at all. You could understand The Score as an extended discussion of how and why gamification goes wrong. This is then extended to discuss the role of metrics in society.

The big question the book asks is found on page 22:

Why is it that mechanical scoring systems are, in games, the site of so much joy and fluidity and play? And why, in the realm of public measures and institutional metrics, do they drain the life out of everything?

Consider a simple game—it can be whatever game you like. It almost certainly has a scoring system of some kind. (Even tag – the children’s game – has a way to keep score: you lose if you’re tagged, you win if you tag someone else.) I like board games, though I don’t get to play them very often these days, and each of these games has a variety of scoring systems: resource points, victory points, cards with certain powers. If you’re playing a game, you are somehow keeping score. And for many of us, this is great fun. If you removed the mechanical scoring system from the game, you might even destroy the fun.

Video games are a good example. A YouTuber, Juniper Dev, made a video about how satisfying it is to see the numbers go up in a good game:

Juniper, I’ll add, is a very thoughtful game design student, and I often watch her videos even if I don’t have any interest in the games she’s discussing.

But mechanical scores aren’t limited to games. Your bank account has one, if you think about it. We’ve also imported mechanical scoring into evaluations of work, teaching, school quality, and even our own health—if you have an Apple Watch, it is keeping score. And these feel different, Nguyen says, in a way that cries out for explanation.

In this week’s readings, we are introduced to some of the basic concepts of the book.

First, we need to understand something about games themselves. Games, Nguyen tells us, do more than just let us have fun:

[Games] tell you what to desire. And we players are fluid enough that we can let those scoring systems shape our desires. We can slip into alternative motivational states like a new set of clothes. We have the ability to start a game, find out what will get us points, and then – for a period of time – care intensely, exactly as we’re told to.

Understood this way, games tell us something interesting about our own minds. Our motivational states – that which we desire, that which drives us to action – are fluid, not fixed. We are able to adopt new motivations depending on the context. Games seem to be just artificial enough that we do so easily, often with very little thought to what is going on in our own minds.

In graduate school, I’d often spend a Saturday playing games with my fellow students. Sometimes we played Dungeons & Dragons – I am usually the DM, and if not, I’m always a dwarf – but we’d play board games too. I remember playing Bohnanza for the first time. It’s a very silly game: you draw cards and try to grow beans, which convert to coins, and whoever has the most coins at the end wins. Yes, it’s silly, but it’s fun, and the first time I played it, I cared intensely about those beans. For a little while, the only thing that mattered to me was growing beans and getting coins. That’s the power of a well-designed game.

I think I lost. Andrew, my friend from the department, had played before, and he probably dominated. Yet, I still had fun. I think this is because I am a striving player, a term that Nguyen defines in Chapter 2:

[Striving players] don’t truly cafe about winning—not cosmically. They care about something else: fun, relaxation, a challenge, the experience of beautiful movement. But to get those cherished experiences, they need to get themselves into the mental state of wanting to win. Their interest in winning, however, is only temporary. The may get themselves to want to win pretty intensely during the game, but they throw away their interest in winning once they finish the game. Their real, lasting purpose lies in the struggle. For striving players, winning is a disposable end.

This is a good description of my own relationship with climbing—another game I don’t have much time for these days. When I would climb on the wall, getting to the top of the problem was only part of the fun. The process was the point, as was the fellowship with my fellow climbers. (You should always climb in a group, because much of the fun comes from resting on the mats and talking about the problem with your friends.) But while on the wall, I had to think about getting to the top, had to want it intensely. If I didn’t, I’d never have a chance of succeeding, but more importantly, I would be robbing myself of the full, rich experience. Yet, when I failed, I could fall to the ground and say, ‘That was great. I’ll try again soon.’

We can contrast striving play with achievement play. For the achievement player, the only thing that matters is winning. I’ve found that achievement players don’t seem to have much fun while playing anything, and they’re likely to decline playing games that they can’t win. They aren’t always the sort of person you invite over for a night of drinking and board games. That’s because the achievement player desires above all a particular result, and if that result isn’t guaranteed – or at least likely – there’s no point to playing.

For the striving player, trying to win is part of the fun. They relish the delicious struggle. For the achievement player, the only thing that matters is the result.

We now have a basic understanding of Nguyen’s theory of games. We can now discuss what I believe is the most important concept in this book: value capture. This is a three-step process, where:

1. Your values are rich and subtle — or developing that way.

2. You enter some social setting that offers you a simplified, often quantified rendition of your values.

3. The simplified version takes over.

There are many examples of value capture that we could discuss—I’d be interested in hearing examples that came to mind while you read The Score. Nguyen briefly mentions ranking systems for philosophy departments. This is something known as the PGR: The Philosophical Gourmet Report. What started as a one-man project to rank philosophy departments, in the way that law schools are ranked, became a large-scale effort to evaluate departments by asking a board of experts to score each department by specialty on a scale from 1-5. The best department is the one with the highest average score. The PGR had huge effects on professional philosophy: I used the PGR to find departments to apply to, and it is always known that the higher PGR departments are (i) more selective in admissions, and (ii) have much better placement rates. (I attended a midlist school, though with higher scores for my chosen specialization, and we had an admission rate of something like 5%. The top schools on the PGR might have admission rates closer to 1%.)

This is value capture. Assessing philosophical quality is a rich and subtle matter: it is context-sensitive, reasonable people can disagree, etc. But the PGR offers a simplified and quantified rendition of those values. Eventually, the rich and subtle values stopped mattering in the minds of many, and what did matter was the PGR score, and in particular, the ranking.

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday; she’s a doctor. I asked what she thought about sleep scores as a medical professional, the sort of scores your Apple Watch might give you. She told me she hates them. What matters is if you wake up feeling rested, not the number on your screen. But even she found that once she started tracking her sleep, she really wanted to get that number up. That’s yet another instance of value capture.

These mechanical scoring systems also produce convergence. Nguyen defines scoring systems on page 55:

A scoring system is a social process that delivers a quantified evaluation, and so enters a singular verdict into some official record.

The phrase ‘singular verdict’ is important. A scoring system is going to tell you who the winners and losers are; there is no room for disagreement. People who are interested in ‘winning’ thus begin to play by the rules of the game—even if this isn’t a game they want to be playing. Scoring systems present themselves as objective, when in fact they are value-laden and project a very particular vision of quality onto the subject.

