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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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. "
There was a bookshelf in the American Library in Paris that became the college education I did not have growing up in Canada. At twenty discovering Hegel, Kant, Nietche, Sartre, Camus, Bouviour, Wilson was life changing. Even Mein Kamf, as no stone was unturned to maintain that dialectic. My great joy is that 50 years later Phenomenalogical Existentialism is back and ready to be discussed. Door number 4 please.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. "
There was a bookshelf in the American Library in Paris that became the college education I did not have growing up in Canada. At twenty discovering Hegel, Kant, Nietche, Sartre, Camus, Bouviour, Wilson was life changing. Even Mein Kamf, as no stone was unturned to maintain that dialectic. My great joy is that 50 years later Phenomenalogical Existentialism is back and ready to be discussed. Door number 4 please.