Asymmetry (part 1)

The unbearable unevenness of online culture

It’s been a little quiet around these parts, and that’s mostly been intentional. Part of it has been finishing my Winterlude course, partly the hectic first week of classes, and partly me just needing a bit of a break¹. I’ve got some ideas churning in the background, though, and I wanted to write a little about one of them.

I’ve been thinking lately about asymmetry. Artificial intelligence is a product whose hype grounds itself in asymmetry in no small measure. If you consider those Apple commercials, you’ll see characters who are credited with a certain amount of effort that Ai allows them to bypass altogether. The unspoken bit of “Write Smarter” in those ads comes from the cliché of “working smarter, not harder,” and indeed, much of the appeal of technology comes in the form of saving labor on our part.

I think that, culturally, we’re reacting to this vibe, the idea that we can all just get away with accomplishing more by doing less². I’m thinking here of phrases like FAFO (“fuck around and find out”) or “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” It’s probably taking them a bit too seriously to describe them as part of a deep-seated societal desire for consequences, justice, or symmetry, but then again, perhaps not. Although I don’t have the energy to synthesize all of the takes that erupted in the wake of Luigi Mangione’s actions at the end of last year, I think that we’re in a moment, that there are a lot more people (than perhaps our political and media elites realize) who are bone-weary of a system that not only permits but incentivizes the sort of asymmetry that I’m talking about.

(I’m not sure why, but Substack’s AI gave me this when I typed in “asymmetry”)

In a very basic sense, what I’m calling asymmetry is at the heart of capitalist economics—it’s the distinction between use value and exchange value that allows those who control the means of production to draw profit from exchange. The prospect of capitalizing on that asymmetry is what drives markets (and innovations with them). Within a given market, competition among multiple agents functions as “self-regulation,” placing limits upon how asymmetric things can get. If one company sells its widgets for triple of the price of other companies’, they’re not likely to last very long in the widget market (unless their widgets have some serious advantage over their competitors’). In that way, then, so-called “free markets” will potentially regulate themselves, keeping the asymmetry to a tolerable level. In part, what I’m describing here is asymmetry operating at different scales. We accept a certain degree of asymmetry in pricing, ie we pay more than something is technically worth, because once we hit a certain social scale, our contributions can only ever be partial and fractional. The asymmetry that pays my salary is diffused by the fact that I spend that salary on food, shelter, transportation, health care, etc., none of which I have the time or expertise to generate myself.

What we think of, then, as “normal” or “fair” is actually a densely interdependent network of unfairnesses, all balanced against each other like a massively intricate house of cards. This is part of Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand of market capitalism: we are fundamentally self-interested, but this inclination is offset by the existence of competition³. As I’ve insisted here on occasion, I don’t have any particular expertise in economics, so I won’t push on this further, but I do want to take it in a slightly different direction.

The invisible hand is more than a metaphor—it’s a myth that’s had an outsized impact on our economy for the past fifty-plus years, in no small part because we want to believe in the equilibrium that it gestures towards. That is, perhaps above all, the majority of us long for symmetry, for a system and a society that treats us fairly, one where our needs (and desires) are affordable, our choices are meaningful, and where we are surrounded by others who (by and large) share those same values and priorities. Even as we recognize that others operate according to their own self-interest, we want to trust that our selfishness (and theirs) will balance out in a way that serves us all in a fashion that won’t cause pain, harm, or evil.

Cory Doctorow’s discussion of enshittification, and in particular the forces that are (or once were) arrayed against it, provides a timely example of what it might mean to think about this at different scales. In his McLuhan address from roughly a year ago, Doctorow talked about how enshittification was, for some time, held at bay by competition, regulation, the willingness and inclination of users to go elsewhere, and the labor power of the tech workforce.

The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

Doctorow has talked about this more recently as well - the problem with the media oligarchy isn’t its profit motive. Rather, it’s the degree to which these companies have turned those profits to the purpose of eliminating, erasing, and eroding all of the forces limiting them. “At its root,” he writes, “enshittification is a theory about constraints.”

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I’ve got two or three more pieces about asymmetry that I want to write over the next couple of weeks, but I bring this introductory episode to an end, I should probably spend a little time making one thing clear, and that’s that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with asymmetry.

It’s a force that operates across multiple scales, and so it’s difficult to parse in any exact way. It feels unfair to us to see grocery prices rise, for instance, but when the price hike comes as a result of supply chain issues (i.e., when the cost of bringing those goods to us rises), it seems a lot less problematic than it does when we learn that the companies providing them are enjoying record profits (and using those profits to buy back stocks and enrich shareholders). We are enmeshed in all sorts of asymmetries, only some of which we experience directly.

And symmetry isn’t an automatic good. For a long time, the “view from nowhere” has been used to impose symmetry upon debates or issues where scientific consensus is clear, whether it’s the benefits of vaccination, the environmental consequences of fossil fuels, or the reality of global warming. Imposing an artificial symmetry (they’re open to debate! who can really say?) on questions where there is (and should be) a rational asymmetry is no less corrupt than asymmetries can become.

A final note, and that’s that I’m thinking a bit about whether or not to think about irony as intrinsically asymmetrical, that it includes a fundamental imbalance between connotation and denotation. I don’t know if I’ll return to this point, but it’s something that’s lurking behind this discussion as well for me. I don’t think I’ve quite justified the subtitle on this post, but it’s the broader theme that’s been driving my thinking here, so I’m going to treat it as more of a promise for later consideration. More soon.

1. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the coincidence of the Presidential inauguration and MLK Day, perhaps the cruelest irony I could imagine, hasn’t left me feeling kind of drained for the past week or so.

2. If I’m being honest, I think our reactions aren’t uniform. While I might see asymmetry (or inequality/inequity) as a problem to be addressed, there are loads of people who’d rather get themselves a piece of it. I wrote about this a bit last year: our cultural turn to influencer economies, access journalism, et al., is a turn towards what I’m calling here asymmetry.

3. I also think about this in terms that Richard Dawkins laid out in The Selfish Gene years and years ago, which made the case that we were fundamentally selfish at the genetic level, even when that (nonmoral) selfishness resulted in apparently altruistic behavior at the scale of organism, like the way that we sort ourselves into families or fill the world with silly love songs.