Mechanical scoring systems offer us a trade-off. We get automatic agreement by using a mechanical evaluation procedure, but there is a price to be paid for that automatic convergence. Mechanical scoring systems will tend to ignore things that are hard and subtle to count. They will tend to change what we score – and what we care about –to what is easy to count mechanically.

Let me use another example drawn from academia. You can measure a scholar’s productivity by counting the number of articles they’ve published in the last year, perhaps weighted by journal quality. This provides an ‘objective’ assessment of the scholar. But let’s ask ourselves a question: is that how we want to measure scholars? Do we want to incentivize more publications or do we want to incentivize better publications? But if we want to incentivize better publications, are we willing to treat it as a rich and subtle value, something that is not easily tracked?

In May, we’re reading The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. Here’s the reading schedule for that book:

• May 4: Chapters 1-4

• May 11: Chapters 5-11

• May 15: Paid Subscriber Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

• May 18: Chapters 12-18

• May 25: Chapters 19-24

• May 29: Chapters 25-29

• May 31: Paid Subscriber Q&A with C. Thi Nguyen, 3 PM Eastern

Notice that the final post is on Friday, May 29. That’s to give us a little more time to finish discussing the book by breaking up that week’s reading and having an additional post. Notice also that we’ll be joined by C. Thi Nguyen on May 31, where you’ll be able to ask him questions about the book directly.

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In our final selection from The Right to Oblivion, we find ourselves discussing Hannah Arendt and what Pressly dubs the ‘production of human depth.’ I believe this to be one of the most interesting, though also most suggestive (rather than straightforwardly argumentative) chapters of the book.

We’ve come a long way together over the past four months, having now read nearly 1,000 pages on the philosophy of technology. In a way, you might think of this as the first arc of the year-long reading group: we started with the suggestive (and even mystical) Byung-Chul Han, moved to Eggers’ The Circle to think about privacy and social media, found the defenders of profilicity in Georg-Moeller & D’Ambrosio, and now read a robust defense of privacy from Lowry, who returns to some of the mystical undertones of Han. While some of the themes will continue with Nguyen, Taylor, etc., this week represents the end of our prolonged discussion about at least one topic: privacy.

Pressly’s central claim is that privacy is valuable because it regularly produces the state of oblivion. This has been characterized in a number of ways throughout the book, and its many goods have been articulated. What I found particularly appealing about Pressly’s view is that oblivion is tied to rest and repose; it offers us a time/place/state of sanctuary in a frenetic world. In this final chapter, Pressly puts forward another claim: that oblivion produces human depth.

It does this in a number of ways. The first lesson is from Pressly’s comparison of oblivion and sleep:

The inability to will ourselves awake, to exercise agency in dreams, or to remember what happens in sleep are some of the most common experiences we have of confronting the limits of our ability to control our lives, to protect and know ourselves…the experience of emerging from sleep…is another type of experience that combines the disintegration of personal identity with the confidence that one’s life is one’s own. 1

In sleep, we confront limits to our agency – I cannot tell myself what to do in my dreams, even when I want to – and so are reminded of our inability to control our lives. In sleep, too, we sometimes forget who we are. Have you had the experience of half-remembering who you are in a dream? I dreamt one night that I was a father with a family, but they weren’t my family, my real wife and real children. Throughout the dream, I felt a sense of dread: something is wrong. But it was only when I was awake that I could make sense of the experience, because only upon awaking was I able to recall who I was. Oblivion is similar for Lowry—in real, genuine oblivion, we forget who we are. I find my thoughts wander freely. I savor moments in bed before falling asleep, when I am half-conscious and letting my mind wander. I think of stories, little lines and words I’d like to include in my writing, but I know that I cannot will myself to write these down—it would ruin the experience. I have to enjoy the experience and hope that I will be able to recall any insights. I think this is an experience of oblivion, because I am totally un-self-conscious; I cannot think of how others might see me, because I cannot think of how I see myself, because I am not thinking of myself. These are experiences had in private, in oblivion, that contribute to the richness and depth of the human person.

The second way that oblivion produces human depth is by being carved off from the public sphere. Pressly’s primary interlocutor here is Hannah Arendt; he is referencing The Human Condition, and you can find notes on that book in the Book Club Archive. Some activities, says Arendt, can only be done in public, and some can only be done in private. Publicity always involves being seen by a diversity of perspectives, and this is one reason why publicity is important—Arendt is in fact a great fan of publicity. (She thinks that one way women were oppressed was in their forced denial of a public life, ‘and in that sense it was as if they didn’t exist.’2) But privacy is not always oppressive; in fact, we need times when we are not seen. The privacy of, say, the home provides the self with shelter, a place where it can develop—this contributes to a rich internal life, of course, but also a richer public life.

The third way that oblivion produces human depth is by encouraging us to round, deep, dynamic characters. A flat character, we say, is one-dimensional, and the character does not change in the course of the story; every story needs a few flat characters, often as grease for the narrative wheels. A round character is more multifaceted. A dynamic character changes over the course of the story. But here is the interesting thing: these characters are not only more complicated, they are also more difficult to write, because these characters contain multitudes; sometimes, it is as if they do not make sense. It is particularly difficult to articulate their personalities. But this difficulty in articulation may in fact be essential to being round, deep, and dynamic.

The goods of oblivion are not merely private; they are also public. The good Pressly focuses on – and I think this is essential to any story about privacy – is trust. A world with privacy is a more trusting world, because less is known, and thus more must be taken on faith or on the testimony of others. Pressly and I had a discussion about this months ago, and I mentioned to him that, without realizing it, I had trusted him a great deal that morning, as he’d brought a backpack into my car. For all I knew, there could be a weapon in the bag—or a vial of poison, or pounds of illegal drugs, or the ferret that Pressly never leaves home without. Notice the key phrase: for all I knew. All of those hypotheticals are consistent with my information state, even if they are implausible. Yet, I took no precautions; I simply trusted Pressly. We don’t even think about these little exercises of trust, as they are part of our day-to-day lives. The privacy of Pressly’s backpack – it was not transparent – meant that I had to trust him. (Imagine if I’d ask to search his bag—he might have gotten out immediately and gone straight to the airport.) And it wasn’t that Pressly was hiding anything from me; his backpack contained no secrets; it was simply a private space.

