Fantastic article, journalism, research, and i love how you always tie it full circle into the bigger picture. Showing us the the parts, the sum of the parts and how they are all similar in their wants/needs/agenda but going at it different ways based upon their chess piece and location on the board. Contiue the great work, please look to spread your materials to school curriculumns
Excellent article. I think this stems from the Enlightenment view of ourselves as 'buffered selves', ie that we have no connection with the world around us, except we are now a collection of 'buffered selves', who don't even talk to the different bits of ourselves, we are a worker at work, a consumer at home, a voter come the election. This means that we can't negotiate the world as an integrated unit. I also think that the Master/slave dynamic is at play here as well, I've written a recent piece on my SS about how I believe that we are both master and slave at the same time in neoliberal societies.
Superb article. Brings together a lot of understanding you’ve already given me and makes a lot of sense. Very shareable by virtue of being non-judgemental too :) great stuff keep at it!
A total tangent: Please add Bluesky to your list of suggested platforms for sharing your (wonderful!) articles. Bluesky membership has exploded within recent weeks, with many individuals and organizations abandoning the increasingly toxic X. 😎✌️
For my money, Bluesky's a bit of a bait-and-switch.
X has become so toxic for left-wingers, so now they're offering Bluesky as the new container to head to (also reinforcing the toxic polarisation of our societal dialogue, by having a 'left-wing place' and a 'right-wing place').
Yet there's no reason to believe that its owner/investors — now prominently including cryptocurrency bros — will resist the built-in temptation to meddle and/or cash in as it becomes more popular. Indeed, here's Cory Doctorow's outstanding explanation of why that's inevitable:
Bluesky claims to be federated/decentralised but, without getting into all the detail, it isn't really. It reminds me very much of "ooh, fairtrade/organic/whatever is a word that means something to people now, what's the minimum we can do to claim that label?".
So I'd highly recommend skipping that next investment/disappointment and heading straight to Mastodon, which truly has no centralised owner, can't be bought, and where if those hosting you implement something that you don't like, you can just leave and take your followers/content with you to Mastodon being run by someone else.
It's what the internet originally promised to be, it's inexorably growing as more and people come to understand the corporate bait-and-switch, and honestly, it's damn fun!
I'm sorry to see so many people pouring their time and beautiful conversations into Bluesky, when it seems they're just going to get screwed again, like with X. And it's wonderful to instead be giving my energies to a platform built on design decisions/values I can actually get behind!
I actually know Jay Graber who runs Bluesky, and she's always had pretty radical politics, so I'm kinda open to it through personally knowing her, but of course the Jack Dorsey/crypto connection is always potentially problematic
I'm not sure it's necessarily a problem to have separated spheres of debate - I mean, it kind of used to be like this with old newspapers that had their political angle - sometimes it's fine to just speak to a more niche audience. I suppose the issue though is that Bluesky might be in direct competition with Mastodon - i.e. if Bluesky wasn't there people might abandon X for Mastodon, which means there might be a bit of a zero-sum dynamic where gains for Bluesky = losses for Mastodon. I don't really know what the resolution to this is, but worth a deeper discussion!
Note that the central thrust of my comment and that Cory Doctorow piece I linked to is that it's NOT about doubting Graber's politics.
Indeed, Doctorow writes:
"I appreciate that the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, has evinced her sincere intention never to enshittify Bluesky and I believe she is totally sincere.
But here's the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were *all* started by people who swore they'd never sell out. I *know* those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered them friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users."
The point that he explores so insightfully is that they're nonetheless inescapably exposed to exactly the kind of inner civil war that your piece is about, in a way that is neatly removed by Mastodon's federated, decentralised structure.
AND, relatedly, that a system where users can leave without pain is a system whose *owners* have high switching costs and whose *users* have none.
On Mastodon, a server owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will quickly lose *a lot* of users; not just those users who care about these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the high costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit swift and devastating pain upon you.
