The Pre-Dating Test

What it is

The test has three steps. Take a claim of the form "this technology is making people behave in this way". Look for a description of that behaviour written before the technology existed. Then ask how closely the old description fits the new behaviour. A close fit is evidence that the condition was already there.

Timandra Harkness applies it to social media and a passage from Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, published in 1979. Lasch wrote that the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem and cannot live without an admiring audience. Harkness reacts in her own voice: "This sounds so much like today's world of social media that I flip back to check the original publication date: 1979." Her conclusion is that today's critics are reading a 1979 book onto social media and finding that it fits, and that the fit means the condition came before the medium.

The test is a sharper relative of the argument from recurrence. The lineage collected under Techno-Panic establishes that alarms about new media come back, which tells a reader how carefully to weigh a new alarm. The Pre-Dating Test offers something closer to a datum: a particular dated text, written before the thing it appears to describe, that fits. One is a prior about a genre. The other is evidence about a case.

It also sits comfortably beside the argument of Harkness's wider book. She holds that the demand for recognition came first, as old social structures dissolved, and that personalising technology is profitable because it supplies a cheap and constant form of that recognition. A description of an audience-dependent self written in 1979 is what that thesis would predict.

The vault credits Harkness with the application to Lasch, not with the underlying pattern of inference, which is older and not hers. For that reason the attribution is recorded with medium confidence.

In effect

In the book: Lasch, 1979

The central case is the one above, at page 199 of Harkness's book. Her account is candid about the order of events. The fit startled her first, and she checked the publication date second, which is the honest version of the move: the surprise preceded the argument. The text is not in dispute. The inference drawn from it is.

In the field: the museum that cut against the premise

The same chapter contains a visit to the Youseum in Amsterdam, a museum built for taking selfies. Harkness went expecting narcissism. She found a social, family-oriented and self-aware place. The field observation undercut the premise the test had been defending: whatever the 1979 description predicted, the behaviour in front of her did not look like it. She leaves both in the chapter. She closes it on Rembrandt's self-portraits and asks what separates a selfie from a self-portrait, answering that the difference lies in the artist's concentrated looking. That is a judgement about value, not a result the test produces.

In commerce: the market answering a prior demand

The commercial form of the argument concerns personalising technology. If the hunger for recognition existed first, then a feed that supplies constant, measurable affirmation is a product meeting a demand, not a machine that manufactured one. Harkness argues this from her wider thesis, which the vault's audit rates honest but untested. The test supports the thesis without proving it, because a close fit between a 1979 description and a present behaviour shows only that the condition predates the platform.

What it does not say

The test can show that a technology is not necessary for a behaviour, since the behaviour could be described without it. It cannot show that the technology does not amplify, accelerate or industrialise the behaviour, and that is almost always what the opposing argument claims. Lasch describing an audience-dependent self in 1979 is compatible with a platform making that self cheaper to be and harder to escape. Treating the test as a refutation makes the mirror-image mistake of the panic it answers.

It depends on the fit being read fairly, and the reader doing the reading usually holds a position already. A description general enough to fit anything will fit here as well, and that is the standing objection to the move.

The evidence status is not-a-research-claim. It is a reasoning frame, and no study has tested whether it works. Harkness herself accepts, at page 243 of her book, that profiling systems may nudge people towards becoming more like the group they are placed in. That is technology shaping identity, the direction her thesis treats as secondary, and she leaves the tension unresolved.

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