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angelsndragons · 3 years

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fjord’s feelings for caduceus changed in episodes 98-99

by which i mean, fjord finally realized how special and important he is to caduceus, which in turn set the tone of their relationship for the rest of the campaign. buckle up, this is a long one.

not when fjord threw away his sword and went to caduceus instead of jester. or when caduceus presented him with the star razor. or after the citadel fight when caduceus gave him his holy symbol. i think things changed for fjord in episode 98-99, when caduceus saved his life and removed the orb.

this is going to require some context.

because here’s the thing: fjord’s always looking for the price, waiting for the catch or other shoe to drop. people caring for him because of him with no strings attached is unprecedented. vandren and the world taught fjord that love is conditional, that only if you hide what others would find ugly and make yourself useful to them will they deign to give you a scrap of affection. i don’t think vandren did this maliciously, mind you, it was just part of his worldview and fjord’s life up to and beyond that point supported it. we can see that right up to the end of the show, where fjord is terrified that vandren didn’t remember him or that he didn’t mean nearly as much to the man as vandren did to him.

so we have fjord, who learned to don masks and hide his truest self, including his best and worst aspects. while fjord made the nein into a coherent group, into a force, a crew, a family, even, he still waited for that other shoe to drop. waited for the day that they would reject him because he was no longer useful or because he pushed them too far. you can see this waiting all over the early campaign; he’s not looking for an excuse like caleb to cut and run but he anticipates nearly all the moments that almost fractured the nein, in spite of that low wisdom score. while jester carried the guilt of not being able to save molly, fjord carried the guilt of not protecting the group in that crucial moment. travis confirmed on talks that fjord’s biggest fear when he lost his powers the first time was that he would no longer be useful and be kicked out of the group.

that’s why fjord damn near broke down at the end of 72. the nein, no questions asked, with their standard level of snark, accepted that he was going to be a liability and kept him around anyway. armed him anyway. declared that he was no liability and that they would help him along until he could help himself and them again. this unconditional acceptance caught fjord completely off guard. it always does, really. because caduceus had said for months, an out of game half a year, that he was looking to reforge the sword as a gift for fjord. he said this to fjord’s face. he did not change course when he learned that the sword was a legendary blade forged by acolytes of the wildmother and moonweaver. the blade was still meant for fjord, even if fjord was still chained to uk’otoa. fjord extends his love and protection to the nein but is still not convinced the reverse is true. he was starting to believe it but he wasn’t quite there yet.

caduceus has a high enough wisdom to understand that’s fjord’s hang up even if he doesn’t quite understand the reasoning behind it. that’s why he pulls fjord aside in ep 75 and tells him that he doesn’t have to choose the wildmother, that there are other gods and other ideas out there looking for a champion. fjord, who at this point considers wildmom his only option (travis says she’s the only one who’s shown the slightest interest in fjord and that’s why he’s gunning for her), is befuddled by caduceus and this whole talk, so much so the pair end up talking past each other for the next several episodes.

after fjord officially becomes a paladin, things between him and caduceus become fairly...unsettled compared to their previous interactions. they talk past each other more, they aren’t in sync enough to double team those social interactions they were just starting to get good at. things are just weird for a while. to me, that’s fjord waiting for the catch, waiting for caduceus to call in some favor or something like it. and he keeps getting confused when caduceus doesn’t. so he tries once or twice to follow in caduceus’ footsteps and do as he would instead. and it just makes things weirder. these two don’t have a moment together that doesn’t leave one of them confused or unsatisfied until ep 87, when caduceus gives fjord the holy symbol and inadvertently kicks off the next phase of their relationship. because here, caduceus tries to put them back on equal footing and fjord recognizes it. caduceus rejects framing their relationship as mentor/student and tells fjord he doesn’t need caduceus to give him answers. fjord is “well on his way.”

by defining what they aren’t, mentor/student, our two boys inadvertently ask the question, “so what are we?” honestly, it’s a question that the entire group grapples with in the 90s as they reintegrate yasha, as veth struggles with the question of changing back and whether she can stay with the nein, as beau tries to sacrifice herself for veth, as jester learns some uncomfortable truths about the traveler, as caduceus finds his family again. fjord and caduceus can easily define what they aren’t - not mentor/student, not brothers or cousins- but what they actually are stumps both of them.

their relationship doesn't look like any of their relationships with the others: beau is fjord's bro and first mate, caleb is fjord's complicated mirror and admiree, jester his crush and first person he learned to be vulnerable with, veth his antagonistic sibling. on caduceus' side, caleb is the one he looks to for a fellow project nerd and clear, unvarnished goals, beau and jester are the sisters caduceus misses, yasha the quiet beloved barbarian he understands better than the rest, and veth a mess he wants to help but can't. but fjord and caduceus' relationship is highly undefined at this point. notably undefined, beyond their newly shared connection to melora. at the dinner with essek, we get the stone bomb. and travis and fjord panic. like no, seriously, they spend the next four episodes low key panicking over this revelation. this ties back to fjord waiting for those other shoes to drop but it’s also more than that.

when it comes to destiny, fjord has always been the answer, the self made man, to both caduceus and caleb’s questions about destiny. he makes choices about who he is, who he wants to be, and takes actions towards those goals. he is one of those rare people who can wear many different masks, take on many different roles, while still maintaining his sense of self and becoming a fuller version of who he is. when I say fjord is the answer to destiny, what i mean is that he is what ioun said way back in c1 about Fate: mortals make choices and through those choices, destiny is fulfilled. he is the answer to caduceus' own growth from passive instrument waiting for someone to play him to active communicator in this conversation between gods and mortals. in this sense, fjord is what caduceus learns to be (this is exactly why caduceus rejects a mentor role; he has as much to learn from fjord as vice versa).

so for this coincidence to pop up, this idea that maybe fjord only had the illusion of choice to extend his service to the wildmother, that maybe somehow he was manipulated again, that there was some grand destiny pushing things and fjord had no say in it, yeah, i can see why fjord was low-key terrified. so is this what fjord and caduceus are: just some predestined grand fairy tale partnership neither of them have that much say in? episode 96 resoundingly rejects that label too. for one thing, none of the stones or clays treat fjord's last name as anything amazing or spectacular. for another, this string of episodes gives us caduceus at his most human. the terror of not knowing what happened to his family, the uncertainty of his homecoming, the relief of saving his family and home, the irritation at the way the chaos crew treats the temple, the playful attitude caduceus cultivates after, it's all on display. caduceus drops much of his placid exterior and willingly allows the nein to see sheer depth of emotion he has.

which leads me back to episode 98-99. uk’otoa’s agents come for fjord. and caduceus is pissed. travis and ashley both said on talks that they hadn’t really seen taliesin that pissed, that it was like someone had threatened an actual loved one of his. fjord dies. and comes back to an exhausted, still pissed off firbolg who is five seconds away from snapping archmage vess derogna’s head off for interrupting his prayer of healing. taliesin doesn’t even begin to relax until they start interrogating the dead fish people the next day. once caduceus confirms the ball is still in fjord, notably caduceus and caleb were the two who remembered, fjord starts asking for a way to remove it. he asks caduceus to start a commune with wildmom in tandem with jester’s commune with the traveler. caleb tells fjord that caduceus fought “very hard for you while you were down, i don’t know if he’s up to it.” having heard that, caduceus still tries, with his first divine intervention attempt of the campaign. and when jester figures out that greater restoration will work, caduceus pushes through his exhaustion, takes charge, and goes through a truly terrifying greater restoration with fjord to remove the ball. convulsing, seizing, shuddering, collapsing, etc.

in those moments, and in the quiet after when fjord confirms that he still has his powers, it finally hits him that yes, people can protect, fight, and love him for who he is alone. there is no chain or other shoe waiting to be dropped here. the wildmother is no uk’otoa, to punish or take power at a whim. caduceus will fight with everything he has and then some for fjord because he loves him (not for nothing does fjord only realizes the depths of jester’s feelings when she uses heal on him). who are caduceus and fjord to each other? they are people who will fight for one another and the others as far as they can. fjord says over and over again that he wants to protect the nein and look out for them because he cares for them. he demonstrates it over and over again as well. caduceus says basically the same thing; he wants everyone safe and happily on their way and will stay until they are. he demonstrates this all the time as well. this is, i think, the first time that he demonstrates his dedication so unequivocally, free of the artifice of duty, fully committed through love. fjord recognizes this in caduceus and caduceus does in fjord.

i say this is a turning point because, while they don’t really have another super in depth conversation alone together, these two start clocking each other and openly help and look out for each other. there’s an ease and intimacy to the relationship after this. fjord watching caduceus swim near vokodo’s lair, fjord being ready to hand over his armor to caduceus when it looks like his won’t be ready, fjord, caduceus, and beau plotting behind jester’s back to keep her safe from the traveler, the absolute offense fjord takes to eadwulf after he spoke to caduceus like that, fjord levels up in paladin after caduceus tells him he’s proud to know him, all the way to the end of the show when fjord shelters the clerics and tells them to finish lucien, we get little moments like these from both of them. hell, caduceus is the first person in the campaign to tell fjord directly that he loves him.

#cr #critical role #cr meta #fjorclay #wildbros #fjord #caduceus clay #prim did theirs so i'm doing mine #in b4 the wrap-up #just barely #and ran out of steam at the end #i'll expand on that later #gotta finish my vm v m9 meta #and the cockroach party analysis

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doshmanziari · 3 years

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Architectural Criticism in 2021/2022 || Part 1.5

Before writing a fuller continuation of my previous essay on architectural criticism, I’m inserting a mini-essay that focuses on a particular piece of criticism. Let me be clear: I don’t see Kate Wagner, the person behind @mcmansionhell, as an enemy; I’m just using one of her articles as an example because I had, in my essay, already linked two articles of hers (more accurately, one article and an image from another), and I’d rather elaborate on what I mean when I write “...a vapid buildup to a politically convenient takeaway” than bring in an entirely different item. Wagner, in my view, represents a sort of destabilizing criticism that takes pleasure in tackling “dry” subject matter with breathless, Meme-heavy sarcasm. I find the tone off-putting, but I appreciate it as one attempt to invigorate and broaden the audiences of architectural appraisal. My issue is that by now the joke has overestimated its capacity for judgmental clarity. Really anything can be made fun of if you’re determined enough, and the more of an unquestioning audience you have the easier it is to believe everything you say is true or coherent.

The image was from this 2018 Vox article: “Betsy DeVos’ summer home deserves a special place in McMansion Hell” (a title likely devised by the editor; given the other residences Wagner has lambasted, I would be surprised if she truly believes this is among the worst). My observations won’t make sense unless anyone who is reading this reads her article as well, so please do that if you’d like to follow along. It should take only a couple of minutes.

What I’d first draw readers’ attention to is that Wagner spends the first four paragraphs on the United States’ beyond-vast inequality of wealth. Two of these paragraphs are the article’s largest, and the article is twelve-paragraphs-long, meaning that 1/3 of it is devoted to establishing a socio-economic context -- at least, that is the pretense. Once Wagner writes “...getting paid to make fun of DeVos’s tacky seaside decor is one of few ways to both feed myself and make myself feel better”, it is clear that her personal intent is a kind of vengeful mocking, and that her intent for readers is to prime them to associatively, knee-jerkingly despise anything which could come next with flat-affect “lmao”s. It’s hardly irrelevant to mention economic realities when examining luxury items (and what else is a mansion?), but Wagner’s subsequent analysis is not really architectural or even artistic: it is rather about looking at several photographs of a building, knowing who lives there and hating that person (and also imagining that they were responsible for all design decisions), and then mocking this-and-that in whatever ways one can devise. These grievances are understandable, but understandable grievances do not automatically lead to perceptive criticism.

Please look (perhaps again) at the first image. Note that only four, maybe, of the fourteen details Wagner chooses to focus on -- “no wry comment needed”, “these look like playdoh stamps”, “when you love consistency”, and “oh my god is this a shutter” -- approach anything vaguely resembling coherent criticism; and the other four images fare even worse (with the exception of the highlighting of an apparently absurd interior balcony). The rest are inane attempts at saying anything at all. Writing “hell portal” by an upper porch area may be funny for a moment, but what does it actually express? Well, nothing, except the author’s own irritation which will find whatever it can to announce its contemptuous sarcasm. Wagner’s captions will land only to the degree that the reader is humorously sympathetic.

