When you set up the thesis and antithesis like this, the synthesis I imagine is things like federated social networks and “mesoculture” (a term Chris Jesu Lee put me on). Substack itself is example of this. Maybe it’s a little over-optimistic. I can imagine a future where the global group mind breaks down and instead we have smaller communities enabled by the internet and platforms etc like discord servers and old-school online forums (but even smaller, I reckon), but also a return to an emphasis on actual physical spaces and local communities. In this world the “mob” still exists, it’s just smaller and less powerful, and the “sovereign individual” is empowered relative to the mob sufficiently to develop a strong individual identity and even influence the “mob” as a whole.
I like this because it is the kind of synthesis that could actually occur. Another way of saying it: maybe the "unbundling" of culture inherently makes the mob weaker, since it is breaking it up from this world-spanning dynamic all-to-all thing to a bunch of smaller subdomains. This decreases its power, since people can always "move" to new subdomains. This solution reminds me a lot of why Europe was so amicable to scientists challenging orthodoxy during the Renaissance: there were a ton of politically fractured states and fiefdoms, and if you said something controversial in one you could always pack your bags and go to another more welcoming one.
This idea is really close to "the internet dark forest theory". It originally was coined to refer to a future internet populated by bots and humans retracting to smaller chat group knowing everyone was human there. It could preserve people from the mob also.
I wrote a thing on this with links to another article explaining the theory
Also the "sovereign individuals" are often cited by the mob to say "cancel culture don’t exist since this people go unaffected". This is very interesting because there is a denial of its existence. And when proof is asked of cancel culture existing the response to the exemples is often "that’s just consequences."
> And when proof is asked of cancel culture existing the response to the examples is often "that’s just consequences."
"That's just X" is a pretty popular get out of jail free card for all ideologues....science leans heavily on it if you watch their language carefully when someone competent challenges their overreach.
An interesting essay but - like all philosophical discourse - perhaps a case of overthinking. Hegel liked thinking and good for him.....but he didn't really have any great insights into the unfolding of human history. As Wittgenstein - that most intellectually agile of thinkers - eventually concluded "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent". There is far more wisdom to be found in great novels than in great philosophers.
There is the Audrey Tang & Glen Weyl "plurality" movement which is aiming to establish some political philosophical grounding for the synthesis of the individual and the collective (I'll use the state as a proxy). They have catchphrases for this, like "infinite diversity from infinite combinations" (yes, from Star Trek), conservative anarchism, and bridging across divides. All hint at the notion that there are important social units that should remain coherent, but that there should also be connectors between these units. They've even gone so far as to develop a mathematical theory behind a certain flavor of this called quadratic voting.
“How do we rebuild communities” is one of the central questions of our age. An optimistic scenario is one where people use the internet to sort out who “their people” are and then move to that neighborhood to be with them, similar to how there used to be Chinatowns, Little Italys etc. Maybe you even take a test in high school that shows you what community you would fit in best. Colleges already do something like this for bringing together roommates.
I don't think that moving to a neighborhood with your people would be sufficient for what most people want from community. It's been tried many times and hasn't proven viable. Missing ingredients: synergy in creating goods and services for each other (instead of obtaining them mostly from the rest of the economy, and giving their energy/time mostly to the rest of the economy), an ability to integrate one's psychological parts as an individual, an embedding in a higher level of a federation of communities which is synergistically producing and consuming goods and services, but less than what is produced and consumed inside the community, valuing the intermediate level of family (the small number of people and quality of intimacy is what matters, not the nuclear form), and probably an integration of the natural world with the community. All the things that capitalism selects agianst...
How about this idea: a social network with strict standards, such that the quality of its membership is superior to all other groups, and thus if it can achieve adequate size (while maintaining quality) it can dominate all other competing organizations?
My favorite thing about this piece is how easy it is to understand what you're on about. I can't imagine how long you spent editing this thing for clarity, but it is utterly readable.
Not common for someone talking about dialectical materialism, Marx, phenomenology, Hegel or group minds. Really great writing.
Yep, probably the most concise example of Hegalian dialectics (or some variety of it) I can think of. Even as a Fukuyama fan, he isn't as good at being concise as this article was.
Where is energy in your analysis? The last 150 years have been a severe anomaly in human history: we've had access to vast reserves of cheap, energy-dense fossil fuel. One barrel of oil does the work of 4.5 years of human labor, so we effectively have 450Billion extra workers given our current fossil consumption. Toxic individualism and toxic "community" (mobs) are enabled by cheap, abundant energy, which allows us to obscure and ignore our utter dependency on other humans (and the biosphere). We believe we're "individuals" who can make it on our own -- just gas up the car, drive to the next city and hit the reset button. Or, buy up Twitter and "shape" culture on your own. In fact, we're dependent on far more people than pre-industrial persons, who knew the people they were dependent on and therefore had to learn to live with them. Recognition of dependency is what makes community. Modern humans are dependent of huge armies of humans, often toiling in horrible conditions, to grow and pick our food, to make our iphones, all the cheap plastic crap filling our garages. We live in the illusion of being independent, "sovereign," of all these people who allow us to live our high-consumption lifestyles (and the constraints of the biosphere) because cheap oil made it so easy to do so.
You've got such great analysis and ideas here -- I'd love to see you add energy into the mix!
