Alienation and Authenticity in an Information Economy
By: Gregory Mcgann
Tags: Marxism, Authenticity, Information Technology, Social Media, Alienation

Photo by Zhimai Zhang on Unsplash

Alienation has been used and adapted too variously for any single definition to capture its history and application but, in essence, the concept has been taken to mean problematic separation of a subject and object that properly belong together (Leopold, 3). Although alienation could apply to any two objects, it typically describes the relationship between a human subject and an object or other person from which he/she is alienated. Alienation is distinct from objectification, with which it is sometimes confused, in that it describes objects that should be together (Wood 2004: 3) and, by extension, could be again; objectification, similarly usually involving a subject and object, makes no such claim and may describe objects that inherently antagonise each other. Alienation is therefore endowed with a sense of an historical process, of past harmony and later alienation, and a sense of the future in which reunion is a possibility. Not coincidentally, the principal exponents of alienation, Hegel and Marx, belong to the tradition of the philosophy of history. Their idiosyncratic schematisation of history rested on a dialectical view of historical progress by thesis, antithesis and synthesis. While Hegel viewed the Prussian state of his time as the culmination of the historical process, Marx was unwilling to prejudice its organic nature with a prophesied conclusion to the thesis-antithesis antagonism. This essay argues that alienation in the Information Economy, with an implicit teleological narrative of loss and possible redemption, belongs to an historical process whose synthesis is the ethic of authenticity (to be discussed in the latter half).

Alienation in the information economy derives from the nature of its singular commodity — data. Despite the dominance of information technologies in world markets, little consensus exists on the exact nature of the commodity on which their business depends. Doubtless much of the extraordinary value industry leaders in the information economy have managed to accrue is ultimately derived from exploitation of this ambiguity, which has given distinctive first-mover advantage, bedevilled regulation and blunted the objections of others in their supply chains.

In some senses, data resembles a public good: it is non-rival and, to a large extent, non-excludable. It is non-rival in that its usage by one person does not limit its usage by another directly although the market value may attenuate. It is more excludable than rival because data can be protected and restricted through various technologies. Some data are also easy to collect because of the availability of its source — for example, pollution data — although it should be noted that data is as much dependent on the instruments used to collect it as the thing it is supposed to be measuring. More importantly, data and information of all kinds have the unique property of being unreturnable once given: in other words, once a piece of information is provided, it cannot be forgotten on request. That is categorically different to other goods including perishable consumables (that can be returned under some circumstances). Information, once public is irreversibly so even if stolen.

Perhaps because of these characteristics, information has always been treated as incomparably different and more important to the public good than any other commodity. Indeed, as soon as market forces arose to commodify it, correspondingly forceful political currents have arisen to deny that it can be treated as a commodity at all. In so far as we can usefully talk about truth, its restriction would seem to intuitively constitute a breach of the public interest. Public access to information is essential to the operation of democracy; its restriction is, by extension, inseparable from undemocratic practices. When we deal with the information economy, which starts from the commoditisation of information, we are therefore intruding on the basic functioning of democracy. At the very least, this special role in public life would seem to require that a minimum of information flows remain publicly accessible. As the democratic franchise expanded through the twentieth century and broader definitions of democracy proliferating, this was extended to the freedom of the information on which such democracy inevitably relied. Starting in the 1960s, general momentum behind liberation of all kinds propelled a conviction that “information wants to be free” at approximately the same time as the inception of the internet and the founding of the companies that would go on to dominate the first wave of technological advance. Although this came to a juddering halt with the bursting of the tech bubble, the second wave of tech companies had internalised the 1960s thinking to an even greater degree and reaped its potential: constructing the most valuable enterprises in the world, transforming the lives of ordinary citizens and harvesting data unencumbered by the micropayment architecture that had been mooted in the early days of the internet (Nielsen, 1998). In so doing, the data-collectors were able to accrue vast wealth to themselves and their associates having, remarkably, started with an ethos inseparable from the radicalism of the 1960s (Foer, 2017; Anderson, 2009). So it was that “free”, poorly defined, facilitated a steep descent into oligopoly.

