Technology fuels the quantification and labeling of every aspect of life and self. Both of my books, Bitwise and Meganets, extrapolate from that principle to portray the fairly drastic shifts in human social relations over the last few decades. Today’s question is what happens when that sort of quantification is dragged into the ethical and political arena? What if, instead of simply labeling large groups of people as “advantaged” or “disadvantaged” based on historical facts and macro-level statistics, we start measuring smaller groups or individuals by such factors?
We already do this in specific contexts. Your tax bracket is a function of your income and implicitly declares your social responsibility to be lesser or greater depending on your income. But your tax return is more or less private, and one’s appearance of being advantaged or disadvantaged in society is mostly as part of larger groups (based on race, gender, class, geographical location). There’s no reason why this has to be the case, though, and given the meganet’s push to consolidate and publicize information, there is building momentum for measurements and rankings of “advantage” to become far more fine-grained than they currently are, with tech and AI doing the legwork of calculating seemingly “objective” measures of advantage and privilege.
That momentum is not good for social cohesion—but not because redistribution is so innately offensive to human nature. We accept taxes, grudgingly, because they are not framed as an explicit redistribution mechanism but as a contribution to a collective societal pool. Adding that extra pooling step softens the blow by making it harder to see who’s winning and who’s losing. Even though the measurements are fine-grained, actual comparisons aren’t. But when you start doing explicit comparisons, especially between smaller groups where tribalism kicks in more readily, the zero-sum aspect rears its head again. The more public such information becomes, the more obvious comparisons become, and the more resentments grow.
Humans adore comparisons. We love measuring those differences to put ourselves either above or below others (the “right” position depending on context). We feel obligated to keep up with the Joneses, suffer status anxiety, and enjoy seeing the undeserving cut down to size. What happens when technology causes an ongoing leakage of fine-grained advantage-related information into public and semi-public social interactions? It will probably be a bad thing.
Ironically, what this all does serves to undermine one of the old warhorses of political science, John Rawls’s Difference Principle, the theory that justice requires that the “fairness” principle that inequalities in society benefit the most disadvantaged. As concepts of fairness go, it's compelling, but the older I get, the more ironic it seems that a principle that sets out to embrace fairness so easily triggers perceptions of unfairness. Through measurement and publication of individual differences, technology has both the capacity to make the Difference Principle that much more implementable, but also that much more untenable.
New York Mayor Eric Adams recently turned a spotlight on the “migrant problem” in the city, saying that the influx of migrants will “destroy” the city if New York doesn’t obtain a huge influx of cash. This is a typical political maneuver but not necessarily a stupid one. The internecine attack on Democrats, attempting to extort President Joe Biden and Governor Kathy Hochul in exchange for keeping his mouth shut, may fail thanks to Adams’s general ham-fisted ineptitude, but calling him the “black Trump” is to ignore that this sort of scapegoating has been the domain of all political parties everywhere since the dawn of civilization.
Aiding migrants is the Difference Principle in action. Whether through scapegoating, NIMBYism, or plain old self-interest, policies favoring the least advantaged very often go over very badly with anyone not deemed to be the least advantaged. As Adams underscores, they go over particularly badly when the issue is painted as zero-sum, when benefits toward the least advantaged (migrants, in this case) are presented as taking away from benefits toward others. A social safety net is tolerable, usually, but a social safety net that soaks up cash from public transit and police departments is not. (Whether the trade-offs are what Adams claims isn’t my concern here; this is all about perception and framing, like most things these days.) The rhetorical move Adams and so many others employ is to yank out the collective laundering step and reframe it as an explicit either/or zero-sum game: “I will cut services if I don’t get money for migrants.”
Under Rawls’s Difference Principle, that’s a fair trade-off. Adams doesn’t think it is, and he knows most New Yorkers won’t think so either. In such a light, the Difference Principle comes to seem more like a Resentment Principle. For a particular policy seen as taking away from the advantaged and giving to the disadvantaged, usually in a zero-sum fashion, the advantaged group splits into two subgroups: (1) resentful advantaged fighting the policy, and (2) sanctimonious advantaged basking in Nietzsche’s ressentiment. Only the second group favors the policy. This happens on a case-by-case basis, as people seem perfectly happy to benefit from being the disadvantaged in one policy while complaining about being the advantaged in another.
(There is a third group of ethically-minded clear-headed sorts who altruistically give informed consent to such policies unmotivated by moral self-congratulation, but because I love humanity enough to try to see it clearly for what it is, not what I wish it were, I only grow more and more convinced that this group is statistically negligible. The wry Marxist G. A. Cohen, author of If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, was once asked in an interview why he complacently lived in comparable privilege, and he fessed up and said he wasn’t a good-enough person. If he wasn’t good enough, I cannot imagine there are many who are. I believe it was some sentiment along these lines that partly led to Rawls later rejecting any comprehensive implementation of the Difference Principle on the liberal grounds that legislating it or any other such overarching political doctrine would devolve into tyranny by would-be Philosopher-Kings. Rawls wrote: “a continuing shared understanding on one comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine can be maintained only by the oppressive use of state power.”)
But the two groups aren’t stable. The resentful group is favored. Once a given playfield is set up, it’s far more common to move from sanctimony to resentment than the other way round. We can say “A conservative is a liberal who’s just been mugged,” or “A liberal is a conservative who’s just lost their job,” and that makes it seem like people can easily migrate in either direction politically, but both those formulations appeal to self-interest. When it comes to Difference Principle policies, movement is overwhelmingly from altruism toward egoism. (Bursts of altruism come from new policy frames or reframings, as with the New Deal, not from shifts within a particular frame.) The success of any particular policy seems to depend on how long it endures before the sanctimonious group dwindles into inconsequentiality.
So now we can return to technology and its tendency to codify and amplify particular categorical and quantitative frameworks. I’ve written much about the tech-enabled increase in labeling, classification, and comparison, and how the use of any particular ontology (demographic or otherwise) tends to build on itself, making it harder to revise. Once you start encoding advantage in certain computationalized ways, those representations are going to persist and reverberate longer than they would if they were just rhetorical abstractions. They will become more reified, they will become more public, they will become more robust.
The difficulty comes in that while a lot of people can agree on what’s fair and what’s not in a soccer game, most situations in life don’t admit to such agreement. Having accepted that people will never agree on what’s “just,” Rawls tried to whittle it down to the more modest concept of “fairness” (and later still to the even more modest concept of “reasonableness.”) Which is more workable until people start examining the details—which, unfortunately, is what technology shoves in our faces, making every possible instance of unfairness far more explicit and manifest. An ongoing amnesia for the sticky details is a better panacea for resentment than almost any examination of the issues.
Computers will force us to define fairness in far more specific ways. Computers will cause us to be reminded of how “fairness” is being implemented in society, and inevitably more and more people will find “fairness” to be “unfair.” Perhaps technology can show us how it evens out in the wash, how there are so many such policies and advantages and disadvantages that the disadvantaged group we resent is actually benefiting us in some other way. But we’ve a long way to go to get there.