I'll add energy to his analysis for you. It goes like this:
"Currently, the internet uses close to 20% of the world's electricity. This is likely to increase as more of the world becomes connected and there is more use of AI. But most of our energy comes from fossil fuels, and these are depleting. So we have one, at most two generations where this analysis will apply to a large fraction of the human race. Then as modern civilisation declines into walled technotopian high-energy cities surrounded by slums of people who enter the city by day to clean it up and make babies for them, it will apply to fewer and fewer people. And two to three generations after that, it will fall over completely."
Absolutely! As much as the world population has grown since the harnessing of electricity and our almost total dependence upon electricity…..and then there is water!
Really thought provoking essay! However, I don’t know if I agree with the prevalence of this particular problem in the thesis. I simply don’t spend my time afraid of the panopticon or worrying about the mob. It might be the social anxiety or covid-trained isolation or simply having never used twitter or posted on instagram, but this mob has not affected my life. And I don’t think I’m above or below it like in the antithesis, just… apart from it.
Maybe I’m not necessarily representative of the current social culture, it just makes me somewhat doubtful of whether this is THE problem of the century when it doesn’t always feel so world-shatteringly important.
You know, fair enough. It does feel good to be liked by the mob. But, more than anything, I’m happy that someone actually replied! While it does feel nice to get likes and all, I made this comment hoping to see more people’s perspectives, and I ended up with like 0 replies. Even now, the point has always been just to talk to people, not necessarily to be liked. So thanks!
I would say so, yes? Although I don’t think either the ones with more security than average or the ones with less happen to be more affected by the mob. Now I’m really curious, why do you ask?
It could be affecting my perceptions, but I don't know in what way. Many of my peers have much less financial security than I do and are not any more affected than the mob than I am, and neither are the ones who have even more security. While I suppose we are all close in proximity, I don't think my particular area would be inherently different from the norm.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but why do you think that financial security would specifically affect this particular thing?
> It could be affecting my perceptions, but I don't know in what way.
Did you try to determine the ways it could, with the same effort you devote (and have devoted) to acquiring money?
> Many of my peers have much less financial security than I do and are not any more affected than the mob than I am, and neither are the ones who have even more security.
Causality is multi-variate.
> While I suppose we are all close in proximity, I don't think my particular area would be inherently different from the norm.
There is a lot of variety in the overall distribution, and the distribution is multi-variate (but appears otherwise).
> I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but why do you think that financial security would specifically affect this particular thing?
Because money is very useful for making *individual* problems go away, or not even arrive in the first place.
I can understand that money tends to have an impact on just about everything, but I don't think it's inherently tied to this issue. As in, I don't think having money removes one from the mob. In his essay, Erik talks about how some people are above the mob, and I don't think it's a coincidence that Elon Musk and Taylor Swift are both rich and above the mob. But if anything, it feels like having money puts one above the mob and not removed from it like I'm saying.
I don't think that the fact that I don't necessarily worry about what everyone may think of me is because of my socioeconomic status, especially since Erik also makes it clear that many people are able to be anonymous and circumvent the mob despite not necessarily being rich. I'm trying to say that I don't think my peers and I worry about this as much as other generations.
Do you believe that only through money can one avoid this issue? I'd understand it making a problem go away, but I don't think it's the only way for it to go away, and I personally feel like it's simply not as big of a problem as it might otherwise seem. How does a lack of financial security make one more vulnerable to what people say on twitter when I'm talking about people who aren't on twitter in the first place?
Love these reflections. I think Foucault would agree these “sovereigns” are manifestations of this system of power-knowledge, thus trapped within their own system of power; thus not sovereign at all (leaving Foucault’s dissolution into hopelessness about ever escaping it aside). On a another point, I think of the antithesis to the mob, or more specifically to disinformation and the diffuse celebrity culture, is becoming an jnformed self-referential sovereign, looking at how one thinks and feels about a thing before agreeing or taking action. That is, when there’s sufficient self development, agency, and wisdom, the mob becomes relevant only as a factor to be considered. Disinformation, fear uncertainty and doubt, have less play in a nonreactive, cultivated mind/body.
The British Empire ruined Anglo philosophy by persuading the philosophers that everything was completely lucid and comprehensible if only you looked at it the right way. After all, the world was becoming more lucid and rational itself with every successful gun boat expedition. One philosopher in particular was especially reviled, namely Hegel (and his left-Hegelian progeny). It was forbidden to think that there really were deep problems and fissures in reality itself, deep contradictions. That's why the Continentals have been more interesting by and large.
I understand that the brain and mind are not the same thing, but we do have expectations of minds that correlate to brain development. If we think of the current state of the mob as primarily brain stem/amygdala/limbic, could it develop a sort of metaphorical pre frontal cortex over time?
This: "If we were to compare the psychological topography of two citizens, one living in the 1990s, and one living in the 2020s, the most significant difference is that only one lives with the oppressive knowledge that they are watched by a panopticon."
I just read Dave Eggers' novel The Every, which is kind of like an episode of Black Mirror (in particular, it's like the episode that most horrified and haunted me, the one in which everyone is filming everything through their eyes 24 / 7).
