Gamification is Swallowing the World
Some years ago I taught a course in a men’s prison. It was an open prison and many of the prisoners there were ‘lifers’, coming to the end of a long stretch behind bars for very serious offences. They were an interesting bunch: some told me stories about prison ‘back in the day’. I remember one lifer in particular – he was in his late 40s and had been inside virtually his entire adult life – telling me how important the radio used to be, and how it had to be listened to clandestinely if you had only ‘basic status’. Reading the incredulity on my face, he went on to explain about prison privileges and how a prisoner would be categorised as ‘basic’, i.e. without privileges, unless he complied with prison rules. If you complied with the rules and manifested ‘good behaviour’, you might come to enjoy ‘enhanced’ or even ‘super-enhanced’ status. Such elevated status would open up a different world, where you could enjoy privileges around extended rights to visitation and exercise and access to forms of media previously denied.
What immediately struck me was how politically useful such an arrangement could be. I didn’t know how it would play out, (this was years before the pandemic) but easily envisaged a future post-democratic society in which the populace fell into such designated categories. By which time, of course, the epithet ‘citizen’ would be merely ironic. As I imagined it then, the enhanced citizen might have access to better schools for their children or to training courses or jobs for themselves. Maybe they could get a house in a nicer part of town, or maybe they could just get a house. This privileged individual would have achieved such status by, perhaps, complying with a vaccinations programme, or refraining from taking their children out of school. Paying bills on time and not ‘getting into trouble with the police’ might be other routes to enhanced status. Basic status would be allocated to people who refused to comply, and instead persisted in the outmoded belief that the social contract still prevailed and that the state had certain obligations regarding its citizenry. These recalcitrant individuals would also insist on some basic freedoms about how they lived their lives and brought up their children. Basic status would probably also be allocated to those not sufficiently open about their activities to enable the state to make a determination. For people who insisted on using cash, who preferred a herbalist to a GP, or chose to educate their children at home, or in some other ways failed to evince a sufficient level of what Orwell called ‘clean mindedness’.
If we had not experienced the tyranny of lockdowns, mandates and selective curfews, I might have kept all these thoughts relegated to the stuff of dystopian fiction, where in some imagined future people are categorised according to the power they wield and the privileges they enjoy. After all, this is the theme in countless sci-fi films and novels: ‘Gattaca’ gave us the ‘valids’ and the ‘in-valids’, a distinction based on genetic identity; ‘Code 46’ revealed a world of ‘insiders’ who had privileges and ‘outsiders’ who didn’t. Orwell’s ‘1984’, written in 1949, is a world lived under the jack-boot and clearly demarcated between the ‘Party’ – ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’, and the ‘Proles’, who are the vast majority. Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, written in 1932, envisages a smilier form of totalitarianism with society genetically engineered into castes, with ‘Alphas’ at the top and ‘Epsilons’ at the bottom; each level colour-coded for easy distinction. And, of course, the ‘Savages’ who continue to be born naturally and don’t form part of society at all. But, maybe, E.M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’, which predates them all, having been written in 1928, is the one that best encapsulates our infatuation with technology and the solipsistic future it is directing us towards. In this world, where the direct perception of reality is shunned and life is entirely mediated through the machine, every want is satisfied with the click of a button. Extensions of the machine protrude into every domain, ensuring immediate gratification - a kind of instant Amazon without the packaging. And with ubiquitous screens – people live underground in single-chambered burrows – communication is via a prototypical zoom. In this world, too, there are privileged levels of existence, with controlled reproduction rights, and infanticide being practised against the physically strong. Those who refuse to commit to the administrations of the machine risk being declared ‘homeless’ and sent into exile. The end result, unsurprisingly, is an idea-less world of ‘white pap’.[1]
As we now know, categorising citizens is no longer solely a work of fiction. In China there is ‘Sesame Credit’ – a government-backed programme which awards people scores, just like a credit score, based on their level of trustworthiness, by which is meant their conformity with government policy. It derives its name from the main agency involved: the Alibaba online shopping outlet, a kind of Chinese Amazon. Alibaba and other forms of social media provide information about a citizen’s shopping habits and their social media usage, such as links they share, photographs they like, etc. This is supplemented by information from financial institutions and public agencies to produce a score – somewhere between 350 and 950, which essentially attests to a person’s loyalty to the state. Just as you might imagine, benefits of a high score include accessing easier loans and jobs and faster security clearance at the airport. A high score can even improve your chances of getting a date - Baihe, the largest dating agency in China, teamed up with Sesame Credit in order to display social credit ratings to prospective partners. Those with low scores get the opposite, with low internet speeds thrown in for good measure. What is particularly insidious about the scheme, if it wasn’t insidious enough already, is that people are also judged according to the friends they keep: having a friend with a low score will automatically pull your own down.