I'd be very interested to hear what Graber makes of Doctorow's piece, if it feels appropriate to send it on!
I think that unfortunately workers today have to also invest (like a 401k) if they want to survive in their retirement years. Their are no pensions hardly today, so workers cannot just be workers, they have to be investors too. So yes it is a contradiction of interests, but in a lot of ways we are forced to have to be this way because as workers we have to survive and being just a worker is just not enough.
I am a socialist at heart, the problem i see is with human nature. Human nature is greedy and i think that we cannot escape the master/slave paradigm. I think if capitalism were to die tommorrow we would still have people on top and people on the bottom.
I think it is just part of the human condition. I am glad that i am alive now where workers at least have it better then even the most recent past with unsafe work conditions and 12 hour days.
I try to just be grateful for living in this time which is better then workers had it in the past.
A few comments: "Unlike a normal war, however, the sides are all within ourselves, so that latter scenario might involve the destruction of some element of yourself. " Really? Pretty much every account of war since the Iliad holds otherwise.
I don't think you should have mentioned it, because it would have lost you readers, but this dream of the integrated self is a, maybe the, problem of modern life. Although I don't think it's exclusively modern. At any rate, Marx's 1848 ms is right on point here.
Third, and speaking of Marx, and no doubt it's the pernicious influence of anglophone anthro, there's this kind of breathless quality, kind of a ghost of unavailable idealized, well, "Marx" by gesture? Meh. As you begin, that structure of thought collapsed, largely for very good reasons -- none of its conceptual apparatus survives. Toronto philosopher Heath did a lovely summary of how this went down in academic philosophy. So this comes off as a kind of rhetorical, academic, tic.
As you know, I've done a lot of "critical" political economy. The danger is being read as a Marxist, which gets zero traction outside of the academy, but it is what people think they are hearing, and so it is what they in fact hear. Which goes far to explain why critical thought has done so badly, politically and socially -- it's imprisoned by its own ideas. Honoring those ideas through tone does not help what I take to be your cause much.
All of which is a bit heavy handed. You're doing a fantastic job explaining this stuff. I look forward to reading more. Kudos.
I'm not in the academic world so much, so I'm not sure I fully understand everything you're getting at, but would be interested to know about this summary of Heath you mention...
> I don't think you should have mentioned it, because it would have lost you readers, but this dream of the integrated self is a, maybe the, problem of modern life.
When you say this about integration do you mean?
1. This is a goal that nobody has accomplished and it is foolish to try, because it has never and will never happen, especially in modern life.
or
2. This is a goal that nobody has accomplished, which is one of the main struggles that defines modern life, but one should keep aspiring to it?
Rajeev, I do think some folks are fairly integrated, or at least at peace with their contradictions, but it’s very difficult for reasons Brett suggests. So I wouldn’t say “nobody” without qualification. I meant your #2 (as did Marx, roughly speaking). Put slighly differently, this is the problem of alienation and the longing for authenticity that haunts monetary societies like ours, and there is a long tradition of critical thinking, including Marx, that swirls around this problem. I discuss this at length in my book City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent.
This is literally the first time I’ve read an analysis of this. As a low-paid working class person, I feel tremendous discomfort about owning stock/mutual fund shares that I know damned well are involved in screwing me over but I can’t see what alternative I have.
Contradictions abound! Exposing the tensions that exist within ourselves and how we must compartmentalise our inner conflicts in order to function, or make peace is a compelling take. Do you see these as concessions?
I like how you put this alongside the consumer that is divorced (or must divorce themselves) from the "underlying origins & contexts" of our choices as we confront often intangible interconnections that exist within our system. Scarily precise, to my experience at least.
You focus on how people are fighting within themselves, but do touch on the fact we are also pitted against one another as a function of the competitive demands within capitalism. This is the civil war we're fighting while embroiled in a much broader struggle...!
