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"I've not seen you since."
It was the mingling of great and trivial that could not be misunderstood.
He went on, "Yet we are so close."
She fell silent, leaning back into colours and shadows of the room: not in fulfillment, which could hardly be, but in voluptuous calm, at peace. Her hand was outstretched on the table, the sleeve pushed up. It was the first time he had seen her inner arm. She knew it might be the only such passage between them, ever. If the usual griefs were coming to her at last, so was this unprecedented perfection.
He said, "I am near thirty-four years of age, and live with too much vacancy." She saw his rectitude existing in a cleared space like his parents' uncluttered house. He told her, "You cannot imagine--well, I do not mean that unkindly. But you, with your completeness--love, children, beauty, troops of friends--how would you understand such formlessness as mine? How would you know solitude, or despair?"
They were matters she had glimpsed in a mirror. She felt his view of her existence settling on her like an ornate, enfeebling garment; closing on her like a trap. She leaned back on the unyielding sofa, and he stood confronting. It was an allegorical contrast--sacred and profane love: her rapture offered like profanity. To assert, or retrieve, she said, "Yet there has been nothing lovelier in my life than the times we sat together at the hospital and looked at the photographs."
In fact almost their only concerted actions over the years have been precisely those designed to dismantle the few instruments of control previously available to them (such as those over cross-border capital movements). On the occasions when they are moved to express concern about the damaging consequences of the growth in money laundering, corruption and organised crime, nobody ever points out that the G7 have the collective power to close down the offshore finance centres which play such a large part in facilitating these activities. Instead their meetings have been reduced to nothing but exercises in platitudinous exhortation based on spurious economics – such as urging the need to hold down wages, reduce public spending and thereby curb inflation as the essential prerequisites to reviving economic growth.
Given the manifest futility of these conclaves, it is perhaps surprising that they have not been abandoned as damaging demonstrations of the incapacity of governments, both collectively and severally, to take effective remedial action against chronic economic failure. However, the fact that this has not happened may reflect a view that actually to terminate the ritual would be an even bigger public-relations disaster, signifying in most people’s eyes not only a confession of helplessness but an abdication of responsibility.
It is precisely the need to challenge the notion of an unconditional right of property and to insist on the public accountability of its owners – taking account of the immense power of corporations to influence the welfare of society – which now demands to be grasped. The justification for doing so is surely all the more compelling in view of the huge privileges and protection now provided to the private corporate sector by the state. These supports – beginning with the right to limited liability conceded in the mid-nineteenth century and culminating in the state’s assumption of the role of lender of last resort in the Keynesian era – have become indispensable to the present-day corporate sector. Yet the implied contract linked to these favours clearly must be that the corporate sector will in turn provide the economic well-being which the community requires.13 Hence it seems inconceivable that in a modern economy the presumption that private companies (whether truly answerable to their shareholders or not) can be the ultimate arbiters of our common economic destiny will be found tolerable indefinitely. Indeed future generations may well marvel that they were allowed so much latitude for so long.
Now, though, like everything else, writing is being restructured around the format of the computer. Billions of people, above all in the world’s richest countries, are writing more than ever before, on our phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. And we are not so much writing, as being written. This is not really about ‘social media’. The term ‘social media’ is too widely used to be wished away, but we should at least put it in question. It is a form of shorthand propaganda. All media, and all machines, are social. Machines are social before they are technological, as the historian Lewis Mumford wrote. Long before the advent of the digital platforms, the philosopher Gilbert Simondon explored the ways in which tools generate social relationships. A tool is, first, the medium of a relationship between a body and the world. It connects users in a set of relationships with one another and the world around them. Moreover, the conceptual schema from which tools are generated can be transferred to new contexts, thus generating new types of relationship. To talk about technologies is to talk about societies.
[...] The social industry has created an addiction machine, not as an accident, but as a logical means to return value to its venture capitalist investors.
[...] There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn’t invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.
The Twittering Machine appears to have a similar magical quality. Technology has never been just technology. It is always a world of intense emotional attachments. The Twittering Machine promises to give us access to everything, limitlessly, allowing us to transcend the limitations of mere flesh. This is how the telecommunications firm, MCI, sold the internet two decades ago. People could communicate ‘mind to mind’. No race, no gender, no age, no infirmity. ‘There are only minds,’ the advertising breathlessly suggested. ‘Utopia? No … The internet. Where minds, doors and lives open up.’ This was digital Clintonism, a kind of thin liberal utopianism. Standing in a weak shadow of the opiate sublime, it promised an abundance of being, ageless immortality, protean plasticity beyond the bedrock of the body. The name of this abundance was connectivity, a truly magical substance.
But as the cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling points out, connectivity is not necessarily a symbol of affluence and plenty. It is, in a sense, the poor who most prize connectivity. Not in the sense of the old classist stereotype that ‘the poor love their cellphones’: no powerful group would turn down the opportunities that smartphones and social media offer. The powerful simply engage differently with the machine. But any culture that values connectivity so highly must be as impoverished in its social life as a culture obsessed with happiness is bitterly depressed. What Bruce Alexander calls the state of permanent ‘psychosocial dislocation’ in late capitalism, with life overrun by the law of markets and competition, is the context for soaring addiction rates. It is as if the addictive relationship stands in for the social relationships that have been upended by the turbulence of capitalism.
The most important problem with teaching machines, though, is political. In Walden Two, the community is overseen by a benign tyrant, Frazier. In defending his techniques, Frazier argues that the alternative is to leave them in the hands of wicked movements like the Nazis. This comparison only serves to illustrate his authoritarianism. The fantasy is that it is possible to know, through scientific research, what is good and how people ought to live. It is a fantasy in which meaning is replaced by technique, and all that is contrary, disputatious and unpleasant in social life is replaced by a smooth surface and flow. (Perhaps it is no coincidence that the aesthetic of late capitalism, and particularly of smartphones and apps, is so obsessed with smoothness and flow.) This requires relentless intrusive surveillance and laboratory-like manipulation of the entire population. But the secret of the good life is not something that can be known, it being different for everyone. So, behind the rule of science and technology, there has to be a tyranny somewhere making these decisions. A small number of real-world communities attempted to emulate Walden Two, with varying degrees of success, one of the main drawbacks being that leaders often identified with the benevolent authoritarianism of Frazier.