The aforementioned remarks, excepting the one about the embedded chubby Tuscan columns’ Play-Doh-likeness, suggest that the worst thing a building can do is be formally heterogeneous. The implicative corollary here is that good architecture is eminently justifiable in all of its parts -- consistent, unified, rational. This is as fine a personal belief as anything else, but when it is wielded as dogma against architecture which has no interest in being a Petit Trianon it can only reveal its intellectual self-limitations. Wagner writes that “there is a difference between architectural complexity and a mess”, yet what that difference may be is hand-waved away. We just have to believe that thirteen different windows styles is too much. What’s the threshold? Does it depend on the size of the building? The types of styles used? Who knows.

Now of course bad architecture exists, and sometimes the failure indeed points to deficient editorial acumen; for architecture, like any other art, is as much about what’s included as what’s excluded. But in saying so little about the shingle style itself, Wagner seems to have given no thought to readers concluding that all shingle style houses are freakish -- more specifically, concluding that this freakishness is a damning transgression, and that no self-respecting, punching-up class-warrior would ever be caught dead sincerely enjoying their geometric, “exquisite corpse” escapades. In fact, the freakish tendencies of shingle style houses are just what make them such great fun to see, visit, or reside in. Wagner’s article, as far as I can tell, omits this possibility. When she writes, “Betsy likely went with this style because it is very popular in New England and in coastal enclaves of the rich and famous in general”, one is being pushed to presume that the only probable reason the shingle style exists or could be preferred over another style is to signal élite solidarity.

The photograph right above is of Kragsyde, a Massachusetts shingle style mansion, designed by the US-Northeast-oriented firm of Peabody & Stearns, completed in the 1880s. It was demolished almost a century ago, but the few exterior images of it which remain are, I think, fascinating -- maybe most of all for its enormous archway, possibly a porte-cochère, which has a thin, overextending keystone bizarrely driven into the top like a nail puncturing a petrified rainbow. I bring the building up because Wagner gives us no reason to consider why Kragsyde may have been a genuine architectonic accomplishment and not merely an oversized farce of contiguous pretensions. To the layperson hot off of the Vox piece, there may be no artistic difference between it and DeVos’ place, except that perhaps Kragsyde has a more consistent fenestrative application (would that make it better? if so, why?).

I appreciate that only so much can be said when you’re limited to less than a thousand words, especially when the issue is “complicated” (as the byline for Vox’s First-person series advertises). But the problem I keep coming back to is how DeVos’ mansion is treated as a stand-in for DeVos herself. This makes any architectural critique, no matter how pressed it is for size, flimsily presentist: its durability starts and ends with how alive the architecture’s resident(s) and political presence are. On some emotional level, this is pretty sensible: if we despise monarchical institution, we can find a sort of loophole to enjoying Versailles palace on the basis of it no longer being the residence of royalty. Our awe over its decadence and scope is intersectionally “admissible” on the basis of its having become a UNESCO World Heritage site. Similarly, one can imagine DeVos’ mansion being appreciated in a hundred years (should it still exist then) because the passage of time will have rendered DeVos’ person a historical fact, and perhaps more separable, and then tolerable, in that regard -- even if the building remains private.

But if architecture is, as a craft, critically whittled down to nothing more or less than inorganic expressions of social disparities, with every aesthetic decision a reflection of politically explicable taste, then we must assume that a great deal of the world’s most remarkable architecture is equally ridiculous and despicable, since so much of it was born out of great privilege and required specialized resources. I doubt Wagner actually believes this, because it would betray the entire premise of her McMansion Hell project, which is to demonstrate how so many modern day mansions are deeply unpleasant mounds of visual illiteracy, and cannot hold even a stump of a candle to the luminously learned and eclectic talents of prior great architects such as Mackintosh, Norman Shaw, Lutyens, or Ledoux. So what’s the takeaway here? As far as I can tell, it’s simply that if you hate Betsy DeVos, and if you care about class, you should hate her house too. And I do not think that that is architectural criticism.

#Architecture #architectural criticism #mcmansion #shingle style

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brightbeautifulthings · 5 years

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The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (trans. Robin Buss)

"'I have heard it said that the dead have never done, in six thousand years, as much evil as the living do in a single day.'"

Year Read: 2019

Rating: 3/5

Context: Last year’s year-long Les Mis read went so well, I decided to choose another intimidating classic to tackle in the same fashion this year. I know myself, and if I don't deliberately pace out a book like this, I'll try to read a thousand pages in a week, and it will just be a miserable experience. (That's not to say some classics aren't miserable experiences regardless of how you read them, but that's another issue entirely.) The Count of Monte Cristo was calling to me from the shelf, and by pure luck, I already owned the edition I wanted to read (plus a B&N abridged version that promptly went into the donation box). Reviews overwhelmingly praise Robin Buss’s translation for ease/modernity, and the Penguin Classics haven’t let me down yet.

For my less coherent updates in real-time: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX. My review is spoiler-free, but my updates are not, so read with caution if you’re not familiar. Trigger warnings: In a book with a thousand pages? Everything, probably, but for sure death, parent/child death, suicide/suicidal thoughts, severe illness, guns, abduction, poisoning, slavery, mental illness, sexism, ableism, grief, depression.

About: When forces conspire to have sailor Edmond Dantès arrested for a crime he didn't commit, he spends years in a hellish prison, fighting to stay sane. Through bravery and good fortune, he manages to escape, and he assumes a new identity for himself: The Count of Monte Cristo. Under this guise, he inserts himself into the lives of the French nobility, vowing revenge on those who wronged him.

Thoughts: Like most thousand page novels, there's no reason this novel needs to be a thousand pages, but the one thing I can say about them, collectively, is that I come away feeling like I have a relationship with them that I usually don't get from a shorter book unless I've read it multiple times. And it makes sense: I've been reading this book for a year. I've had relationships with actual humans that were much shorter than that. Dumas's prose (helped along by Buss's translation) is accessible and not overly dry, if not quite as humorous as Victor Hugo’s. Thanks to both of them, I now have a rudimentary understanding of the French Revolution and the difference between a Royalist and Bonapartist (because truly the only way to make me read about history is to put it in a novel).

Dumas proves himself more capable of staying on topic though, with one or two exceptions. The only margin note I cared to write was, apparently, "Horrible digression", and I stand by that. As soon as the novel leaves Dantès’s perspective, it gets less interesting, beginning with Franz encountering Sinbad the Sailor on Monte Cristo and continuing with the Very Weird and Terrible Side Anecdotes about bandits in Rome. Otherwise, much of the storyline is more or less linear, without the intricacies of Waterloo or the Paris sewer system. It grows more chaotic as the book goes on though, with frequent digressions into every character's backstory.

The plot takes such a drastic turn that it's almost like reading two different novels with two different main characters. At the beginning, it’s most like an adventure story. There are sailors, prison breaks, and buried treasure. Yet, for all those things, it’s surprisingly un-suspenseful. Dumas has a very stolid way of story-telling. The pace is almost supernaturally consistent, so that even things that probably should have tension in them are presented as a matter of course. (Or maybe I’m just hugely desensitized by media.) I wasn’t as excited as I thought I should be during some of the more compelling parts, but there’s something reassuring about Dumas’s relentlessly straightforward story-telling.

The middle takes a major dip in interest. Cue a lot of long and tedious backstories, plus Monte Cristo's elaborate set-ups to take down his enemies. It basically devolves into a soap opera of the various dramas of Paris’s rich and powerful families. Monte Cristo barely needs to lift a finger to destroy these people, since with a few mostly harmless suggestions, it looks like they're all going to self-destruct at any moment without outside help. The ending never really recovers from the action of the beginning, thanks in large part to the characters. There are more than it's worth keeping track of, including a lot of side characters, family members, and name changes. A detailed, spoiler-free flow chart of how everyone is connected to everyone else would have been helpful. (But be careful about Googling those because spoilers.)

Edmond Dantès is an easy hero to pull for, since he’s honest, good, and capable, and he has a kind of earnest faith that things will work out that’s endearing. He goes through a fair amount of character development in prison, and his father/son relationship with Faria is especially moving. On the other hand, it's difficult to like his alternate persona, The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas goes a bit overboard in making him filthy rich and knowledgeable about literally every subject, and no matter how generous he is to his slaves, they're still slaves. Whether he’s playing the part of a pompous ass or is actually a pompous ass is sort of irrelevant by the end. There are a couple of flailing attempts at character development in the last sections where he wonders whether he had the right to do everything he did, but it's too little/too late to make much of an impact.

The story wouldn't work without some Shakespeare-level villains. Danglars is Iago whispering in Othello’s ear, and Villefort is even more insidious because his upstanding citizen act is so convincing. Caderousse is just a coward, and it’s interesting to see how jealousy, ambition, and fear all play an integral part in condemning an innocent man. Mercédès is a bland love interest; Valentine and Morrel are basically the Cosette and Marius of the novel, but at least there are some decent people on the page to pull for. Much as I dislike all the descriptors of Eugenie as “masculine” (because she must be less of a woman if she has a mind of her own), she's a powerhouse, and I was living for her lesbian relationship with her piano instructor.

It's clear Dumas has no idea when to end a story, since every time I thought we'd wrapped up a plot with a certain character, they'd resurface a few chapters later to spin it out a little further. Though everything (and I do mean everything) moves much more slowly than necessary, I was satisfied with the way it all played out. It's hard to come back from a main character I can barely stand though, and I happen to not like novels where nearly every character is terrible. While I found Les Mis surprisingly relevant on its social commentary, I’m struggling to see why Monte Cristo has stuck around. Only the first parts could reliably be called an "adventure novel," and the rest is purely middle of the road.

#book review #the count of monte cristo #alexandre dumas #monte cristo readalong #classics #3/5 #rating: 3/5

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Doug McConnell & Anke Snoek, The Importance of Self-Narration in Recovery from Addiction, 25 Phil, Psychiatry, & Psychology E-31 (2018)

Abstract

Addiction involves a chronic deficit in self-governance that treatment aims to restore. We draw on our interviews with addicted people to argue that addiction is, in part, a problem of self-narrative change. Over time, agents come to strongly identify with the aspects of their self-narratives that are consistently verified by others. When addiction self-narratives become established, they shape the addicted person's experience, plans, and expectations so that pathways to recovery seem to be implausible and feel alien. Therefore, the agent may prefer to enact her disvalued self-narrative because at least it represents who she takes herself to be. To recover, the agent needs to conduct narrative work, adjusting her existing self-narrative so that it better supports recovery-directed narrative projections. Reducing cravings, managing withdrawals, increasing self-control, and developing goals are all important for recovery, but those approaches will often be in vain if the influence of self-narrative is ignored. If our analysis is correct, addiction treatment will typically be more effective if it incorporates support for self-narrative change.

The first-hand reports of addicted people and the obvious misery they cause themselves make it clear that these people struggle to live according to their values.1 The goal of treatment is to help these people develop the agential resources to live a life they would value more highly. Sadly, most addicted people who seek treatment relapse repeatedly, often over several years, and despite multiple cycles of treatment; some never recover (Brandon, Vidrine, & Litvin, 2007; Dennis, Scott, Funk, & Foss, 2005; Stanford, Banerjee, & Garner, 2010). However, the fact that some do recover, sometimes quite quickly, generates hope that efficient treatment can become more widespread (Heyman, 2009). Any improvement in treatment efficiency will have a significant payoff given that addicted people typically do extensive damage to themselves, their friends and family, and wider society during their struggles to recover (Birnbaum et al., 2011; Mohapatra, Patra, Popova, Duhig, & Rehm, 2010; Orford, Velleman, Natera, Templeton, & Copello, 2013). In this paper, we draw on our qualitative interviews with addicted people to explain why addiction is, in part, a problem of self-narrative change and why treatment will be more efficient if it supports that change.

