Placebo: An Art of Politics
Article published in the collective work « Dialectique et création, l’art comme fait politique », éditions L’Harmattan, juin 2024, under the direction of Xavier Lambert, Emeritus Professor at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès.
On April 21, 2020, I spontaneously and almost without prior reflection published a call on the MyOwnDocumenta platform to create a new political party called “the Placebo Party.” Presenting itself as the party of “scientific democracy,” the Placebo Party then published its first political proposals on social media with the hashtag #Placebo2022 in reference to the upcoming French presidential election.
CALL of APRIL 21, 2020
The Placebo Party is both a new political party and a participative art and science initiative born in the context of COVID-19. Our project is that in the future all political and economic measures, as well as the public figures proposing them, be evaluated (when possible in a randomized and double-blind manner) against our control group offering placebo treatments and representatives.
“Vote for us. We only offer placebos.”
Of course, it’s not because the activists and elected officials of our party propose nothing but placebos that they won’t have effects, especially since these placebos could allow for measuring the potential benefits of supposedly active policies (this can happen) or their toxicity (as is unfortunately often the case).
It goes without saying that the Placebo Party is anything but resigned, immobile, and fatalistic. Indeed, in medical terms, what would we do without placebos? They are what actually cure most diseases! Who knows, maybe in politics too?
The political placebos proposed by our party call upon all the resources of the social body to heal itself. Everyone is involved and indispensable. No one is left out. This is already the beginning of a healing!
This call, which was widely relayed on social media, attracted the attention of a wide variety of people, including artists, scientists, and activists, who joined the initiative, some of whom contributed to this article (*). Beyond the initial formulation of this political party project, which may resemble DataDada, everyone understood that the Placebo Party raises crucial questions. It is, in essence, about ensuring that all political measures in all areas of public life benefit from the same level of proof as medical treatments. And much more.
(*) Corinne Dangas, Marc de Verneuil, Michel Filippi, Philippe de Tilbourg.
Informally, discussions took place to explore the context, motivations, and paradoxes of such a proposal. It involves questioning its artistic, scientific, and political nature, as well as its potential for action in these three areas. This article attempts to summarize the state of these debates and research.
Evidence-Based Medicine
The call of the Placebo Party came at the beginning of the first lockdown related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, in the media, there was a lot of discussion about the placebo effect.
A placebo (from Latin placebō: “I shall please”) is a therapeutic method that has no inherent or specific effectiveness but acts on the patient through psychological and physiological mechanisms.
Less discussed was its counterpart: the nocebo effect.
The nocebo effect (from Latin nocebō: “I will harm”) is a term introduced in 1961 by Walter Kennedy. The psychological or physiological effect associated with the intake of an inert substance is not always beneficial (placebo effect). It can also be harmful to the individual. This is referred to as the nocebo effect.
Placebo and nocebo are essential concepts in evidence-based medicine(*). A section of scientists, often presented as the majority, considers the scientific method advocated by this type of medicine as the only one capable of evaluating therapeutics. According to them, every new treatment must prove its effectiveness in a randomized, double-blind clinical trial against a placebo, during which, by definition, neither doctors nor patients should know whether the substance taken contains an active ingredient or not. Other scientists, presented as a minority, have deemed this method unethical in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic. According to them, it is not acceptable not to treat people in the control group (who therefore only benefit from a placebo). This position was notably defended in China.
The term Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) was introduced into the medical literature in an article published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 1992 titled: Evidence-Based Medicine. A new approach to teaching the practice of medicine.
The dilemma can be summarized as follows: according to evidence-based medicine, only therapies whose efficacy has been proven in a RCT or even several, subsequently scrutinized in retrospective studies to obtain the highest possible level of proof, should be prescribed. Undoubtedly, this method is considered the only solid bulwark against false treatments and charlatanism. However, in an emergency facing a disease for which there is no proven treatment, this can lead to not treating and thus depriving oneself of the potentially powerful placebo effect of a hypothetical treatment. On the other hand, according to healing medicine, the goal is to relieve as best as possible, which can lead in these same emergency conditions to optimize the placebo effect of treatments that, despite not having proven any effectiveness, are reputed to be completely harmless as long as they are administered with caution.
Indeed, everyone could observe that the aforementioned dilemma turned into a real information war between proponents of each approach. The hypothetical treatment, to name it, was hydroxychloroquine. It should be noted that proponents of evidence-based medicine, as well as those of healing medicine, only publicly argued that this substance could have the virtues of a placebo. They simply maintained, vehemently, that it was ineffective or even dangerous for the former, or effective and perfectly harmless for the latter.
