The vanishing micro/macro divide and the politics of computational interactionism

This essay is about, or more precisely against, the micro/macro divide. It claims that this divide is inaccurate as an ontological distinction, outdated as an epistemological split and, worst of all, misleading as a political alternative. The micro/macro divide, this chapter suggests, was a decent scholarly metaphor for the form of social governance that characterized early modernity, that is for the separation between the public sphere governed by the state and the private sphere governed by the pater familias. This separation, however, has grown increasingly obsolete because of the development of what I will call “computational interactionism”: an increasingly common type of social situations in which the interaction between human beings is mediated, monitored or otherwise influenced by techniques of advanced digital computation.