I'm far more Luddite than most, but I particularly object to filming and videoing of others without consent, which amounts to group auto-surveillance. My prediction (more accurately, my hope) is that in five or ten years we will see intentionally tech-free zones, and / or a strong cultural pushback, as in your gym example.
I look forward to you continuing to develop this topic!
One connection between your objective model and fiction: I find a resonance of this dialectic in fiction in Jason Pargin's Zoey Ashe series (specifically: "Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits"). The protagonist almost seems like a time-traveler from the '90s or early '00s - Zoey herself grew up mostly offline with a hippie mom who assumes the best intentions of others and has a clear moral code. She's thrust into a world where a mostly morally corrupt and/or hypercapitalist individuals seek power and status in a libertarian state, unbound by laws or norms via their influence over the online mob, their material resources, and their cunning. In the book, the mob is everywhere via the ubiquitous "social network" Blink that enables constant streaming of anyone anywhere by anyone anywhere to everyone everywhere. While this is great for creating a rollicking and fast paced narrative, it also shows how hard (impossible?) it is to escape the dynamic of the individual and the mob. This dynamic of push and pull between mob and individual creates its own momentum. Your Hegelian model and the Ashe narrative also shows a society lacking a shared or foundational morality or purpose (beyond materialistic ones), which feels (unfortunately) true to our time as well.
All this to say, more evidence to support your proposal - this dynamic seems to be lurking in many minds of late.
Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis is a notoriously bad way to capture what Hegel was getting at, especially when applied to vague political terms like "capitalism" and "communism". Dialectics is really just a way to arrive at logically necessary conclusions by thinking through the necessary contradictions arising from an abstract concept like "being" -- e.g. if you really sit down and think about being, it becomes obvious that the concept makes no sense without it's contradiction, non-being and then there's a dynamic between the two that will necessarily arive at becoming.
... and I get that this wasn't meant to be an academic paper on Hegel or anything, but people like Antonio Wolf have done extensive work trying to lay this all out in a way that is accessible (as far as that is possible) to lay people and I think bringing back the old thesis-antithesis-synthesis model is doing these ideas a disservice.
All worthwhile noting for sure. I did say the dialectic was a "caricature" as a historical concept, and this is partly what I mean. But I think accepting this fully requires saying that the most popular uses of the dialectic since then, like Marx and Fukuyama, are just flat-out wrong. Perhaps, but at a certain point ideas that are this popular gain a life of their own beyond their conception (and then see, e.g., Hegel's own application to the events of his day).
I wouldn't say they're wrong, they're just a different concept with the same name (not unusual in the history of philosophy). I don't think Hegel necessarily has any kind of interpretative authority over the term dialectics, it's just that when talking about "Hegel's dialectic", I think it's important to really lay out the difference between the colloquial and the strict systematic use, especially when writing for laypeople. And Marx in Capital is much closer to the systematic than the colloquial use, e.g. the whole analysis of the commodity form is pretty faithfully Hegelian. Boiling that down to the popularized capitalism-socialism-communism understanding of dialectics leaves out most of the really interesting analysis!
This essay is very well researched and written, though I am not sure it goes deep enough, as it seems to me to treat of symptoms rather than the underlying issues. The cluster of issues is truly hard to disentangle, so my disagreements might just come down to my having a different view of the tangle.
“Nor is the 21st-century dialectic likely to be economic, for that too is also already mostly played out.” Does the playing out of one instance of a historical dialectic really preclude its recurrence? Is the capitalistic/growthist tension driving the plethora of crises in our age not still fully in play?
“We can therefore conclude that, since it will not be political, nor economic, the 21st century dialectic must be domestic, internal, cultural, ideological.” I think the dialectic of the 21st-century is ALSO, but not exclusively, domestic, internal, cultural, ideological. In addition it is political and economic, and will at a deeper level be philosophical and scientific, about our world view (which is inclusive of all of the above categories), for as I argue in Philosophy for our Future, the tension of our age is about our view of and relation to reality.
The mob vs the individual can certainly be seen as a dialectic, but rather than it being THE dialectic of the 21st century, I would say that our age has seen the tension be increased by the growing strength of the mobs voice by technological and online means. The tension has however always been there, though of course much reduced and different in pre-industrial cultures. Thinking about how the self-governance and self-moderation of the mob can be better facilitated I am reminded of a recent post by The Elysian on “Wikiocracy” (https://www.elysian.press/p/what-if-government-worked-like-wikipedia). Applying the “wiki” model to the mob, would require social media architectures that are open and promote diversity of views to all users, rather than reinforcing in-group views and isolating people in bubbles. This will of course be bad for business in the short-term.
The same architecture that causes in-group bubbles is also at the helm of other (online) fragmentations. To be highly simplistic in order to make plausible a point: young people both make up more of the mobs voice and are less wise. Could the collective wisdom of the elder moderate the mob by bridging fragmentations between age groups on social media? The answer to the question of “How do you domesticate a group mind?” could as such be be achieved by different social media/mob architectures. Another answer could be to phase these “fire-breathing dragons” out altogether, as they might very well not be part of the solution to our crises in any form.
A follow-up thought, which might be tangential to what the essay tries to address: is it useful to think of the "mob" as opposed to "mobs"? Might discussing this in terms of a singular mob be a fallacious projection from one's limited context? All humans are prone to cognitive biases, and projecting the particular to the universal is a common one. If we investigate the mob we will of course find that it is a plurality of viewpoints. Could some of the dialectical tension be released by properly conceptualizing the mob as a diverse plurality, rather than a monolith?