We build on a lineage of research claiming that recovery requires or is promoted by a change in self-concept (Biernacki, 1986; Kellog, 1993; Shadel, Mermelstein, & Borelli, 1996; Shinebourne & Smith, 2009; Walters, 1996), or, more specifically, a change in self-narrative (Hänninen & Koski-Jännes, 1999; Koski-Jannes, 2002; McConnell, 2016; McIntosh & McKeganey, 2000). However, the existing research is largely descriptive and so a skeptic might believe that changes in self-concept or self-narrative do not drive recovery, but merely reflect it. If this is true, then treatment should not focus on self-conceptual or self-narrative change, but on the real causes of addiction whatever they may be. Some empirical research speaks against such skepticism, however. West (2006) reports that identifying as an ex-smoker a week after quitting predicted abstinence 6 months later. Similarly, Dunlop and Tracy (2013) found that recovering alcoholics who, at baseline, narrated their last drink as part of a positive story of adaptive self-change were more likely to be sober at follow-up than those who did not tell such stories at baseline. But why would self-conceptual or self-narrative change itself be difficult and why would some manage to make the necessary changes and others not? Without a plausible explanation of how self-concepts or self-narratives influence recovery, the skeptic might worry that the effects associated with self-narratives are actually caused by one or more confounding variables. We develop a response to this skeptical concern by outlining the ways in which self-narratives plausibly influence recovery. We argue, with support from our interviews, that the cumulative, socially mediated process of self-narration leads addicted people to identify with their disvalued self-narratives, and both the addicted person and their peers to treat those disvalued narratives as factual. Therefore, people tend to enact their self-narratives even as they disvalue them. Furthermore, disvalued self-narratives cannot simply be switched for more valued self-narratives, because any new self-narrative content that fails to cohere with the established self-narrative will feel alien to the addicted person and seem to be implausible both to herself and her peers.

The paper is structured as follows: First, we sketch our favored accounts of self-narration and the relationship between self-narration and self-governance. Second, we outline the methodology of our qualitative study. Third, we draw on examples from our interviews to illustrate the motivational effects of self-narratives in the context of addiction. Finally, we argue that the self-narrative effects we have identified are likely to be particularly pervasive and influential in addiction and so should be given widespread consideration in treatment.

Narrative Self-Constitution and Self-Governance

Narratives render events meaningful by specifying the causal, teleological, or thematic connections between them (Schechtman, 2007). Therefore, they are more than just lists of events; however, they need not meet the stronger aesthetic requirements of novels or films so they can be banal and include extraneous material. In self-narration, the agent specifies meaningful connections between events (experienced, anticipated, or possible) that she judges to be relevant to her life. This process involves building narrative connections between her plans, desires, and contingent circumstance—for example, working out which actions make sense given the circumstance and which outcome each action will lead to. Therefore, a self-narrative is a way of describing part of a person's self-concept; it specifies the meaningful connections that the agent makes between her beliefs, desires, plans, values, and so on. Self-narration is selective, that is, it focuses the mind on particular relations between events, clearing the mind of other possibilities that would otherwise by overwhelming (Mackenzie & Poltera, 2010). Human life involves diverse experiences, values, and goals, so the agent does not, typically, try to connect everything in her life into a single coherent story but rather, she develops a collection of many partially overlapping, partially interconnected narrative threads (Lloyd, 1993; Wollheim, 1984).

Conceived in this way, self-narration is necessary for self-governance, that is, the successful pursuit of one's values, because it provides a way to understand how the past led to the present and, therefore, a way to reasonably specify plans and expectations. Without such an understanding, the agent does not know why things happen or how to respond reasonably (Mackenzie & Poltera, 2010; Phillips, 2003). Self-narratives, therefore, provide some basis for imagining realistically achievable projections that best further one's values (Lindemann Nelson, 2001; Mackenzie, 2008). However, as we show elsewhere in this paper, having a self-narrative is not sufficient for self-governance because one can disvalue one's self-narrative.2

Intersubjective Influences on Self-Narration

All people depend on co-authoring to develop and maintain a self-narrative. Indeed, "we are never more (and sometimes less) than the coauthors of our own narratives" (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 2016). As children, we rely on caregivers to teach us narrative archetypes. For example, we learn about heroes, victims, and villains, what motivates them, their qualities, how they develop, and what happens to them. These archetypes help us to understand what we can become and how, so that children deprived of stories are left "unscripted, anxious stutterers in their action as in their words" (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 2016). Furthermore, by the time we begin to self-narrate, we discover that many threads of our own self-narrative have already been developed by others and are waiting for us to adopt. We are members of a particular family in a certain place and saddled with certain expectations. Even as adults, we rarely self-narrate completely from scratch; rather, we continue to draw on the cultural store of narrative archetypes and the more specific narratives others provide for us (Cocking & Kennett, 1998; MacIntyre, 1984). This is especially the case when we face an unfamiliar experience. Consider a terminal cancer diagnosis, for example. Archetypes suggest the patient might feel anger, be in denial, write a 'bucket list,' or discover a heightened value in everyday activities. Archetypes suggest self-interpretations that the agent should be sensitive to and actions that should be considered or rejected; feelings and actions that are excluded from archetypes are implicitly discouraged. The narrative archetypes of addiction suggest to the addicted person that she will face powerful cravings, lack self-respect, suffer from poor health, be untrustworthy, and so on. There are also narrative archetypes of recovery from addiction. Hänninen and Koski-Jännes (1999) have identified several kinds, the most well-known of these comes from Twelve-Step programs, where one has to hit rock bottom before recovery becomes possible through accepting a higher power in one's life. Given the co-authoring involved in the treatment of addiction, it is not surprising that the self-narratives of those in treatment tend to parallel the narrative archetypes provided by the treatment (McIntosh & McKeganey, 2000, p. 1508). Even when we develop novel self-narrative content, we look to others to verify that content and we reconsider and often revise that content when it is challenged. In rare cases, it may be possible for people to successfully self-narrate in ways that are incorrectly rejected by everybody. However, such self-narration would be much more difficult than self-narrating in more socially acceptable ways. In short, we rely on co-authoring throughout our lives to facilitate both self-understanding and being understood by others.

Motivational Effects of Self-Narratives

The process by which self-narratives are constructed over time has important implications for how easily we can change them. Although any self-narrative thread begins as merely a potential candidate for inclusion in the self-narrative, over time, certain narrative threads are consistently intersubjectively verified and entrenched within a network of other verified threads. The agent and her peers then take these established threads to represent facts about who the agent is and who she can hope to become. The implicit psychological pressure to self-narrate in accordance with these perceived facts stems from three sources. First, self-narrating contrary to facts tends to damage diachronic agency because inaccurate imaginative projections undermine goal attainment. It feels self-destructive to undermine one's diachronic agency because it is essential for creating or shaping oneself. Second, agents value self-knowledge for its own sake (Christman, 2008). The established self-narrative is taken to represent self-knowledge so adopting contrary self-narrative threads feels self-deceptive. Third, the agent's peers, given their own interest in the truth, will tend to challenge or reject the agent's self-narration if it strays too far from her established self-narrative. Agents value social inclusion which, among other things, requires that they give weight to the co-authoring of their peers (Cocking & Kennett, 1998). In summary, the less plausible it is that a new narrative thread can be a continuation of the established self-narrative, the greater the feelings of self-alienation from undermining one's diachronic agency, self-knowledge, and social position. These feelings of alienation tend to generate the intuition that the narrative projection under consideration "just isn't me."

When the agent's established self-narrative aligns with all her values (i.e., not just the values implicitly entrenching the established narrative), the negative feelings of going against the established self-narrative support self-governance. However, to the extent that the agent's values (e.g., recovery from addiction) conflict with the action recommended by her established self-narrative (e.g., continuing drug use), the motivational force of the established self-narrative undermines self-governance.3 Of course, there are feelings of alienation when agents act contrary to any of their values, so why isn't the alienation of failing to pursue a valued recovery sufficient to motivate recovery as some have claimed (Downey, Rosengren, & Donovan, 2000; Weisz, 1996)? According to our view, the reason is that, no matter how much one explicitly values recovery, one also values the things implicitly represented by the established self-narrative—diachronic agency, self-knowledge, and social inclusion. As a result, it can feel more alienating to act contrary to one's established self-narrative despite the fact that it excludes some things that one values highly. Although established addiction self-narratives poorly express the values of diachronic agency, self-knowledge, and social inclusion, a diminished expression of value is better than its complete loss, which is what one risks if one self-narrates without regard for the established self-narrative.

Narrative Work: Resolving Conflicts Between Values and Self-Narrative

When a self-narrative thread under consideration generates feelings of alienation and an intuition that it is "not me," one can take that intuition at face value and reject the thread, or one can expend the cognitive effort to explicitly assess the source of that intuition. Reflection might reveal which aspects of one's established self-narrative conflict with the narrative thread under consideration. Further assessment involves interrogating those aspects of one's established self-narrative. Are they really mutually exclusive of the new thread? Are they really factual, that is, really essential for diachronic agency, self-knowledge, and social inclusion? This process of assessment is necessarily creative and can be thought of as 'narrative work.' When assessing whether an alien-seeming thread can be plausibly integrated in her self-narrative, the agent needs to imagine plausible narrative connections between who she is now and who she would be in the future if she enacted that narrative thread. This involves means–ends planning (how would someone like me go about successfully pursuing that end?), but it also involves making sense of the narrative trajectory (why would someone like me go about pursuing that end?). Through this narrative work, she might be surprised to find that there is a plausible path toward achieving the goal for someone like her after all. In parallel to this, the agent might also reinterpret the conflicting aspects of her established self-narrative so that it can more plausibly accommodate the goal. Reflection on her past might reveal an alternative interpretation that can also make sense of events (e.g., one was not a victim but a survivor). Once those reinterpretations are made, the existing self-narrative might be more amenable to the narrative thread under assessment. As a result of this narrative work, the agent might find that a narrative thread which initially felt alien is actually sufficiently plausible to try and integrate it in her self-narrative. If not, she must judge that the conflict between the value of the new narrative thread and those implicit in the established self-narrative is real. This entails that pursuit of the new narrative thread is unrealistic for someone like her, so her initial intuition to reject it and act in accordance with her established self-narrative was correct.4 For a more detailed discussion of the cognitive efforts required in self-narrative change and why they are not reducible to intentional planning see Mackenzie (2008) and McConnell (2016).

The narrative work required to change disvalued aspects of one's established self-narrative is not over at the point the agent tentatively adopts the new narrative projection. Whether a new narrative thread is ultimately integrated more permanently in the wider self-narrative depends on successfully enacting it and convincing others of its truth. In addition to all the usual challenges to agency, this involves resisting the temptation to prematurely abandon the new narrative threads for the old established narrative. When someone is trying to enact a new narrative thread that is inconsistent with the old, more established narrative, any actions or events that favor the established narrative over the new narrative loom much larger (e.g., lapses in abstinence or being called a "junkie" in the street). Both the agent and her peers are likely to quickly judge that the old narrative remains true. Comparatively, if the agent has a lapse in enacting an established self-narrative, it is much easier to convince herself and others that the lapse does not threaten the truth of her self-narrative.

The amount of narrative work required in narrative change is fixed by the disparity between the potential narrative thread and the established self-narrative. The less compatible a new thread is with the established self-narrative, the more narrative work it takes to convince oneself and others of its truth. Without doing this narrative work, the agent continues to enact her existing self-narrative because, even if she disvalues aspects of that narrative, at least it supports a degree of diachronic agency, self-knowledge, and social inclusion.5 If the above view of self-narrative development and change is correct, we would expect to find evidence of agents struggling to adjust their established self-narratives whenever they were attempting to enact life transformations. Given that recovery from addiction is one of the more pressing self-transformative challenges in health care, it is important that we investigate this self-narrative aspect of it.

