“In fact, the Obama administration classifies all military-age males as militants, so that they can report a smaller number of civilian casualties without having to alter their practices. ”

that is insane.

Neoliberalism doesn’t even know there’s an issue with rule-following precisely because it treats rules as algorithms: procedures that operate autonomically, externally from subjectivity.

I suspect I’m fairly far to the right of you, but you absolve the present order far too easily. For example, you described the war on terror as follows:

Take drone warfare in the “global war on terror”. Write it as an algorithm. […] The only reason that Americans live with the current implementation of that algorithm is that the people being killed are out of sight and are racially and culturally coded as legitimate victims.

In fact, the Obama administration classifies all military-age males as militants, so that they can report a smaller number of civilian casualties without having to alter their practices. This is not the behaviour of a Javert — this is the behaviour of a Talleyrand.

Our leaders understand subjectivity perfectly well. Presenting their decisions as the output of mathematical algorithms lets them claim the mantle of rationality and dismiss their opponents as irrational.

Programs do what programmers make them do, and programmers do what their bosses tell them to. Our rulers are not the implementation of an algorithm — the algorithms are the implementation of their intent. (As an aside, I strongly recommend Maciej Ceglowski’s short essay The Moral Economy of Tech.)

To me, this is a key difference between liberalism and neoliberalism that has many dimensions. I regret the extent to which many leftists have allowed a critique of neoliberalism to “swallow” liberalism. Or maybe what I think of liberalism is something more like an ungainly hybrid of romantic ideas and liberal political structures–the upshot being that neoliberalism has no room for a kind of humanism that is inconsistent or contradictory on purpose, but I think liberalism did. In fact, impulsiveness, whimsy and transformation were signs for some 19th C. liberals (the not-utilitarian kinds) that we were free, that we might not follow procedure if it seemed situationally wrong. Liberalism wrung its hands a lot about the dangers of rule-following, about becoming Inspector Javert or Captain Vere. Neoliberalism doesn’t even know there’s an issue with rule-following precisely because it treats rules as algorithms: procedures that operate autonomically, externally from subjectivity. Whereas liberal rule-following and fears thereof was all about the danger of incorporating the rules into selfhood, about the dangerous kinds of human beings who entangled their individuality with procedure.

Yes. Except that I think one of the problems with a lot of the procedural life of neoliberalism is that people resignedly say that they have no choice but to enact various procedures, even if the results are not useful or the actions are harmful. I feel like the standard form that assessment has taken in a lot of higher education is like that: well, we must do it and do it in the following ways, even if there’s no evidence that it actually helps with anything, because this is what produces data that looks like data. We are already cyborgs of a kind, and that is interfering with our faith that someone, somehow, will still have the freedom not to follow the algorithm.