> Applying the “wiki” model to the mob, would require social media architectures that are open and promote diversity of views to all users, rather than reinforcing in-group views and isolating people in bubbles. This will of course be bad for business in the short-term.
Something few people know: internet platforms don't necessarily have to generate *or even promise to generate* vast riches to be implemented, that is only a custom that our culture happened to adopt.
This post is very much my jam -- I never got very far into Hegel, but have spent enough time trying to figure him out to appreciate this summary of the strengths and weaknesses of his approach.
But I lean towards a different grand narrative of the 21st Century; I just keep coming back to the desire for stability vs the inevitability of change (which, I realize, do not construct a Hegelian dialectic). I feel like the 20th Century was a time of upheaval, political and economic, and the 21st Century is seeing both remaking of the social environment (as this post discusses) and the broad climate of the planet, and there's constant conflict between the impulses towards, "We are loosing too much: we need to slow down and restore some of what is breaking " vs "the only way out is through; we need to embrace change and recognize that a better future is visible and achievable. "
This is a wonderful post, Erik. Very nicely done. Two comments:
1. You wrote, "Bitcoin’s supposed radicalness was consolidated without much fuss into the system." Yes, this is because the entire crypto ecosystem has been corrupted by the Tether fraud. Under Tether, the establishment can inflate or deflate crypto's valuation at whim by printing, without backing, many tens of billions of dollars. It is a 15 man operation and has never been audited. The only explanation for why this blatant and obvious Ponzi fraud hasn't been taken down is because it is controlled by establishment forces, almost certainly the NSA. Therefore, instead of being a counterweight to the almighty dollar, it has been corrupted and made subservient to it.
2. "Either way, they attain their immunity to the mob parasitically. They do not actually ignore the mob, they play to it. " The synthesis that I hope happens is a return to Christian gnosticism, i.e. individual experience of gnosis. Only a felt experience of the divine on our own individual paths can, I think, fundamentally oppose the brutality of the mob. Gnostic Bishop Hoeller commented on this principle in a 2014 interview:
[Bishop Hoeller]: "Speaking of Jung, it is no doubt known to many that his mysterious and long-awaited book Liber Novus (The Red Book) has been published at last. One of the principal disclosures to be found in this work is Jung’s belief that the Age of Aquarius is upon us, that significant changes in the consciousness of humanity are taking place, and that more of the same may be expected in the future. The “Aeon of Aquarius,” as Jung calls it, will eventually bring great psychological changes in its wake, amounting to a new religious consciousness which will differ greatly from the religious consciousness of the Piscean Age. It will manifest primarily in a new God-image that was very important to the ancient Gnostics and that in various ways has made its appearance throughout history in the esoteric tradition.
Two thousand and some years ago a new religion constellated itself in the Mediterranean region. With that religion came a new myth of redemption, centred in the image of Jesus, the Saviour God. Now Jung is telling us in The Red Book that the Aeon of Aquarius is upon us, and with it comes the new God-image of the God within. This image is of course none other than the God to whom St. Paul referred as “the Christ in you, our hope of glory.” It is also the indwelling Christ affirmed and venerated in the Gnostic tradition.
There is no doubt that Jung saw in the new Gnostic Renaissance, which began with the discovery in 1945 of the Nag Hammadi library, a manifestation of his own prophecy in the then still secret Red Book. The connection of Jung’s prophecy with the tradition of Gnosis is unmistakable.
In his Red Book, Jung stated clearly that the task of the present and near future was “to give birth to the ancient in a new time,” and he clearly meant the Gnostic tradition is in fact that ancient thing to which he and others were giving birth.
I have spent a very large portion of my adult life studying and commenting upon the work of Jung and the Gnostic sacred writings. I should say, then, that humanity today is experiencing the rebirth of Gnosticism, and its principal God-image is being born in a new time. The esoteric as well as the exoteric implications of this process are momentous."
I think your response to his bitcoin statement wasn't really even a refutation of what was said.
It only took 13 years for Bitcoin to become not only non-radical, but a fully-fledged Wall Street financial instrument. I don't think he was saying that it's no longer a force of resistance at all or has no noble ideas behind it, only that it's really no longer relevant as an instrument of counter-culture or revolution.
Also, crypto wasn't just corrupted by tether. Crypto has been almost entirely corrupt from the beginning, and things like tether are what corrupt systems produce. Those are not the same thing. Tether is the example, not the exception.
When you set up the thesis and antithesis like this, the synthesis I imagine is things like federated social networks and “mesoculture” (a term Chris Jesu Lee put me on). Substack itself is example of this. Maybe it’s a little over-optimistic. I can imagine a future where the global group mind breaks down and instead we have smaller communities enabled by the internet and platforms etc like discord servers and old-school online forums (but even smaller, I reckon), but also a return to an emphasis on actual physical spaces and local communities. In this world the “mob” still exists, it’s just smaller and less powerful, and the “sovereign individual” is empowered relative to the mob sufficiently to develop a strong individual identity and even influence the “mob” as a whole.
