Social experiments without experimentalism

In the spring of 2009, filmmaker Ruben Östlund was interviewed about his forthcoming movie Play. Asked about his new ‘attitude’ of describing the film’s plot in detail before it had even premiered, he explained that the way people watch movies has changed. The viewer is no longer asking ‘what’s going to happen?’; instead they ask: ‘How is it going to happen and what does it look like?’1

When I look back on the years since Östlund formulated his theory about watching, it’s clear that it has not only been confirmed – it should be generalized. I don’t think I’m alone in following the events of contemporary history in the way Östlund claims we watch movies. Since 2008, crisis has followed crisis, and it seems as if people view these as expressions of what it looks like when the already-known plot of the twenty-first century plays out.

Yes, the plot has already been written by political scientists and historians. The end of history was a silly notion. The Anglo-American and European models of liberal democracy plus capitalism will face increasing challenges from other systems. It is also clear that both European influence and the role of the United States as the world’s sole superpower will be hollowed out. What nobody can say, though, is how it will happen when these events unfold – that is to say, what it looks like when a present-day empire, one that has structured our lived experience, gradually declines.

The way this plot plays out is especially captivating for those of us who became adults in the 1990s. We seem to be particularly primed on the comfortable notion that nothing is at stake in history’s unfolding, and on the conviction that foundational political institutions can’t be torn up overnight. At least this is how I try to understand my own fascination – and horror – over what it looks like when history is at play again.

This return of history is also linked to a feeling of loss. The proclamation of the end of history came with a reduced ability to experiment with alternative futures – and yet, the return of history has not reestablished that ability, since the alternative futures of our time are articulated by either tech oligarchs or authoritarian governments. The future is back, but it remains out of reach.

I am not alone in these feelings of fascination, horror and loss. In fact, it is a mood so widespread that we can speak of a general cultural atmosphere, in which viewers in Europe and North America follow the familiar plotline but still can’t believe their eyes. You’ll find this mood, for instance, in the business press. It’s symptomatic that the 2025 Financial Times shortlist for the best business books was dominated by titles exploring the same question2: why is China the country building the future, and why is ‘the West’ incapable of doing the same?

One of these books is Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s quest to engineer the future, which argues that the US, a country governed by lawyers, appears increasingly dysfunctional in comparison with a high-functioning China governed by engineers. The same partiality toward engineers is expressed in another 2025 bestseller of the same genre. In The Technological Republic, Alex Karp, founder and CEO of Palantir, the controversial defense contractor, argues that the US is not doing a good job managing its engineering expertise.3 Silicon Valley has spent decades building frivolous apps and addictive algorithms, thereby reducing the art of engineering to a trifling and hollow endeavour. Engineers need to raise their gazes, Karp argues, and, like Palantir, build the technology that strengthens Western civilization.

In other words, the wealthy classes of Europe and North America feel that they’re experiencing a civilizational deceleration and suspect that it has something to do with engineering. This idea warrants critical examination, and such readings do indeed exist. 4 But what would happen if we naively took the concerns of these elites at face value? Might it be the case that we’ve lost our collective capacity to build and try out alternative futures? Have we, simply put, become less adept at conducting social experiments? 5

The fall of experimentalism

The thesis of a civilizational slowdown would likely have been harder to swallow had it not been around before. The books on the Financial Times shortlist echo a refrain that’s already been circulated in, for example, the artworld’s institutional critique debates.6 The British artist Liam Gillick argues that the artworld is stuck in a Catch-22, whereby art institutions like to invite artists who are aligned with radical experimentalism, but they rarely allow actual experiments.7 Or, vice versa: the experiments that do take place within the walls of the institution are rarely based in radical experimentalism.8 Are contemporary social experiments characterized by a similar stuckness?