Despite these reservations, there remain strong, if not incontrovertible, reasons for thinking that at least some information should be free, for the purposes of freedom of thought and expression, democracy, equality of opportunity and public truth as an end in itself. Thus, the first way in which participants in the information economy may feel alienated — that is to say, in line with the definition, separated from something from which they should be joined — is in being deprived of the truth per se. Despite its unfortunate association with inequality and disempowerment in practice, the belief that “information wants to be free” rests on compelling human intuitions about the unique properties of information and the public right to it.

Equally, however, we may feel alienated from information that is intuitively felt to belong entirely to individuals. Privacy is the primary manifestation of this institution. Advocates of privacy would baulk at the notion that theirs is a group of beliefs belonging to a wider family of ideas that commodify truth but their vocabulary of ownership is unmistakably akin it (they are, in a sense, privatising the truth). The difference, it would seem, is that privacy promises a legal seal against alienation: uniting person and personal information in a comforting, if illusory, unity. The exclusion of the market, despite the wording of self-ownership familiar to libertarian thought, and the implied role of the state are potent analgesics in a confusing information economy. Privacy situates the proper place of personal information with the individual it concerns. However, privacy has no positive relationship with freedom, strictly defined. There would seem to be something dubious about a concept that claims to serve individuality but disassociates it from liberty. The privacy paradox is evidence of that dissonance: it describes the apparent contradiction between someone’s zealous attachment to their privacy in principle but broad willingness to provide highly revealing information, often on social media. The attraction of participation in the information economy and the tangible freedoms its provides render privacy a contradictory and, in places, imaginary defence against online iniquities and exploitation.

No party in the present debate about the information economy disputes that data and information are alienated from their proper place. The only question is which place is proper. The competition between “free information” and “privacy” is essentially a competition between society and the individual as the rightful owner of information.

The attitude to the market in both camps is contradictory. As is often the case, attempts to utterly quash the role of market dynamics, as both attempt to, only succeed releasing all restraints upon it that a compromise position could have attained. While the “free information” movements have naively engendered an historic accumulation of wealth in the data “oil barons” (The Economist, 2017) over whose hardware and software the data “freely” passes. Ironically, in introducing the market as a bridge between the society and individual poles, the most destructive expressions of market forces could be expected to attenuate, become more visible, more contestable and more understandable.

The idea of a market for data — in other words, paying people for the data they produce online — has benefitted from a large body of public and academic support since its inception in 2013 (Lanier, 2013). Since that time, economists have focussed on devising an infrastructure capable to supporting the basic moral assumption that, since internet users are doing something that produces value, they should at least have the option of negotiating compensation for it. The moral rationale rests on the observation that the profitability of the data-collecting companies rests on their unwillingness to acknowledge that the activity of production is being done by their users not their legal employees. By failing to acknowledge data work as labour, they have been able to suppress cost and maximise profit (Posner and Weyl, 2017). As of 2020, no such architecture exists, limited experiments have been confounded and there is much scepticism that viable options will exist in the near future. Neither the sophisticated system of micropayments nor the sheer volume of monetizable data exist such that concerted private sector efforts could be mobilised. (Coyle et al, 2020)

If the production of data lent itself to a simple contractual agreement between (data) worker and data-producing platform then there would be no reason to suppose that existing conventions of self-ownership and employment could not be applied. However, data is a unique commodity that conventional definitions of ownership cannot accommodate. The solution must involve recognition of its unique qualities without denying that its production is work and work requires legal recognition and non-arbitrary compensation. The law must incorporate the inexorable overlap between data as labour, of which the worker must be cognizant, and data as a public good, to which society as a whole is entitled.