The way Sesame Credit works is through ‘gamification’ or ‘audience engagement technology’ i.e., the application of gaming techniques to areas of life outside of gaming, such as shopping, education or employment. Just as in gaming, people are rewarded for certain activities, by collecting points and reaching new levels. But with Sesame Credit the aim, of course, is to demonstrate ‘political trustworthiness’, so people are only rewarded when they do something the government approves of. It has proved very popular with a certain sector of society, i.e., the most affluent, as per usual. All happily tweeting their scores, which unsurprisingly are on the high side.
Gamification is growing in popularity here too. Of Forbes top 2000 global companies, 70% were using it in 2022 and the market is expected to expand another 30% by 2024. In fact, hundreds of companies already use gamification techniques to keep their employees engaged with the tasks at hand, rewarding them for the sales they achieve or the calls they answer, with points, badges and trophies. Leaderboards are often used to shame the stragglers, and there are even virtual catwalks for triumphant employees to parade along. Encouraging customer loyalty and collaboration has become another prominent use of gamification in the retail industry. Persuading, or rather ‘permitting’ purchasers (such has been the response) to contribute to advertising platforms has been highly effective in driving sales. Customers do this by liking, sharing, reposting, or commenting on whatever is posted on the platform, thereby creating a virtual community of consumers. And not just commenting, but also taking part in the selling process itself, by voting, entering competitions, writing reviews, offering tips and recipes, telling friends what they have bought, and, of course, uploading photos of themselves and their friends and their pets and their gardens, and whatever else. Gamification is also increasingly used in education, supposedly for keeping students engaged and motivated to learn. Although, with the growing emphasis on teaching ‘Soft skills’ i.e., a kind of docile optimism, one can’t help but think that the major lesson here concerns the normalisation of ubiquitous technology and the production of tomorrow’s digital consumers.
All the things that people already do on Facebook, Instagram and other forms of social media are aspects of gaming protocol, which is probably why it has proved so popular. With its emphasis on the attainment of precise, measurable goals, coupled with the opportunity for immediate rewards and public recognition, it is easy to see how gamification could be profitably applied to a wide area of social activities. Particularly if the performance-driven experience of freedom that playing games engenders - such as destroying opponents or breaching castle keeps - succeeds in sublimating energies that might previously have sought out authentic forms of libertarian expression.
If we now live in post-democratic times, in which the management of society has become entirely decoupled from democratic principles, as Colin Crouch asserts in his 2004 polemic ‘Post-Democracy‘. And, if instead of democratic government, it is now the market that is “the principal mechanism of collective decision-making,”[2] as economic sociologist, Wolfgang Streeck convincingly shows, then the large scale social participation that gamification offers would seem to provide a suitable simulacrum of democracy: an engaged and animate ‘demos’ without any political power or aspirations. The deployment of Sesame Credit as an instrument of government control used to provoke alarm in democratic societies. But that was prior to the pandemic. What has been revealed over the past couple of years is just how many citizens, or rather, consumers, are comfortable with digital compliance.
It is this latter aspect of post-democracy that Wolfgang Streeck explores in his 2016 work ‘How Will Capitalism End?’ It being Streeck’s contention that ‘political participation has been re-organised as consumption and that citizens are now restyled as consumers’. To see how this has come about Streeck takes us back several decades to the explosion in consumerism that began in the late 70s. When, in order to overcome the stagnation of the grey ‘Fordist’ years of mass production, capitalism developed ‘niche’ or ‘boutique’ goods; essentially, it became personalised. New ‘customised’ products were created to appeal to an increasingly status-conscious middle class, seeking to use its cash to distinguish itself from the masses. However, post-Fordist capitalism didn’t just herald a new way to sell a lot of stuff, it also opened up a new way to categorise society through the self-identifying process implicit in niche consumption. As Streeck explains, “diversified consumption entailed hitherto unknown opportunities for the individual expression of social identities.”[3] Basically, people expressed who they were, or who they wanted to be seen to be, through what they bought. The word Streeck uses is ‘sociation’ - meaning the way individuals link up and define their place in the world. This new consumer led form of sociation has culminated in a form of self-branding, as people identify with people like themselves, i.e., people who buy the same goods. Such sociation has the commercial advantage of being rootless and largely ‘politics-free’, because the allegiances it gives rise to are shaped through product and lifestyle choices rather than old political loyalties. Groupings may cluster around single issue politics now and again – but only on a fleeting, transient basis, as new causes are picked up and others discarded. Whilst niche capitalism emerged before the internet, it is the World Wide Web and its forms of associated social media which have provided the perfect global platform for developing and globalising this new form of apolitical sociation, with its ever-expanding array of unbounded social groupings.
