Introduction

Early in Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet there is an exchange between Almeetra, a wise woman, a seeress, of the city Almustafa is visiting. The people of the city have asked Almustafa to share his wisdom with them ‘to tell us all that has been shown you of that which is between birth and death’. The prophet says he can only tell them ‘what is moving within their souls’, prompting Almitra to say ‘Speak to us of Love’. The prophet responds:

Kahlil Gibran's prose reminds us of the breadth of love's potential. It seems love, in Gibran's sense, carries almost simultaneous possibilities for both joy and destruction. This chapter seeks to foreground the reflections and experiences on intimate life among young people with experience of road life. We will be introducing the concept of ‘tainted love’; one which seeks to validate the possibilities of love persisting in marginalised spaces, but which reflects the ways it can be tainted by complex histories and processes of structural violence. Often its hue is shared with wider societal issues, but in marginalised spaces may at times become more acute – exacerbated by issues such as ontological, economic and existential insecurities.

What the data in this chapter will present is the micro social process in which love is informed by the structural manifestations of race, class and gender. In this way, and although the voices we situate are from both cisgender men and women, weaved throughout is our own and the participants’ reinterpretation of love within the very specific terrain of road life. These specificities are intensified by the patriarchal social reproductions which we explore through the varied experiences of our participants.

Road life, a variant form of street culture, is often constructed as virulently violent.

There should be somewhere on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weaknesses and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasure and material enjoyment. In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their souls; education would be given not for passing examinations or obtaining certificates and posts but to enrich existing faculties and bring forth new ones. In this place, titles and positions would be replaced by opportunities to serve and organise; the bodily needs of each one would be equally provided for, and intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority would be expressed in the general organisation not by an increase in the pleasures and powers of life but by increased duties and responsibilities. Beauty in all its artistic forms, painting, sculpture, music, literature, would be equally accessible to all; the ability to share in the joy it brings would be limited only by the capacities of each one and not by social or financial position. For in this ideal place money would no longer be the sovereign lord; individual worth would have a far greater importance than that of material wealth and social standing. There, work would not be a way to earn one's living but a way to express oneself and to develop one's capacities and possibilities while being of service to the community as a whole, which, for its own part, would provide for each individual's subsistence and sphere of action. In short, it would be a place where human relationships, which are normally based almost exclusively on competition and strife, would be replaced by relationships of emulation in doing well, of collaboration and real brotherhood.

Introduction

Throughout the community's history, Aurovilians have experimented with various, alternative socio-economic forms of association that have sought to embody the community's ideals, as outlined by The Mother in her statements for how the township would be organized as an economic community and inspired by Sri Aurobindo's writings on flexible, subjective systems of collective organization. While Chapter 6 explored the development of Auroville's overarching communal economic administration, the current chapter examines economic experiments outside of this ‘public sector’ that ultimately informed it. The emergence and development of these experiments from the private to the public sphere is revelatory of the various levels of political agency that shape Auroville's economic practices and organization – including activist community members, community administrators and government advisors – which is significant in understanding the anarchic and ‘transgressive’ (Sargisson, 2000: 1) nature of its utopian practice.

We will focus on the evolution of a series of experiments in common accounts and how these prefigured unique cooperative public services in the community, delving into a case study of one such service – the PTDC – to explore the process of its establishment and ongoing challenges in its development. The latter will continue to be revelatory of how Aurovilians engage in a critical prefigurative practice and how this dimension of critique can both fuel and stall its progress. Such insight into the unique model and experience of Auroville's cooperatives will hopefully serve the development of the already wide-ranging practice of cooperative economic practices and organizations worldwide.

Common accounts in Auroville

I discovered the practice of common accounts in Auroville at Sunday lunch at home with my parents. Like in virtually every conversation at a family meal, we had wound up talking about Auroville – a habit that preceded my research, though the latter fomented it. On this particular Sunday, I had expressed concern over economic inequality in our community and was raising questions about how Aurovilians who struggled financially were, or could be, supported economically.

