Algorithmic individuation and subjects cannot replicate humanity, policymaking solves the link and doesn’t trade off with sociality.

Increasingly, “power” grasps the subjects of algorithmic governmentality no longer through their physical body, nor through their moral conscience – the traditional holds of power in its legal discursive form [13] [13] As well as its disciplinary form – to use Foucauldian models of… – but through multiple “profiles” assigned to them, often automatically, based on digital traces of their existence and their everyday journeys. Algorithmic governmentality is quite close to what Foucault already had in mind with his concept of security apparatuses: 14The fact of power having a digital rather than a physical “grasp” in no way means that individuals are ontologically and existentially reducible to networks of data that can be recombined by apparatuses, nor that they are totally under the grip of these apparatuses. It simply means that, irrespective of their capacity for understanding, willpower and expression, “power” approaches them no longer on the basis of these capacities, but rather on that of their “profiles” (as a potential fraudster, a consumer, a potential terrorist, a student with high potential, etc.). Algorithmic governmentality further exacerbates the ambivalences of the time regarding the question of individualization. Our era is often considered as that of the victory of the individual, in the sense that an individualization of services is observed, due to the possibility afforded by statistical practices to closely target the needs and dangers specific to each individual. At the same time, it is also seen as an era in which individuals are jeopardized, as their intimacy, privacy, autonomy and self-determination are threatened by those very practices. Some even write about the risks of pure desubjectification. Both hypotheses – that of the individual at the centre of everything, and that of desubjectification – are, in our opinion, equally wrong. Let us see why. Is personalization really a form of individuation? 15IBM presents “individualized” marketing – “smart marketing” – as a revolution that is turning marketing and advertising into “consumer-oriented services”, sounding the great return of the customer-king who, placed at the heart of companies’ concerns, no longer has to even conceive of or express his or her desires, which are commands. In the words of Éric Schmidt, the CEO of Google: “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are [in other words we know your ‘school of fish’] the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them” (in other words a seemingly individualized prediction would be possible). In fact, this form of individualization resembles more of a hyper-segmentation and a hyper-plasticity of commercial offers than comprehensive consideration of the needs and desires specific to each person. In fact the aim is of course precisely not so much to tailor the offer to individuals’ spontaneous desires (assuming such a thing exists), as to adapt those desires to the offer by tailoring sales strategies (the way of presenting the product, of pricing it, etc.) to each person’s profile. Thus, “dynamic pricing” strategies or the adaptation of certain goods’ or services’ price to each potential customer’s “willingness to pay” appear to already be in place on certain airline ticket sales websites. This is not only about individualization: it is indeed market segmentation. Here is a rather trivial example: you go onto the website of an airline whose name we shall not mention (call it Company Y) and find out about the price of a flight to Pisa from Brussels, leaving in three days. Say that the price shown is €180. As this is a bit too expensive for you, you go onto another company’s website (Company Z), or you look elsewhere online, to find a cheaper ticket. Suppose that you do not find better. You return to Company Y’s website and – surprise surprise – you realise that the ticket price has increased by €50 within less than half an hour, just the time for you to do your research. This is simply because you have been attributed a “captive traveller” profile: based on your online browsing and your desired departure date, the website has detected that you really need this airplane ticket and that you will therefore be prepared to spend an extra €50 to get it, especially since you will have the impression that if you do not hurry up to buy it, the price will only increase. If, instead of reacting “logically” and buying the ticket as fast as possible, you change computer and IP address and visit the airline’s website once again, your ticket will cost you €180 instead of €230. Why? Because the vendor relies on your first reflex being to buy as soon as possible following the “alert” raised: the price is increasing, and fast. In this case, the consequences are relatively trivial. But this example clearly shows how, rather than scrupulously respecting each singular consumer’s individual desires, the approach automatically detects certain (purchase) propensities and the (in)elasticity of individual demand regarding a price variation to trigger a purchase. The latter will then be based on a reflex response to an alert stimulus short-circuiting individual reflexivity and the formation of singular desire. 16The aim is therefore to prompt individuals to act without forming or formulating a desire. Algorithmic governance thus seems to signal the culmination of a dispersal of the spatial, temporal and linguistic conditions of subjectification and individuation. These are being replaced by objective, operational regulation of possible behaviours, based on “raw data” that carry no meaning on their own and whose statistical processing is primarily designed to accelerate flows – avoiding any form of “detour” or subjective “reflexive suspension” between “stimuli” and their “reflex responses”. The fact that what thus “flows” is a-signifying is of no importance [14] Because digital signals “can be computed quantitatively irrespective of their possible meaning” (Eco, 1976: 20 cited by Genosko, 2008), everything happens as though meaning were no longer absolutely necessary, as though the universe were already – independently of any interpretation – saturated with meaning, as though it were therefore no longer necessary for people to connect to one another through meaningful language, nor through any symbolic, institutional or conventional transcription. It consequently seems that the apparatuses of algorithmic governmentality consecrated both signifiers’ emancipation from the signified (quantification, algorithmic recombinations of profiles) and the substitution of signifiers with the signified (production of reality within the world itself – the only reality that “counts” for algorithmic governmentality is digital reality) (Rouvroy, 2013b). This assignation of human action to a preconscious stage has everything to do with what Bernard Stiegler calls proletarianization: 17 “Historically, proletarianization was the loss of workers’ knowledge to machines, which absorbed this knowledge. Today, proletarianization is the standardization of behaviours through marketing and services, and the mechanization of minds through the externalization of knowledge in systems, such that these ‘minds’ no longer know anything about these information processing devices, of which they merely set the parameters. This is precisely what the electronic mathematization of financial decision making shows, and it affects everyone: employers, doctors, designers, intellectuals, leaders. More and more engineers take part in technical processes