Despite these reservations, there remain strong, if not incontrovertible, reasons for thinking that at least some information should be free, for the purposes of freedom of thought and expression, democracy, equality of opportunity and public truth as an end in itself. Thus, the first way in which participants in the information economy may feel alienated — that is to say, in line with the definition, separated from something from which they should be joined — is in being deprived of the truth per se. Despite its unfortunate association with inequality and disempowerment in practice, the belief that “information wants to be free” rests on compelling human intuitions about the unique properties of information and the public right to it.

Equally, however, we may feel alienated from information that is intuitively felt to belong entirely to individuals. Privacy is the primary manifestation of this institution. Advocates of privacy would baulk at the notion that theirs is a group of beliefs belonging to a wider family of ideas that commodify truth but their vocabulary of ownership is unmistakably akin it (they are, in a sense, privatising the truth). The difference, it would seem, is that privacy promises a legal seal against alienation: uniting person and personal information in a comforting, if illusory, unity. The exclusion of the market, despite the wording of self-ownership familiar to libertarian thought, and the implied role of the state are potent analgesics in an other wise disorienting information economy. Privacy situates the proper place of personal information with the individual it concerns. However, privacy has no relationship with freedom, strictly defined. There would seem to be something dubious about a concept that claims to serve individuality but disassociates it from liberty. The privacy paradox is evidence of that dissonance: it describes the apparent contradiction between someone’s zealous attachment to their privacy in principle but broad willingness to provide highly revealing information, often on social media. The attraction of participation in the information economy and the tangible freedoms its provides render privacy a contradictory and, in places, imaginary defence against online iniquities and exploitation.

No party in the present debate about the information economy disputes that data and information are alienated from their proper place. The only question is which place is proper. The competition between “free information” and “privacy” is essentially a competition between society and the individual as the rightful owner of information.

The attitude to the market in both camps is contradictory. As is often the case, attempts to utterly quash the role of market dynamics, as both attempt to, only succeed releasing all restraints upon it that a compromise position could have attained. While the “free information” movements have naively engendered an historic accumulation of wealth in the data “oil barons” (The Economist, 2017) over whose hardware and software the data “freely” passes. While privacy, if implemented as conceived, would demolish the information economy entirely. In reality, the undesirability of such an outcome means that people divulge their data. The only effect of privacy in practice has been to immobilise debate, the public having no appetite for exposing their own paradox, and therefore shut down rational, open policy making that could confront market failure without disposing of market dynamism.

Ironically, in introducing the market as a bridge between the society (i.e “free” data) and individual (i.e. privacy) poles, the most destructive expressions of market forces could be expected to attenuate, become more visible, more contestable and more understandable. The idea of a market for data — in other words, paying people for the data they produce online — has benefitted from a large body of public and academic support since its inception in 2013 (Lanier, 2013). Since that time, economists have focussed on devising an infrastructure capable of supporting the basic moral assumption that, since internet users are doing something that produces value, they should at least have the option of negotiating compensation for it. The moral rationale rests on the observation that the profitability of the data-collecting companies relies on their unwillingness to acknowledge that the activity of production is being done by their users not their legal employees. By failing to acknowledge data work as labour, they have been able to suppress cost and maximise profit (Posner and Weyl, 2017). As of 2020, no such architecture exists, limited experiments have been confounded and there is much scepticism that viable options will exist in the near future. Neither the sophisticated system of micropayments nor the sheer volume of monetizable data exist such that concerted private sector efforts could be mobilised. (Coyle et al, 2020)

If the production of data lent itself to a simple contractual agreement between (data) worker and data-producing platform then there would be no reason to suppose that existing conventions of self-ownership and employment could not be applied. However, data is a unique commodity that conventional definitions of ownership cannot accommodate. The solution must involve recognition of its unique qualities without denying that its production is work and work requires legal recognition and non-arbitrary compensation. The law must incorporate the inexorable overlap between data as labour, of which the worker must be cognizant, and data as a public good, to which society as a whole is entitled.