We encounter another version of this refrain in the writings of British theorist Mark Fisher. In the early 2010s, Fisher described a parallel form of stagnation: in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, both music and politics were shaped by a gradual snuffing out of the ‘experimental culture’ that was emblematic for the twentieth century.9 After the turn of the millennium, fewer and fewer culture workers subscribed to the modernist imperative of breaking with the old to deliberately create something new. According to Fisher, twenty-first century culture doesn’t look to the future; instead, it keeps referring back.10

To convince his reader, Fisher proposes a thought experiment. Imagine ‘any record’ from 2012 and time machine it back to 1995. Few 1990s listeners would believe that the 2012 record had actually come from the future; and if they did, they would be more likely to ask why so little had happened during a whole seventeen years of cultural evolution. Perhaps next they would look back and compare the stagnated future with the inventiveness that characterized the pop music of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Fisher saw the same tendencies in the political imaginary. After the fall of the Wall, the boundaries for what was possible to imagine in the political left kept shrinking – especially when compared to something like the bold experiments that resulted in the creation of the welfare state. 11

These ideas should, in turn, be placed in the context of a broader story about what happened to the modernist project. There is an oft-cited narrative about the rise and fall of modernism in design disciplines that study architecture and urbanism. In Designing Disorder (2020), sociologist and urbanist Richard Sennett discusses his first book, published in 1970 – a time when architects and planners still believed in modernist architecture. Since then, ‘doubt about that modernist project’ has become widespread, since it ‘failed in its commitment to experimentation‘. 12 After all, modernism had promised to break with the old by experimenting with the new, and in so doing dispel the need for political revolution.

Is the failure of modernism, then, a failure of experimentalism? Marshall Berman claims something of the sort in All That is Solid Melts Into Air. 13 Berman’s project is to investigate the dialectical relationship between the modernization of the urban environment on the one hand, and the evolution of modernist expression in art, literature and social thinking on the other. Several modernists – artists, authors and thinkers – are woven into this story. The book’s title may be inspired by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ manifesto, but its central message is derived from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground.14

In Berman’s view, Dostoevsky is the first prophet to articulate the impending fate of modern experimentalism:15 the Russian author’s pro-existentialist novella is in intricate conversation with modern urban landscapes in Saint Petersburg as well as modern buildings like London’s Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace, in particular, plays an important role in the underground notes, and the standard reading of the work tends to dwell on the way Dostoevsky associates the building with the rationalization and scientification of human existence.

Berman, instead, seeks to emphasize a subtle and nevertheless crucial nuance of Dostoevsky’s thinking. There’s an odd discrepancy between the Crystal Palace construed for London’s Great Exhibition and the crystal palace described in Notes From Underground. Berman argues that Dostoevsky’s critique isn’t directed at the real-world Crystal Palace but rather targets representation of the crystal palace in fiction, where it was praised by Russian utopian socialists.16 These dreamed of a civilization molded by science, where the new man leaves the chaotic modern metropolis for an exurban geometric landscape organized around standardized crystal palaces.

This is the utopia Dostoevsky has in mind when he writes that the crystal palace represents the crushing of free will. In that building, everything will ‘be so accurately calculated and specified that there will no longer be either independent actions or adventures in this world’.17 The construction of the crystal palace represents the end of the adventure of progress, and therefore also the end of history.

Even so, Berman notes, London’s Crystal Palace was in fact an expression of the adventurous ideals Dostoevsky defends in his Notes. The building was designed by engineers, not classically trained architects. The project’s speculative aspect was explicit; it was built with the intention of seeing if it was at all possible to construct a building entirely in glass and wrought iron – simply put, it was an experiment that was allowed to be experimental. To Berman, this is the exact spirit Dostoevsky emphasizes when he describes what it is to be human in a modern world:

… man is, above all, a predominantly creative animal, condemned consciously to strive towards a goal and to engage in the art of engineering, that is, eternally, unceasingly construct a road for himself, wherever it may lead. 18

‘Wherever it may lead’ is the key sentence in italics for Dostoevsky as well as for Berman. Engineering is deeply human, and can represent the same unpredictability and adventurousness as what we find in humankind – but it can also be captured by the scientism and standardization promoted by the utopian socialists. In this context, engineering becomes a tool for the creation of a new human. Engineering, in other words, has the ability to break open new futures, but it can also be rallied to foreclose them. Dostoevsky, who was himself a trained engineer, thought of modernization as a human adventure, despite also warning that the same process risked evolving into thoughtless, soul-destroying tedium.