Our Study: Methodology

In 2011, we began a qualitative cohort follow-up study of substance-dependent people, recruiting participants at a detox facility and opioid replacement treatment facility in Sydney, Australia. At baseline, we interviewed 69 respondents who were between 23 and 64 years of age; 35 were male and 34 were female. The substances they were seeking treatment for were alcohol (n = 32), opioids (n = 35), and amphetamines (n = 7); some respondents were in treatment for multiple substances. Twenty-eight of the respondents were re-interviewed both 1 and 2 years from baseline, twenty respondents were interviewed roughly 3 years from baseline. Eighteen people completed all four interviews and thirty-three people completed at least two interviews. In total, 145 interviews were conducted.

At baseline we asked them, using a timeline, to narrate their life story so far. Respondents were prompted to describe their lives before they started using substances, when and why they started using substances, when their substance use became a problem, what their hopes and plans for the future used to be and what they are now, what they find important in life, and where they expect to be in 1 years' time. At follow-up interviews, participants were prompted to reflect on where they were at that moment in life, how it differed from where they expected to be a year ago, and if they were happy with where they were. All the interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed with Nvivo software.

Given that recovery and self-narrative transformation are long-duration phenomena, our study is limited by its relatively short, 3-year timeframe. It would be impossible to say with any certainty that any of our study participants had entered a stable, long-lasting recovery during this period. Therefore, we do not have any participants whom we could argue recovered through narrative work. Neither can we say that any participant would have recovered if only they had undertaken more narrative work. Given the shorter timeframe of our study, we have the more modest aim of illustrating the ways in which self-narratives influence the many small steps toward recovery and the lapses that sometimes lead to full-blown relapse. The design of our study is suited to investigate the role of self-narration in this detail because the frequency of in-depth interviews conducted over the 3 years elicited ample self-narrative content from each participant.

Our Study: Narrative Influences on Recovery

Identification with Established But Disvalued Self-Narratives

By the time addicted people seek treatment, they typically disvalue several aspects of their established self-narratives. At the very least, they disvalue the extent to which drug use dominates their lives at the expense of things they value more highly, such as closer relationships with friends and family, a career, and better health. It is also common for disvalued behaviors that support drug use to have become entrenched in the self-narrative, for example, stealing, lying, prostitution, taking advantage of others' trust, and so on. For example, consider how Joshua, one of our study participants, narrates the development of his addiction:

It's like at first you use it for security sort of. Yeah like it's a bit of a party thing or whatever and then you get a habit and then you start to really degrade yourself and do things you never thought to get the money 'cause it's quick, easy money. And then you start using the heroin to forget about how you got the money. It's everyday you're doing things you don't want to do to get the money to forget about what you've just done and it goes on and on and on.

As this kind of self-narrative becomes established, it is increasingly difficult to believe that more valued futures involving recovery from addiction, a happy family, high self-esteem, a stable job, and so on, are achievable. The amount of narrative work required to plausibly link the current self-narrative with those valued futures is daunting. Comparatively few paths to recovery seem possible and, even then, they seem relatively implausible.

We claim that the cumulative verification of the addiction self-narrative leads addicted people to identify with it despite disvaluing it. We found some evidence of that among our participants. Nicole's addiction self-narrative is so deeply entrenched that she assumes she is instantly recognizable as an addict.

I was worried about what other people were thinking about me and you know being an addict and… I think that they can see it, you know?

Whether other people view Nicole this way or not, Nicole clearly cannot hide from her own self-narrative, which continues to guide how she interprets and responds to the world. A confronting incident at university is particularly revealing:

I was in the library and I felt like everyone was laughing at me which is really weird. And I think they probably were, not really but I don't know and it doesn't really matter but so I had an outburst and I told some … another student off. … I was very embarrassed because I looked like a crazy person and it was my old self you know.

The reactions of the other students and the professor would, presumably, have been sufficiently general to verify a number of potential narrative threads that would make sense of this overly sensitive and aggressive behavior. However, from Nicole's perspective, it seems that their reactions reinforce the specific, detailed set of disvalued narrative threads that Nicole would like to be her "old self," but clearly continue to be part of her present self. In this incident, Nicole's established addiction self-narrative not only guides her initial interpretation of the situation and her response, but it also guides her interpretation of the subsequent co-authoring in a way which reinforces those disvalued narrative threads. When the established addiction narrative regularly self-reinforces in this way, it is much harder to convince oneself that recovery-directed narrative threads contrary to that established self-narrative could be true.

The challenge of narrative change is made even more difficult by the fact that the established self-narratives of addicted people are frequently fatalistic. Joshua characterizes his ongoing drug use as something that happens to him rather than something he does, "it goes on and on and on." When asked where he saw himself in one year's time, Howard said, "Probably exactly where I am now. Exactly where I am now." Similarly, John said, "I've been trying to change my life heaps but I haven't… I always end up … back here, you know?" These self-narratives support the idea that the agent is trapped in cycles of drug use from which they are powerless to escape. Assuming that a recovered future is incompatible with such fatalism, these addicted people will have to do even more narrative work to recover. They either must narrate a plausible story of how they will reestablish agential power or reinterpret the past in such a way that they never actually lost that agential power.

Alienation and Implausibility of Narrating Contrary to Established Self-Narrative

We also found some suggestive evidence supporting our claim that self-narrating contrary to one's established self-narrative will feel alien to the agent and appear implausible to him and his peers.

I feel myself when I'm using and it's when I don't use… I don't feel myself. (…) But I'm trying to … find myself without using, it's hard.

I was using for so long, more than half my life, and what I thought was normal in all that time I was using, so I don't really know if I'm normal now, it hasn't been that long that I've been trying to get straight.

We suspect that Hayden and Craig do not 'feel themselves' because they are 'trying to find themselves' in unfamiliar self-narratives (without denying that narrative-independent, physiological changes will also contribute to these alien feelings). As long as recovery-directed narrative threads feel alien, the agent will be tempted to abandon them for the relative familiarity of the established addiction self-narrative. He may then decide to try and recover again, oscillating between two incompatible narrative networks—one moment living in the old narrative, the next trying to live according to the nascent recovery narrative.6 This oscillation will tend to undermine recovery because even short periods of enacting the addiction narrative can severely damage the plausibility of what was already a relatively implausible narrative projection.

Diana reveals the effect that repeated relapse can have on other's perception of the addicted person.

People's perception of me is so important now because I've ruined half of it. And I don't deny that that's my doing but to have them believe in me again is so important. And I can't even look at you in the eye 'cause I wonder if you think I'm even telling you the truth. This is how I feel… I'm so scared that people are going to judge me that I don't know whether … what I'm saying is worth it or not.

Diana recognizes the need for others to verify her self-narration, that is, to "believe in her," and laments the fact that her established self-narrative of repeated relapse makes it hard for others to take her recovery-directed self-narrative seriously. Even worse, her established self-narrative guides her expectation that others see what she says as worthless no matter the content. Her established self-narrative is not just at odds with recovery, it is at odds with being a reliable self-author. In these cases, recovery also requires a plausible narrative projection of how powers of self-authorization will be re-established (Kennett, McConnell, & Snoek, n.d.).

As discussed, one cannot do much narrative work in social isolation. One needs co-authors to verify and challenge new self-narration, to support its development and guide its accuracy. Hence the value, often referred to by people who have recovered, of surrounding oneself with co-authors who are supportive of the process of narrative change (Hänninen & Koski-Jännes, 1999; Lewis, 2012). Unfortunately, addicted people face strong stigma and have often alienated the supportive co-authors they need:

You're a drug addict person. People look to you … a different way … they judge you, they're scared of you… Different from … normal people. … You're really low, you're just like nobody.

Clearly, when others are scared of the agent or see him as a nobody, they will not provide the supportive co-authoring required to establish the plausibility of his recovery self-narrative. Often the co-authors that remain are still part of the drug-using milieu and those co-authors may be inclined to detrimentally entrench the established narrative threads.

The other addicts … don't want to see someone get on with their life … they're comfortable. I don't know, it's kind of like misery loves company… I notice when I'm going well, no-one's that happy and it's like no-one wants to give you a shot when you're hanging out but when you've been clean for six months everyone wants to give you a shot…

So how can someone with an established, dis-valued addiction self-narrative overcome the detrimental effects of that self-narrative to successfully pursue recovery? The answer is through undertaking the narrative work outlined herein.

Reinterpreting the Past to Support Recovery

One form of narrative work is to reinterpret those aspects of the established self-narrative that render recovery-directed narrative threads implausible and alien. When trying to change fatalistic expectations, for example, one need to believe that one's "future is open, in the sense that it is something one can create and shape through choice, resolve, and will" (Pickard, 2014, p. 12). Agents can develop their belief in an open future by reinterpreting their past so that more valued projections become more plausible. Joshua could reinterpret his cycles of drug use as something that he did, rather than something that happened to him, for example. That reinterpretation indicates that he has some capacity to intervene in these cycles, making a range of recovery projections more plausible than they were.

It can also be helpful to reinterpret the aspects of one's self-narrative that have supported the value of drug use in the past. Victoria does just this in regard to the opiates that she had become addicted to as pain medication:

I still get sore legs yeah, but not like I was, so I think … a lot of it had to do with just being in my head. … In your head you want it [opiates] … more than really you are in pain. It just makes you crave it. You get addicted to it so quick that you don't know what's real and what's not real anymore.

On her new self-narrative interpretation, she thinks that her earlier leg pain was partially imagined, a delusional exaggeration that acted as an excuse to satisfy her cravings. This new self-narrative thread suggests that opiate use will ultimately make her pain feel worse, so she can no longer use leg pain to justify opiate use. Therefore, the new self-narrative provides some protection against relapse and is more open to futures with better forms of pain management. Similarly, Nicole benefits from reinterpreting the role of ice (crystal methamphetamine) in her life, no longer seeing it as a solution for her lack of self-confidence.

[Ice] did [help], yeah, it really did. But obviously only short term. … I think it made my mental health worse. … I think it made me confident but in the wrong way, you know. You can't learn to be confident through ice, that's for sure…

By narrating a connection between ice and her worsening mental health, Nicole sees that self-medication is not a good reason to use ice. Furthermore, with this new narrative interpretation, it becomes more plausible that she would pursue more effective ways of building social confidence. Indeed, this is part of her motivation for enrolling in university, a significant step toward recovery.

Integrating Recovery Narrative Threats with the Existing Self-Narrative

Another form of narrative work is to better integrate recovery-directed narrative threads with the existing self-narrative by developing a network of plausible narrative connections between them. This should tend to increase the plausibility of the recovery and decrease the agent's feelings of alienation from it. Nicole is supported in this process by a counselor, who encourages her to go back to university. The counselor helps co-author Nicole's recovery narrative by telling her, roughly, "You are somebody who could succeed at university." Nicole takes ownership of this new self-narrative focus by choosing the university course that suits her and making narrative connections with her existing self-narrative.

See my problem is I don't have many hobbies and I don't have many things that interest me but something that does interest me is anatomy and, you know, all that sort of medical stuff… I didn't really realize how much I enjoyed it until I went back to uni.

The narrative threads she forms between her past interest in anatomy and her developing recovery narrative help to reinforce that this is not just any recovery; this is her recovery. This particular connection with valued aspects of her pre-addicted life raises hope that she will also re-establish other valued characteristics that she was afraid she had lost.

When I was younger before I used drugs, I was such a lovely caring person and thoughtful person and a loving person and I used to be very thoughtful and do things for other people without even being asked… I feel like that's who I am becoming again you know.

The experience of reconnecting with valued aspects of her past self-narrative might explain, in part, why she enjoys the university course so much and that enjoyment should help her to persevere with the course and recovery in general.

The development of completely new values may also support recovery; indeed, some people have been addicted from such a young age that there is relatively little in their existing narrative worth reconnecting to. However, completely new values do not provide a shortcut to the feelings of identification that can be elicited by connecting with previously established aspects of the self-narrative.

Unfortunately, when we interview Nicole 2 years from baseline, she has had a major relapse which she explains was triggered by failing a major practical examination. Arguably, her recovery narrative was focused so intently on her university course that failure in that course would be experienced as a challenge to her whole recovery. Even when her course was going well, she felt that people saw her as an addict and this incident at her practical examination seriously challenged the truth of her recovery-directed narrative. This time, she did not have the mental resources to continue to try and convince herself and others that her recovery narrative was still true of her. She could much more easily explain her failure by incorporating it in her more established addiction self-narrative, her "old self."