It reminded me of a piece by Peter Joseph that touches on the conditioning capitalist 'competition' invokes, and how it is both an inefficient and destructive force that could (and should) be overcome. See here if you're interested https://substack.com/home/post/p-149986086
This is a follow up to my earlier comment. I said I wanted time to digest this essay and, as often happens, it was a different topic, diversity (class and race) and multiculturalism in the British media that alerted me to the strength of your argument concerning the atomisation of labour. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/dec/09/british-tv-industry-must-diversify-to-survive-lisa-nandy-warns. I was only telling my Gen Z Anglo-French daughter the other day that her favourite British streaming comedy chat show leaves me cold since "I have class built into my DNA". Yet I used the US example--where class is excluded from public discourse (workers for working class, business for capitalists)-- to dispute your essay based on what was once, but is no longer the most class-conscious country in the world, our own (or your adopted one; I have a second home in Durban).
As an upwardly mobile Cambridge scholarship boy and expat, I am much more aware of my lifelong struggle with cultural aspects of class than the current British labour market. Hence this particular trigger. But you were saying that the neoliberal atomisation of class consciousness promotes a compartmentalisation of personal identity that makes the subjectivity of each of us the site of an inner civil war that we can't figure out how to fight.
I find it interesting that class politics in Britain peaked in the 1870s and after (formation of the Labour party etc) when the second reform act conferred active citizenship on significant parts of the working class. I grew up in what the French call les trente (30 years) glorieuses after the second world war when social democracy, socialism and communism united the world economy through national programs of greater citizen equality. Instead of fragmented capitalist business cycles, developmental states everywhere were doing the same thing and the developmental states everywhere--Nixon said "we are all Keynesians now" in 1972-- generated a record world boom that has never been seen before or since. The insidious promotion of identity politics over the postwar needs of citizens who had suffered what Churchill called "the second thirty years war" of 1914-45 contrasts with Gen Z knowing of little else when faced with the worst prospects of any western generation in living memory.
I have made a pdf of this essay in political education and put in on my desktop with only a few others that I can read when I get a break. There is so much here, it will take time to discover what I think. Communication means thought passing from one mind into another. I use 'translation' for this. Humanity has few universal heroic qualities, but one of them is the belief that what I say or write is substantially absorbed by the listener/reader, whereas we are ships passing in the night and can take from a statement only what connects with what is already in our memory. Much of that is incoherent, but sometimes an interaction produces a moment of revelation that helps us to objectify and share it with others in speech or writing.
I am struck by the relative absence of money as a dynamic concept here. I am writing a book on Marcel Mauss and for him, the economy does not consist of production, distribution and consumption, but of production, consumption and money. I wonder if the classification of social actors you have provided can help us understand our moment of history. For what money has become today is above all debt. The plutocracy and the state apparatus it has bought has so much of it that they can postpone the liquidation of the first global debt crisis indefinitely. The gap between middle and working classes has been obliterated. The vast majority of Americans have no savings and live from one month to the next, while having to borrow more. This enriches the creditor class who put their money into financial asset markets that have broken all records for unsustainability, yet the crash continues to be deferred.
You have provided so much to think with, Brett. I want to find out how much of it I can absorb for my own use and that will take time.
I very much enjoyed this anatomy -- all that's missing is the unfortunate fact that politicians are functionally owned by the donor class which is composed primarily of shareholders and upper level managers thus ensuring that the rules are rigged to ruthlessly exploit workers and rip off consumers just under the threshold which would lead to systemic collapse.
Fantastic article, journalism, research, and i love how you always tie it full circle into the bigger picture. Showing us the the parts, the sum of the parts and how they are all similar in their wants/needs/agenda but going at it different ways based upon their chess piece and location on the board. Contiue the great work, please look to spread your materials to school curriculumns
Excellent article. I think this stems from the Enlightenment view of ourselves as 'buffered selves', ie that we have no connection with the world around us, except we are now a collection of 'buffered selves', who don't even talk to the different bits of ourselves, we are a worker at work, a consumer at home, a voter come the election. This means that we can't negotiate the world as an integrated unit. I also think that the Master/slave dynamic is at play here as well, I've written a recent piece on my SS about how I believe that we are both master and slave at the same time in neoliberal societies.