“Well, we had the Common Account”, ventured my mother, Nicole. I had never heard of it. “Who started that?”, I first asked. “We did!”, she answered. “Who's ‘we’?”, I retorted, thinking she meant Auroville at large. Nicole pointed at herself, while saying “and Peter”, my dad.

Introduction

This chapter aims to explore the similarities between Albanian ‘street life’ (Jeta e Rrugës) with life on-road in the United Kingdom. The salience of this proposed comparison is that the young people who took part in the research in Albania discussed being literally ‘on the roads’ as they experience international migration in adolescence, much of which involved journeys on both sides of the law in the respective countries. In drawing the comparisons between the hustle of the international ‘street life’ experienced by Albanian young people and the life ‘on-road’, we propose that some live the translocal on-road hustle. This chapter draws on original research findings derived from life-story interviews based on music elicitation (Levell, 2021) in Albania. This research was conducted with translocal Albanian young men between 18 and 25 years old, who had been identified as previously involved with serious and organised crime by professional gatekeepers. Interviews took place in three Albanian prisons and with young men under community probation supervision in the local community in late 2021 and early 2022. Our analysis of the life stories told by research participants through music elicitation in their own words, however, suggest that the experiences and reactions of Albanian youth who participate ‘on-road’ differs from their UK counterparts only in terms of very specific, contextual factors. Relevant experiences were framed as being part of ‘street life’ (in Albanian, jeta e rrugës) which resonated with the way in which life ‘on-road’ was discussed by men in the UK in the author's previous research (Levell, 2022a).

The stories told by the research participants reveal criminalisation pathways which emerge as contextually, rather than culturally, specific. The most notable contextual difference between expressions of urban street life in Albania and the UK on-road experience discovered, was the translocality of life on-road for many of the young Albanians. Rather than their street hustling involving ‘county lines’, much discussed in the UK, participants remembered different forms of migration, some regular and others irregular (including internal, external and return migration), which for many defined their youth. These suggest a continuum of marginalisation experienced along internal and external migration flows.

Technology suffers serious trust issues. Between citizens and governments, users and platforms, governments and tech companies, the media and everyone, mistrust is rife. With good reason. And yet, we still act as if we trust technologies, the people who make them, and the people who use them on us. Every day we still use untrustworthy technologies designed by untrustworthy companies or have them used on us by untrustworthy organizations. We act as if we trust, even when we do not. We are expected to perform the conditions of trust even as trust crumbles with every new leak or revelation about the problems caused by unjust uses of technology. The problem has become not only a lack of trust, but that the prevailing discourses and power structures that surround technology have defanged the potential of mistrust to create change. How is it that the conditions of trust are created even in its absence? How is it that the legitimacy that comes from trust is extracted from people and populations?

The ways we talk about technology emphasize the need for trust. This might be to encourage the adoption of new technologies, to justify expanding the use of existing technologies, to support further research, or to back up (or counter) regulation. This book details how trust is quantified and extracted from populations. This process – which I call trustification – works in a similar way to how consent is extracted from individuals when they click ‘accept’ on a cookie popup notification. It is a sleight of hand that legitimizes not only specific uses of technology but the wider set of power relations in which they are developed and deployed, often against minoritized groups. The stakes of trustification are high, extracting legitimacy across local and global scales, and exacerbating existing inequalities in the process.

I do not use trustification in the financial–legal sense, but in relation to issues of quantification, datafication and the other processes of technologizing society. By operationalizing trust, converting it into a metric to be achieved, trustification extracts legitimacy from people to further the aims of using technology to manage society. But trustification is also about discourses, the stories we tell about technology and the way trust is used by and for power. These stories themselves legitimize the framing of trust as a quantifiable and solvable problem.

The stories we tell about technology are important. The legitimacy of the process of trustification is built on stories of quantification, extraction and power. These stories are spread by states, companies and academia, but they find their expression repeated, performed and measured in the media.