Despite these challenges, the reimagining of data as labour at a stroke rescues practically the entire traditional schema of economic alienation. That is a significant achievement and a strong reason to believe in its strength as an idea given that the core problem of the information economy has consistently been reduced to one of alienation. The alienation schema is derived from Marx, which is an impediment to its credibility at a time when traditional Marxism enjoys limited academic support. But the data-as-labour concept does not merely inhabit the categories of alienation; it provides scope for clarity and rigour in place of ambiguity and speculation. It is for this reason — that the data labour argument is not just being put into the Marxist concept but that the concept is being adapted to the reality of the information economy and the worker in it — that we can adopt the schema. Another reason might be that alienation, in its non-Marxian guises, is primarily philosophical and belonging to an idealist traditional at odds with the centrality of labour, which is more at home in the materialist tradition.

The traditional Marxist view of alienation from the activity of labour rests on the observation of the factory setting, something not unlike the Fordian production line. Adam Smith’s portrait of a pin factory in which production is optimised by each worker producing a different, minute part of the pin is an example of the profit that is derived from consigning the worker to repetitive tasks that do a disservice to the imaginative potential of man and the breadth of skills of which he is capable.

“Data labour” has little to contribute to the Marxist view of wage compulsion, the contribution of money to systems of exchange or the rejection of a salary as legitimate compensation for work. However, the present collection and utilisation of data labour is, in another respect, the most profound alienation imaginable. While the traditionally alienated worker was merely unable to recognise his contribution in a completed product to which he had contributed, the data worker is denied even the knowledge that he was working at all. He is therefore unable, completely, to identify himself with the final product, let alone reap its profits. This false consciousness has myriad side-effects including a demoralising disassociation of pleasure and creativity from work. Traditionally, leisure is construed as the escape from work once work becomes alien and immiserating. The special cruelty of data labour alienation is that, by refusing to recognise it as economically value-creating, leisure becomes synonymous with unpaid work. The enormous burst of creativity around social activity is being stripped of its work character making people regard the best things they are doing in life as essentially a valueless sideshow. False consciousness also substantially degrades the data being produced, which lacks the context that someone conscious they were working would add: of course, those kept unaware that they are doing a job cannot be informed how to do it better.

Perhaps the most disabling weakness of the traditional alienation critique was that Marx’s view of the product alienated per se from its creator by capitalism was not able to establish itself as essentially wrong. That is to say, long and complex supply chains involving thousands, even millions, of workers across the world results, unsurprisingly, in a final product in which any one worker struggles to see his particular contribution. Those supportive of capitalism, such Milton Friedman, with his example of the simple pencil, whose mysterious origins embodied the capitalist miracle, took this as proof that the market was simply superior at organising people. Marx himself, adhering rigidly to the neutrality of empiricism in his attempt to style his analyses as scientific, did not describe it pejoratively. The objectification of human social activity, messaging, reactions, however, intuitively feels dubious in a way that other products don’t. For some critics of the information economy, this anxiety is the collective discernment of a red line, beyond which commercialisation becomes intolerably invasive. While this may go to far — the debate about the moral quality of the information economy being currently dominated by extremes of total rejection or complacency — there can be little doubt that that alienation, in another sense, is fulfilled completely. A vital idea in the philosophical tradition of alienation is that the object is not merely separated from something or, more usually, someone with whom it should properly be together but that the object reappears subjectively as alien. The data, having been invisibly harvested and processed into personal information, is repackaged into insights adapted for advertising. As the advert, the product reappears in an alien form, a commercialised, often mistaken, cipher of the human. By rarely, if ever, directly linking the data collected with the advertisement represented, the “product” returns in a form freakishly both familiar and unfamiliar. By obscuring the link between the data as produced at source and its final result, the person to whom it loops back is denied both the profit of their labour and accurate self-knowledge. Advertising is not oppression but the repurposing of a person’s information by processes unknown to them is disorienting in a way that is psychologically unsettling and ultimately unprofitable.

