Instrumentarian society promises a future guaranteed free of mistakes, accidents, and random messes.

Evidence

In this way, the machine hive becomes the role model for a new human hive in which we march in peaceful unison toward the same direction based on the same “correct” understanding in order to construct a world free of mistakes, accidents, and random messes. In this world the “correct” outcomes are known in advance and guaranteed in action. The same ubiquitous instrumentation and transparency that define the machine system must also define the social system, which in the end is simply another way of describing the ground truth of instrumentarian society. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1322

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘known in advance, guaranteed in action’ promise resonates with the prediction-products logic of earlier chapters and with modern data-driven governance critiques. — connects to: Instrumentarian society is a planned society enforcing total behavioral control — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1394; A freely-made promise transforms uncertainty into fact by willing a future into being — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1035; The speculative imagination keeps the future open to change by collectively owning its indeterminacy — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 249
• FICTION: A utopian-dystopia seed: a society promising the abolition of accident — the erasure of contingency as the organizing promise of governance.

Broader Connections

• Instrumentarian society is a planned society enforcing total behavioral control #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1394
• The speculative imagination keeps the future open to change by collectively owning its indeterminacy #contradicts (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 249
• A freely-made promise transforms uncertainty into fact by willing a future into being #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1035