Narratives and discourses mediate and are mediated by technology companies and platforms. They are performed on platforms about platforms. From persistent forms such as the press, advertising and film to each new social media company, media act as the stage and frame for constituting our collective discourse of technology. Measured in clicks, likes and shares – or on a different level in reach, ad revenue and market share – trust is extracted in and through media. Narratives are built and challenged around the conflicting and shifting loci of trust in media assemblages. The apparent depoliticization of quantified trust belies the highly political nature of the way such systems render trust little more than a metaphor for operationalizing the engagement of populations to legitimize power. Every minute spent scrolling performs the conditions of trust in media regardless of whether trust even enters the equation.

Examples of these shifting narratives are everywhere, each one contributing to the constituting of wider discourses of technological solutionism in different ways, in different contexts, to different audiences. Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia (2021) write of the differences in power and privilege that can transform the perception of surveillance technologies into both a tool of oppression used against the marginalized or a luxury item for the wealthy. Devices that collect obscene amounts of personal data are repackaged as high-end consumer items desirable for features that would rightly scare others, all based on the perception of branding and media that justifies the costs (both financial and social).

Even when companies like Apple make grand gestures about user privacy, it comes at a cost few can afford and still places data into the hands of that one trusted luxury brand. The same technologies are felt differently by different groups. Embedded within sociotechnical systems and discourses, these affective qualities create wildly unequal effects. A 2009 Apple iPhone advert popularized the phrase that whatever you need, ‘there's an app for that’. The way this became trivialized as a joke conceals the combination of lifestyle, brand and utility narratives that normalize a data economy as the dominant understanding of complex informational ecosystems.

If knowledge is power, then the places where knowledge is produced are important sites to examine. They can shape how technologies and discourses develop. Intertwined with the power and discourses of technology companies and states, academia and research agendas also shape, legitimize and entrench trustification narratives. The ivory tower has its foundations in the same need for trust, for legitimacy to support its privileged position, a position not as detached as it is often portrayed. It too relies on stories of evidence, numbers and measurement to extract its power and privilege, from states, corporations and publics. The role of academia in defining technology discourse makes it important to consider how the legitimacy of experts and the results of research are performed as worthy of trust. The global research community (though the term community is stretched here) shifts trust onto methods, institutions and the norms and dominant power structures that shape knowledge production.

There is a long, colonial (as well as racist, heteropatriarchal and ableist) history of reverence afforded to the scientific method and claims of objectivity. Today this has shaped much of how technologies like AI and data are conceptualized and performed. This is significant, as ‘methods constitute the things they claim to represent’ (Kennedy et al, 2022: 393) while participants, who also shape results, are largely excluded from the same level of consideration (2022: 409–10) even as these methods perform the same values into discourses of society more widely.

In the US, for example, universities played a legitimizing role in sustaining mythologies of settler colonialism, carried forward to contemporary policing and surveillance of any counter discourses that emerge from universities. As Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira write, ‘ “imperial cartographies” can be traced through the meshed contours of research methods and scholarly theories’ (2014). This perpetuates the ‘empires of knowledge’, which continue to be built on ‘racial statecraft, militarized science, and enduring notions of civilizational superiority’. Taken together, this constitutes ‘the many different ways white supremacy and coloniality still form the glue for the institutional and intellectual disciplinarity of western critical thought’ (Weheliye, 2014: 63). These processes, assumptions and framings embody a sort of quantification in terms of who or what ‘counts’ as valid for academic freedom or recognition.

Trust became a key feature of the way health, governance and technology discourses intertwined during the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for public trust in the measures being put in place – and the tools being designed and deployed to support those measures – was seen as paramount. So too, then, did the measurement of trust become an important factor in defining policy and negotiating the vast array of public and private organizations involved in supporting responses to the pandemic globally and locally.

This prevailing discourse focused on trust deficits, the premise that lack of trust in both government and technology was hampering society's responses to the pandemic. Trust deficit narratives combined trustification with existing deficit narratives in the perpetuation of longstanding inequalities in the effects of the pandemic. This type of framing established trust as something required of populations, and therefore something governments needed to ‘get’, to extract and measure, something populations were required to provide and blamed if they did not. Populations around the world therefore became subject to what I have called trustification.