A world without trust is a world of suspicion: ‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.’ A world without trust is a world that functions less well, as everything becomes an exchange that must be verified and reverified. A world without trust is a world I wouldn’t want to live in—but it is a world we’re heading toward, I would posit, as we abolish privacy.

Thank you, everyone, for joining in the reading of The Right to Oblivion. I hope you’ve gotten something out of it, even if you’ve only read selections or followed our discussions on Substack. I look forward to reading The Score with you next month.

Here are two comments from last week that I want to highlight:

ChristineB.:

This section has me thinking abut the fixity of shame (vs the potential/dynamism of guilt and forgiveness). Human memory affords us the ability to de-prioritize, forget, re-frame past actions that tether us to a self we may have grown past (both about ourselves and others) to the extent that we have "never forget" slogans about certain particularly terrible events so that we don't let the mists of time obscure their severity. But the idea that all of our non-private actions can be stored in a fixed manner and be brought up to constantly hold one to the self of that moment in time seems like a shame environment that would be very harmful to human development and self- discovery. It has made me think more deeply about how and why forgiveness is such a powerful concept, however one believes that it should be implemented.

Walter B.:

Thinking about Funes, one of the tragic results of his condition seems to be that past seems to bombard the present with detail, such that he seems to be paralyzed by memories, so much so that it affects his agency. This makes forgetting important for Borges. (Pressly’s own interpretation is a variant here, though I hope still compatible.)

In this context, I found myself thinking about what it would be like to be a member of a hive mind (like a Borg drone). As depicted in Star Trek, Borg drones are flooded with the thoughts of their fellow drones, which they cannot ignore. When I imagine their phenomology, I suspect that in such a condition of thought spamming, one would lose the ability to tell ones own thoughts from ones fellows, which means losing a sense of “my thoughts”, and thus losing the ability to differentiate ones own deliberation from the cacophany. If Borg Drones were real (ehem, Neuralink?), would they simply have analysis paralysis, too many competing and messy thoughts to maintain agency, like Funes? I wonder if this might be how the mechanism of control also happens. If this condition makes individual action impossible, a stronger overriding thinker, like the aggegrate will of the Hive itself, may effortlessly acquire control. In other words, the lack of personal ability for action is not enforced by the hive mind, but perhaps simply emergent from the non-private condition of thoughts in a hive mind.

In both my reading of Borges and the Borg, an excluding mechanism (forgetting/ignoring) may be a precondition for present/individual agency.

I had Pressly in ‘spotlight’ mode for participants, which apparently means that the recording only picked up his face — so you’re unable to see the faces of those asking questions.

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Here is the reading schedule for The Right to Oblivion:

• April 6: Introduction and Chapter 1

• April 13: Chapters 2 & 3

• April 17: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern (a recording is now available)

• April 20: Chapter 4

• April 26: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

• April 27: Chapter 5 & Postscript

On April 26, we’re in for a real treat: Pressly has agreed to join the Zoom call, which means paid subscribers will be able to engage with the author directly. I’ll send an email out in a few days asking for paid subscribers to submit questions in advance. That way, I can curate some initial questions to get the conversation started. You will still have the option to ask fresh questions to Pressly in the Zoom call.

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Up to this point, our exploration of privacy has taken place in the present tense, so to speak. That one has privacy or is in private means that right now, the living, breathing invidual is enjoying whatever benefits one gets from privacy, be it under the basic description of epistemic barriers, the repose of unaccountability, or the psychological freedom of being untethered….Yet knowledge of ourselves and others is not confined to the present or the future. In fact, most of what we know about anybody, including ourselves, cocnerns the past: living memory and historical records.1

Here Pressly turns away from the present and the future. In ‘Memory and Oblivion,’ Pressly explores a cluster of topics – memory, the right to be forgotten, an ethics against fixity – and takes the concepts we’ve developed in the first three chapters, applying them to the past.

We begin with the story of Ireneo Funes, from Borges’ ‘Funes, The Memorious.’2 (You can read the entire story in the linked PDF. It is about 8 pages long.) Funes is a boy who, having suffered an accident, is now able to remember everything. Though, as Pressly observes, it is not only his memory which is affected—he is able to perceive everything in an excruciating level of detail. Seeing a house, he sees the molding and the joints; seeing a glass of wine, he sees the grapes that produced it. Contrary to the common interpretations of the story – the sort you find in, say, neuroscience literature using it as a literary illustration – Pressly sees the tragedy of the story to reside in two facts.

First, his inability to forget. Funes says that his memory is like a garbage heap. No selection or editing is taking place. The typical human memory is highly imperfect, and we constantly reinterpret the story of our lives; as we reinterpret this story, certain episodes and details take on special significance; other episodes and details are quietly omitted until they are eventually forgotten. Funes is not afford that luxury—the past is rendered exactly as he perceived it. The memories pile up, thus the heap. Second, his precise perception. Funes sees everything, and so he does not ‘take in’ only the important details. This means that many irrelevant details pile upon one another. Thus, the garbage. Funes’ relationship to the past is totally fixed and lacking in ambiguity. So, Pressly would say that Funes does experience oblivion in relation to his past self.

Pressly compares this to the insomniac—insomnia appears several times in ‘Memory and Oblivion,’ and Funes is also said to suffer from insomnia:

Like the insomniac who lies helplessly awake, relentlessly accounting for the missteps he may or may not have made the day before, Funes is unable to detach himself from his and sworld. He cannot, as we put it in a previous chapter, let himself go or get out of his head.

His only relief is to look out into the distance, perceiving new houses – which he has not previously seen – as shadowy boxes, lacking in detail. Then, he is able to sleep and enter into a period of repose.

What does this have to do with the right to be forgotten? For Pressly, I believe the connection is quite simple. Funes is unable to let himself off the hook, and he is always bound by the past. His is the personal case. When we consider the case of K – the unnamed murderer used as an illustration of the right to be forgotten – we see that this is about others letting K off the hook.

K is a murderer, after all. He killed two people in 1982, was arrested and eventually imprisoned, and then was released after serving his sentence. His records were expunged from the internet on the grounds that K had a right to be forgotten.