Crystal Palace, London, Daguerreotype. Image via Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

This idea is central to Berman’s story about what happened to the modern project. Indeed, the twentieth century became a story of adventure replaced by routine. Ultimately, the scientific socialists’ version of the crystal palace won out. A routinized modernization of the living environment was introduced in the Soviet Union, and in the West, the glass and wrought iron experiment degenerated into an ‘overpopulation’19 of standardized glass boxes as shopping malls and office buildings. This is how modernist architecture came to abandon its ‘commitment to experimentation’.

Experimentalism in the welfare state

Mark Fisher isn’t alone in looking back at the experimentalism that produced the welfare state. Within the Swedish debate, ‘the Swedish model’ has also been described as ‘the Swedish experiment’, since the country’s social engineers dared to try welfare solutions that diverged significantly from other countries. 20 In recent years, however, the Nordic welfare state experiment that has drawn the most attention is Finland’s basic income trial.

In 2015, Juha Sipilä’s government launched the ambitious initiative ‘Experimental Finland’. Based on government reports,21 Sipilä, who also happens to be trained as a civil engineer, launched the flagship Finnish basic income experiment, undertaken during a two-year period between January 2017 and December 2018. 2,000 randomly selected job seekers were offered a monthly basic income of €560. The sum, which corresponded to regular unemployment benefit, was provided unconditionally, without means testing, and wasn’t reduced if new job income was earned. Since the study was set up as a randomized controlled trial (RCT), the 2,200 ‘treated’ individuals were compared with a ‘non-treated’ control group consisting of 178,000 regular employment seekers, who were given traditional unemployment benefits.

In the leadup to the experiment, the lead scientist, sociologist Olli Kangas, had to contend with a number of complications. Sipilä’s right-wing government wasn’t interested in studying the possible effects of basic income on wellbeing and health – outcomes that are often highlighted by the proponents of universal basic income – but sought, instead, to focus exclusively on the effects on employment. How does the basic income scheme described above affect the participants’ tendency to apply for and land new jobs?

A desire to ensure the experiment’s scientific standards also delayed the project. To achieve the highest RCT standard, Kangas decided that participation would be obligatory. In other words, the 2,000 randomly selected individuals weren’t ‘offered’ a basic income; they were obligated to participate in the experiment. This meant that the Finnish Constitutional Law Committee needed to find a way to circumvent Article 7 of the UN International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits governments from performing medical and scientific experiments without the free consent of the individuals involved.

Eventually, though, the experiment did get off the ground and was performed with impeccable scientific rigour. Unfortunately, however, the results were ambiguous. Basic income’s effect on employment remained unclear and the experiment did not inform the policy work that followed.22

In line with Gillick’s critique of art institutions, this could be described as an experiment without experimentalism, in that the experiment was not allowed to serve as the basis for alternative futures. The fact that effects on health and wellbeing weren’t considered meant that relatively little was at stake; ultimately this experiment was not about testing basic income with the intention of possibly making it a permanent feature of the welfare system. Rather, the basic income experiment ultimately became a kind of experiment in experimentation – or so claims Finnish political scientist Mona Mannevuo. In her analysis, the primary effect of the experience related to RCT experimentation as such. In an interview, Finnish national economists highlight the fact that the experiment was, above all, ‘a real breakthrough for field experiments’.23

The experiment’s sophisticated survey of citizens’ behavioral patterns means it can be viewed as a milestone in what is becoming known as ‘neuroliberal’ governance.24  Neuroliberalism can be thought of as a continuation of neoliberalism, though with its own specific characteristics. If neoliberalism attempts to force behavior to conform to the rational homo oeconomicus of national economics, neuroliberalism accepts and exploits the fact that the human subject doesn’t always act rationally.

Taking this behavioural-scientific premise as its starting point, neuroliberalism brings together perspectives and practices from behavioural economics, behavioural science and UX design. In neuroliberalism, governing is no longer about shaping the human subject but rather about gently modulating its behaviours.25  Mannevuo claims that it is ‘the logic of experimentation’ that enables this kind of governing. 26 The story about experimental Finland is, then, not only about experimentalism’s decline but also about behaviouralism’s ascension.