Furthermore, since the record of someone’s action as collected through online activity (one’s revealed preference) is invariably trusted more than what someone says they want (their stated preference), the collection of personal information devalues someone’s voice. In other words, why ask people what they want when you can observe it? This of course, with some justification, ascribes the gulf between the two only to self-ignorance. However, aspirations for self-improvement begin and usually remain in the part of the mind tapped by asking. The data collectors have presumably no interest in acquainting those more self-critical parts of the mind with the commercial history that will fall short of its self-expectations but nonetheless profit the data collector and his clients. The different parts of the mind both hold value and could be reunited by fixing the alienation of data from its producers, the worker from his product.

Of course, this all implies that the proper place of the information composing the digital twin is either in the possession (and awareness) of the person it is about or, in the case of those more opposed to the information economy, that such data is never collected in the first place. The latter option is destructive but consistent. The former, which this essay proposes is the right option, is nonetheless fraught with epistemic dangers. Data collected on the mind and body is, of course, predictive but its prescience should make us wary of it. MRI scans of the brain have shown that reactions to stimuli are detectable before they appear in conscious thought. What would happen if our digital twin began revealing our decisions before we had made them? At what point does this self-awareness infringe on the assumption of free will? This represents perhaps the most extreme kind of fetishism, which is characterised by the alienation of something from its creator and its return, not just as something alien but as something that dominates or oppresses its creator. The capacity of the digital twin to dominate its creator by dint of precognition — thereby denying their free will — gives succour to the argument that an information economy in any form dehumanises its participants. While this may represent an esoteric extreme, the predictive power of personal information as it intervenes on the life of its creator has been widely interpreted as prejudicing freedom. Production always involves objectification in the literal sense that it produces a separate object from the work of one or several people or things. Personal data production seems to be incapable of neutral, harmless objectification; by the mere fact of its being about someone,[1] objectification is transformed into a sinister fetishism. In its soft form — the digital twin constructed by data collectors — ownership would seem to be enough to solve the problematic aspect of production but in its harder, more esoteric form — where the existence of the data prejudices or disrupts the life of its creator — objectification is inextricably fetishistic.

This is a particularly important caveat because, as will become clear, the core evil of alienation in the information economy is that it prevents self-knowledge. While superficially a less dreadful injustice than the absence of explicit compensation for data labour, and the corresponding extreme concentration of wealth in few hands, the multidimensional false consciousness and self-delusion is actually more injurious because of the profound importance of self-awareness to economic and personal freedom. The problematic nature of personal information, in its extreme but not implausible form of the perfect, real-time digital twin, suggests that dehumanising alienation will be contained and managed but not eliminated.

The profound alienation that the information economy has produced is a debilitating disability on its own terms. However, it is especially destructive because it is preventing workers from the authentic expression of their nature. Authenticity is the only commodity in the possession and production of humanity that is by definition un-automatable. Uniquely, an authentic product may be substantively replicable by a machine; the difference is that, if it is done by a machine, it is no longer considered to be authentic. The arrival of the machine age has, organically, given rise to a distinct quality of not being machine-made, which is partly what we mean by authentic. In some circumstances, it also means made by a specific person, not copied from someone else. Finally, an authentic expression by an individual is taken to mean their loyalty to themselves, consistency with their character and behaviour. So, authenticity has come to combine, organically in the public mind, humanity, individuality and honesty. That such a complex concept should have become common currency and have real purchase on the private lives of ordinary people is an extraordinary resource for social change. Arguably, it arose out of an instinctive resilience to the contradictions of this information age. It’s usage mirrors anxiety about automation, globalisation and other threats to identity associated with rapid technological change: it arose in the modern early, peaked in the nineteenth century, and receded steadily until the post-war period, at which point it trended unmistakably upward.

