Page - 51 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

a direction other than the one desired (Latour 1992; 1990b, 105). This category encompasses everything that increases the likelihood a regulatory attempt fails (from the viewpoint of the regulator). If a program is to be successful, it thus has to neutralize all anti-programs, i.e., all counteracting factors, so that the entity in question behaves in the desired way. In his famous vignette about a hotel manager trying to ensure that guests leave their room keys at the counter before going for a walk, Latour points out two strategies for developing successful programs: acting on the customers and their interpretation of the world or acting on the key itself by attaching a weight to it that makes it uncomfortable to carry around (Latour 1990b). For Latour, this is the distinction between incorporation and excorporation. Elaborating on these two notions is a useful way of discerning types of behaviour modification. Incorporation operates through the modification of the inner working of the regulated entity. In Foucauldian terms, we could speak of processes of subjectivation (Foucault 1990) and discipline (Foucault 1995, 135ff.): of internalizing subjective norms and values and creating bodily or mental routines and conditioning. An example of the former can be found in “lifelogging” and related practices of data-based self-monitoring that affect individuals’ subjectivities and, thus, their individual behaviour, e.g., by increasing sporting activity (Schaupp 2016). The latter form of incorporation is employed, for instance, in what Fogg calls “conditioning technology”, i.e., “[c]omputing technology [using] positive reinforcement to shape complex behaviour or transform existing behaviors into habits” (Fogg 2003, 53; see also Berlin Script Collective 2017, 24). Excorporation, in contrast, focusses on environments and situations rather than on individuals themselves. Madeleine Akrich’s (1992) analysis of how innovators inscribe normative assumptions into technology is instructive here. Building on a recent paper by the Berlin Script Collective (2017), we can distinguish three types of such behaviour modification through technological environments: coercion, inducement and the initiation of re-interpretations through the provision of knowledge. In each of these three cases, behaviour modification operates by (re)arranging the environment — e.g., through laws, taxes, or information campaigns — in such a way that the desired behaviour is rendered the most (instrumentally or normatively) rational option. To these three types of excorporate behaviour modification that make use of the rational capacities of individuals we add a fourth one which we term influence through non-rational properties: This type of influence makes use of the non-rational aspects of human behaviour and has been popularized by the debate about “nudges” and their mechanisms that exploit “heuristics and biases” (Thaler & Sunstein 2008; for digital environments, this kind of influence has also been explored by Yeung 2017b). The “status quo bias” for instance can be utilized through purposeful setting of technological defaults. As the fields of Persuasive Computing and Human-Computer Interaction show, digital technologies can be applied in all four of these types. Concluding this brief sketch of the framework, it is important to note that the three components should not be understood as successive phases. In reality, they are always intertwined, as the following case illustrates. The example of Uber As an illustration, the framework is now applied to the well-researched case of the personal transportation platform Uber and its regulation of drivers. Uber drivers usually register with the app and then indicate that they are currently available for work. While they are, they will be 51