Experimentalism is a behaviouralism

The triumph of behaviouralism also fits into Berman’s framing device about how modernity as adventure has been replaced by modernity as routine. This shift affects the dialectical relationship between modernization (of the urban environment) and modernism (in art, literature and social thinking), and is particularly conspicuous in literature and political discourse. Berman highlights the fifties as a period of transition. Previously, modernist authors and thinkers had written the modern environment into their works, but in, for instance, Albert Camus’ The Fall (1956), it is barely present at all. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition goes further, presenting the modern environment as something to think against, not with.

When Arendt discusses technology, it is no longer in adventurous terms. The satellite and the supercomputer are, in the first place, a threat to humans. There’s no room in Arendt for Dostoevsky’s sense of engineering as a deeply human experimentalism; instead, her exploration of the creation of artefacts is overshadowed by antipathy toward Thomas Hobbes and his mechanical view of the state. Ultimately, Arendt argues, it is Hobbes who is responsible for the fact that the modern world has reduced the political to a kind of engineering practice whose goal is to build state institutions.

Arendt formalizes this approach as a split between the creation of artefacts (work) and imaginative powers (action). Today, this view seems emblematic of the critical social theorists who distanced themselves from postwar modernism. Political imagination was separated from the techno-scientific remaking of the world, splitting the political-experimental way of thinking from the technological and organizational capacity to actually perform experiments.

Arendt, however, is just as prophetic as Dostoevsky, and The Human Condition warns of treacherous behaviourism. The problem with behaviourists, Arendt writes, isn’t primarily that they are wrong in claiming that man is a highly malleable animal lacking a mental core – the problem is that they, in the future, might be right. ‘It is quite conceivable,’ she writes, that the modern age may end in ‘the most sterile passivity history has ever known’. 27

She writes in a time of ‘giant’ computers and could probably (with Hobbes’ Leviathan in mind) not imagine how petite and pleasantly well designed this technology would become. On the other hand, nor would she probably have been surprised to learn that the black mirrors in our hands are programmed to work as Skinner boxes.28 Because of course that’s the case: digitalization is, to a great extent, a form of experimentalization.

In the digital world, we are constantly participating in so-called A/B experiments: the tech world’s version of randomized trials with control groups. Anyone who spends time online is constantly slotted into A or B groups,29 subjected to small variations in the user experience, and thereby generating increasingly fine-grained data about human behaviour for the tech companies. Google is said to run more than 10,000 different A/B tests every year, and the same is true for Microsoft and other tech giants. These numbers will likely increase even further as experimentation gradually becomes automated by AI.

In other words, our lives unfold in the midst of the background noise of constant and innumerable tiny experiments. Experiments that measure how many milliseconds you hesitate before you scroll away from one of the algorithm’s carefully selected videos. Experiments that measure how many per mille of the participants in the treated A group will click through on a link that has been moved ten pixels to the left. Or experiments in how many iterations a generative AI algorithm needs in order to create an image deemed sufficiently realistic.

There’s a paradox here. We clearly lack the ability to perform social experiments with real alternative futures as their stakes – but this coexists with an explosion in other kinds of experiments. The vast increase in digital experiments is also, in and of itself, paradoxical: on the one hand, it is made up of tiny, insignificant, fleeting experiments, which, in contrast to a project like Crystal Palace, in themselves do not leave any mark. On the other hand, this explosion is made possible by a new technostructure for computing power, an exoskeleton that is slowly growing to encase Earth.30

To paraphrase the Swedish writer Nina Björk, who described capitalist consumer desires as ‘shit dreams’, we simply have to realize that we’ve built a society of shit experiments. 31 The question is what we should feel when confronted with this fact. Resignation is one option; those of us who grieve the experimentalism of days past could sketch out a ‘politics of decline’ for our time,32 which might lean on contemporary attempts to think beyond progress, thereby radically reassessing the fundamental values of modernism – not least its relationship to technology and science.

Then again, there’s a risk that this cultural mood leads to a reasoning error. Yes, the plot we see play out is familiar, and we’ll continue to not believe our eyes when we watch as empires fall and geopolitical maps are redrawn. Ultimately, however, that story is disconnected from experimentalism as idea and practice. Even within great powers in decline, it is possible to choose adventure over routine, follow one’s free will, and build a road into the future, wherever it may lead.

This article was first published in Swedish journal Glänta 3-4/2026.