Superb article. Brings together a lot of understanding you’ve already given me and makes a lot of sense. Very shareable by virtue of being non-judgemental too :) great stuff keep at it!
A total tangent: Please add Bluesky to your list of suggested platforms for sharing your (wonderful!) articles. Bluesky membership has exploded within recent weeks, with many individuals and organizations abandoning the increasingly toxic X. 😎✌️
Good point. Will do!
For my money, Bluesky's a bit of a bait-and-switch.
X has become so toxic for left-wingers, so now they're offering Bluesky as the new container to head to (also reinforcing the toxic polarisation of our societal dialogue, by having a 'left-wing place' and a 'right-wing place').
Yet there's no reason to believe that its owner/investors — now prominently including cryptocurrency bros — will resist the built-in temptation to meddle and/or cash in as it becomes more popular. Indeed, here's Cory Doctorow's outstanding explanation of why that's inevitable:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
Bluesky claims to be federated/decentralised but, without getting into all the detail, it isn't really. It reminds me very much of "ooh, fairtrade/organic/whatever is a word that means something to people now, what's the minimum we can do to claim that label?".
So I'd highly recommend skipping that next investment/disappointment and heading straight to Mastodon, which truly has no centralised owner, can't be bought, and where if those hosting you implement something that you don't like, you can just leave and take your followers/content with you to Mastodon being run by someone else.
It's what the internet originally promised to be, it's inexorably growing as more and people come to understand the corporate bait-and-switch, and honestly, it's damn fun!
I'm sorry to see so many people pouring their time and beautiful conversations into Bluesky, when it seems they're just going to get screwed again, like with X. And it's wonderful to instead be giving my energies to a platform built on design decisions/values I can actually get behind!
I actually know Jay Graber who runs Bluesky, and she's always had pretty radical politics, so I'm kinda open to it through personally knowing her, but of course the Jack Dorsey/crypto connection is always potentially problematic
I'm not sure it's necessarily a problem to have separated spheres of debate - I mean, it kind of used to be like this with old newspapers that had their political angle - sometimes it's fine to just speak to a more niche audience. I suppose the issue though is that Bluesky might be in direct competition with Mastodon - i.e. if Bluesky wasn't there people might abandon X for Mastodon, which means there might be a bit of a zero-sum dynamic where gains for Bluesky = losses for Mastodon. I don't really know what the resolution to this is, but worth a deeper discussion!
Note that the central thrust of my comment and that Cory Doctorow piece I linked to is that it's NOT about doubting Graber's politics.
Indeed, Doctorow writes:
"I appreciate that the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, has evinced her sincere intention never to enshittify Bluesky and I believe she is totally sincere.
But here's the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were *all* started by people who swore they'd never sell out. I *know* those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered them friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users."
The point that he explores so insightfully is that they're nonetheless inescapably exposed to exactly the kind of inner civil war that your piece is about, in a way that is neatly removed by Mastodon's federated, decentralised structure.
AND, relatedly, that a system where users can leave without pain is a system whose *owners* have high switching costs and whose *users* have none.
On Mastodon, a server owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will quickly lose *a lot* of users; not just those users who care about these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the high costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit swift and devastating pain upon you.
I'd be very interested to hear what Graber makes of Doctorow's piece, if it feels appropriate to send it on!
Fabulous simple explanation. I recognise much of this and it relates to my own research so has helped my thinking.
Thanks Nadine - glad it's useful for you!
