Living Under the Influence Behaviourism and the Hidden Costs of Intervening in Human Complexity
In this imagined self-writing ‘wikiverse’, the semi-centralised deliberative processes which have accompanied most versions of democracy throughout the ages, are replaced by a form of decentralised blind auction. Sunstein, also a noted behavioural economist, believes the insights from cognitive psychology give sound reason not only to doubt human judgement, and therefore the usefulness of traditional deliberation, but to engender intervention by benign controllers to shape it. Infotopia engages with economic and information theory to propose a superior methodology for knowledge formation and resource allocation in society.
One might look back on Infotopia, from the vantage point of 2022 and the last five years, with a sense of vertigo. Much similar sentiment, particularly when espoused by Silicon Valley CEOs and not Harvard Professors, has in more recent times been derided as myopic nonsense.2
It’s unlikely Mark Zuckerberg will ever stand on stage again to pronounce his company’s committed belief in ‘connecting people’ without fearing instantaneous derision, and Facebook’s viability going forward is increasingly in question.3 As the authors of Your Computer Is on Fire4 make clear, the two decades or so of wide-eyed naivety about the digital age are fully over.
Referring to this goal of ‘the healthy aggregation of information’, Sunstein flagged the downside risks. He foresaw that all this connectivity may simply amplify, not dispel, errors. His ‘information cocoons’ would
