The Optimization of Everyday Life. Or How the Promise of Individual Sovereignty Made Us Submissive to Digitalization

Barry Schwartz identified that, due to the overwhelming number of choices available to us,we suffer from the “paradox of choice”: we fear making the wrong decision, and abundance ceases to be a blessing, becoming a problem instead. This premise helps illuminate a particularly contemporary need: the desire for a “decision-making machine,” a role that digital platforms appear to have taken on. Their algorithms allow us to filter through an abundance of content to find what most closely matches our preferences. However, what Schwartz’smodel fails to address – or addresses only marginally – is the root cause of decision-making distress, which justifies our willingness to offload this burden. The goal of our research is precisely to explain why we so readily embrace automated decision-making mechanisms. Our central hypothesis is that decision-making is not merely burdensome because we seek to maximize our well-being (and thus fear missing out on the best option), as Schwartz suggests. Rather, it is burdensome because we have inherited a particular conception of individual sovereignty, which makes the experience of choosing an intensely demanding one. According to this hypothesis, individuals today are assumed to want what happens to them. An indicator of this shared experience is the shame we feel when we must admit that we are not doingwhat we truly want. As a result, individuals seek reassurance that what they are doing is, indeed, what they want to do. Digital platforms then provide relief by presenting the option that aligns with their desires while validating this alignment through data-driven justifications. In a way, platforms create certainty in decision-making just as, according to Max Weber, the practice of Beruf provided the Pietist with certainty of salvation. To demonstrate our hypothesis, we draw on various insights. First, we argue that the modern promise is individual sovereignty, which gives rise to a particular form of anxiety. Critical commentary on this situation is strongly present in the works of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and of Alain Ehrenberg. We then assert that cybernetics has successfully met this need by rationalizing decision-making through information processing. The connection between sovereignty, decision-making, and cybernetics has been recently explored by Alain Supiot and by Nicolas Guilhot. Finally, we contend that digital technology – or at least the digital cultural industry (i.e., the everyday mediation of decisions through platforms) – is the technical realization of the promise of living a life perfectly aligned with one’s individual will. This conclusion challenges the Foucauldian assumptions underpinning Shoshanna Zuboff’ scritique, which argues that digitalization is forcefully imposed upon us. Instead, we emphasize our own need for optimization. We conclude, therefore, that breaking free from the relentless digitalization of everyday life requires rejecting the notion of individual sovereignty and embracing a principle of collective sovereignty – one that may even entail abandoning the concept of sovereignty altogether.