I like this because it is the kind of synthesis that could actually occur. Another way of saying it: maybe the "unbundling" of culture inherently makes the mob weaker, since it is breaking it up from this world-spanning dynamic all-to-all thing to a bunch of smaller subdomains. This decreases its power, since people can always "move" to new subdomains. This solution reminds me a lot of why Europe was so amicable to scientists challenging orthodoxy during the Renaissance: there were a ton of politically fractured states and fiefdoms, and if you said something controversial in one you could always pack your bags and go to another more welcoming one.
This idea is really close to "the internet dark forest theory". It originally was coined to refer to a future internet populated by bots and humans retracting to smaller chat group knowing everyone was human there. It could preserve people from the mob also.
I wrote a thing on this with links to another article explaining the theory
https://open.substack.com/pub/prosopon/p/under-the-internets-forest-theres?r=3hwnr4&utm_medium=ios
Also the "sovereign individuals" are often cited by the mob to say "cancel culture don’t exist since this people go unaffected". This is very interesting because there is a denial of its existence. And when proof is asked of cancel culture existing the response to the exemples is often "that’s just consequences."
> And when proof is asked of cancel culture existing the response to the examples is often "that’s just consequences."
"That's just X" is a pretty popular get out of jail free card for all ideologues....science leans heavily on it if you watch their language carefully when someone competent challenges their overreach.
An interesting essay but - like all philosophical discourse - perhaps a case of overthinking. Hegel liked thinking and good for him.....but he didn't really have any great insights into the unfolding of human history. As Wittgenstein - that most intellectually agile of thinkers - eventually concluded "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent". There is far more wisdom to be found in great novels than in great philosophers.
That's gotta be one of Wittgenstein's worst theories imho.
There is the Audrey Tang & Glen Weyl "plurality" movement which is aiming to establish some political philosophical grounding for the synthesis of the individual and the collective (I'll use the state as a proxy). They have catchphrases for this, like "infinite diversity from infinite combinations" (yes, from Star Trek), conservative anarchism, and bridging across divides. All hint at the notion that there are important social units that should remain coherent, but that there should also be connectors between these units. They've even gone so far as to develop a mathematical theory behind a certain flavor of this called quadratic voting.
I wrote a little on this a few years ago here, with a nod to the Hegelian dialectic: https://github.com/wesc/sf-psn
“How do we rebuild communities” is one of the central questions of our age. An optimistic scenario is one where people use the internet to sort out who “their people” are and then move to that neighborhood to be with them, similar to how there used to be Chinatowns, Little Italys etc. Maybe you even take a test in high school that shows you what community you would fit in best. Colleges already do something like this for bringing together roommates.
I don't think that moving to a neighborhood with your people would be sufficient for what most people want from community. It's been tried many times and hasn't proven viable. Missing ingredients: synergy in creating goods and services for each other (instead of obtaining them mostly from the rest of the economy, and giving their energy/time mostly to the rest of the economy), an ability to integrate one's psychological parts as an individual, an embedding in a higher level of a federation of communities which is synergistically producing and consuming goods and services, but less than what is produced and consumed inside the community, valuing the intermediate level of family (the small number of people and quality of intimacy is what matters, not the nuclear form), and probably an integration of the natural world with the community. All the things that capitalism selects agianst...
Totally! Reminds me a lot of this piece: https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest
How about this idea: a social network with strict standards, such that the quality of its membership is superior to all other groups, and thus if it can achieve adequate size (while maintaining quality) it can dominate all other competing organizations?
My favorite thing about this piece is how easy it is to understand what you're on about. I can't imagine how long you spent editing this thing for clarity, but it is utterly readable.
Not common for someone talking about dialectical materialism, Marx, phenomenology, Hegel or group minds. Really great writing.
Thank you for noticing Justin. There was indeed much editing!
I often feel that way when reading Eric's work. He has a grip on reality, and yes, I have moved to his neighborhood.
Yep, probably the most concise example of Hegalian dialectics (or some variety of it) I can think of. Even as a Fukuyama fan, he isn't as good at being concise as this article was.
Where is energy in your analysis? The last 150 years have been a severe anomaly in human history: we've had access to vast reserves of cheap, energy-dense fossil fuel. One barrel of oil does the work of 4.5 years of human labor, so we effectively have 450Billion extra workers given our current fossil consumption. Toxic individualism and toxic "community" (mobs) are enabled by cheap, abundant energy, which allows us to obscure and ignore our utter dependency on other humans (and the biosphere). We believe we're "individuals" who can make it on our own -- just gas up the car, drive to the next city and hit the reset button. Or, buy up Twitter and "shape" culture on your own. In fact, we're dependent on far more people than pre-industrial persons, who knew the people they were dependent on and therefore had to learn to live with them. Recognition of dependency is what makes community. Modern humans are dependent of huge armies of humans, often toiling in horrible conditions, to grow and pick our food, to make our iphones, all the cheap plastic crap filling our garages. We live in the illusion of being independent, "sovereign," of all these people who allow us to live our high-consumption lifestyles (and the constraints of the biosphere) because cheap oil made it so easy to do so.
You've got such great analysis and ideas here -- I'd love to see you add energy into the mix!