Despite her good progress at university, there were signs that Nicole's recovery up to this point remained highly vulnerable. She still identified strongly with being a stigmatized drug user and had been unable to resolve the incompatibility between her established drug-using narrative threads and her nascent recovery.

I find it hard to hide who I am and or where I've been or who I have been or what I've done… It's always going to be a part of who I am and I think it's really sad but it's true… I have a drug problem or had a drug problem or that I'm on Suboxone and I think it's part of who I am and I think that worries me.

By hiding her past, Nicole shuts it off from narrative work so that she cannot connect it with her recovery. This process created a conflict in her self-narrative, a fissure between her past self and her recovering self. As long as that conflict remained, there was a risk that she would resolve it by abandoning the more alien recovery narrative threads. If Nicole could have connected her recovery more thoroughly to her addicted past, she would have begun to dissolve the relatively independent existences of these two incompatible self-narrative networks, eliminating the conflict between them. Eventually, there would not have been a readily available addicted self-narrative to return to, but neither would there have been a perfect non-addicted narrative that completely excluded the addicted past. To this end, a particularly helpful narrative archetype for Nicole might have been what Shadd Maruna (2010) refers to as a redemption script. In a redemption script, the narrator rewrites "a shameful past into a necessary prelude to a productive and worthy life" (p. 87), where what counts as "worthy" is judged by the narrator, not some external authority. This narrative archetype provides a way to accommodate one's negative past in the self-narrative while mitigating some of the shame associated with that past. Perhaps, for example, Nicole could have become an especially caring person because of the deep sensitivity to vulnerable people she gained through her experience of addiction.7

Obviously, Nicole's difficulty in developing her recovery self-narrative was not the only factor in her relapse—she suffers from low self-esteem, cravings for ice, and she tells us in her final interview that she has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. However, we cannot understand the relapse as simply the result of an intense desire or an emotional response exacerbated by mental disorder because the intensity of the desire or emotion depends on her self-narrative context. Neither can we understand a return to drug use as a rational response, given the lack of alternative opportunities. A failed practical examination only means that she must repeat her third year. Non–drug-using options remain available to her, options that she would presumably value more highly than this relapse. Her emotional response might have clouded her judgment so that she could not see or properly evaluate all the options available to her but, again, that emotional response is influenced by her self-narrative.

Nicole's relapse could have been prevented or mitigated by a range of non-narrative interventions if the resources were available, for example, a closer and more qualified support person or group, various pharmacotherapeutic approaches, and so on. However, consideration of self-narrative effects could also have protected her from relapse in at least two ways. First, an awareness of Nicole's self-narrative would highlight the significance of the practical examination. If Nicole's support network was aware of that significance, then they could have redoubled their support efforts around that time. Second, had Nicole been better supported in the narrative work of integrating her recovery with her established self-narrative, one failure at university would have been less likely to convince her that recovery was impossible and that the old addiction narrative represented who she really was.

Pervasiveness of Narrative Effects in Addiction and Future Research

One implication of our research is that we should expect self-narrative effects to be particularly influential and widespread in addiction. In a trivial sense, self-narrative effects will be involved in nearly all attempts at recovery. This is because almost every recovery requires some degree of agential effort (Pickard, 2012) and all exercises of agency are influenced by the established self-narrative context.8 However, there is reason to think that many attempted recoveries would stand to benefit more substantially from a self-narrative focus in treatment. In a large subset of attempted recoveries, the addicted person has been a drug user for many years (Dennis et al., 2005). In such long-running cases, the agent has inevitably developed a multitude of self-narrative threads to understand drug-related events, to successfully access and use drugs, and to coordinate drug use with other aspects of their lives. These narrative threads will usually have been subject to long-term, cumulative social verification by others. As a result, addiction-related narrative threads typically become well-established in the self-narrative and make up a considerable proportion of the self-narrative. People usually start to become concerned about their drug use when it begins to impinge on their other values. Eventually, their inability to protect their non–drug-using values drives them to seek treatment despite the associated stigma. So, by the time people present for treatment, they have usually been struggling with their addiction for some time. During that struggle, they will have typically created numerous narrative threads to justify and explain their behavior, so that many aspects of their lives have come to be understood and shaped in relation to drug use. Therefore, well-established, addiction-related narrative threads will pervade the self-narratives of most long-term drug users who are seeking treatment. However, the group whose self-narratives will be most dominated by addiction-related narrative threads are those, all too common, cases who have gone through multiple rounds of failed treatment (Dennis et al., 2005). For each unsuccessful round of treatment, the agent tries to understand why he failed to recover. Such failures despite professional treatment drive the agent toward more thoroughly hopeless and fatalistic self-understandings. In summary, self-narrative effects on recovery from addiction are likely to be at their strongest in longer running addictions, especially those characterized by long struggles to balance one's values and failed rounds of treatment. Such cases are common and, therefore, we would expect a wide range of addicted people to benefit from a narrative complement to treatment.

Future research should investigate whether various interventions are effective in supporting the agent complete the necessary narrative work required for recovery. For example, it would be useful to discover which narrative archetypes are best given the individual's situation and which interventions increase the rate at which people successfully adopt recovery-directed narratives. Another line of research should investigate the efficacy of narrative therapy (White, 2007; White & Epston, 1990) for the treatment of addiction. Narrative therapy supports what we have been calling 'narrative work' in a variety of ways. Briefly, clients are asked to recall a situation in which they handled their addiction in a self-controlled way, for example, successfully resisting an episode of craving. The counselor then encourages the client to elaborate on why this attempt was successful, to develop an alternative narrative in which their capacities to control their substance use is made central. When addicted persons become sensitive to episodes in their lives where they coped successfully, it becomes possible for them to imagine "new endings to painful and repetitive stories" (Singer, 2001, p. 389). It would be tempting to use narrative therapy as the narrative-focused complement to addiction treatment because it is an established therapeutic system with a body of trained practitioners. However, despite a few suggestive case studies, its efficacy has not been properly investigated (Butt, 2011; Man-kwong, 2004; Poole, Gardner, Flower, & Cooper, 2009; Singer, 2001). We agree with Hutto and Gallagher (2017) that narrative therapy could be improved in several ways, including eschewing a post-structuralist view of the self and being more open to empirical assessment. In any case, narrative Therapy is only one of several possible narrative-based therapeutic approaches and we should remain open to other styles of narrative intervention should they be developed.

Conclusions

We have explained how established self-narratives can hinder self-governance. People strongly identify with aspects of their self-narratives that have become established through consistent verification. Future possibilities that would be contrary to the established self-narrative then seem to be implausible and feel alien. When disvalued self-narratives become established, people are motivated to enact those self-narratives rather than pursue more highly valued possibilities because the established self-narrative represents who they take themselves to be. We have also explained how self-governance can be reestablished through narrative work, that is, the cognitively effortful process of narrating connections between a valued future and one's self-narrative. When successful, narrative work integrates the valued future with the self-narrative in such a way that it feels less alien and seems to be more plausible. The amount of narrative work required to regain self-governance depends on the disparity between the established self-narrative and the valued future. People do not always succeed in this narrative work because it can demand too much time and effort. If our empirically informed account of the relationship between self-narratives, self-narrative work, and self-governance is plausible, it represents an important step in responding to the skeptical concern that self-narration is only ever descriptive. However, randomized, controlled trials would be needed to draw any more definite conclusions.

Addicted people often disvalue aspects of their established self-narratives, especially in long-running addiction, when they have been through failed rounds of treatment. If our account is correct, these established self-narratives undermine self-governance by making recovery-directed narrative threads feel alien and seem implausible. As a result, addicted people have a default motivation to enact their disvalued self-narratives because it least represents who they take themselves to be. Consequently, many addicted people would benefit if they received support for the narrative work required to connect their established self-narratives with recovery. This leads us to conclude that existing forms of addiction treatment will tend to be more effective and efficient if they are complemented by narrative-focused interventions.

Notes

For our purposes, we assume that the agent's evaluative judgement correctly identifies her authentic values. Clearly, this is not always true, but it will usually be the case in long-term, self-destructive addiction where the agent consistently claims to value a non-addicted life (Kennett, 2013).

The main claims of this paper would also be consistent with views that see narratives as having a lesser role in shaping who we are. For example, if one defined narrative more narrowly than we do here, then self-narration and its motivational effects would be less ubiquitous. However, to the extent that self-narratives continued to feature in cognition, we would expect them to influence self-governance in the ways we describe. For arguments that support conceiving of self-narratives as we do here see Schechtman (2007) and Velleman (2005).

We do not deny that the agent's evaluative judgement can be wrong and, in such cases, it would be possible that the agent's self-narrative more accurately represents her authentic values. We think that such cases will be rare in those who claim to value recovery over their long-term addiction, so we set them aside.

In some cases, perhaps outright false self-narrative reinterpretations will ultimately support attaining one's values. Presumably this happens with successful 'fake it 'til you make it' strategies. See, for example, McConnell and Snoek (2012). The potential success of these approaches show that a self-narrative thread only needs to be perceived as true and does not have to align with objective truth to become beneficially incorporated in a self-narrative.

The agent's appetite and capacity for narrative work depend on a range of factors, including belief in her own agency, self-esteem, optimism, powers of reasoning, discursive skill, and so on. Therefore, some agents will find self-narrative change easier than others. However, it is important to note that those factors are not independent of the content of the self-narrative. Sometimes the work of narrative change will involve changing a self-narrative where it does not make sense to have optimism, for example, to one where optimism makes more sense.

Neil Levy (2014) has suggested that addiction is a disorder of belief (rather than desire), characterized by the involuntary oscillation between believing that drug use is the best course of action and believing that it is not. We suggest that this oscillation can be controlled to some extent by adjusting the narrative networks in which those beliefs reside. The belief that using drugs is the best course of action will tend to seem implausible once the established addiction self-narrative has been sufficiently reshaped.

In our view, redemption narratives of the kind Maruna specifies are just one way to connect a recovery with one's past. Any archetype that can plausibly link the recovery with the existing self-narrative should work, for example, those described by Hänninen and Koski-Jännes (1999). The centrality of redemption in recovery depends on how broadly one defines redemption. If any narrative of a positive future emerging from a negative past counts as redemption, which is the definition Dunlop and Tracy (2013) use, then perhaps most recoveries will be redemptive. But, even then, we would not want to rule out other possible archetypes, for example, where addiction is interpreted as having been the best response to extreme circumstances, but then became unsuitable once circumstances changed.

There might be some cases where recovery is completely attributable to environmental change, for example, the Vietnam veterans who recovered from opiate addiction upon returning home; see Robins, Helzer, Hesselbrock, and Wish (2010) Similarly, we might develop physiological interventions that prevent cravings or 'highs' so successfully that recovery needs no further agential input. However, these paths to successful recovery are rare. The recovery-promoting environment that the Vietnam veterans enjoyed is unavailable to most. Physiological interventions, in contrast, are often available but, as of yet, are rarely fully effective on their own.

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Shoshana Zuboff | An excerpt adapted from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power | PublicAffairs | 2019 | 23 minutes (6,281 words)

In 2000 a group of computer scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech collaborated on a project called the “Aware Home.” It was meant to be a “living laboratory” for the study of “ubiquitous computing.” They imagined a “human-home symbiosis” in which many animate and inanimate processes would be captured by an elaborate network of “context aware sensors” embedded in the house and by wearable computers worn by the home’s occupants. The design called for an “automated wireless collaboration” between the platform that hosted personal information from the occupants’ wearables and a second one that hosted the environmental information from the sensors.

There were three working assumptions: first, the scientists and engineers understood that the new data systems would produce an entirely new knowledge domain. Second, it was assumed that the rights to that new knowledge and the power to use it to improve one’s life would belong exclusively to the people who live in the house. Third, the team assumed that for all of its digital wizardry, the Aware Home would take its place as a modern incarnation of the ancient conventions that understand “home” as the private sanctuary of those who dwell within its walls.

