In her brilliant review of The Social Network, Zadie Smith makes an important observation regarding Mark Zuckerberg (or at the very least, his depiction in the film) - the mystery of his vocation.
If it’s not for money and it’s not for girls—what is it for? With Zuckerberg we have a real American mystery. Maybe it’s not mysterious and he’s just playing the long game, holding out: not a billion dollars but a hundred billion dollars. Or is it possible he just loves programming? No doubt the filmmakers considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming—if such a pleasure exists—in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible? Movies are notoriously bad at showing the pleasures and rigors of art-making, even when the medium is familiar.
It may indeed be that Facebook involves extending 'the hacker ethic' into everyday life, but mischievously divorcing that ethic from the technological domain which it initially accompanied. As I suggested in this post, the hacker ethic becomes especially disruptive, once no longer confined to coders (just as economics becomes most disruptive when no longer confined to the analysis of markets). But Smith's point is a good one nevertheless. Part of Zuckerberg and Facebook's power lies in refusing to inhabit any known 'vocation' (Weber), 'Sphere of justice' (Walzer), or 'order of worth' (Boltanski and Thevenot).
It strikes me that Britain's coalition government is doing something similar: promising to unleash chaos into public services, but without offering any justification for doing so. As I've argued before, this betrays a certain manic psychological element. But it may also be politically astute. George Osborne is a man entirely at ease with his own unpleasantness, thereby side-stepping Tony Blair's achilles heal, namely vanity. It was Osborne, as much as any Cameroon advisor, who suggested he remain sidelined in the run up to the 2010 election. He knows what the public thinks about him but doesn't care.
If Polly Toynbee is even half right in her assessment, we have a genuinely and frighteningly radical government on how hands. But to what end? With what justification? Driven by what vocation or sense of worth? Answers are few and far between, which must surely be considered a strategy. A government that justifies itself immediately establishes certain implicit limits for itself. It offers its critics a moral benchmark, which it itself has introduced. To justify is, therefore, to close down the scope for chaos, to set tramlines for the whirlwind of innovation. As David Stark argues in The Sense of Dissonance, innovation (as enacted by entrepreneurs) involves "keeping multiple evaluative principles in play", thereby preserving an element of uncertainty and maintaining respect for the power of contingency. Stark is writing about the economy, but transported to the realm of politics, this same principle sits at the heart of a Machiavellian or even Schmittian concept of realpolitik.
Zuckerberg's genius undoubtedly resides in refusing to adopt a single benchmark of success, as The Social Network well demonstrates. John Naughton wrote a nice piece a few weeks back about why the brutish Winklevoss twins would not be in Zuckerberg's position right now, had they retained control over Facebook - they were in it for the money. But Facebook seems, even more than Google, to succeed through a complete absence of moral rulebook, rather than a moral pluralism. The same is true of this increasingly disturbing government, which gives less and less account of itself, yet discretely unveils greater and greater policy ambition. To say that 'The Big Society' provides the moral vision behind the current NHS reforms is like saying that 'friendship' provides the moral vision behind a for-profit, privately-owned internet platform with half a billion users.
None of this is to say that Mark Zuckerberg or George Osborne is actually a nihilist. I'm not sure I believe in the possibility of nihilism as a consistent philosophy, but only as lurking existential unease that cannot be articulated. Articulation is already an exit from nihilism of sorts. However, the condition of the modern individual, as Weber would see it, is for one's vocation or meaning or ethos, to be a painfully private one. At best, it is shared by a small community, but never by society or state at large. The Weberian individual pines for a re-enchanted world, filled with shared meaning for all, embodied in great public figures or works - but this is never realised.
The Zuckerberg-Osborne strategy is the inverse - it is to refuse articulation, to keep one's personal vocation as private and mysterious as possible, to create an illusion that one has no justification for one's actions. It is a lie, of course, but one that then maximises room for manoeuvre. In practice, the nihilist is not quite without any morality, just without any confession of one; laughter is offered in place of explanation or justification. Twenty years ago, the Conservative government used to ban Sinn Fein's leaders from having their own voices broadcast, as a means of constraining their demands within the nihilistic category of 'terrorism'. Today, Tory politicians turn this same trick to their own advantage, by demanding that chaos sweeps through the public sector, but refusing to articulate why.
Thanks Will.
I agree that the Coalition is increasingly impulsive and disturbing. But is the reason for it quite as metaphysically alarming as you suggest? Several factors seem more evidently in play. First, numerous ministers clearly are out of their depth, having never come anywhere near a Cabinet or other executive office in their entire careers. Second, none of the Coalition knows how to run a coalition yet - British political life has equipped none of them for it. Third, ministers realise that the downturn, the cuts and the inability of the state to do anything at all about the banking classes all mean that re-election is at best unlikely: so moving fast and recklessly to create faits accomplis in the economy and wider society makes some sense. Fourth, all modern rightwingers are surely driven somewhat mad by their simultaneous need to be patriotic and admire traditional institutions and also to kowtow to neoliberal capitalists, the least patriotic and tradition-minded people on Earth. Finally, a deep problem in modern Western politics (and not only in the West) is that any politician who told the truth about relative decline, the limits to consumption, the pathologies of individualism and the state of the environment would never get elected. So explaining yourself too much is bound to seem like a bad idea.
Posted by: Ian C | February 22, 2011 at 11:33 PM
All good points, Ian. However, I'm not suggesting that the government is all that "metaphysically" different from any other government. They have reasons for what they're doing, but they seem to view those reasons as their own private business. That's what's alarming. As I argue, they've gone one better than New Labour, and thrown off even the shackles of the desire to be liked. Maybe they view Blairism as hampered by its own need for consensus and moral high-ground. Far more politically efficient to act first, then deliberate later.
Posted by: Will Davies | February 23, 2011 at 06:51 AM
Hmm. I'll go half way on this with you. I certainly think that there is a recklessness to current government policy as if they were simply adopting a scorched earth strategy designed to kill off the last vestiges of the post-1945 welfare state: consider, for example, education policy. I struggle to believe they think they're governing for the long term. Policy seems designed to store up as many problems as possible for their successors rather than lay the basis for realising a even partially formed dream of how things might be different and better.
Where I would partially part company with you, though, is on two points:
1. At the level of immediate, day to day politics I'm not sure I agree that they don't offer reasons for what they're doing. They do, they're just not as remorselessly good as doing so as New Labour were. There is a case to say we're all now so subliminally conditioned to expect world class spin and media management from Downing St and Whitehall that its' absence confuses us.
2. More profoundly, they're trying to put the financial Humpty-Dumpty together again after the Great Fall of 2008 - that is, they seek to recreate the international economic advantage of the City of London and financial services more generally that existed in the period of the Great Moderation. Much must be sacrificed to this end. If the initial blood letting and leeches don't restore the patient to health then, obviously, more blood letting is required.
Posted by: CharlieMcMenamin | February 23, 2011 at 10:45 AM
@Ian C
< moving fast and recklessly to create faits
< accomplis in the economy and wider society makes some sense
I'm sure you're right there. Thatcher's great strategic sociological insight was to recognise the "ratchet effect" of democratic socialism and seek to break it. These guys have learned her lesson well - do all the damage you can within one term to reverse the direction of that ratchet.
Posted by: Dick Pountain | February 24, 2011 at 01:13 PM
In more blunt terms, they don't really have a strategy and they don't believe in anything. This has been clear since the CSR:
http://perelebrun.blogspot.com/2011/02/well-duh.html
Posted by: W.Kasper | February 25, 2011 at 12:20 AM