I'll add energy to his analysis for you. It goes like this:
"Currently, the internet uses close to 20% of the world's electricity. This is likely to increase as more of the world becomes connected and there is more use of AI. But most of our energy comes from fossil fuels, and these are depleting. So we have one, at most two generations where this analysis will apply to a large fraction of the human race. Then as modern civilisation declines into walled technotopian high-energy cities surrounded by slums of people who enter the city by day to clean it up and make babies for them, it will apply to fewer and fewer people. And two to three generations after that, it will fall over completely."
There you go.
Absolutely! As much as the world population has grown since the harnessing of electricity and our almost total dependence upon electricity…..and then there is water!
See “New Water For a Thirsty World” by Michael H. Salzman
Really thought provoking essay! However, I don’t know if I agree with the prevalence of this particular problem in the thesis. I simply don’t spend my time afraid of the panopticon or worrying about the mob. It might be the social anxiety or covid-trained isolation or simply having never used twitter or posted on instagram, but this mob has not affected my life. And I don’t think I’m above or below it like in the antithesis, just… apart from it.
Maybe I’m not necessarily representative of the current social culture, it just makes me somewhat doubtful of whether this is THE problem of the century when it doesn’t always feel so world-shatteringly important.
Then here is your like, how does it make you feel?
You know, fair enough. It does feel good to be liked by the mob. But, more than anything, I’m happy that someone actually replied! While it does feel nice to get likes and all, I made this comment hoping to see more people’s perspectives, and I ended up with like 0 replies. Even now, the point has always been just to talk to people, not necessarily to be liked. So thanks!
Have you and your peers financial and other security in your life, generally speaking?
I would say so, yes? Although I don’t think either the ones with more security than average or the ones with less happen to be more affected by the mob. Now I’m really curious, why do you ask?
> I would say so, yes?
Do you think that could have an effect on your perceptions on the matter, or the fact of the matter?
> Although I don’t think either the ones with more security than average or the ones with less happen to be more affected by the mob.
Physical proximity alone surely plays at least some role, and better off people tend to live in safer neighborhoods.
Also: this too may be affected by your level of security.
> Now I’m really curious, why do you ask?
I am interested in the nature of reality.
It could be affecting my perceptions, but I don't know in what way. Many of my peers have much less financial security than I do and are not any more affected than the mob than I am, and neither are the ones who have even more security. While I suppose we are all close in proximity, I don't think my particular area would be inherently different from the norm.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but why do you think that financial security would specifically affect this particular thing?
> It could be affecting my perceptions, but I don't know in what way.
Did you try to determine the ways it could, with the same effort you devote (and have devoted) to acquiring money?
> Many of my peers have much less financial security than I do and are not any more affected than the mob than I am, and neither are the ones who have even more security.
Causality is multi-variate.
> While I suppose we are all close in proximity, I don't think my particular area would be inherently different from the norm.
There is a lot of variety in the overall distribution, and the distribution is multi-variate (but appears otherwise).
> I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but why do you think that financial security would specifically affect this particular thing?
Because money is very useful for making *individual* problems go away, or not even arrive in the first place.
I can understand that money tends to have an impact on just about everything, but I don't think it's inherently tied to this issue. As in, I don't think having money removes one from the mob. In his essay, Erik talks about how some people are above the mob, and I don't think it's a coincidence that Elon Musk and Taylor Swift are both rich and above the mob. But if anything, it feels like having money puts one above the mob and not removed from it like I'm saying.
I don't think that the fact that I don't necessarily worry about what everyone may think of me is because of my socioeconomic status, especially since Erik also makes it clear that many people are able to be anonymous and circumvent the mob despite not necessarily being rich. I'm trying to say that I don't think my peers and I worry about this as much as other generations.
Do you believe that only through money can one avoid this issue? I'd understand it making a problem go away, but I don't think it's the only way for it to go away, and I personally feel like it's simply not as big of a problem as it might otherwise seem. How does a lack of financial security make one more vulnerable to what people say on twitter when I'm talking about people who aren't on twitter in the first place?
Love these reflections. I think Foucault would agree these “sovereigns” are manifestations of this system of power-knowledge, thus trapped within their own system of power; thus not sovereign at all (leaving Foucault’s dissolution into hopelessness about ever escaping it aside). On a another point, I think of the antithesis to the mob, or more specifically to disinformation and the diffuse celebrity culture, is becoming an jnformed self-referential sovereign, looking at how one thinks and feels about a thing before agreeing or taking action. That is, when there’s sufficient self development, agency, and wisdom, the mob becomes relevant only as a factor to be considered. Disinformation, fear uncertainty and doubt, have less play in a nonreactive, cultivated mind/body.
The British Empire ruined Anglo philosophy by persuading the philosophers that everything was completely lucid and comprehensible if only you looked at it the right way. After all, the world was becoming more lucid and rational itself with every successful gun boat expedition. One philosopher in particular was especially reviled, namely Hegel (and his left-Hegelian progeny). It was forbidden to think that there really were deep problems and fissures in reality itself, deep contradictions. That's why the Continentals have been more interesting by and large.
I exaggerate for effect, but not much.
I understand that the brain and mind are not the same thing, but we do have expectations of minds that correlate to brain development. If we think of the current state of the mob as primarily brain stem/amygdala/limbic, could it develop a sort of metaphorical pre frontal cortex over time?
P.S. Thank you for employing an actual human being to illustrate your writing.