The pandemic context exposed ‘the complexity and fragility of trust relations at the intersection of society, technology and government’ (Bodó and Janssen, 2020, 3) and ‘growing societal distrust in the veracity of numbers and the increasing lack of confidence in the validity of the deployed tech solutions’ (Milan, 2020: 2). But the promise of certainty offered by measurement, by quantifying social problems, became ‘particularly seductive in times of global uncertainty’ (Milan, 2022: 1). A reliance on data became ‘a fundamental ingredient of any reporting on disease diffusion, betraying a positivist belief on the power of information to solve the most pressing problems of our times’ (2022: 447–8). Trust in measurement, and measuring trust, defined many aspects of COVID-19 policy, and this is nowhere more apparent than in contact tracing apps.

Os Keyes (2020) identified in the push for technological solutions to contact tracing ‘a vast array of proposals to integrate automation and technological surveillance’ (2020: 59). This discourse replaced the use of human contact tracing based on consensual data sharing and building interpersonal trust developed by social researchers gathering qualitative data on transmission. These qualitative approaches were essential in informing early responses during, for example, the HIV/AIDS pandemic (Kaurin, 2020: 68).

The face, as a site of interpersonal interaction often linked to identity, has become a prime target for quantification, datafication and automated assessment by algorithms like AI. Facial recognition has seen a massive rise in use across high stakes contexts like policing and education. The systems are particularly used to assess trust and its various proxies. These technologies are an update of historical practices like physiognomy that assign values for personal qualities based on the shape and measurements of people's faces (or brains or other body parts).

Parallels between AI and physiognomy are ‘both disturbing and instructive’ (Stark and Hutson, 2022: 954). Both are an attempt to read into the body characteristics that are deemed innate, and therefore inescapable. Measuring for these attributes performs them as roles and identities for specific individuals and groups. They include characteristics like ‘employability, educability, attentiveness, criminality, emotional stability, sexuality, compatibility, and trustworthiness’ (2022: 954). Trustworthiness was a key target for physiognomy, attempting to embed social biases within the narratives of a scientific discipline, performing legitimacy for discrimination. Parallels also include the view of physiognomy as progressive, which aligns with innovation narratives that hype up facial recognition ‘solutions’.

However, despite the sheer number of tools and academic papers being developed, there are big questions over the significant flaws in methodology and assumptions. This includes a frequent lack of definition of what concepts like trustworthiness actually are, part of a chain of proxy conflation of terms and ideas (Spanton and Guest, 2022). This critique highlights the ethical risks inherent even to ‘demonstration’ type academic papers, aligning with what Abeba Birhane describes as ‘cheap AI’ rooted in ‘prejudiced assumptions masquerading as objective enquiry’ (2021b: 45). Faulty demonstrations of the possibilities of machine learning technology are easily picked up and misinterpreted by the media to feed the myths of AI. But problematic papers also enable the same biased and decontextualized judgements to be easily transferred to policing, insurance, education and other areas where quantifying trust is directly, materially harmful.

Saving faces

The way facial recognition technologies are developed and deployed perpetuates specific injustices. If they work, they purposefully entrench power. When they do not work, which is often, then ‘the harm inflicted by these products is a direct consequence of shoddy craftsmanship, unacknowledged technical limits, and poor design’ (Raji, 2021: 57).

The previous chapter outlined the ways that trustification emerges. In this chapter, I apply this conceptual framework to state logics of power, and the different ways that states have trustified their populations throughout history and today. From projects of measuring through to large-scale surveillance and manipulation, states have unevenly extracted legitimacy through the use of exploitative technologies.

Trustification turns trust into a technology of power. As with many technologies, and many forms of power, trustification is not a brand-new phenomenon. Despite the representation of constant newness that technology discourses use to maintain the legitimacy of the ideology of progress, technologies tend to reflect, reify and reinforce existing social values, inequalities and injustices. So too can the underlying aims of trustification be traced backwards in time, particularly as embodied in the state.

The history of representative democracy is a precursor of trustification. This ‘indirect’ form of governance rests on measures of authority. Power slides and aggregates across social assemblages. Narratives of votes, representatives and majorities act as measures for the legitimacy of a political manifesto. Confidence and trust produce a mandate with which to exercise authority, played out with higher levels enabling more extreme policies. Games between those in or seeking power treat populations as a resource from which to extract legitimacy for that power.