Pressly has a knack for choosing the hardest cases. In last week’s reading, we focused on a case of harmless voyeurism (or apparently harmless voyeurism, as Pressly argues that there is, in fact, some harm). It made the discussion more interesting – the Friday Zoom call was quite robust – but it makes Pressly’s argument harder to follow. I suspect that some readers are less sympathetic to K, and they believe that we as the public have a right to know about a grave crime like a double homicide.

Consider the phrase ‘the internet never forgets.’ Pressly says that this is a misnomer, because the internet is an archive and so does not remember.3 I suspect he’s missed something about the phrase: when people say ‘the internet,’ they often mean ‘people on the internet’ (and this elision is most common among people on the internet). And I think this phrase is onto something, even if it is literally false. Because of the vast archive that is now easily searchable, some individuals make a sport of dredging up every embarrassing post, story, and image about their targets. Other individuals are held endlessly accountable for, say, edgy (sometimes grossly offensive) things they said when they were still minors. The internet makes this significantly easier. The harm we endure, along with K, is, according to Pressly, the same harm that Funes endures: we are shackled to the past.

Being shackled is bad not only because of how it limits what is possible to do or achieve in one’s life. It also injures in the message it sends to the shackled person that it is futile even to try exceeding the limits of his chain. The shackled person is worse off to the extent that he comes to see the direction of his life as futile as well as constrained.4

This brings us to Pressly’s ‘ethic against fixity.’ When we are overly fixed, we lose autonomy; we no longer control the direction of our lives.5 We become like the branded criminal, always bearing the mark of what we have done before and always being reminded that this is who we really are.

We can think about this in the personal realm, too. I have, of course, done many wrong things—I’d prefer not to list them. I have felt immense guilt in my life. I assume that all of you have as well. But there is something unhealthy, even immoral, in carrying the weight of your past transgressions forever: in doing so, you deny that you are capable of change. Just as we say ‘It’s in the past’ as a way of signifying our forgiveness to others (perhaps casting the event into the realm of oblivion?), we owe it to ourselves to do this as well, certainly once sufficient time and penance have been observed.

Edit: I neglected to include some of the best comments from last week’s discussion.

Most readers of the book have been very enthusiastic. David F.? Not so much. Here are a few of his criticisms:

I guess I am not buying most of this.

First, I think the voyeur example is flawed. Someone does know that Ben’s privacy has been invaded - the reader of the example. And it is the reader who is making the moral judgement, not the characters in the example.

Second, I don’t think you need to construct an elaborate philosophical framework for harm to Ben, it is much more straightforward to think about it in terms of risk. Say I exercise my right to oblivion in the old fashioned way by consuming half a dozen Old Fashioneds at the bar. I then drive safely home. No one is the wiser, but I still have acted wrongly because I have greatly increased others risk of injury, and society judges this unacceptable. As a side note, this allows society’s judgements to change over time, they don’t have to be fixed forever, which seems applicable to privacy.

Risk also sheds light on many of the other examples in the book. When people keep records of things, even if they don’t intend to share them, there is always the possibility of them falling into the wrong hands. It feels wrong to record my neighbor’s comings and goings, even if they are public, because I have created a record that has a risk of being used in some unacceptable way.

I also have a hard time with the “oblivion” concept as separating privacy from information. Only your thoughts have no external information, not your actions. And when considering an act, I believe (have no evidence though) that you are always thinking about how this will be perceived by an “other”. One example is God, which is a bit of a stretch for many of us. A second example would be our future self (which as we all know is pretty different than our current self - think about your teenage years, for example). A third example would be from our last reading, where one “profile” will be observing another “profile”. All of these come into play - you never have privacy from these viewpoints and they are all in your head. As soon as you act, then information is created and we can use the very useful informational privacy framework he outlines on page 96 (reference by note 17 in chapter 3).

I’ll respond to the first point here: I don’t think it is relevant that the reader knows about the violation. Any thought experiment requires the imagining of a situation, and thus the situation is ‘observed’ at least in a metaphorical way. But the fact that we are observing is not, I think, morally relevant.

Unless the objection is more like this: We have bad moral judgments about unknown privacy violations because they are inconceivable. (Try to conceive of an unknown violation — boom, you know about it.) But I think even that is wrong. Since it is Ben who is harmed, and not us, our knowing should still be morally irrelevant.

Lorraine slightly disagreed with my interpretation of Pressly (and I think she’s likely correct), so here’s her correction:

I think Pressley’s point about the harm to Ben is even more subtle; it is not just that he is being deprived of control over his self-presentation (thereby implying that he has a ‘self’ he consciously presents to himself in private) but that his self is being presented at all, as opposed to inhabiting that realm of potentiality and ambiguity.

My own illustrative example: I recently had to leave my house very short notice on a day I had not otherwise planned to; as I was getting my keys and a water bottle and rushing out the door I suddenly became very conscious of my appearance in a way I had not previously been. I think this awareness and (self-) consciousness was the result of leaving the privacy of my home and therefore the realm in which my appearance was fuzzy and unknown to myself, even though my actual physical appearance underwent no change in this time.

I’m conscious that this example relies on my personal awareness of being observed, as opposed to Ben, who is entirely unaware of Foos, but it strikes me that Foos creates a specific reality by witnessing Ben, a reality which by necessity obliterates the reality of privacy. So it is not that Ben is deprived of control over his self-presentation, but also that he is forced to present a self, and therefore to exercise control over it, where previously he would not have.

The distinction, subtle but important, is the difference between the manner and extent to which you are presenting yourself to the world and the question of whether or not you are presenting at all.

Chantal’s comment was quite long, so I’ve cut it in half. It’s worth going to read the rest of it after she introduces her question:

I really appreciated and enjoyed the deep exploration of what privacy is for and why it’s important, even if we aren’t explicitly harmed when it is violated in this week’s reading.

I was really moved by something Pressly wrote on page 76 in chapter 2, where he says, “All of this means that, for human agents, living a life takes persistent effort. You have to keep it up if you would be anyone at all.”