All of this was expressed in the engineering plan. It emphasized trust, simplicity, the sovereignty of the individual, and the inviolability of the home as a private domain. The Aware Home information system was imagined as a simple “closed loop” with only two nodes and controlled entirely by the home’s occupants. Because the house would be “constantly monitoring the occupants’ whereabouts and activities…even tracing its inhabitants’ medical conditions,” the team concluded, “there is a clear need to give the occupants knowledge and control of the distribution of this information.” All the information was to be stored on the occupants’ wearable computers “to insure the privacy of an individual’s information.”

By 2018, the global “smart-home” market was valued at $36 billion and expected to reach $151 billion by 2023. The numbers betray an earthquake beneath their surface. Consider just one smart-home device: the Nest thermostat, which was made by a company that was owned by Alphabet, the Google holding company, and then merged with Google in 2018. The Nest thermostat does many things imagined in the Aware Home. It collects data about its uses and environment. It uses motion sensors and computation to “learn” the behaviors of a home’s inhabitants. Nest’s apps can gather data from other connected products such as cars, ovens, fitness trackers, and beds. Such systems can, for example, trigger lights if an anomalous motion is detected, signal video and audio recording, and even send notifications to homeowners or others. As a result of the merger with Google, the thermostat, like other Nest products, will be built with Google’s artificial intelligence capabilities, including its personal digital “assistant.” Like the Aware Home, the thermostat and its brethren devices create immense new stores of knowledge and therefore new power — but for whom?

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Wi-Fi–enabled and networked, the thermostat’s intricate, personalized data stores are uploaded to Google’s servers. Each thermostat comes with a “privacy policy,” a “terms-of-service agreement,” and an “end-user licensing agreement.” These reveal oppressive privacy and security consequences in which sensitive household and personal information are shared with other smart devices, unnamed personnel, and third parties for the purposes of predictive analyses and sales to other unspecified parties. Nest takes little responsibility for the security of the information it collects and none for how the other companies in its ecosystem will put those data to use. A detailed analysis of Nest’s policies by two University of London scholars concluded that were one to enter into the Nest ecosystem of connected devices and apps, each with their own equally burdensome and audacious terms, the purchase of a single home thermostat would entail the need to review nearly a thousand so-called contracts.

Should the customer refuse to agree to Nest’s stipulations, the terms of service indicate that the functionality and security of the thermostat will be deeply compromised, no longer supported by the necessary updates meant to ensure its reliability and safety. The consequences can range from frozen pipes to failed smoke alarms to an easily hacked internal home system.

By 2018, the assumptions of the Aware Home were gone with the wind. Where did they go? What was that wind? The Aware Home, like many other visionary projects, imagined a digital future that empowers individuals to lead more-effective lives. What is most critical is that in the year 2000 this vision naturally assumed an unwavering commitment to the privacy of individual experience. Should an individual choose to render her experience digitally, then she would exercise exclusive rights to the knowledge garnered from such data, as well as exclusive rights to decide how such knowledge might be put to use. Today these rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it. What does this sea change mean for us, for our children, for our democracies, and for the very possibility of a human future in a digital world? It is the darkening of the digital dream into a voracious and utterly novel commercial project that I call surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance capitalism runs contrary to the early digital dream, consigning the Aware Home to ancient history. Instead, it strips away the illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being “connected” is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the democratization of knowledge. Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience. Google invented and perfected surveillance capitalism in much the same way that a century ago General Motors invented and perfected managerial capitalism. Google was the pioneer of surveillance capitalism in thought and practice, the deep pocket for research and development, and the trailblazer in experimentation and implementation, but it is no longer the only actor on this path. Surveillance capitalism quickly spread to Facebook and later to Microsoft. Evidence suggests that Amazon has veered in this direction, and it is a constant challenge to Apple, both as an external threat and as a source of internal debate and conflict.

As the pioneer of surveillance capitalism, Google launched an unprecedented market operation into the unmapped spaces of the internet, where it faced few impediments from law or competitors, like an invasive species in a landscape free of natural predators. Its leaders drove the systemic coherence of their businesses at a breakneck pace that neither public institutions nor individuals could follow. Google also benefited from historical events when a national security apparatus galvanized by the attacks of 9/11 was inclined to nurture, mimic, shelter, and appropriate surveillance capitalism’s emergent capabilities for the sake of total knowledge and its promise of certainty.

Our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends…We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus.

Surveillance capitalists quickly realized that they could do anything they wanted, and they did. They dressed in the fashions of advocacy and emancipation, appealing to and exploiting contemporary anxieties, while the real action was hidden offstage. Theirs was an invisibility cloak woven in equal measure to the rhetoric of the empowering web, the ability to move swiftly, the confidence of vast revenue streams, and the wild, undefended nature of the territory they would conquer and claim. They were protected by the inherent illegibility of the automated processes that they rule, the ignorance that these processes breed, and the sense of inevitability that they foster.

Surveillance capitalism is no longer confined to the competitive dramas of the large internet companies, where behavioral futures markets were first aimed at online advertising. Its mechanisms and economic imperatives have become the default model for most internet-based businesses. Eventually, competitive pressure drove expansion into the offline world, where the same foundational mechanisms that expropriate your online browsing, likes, and clicks are trained on your run in the park, breakfast conversation, or hunt for a parking space. Today’s prediction products are traded in behavioral futures markets that extend beyond targeted online ads to many other sectors, including insurance, retail, finance, and an ever-widening range of goods and services companies determined to participate in these new and profitable markets. Whether it’s a “smart” home device, what the insurance companies call “behavioral underwriting,” or any one of thousands of other transactions, we now pay for our own domination.

Surveillance capitalism’s products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead, they are the “hooks” that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends. We are not surveillance capitalism’s “customers.” Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.

Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production–based managerial capitalism. New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered by people in a time and place and then perfected through trial and error. In our time Google became the pioneer, discoverer, elaborator, experimenter, lead practitioner, role model, and diffusion hub of surveillance capitalism. GM and Ford’s iconic status as pioneers of twentieth-century capitalism made them enduring objects of scholarly research and public fascination because the lessons they had to teach resonated far beyond the individual companies. Google’s practices deserve the same kind of examination, not merely as a critique of a single company but rather as the starting point for the codification of a powerful new form of capitalism.

With the triumph of mass production at Ford and for decades thereafter, hundreds of researchers, businesspeople, engineers, journalists, and scholars would excavate the circumstances of its invention, origins, and consequences. Decades later, scholars continued to write extensively about Ford, the man and the company. GM has also been an object of intense scrutiny. It was the site of Peter Drucker’s field studies for his seminal Concept of the Corporation, the 1946 book that codified the practices of the twentieth-century business organization and established Drucker’s reputation as a management sage. In addition to the many works of scholarship and analysis on these two firms, their own leaders enthusiastically articulated their discoveries and practices. Henry Ford and his general manager, James Couzens, and Alfred Sloan and his marketing man, Henry “Buck” Weaver, reflected on, conceptualized, and proselytized their achievements, specifically locating them in the evolutionary drama of American capitalism.

Google is a notoriously secretive company, and one is hard-pressed to imagine a Drucker equivalent freely roaming the scene and scribbling in the hallways. Its executives carefully craft their messages of digital evangelism in books and blog posts, but its operations are not easily accessible to outside researchers or journalists. In 2016 a lawsuit brought against the company by a product manager alleged an internal spying program in which employees are expected to identify coworkers who violate the firm’s confidentiality agreement: a broad prohibition against divulging anything about the company to anyone. The closest thing we have to a Buck Weaver or James Couzens codifying Google’s practices and objectives is the company’s longtime chief economist, Hal Varian, who aids the cause of understanding with scholarly articles that explore important themes. Varian has been described as “the Adam Smith of the discipline of Googlenomics” and the “godfather” of its advertising model. It is in Varian’s work that we find hidden-in-plain-sight important clues to the logic of surveillance capitalism and its claims to power.

In two extraordinary articles in scholarly journals, Varian explored the theme of “computer-mediated transactions” and their transformational effects on the modern economy. Both pieces are written in amiable, down-to-earth prose, but Varian’s casual understatement stands in counterpoint to his often-startling declarations: “Nowadays there is a computer in the middle of virtually every transaction…now that they are available these computers have several other uses.” He then identifies four such new uses: “data extraction and analysis,” “new contractual forms due to better monitoring,” “personalization and customization,” and “continuous experiments.”

Varian’s discussions of these new “uses” are an unexpected guide to the strange logic of surveillance capitalism, the division of learning that it shapes, and the character of the information civilization toward which it leads. “Data extraction and analysis,” Varian writes, “is what everyone is talking about when they talk about big data.”

Google was incorporated in 1998, founded by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin just two years after the Mosaic browser threw open the doors of the world wide web to the computer-using public. From the start, the company embodied the promise of information capitalism as a liberating and democratic social force that galvanized and delighted second-modernity populations around the world.

Thanks to this wide embrace, Google successfully imposed computer mediation on broad new domains of human behavior as people searched online and engaged with the web through a growing roster of Google services. As these new activities were informated for the first time, they produced wholly new data resources. For example, in addition to key words, each Google search query produces a wake of collateral data such as the number and pattern of search terms, how a query is phrased, spelling, punctuation, dwell times, click patterns, and location.

There was no reliable way to turn investors’ money into revenue…The behavioral value reinvestment cycle produced a very cool search function, but it was not yet capitalism.

Early on, these behavioral by-products were haphazardly stored and operationally ignored. Amit Patel, a young Stanford graduate student with a special interest in “data mining,” is frequently credited with the groundbreaking insight into the significance of Google’s accidental data caches. His work with these data logs persuaded him that detailed stories about each user — thoughts, feelings, interests — could be constructed from the wake of unstructured signals that trailed every online action. These data, he concluded, actually provided a “broad sensor of human behavior” and could be put to immediate use in realizing cofounder Larry Page’s dream of Search as a comprehensive artificial intelligence.

Google’s engineers soon grasped that the continuous flows of collateral behavioral data could turn the search engine into a recursive learning system that constantly improved search results and spurred product innovations such as spell check, translation, and voice recognition. As Kenneth Cukier observed at that time,

Other search engines in the 1990s had the chance to do the same, but did not pursue it. Around 2000 Yahoo! saw the potential, but nothing came of the idea. It was Google that recognized the gold dust in the detritus of its interactions with its users and took the trouble to collect it up…Google exploits information that is a by-product of user interactions, or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled to improve the service or create an entirely new product.

What had been regarded as waste material — “data exhaust” spewed into Google’s servers during the combustive action of Search — was quickly reimagined as a critical element in the transformation of Google’s search engine into a reflexive process of continuous learning and improvement.

At that early stage of Google’s development, the feedback loops involved in improving its Search functions produced a balance of power: Search needed people to learn from, and people needed Search to learn from. This symbiosis enabled Google’s algorithms to learn and produce ever-more relevant and comprehensive search results. More queries meant more learning; more learning produced more relevance. More relevance meant more searches and more users. By the time the young company held its first press conference in 1999, to announce a $25 million equity investment from two of the most revered Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, Google Search was already fielding seven million requests each day. A few years later, Hal Varian, who joined Google as its chief economist in 2002, would note, “Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system.” The Page Rank algorithm, named after its founder, had already given Google a significant advantage in identifying the most popular results for queries. Over the course of the next few years it would be the capture, storage, analysis, and learning from the by-products of those search queries that would turn Google into the gold standard of web search.

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The key point for us rests on a critical distinction. During this early period, behavioral data were put to work entirely on the user’s behalf. User data provided value at no cost, and that value was reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved services: enhancements that were also offered at no cost to users. Users provided the raw material in the form of behavioral data, and those data were harvested to improve speed, accuracy, and relevance and to help build ancillary products such as translation. I call this the behavioral value reinvestment cycle, in which all behavioral data are reinvested in the improvement of the product or service.