This shift towards sociation represents a radical transformation in politics. With, what Streeck describes as a new ‘politics of consumption’ replacing the old ‘politics of the political’. This novel form of political allegiance is still formed along class lines, however. Since it is the middle classes who have the power to exercise consumer choice and use the market to satisfy their desires, whereas the working class remains dependent on the residual public services provided by a hollowed out state. The reason the state itself has become so depleted is because the ‘political goods’ of citizenship – distributive justice, democracy and social solidarity, which the market can’t provide and wouldn’t want to, (although it still promotes a capitalist friendly form of consumerist liberalism) cease to be available when the middle classes disassociate themselves from the political process. And, the middle classes do this because, having been used to gratifying their desires through the market, they feel increasingly disinclined to continue their participation in a political project which they feel gives them nothing. As a result, democratic principles have become devalued and the working class who rely on them utterly denigrated.
Whilst in a post-democratic society the institutions of democracy remain, providing essential reference points for the façade that is political debate, it is the citizen, qua citizen, who no longer has any political string to pull. In such a depoliticised society it is obviously the working classes who primarily lose out. Since, without access to the market, the only power they wield is a dwindling political one. According to the late, Sheldon Wolin, adding an addendum to Marx, capitalism not only deforms the worker qua worker but also qua citizen… it produces ‘human beings unfitted for democratic citizenship, self-interested, exploitative, competitive, striving for inequalities, fearful of downward mobility.” And this is because the very definition of citizenship means that you are not always going to get your choices fulfilled in the way that you can when you simply buy what you want. “The role of the citizen requires a disciplined readiness to accept decisions that one had originally opposed, or that are contrary to one’s own interest.”[4] But the reason one accepts this, or at least used to, is because democracy and civic wholeness are seen to be greater goods than one’s own limited self-interest. The difficulty arises, of course, when those greater goods are no longer recognised for what they are. The political vacuum that results when support is withdrawn is quickly filled by exploitative capitalist forces and this then gives rise to what Wolin identifies as ‘Inverted Totalitarianism’- a form of totalitarianism formed not around a charismatic figure seeking to mobilise the populace, but around an anonymous corporate elite seeking to depoliticize the citizenry. And, according to Wolin, what is needed in order to develop and sustain such a form of totalitarianism, which is consented to by the people, is the full integration of technology into the capitalist economy.
Socially engineering a population to conform to the requirements of the prevailing economic system is hardly new. After all, drawing attention to such techniques of control was the primary concern of the Frankfurt school, writing just after the Second World War. Marcuse’s ‘One Dimensional Man’ and Horkheimer’s ‘Eclipse of Reason’ being two such works which highlighted our shrinking capacity to appreciate the transformation that capitalism was effecting within us. What is new, however, is that the space between us and capitalism’s assault on our capacity to reason and articulate a critique is rapidly closing. It’s not just the depth of the psychological techniques being applied against us which should give cause for concern or the ubiquity of the technology deploying them, but the fact that the form of exploitation now taking place is on an entirely new level.
In her extensive study of surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff reveals a world in which the populace has been entirely pervaded by the market. She shows that the primary goal of personalised marketing is not the satisfaction of the narcissistic consumer – although, the longer that pretence can be sustained the better - but the harvesting of personality types for ‘micro targeting’. Because the real customers for the ‘behavioural surplus’ we unknowingly render up for analysis every time we enter the digital world are global corporations seeking to sell us their goods and services. And their aim is not simply to offer us more stuff to buy, but to modify our behaviour as a way of ensuring that we remain in the mood for consumption and are permanently exploitable. As Zuboff reports, the methodology of choice for effecting such behaviour modification is the challenge and reward structure of gamification, which soon won’t be something that we log on to do, but the means by which we navigate our way through the real world. Although, of course, once every aspect of reality is digitally augmented and monetised, the distinction between the real and the digital will disappear. There will be no logging off.
It is difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of what is around the corner, with big tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and China’s Baidhu all hastily gathering terabytes of voice recordings ready for embedment in wearables. According to Zuboff “Every day life is set to become a mere canvas for the explosion of a new always-on market cosmos dedicated to our behaviour and from which there is no escape.[5] Joseph Paradiso of the MIT media lab advises us not to think ‘incremental’ - the shift to the ‘internet of things’ i.e., an all-around digital world, will be ‘revolutionary’. With undetectable ‘emotion chips’ implanted in wearables and ‘emotion scanners’ as common as cookies - watching us every moment of the day to ensure that we stay in a positive purchasing mood because ‘happy customers are more engaged.’ ‘Happiness as a Service’[6] is on its way.
[1] E.M. Forster, The World Stops, (Penguin Modern Classics: London, 2008) p.54
[2] Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? (Verso: London, 2016) p.140
[3] Streeck p.100
[4] Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision, (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2004) p. 107
[5] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, (Profile Books Ltd: London, 2019) p. 269
[6] Zuboff, 290