This line, for me, really sums up so much of why I deeply value solitude and privacy. There is so much work to be done to be the kind of person I want to be. It requires a lot of curiosity and learning and trying and failing or succeeding and struggling. Having true privacy, in the sense that there are parts of me I do not know yet and may never know, and having the time and space to let those parts of me flourish and flounder and exist without categorization or packaging for others’ consumption is so precious to me and my well-being.

This week’s reading also made me think a lot about the collision of different types of thinking about privacy. So many people today subscribe to the informational view of privacy and see people’s lives and experiences as essentially collections of information that they decide to share or not share. It can impact the way people see your relationship with them when you decide to keep something private (“Do they not trust me?” “I bet they told XYZ and not me.”) or tend to see keeping something private as a “statement” (“They must believe ABC and be embarrassed about it.”). While I think every relationship involves some negotiating of boundaries around sensitive areas, when you’re doing that with someone who sees everything they don’t know about you as a secret, it can be exhausting and frustrating!

This is something that I think happens to a lot of people on a structural/societal level already (like the mention of Simone Browne’s proposal on page 82 about “privacy [being] among the goods that a racist society unjustly distributes to the detriment of marginalized racial groups.”). I’m thinking specifically of pretty much every trans person I’ve ever known talking about the invasive questions they get about their bodies, their sex lives, their medical history, etc. And in that example, too, something which is for so many people expansive and shifting and unknowable to even ourselves (gender, sexual orientation, etc.) is reduced to pieces of information that others think they deserve access to and sometimes resent as a “secret” if they aren’t given the information.

Which brings me to something I wondered about that I feel like Pressly didn’t explicitly talk about but did kind of touch on, which is whether someone simply looking for a piece of information about you (i.e., a seeker existing), even if it is something we ourselves are oblivious to, turns it into a situation where we are unknowingly hiding something?

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This is not the consensus view, and every so often, people on Substack decide to argue against continental philosophy as a whole. A few examples:

• Bentham’s Bulldog on Judith Butler (and the general argumentation strategy of continental philosophers).

• Noah McKay on why he doesn’t read continental philosophy.

• Bentham’s Bulldog, again, on what continental philosophers cannot explain.

Unfortunately, I think that the arguments in these pieces are deficient—and I think this from the standpoint of an analytic philosopher. If analytic philosophers want to argue that continental philosophy is an inferior discipline or tradition, they will need to find better arguments.

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I’ll get to the specifics of the arguments in just a moment. Let’s first step back and ask ourselves whether this argument is even worth having. There are several reasons to think that it isn’t.

First, the terms are poorly defined. There is certainly something called ‘analytic philosophy’, and many contemporary (mostly Anglophone, but not entirely) philosophers self-consciously place themselves in this tradition. We typically define this historically, placing ourselves in a philosophical lineage with an attending methodology. We cite Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore as two of our founders, especially in their reaction to the idealism of their day. We see Frege as initiating a new paradigm in mathematical logic. We see the emphasis on the logical analysis of language as a core part of our methodology, with roots back to the Vienna Circle. We claim people like Carnap, Quine, and Putnam as part of our tradition.

Yet, the philosophers that fall under the heading of ‘analytic philosophy’ are in fact a heterogeneous group. Especially in the early 20th century, much of analytic philosophy was skeptical of metaphysics; it was quite common to claim that metaphysical talk was nonsense. There were always outliers, but I think it is fair to say that analytic philosophy as a whole became significantly more friendly to metaphysical questions, especially around the mid-20th century. By the early 21st century, we had whole volumes on metametaphysics. We had special issues on grounding, an explanatory (but admittedly mysterious) metaphysical relation. We had papers like ‘On What Grounds What.’ The discipline as a whole became interested in metaphysics again—this was a radical change.

Now, what I am not saying is that by doing metaphysics they were no longer analytic philosophers; I think the recovery of metaphysics was a good thing, for one, but that also would be irrelevant to the point. What I am saying is that within this tradition, there have been large methodological shifts and a changing of norms concerning what counts as good philosophy, or even philosophy at all. And as a good analytic philosopher, the heterogeneity of the work produced by self-described analytic philosophers makes me skeptical that there really is one such thing that is properly picked out by the term ‘analytic philosophy.’ We’re using an imprecise term for a very diverse group of thinkers, and that makes me skeptical of any robust generalizations over the group.

The same can be said for continental philosophy. There is a tradition of sorts, and we can pick out names that are continental as opposed to analytic: Husserl, Heidegger, the Existentialists, Derrida, etc. Yet, just like with analytic philosophy, this is an incredibly diverse group, and so we should be skeptical about generalizations over that group. We might even think – and this is probably the position that I would endorse – that we would be better off dropping labels like ‘analytic’ and ‘continental,’ instead using them (at most) as shorthands for different ways of doing philosophy. That’s less fun, of course, if you’re interested in anti-continental (or anti-analytic) polemics, but philosophy isn’t about having fun; it is presumably about getting at the truth.

That’s the first reason to be suspicious of the whole argument. The terms are so poorly defined that I suspect we aren’t having a substantive argument.

There’s one other reason to be suspicious. Despite the fact that ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ don’t have well-defined referents, the philosophers who place themselves in these traditions don’t tend to read each other. Due to this lack of exposure to each other’s work, I doubt that we can have real arguments about quality. I assume that you need more than a passing familiarity with analytic philosophy to appreciate it or critique it; I assume the same for continental philosophy. If you lack that familiarity, your criticisms are likely to fail, as you haven’t adequately understood your target.

If I want ill-informed polemics about an opposing group, I’ll watch cable news. I could do with less of it in philosophy.

So, let’s turn to some of the specific anti-continental arguments that have been floating around.

First, ’s story about why he stopped reading continental philosophy:

In college, I took a class on continental philosophy. I read all the greats — Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Habermas, Arendt, de Beauvoir, and so on. Their writing was unintelligible to me. More importantly, it was unintelligible in a distinctive way. It was recalcitrantly unintelligible. A text is recalcitrantly unintelligible to someone just in case (i) it is unintelligible to them and (ii) those who claim to understand the text cannot make it intelligible to them.

The argument, as I understand it, is that continental philosophy is recalcitrantly unintelligible and so not worth reading.