It is useful to consider the mechanisms and moments in which state or representative authority breaks down, the points where the extraction of legitimacy becomes visible. Election monitors meant to prevent fraud are designed as a mechanism to support (or reject) the legitimacy of the outcome. Australia's representative democracy enforces participation as a means of extracting legitimacy for the wider system: abstention is still registered as a mark of consent; and the historical exclusion of indigenous peoples categorizes who does and does not count as the population from whom legitimacy is required. Autocratic regimes employ unfree and unfair elections to force consent from their population, falsifying measures to maintain legitimacy. Migrant populations suffer bureaucratic and now technocratic counting to ‘count’ for aid (Metcalfe and Dencik, 2019). This extracts the conditions of trust out of sheer necessity. Among those embedded within the games of power, a vote of (no) confidence quantifies even mistrust, shifting the role of trust to be operationalized as a power grab under a metricized veil of democracy between those playing the game.

Here, I build on the previous chapter's discussion of trustification under state logics of power by focusing on corporate power. The companies that design and manage technologies wield inordinate power, with the ability to embed certain values and priorities. This ‘governance-by-design’ (Mulligan and Bamberger, 2018) risks bypassing state and public forms of governance through the ways technologies are developed to shape increasing areas of everyday life. In order to justify this power, and to keep it in the hands of tech companies, trustification is used in ways different from state logics, instead based in corporate narratives and logics of power.

Corporations engage in games of legitimacy against states and societies. Companies and states perform certain roles in relation to one another and constitute their power within such relations: as regulator; as provider of essential infrastructure or services; as investor; as problem to be dealt with or avoided. To accomplish this, each must learn to see (and speak) as the other. As Félix Tréguer (2019: 148–9) has identified, there are different constraints affecting a company's focus on resistance or cooperation with state surveillance, particularly following the Snowden mass surveillance leaks. These constraints include high concern for user trust and competition weighting more towards resistance, while holding (or seeking) government contracts weights more towards cooperation.

The games come down, in part, to where a corporation seeks to extract legitimacy, and managing potential risks. For example, pursuing a law-enforcement contract for facial recognition algorithms may make Google feel more inclined to share people's search data with that same agency. The straight extraction of data from individuals undermines the idea of any kind of transaction between corporations and their users, consumers or workers (Lyon, 2019: 67). Instead, data is exchanged between corporations (and states): games played at levels of power far beyond the populations the data is about.

The imposition of corporate discourses over several decades has embedded economic risk-based metrics into state thinking. The state also sees like big tech; the audience to corporate performances turns into a performer of those same discourses. For example, state capitalism ‘now appears to deploy its authority less to consolidate its political rule than to reduce its market risk’ (Gonzaga, 2021: 448).

Throughout this book, I have discussed the role of trust in technology discourses as part of a process of quantification, extraction and legitimization that entrenches existing inequalities and injustices. I have shown how this process, which I have called trustification, consolidates power in the hands of those designing and deploying technologies on populations around the world. Embedded within these narratives is a computational logic that emphasizes the reduction of people and of social problems into something that is countable and can appear solvable. It is through this framing that technological solutionism, and the application of generic solutions across contexts, seeks discursive legitimacy. In the absence of trust, technology discourses measure proxies for trust in order to extract from populations the legitimacy that trust can provide.

Trusting technology is virtually impossible. When we cannot tell who or what it is we are trusting amid sprawling sociotechnical assemblages, trustworthiness becomes replaced by what levels of trust can be measured. In the absence of both specific trust and the possibility of trust, we are expected to act as if we trust anyway. The discourses of technology development and deployment serve to enact what I have called trustification. This is the construction of situations in which populations are forced to perform the conditions of trust when trust itself does not or cannot exist.

Discourses are important in mediating power relations of technologies. As Simone Natale writes, ‘technologies function not only at a material and technical level but also through the narrative they generate or into which they are forced’ (2021: 55). We must pay close attention to the stories constructed around technologies, how they are constructed, and how those stories emerge from historical narratives such as colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and others. Throughout this book I have emphasized the performative nature of technologies and their discourses, the way that telling stories constitutes those material and social conditions differently for different populations.

