Ulterior Motives

"Therefore, all this chatter about sociality and community is partly inherited hypocrisy and partly studied perfidy." —Kierkegaard

Imagine for a moment that "social" wasn't habitually confused with "sociable," and that instead it merely distinguished an aspect of human activity. Imagine that it carried a gray, featureless, disciplinary neutrality, and that the prospect of affixing it — to design, to networks, to media, to software, and so on — invited the banal consideration of whether the extra syllables were really worth it. Imagine that the social, understood categorically, encompassed deeply disturbing attitudes and activities — the sorts of things often dismissed as "antisocial."

This is a useful exercise, because the "social," as it typically appears in pop discourse, does none of these things. On the contrary: the word has become a sort of trojan horse laden with vague and self-congratulatory associations, implications, and insinuations: variously, of vibrant and engaged exchanges, of open and transparent processes culminating in consensus, &c., &c. — in short, the smarmy mannerisms that increasingly pass for political discourse.

At this point, well- (or at least thoroughly) trained readers might pale at the prospect of yet another lecture about how everything is "political." No such luck. Everything is indeed political (and therefore we have to choose how much to emphasize that dimension in any given context); but that's a very different problem from the use of the "social" — that is, the trendy descriptor emptied of its categorical power by dint of being overstuffed with a priori warm and fuzzies — to mask the political.

So what then of "social design"? Does it designate a range or constellation of new values, frameworks, procedures, and so on? Of course — it would hardly make sense to question a trend that demonstrably exists. No, at issue is the model of the social at work in "social design."

Let's take two hypothetical cities. One, in northwestern Europe, is subject to typical political vagaries (a rudderless center-left, a resurgent and radicalizing right, a smattering of alternative parties, and so on); but overall it dedicates a reasonable proportion of its political activity to developing sensible, deliberate socio-technical policies — very much including issues such as urban planning, land use, recycling, labor-force education, and so on. The other is in southern Europe: organized crime has subverted its civic and regional governments, leading to the breakdown of certain services such as garbage collection; mountains of waste accumulate, and open warfare erupts in the streets. Which of these cities better expresses the values of social design?

The answer, without a doubt, is the northwestern city — which illustrates (graphically, one might say) the chasm that separates the boutique rendition of the "social" that serves as a parochial distinction within the field of design, on the one hand, and the actually existing field of the social, on the other. The social, as it is understood in the phrase "social design," is incapable of addressing their condition.

So what can we learn from this admittedly cartoonish dichotomy? If one's goal were to "raise consciousness" about the threats that waste poses for civilization, which city's denizens know best? Certainly, those of the southern city have plumbed the abysmal depths of this question and, in that regard, might be seen as experts — and maybe even more committed to systemic solutions. But is this really a model of expertise we want to rely on or emulate? Certainly not.

But does the neo-Fabian approach of social design (with its emphasis on civic and communitarian processes, consensus-building, and gradualist reform) offer a viable alternative? At certain scales, yes: the scale of the rational actor, whether a human individual or perhaps the legal fiction of a corporation. But these subjects rely, utterly rely, on the stability of the juridical environment — which may well be why social design can function well at small scales. At larger scales, though — the scale of the nation or, increasingly, the supra-, tran-, and counter-national actors — social design has little or nothing to offer.

Social design places tremendous emphasis (if only by dint of its narrow scope) on the language of commerce: professionalism, entrepreneurialism, "ownership," commodities, vendors, materials, production techniques, and the like. In part, this is a logical and entirely reasonable consequence of design's roots in practical trades. Only in part, though, because that isn't an adequate account: itmay be true, but it doesn't exclude other, less pragmatic and/or genealogical explanations. For example, one could argue — as I would — that this emphasis on commerce is part and parcel of a broader flight from the sphere of politics. The belief (one could even call it faith) in a commercialized "social" field of advance and possibility tacitly conflates the alternatives to each of these distinctions: the civil, the political, the regressive, and hopelessness.

In this respect, the tendentious and blinkered model of the social so central to "social design" takes on a slightly more sinister cast. In part, it's just an innocent oversight, an artifact of contexts past and present. It's important for critics of social design to grant this naivete a measure of legitimacy. But, by the same token, this impotent, affirmative model of the social has very real consequences that are all too familiar from earlier moments in history: it pretends to describe, foreclose analysis, and steers social dynamism in the direction of commerce and — intentions and protestations aside — exploitation. It's equally important for advocates of social design to grant the skepticism and even cynicism these observations invite a measure of legitimacy as well. It's unlikely at this stage that the critics and advocates of social design are locked in mortal combat; that may come to pass, but it won't be over phraseology.