The cycle emulates the logic of the iPod; it worked beautifully at Google but with one critical difference: the absence of a sustainable market transaction. In the case of the iPod, the cycle was triggered by the purchase of a high-margin physical product. Subsequent reciprocities improved the iPod product and led to increased sales. Customers were the subjects of the commercial process, which promised alignment with their “what I want, when I want, where I want” demands. At Google, the cycle was similarly oriented toward the individual as its subject, but without a physical product to sell, it floated outside the marketplace, an interaction with “users” rather than a market transaction with customers.

This helps to explain why it is inaccurate to think of Google’s users as its customers: there is no economic exchange, no price, and no profit. Nor do users function in the role of workers. When a capitalist hires workers and provides them with wages and means of production, the products that they produce belong to the capitalist to sell at a profit. Not so here. Users are not paid for their labor, nor do they operate the means of production. Finally, people often say that the user is the “product.” This is also misleading. Users are not products, but rather we are the sources of raw-material supply. Surveillance capitalism’s unusual products manage to be derived from our behavior while remaining indifferent to our behavior. Its products are about predicting us, without actually caring what we do or what is done to us.

At this early stage of Google’s development, whatever Search users inadvertently gave up that was of value to the company they also used up in the form of improved services. In this reinvestment cycle, serving users with amazing Search results “consumed” all the value that users created when they provided extra behavioral data. The fact that users needed Search about as much as Search needed users created a balance of power between Google and its populations. People were treated as ends in themselves, the subjects of a nonmarket, self-contained cycle that was perfectly aligned with Google’s stated mission “to organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful.”

By 1999, despite the splendor of Google’s new world of searchable web pages, its growing computer science capabilities, and its glamorous venture backers, there was no reliable way to turn investors’ money into revenue. The behavioral value reinvestment cycle produced a very cool search function, but it was not yet capitalism. The balance of power made it financially risky and possibly counterproductive to charge users a fee for search services. Selling search results would also have set a dangerous precedent for the firm, assigning a price to indexed information that Google’s web crawler had already taken from others without payment. Without a device like Apple’s iPod or its digital songs, there were no margins, no surplus, nothing left over to sell and turn into revenue.

Google had relegated advertising to steerage class: its AdWords team consisted of seven people, most of whom shared the founders’ general antipathy toward ads. The tone had been set in Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s milestone paper that unveiled their search engine conception, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” presented at the 1998 World Wide Web Conference: “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market…we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

Google’s first revenues depended instead on exclusive licensing deals to provide web services to portals such as Yahoo! and Japan’s BIGLOBE. It also generated modest revenue from sponsored ads linked to search query keywords. There were other models for consideration. Rival search engines such as Overture, used exclusively by the then-giant portal AOL, or Inktomi, the search engine adopted by Microsoft, collected revenues from the sites whose pages they indexed. Overture was also successful in attracting online ads with its policy of allowing advertisers to pay for high-ranking search listings, the very format that Brin and Page scorned.

Prominent analysts publicly doubted whether Google could compete with its more-established rivals. As the New York Times asked, “Can Google create a business model even remotely as good as its technology?” A well-known Forrester Research analyst proclaimed that there were only a few ways for Google to make money with Search: “build a portal [like Yahoo!]…partner with a portal…license the technology…wait for a big company to purchase them.”

Despite these general misgivings about Google’s viability, the firm’s prestigious venture backing gave the founders confidence in their ability to raise money. This changed abruptly in April 2000, when the legendary dot-com economy began its steep plunge into recession, and Silicon Valley’s Garden of Eden unexpectedly became the epicenter of a financial earthquake.

The idea of being able to deliver a particular message to a particular person at just the moment when it might have a high probability of actually influencing his or her behavior was, and had always been, the holy grail of advertising.

By mid-April, Silicon Valley’s fast-money culture of privilege was under siege with the implosion of what came to be known as the “dot-com bubble.” It is easy to forget exactly how terrifying things were for the valley’s ambitious young people and their slightly older investors. Startups with outsized valuations just months earlier were suddenly forced to shutter. Prominent articles such as “Doom Stalks the Dotcoms” noted that the stock prices of Wall Street’s most-revered internet “high flyers” were “down for the count,” with many of them trading below their initial offering price: “With many dotcoms declining, neither venture capitalists nor Wall Street is eager to give them a dime…” The news brimmed with descriptions of shell-shocked investors. The week of April 10 saw the worst decline in the history of the NASDAQ, where many internet companies had gone public, and there was a growing consensus that the “game” had irreversibly changed.

As the business environment in Silicon Valley unraveled, investors’ prospects for cashing out by selling Google to a big company seemed far less likely, and they were not immune to the rising tide of panic. Many Google investors began to express doubts about the company’s prospects, and some threatened to withdraw support. Pressure for profit mounted sharply, despite the fact that Google Search was widely considered the best of all the search engines, traffic to its website was surging, and a thousand résumés flooded the firm’s Mountain View office each day. Page and Brin were seen to be moving too slowly, and their top venture capitalists, John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins and Michael Moritz from Sequoia, were frustrated. According to Google chronicler Steven Levy, “The VCs were screaming bloody murder. Tech’s salad days were over, and it wasn’t certain that Google would avoid becoming another crushed radish.”

The specific character of Silicon Valley’s venture funding, especially during the years leading up to dangerous levels of startup inflation, also contributed to a growing sense of emergency at Google. As Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter and his colleague Michel Ferrary found in their study of valley venture firms, “A connection with a high-status VC firm signals the high status of the startup and encourages other agents to link to it.” These themes may seem obvious now, but it is useful to mark the anxiety of those months of sudden crisis. Prestigious risk investment functioned as a form of vetting — much like acceptance to a top university sorts and legitimates students, elevating a few against the backdrop of the many — especially in the “uncertain” environment characteristic of high-tech investing. Loss of that high-status signaling power assigned a young company to a long list of also-rans in Silicon Valley’s fast-moving saga.

Other research findings point to the consequences of the impatient money that flooded the valley as inflationary hype drew speculators and ratcheted up the volatility of venture funding. Studies of pre-bubble investment patterns showed a “big-score” mentality in which bad results tended to stimulate increased investing as funders chased the belief that some young company would suddenly discover the elusive business model destined to turn all their bets into rivers of gold. Startup mortality rates in Silicon Valley outstripped those for other venture capital centers such as Boston and Washington, DC, with impatient money producing a few big wins and many losses. Impatient money is also reflected in the size of Silicon Valley startups, which during this period were significantly smaller than in other regions, employing an average of 68 employees as compared to an average of 112 in the rest of the country. This reflects an interest in quick returns without spending much time on growing a business or deepening its talent base, let alone developing the institutional capabilities. These propensities were exacerbated by the larger Silicon Valley culture, where net worth was celebrated as the sole measure of success for valley parents and their children.

For all their genius and principled insights, Brin and Page could not ignore the mounting sense of emergency. By December 2000, the Wall Street Journal reported on the new “mantra” emerging from Silicon Valley’s investment community: “Simply displaying the ability to make money will not be enough to remain a major player in the years ahead. What will be required will be an ability to show sustained and exponential profits.”

The declaration of a state of exception functions in politics as cover for the suspension of the rule of law and the introduction of new executive powers justified by crisis. At Google in late 2000, it became a rationale for annulling the reciprocal relationship that existed between Google and its users, steeling the founders to abandon their passionate and public opposition to advertising. As a specific response to investors’ anxiety, the founders tasked the tiny AdWords team with the objective of looking for ways to make more money. Page demanded that the whole process be simplified for advertisers. In this new approach, he insisted that advertisers “shouldn’t even get involved with choosing keywords — Google would choose them.”

Operationally, this meant that Google would turn its own growing cache of behavioral data and its computational power and expertise toward the single task of matching ads with queries. New rhetoric took hold to legitimate this unusual move. If there was to be advertising, then it had to be “relevant” to users. Ads would no longer be linked to keywords in a search query, but rather a particular ad would be “targeted” to a particular individual. Securing this holy grail of advertising would ensure relevance to users and value to Advertisers.

Absent from the new rhetoric was the fact that in pursuit of this new aim, Google would cross into virgin territory by exploiting sensitivities that only its exclusive and detailed collateral behavioral data about millions and later billions of users could reveal. To meet the new objective, the behavioral value reinvestment cycle was rapidly and secretly subordinated to a larger and more complex undertaking. The raw materials that had been solely used to improve the quality of search results would now also be put to use in the service of targeting advertising to individual users. Some data would continue to be applied to service improvement, but the growing stores of collateral signals would be repurposed to improve the profitability of ads for both Google and its advertisers. These behavioral data available for uses beyond service improvement constituted a surplus, and it was on the strength of this behavioral surplus that the young company would find its way to the “sustained and exponential profits” that would be necessary for survival. Thanks to a perceived emergency, a new mutation began to gather form and quietly slip its moorings in the implicit advocacy-oriented social contract of the firm’s original relationship with users.

Google’s declared state of exception was the backdrop for 2002, the watershed year during which surveillance capitalism took root. The firm’s appreciation of behavioral surplus crossed another threshold that April, when the data logs team arrived at their offices one morning to find that a peculiar phrase had surged to the top of the search queries: “Carol Brady’s maiden name.” Why the sudden interest in a 1970s television character? It was data scientist and logs team member Amit Patel who recounted the event to the New York Times, noting, “You can’t interpret it unless you know what else is going on in the world.”

The team went to work to solve the puzzle. First, they discerned that the pattern of queries had produced five separate spikes, each beginning at forty-eight minutes after the hour. Then they learned that the query pattern occurred during the airing of the popular TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The spikes reflected the successive time zones during which the show aired, ending in Hawaii. In each time zone, the show’s host posed the question of Carol Brady’s maiden name, and in each zone the queries immediately flooded into Google’s servers.

As the New York Times reported, “The precision of the Carol Brady data was eye-opening for some.” Even Brin was stunned by the clarity of Search’s predictive power, revealing events and trends before they “hit the radar” of traditional media. As he told the Times, “It was like trying an electron microscope for the first time. It was like a moment-by-moment barometer.” Google executives were described by the Times as reluctant to share their thoughts about how their massive stores of query data might be commercialized. “There is tremendous opportunity with this data,” one executive confided.

Just a month before the Carol Brady moment, while the AdWords team was already working on new approaches, Brin and Page hired Eric Schmidt, an experienced executive, engineer, and computer science Ph.D., as chairman. By August, they appointed him to the CEO’s role. Doerr and Moritz had been pushing the founders to hire a professional manager who would know how to pivot the firm toward profit. Schmidt immediately implemented a “belt-tightening” program, grabbing the budgetary reins and heightening the general sense of financial alarm as fund-raising prospects came under threat. A squeeze on workspace found him unexpectedly sharing his office with none other than Amit Patel.

Schmidt later boasted that as a result of their close quarters over the course of several months, he had instant access to better revenue figures than did his own financial planners. We do not know (and may never know) what other insights Schmidt might have gleaned from Patel about the predictive power of Google’s behavioral data stores, but there is no doubt that a deeper grasp of the predictive power of data quickly shaped Google’s specific response to financial emergency, triggering the crucial mutation that ultimately turned AdWords, Google, the internet, and the very nature of information capitalism toward an astonishingly lucrative surveillance project.

That this no longer seems astonishing to us, or perhaps even worthy of note, is evidence of the profound psychic numbing that has inured us to a bold and unprecedented shift in capitalist methods.

Google’s earliest ads had been considered more effective than most online advertising at the time because they were linked to search queries and Google could track when users actually clicked on an ad, known as the “click-through” rate. Despite this, advertisers were billed in the conventional manner according to how many people viewed an ad. As Search expanded, Google created the self-service system called AdWords, in which a search that used the advertiser’s keyword would include that advertiser’s text box and a link to its landing page. Ad pricing depended upon the ad’s position on the search results page.