I think that unfortunately workers today have to also invest (like a 401k) if they want to survive in their retirement years. Their are no pensions hardly today, so workers cannot just be workers, they have to be investors too. So yes it is a contradiction of interests, but in a lot of ways we are forced to have to be this way because as workers we have to survive and being just a worker is just not enough.
I am a socialist at heart, the problem i see is with human nature. Human nature is greedy and i think that we cannot escape the master/slave paradigm. I think if capitalism were to die tommorrow we would still have people on top and people on the bottom.
I think it is just part of the human condition. I am glad that i am alive now where workers at least have it better then even the most recent past with unsafe work conditions and 12 hour days.
I try to just be grateful for living in this time which is better then workers had it in the past.
Brett, well I really do like your stuff. Sometimes, tbh, it's a bit eerie to read.
The Heath is here, embedded in a discussion of left/right and the difficulty of political categories generally.
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidawestbrook/p/democratic-rock-or-republican-whirlpool-8da?r=13evep&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Really nicely done, Brett!
A few comments: "Unlike a normal war, however, the sides are all within ourselves, so that latter scenario might involve the destruction of some element of yourself. " Really? Pretty much every account of war since the Iliad holds otherwise.
I don't think you should have mentioned it, because it would have lost you readers, but this dream of the integrated self is a, maybe the, problem of modern life. Although I don't think it's exclusively modern. At any rate, Marx's 1848 ms is right on point here.
Third, and speaking of Marx, and no doubt it's the pernicious influence of anglophone anthro, there's this kind of breathless quality, kind of a ghost of unavailable idealized, well, "Marx" by gesture? Meh. As you begin, that structure of thought collapsed, largely for very good reasons -- none of its conceptual apparatus survives. Toronto philosopher Heath did a lovely summary of how this went down in academic philosophy. So this comes off as a kind of rhetorical, academic, tic.
As you know, I've done a lot of "critical" political economy. The danger is being read as a Marxist, which gets zero traction outside of the academy, but it is what people think they are hearing, and so it is what they in fact hear. Which goes far to explain why critical thought has done so badly, politically and socially -- it's imprisoned by its own ideas. Honoring those ideas through tone does not help what I take to be your cause much.
All of which is a bit heavy handed. You're doing a fantastic job explaining this stuff. I look forward to reading more. Kudos.
Thanks for the reflections, and glad you like it
I'm not in the academic world so much, so I'm not sure I fully understand everything you're getting at, but would be interested to know about this summary of Heath you mention...
> I don't think you should have mentioned it, because it would have lost you readers, but this dream of the integrated self is a, maybe the, problem of modern life.
When you say this about integration do you mean?
1. This is a goal that nobody has accomplished and it is foolish to try, because it has never and will never happen, especially in modern life.
or
2. This is a goal that nobody has accomplished, which is one of the main struggles that defines modern life, but one should keep aspiring to it?
Rajeev, I do think some folks are fairly integrated, or at least at peace with their contradictions, but it’s very difficult for reasons Brett suggests. So I wouldn’t say “nobody” without qualification. I meant your #2 (as did Marx, roughly speaking). Put slighly differently, this is the problem of alienation and the longing for authenticity that haunts monetary societies like ours, and there is a long tradition of critical thinking, including Marx, that swirls around this problem. I discuss this at length in my book City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent.
https://www.davidawestbrook.com/city-of-gold.html
This is literally the first time I’ve read an analysis of this. As a low-paid working class person, I feel tremendous discomfort about owning stock/mutual fund shares that I know damned well are involved in screwing me over but I can’t see what alternative I have.
Thank you, Brett.
Contradictions abound! Exposing the tensions that exist within ourselves and how we must compartmentalise our inner conflicts in order to function, or make peace is a compelling take. Do you see these as concessions?
I like how you put this alongside the consumer that is divorced (or must divorce themselves) from the "underlying origins & contexts" of our choices as we confront often intangible interconnections that exist within our system. Scarily precise, to my experience at least.