The still nascent Placebo Party took care not to align with any faction. We only tried to point out that it might be wise to test supposed active hydroxychloroquine against supposed inactive hydroxychloroquine, that is, duly identified by both patients and doctors as a placebo. Thus, all people enrolled in the study received the same treatment, which in theory could reduce the ethical reluctance of proponents of healing medicine and could be seen by proponents of evidence-based medicine as conditions close to the clinical trials they desire. Neither of the two camps took our proposal into account.
The battle over treatments pales in comparison to the one provoked and still ongoing regarding non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), namely the political measures taken by governments to curb the epidemic. Due to the inability to conduct RCTs for such interventions, evidence-based medicine is still searching for benchmarks. Currently, the field is dominated by predictive epidemiological models, whose relevance is uncertain and many of which have proved to be far from reality. Governments have been reduced to believing in one or another faction and conforming to their predictions. Their multiple shifts in stance, which need no reminding, show how fragile institutional positions have been and how they have contributed to discrediting all forms of political action, not just in times of crisis.
Let’s talk about lockdown measures. Depending on the scientific factions they listened to, governments applied these measures in extremely varied ways, from the most authoritarian to the most lenient, or even almost not implementing lockdowns at all, as was the case in Sweden. In retrospect, statistical studies conducted by renowned scientists have established correlations, in the absence of cause-and-effect relationships, between lockdown measures and the containment of the epidemic, while others, equally prestigious, have found no such correlations, or even that lockdowns could be counterproductive in some cases. Eventually, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control tacitly acknowledged that “the available evidence does not show that stay-at-home measures are more effective than other measures”. And regarding other measures, it does not provide evidence either.
In contrast, everyone agreed to anticipate and observe the deleterious secondary effects on the economy, mental health, and social peace of non-pharmaceutical interventions in general, and particularly of lockdowns and curfews. The anticipation of the economic impact of lockdowns notably justified the injection of trillions into the market by central banks of developed countries to prevent a possible collapse.
Regarding the last point, social peace: in October 2020, while curfew measures imposed in France and Europe had triggered a wave of riots and arson, the Placebo Party, still in the infancy of its art, proposed the concept of a universal curfew (CFU) as a placebo for the classic curfew (CFC). It simply involves forming a control group by recruiting people who accept a placebo treatment, namely wearing a blanket resistant to high temperatures so that they can use it to extinguish a fire if necessary.
Obviously, the CFU placebo is of no use in fighting the epidemic. However, it can be assumed that it has no social toxicity. It could even effectively combat the fires ignited in response to the CFC. In short, the CFU extinguishes fires while the CFC, although not its intended purpose, ignites them outright. Looking back, and extending slightly the observation of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control mentioned above, we can admit that both CFU and CFC are completely ineffective against the epidemic, but the former is devoid of side effects unlike the latter. It seems, therefore, that in this particular case, the placebo is superior to the supposed treatment. This has not failed to encourage the Placebo Party to continue its approach.
Evidence-Based Policy
Members of the Placebo Party are not the only ones to observe that, unlike medical therapies for which a high level of proof is required regarding their efficacy and non-toxicity, the demand for similar evidence in non-pharmaceutical interventions is very limited. This observation is not limited to political interventions in times of pandemic, such as the monetary policy of central banks based not on evidence but on economic beliefs. It concerns all aspects of policies carried out in “normal” times, which should aim not just to “please” (placebo) but to effectively address the problems they are supposed to solve and, above all, to avoid “harming” (nocebo).
In the United States in 2016, under the Obama presidency, a Commission on Evidence-Based Policy Making(*) was established. This Commission, still active today, aims to promote data accessibility and its responsible use, notably by creating data managers, evaluation agents, and statistics officers in federal government agencies. In a context where policies are increasingly implemented by algorithms, the notion of data has extended to computer programs themselves. Thus, a recent bill inspired by the same American Commission intends to require administrations to evaluate algorithms to eliminate biases before they can be used. Similarly, the European Commission is currently designing a law on artificial intelligence that goes in the same direction.
(*) Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission Act (PL 114–140).
From the perspective of the Placebo Party, these institutional attempts to establish evidence-based policy are far from sufficient.
The first objection concerns practical realism. It is noted that the scope of these institutional attempts is limited to governmental spheres and does not touch or barely affects the majority of algorithms developed and implemented by private actors, especially by the internet giants commonly known as GAFAM, as well as by all industries producing artifacts impacting humans. For example, an autonomous car is a kind of algorithm that largely conditions behaviors. Only China, which has recently taken control of its internet giants, the BATX, and many other industries, especially financial ones, incorporating them all into its Social Credit policy, escapes to a certain extent our first objection but not the second.