Rival search startup Overture had developed an online auction system for web page placement that allowed it to scale online advertising targeted to keywords. Google would produce a transformational enhancement to that model, one that was destined to alter the course of information capitalism. As a Bloomberg journalist explained in 2006, “Google maximizes the revenue it gets from that precious real estate by giving its best position to the advertiser who is likely to pay Google the most in total, based on the price per click multiplied by Google’s estimate of the likelihood that someone will actually click on the ad.” That pivotal multiplier was the result of Google’s advanced computational capabilities trained on its most significant and secret discovery: behavioral surplus. From this point forward, the combination of ever-increasing machine intelligence and ever-more-vast supplies of behavioral surplus would become the foundation of an unprecedented logic of accumulation. Google’s reinvestment priorities would shift from merely improving its user offerings to inventing and institutionalizing the most far-reaching and technologically advanced raw-material supply operations that the world had ever seen. Henceforth, revenues and growth would depend upon more behavioral surplus.

Google’s many patents filed during those early years illustrate the explosion of discovery, inventiveness, and complexity detonated by the state of exception that led to these crucial innovations and the firm’s determination to advance the capture of behavioral surplus. One patent submitted in 2003 by three of the firm’s top computer scientists is titled “Generating User Information for Use in Targeted Advertising.” The patent is emblematic of the new mutation and the emerging logic of accumulation that would define Google’s success. Of even greater interest, it also provides an unusual glimpse into the “economic orientation” baked deep into the technology cake by reflecting the mindset of Google’s distinguished scientists as they harnessed their knowledge to the firm’s new aims. In this way, the patent stands as a treatise on a new political economics of clicks and its moral universe, before the company learned to disguise this project in a fog of euphemism.

The patent reveals a pivoting of the backstage operation toward Google’s new audience of genuine customers. “The present invention concerns advertising,” the inventors announce. Despite the enormous quantity of demographic data available to advertisers, the scientists note that much of an ad budget “is simply wasted…it is very difficult to identify and eliminate such waste.”

Advertising had always been a guessing game: art, relationships, conventional wisdom, standard practice, but never “science.” The idea of being able to deliver a particular message to a particular person at just the moment when it might have a high probability of actually influencing his or her behavior was, and had always been, the holy grail of advertising. The inventors point out that online ad systems had also failed to achieve this elusive goal. The then-predominant approaches used by Google’s competitors, in which ads were targeted to keywords or content, were unable to identify relevant ads “for a particular user.” Now the inventors offered a scientific solution that exceeded the most-ambitious dreams of any advertising executive:

There is a need to increase the relevancy of ads served for some user request, such as a search query or a document request…to the user that submitted the request…The present invention may involve novel methods, apparatus, message formats and/or data structures for determining user profile information and using such determined user profile information for ad serving.

In other words, Google would no longer mine behavioral data strictly to improve service for users but rather to read users’ minds for the purposes of matching ads to their interests, as those interests are deduced from the collateral traces of online behavior. With Google’s unique access to behavioral data, it would now be possible to know what a particular individual in a particular time and place was thinking, feeling, and doing. That this no longer seems astonishing to us, or perhaps even worthy of note, is evidence of the profound psychic numbing that has inured us to a bold and unprecedented shift in capitalist methods.

The techniques described in the patent meant that each time a user queries Google’s search engine, the system simultaneously presents a specific configuration of a particular ad, all in the fraction of a moment that it takes to fulfill the search query. The data used to perform this instant translation from query to ad, a predictive analysis that was dubbed “matching,” went far beyond the mere denotation of search terms. New data sets were compiled that would dramatically enhance the accuracy of these predictions. These data sets were referred to as “user profile information” or “UPI.” These new data meant that there would be no more guesswork and far less waste in the advertising budget. Mathematical certainty would replace all of that.

* * *

From THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff. Reprinted with permission from PublicAffairs, a division of the Hachette Book Group.

Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita, Harvard Business School. She is the author of In The Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism.

Longreads Editor: Dana Snitzky

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narcissistpsychopath-abuse · 7 years

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True self and false self

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_self_and_false_self

True self and false self From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

True self (also known as real self, authentic self, original self and vulnerable self) and false self (also known as fake self, ideal self, perfect self, superficial self and pseudo self) are psychological concepts often used in connection with narcissism.

They were introduced into psychoanalysis in 1960 by D. W. Winnicott.[1] Winnicott used true self to describe a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience, and a feeling of being alive, having a real self.[2]

The false self, by contrast, Winnicott saw as a defensive façade[1]—one which in extreme cases could leave its holders lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty, behind a mere appearance of being real.[1]

To maintain their self-esteem, and protect their vulnerable true selves, narcissists need to control others' behavior – particularly that of their children seen as extensions of themselves.[3]

Contents

1 Characteristics

2 Precursors

3 Later developments

4 Literary examples

5 Criticisms

6 See also

7 References

8 Further reading

9 External links

3.1 Kohut

3.2 Lowen

3.3 Masterson

3.4 Symington

3.5 Vaknin

3.6 Miller

3.7 Orbach: false bodies

3.8 Jungian persona

3.9 Stern's tripartite self

Characteristics

Winnicott saw the true self as rooted from early infancy in the experience of being alive, including blood pumping and lungs breathing—what Winnicott called simply being.[4] Out of this, the baby creates the experience of a sense of reality, a sense that life is worth living. The baby's spontaneous, nonverbal gestures derive from that instinctual sense,[5] and if responded to by the mother, become the basis for the continuing development of the true self.

However, when what Winnicott was careful to describe as good enough parenting—i.e., not necessarily perfect![6]—was not in place, the infant's spontaneity was in danger of being encroached on by the need for compliance with the parents' wishes/expectations.[7] The result for Winnicott could be the creation of what he called the false self, where "Other people's expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one's being".[8] The danger he saw was that "through this false self, the infant builds up a false set of relationships, and by means of introjections even attains a show of being real",[9] while, in fact, merely concealing a barren emptiness behind an independent-seeming facade.[10]

The danger was particularly acute where the baby had to provide attunement for the mother/parents, rather than vice versa, building up a sort of dissociated recognition of the object on an impersonal, not personal and spontaneous basis.[11] But while such a pathological false self stifled the spontaneous gestures of the true self in favour of a lifeless imitation, Winnicott nevertheless considered it of vital importance in preventing something worse: the annihilating experience of the exploitation of the hidden true self itself.[4]

Precursors

There was much in psychoanalytic theory on which Winnicott could draw for his concept of the false self. Helene Deutsch had described the "as if" personalities, with their pseudo relationships substituting for real ones.[12] Winnicott's analyst, Joan Riviere, had explored the concept of the narcissist's masquerade—superficial assent concealing a subtle hidden struggle for control.[13] Freud's own late theory of the ego as the product of identifications[14] came close to viewing it only as a false self;[15] while Winnicott's true/false distinction has also been compared to Michael Balint's "basic fault" and to Ronald Fairbairn's notion of the "compromised ego".[16]

Erich Fromm, in his book The Fear of Freedom distinguished between original self and pseudo self—the inauthenticality of the latter being a way to escape the loneliness of freedom;[17] while much earlier the existentialist like Kierkegaard had claimed that "to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair"—the despair of choosing "to be another than himself".[18]

Karen Horney, in her 1950 book, Neurosis and Human Growth, based her idea of "true self" and "false self" through the view of self-improvement, interpreting it as real self and ideal self, with the real self being what one currently is and the ideal self being what one could become.[19] (See also Karen Horney § Theory of the self).

Later developments

The last half-century have seen Winnicott's ideas extended and applied in a variety of contexts, both in psychoanalysis and beyond.

Kohut Main article:

Heinz Kohut

Kohut extended Winnicott's work in his investigation of narcissism,[20] seeing narcissists as evolving a defensive armor around their damaged inner selves.[21] He considered it less pathological to identify with the damaged remnants of the self, than to achieve coherence through identification with an external personality at the cost of one's own autonomous creativity.[22]

Lowen Main article:

Alexander Lowen

Alexander Lowen identified narcissists as having a true and a false, or superficial, self. The false self rests on the surface, as the self presented to the world. It stands in contrast to the true self, which resides behind the facade or image. This true self is the feeling self, but it is a self that must be hidden and denied. Since the superficial self represents submission and conformity, the inner or true self is rebellious and angry. This underlying rebellion and anger can never be fully suppressed since it is an expression of the life force in that person. But because of the denial, it cannot be expressed directly. Instead it shows up in the narcissist's acting out. And it can become a perverse force.[23]

Masterson Main article:

James F. Masterson

James F. Masterson argued that all the personality disorders crucially involve the conflict between a person's two selves: the false self, which the very young child constructs to please the mother, and the true self. The psychotherapy of personality disorders is an attempt to put people back in touch with their real selves.[24]

Symington Main article:

Neville Symington

Symington developed Winnicott's contrast between true and false self to cover the sources of personal action, contrasting an autonomous and a discordant source of action—the latter drawn from the internalisation of external influences and pressures.[25] Thus for example parental dreams of self-glorification by way of their child's achievements can be internalised as an alien discordant source of action.[26] Symington stressed however the intentional element in the individual's abandoning the autonomous self in favour of a false self or narcissistic mask—something he considered Winnicott to have overlooked.[27]

Vaknin

As part of what has been described as a personal mission by self-confessed narcissist and author Sam Vaknin to raise the profile of the condition.[28] Vaknin has highlighted the role of the false self in narcissism. The false self replaces the narcissist's true self and is intended to shield him from hurt and narcissistic injury by self-imputing omnipotence. The narcissist pretends that his false self is real and demands that others affirm this confabulation, meanwhile keeping his real imperfect true self under wraps.[29]

For Vaknin, the false self is by far more important to the narcissist than his dilapidated, dysfunctional true self; and in contrast to the psychoanalysts he does not believe in the ability to resuscitate it through therapy.[30]

Miller Main article:

Alice Miller (psychologist)

Alice Miller cautiously warns that a child/patient may not have any formed true self, waiting behind the false self facade;[31] and that as a result freeing the true self is not as simple as the Winnicottian image of the butterfly emerging from its cocoon.[32] If a true self can be developed, however, she considered that the empty grandiosity of the false self could give way to a new sense of autonomous vitality.[33]

Orbach: false bodies Main article:

Susie Orbach

Susie Orbach saw the false self as an overdevelopment (under parental pressure) of certain aspects of the self at the expense of other aspects—of the full potential of the self—producing thereby an abiding distrust of what emerges spontaneously from the individual himself or herself.[34] Orbach went on to extend Winnicott's account of how environmental failure can lead to an inner splitting of mind and body,[35] so as to cover the idea of the false body — falsified sense of one's own body.[36] Orbach saw the female false body in particular as built upon identifications with others, at the cost of an inner sense of authenticity and reliability.[37] Breaking up a monolithic but false body-sense in the process of therapy could allow for the emergence of a range of authentic (even if often painful) body feelings in the patient.[38]

Jungian persona Main article:

Carl Jung

Jungians have explored the overlap between Jung's concept of the persona and Winnicott's false self;[39] but, while noting similarities, consider that only the most rigidly defensive persona approximates to the pathological status of the false self.[40]

Stern's tripartite self Main article:

Daniel Stern (psychologist)

Daniel Stern considered Winnicott's sense of "going on being" as constitutive of the core, pre-verbal self.[41] He also explored how language could be used to reinforce a false sense of self, leaving the true self linguistically opaque and disavowed.[42] He ended however by proposing a three-fold division of social, private, and of disavowed self.[43]

Literary examples

Wuthering Heights has been interpreted in terms of the true self's struggle to break through the conventional overlay.[44]

In the novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, the heroine saw her outward personality as a mere ghost of a Semblance, behind which her true self hid ever more completely.[45]

Sylvia Plath's poetry has been interpreted in terms of the conflict of the true and false selves.[46]

Criticisms

Neville Symington criticised Winnicott for failing to integrate his false self insight with the theory of ego and id.[47] Similarly continental analysts like Jean-Bertrand Pontalis have made use of true/false self as a clinical distinction, while having reservations about its theoretical status.[48]

The philosopher Michel Foucault took issue more broadly with the concept of a true self on the anti-essentialist grounds that the self was a construct—something one had to evolve through a process of subjectification, an aesthetics of self-formation, not something simply waiting to be uncovered:[49] "we have to create ourselves as a work of art".[50]