Conference Agenda

…we are at least beginning to discover that there was a concealed catch in the original promise. The scientific ideology that made possible these colossal benefits, we now find, cannot be easily attached to other valid and purposeful human ends. In order to enjoy all these abundant goods, one must strictly conform to the dominant system, faithfully consuming all that it produces, meekly accepting its quantitative scale of values, never once demanding the most essential of all human goods, an ever more meaningful life, for that is precisely what automation, by its very nature and on its own strict premises, is utterly impotent to produce.

—Lewis Mumford (1964, p. 263)

In countless tiny creative actions, we remake our world in the name of a narrow conception of progress. The cumulative effect of these choices is a world where our behaviors are increasingly predicted, controlled, and optimized. We continue to fail, as a culture, to take seriously the claim that we eliminate valuable aspects of our experience in this accelerating process of rationalization.

I call this view “efficiency fundamentalism” and I outline several of its symptoms here. Representing a recent mutation of the Californian Ideology, efficiency fundamentalism is on full display especially in Silicon Valley (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996). I draw upon several examples of emerging technologies that demonstrate this trend from there, including autonomous vehicles, the “Soylent” food substitute, Amazon’s fulfillment warehouses, online education, and the “life hacking” and “quantified self” movements. The observation has been made before that there exists a myopic obsession with efficiency, especially at the frontiers of technological development. But Silicon Valley in particular indulges this fetish with a new, unbridled extravagance.

Efficiency fundamentalism is characterized by: (1) the reverence for efficiency and optimization at the expense of other values; (2) the Procrustean quantification of holistic, ineffable experiences and practices; and (3) the elimination of what Jacques Ellul calls the “organic qualities” of a thing (Ellul, 1964, p. 135 ff).

In §1, I diagnose efficiency fundamentalism through the case of the Soylent food replacement, which illustrates its central features. In §2, I discuss several other examples of the practice and suggest what is specifically wrong with it is that it undermines our opportunities for authentic engagement with the world. In §3, I clarify these features and identify them in the case of the “quantified self” and “life hacking” movements, which represent the apotheosis of efficiency fundamentalism. By identifying these failures, my hope is that we might move beyond the obsession with efficiency to recapture some solace in a world increasingly subjected to the demands of quantification and optimization.

References

Barbrook, R., & Cameron, A. (1996). The Californian Ideology. Science as Culture, 44–72.

Ellul, J. (1964). The Technological Society. Toronto: Vintage Books.

Mumford, L. (1964). The Automation of Knowledge. AV Communication Review, 261–276.