The second objection concerns theoretical points that are rarely considered18.
All attempts at “algorithmic governance” confront what is called the “measurement paradox.” Since the late 19th century, it has been known that the result of a measurement, even in the geometric domain and even more so in the psychological, sociological, and political domains, is very sensitive to the method of measurement. Thus, in many cases, we only measure the biases of our methods and measuring instruments. This is known as the “observer effect”(*).
(*) Massimiliano Sassoli de Bianchi (2018). Observer Effect. In: The SAGE encyclopedia of educational research, measurement, and evaluation. Edited by: Bruce B. Frey, pp. 1172–1174, SAGE Publications.
The measurement paradox and the observer effect pose a real challenge when it comes to measuring a human phenomenon. Evidence-based medicine attempts to meet this challenge at the cost of a plethora of precautions, without always succeeding. This is far from the case with evidence-based politics. Indeed, the challenge is not technical or financial, but conceptual. There is even a fear that the mass of data (big data) and the computational means mobilized by evidence-based politics to measure and predict human behavior, no matter how significant, may not be able to overcome this conceptual barrier, or may even tend to increase it.
Proof or legitimacy?
When a political body attempts to measure or control the real city, it acts on its “structural couplings”(*). In other words, it creates or modifies certain “artificial organs” through which individuals are coupled to each other and to their environment (by increasing the price of gasoline, by limiting speed, by imposing the wearing a mask, one day perhaps by banning human driving in favor of autonomous cars, by decreeing a tax or a CO2 credit, or by imposing a new cryptographic currency, etc.). The artificial organs in question are artifacts; more generally networks, most often asymmetrical. These organs select human behaviors and are themselves drawn into a cybernetic loop where they are subject to complex mechanisms of selection and evolution.
(*)There are three types of structural couplings: 1) between the individual and his environment; 2) between the individual and himself through his mental representations: 3) between individuals within society.
Cf. Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana (1987). Tree of knowledge. Shambhala, Boston & London. P.180–193.
This conception of political action as an alteration of structural couplings raises the question of the regime of proof that is applicable to it. The most common answers are the absence of bias a priori , or the effectiveness assumed and observed a posteriori . Often the non-toxicity and side effects are overlooked. For our part, we propose that the proof of a political action must relate to its “legitimacy”, not the legitimacy that the institution gives a priori to political actors and their decisions, but to a form of legitimacy emerging from networks called “anoptic legitimacy” (*).
“Anoptic legitimacy attests to the absence of noloops(**), that is to say the absence of interference from all forms of structural coupling. It serves to ensure the mutability of the network of which we are part, in other words its capacity to adapt to its environment. ” [ ANOPTIKON ]
(*) The term “anoptic” (non-optical) designates a type of perspective specific to networks and their artifacts, analogous to the spatial (optical) perspective invented during the Renaissance. Just as we have theorized the legitimate construction of optical perspective (on a geometric basis), we can imagine a legitimate construction of anoptic perspective (on a cognitive basis).
(**) Term invented by Florence Meichel (2016). Noloops and 7th sense. Learning networks .
Thus, in our opinion, the legitimacy of political action acting on structural couplings manifested on various networks can be tested according to three legitimacy criteria (A, AB, ABC). These cognitive criteria are formulated as questions that it is up to each person to answer:
A : Does any agent A have the real right to access the network if he requests it? Can A leave the network freely?
AB : Is any agent B (present or future, including agents who design, manage and develop the network) treated as A?
ABC : If three agents A, B and C (three being the start of a multitude) belong to a network which meets the first two criteria, do they participate in the same “being in a network”? In other words, do they constitute peers? Are they able to recognize each other, trust each other, respect each other, and build common sense?
Artistic and political strategy
In short, the Placebo party here lays the theoretical foundations for political action consisting of selecting the networks and artifacts through which politics manifests itself, rather than allowing itself to be selected by them. It is about creating the conditions so that everyone is in a position to favor “legitimate perspectives” and reject others. This action opposes the idea commonly conveyed in political circles according to which “there is no alternative” . It is also opposed to instrumental rationality(*) which wants hammers to hit everything that looks like a nail until general exhaustion.
(*) “I call it the law of the instrument, and it can be formulated as follows: Give a little boy a hammer, and he will judge that everything he comes across should be hit.” Abraham Kaplan (1964). The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co. p. 28.