The deprivation of man from his authentic self is a tangible economic injury because the advent of the information economy raises the value of authenticity. If automation eventually conquers all before it, and there is no logical, as opposed to historical, reason to believe It won’t, then authenticity will become the only resource accessible to human beings. It also revivifies the Marxian scepticism of the division of labour, which has suffered from a dearth of plausible alternatives to the engine of capitalist growth. Sitting on an economy of compensated data labour dominated by social activity, the comparative advantage of the individual is their authenticity. In this case, the definition of authenticity rewards the expression of the whole personality, not some mere part of their skillset. In this way, authenticity offers division of labour — each individual to their authentic self-expression — without alienation: an unheralded solution to the Marxist lament.

Now we must turn to freedom, currently sitting idle in the discredited possession of the aforementioned proponents of “free data”. The classical formulation of freedom has it divided into two: negative, which sees the essence of the term in the liberation from external constraints, and positive, which believes that it can be given or enhanced through direct assistance even at the cost of imposing restrictions. Negative freedom benefits from a more intuitive identification with freedom while positive definitions has pre-occupied policy making in recent decades. However, the advent of more empirical studies of behaviour at the intersection of psychology and economics have refined the theoretical framework. These approaches, along with studies of addiction (Kellogg, 2018), have resulted in the incorporation of self-control into freedom[2]. Drawing on an ancient history of thought that recognised the role of restraint in personal liberty, the inability of an individual to control their own urges is seen as incompatible with complete personal freedom. The special contribution of the new approaches has been to formalize the logic of this intuition. The workhorse of this science of self-control has been the dual-self model, introduced by Thaler and Shefrin (1981), that explores distinct present and future selves with differing preferences. The dual-self model has permitted us to confront paradoxes in the standard account of utility maximization and provided tools to analyze impulse control and other facets of time-inconsistency (Fudenberg & Levine, 2006).

Self-control, and by extension freedom, is one of the casualties of alienation in the information economy. By denying self-knowledge, self-control becomes impossible: preferences are obscured and manipulated or the digital mirror reflects a self that is freakishly distorted. In a highly unstable, albeit productive, market the future self is in any case obscured enough that acting on its behalf becomes impossible. In other words, the situation of the mature, information-saturated capitalism often makes the exercise of self-control, and therefore the experience of true freedom, impossible. It does, however, uplift short termism and therefore spending, which is undeniably the preference of both the “data-barons” and macroeconomic policy.

In principle, the advent of personal information collection, even up to the point of being comprehensive, offers unprecedented self-awareness. People can use the data collected about them to objectively measure their actions and interests across their whole lives down to the smallest detail. If the information is liberated from its collectors and further insights extracted from the black box of commercial psychology, people can potentially attain near-perfect self-awareness. Given the role of self-control in freedom, a clear understanding of oneself could maximise both the material and subjective experience of liberty. Therein lies the great promise of the information economy. Despite this, we must recognise that the information economy complicates self-control in more esoteric and less redeemable ways. As traditionally explained, freedom is maximised by replacing the external (legal, political and cultural) constraints on someone, if devised by others[3], with internal constraints that reflect their preferences and (sometimes/to a lesser extent) their welfare. Where does personal information reside in the internal/external division? As we have seen, the existence of personal information naturally assembles into a predictive model that can disrupt fundamental assumptions about freedom of action.

From the vestiges of this heightened self-awareness that already exist, such as wearable technology that records fitness, a fear has emerged that people will become automata enslaved to a narrow definition of rational self-interest. In some areas, such as health, that is not an unreasonable or unwelcome prediction. In most others, such as culture, it is distinctly dystopian. Authenticity provides a conceptual bulwark against this: it tempers the pure rationality that self-control threatens to infuse freedom with. This is because the ethic of authenticity places certain motivations and commitments above rational reflection. It holds that too great an adherence to either rationality or liberty for their own sake can be destructive in a manner that becomes self-defeating: some personal fundamentals may be so important to moral agency that ignoring them would dissolve the moral agent itself. In other words, the exercise of freedom or rationality may break apart the bonds that constitute the self. If the self as a concept breaks down, freedom, self-control and self-interest become void. Taking one meaning of authenticity to be the integrity of the self, it becomes clear that the other values are subordinate to it but remain important (Menke 2005; 308). In fact, authenticity and liberty cooperate in the sense that both scrutinise behaviour on the basis of self-determined preferences (Honneth 1994). Self-accountability is also inherent in the concept: the word authenticity, as it comes to us from Heidegger’s neologism Eigentlichkeit, might be literally translated as ‘ownedness’, or ‘being one’s own’ (Verga and Guignon 2017). The model of self-control that behavioural economics deploys also recognises that self-control does not necessarily mean sacrificing pleasure (Vosgerau et al, 2019), only that one acts in accordance with a certain hierarchy of preferences. Authenticity provides substance to this in the sense that the model only previously allowed that self-control could accommodate less than rational behaviour but was not clear why it should.