This point is picked up by :

Of the people I know who I consider best at philosophy, most share this judgment. So do Chomsky, Kit Fine, Timothy Williamson, John Searle, Michael Huemer, and Carnap. In fact, rather mysteriously, there seems to be very little correlation (and perhaps even an inverse one) between philosophical competence and appreciation of continental philosophy. While many of the most eminent and brilliant philosophers in the world can’t make heads or tails of Heidegger, a sizeable portion of undergraduates claim to be able to. Maybe you deny that undergraduates can understand continental texts, but if so, then presumably you shouldn’t favor teaching them to undergraduates?

McKay’s point – he says this in his original piece – is that these works seemed recalcitrantly unintelligible to him, and so he stopped reading. Fair enough. McKay admits it’s a confession, not a real argument. Bentham’s Bulldog is making a different argument. He is identifying experts in the field of philosophy and relying on their testimony to inform his view.

However, there is a severe problem with this argument. Namely, the judgment of Fine, Searle, Carnap, etc. is not representative of the field. I made this point in a comment on BB’s post. I’ll simply copy what I wrote:

Second, the appeal to Williamson, Huemer, Carnap, etc. is fairly easily countered, isn't it? Robert Brandom, one of the most interesting living philosophers in the analytic tradition, has devoted extensive time and energy to interpreting Hegel. John McDowell, too. Paul Guyer takes Schelling seriously enough to include him in his recent book on Kant's impact on moral philosophy. Rawls lectured on Hegel numerous times. If we're relying on the testimony of others to determine if an entire tradition is worth reading, shouldn't we look at the testimony of those who are also analytic philosophers and have substantively engaged with the material?

My point is that within analytic philosophy, there are experts who do not share the judgment that continental philosophy is unintelligible (or nonsubstantive—for now, I’m treating these as synonymous). Robert Brandom is clearly an analytic philosopher; he happens to be an analytic philosopher whom I respect a great deal. His most recent book is a prolonged interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. (Admittedly, Hegel is not on McKay’s list, and he’s too early to be a ‘continental philosopher’ given that he was a 19th-century idealist, but the anti-Hegel polemics take the same form as the anti-Heidegger polemics.) Michael Dummett, one of the great analytic philosophers of the mid-20th century, wrote a book on the similarities between Frege and Husserl. Hubert Dreyfus studied under Quine at Harvard and went on to become a leading Anglophone interpreter of Heidegger’s Being & Time. These philosophers – all analytics, I would say, though you could make an argument about Dreyfus – certainly believed that there was something substantive in these works.

And there’s a key difference between their judgment and the judgment of, say, Kit Fine: they’ve studied the material.1 I would say that their engagement with the material in fact makes them the actual experts. And if we are relying on expert testimony as evidence for or against the intelligibility of continental philosophy, we should identify the actual experts—again, those who have studied the material and written well on it.

So, it is not only a case of disagreement amongst experts. It’s a case of a better-informed group of specialist experts disagreeing with the worse-informed generalist experts. I think it’s more epistemically responsible to defer to the specialists, absent other considerations.

And here’s the response I expect: I can read these texts for myself, and I can tell they are nonsense. So, it is helpful to look at some of the specific philosophers named in these pieces to see if they are, in fact, nonsense. But how do we do this? I can’t go over every single piece of writing from each of these philosophers. So, let’s pick a few and then look at some random samples.

First, from Hannah Arendt:

Descartes’ philosophy is haunted by two nightmares which in a sense became the nightmares of the whole modern age, not because this age was so deeply influenced by Cartesian philosophy, but because their emergence was almost inescapable once the true implications of the modern world view were understood. These nightmares are very simple and very well known. In the one, reality, the reality of the world as well as of human life, is doubted; if neither the senses nor common sense nor reason can be trusted, then it may well be that all that we take for reality is only a dream. The other concerns the general human condition as it was revealed by the new discoveries and the impossibility for man to trust his senses and his reason; under these circumstances it seems, indeed, much more likely that an evil spirit, a Dieu trompeur, wilfully and spitefully betrays man than that God is the ruler of the universe. The consummate devilry of this evil spirit would consist in having created a creature which harbors a notion of truth only to bestow on it such other faculties that it will never be able to reach any truth, never be able to be certain of anything.

I chose this passage by looking at my PDF of The Human Condition, scrolling to a random page, and copying the first full paragraph on that page.

Now, is this nonsense? I can understand it. I would assume that most competent readers can. (It has a literary flourish that may be unappealing to some, but style does not equal nonsense!) Arendt seems to be saying that there are two negative (emotionally speaking, thus the word ‘nightmare’) consequences of Descartes’ philosophy. First, the introduction of radical skepticism and the idea that our knowledge of the world might be ultimately unfounded. Second, that in fact we are ruled over by an evil God who gives us an illusion of knowledge, when in fact we can know nothing. In other words, Arendt is articulating the emotional human response to the unsettling possibility of radical skepticism. And to boot: I think she’s right! Skepticism is highly unsettling!

Let’s look at Husserl. This is from Cartesian Meditations:

It becomes evident that, as intentional, the analysis of consciousness is totally different from analysis in the usual andnatural sense. Conscious life, as we said once before, is not just a whole made up of "data" of consciousness and therefore "analyzable" (in an extremely broad sense, divisible) merelyinto its selfsufficient and non-selfsufficient elements the formsof unity (the "form-qualities") being included then among the non-selfsufficient elements. To be sure, when regard is directed to certain themes, intentional "analysis" does lead also to suchdivisions, and to that extent the word can still serve in the original sense; but everywhere its peculiar attainment (as "intentional") is an uncovering of the potentialities "implicit" in actualities of consciousness an uncovering that brings about, on the noematic side, an / "explication" or "unfolding", a "becoming distinct" and perhaps a "clearing" of what is consciously meant (the objective sense) and, correlatively, an explication of the potential intentional processes themselves. Intentional analysis is guided by the fundamental cognition that, as a consciousness, every cogito is indeed (in the broadest sense) a meaning of its meant [Meinung seines Gemeinten], but that, at any moment,this something meant [dieses Vermeinte] is more somethingmeant with something more than what is meant at that moment "explicitly".

