Under the Sign of Automatic Decision: How Carl Schmitt and Cybernetics Shed Light on Our Digital Experience

Today’s user experience of digital tools is heavily mediated by automatic decisions. The “contents” – music, photos, videos, texts, etc. – with which we interact daily through our devices is indeed placed in front of us based on a mechanism of information collection and processing that requires minimal agency from us. As long as you connect to a platform and regularly brush the screen – though even this is sometimes not required anymore, as evidenced by autoplay mechanisms – artificial intelligence will organize your digital journey. Interestingly, especially concerning the consumption of artworks accessible via streaming services – movies, series, songs, etc. – we feel a certain satisfaction in only having to exert minimal effort before being entertained. This allows us to solve the “paradox of choice” (Schwartz), which describes the dissatisfaction necessarily felt when faced with too many options. Confronted with digital abundance, it is indeed impossible for users to know if they have chosen the optimal product considering the desired goal, which leads to the constant feeling of missing out on the best. Recommendation systems avoid this burden by determining the source of pleasure that best suits us, based on available data. One could even hypothesize that what platforms we subscribe to sell today is not just access to a catalog but rather the ability to determine what we need. My hypothesis is that the gesture by which we entrust our cultural and aesthetic itinerary to a device thrives on a particular, and probably historically contingent, relationship to experience. I argue that in order to conceptually shed light on our docility to platforms despite the blatant scandal of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff), critique must account for the unbearability of the choice they exempt us from. This means answering the question: “why has decision-making become so painful for us?”. To outline such critique, I suggest going back to Carl Schmitt’s political theology and cybernetics, two paradigms famous for their decision theories. First, I will show how Schmitt and the cyberneticians converge in their conception of experience as a series of continuous decisions through which the entirety of the situation is determined. I will then show how the unbearable nature of such an experience, which denies any human relationship to objective reality, justifies automation and how the contemporary digital user realizes this dialectic of a subject entirely responsible ultimately reduced to the most alienating obedience.