The New Regime of Total Certainty: How Instrumentarian Power Redesigns Human Freedom

 

The New Regime of Total Certainty

The New Regime of Total Certainty: How Instrumentarian Power Redesigns Human Freedom

The twentieth century knew a terrifying political project called totalitarianism—a project in which the state attempted total possession of human beings: their bodies, thoughts, identity, dreams, fears, and inner conscience. But our century is witnessing a different transformation. The threat no longer comes from the state demanding total loyalty. Instead, it comes from the market demanding total certainty.

Instrumentarianism—powered by Big Other and fueled by surveillance capitalism—seeks not obedience but predictability. And in this demand for perfect behavioral prediction, it quietly pushes humanity into a new form of control, smoother than dictatorship but far more pervasive.

1. From Total State-Control to Total Market-Certainty

Unlike totalitarian states that demanded loyalty to ideology, instrumentarian power demands something else:

that human behavior must become predictable.

This transformation was impossible before the digital age. Without smartphones, GPS, sensors, biometric devices, or social media, the market could never dream of knowing human behavior at such a microscopic level.

But today:

Facebook predicts your political leanings before you do.

TikTok knows your attention pattern better than your teacher or spouse.

Amazon predicts what you will buy, at what time, and in what mood.

PayTM, Swiggy, and Zomato in India predict spending cycles with frightening precision.

The goal is not to dominate your mind but to guarantee your next action.

Argument:

Totalitarianism wanted complete control; instrumentarianism wants complete prediction.

In political dictatorships, freedom was eliminated through violence.

In digital markets, freedom is dissolved through convenience.

2. Big Other: When Surveillance Merges with Behavioral Markets

Instrumentarian power emerges from a historic convergence of two forces:

Big Other – the digital machinery that monitors, measures, and influences every action.

Behavioral surplus – the extra data extracted from your daily life and sold in new behavioral futures markets.

Together, they create an economic logic where human experience becomes raw material, and human behavior becomes the final product.

Examples from daily life:

Google Maps selling aggregated movement patterns to advertisers and city planners.

Social media turning your emotional pauses into targeted advertising insights.

Gaming apps like FreeFire and Candy Crush using your clicking rhythm to predict impulsive spending.

Fitness apps selling your sleep and movement data to insurance companies.

Argument:

We are no longer the “product.”

Our behavior is the product, our life the raw material, and our future actions the commodity sold in global markets.

3. Humans Reduced to Reacting Creatures, Not Thinking Beings

Instrumentarian power does not care about human interiority—your meaning, emotions, or intentions.

It looks at humans only as organisms that behave.

Hannah Arendt warned that if we reduce thinking to a “brain activity,” machines will eventually replace it.

This is exactly what is happening.

For Big Other:

Your joy or sorrow while watching a video does not matter.

Your personal story is irrelevant.

Only your next click matters.

Your inner world becomes invisible; your outer actions become everything.

Examples from digital life:

YouTube cares only how long you watched, not how it made you feel.

Instagram sees you as an “engagement unit,” not a person.

Online learning platforms measure performance by clicks and completion rates, not understanding.

Argument:

By stripping human behavior of meaning, instrumentarian power turns individuals into predictable reaction-machines—perfect for market exploitation.

4. Arendt’s Warning: A Society of Automatic Jobholders

Hannah Arendt foresaw this danger decades ago.

She feared that modern society would push people into automatic functioning—as if individual life could dissolve into mechanical routines.

What she described is now visible everywhere:

Companies expect workers to match algorithmic performance targets.

Gig workers in India (Swiggy, Uber, Zomato) are judged by automated systems that track their speed, ratings, and compliance.

Education systems push for test scores rather than independent thought.

Social media platforms want users who follow predictable clicking patterns, not reflective reasoning.

Argument:

Arendt feared that modern society might end not in creativity but in a silent, passive, functional numbness.

Instrumentarianism accelerates exactly this.

5. The Rise of Passive Societies: Modern on the Outside, Lifeless Inside

Arendt warned that a society overflowing with technological energy might die in a new kind of passivity—smooth from the outside, hollow within.

And we see this today:

Most people surrender privacy for convenience.

Political opinions are shaped by feeds, not deliberation.

Public debate is replaced by algorithmic echo chambers.

People outsource thinking to Google, choices to Netflix, relationships to Tinder, and routes to GPS.

India, the US, China, Europe—everywhere we see the same pattern:

citizens who act without awareness, scroll without intention, and conform without resistance.

Argument:

A society driven by digital nudges becomes modern in infrastructure but empty in imagination.

6. The Final Question: Is This the World We Want to Call Home?

The passage ends with a moral question:

Do we want a world where self-automation becomes the price we pay for the automation of society?

In other words:

To make society perfectly predictable,

humans must first become predictable.

To guarantee outcomes for corporations,

individuals must surrender volition.

Tech companies tell us:

“Give us more data, and your experience will improve.”

But the truth is different:

What improves is our predictability, not our humanity.

What grows is their power, not our freedom.

Argument:

If society seeks “automated certainty,” then human freedom will be the first sacrifice.

This is not a technological problem—it is the central moral and political challenge of our time.

Conclusion: Total Certainty Means Total Loss of Humanity

Instrumentarianism does not jail people, torture them, or censor them openly.

Its violence is quiet.

Its weapon is prediction.

Its method is nudging.

Its reward is compliance.

Its cost is autonomy.

The transformation is subtle but radical:

Thought becomes reaction.

Freedom becomes predictability.

Individuals become datasets.

Society becomes a behavioral market.

Democracy becomes an algorithmic playground.

Arendt, Skinner, and many thinkers warned us in different ways:

Humanity may lose its future not through oppression, but through convenience.

The question that remains is not technological but civilizational:

Will we remain authors of our own lives,

or will we become the predictable creatures of someone else’s market dreams?