I will admit here that this is not an easy passage. (This is how you know I’m being honest: if I wanted to make my case stronger, I’d choose an easier passage from Husserl.) Yet, I believe I can grasp the basics of it. I can at least grasp that Husserl is trying to offer an analysis of what makes intentional mental states so peculiar. Do I understand what he means when he says, for instance, ‘on the noematic side’? No. But I suspect this is due to the fact that I do not have an adequate grasp of phenomenology. I believe this is analogous to an expert mathematician not being able to make sense of a proof in, say, category theory: it looks unintelligible because I do not yet have an adequate grasp on the theoretical vocabulary.

And now Sartre, from Existentialism is a Humanism:

And when we speak of “abandonment” – a favorite word of Heidegger – we only mean to say that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain type of secular moralism which seeks to suppress God at the least possible expense. Towards 1880, when the French professors endeavoured to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis, so we will do without it. However, if we are to have morality, a society and a law-abiding world, it is essential that certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an a priori existence ascribed to them. It must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest, not to lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth; so we are going to do a little work on this subject, which will enable us to show that these values exist all the same, inscribed in an intelligible heaven although, of course, there is no God. In other words – and this is, I believe, the purport of all that we in France call radicalism – nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself. The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven.

No special jargon, nothing particularly unintelligible. It helps if you know a little about Nietzsche on the death of God, I suppose, but I think any undergraduate can read and understand it.

Finally, from Heidegger’s Being & Time:

The primary signification of"assertion" is "pointing out" [Aufzeigen]. In this we adhere to the primordial meaning of [greek that my copy-and-paste keeps rendering as nonsense] -letting an entity be seen from itself. In the assertion 'The hammer is too heavy', what is discovered for sight is not a 'meaning', but an entity in the way that it is ready-to-hand. Even if this entity is not close enough to be grasped and 'seen', the pointing-out has in view the entity itself and not, let us say, a mere "representation'' [Vorstellung] of it-neither something 'merely represented' nor the psychical condition in which the person who makes the assertion "represents" it.

If you look to the surrounding context of this passage, you’ll see that Heidegger is giving an analysis of three different significances of assertion—dangerously close to what an ordinary language philosopher might have done. I take him to be analyzing what we in the analytic tradition might have called the pragmatics of an assertion like ‘The hammer is too heavy’, or of its practical significance. In saying that the hammer is too heavy, we are not merely representing the hammer as having a certain quality, but also remarking on its state of being read-to-hand. You might not like Heidegger’s analysis, you may even think it is bad, but I do not think you can call this nonsense.

There is another response to this which I anticipate: OK, so you’ve established (let’s grant) that Arendt, Husserl, Sartre, and perhaps Heidegger aren’t nonsense. But what about the others?

My response: You are using these philosophers – along with a grab bag of others – to make a general claim about continental philosophy. I don’t need to defend every particular continental philosopher to argue against the claim. I’ve provided three instances where the generalization fails. Maybe Derrida’s nonsense—but that’s a specific argument, and one that is better defined, and one that we can have if we find ourselves disagreeing.2

And that, I think, is the real moral of this whole dust-up. These terms – ‘analytic,’ ‘continental’– are silly and unfitting for serious philosophy. They should be confined to the dustheap of discourse. If you want to argue that a particular philosopher is nonsense, or vapid, or whatever, that’s fine and good—but you earn the right to levy that criticism by attending to the particulars of that philosopher, not by arguing about a poorly defined group.

Here is the reading schedule for The Right to Oblivion:

• April 6: Introduction and Chapter 1

• April 13: Chapters 2 & 3

• April 17: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

  • I plan to use this to discuss Chapters 1-3 of The Right to Oblivion as well as ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ by James Tiptree Jr.

• April 20: Chapter 4

• April 26: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

• April 27: Chapter 5 & Postscript

On April 26, we’re in for a real treat: Pressly has agreed to join the Zoom call, which means paid subscribers will be able to engage with the author directly.

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Pressly’s focus in Chapter 2 is on identifying the harm of privacy violations. This already may have you confused, or a little bit skeptical, because if you think about the right to privacy, you don’t necessarily think about its harmful effects; in other words, you might be thinking more deontologically than consequentially about the matter. We can note this and still try to make sense of what Pressly is up to in this chapter, though I think it is helpful to keep in mind that Pressly has something like the following as an assumption:

If an action A is wrong to perform on person P, then A harms P in some way.

We could even call this the harm principle. Pressly also gives us a definition of harm (pg. 61):

A person is harmed, I assume, when something happens to them that injures, thwarts, or interferes with some interest, understood as a general component of human well-being.

Slightly earlier in the chapter, we get a brief defense of this idea: liberal societies typically do not want to prohibit harmless behavior, and ‘it is always a short step from a judgment of harmlessness to “no harm, no foul”’ (pg. 60).

All of that is to say that we need some account for why privacy violations are harmful. Pressly begins the chapter by drawing on a story from Gay Talese’s The Voyeur’s Motel.

He calls this story Voyeur:

Ben is a traveling salesman far from home who stops in at the Manor House Motel to spend the night. He rents one of the rooms where, unknown to him, Gerald Goos has installed an aperture for observing unsuspected lodgers. Over the course of the evening, Foos sees Ben watch television, adjust his clothes in the mirror, and read a book. At some point, Ben goes into the bathroom and reemerges dressed in the sweatpants and t-shirt that he wears to bed and, in the morning, that he will also wear to the breakfast buffet. Foos is a simple voyeur and a total stranger to Ben. He never learns more about Ben than what he observes through the hole, and he never tells anyone what he saw. Ben never finds out about Foos’s spying. Sometime later Foos forgets about Ben, and shortly thereafter takes the knowledge of his voyeurism to the grave.

This is a strange and difficult case, because:

1. We have a sense that Ben’s privacy really is violated, and so he was harmed in some way. Foos did something wrong.

2. Foos is a voyeur, but he is as close to an ‘innocent’ voyeur as you could imagine. He does not seem to derive unwanted or untoward sexual pleasure from observing Ben, for instance. He also does not record Ben. He does not observe Ben doing anything Ben would not have done in public—in fact, many of the activities he observes, Ben will perform in public gladly.

