Competition of Man and Machine

How did man and machine end up in this competition? One of the answers lies in how we have historically conceived the institutions through which we coordinate our actions. To understand the origins of the dilemma we have to go back to the seventeenth century and examine how the Enlightenment thinkers who developed the blueprints for many of the foundational institu-tions of modern society thought about these instituinstitu-tions. They did so under a rationalist paradigm with the ideal of a well-functioning machine. It is, th-erefore, no coincidence that computers are taking over our administrative systems or routinely make human administration skills look inferior. Rather, it is a strictly logical consequence of the founding DNA we gave to our insti-tutional arrangements in the early modern era.

I will illustrate and ground this claim with the help of a milestone pub-lication of Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, first published in 1651.¹¹² In the

Le-111 Sascha Meinrath, James Losey, Victor Pickard, Anthony DeRosa, Evgeny Morozov and Nicco Mele are some of the exponents of such a theory. Cf. Nicco Mele, The End of Big, 119. See also Sascha D. Meinrath, James W. Losey, Victor W. Pickard, “Digital Feudalism:

Enclosures and Erasures from Digital Rights Management to the Digital Divide,” Comm-Law Conspectus 19:2 (2011), 423—479. http://scholarship.law.edu/commlaw/vol19/

iss2/6. For De Rosa’s contribution, see his blog post from early 2011: Anthony De Rosa,

“The death of platforms,” January 17, 2011, accessed July 16, 2017, http://soupsoup.tum-blr.com/post/2800255638/the-death-of-platforms. For Morozov’s contribution see Evge-ny Morozov, “ Tech titans are busy privatising our data. When Facebook and Google fi-nally destroy the competition, a new age of feudalism will arrive,” April 24, 2016, accessed July 16, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/ 24/the-new-feu-dalism-silicon-valley-overlords-advertising-necessary-evil. Also see Morozov’s forthco-ming book: Evgeny Morozov, Freedom as a Service: The New Digital Feudalism and the Future of the City (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2019).

112 All following citations are taken from the Cambridge edition: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1991).

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viathan, Hobbes develops his proposal for how the people should expectably and concretely coordinate their interactions with a broad base of legitimacy. He does so by explaining with which natural rights the individual is endowed, which of those an individual is most prone to protect, which of the rights the individual must hand to a higher power to secure all other individual rights, and how this higher authority should be generated through the covenant of the people. He calls this authority the Commonwealth of subjects and so-vereign, run by a person or assembly endowed with sovereign powers by the subjects.

This marks a huge step from government instituted as a temporal sovereign by the ultimately sovereign ecclesial power towards the proceduralist argu-ment of democratic contract theory made popular about a century and a half later. Hobbes himself, though, makes clear that he does not have a truly con-tractual agreement with a sole base in free will in mind: “This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a real Unitie [sic!] of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I Authorize and give up my Right of Go-verning my self, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.”¹¹³

Hobbes sees strong and stable government as the only path to lasting pe-ace. The circumstances for him were quite different from a post-Holocaust awareness of the horrific violence which extended through all branches of the state apparatus during the Nazi regime. Hobbes’ view, in contrast, is defined by the experience of religious civil war and has high hopes for a strong sover-eign state which, in his view, might actually have the strength to pacify the violent forces. The process of uniting “the Multitude … in one Person” Ho-bbes calls “Common-Wealth, in latine Civitas. This is the Generation of that great Leviathan, or rather … of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence.”¹¹⁴

The language used in this famous passage can be characterized as orga-nic. He speaks of the Leviathan, the great sea monster in the Old Testament.

Threatening as it might appear, it is a living organism. And since the condi-tion for mortality is life, the descripcondi-tion of the state as a “Mortal God” also

113 Hobbes, Leviathan, 120.

114 Ibid.

59 points towards a living organism. This organism, however, is given the ideal of the automated workflow, as he explains in the introduction. The art of sta-te-making, as Hobbes conceives it, closely resembles the art of engineering:

“For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves less by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings;

and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great Leviathan called a Common-Wealth, or State.”¹¹⁵

These words show how much hope Hobbes laid into automation as a mode of praxis for society’s foundational institutions. The smoothly and harmoni-ously running watch served as a metaphor for the Commonwealth as Hobbes imagined it, all nerves and joints working in sync, the limbs and heart joining into a wonderful symphony brought forth by the composer. The mechanisms of the watch gained prominence as a metaphor for both nature and the design of social systems through the popularization of deistic concepts. Deism po-sits that God created the universe but does not interfere with its mechanics.

Hence, there is no room for supernatural intervention, which distinguishes Deism-influenced social theories and natural sciences from their orthodox Christian equivalents. Ernst Troeltsch describes Deism as the attempt to find an “general, universally applicable truth standard, that is accessible to everyo-ne and serves as a basis to which oeveryo-ne can come back to from competing reli-gions, from which one can evaluate the value and legitimacy of immediately revealed claims of revelation, and which is congruent with the metaphysical

115 Ibid., 9. The application of mechanical language to political philosophy is not just appa-rent in Thomas Hobbes’ writings, but also in the works of Adam Smith, and was heavily influenced by the success of Isaac Newton. Smith considers Newton’s findings “the grea-test discovery that ever was made by man, the discovery of an immense chain of the most important and sublime truths, all closely connected together, by one capital fact, of the reality of which we have daily experience.” Newton’s system, Smith writes, “now prevails over all opposition, and has advanced to the acquisition of the most universal empire that was ever established in philosophy. His principles, it must be acknowledged, have a degree of firmness and solidity that we should in vain look for in any other system. The most sceptical [sic!] cannot avoid feeling this.” Cf. Adam Smith, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith Vol. 3: Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D.

Wightman, J. C. Bryce, and I. S. Ross (Oxford: Univ. Press, 1980), 98.

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results of the new sciences.”¹¹⁶ Given his excruciating experience with vio-lently competing religions during the religious civil war in England, Hobbes’

hopes for the deist metaphors become very plausible.

Today, Hobbes’ imaginative metaphor has produced actual machines that compute faster and more reliably than humans in many of our everyday con-texts. This is where much of the contemporary man vs. machine dilemma comes from. Just like the Leibniz example, our examination of the Leviathan shows that the machines in use today are derived from the very same ratio-nalist logics that defined how we chose to expectably and concretely coordinate our interactions with a broad base of legitimacy through the nation state in the early modern era.

116 The German original: „allgemeine, überall gleiche, jedermann erkennbare religiöse Nor-malwahrheit zu suchen, auf die man von den konkurrierenden einzelnen Religionen zurückgehen kann, von der aus Wert und Recht der unmittelbar sich gebenden Offen-barungsansprüche sich prüfen läßt, und die mit den metaphysischen Ergebnissen der neuen Wissenschaften übereinstimmt.” Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, Der Deismus, in Gesammelte Schriften Vol. IV, by Ernst Troeltsch (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1925), 431.

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