The strategy we propose is a kind of hack (or critical diversion) of the social cybernetic loop. It first consists of testing the actions of governments and industries on the structural couplings between individuals, society and the environment. We propose to compare these actions to political placebos without active ingredients on the problems supposedly targeted by said actions.
These political placebos first show that there is the possibility of not acting, which may eventually prove more beneficial and less toxic than a supposedly active policy.
Political placebos then question individuals about the nature of the couplings they maintain, with each other, with society and with the environment. How are these couplings deficient and would require political action to modify them? Why do we want, or not, these actions, regardless of any proof of their effectiveness and non-toxicity?
Finally, policy placebos are likely to allow individuals to evaluate structural couplings between governments and industries that are often opaque or even obscure. This is particularly the case in matters of tax policy, an area where States compete with each other to offer the most lenient conditions to multinationals, which leads them to tolerate, or even maintain, tax havens and to protect the people who benefit from it. This is especially the case in terms of monetary creation in which the States-Industries couple, including private banks, have monopolized the monopoly.
Generally speaking, the couplings between governments and industries are deployed according to networks which often have nothing legitimate in the anoptical sense. In particular in these networks, the AB criterion is not respected (A is not treated like B). This is what the Placebo party intends to help highlight, and perhaps transform.
In practice, when a political action project manifests itself publicly, or continues or is implemented furtively, the Placebo party intends to propose a suitable political placebo capable of evaluating it.
The evaluation is all the easier and quicker as the political measures to be tested turn out to be themselves “false” political placebos, that is to say, pure political communication measures intended to “please” ( placebo ) to this or that electorate or pressure group, and not including any active principle against the supposed problem, although claiming the opposite. Very often, these “false” political placebos are not exempt from toxicity, if only because, being calibrated to please some (those demanding authoritarian measures), they displease others, which has the effect ( nocebo ) to gang up one section of the population against another.
The political placebos proposed by our party are, on the contrary, “real” placebos, in the sense that it clearly appears that they do not contain any active ingredient. This is a point which distinguishes them from medical placebos which see their usefulness reduced to nothing ( or almost ) when they are presented as such to patients. Paradoxically, political placebos could show a certain effectiveness when they are seen as such by citizens.
Political placebos
Below we offer some examples taken from the vast array of political placebos published between April 2020 and September 2021. Not all of them were invented by party members. Depending on the case, their authors can be artists recognized in the contemporary art system, activists, trade unionists, ordinary citizens, or anonymous authors who have published on the internet, whose ideas the Placebo party has taken up and/or images.
Given the short history of the Placebo party, it seems too early to propose a typology of political placebos. Let’s say that we consider them as part of the field of art in the broad sense, but note that they immediately disrupt the boundaries between major art (that which is collected and exhibited in museums and galleries) and arts minors (the art that everyone is capable of producing and which is generally despised).
Political placebos are “artifacts”, “artificial organs”, often deriving from existing artefacts and organs by change of functions in the manner of the HCQP, CFU and NUDGE readymades mentioned above. But this change in functions alone is not sufficient to characterize them. There is also an intentional dimension to the art of political placebos.
Indeed, the unintentional change of functions of an organ is a common phenomenon called “exaptation”(*). For example, in the winter of 2018, the artificial organ “yellow vest” suddenly changed its function. It went from the status of a “security instrument” to that of a “sign of revolt”. The imagination has radically transformed, so much so that yellow vests will never again be seen as before. This episode most certainly marks a stage of intersubjective time, but this exaptation was undoubtedly not the fruit of an intention and a decision. She was spontaneous. Likewise, during the summer of 2020, when many people began, without prior intention, to wear their mask, not on the face, but on the neck, the mask found a new function to fight against an imaginary illness which we could call “couvid”.
(*) The concept of exaptation was initially developed by paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba in 1982. “In the theory of evolution, exaptation is an opportunistic selective adaptation, favoring traits that are useful to a new function, for which they had not initially been selected. For example, theropod feathers, initially selected because they ensured their thermoregulation, allowed adaptation to flight. Bipedalism or speech would also be exaptations.” (Wikipedia). The concept therefore initially relates to biology and evolution but it is also used by several authors to characterize phenomena relating to culture and technology.
Although unintentional exaptations often have a strong political dimension, we do not consider them political placebos. Indeed, spontaneous exaptations such as the yellow vests can challenge political power but they do not measure it in a quasi-scientific way as is the intention of political placebos.
A similar distinction can be made about contemporary art. Indeed, although it sometimes produces intentional exaptations (such as the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude) which give the measure of political power, these rarely challenge it on its own ground by showing its alternatives as is the case. case of political placebos.