You focus on how people are fighting within themselves, but do touch on the fact we are also pitted against one another as a function of the competitive demands within capitalism. This is the civil war we're fighting while embroiled in a much broader struggle...!
It reminded me of a piece by Peter Joseph that touches on the conditioning capitalist 'competition' invokes, and how it is both an inefficient and destructive force that could (and should) be overcome. See here if you're interested https://substack.com/home/post/p-149986086
Waffle over. Apologies.
This is a follow up to my earlier comment. I said I wanted time to digest this essay and, as often happens, it was a different topic, diversity (class and race) and multiculturalism in the British media that alerted me to the strength of your argument concerning the atomisation of labour. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/dec/09/british-tv-industry-must-diversify-to-survive-lisa-nandy-warns. I was only telling my Gen Z Anglo-French daughter the other day that her favourite British streaming comedy chat show leaves me cold since "I have class built into my DNA". Yet I used the US example--where class is excluded from public discourse (workers for working class, business for capitalists)-- to dispute your essay based on what was once, but is no longer the most class-conscious country in the world, our own (or your adopted one; I have a second home in Durban).
As an upwardly mobile Cambridge scholarship boy and expat, I am much more aware of my lifelong struggle with cultural aspects of class than the current British labour market. Hence this particular trigger. But you were saying that the neoliberal atomisation of class consciousness promotes a compartmentalisation of personal identity that makes the subjectivity of each of us the site of an inner civil war that we can't figure out how to fight.
I find it interesting that class politics in Britain peaked in the 1870s and after (formation of the Labour party etc) when the second reform act conferred active citizenship on significant parts of the working class. I grew up in what the French call les trente (30 years) glorieuses after the second world war when social democracy, socialism and communism united the world economy through national programs of greater citizen equality. Instead of fragmented capitalist business cycles, developmental states everywhere were doing the same thing and the developmental states everywhere--Nixon said "we are all Keynesians now" in 1972-- generated a record world boom that has never been seen before or since. The insidious promotion of identity politics over the postwar needs of citizens who had suffered what Churchill called "the second thirty years war" of 1914-45 contrasts with Gen Z knowing of little else when faced with the worst prospects of any western generation in living memory.
I have made a pdf of this essay in political education and put in on my desktop with only a few others that I can read when I get a break. There is so much here, it will take time to discover what I think. Communication means thought passing from one mind into another. I use 'translation' for this. Humanity has few universal heroic qualities, but one of them is the belief that what I say or write is substantially absorbed by the listener/reader, whereas we are ships passing in the night and can take from a statement only what connects with what is already in our memory. Much of that is incoherent, but sometimes an interaction produces a moment of revelation that helps us to objectify and share it with others in speech or writing.
I am struck by the relative absence of money as a dynamic concept here. I am writing a book on Marcel Mauss and for him, the economy does not consist of production, distribution and consumption, but of production, consumption and money. I wonder if the classification of social actors you have provided can help us understand our moment of history. For what money has become today is above all debt. The plutocracy and the state apparatus it has bought has so much of it that they can postpone the liquidation of the first global debt crisis indefinitely. The gap between middle and working classes has been obliterated. The vast majority of Americans have no savings and live from one month to the next, while having to borrow more. This enriches the creditor class who put their money into financial asset markets that have broken all records for unsustainability, yet the crash continues to be deferred.
You have provided so much to think with, Brett. I want to find out how much of it I can absorb for my own use and that will take time.
I very much enjoyed this anatomy -- all that's missing is the unfortunate fact that politicians are functionally owned by the donor class which is composed primarily of shareholders and upper level managers thus ensuring that the rules are rigged to ruthlessly exploit workers and rip off consumers just under the threshold which would lead to systemic collapse.
Keep going! Give us the Numbers! Let us know how much the financial sector influence the cost of living, for example.. 💣
Finally a clear and simple Demistification of capitalism and financial-corporative big parassites!
Masterpiece!