3. So, we do not know what the particular harm is.

I think Pressly is right that standard informational views about privacy – the sorts of views that liken privacy to hiding (see Chapter 3) – cannot explain Foos’s wrongdoing. The information gleaned by Foos is not being concealed, except by the closed door, and Ben (we can suppose) is not actively embarrassed by anything he’s done. (I think it is good that Pressly doesn’t consider a case of, say, sexual intercourse, where we might have more explicit beliefs about not wanting to be observed.) And since Ben never learns of Foos’ voyeurism, he is not harmed by the mental anguish that comes from finding out that you’ve been spied on.

That’s the puzzle: what is the harm of having your privacy violated, especially if no one does anything untoward with the information and you never find out about it?

Here is Pressly’s answer:

Foos harms Ben not simply forming a part of his biographical dimension, but by depriving him of a degree of possibility in that dimension that would have existed but for Foos’ spying.

The harm in Voyeur is a harm of deprivation. I would say – and I think Pressly would agree – that what Ben is deprived of in this scenario is a degree of control over his self-presentation, the presentation he wants to make to the world, which will form the image others have of him.

Here’s an illustrative example from my own life. From a very young age, I have hated sweatpants. I will not wear them in public. If I wear a pair of sweatpants in public, like when I wore them as a child when my mother used to dress me, I think that others must be thinking of me in a particular way: I’m a slob, I’ve just rolled out of bed, etc. This may or may not be a rational belief, but it is a prejudice of mine that I can’t shake. (And what’s weirder: I don’t form these views about others. I don’t think anybody looks good in sweatpants, but I don’t care if you wear them to the grocery store.) But I own a pair of sweatpants that I sometimes wear around the house while doing chores. In public, I get to choose how I present myself. In private, I don’t have to worry about it. If someone were to spy on me, they’d see me in sweatpants, and this deprives me of some control over my self-presentation.

More fundamentally, in privacy, we have areas of our lives where we can be unaccountable (pg. 72). When Foos deprives Ben of his privacy, Ben is suddenly accountable for his actions, even if he does not know it. If he were to do something embarrassing or mildly transgressive, someone would know about it and could hold him to account. But we require places in our lives where we are not held to account. Pressly later calls these places of repose or rest: in other words, places where you can set aside your ordinary cares. This reminds me of many scenes in Eggers’ The Circle, especially when Mae becomes obsessed over what she eats, what she watches, what she says. She has no time or place to rest. She is always on exhibition, always being held to account.

From there, Pressly turns toward the related topics of attention and hiding. It’s an interesting move, because I’m interested in both attention and privacy, but I haven’t quite been able to make a strong conceptual connection between them.

Pressly sees an analogous relationship between solitude/loneliness and privacy/hiding: ‘the degradation of solitude into loneliness is… analogous to the degradation of privacy into hiding.’ Solitude degrades into loneliness, he says, because of constant connectivity—we’re never really alone with our thoughts and our selves. So, we’re left with a poorer experience: the experience of loneliness. Similarly, due to the prevalence of informational views of privacy, we degrade privacy and think of it as a kind of hiding. We’re always concealing.

The link between hiding, concealment, and privacy is easy to find in the literature. Pressly gives us several schematic definitions of hiding. You’ll also see it in Nagel’s writing, where he stresses the need for concealment in our social lives. But all of these presume the existence of information that is being concealed, and we have to recall that Pressly is largely interested in the realm of ambiguity and non-fixity, where there is no information as such.

We also see a connection to some of our other topics of interest around pages 106-7, where Pressly asks us to imagine a girl in her room, alone. He asks if she has any privacy. He says that if she does, it is in a degraded sense, because her ‘attention is oriented toward publics in a way that resembles the tether of hiding more than before.’ And this, I think, is a very interesting thought—also calling to mind our recent discussion of You and Your Profile. We could borrow some of Moeller & D’Ambrosio’s terminology here: even while alone, is the girl performing profilicity?

We had some great conversations in last week’s comments section. Here are a few particularly insightful comments.

From Anastasia:

This comports with my experience. I'm largely not on social media. Sometimes it feels like my ability to grow and change is directly correlated with how "hidden" of a life I am leading. The periods of greatest change often feel ambiguous while they are ongoing. If we were forced to publicly explain each of these, growth would be stunted. Undefined, unhistoric acts make up a life. This feels like freedom.

Though now, we met not say ‘hidden,’ in light of Chapter 3?

Miguel asks a question about fluidity (and notes a connection/inversion of Han):

How should we regard our attempts to fix or capture the fluidity of our own oblivion? I’m thinking of journals, diaries, perhaps even self photographs. It seems ridiculous to call these invasions of (our own) privacy. (I suppose “invasion” implies *someone else* is violating our right). In fact, it seems like some of these acts may be part of the exploration of that potentiality Pressly talks about. And yet, we are creating information of sorts when we “record” ourselves. I wonder if anything is lost or changed by this, and if there should be some piece of oblivion that’s off limits even to ourselves.

And one observation: I found it interesting that this book reverses, in a way, the fixed vs fluid dichotomy that we saw in Han’s Non-things (of course, they are talking about different matters). For Han, information is almost a synonym for instability while “things” were grounding and stable. For Pressly, information actually fixes what’s ambiguous and fluid about us.

This was part of my response:

I know that some people treat journals are records of events or as a way to make memories more concrete. In my own journaling, it tends to be more dynamic: I don't revisit old journals very often, and I expect if I did I would find myself surprised by what I used to think. Each entry is an opportunity to start a new inquiry into myself.

But perhaps I am the oddball?

From Patrick:

I love the counterintuitive angle of a philosopher who argues against knowledge and interpretability. Pressly acknowledges this in the book’s opening pages.

We tend to be so fiercely oriented towards the idea that everything ought to be known, that all possible information should be gathered—that privacy is, in some sense, theft. As I read it, this is implicitly one of the biggest questions The Circle asks readers to confront: the reader senses that the idea of going ‘transparent’ is somehow wrong, but it’s a challenge to articulate exactly which human value is being betrayed here. Pressly’s book seems to be an admirable attempt to answer just that question.

The idea that there is a positive value in not-knowing, in non-interpretability, which ought to be defended strikes me as a healthy corrective to all the mania for information, discovery, and transparency.

It is counterintuitive, and I would also say remarkably generative. I’ve been thinking more and more about various aspects of our lives where it is better to not now —not just inconvenient truths that make us uncomfortable, but areas of life that are best left unexamined or only partially examined, because the observation affects the observed and the observer alike.