This: "If we were to compare the psychological topography of two citizens, one living in the 1990s, and one living in the 2020s, the most significant difference is that only one lives with the oppressive knowledge that they are watched by a panopticon."
I just read Dave Eggers' novel The Every, which is kind of like an episode of Black Mirror (in particular, it's like the episode that most horrified and haunted me, the one in which everyone is filming everything through their eyes 24 / 7).
I'm far more Luddite than most, but I particularly object to filming and videoing of others without consent, which amounts to group auto-surveillance. My prediction (more accurately, my hope) is that in five or ten years we will see intentionally tech-free zones, and / or a strong cultural pushback, as in your gym example.
More properly: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer.
I look forward to you continuing to develop this topic!
One connection between your objective model and fiction: I find a resonance of this dialectic in fiction in Jason Pargin's Zoey Ashe series (specifically: "Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits"). The protagonist almost seems like a time-traveler from the '90s or early '00s - Zoey herself grew up mostly offline with a hippie mom who assumes the best intentions of others and has a clear moral code. She's thrust into a world where a mostly morally corrupt and/or hypercapitalist individuals seek power and status in a libertarian state, unbound by laws or norms via their influence over the online mob, their material resources, and their cunning. In the book, the mob is everywhere via the ubiquitous "social network" Blink that enables constant streaming of anyone anywhere by anyone anywhere to everyone everywhere. While this is great for creating a rollicking and fast paced narrative, it also shows how hard (impossible?) it is to escape the dynamic of the individual and the mob. This dynamic of push and pull between mob and individual creates its own momentum. Your Hegelian model and the Ashe narrative also shows a society lacking a shared or foundational morality or purpose (beyond materialistic ones), which feels (unfortunately) true to our time as well.
All this to say, more evidence to support your proposal - this dynamic seems to be lurking in many minds of late.
Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis is a notoriously bad way to capture what Hegel was getting at, especially when applied to vague political terms like "capitalism" and "communism". Dialectics is really just a way to arrive at logically necessary conclusions by thinking through the necessary contradictions arising from an abstract concept like "being" -- e.g. if you really sit down and think about being, it becomes obvious that the concept makes no sense without it's contradiction, non-being and then there's a dynamic between the two that will necessarily arive at becoming.
... and I get that this wasn't meant to be an academic paper on Hegel or anything, but people like Antonio Wolf have done extensive work trying to lay this all out in a way that is accessible (as far as that is possible) to lay people and I think bringing back the old thesis-antithesis-synthesis model is doing these ideas a disservice.
All worthwhile noting for sure. I did say the dialectic was a "caricature" as a historical concept, and this is partly what I mean. But I think accepting this fully requires saying that the most popular uses of the dialectic since then, like Marx and Fukuyama, are just flat-out wrong. Perhaps, but at a certain point ideas that are this popular gain a life of their own beyond their conception (and then see, e.g., Hegel's own application to the events of his day).
I wouldn't say they're wrong, they're just a different concept with the same name (not unusual in the history of philosophy). I don't think Hegel necessarily has any kind of interpretative authority over the term dialectics, it's just that when talking about "Hegel's dialectic", I think it's important to really lay out the difference between the colloquial and the strict systematic use, especially when writing for laypeople. And Marx in Capital is much closer to the systematic than the colloquial use, e.g. the whole analysis of the commodity form is pretty faithfully Hegelian. Boiling that down to the popularized capitalism-socialism-communism understanding of dialectics leaves out most of the really interesting analysis!
This essay is very well researched and written, though I am not sure it goes deep enough, as it seems to me to treat of symptoms rather than the underlying issues. The cluster of issues is truly hard to disentangle, so my disagreements might just come down to my having a different view of the tangle.
“Nor is the 21st-century dialectic likely to be economic, for that too is also already mostly played out.” Does the playing out of one instance of a historical dialectic really preclude its recurrence? Is the capitalistic/growthist tension driving the plethora of crises in our age not still fully in play?
“We can therefore conclude that, since it will not be political, nor economic, the 21st century dialectic must be domestic, internal, cultural, ideological.” I think the dialectic of the 21st-century is ALSO, but not exclusively, domestic, internal, cultural, ideological. In addition it is political and economic, and will at a deeper level be philosophical and scientific, about our world view (which is inclusive of all of the above categories), for as I argue in Philosophy for our Future, the tension of our age is about our view of and relation to reality.
The mob vs the individual can certainly be seen as a dialectic, but rather than it being THE dialectic of the 21st century, I would say that our age has seen the tension be increased by the growing strength of the mobs voice by technological and online means. The tension has however always been there, though of course much reduced and different in pre-industrial cultures. Thinking about how the self-governance and self-moderation of the mob can be better facilitated I am reminded of a recent post by The Elysian on “Wikiocracy” (https://www.elysian.press/p/what-if-government-worked-like-wikipedia). Applying the “wiki” model to the mob, would require social media architectures that are open and promote diversity of views to all users, rather than reinforcing in-group views and isolating people in bubbles. This will of course be bad for business in the short-term.
The same architecture that causes in-group bubbles is also at the helm of other (online) fragmentations. To be highly simplistic in order to make plausible a point: young people both make up more of the mobs voice and are less wise. Could the collective wisdom of the elder moderate the mob by bridging fragmentations between age groups on social media? The answer to the question of “How do you domesticate a group mind?” could as such be be achieved by different social media/mob architectures. Another answer could be to phase these “fire-breathing dragons” out altogether, as they might very well not be part of the solution to our crises in any form.