Authenticity is not a new idea, having risen to occupy a central place in modern thought (Taylor 2007; Ferrarra 1998; Schneewinf 1998; Dworkin 1988). It has often been associated with autonomy in that it marks a departure from fidelity to external society to being true to oneself (Ferrara 1993; Varga 2011). As such, it has been seen as another destructive member of the radical individualist family of ideas: it has been rejected as de facto narcissism (Lasch 1979), economically disruptive “megalomania” (Bell, 1976:84). But authenticity, as it appears in the information economy, is disassociated from autonomy. As explained, it is a departure from simple negative freedom and an affirmation of the traditional criticism that separating self from society is absurd when the authentic self is constituted by its community (Slater 1970; Sick 1973). By opening up a justification of why the self should depart from simplified notions of freedom and rationality — by arguing from the principal importance of the integrity of the agent itself — this definition of authenticity can acknowledge that the self is diminished by the loss of its society (Bellah et al. 1985, Fairlie 1978). Recent defences of authenticity have taken this form, acknowledging the idea’s “contamination” by a self-defeating definitions of personal independence (Taylor 1991:38). Extricating the concept from that aestheticism, subjectivism and individualism, this involves adopting the idea, inherited from Heidegger and Kierkegaard, that authenticity is relational and constituted by those relations. As Charles Taylor writes, “authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it presupposes such demands” (1991:41).

By locating authenticity in society and, as shown, subordinating imperatives of liberty and rationality too, one of the fundamental conceptual problems of freedom can be fixed. As stated, the greater the instability in society, the less the ability of someone to imagine their future and act on its behalf, thereby limiting the scope for self control and the freedom that self control enables. The instability in society is, however, a result of rights derived from ideas of negative freedom that have proved essential to the operation of mature market capitalism. We have now established however that such freedom is dependent on the integrity of the self — authenticity — and, as such, the expression of authenticity through social bonds, obligations and duties, have at least as much right to expression as negative freedom. If these ties can stabilise society, they offer scope for self-control. Authenticity can ameliorate the instability, self-fragmentation and meaningless that collectively constitute the malaise of modernity (Taylor 1991).

In a sense, debate is marooned between two poles: the first, the ironic coexistence of inalienable rights to economic liberty (essentially the apotheosis of negative freedom) with rampant alienation; the second, a disorganised coalition committed to dismantling those rights and ending alienation. The solution is a synthesis of the two that has arisen separately from political activism. Appropriately since he was the primary historical proponent of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis schema, Hegel saw alienation as the necessary, if unpleasant, rout to authenticity. The self, though temporarily “disintegrated” (Williams 2002: 190) would eventually reassemble in its authentic form. This essay recognised authenticity as the salve of alienation.

Traditional understanding of alienation has been hobbled by the absence of a clear sense of what constituted the unalienated individual or society. In a sense, the organic rise of the concept of the authentic vindicates the Marxian reticence about proposing a solution: in the “scientific socialism”, which is a hallmark of the Marxist style, the contradictions in capitalism would naturally bring about responses in the workers that did not require articulation and enforcement by a bourgeois intellectual clique. The instinctive, decentralised adoption of the idea of authenticity out of experience — rising out of the data workers’ own work — would seem to match this prediction closely.