whose functioning they know nothing about, but which are ruining the world”. (Stiegler, 2011) 18Maurizio Lazzarato sums up quite well how a-signifying semiotics, exemplified by digital behaviourism, produce machinic enslavement rather than subjective alienation: 19 “If signifying semiotics have a function of subjective alienation, of ‘social subjection’, a-signifying semiotics have one of ‘machinic enslavement’. A-signifying semiotics synchronize and modulate the pre-individual and pre-verbal elements of subjectivity by causing the affects, perceptions, emotions, etc. to function like component parts, like the elements in a machine (machinic enslavement). We can all function like the input/output elements in semiotic machines, like simple television or Internet relays that facilitate or block the transmission of information, communication or affects. Unlike signifying semiotics, a-signifying semiotics recognize neither persons, nor roles, nor subjects. […] In the first case, the system speaks and generates speech; it indexes and folds the multiplicity of pre-signifying and symbolic semiotics over language, over linguistic chains, by giving priority to its representative functions. In the second case, however, the system does not generate discourse: it does not speak but it functions, setting things in motion by connecting directly to the ‘nervous system, the brain, the memory, etc.’ and activat[ing] the affective, transitivist, transindividual relations that are difficult to attribute to a subject, an individual, a me.” (Lazzarato, 2006) The paradoxes of personalization: an algorithmic governmentality without subjects but compatible with contemporary hyper-subjectification phenomena 20However “impressive” it may be, the hypothesis of desubjectification, of “the jeopardization of the individual”, of the individual diluted in networks, is in no way self-evident. One could even say that social networks and so on produce “hyper-subjects” – probably because for their users, they are full of signifying semiotics –, that many people have become obsessed with producing subjectivity, and that it has even become some individuals’ reason to live. It therefore seems too simplistic to us just to claim that the transformations underway produce desubjectification only, on the grounds that they weaken the bastions of intimacy (even this is debatable: certain devices in the information society, on the contrary, reinforce individuals’ isolation, sparing them from interacting with others…) and of privacy, and that they perhaps affect the conditions of autonomy and free choice (how this happens remains to be seen: intelligent environments sparing us from constantly having to make choices in perfectly trivial areas of life can also free our minds, make us available for more interesting intellectual tasks, make us more altruistic, etc.). Yet laws protecting privacy and personal data, essentially motivated by risks of personal, private or sensitive information being revealed, of inappropriate disclosures, of individuals losing control over “their” profiles and of infringements of the principles of individual autonomy and self-determination, have focused on erecting a series of essentially defensive and restrictive “barriers” around the individual. 21Without considering this as pointless, we would like to strongly emphasize this “algorithmic governance’s” indifference to individuals, insofar as it simply focuses on and controls our “statistical doubles”, in other words combinations of correlations, produced automatically and using big data, themselves constituted or collected “by default”. In short, what we are, “roughly”, to use Éric Schmidt’s term, is precisely no longer ourselves (singular beings) in any way. And that is precisely the problem, a problem which as we shall see is more the result of a rarefaction of subjectification processes and opportunities, of a difficulty to become subjects, than the product of a “de-subjectification” or jeopardization of the individual. With this in mind, let us return to the question of the subject, or rather of “avoidance” of the subject in the three-stage normative process described above. The first thing to point out is the difficulty to produce algorithmic subjects who conceive of or think about themselves as such. First of all, as we have seen, the subject’s consent is weak when they share information (these data can often be used while still remaining anonymous, but this could just as well no longer be the case, as the meaning of their anonymity has become relative). That is not to say that this information is “stolen”, which would allow the subject to oppose it, to stand as a subject resisting such theft. Rather, we are witnessing a considerable decline in the “deliberate” nature of information disclosures – most of the time trivial, insignificant, segmented and decontextualized information –, of these “traces” whose subsequent trajectory and uses, for the “subject”, are unpredictable and uncontrollable, even if significant research investment is currently going into developing technical tools to allow computer service “users” to better control “their” data. Second, in terms of its processing, the main characteristic of the “knowledge” produced is that it appears to emerge directly from big data, without the hypothesis leading to this knowledge being pre-existent: the hypotheses themselves are “generated” from the data. Finally, the normative action deriving from these statistical processes will always be closer to action on / and therefore by the environment than to action on the individual themselves. The latter’s action no longer arises in direct confrontation with an external norm – law, average, definition of normality –; their realm of possibilities is directly organized within their environment. 23For these three reasons, we argue that both the force and the danger of the generalization of the statistical practices that we are witnessing lies not in these practices’ individual nature, but on the contrary in their autonomy or even their indifference to the individual. To put this as clearly as possible, our problem is not being stripped of what we considered as our own, or being forced to give up information that would violate our privacy or our freedom. Far more fundamentally, it stems from the fact that our statistical doubles are too detached from us, that we have no “relationship” with them, when at the same time contemporary normative actions are directed towards these statistical doubles in order to be effective. The confessional constructs the subject of the introspection which probes his/her soul, virtue, desires and deepest intentions, for through the process of confession “he who speaks promises to be what he affirms himself to be, precisely because he is just that” (Foucault, 2014: 16); the law produces subjects of law intent on their equality and the impartiality of procedures; and the average man once seemed too average compared to the singular subject likely to contradict this average. Algorithmic governance, however, neither produces nor provides an affordance for any active, consistent and reflexive statistical subject likely to lend it legitimacy or resist it [15] [15] Our analysis claims a more nuanced stance regarding the trends…. That is precisely what we must now be attentive to, essentially through knowledge (even technical) and recognition of the discrepancy, the difference between these statistical representations and what constitutes individuals in their individuation processes, with the moments of spontaneity, the events and the sidesteps from possibilities anticipated that prevail in these processes.