Trustification fuses this discursive process with quantification. We can describe it as a conflating of narrative logics and computational logics. By measuring trust, and by speaking those measurements, trustification constitutes the conditions of trust regardless of whether trustworthiness or trusting relations actually exist. In doing so, it also creates the expectations of trust and the expectation of legitimacy generated by populations performatively acting as if they trust.

Trustification operates when populations or groups are forced to perform the conditions of trust without corresponding relations of trust. The power asymmetry between those extracting trust to legitimize technology development and deployment, and those expected to trust them, creates and entrenches structural inequalities. This occurs even within initiatives that claim to be creating technologies ‘for good’.

These programmes – data for good, AI for good, tech for good – seem to be everywhere, connecting corporate, state, research and public sector organizations, agendas and interests. But we must ask what good? And whose good? The interests of those on whom these systems operate are often left out of the decision-making process, sidelined in the discourses that determine but rarely define this elusive ‘good’. And tech ‘for good’, especially humanitarian tech, is used to extract legitimacy for tech ‘for no good’, furthering capitalist and/or state aims of escalating and consolidating power and wealth.

The discursive project of tech for good performs many of the dominant (and harmful) assumptions that surround the use and role of technology in society. The quantification of social issues, and the datafication of those affected by them, feeds into the expansion of technological solutionism and the extraction of legitimacy for those solutions. Involvement in humanitarian projects therefore acts as marketing for tech companies, what has been labelled as ‘aidwashing’ (Martin, 2023) in the embedding of surveillance systems to control the distribution of aid, or #Help (Johns, 2023) in the policy influencing practices of translating populations to data, embedding the interface as a mode of control in ways that echo the dashboard of sensory power (Isin and Ruppert, 2020). This is all framed in the prevailing narratives that label tech as neutral, tech companies as benevolent, and their solutions as objective.

Around technologies such as AI, the assumption that it ‘is neutral and should be used “for the greater good” […] neutralises criticism as simply a matter of imperfect information.’ (Jansen and Cath, 2021: 189). These ‘completionist’ desires become embedded in sociotechnical systems. The framing assumes that tech for good is a universally viable approach and aim, and that any given technological solution can be applied to any context with enough data and infrastructure.

In this chapter, I outline the conceptual framework of trustification, a way of describing how legitimacy is extracted from populations through processes of quantification, creating the conditions of trust without the underlying social relations of trustworthiness. This is set out from the relation between technology and trust, through the processes at work, to the role of proxy variables that stand in for trust in legitimizing technology discourses. The socially constructed drive to technology, particularly the drive to AI or the drive to data, does not accept the interplay of trust and mistrust. It does not accept any challenge to objectivity narratives, any hint that problems are not ‘solvable’ (in principle or through technology). Such ambiguity does not fit within the discourses that surround the power and legitimacy of technology and those who design, build, sell or use it. Such a challenge to the absolute faith in technology as a force for good for individuals and society is not permitted by those discourses.

A nuanced, political, socially engaged, fluid approach to trust and mistrust is simply outside mainstream technology discourses because it challenges the power structures and inequalities that such narratives sustain. These narratives no longer seek to build trust, but to create the impression of it, to perform the conditions of it. Or, more bluntly, to extract it. This process of performative extraction between quantification and discursive power I call trustification.

Trusting technology

People are asked every day to trust technology. This is in part trusting it to function as intended, which already involves not only expectations of operational accuracy (trust in the actions of the technology) but also expectations of intent (trust in both the intentions and actions of the designers or users of the technology). When we situate this operational form of trust across the sociotechnical assemblage that constitutes a given technology, we acknowledge other forms of trust as well. We are not only being asked to trust specific instances of specific technologies. We are not only being asked to trust the sprawling network of constituent technologies, materials and processes that make a specific technology. We are also being asked to trust in ‘technology’ as a broader concept and discourse, an organizing principle of society.