A follow-up thought, which might be tangential to what the essay tries to address: is it useful to think of the "mob" as opposed to "mobs"? Might discussing this in terms of a singular mob be a fallacious projection from one's limited context? All humans are prone to cognitive biases, and projecting the particular to the universal is a common one. If we investigate the mob we will of course find that it is a plurality of viewpoints. Could some of the dialectical tension be released by properly conceptualizing the mob as a diverse plurality, rather than a monolith?
Some good out of the box thinking!
> Applying the “wiki” model to the mob, would require social media architectures that are open and promote diversity of views to all users, rather than reinforcing in-group views and isolating people in bubbles. This will of course be bad for business in the short-term.
Something few people know: internet platforms don't necessarily have to generate *or even promise to generate* vast riches to be implemented, that is only a custom that our culture happened to adopt.
The essay of the year so far, for me. Wonderful work.
This post is very much my jam -- I never got very far into Hegel, but have spent enough time trying to figure him out to appreciate this summary of the strengths and weaknesses of his approach.
But I lean towards a different grand narrative of the 21st Century; I just keep coming back to the desire for stability vs the inevitability of change (which, I realize, do not construct a Hegelian dialectic). I feel like the 20th Century was a time of upheaval, political and economic, and the 21st Century is seeing both remaking of the social environment (as this post discusses) and the broad climate of the planet, and there's constant conflict between the impulses towards, "We are loosing too much: we need to slow down and restore some of what is breaking " vs "the only way out is through; we need to embrace change and recognize that a better future is visible and achievable. "
This is a wonderful post, Erik. Very nicely done. Two comments:
1. You wrote, "Bitcoin’s supposed radicalness was consolidated without much fuss into the system." Yes, this is because the entire crypto ecosystem has been corrupted by the Tether fraud. Under Tether, the establishment can inflate or deflate crypto's valuation at whim by printing, without backing, many tens of billions of dollars. It is a 15 man operation and has never been audited. The only explanation for why this blatant and obvious Ponzi fraud hasn't been taken down is because it is controlled by establishment forces, almost certainly the NSA. Therefore, instead of being a counterweight to the almighty dollar, it has been corrupted and made subservient to it.
2. "Either way, they attain their immunity to the mob parasitically. They do not actually ignore the mob, they play to it. " The synthesis that I hope happens is a return to Christian gnosticism, i.e. individual experience of gnosis. Only a felt experience of the divine on our own individual paths can, I think, fundamentally oppose the brutality of the mob. Gnostic Bishop Hoeller commented on this principle in a 2014 interview:
[Bishop Hoeller]: "Speaking of Jung, it is no doubt known to many that his mysterious and long-awaited book Liber Novus (The Red Book) has been published at last. One of the principal disclosures to be found in this work is Jung’s belief that the Age of Aquarius is upon us, that significant changes in the consciousness of humanity are taking place, and that more of the same may be expected in the future. The “Aeon of Aquarius,” as Jung calls it, will eventually bring great psychological changes in its wake, amounting to a new religious consciousness which will differ greatly from the religious consciousness of the Piscean Age. It will manifest primarily in a new God-image that was very important to the ancient Gnostics and that in various ways has made its appearance throughout history in the esoteric tradition.
Two thousand and some years ago a new religion constellated itself in the Mediterranean region. With that religion came a new myth of redemption, centred in the image of Jesus, the Saviour God. Now Jung is telling us in The Red Book that the Aeon of Aquarius is upon us, and with it comes the new God-image of the God within. This image is of course none other than the God to whom St. Paul referred as “the Christ in you, our hope of glory.” It is also the indwelling Christ affirmed and venerated in the Gnostic tradition.
There is no doubt that Jung saw in the new Gnostic Renaissance, which began with the discovery in 1945 of the Nag Hammadi library, a manifestation of his own prophecy in the then still secret Red Book. The connection of Jung’s prophecy with the tradition of Gnosis is unmistakable.
In his Red Book, Jung stated clearly that the task of the present and near future was “to give birth to the ancient in a new time,” and he clearly meant the Gnostic tradition is in fact that ancient thing to which he and others were giving birth.
I have spent a very large portion of my adult life studying and commenting upon the work of Jung and the Gnostic sacred writings. I should say, then, that humanity today is experiencing the rebirth of Gnosticism, and its principal God-image is being born in a new time. The esoteric as well as the exoteric implications of this process are momentous."
From: https://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/secret-wisdom/the-rebirth-of-gnosticism-an-interview-with-dr-stephan-a-hoeller
I think your response to his bitcoin statement wasn't really even a refutation of what was said.
It only took 13 years for Bitcoin to become not only non-radical, but a fully-fledged Wall Street financial instrument. I don't think he was saying that it's no longer a force of resistance at all or has no noble ideas behind it, only that it's really no longer relevant as an instrument of counter-culture or revolution.
Also, crypto wasn't just corrupted by tether. Crypto has been almost entirely corrupt from the beginning, and things like tether are what corrupt systems produce. Those are not the same thing. Tether is the example, not the exception.
How very patriarchal of you.