Thus, before looking at a few examples, we could conclude this first attempt to theorize political placebos by saying that they offer an art of (dis)measurement of power, both of art and of politics.
Fans for the climate (May 2020)
The Placebo party, noting the growing agitation relating to climate change and the inability of the political class to propose relevant treatments of these issues, decided to promote the making of climate fans that school children are invited to make. make and decorate according to their tastes.
These ranges are obviously policy placebos that do not directly address any aspect of climate change. However, climate fans could have an indirect effect as placebos allowing everyone to measure the possible effectiveness or toxicity of all other policy measures. Furthermore, these fans, the making and use of which are the result of simple, economical and delicate individual gestures, symbolically place the issue of climate change in everyone’s hands. Thus, they could inspire multiple cultural transformations and practices of which each can be both the source and the actor, and which all together could prove relevant with regard to climate change.
Receipt for non-identity check (March 2021)
The Placebo party did not invent the non-identity check receipt but willingly integrates it into its array of placebos. Our data scientists put their skills at the service of the police in order to carry out a solid study on the comparative effectiveness of non-control receipts and control receipts according to criteria of public order, social cohesion and good humor.
Nuclear Puzzle (December 2020)
The Placebo party is also interested in defense policy. Our team of strategists proposes to evaluate the “nuclear aircraft carrier” treatment against a nuclear aircraft carrier placebo: a nuclear puzzle made up of special steel pieces assembled at microns and welded under a controlled atmosphere, all the size of an aircraft carrier.
The evaluation criteria are listed in this press article . As a first approximation, the placebo equals the treatment on the following points:
The placebo can pleasantly occupy the defense councils (the generals can practice putting together the puzzle on a scale model).
The placebo can give work to specialized welders whose know-how is valuable.
In addition, the placebo appears to be superior to the treatment on the following points:
The placebo is immune to hypersonic missiles that aircraft carriers cannot withstand and which render them obsolete before they are even built.
It is guaranteed that the placebo will never cause nuclear pollution at sea.
Placebosis (April 2021)
“I just joined, and suddenly I felt better.”
(A new member of the Placebo party)
After extensive research, the Placebo party launches what will perhaps remain as its ultimate placebo, a new disease: Placebosis. Placebose can only be cured with the help of party placebos (100% effective according to our first tests on rabbits).
How do you know if you have placebo?
If you don’t wear a banana on your head, you have placebosis.
Is placebo a serious illness?
Yes, having placebo shows that you do not respect the authority of the party asking you to wear a banana on your head and that you are encouraging others to refuse it as well. This is extremely serious.
The only proven treatment against placebo tested on a rabbit. Political Placebo, Placebo 2022. Source: Stuff on my rabbit (DR).
How to cure placebosis?
The only real treatment is to wear a banana on your head. Failing that, our research teams are studying the effectiveness of other placebos, more sophisticated, but also more expensive.
What to do in the event of a placebo epidemic?
The party reserves the possibility of mobilizing the police forces to impose on everyone the only proven protection measure, namely the wearing of the banana.
A possible misunderstanding should be avoided. Placebosis has only a distant relationship with Covid-19. Indeed, placebosis belongs to a branch of emerging pathologies, called “artifact” pathologies, described in general terms as coming from the mimetic effects linked to the irruption of any technical artifact into the political and social field.
For example, we may fear that “ implantosis ” will develop in the future caused by the emergence of Neuralink implants currently being tested on monkeys . In the category of “artifact” diseases, our research teams are carefully examining the possible emergence of several forms of “ eneftoses ” linked to the emergence of NFTs (Non Fungible Token) in the fields of art and crypto. -currencies , or even a variety of “ crisprtoses ”, all the more dangerous because their name is unpronounceable, driven by CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive technology .
In the case of Covid-19, the artifacts (masks, gel, tracing, vaccines, etc.) do not precede the disease as is the case in “artifact” diseases. Nevertheless, the mimetic effects of said artifacts are similar, so much so that Covid-19 tends to double as an imaginary social disease that we could call Covid-1984.
It is to the treatment of this type of illness that the Placebo party intends to contribute in the future.
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Declaration of absence of conflicts of interest
The authors of this article declare that they have no conflict of interest incompatible with the objectives of the Placebo party. In particular, we have no links with existing political parties or unions nor with the producers of the political placebos that we advocate, such as banana importers, manufacturers of fire-resistant blankets, manufacturers of urinals, welders specializing in nuclear or sellers of colored pencils, etc.
