Generation Bubble

It’s no secret that Generation Bubble’s political slant tilts to the left. Which is as it should be, I believe most days. But like any idealist, I suffer the occasional dark night of the soul. At such times I’m reminded of some words of Samuel Johnson’s. “None of the cruelties exercised by wealth and power upon indigence and dependence is more mischievous in its consequences, or more frequently practised with wanton negligence,” Johnson wrote, “than the encouragement of expectations which are never to be gratified, and the elation and depression of the heart by needless vicissitudes of hope and disappointment.”

It is in the spirit of Dr. Johnson’s maxim that I present the following three theses.

1. The establishment, consolidation and maintenance of redistributive economic relations makes necessary bureaucracies to discharge these functions; but these bureaucracies breed within themselves a proliferation of sites enabling petty expressions of individual power, which eventually halt the redistributive functions of these bureaucracies.

Ever wonder if cops flip their cruisers’ sirens on just because they don’t feel like sitting in traffic? I do. The temptation must surely be too great to resist, especially where I live. Here roadways are a maddening spaghetti burdened with tons of cars at all hours. Never having had its own version of a Robert Moses, my town remains eternally captive to legacy infrastructure that was laid down in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

And, as I quickly learned upon moving here, car headaches don’t end once one gets off the road. My maiden foray into the bureaucratic thickets of the local Motor Vehicle Registry — which, incidentally, is housed in a decaying department store in a dead mall (a curious circumstance worthy of its own blog entry) — soon got me snarled in red tape as I tried to clarify my auto insurance situation to the registry’s liking. An hour of cell calls in the registry’s waiting area led only to a further muddle, as the ham-n’-egger I spoke to at my insurance company forgot to change the state’s name on my insurance card. By the time I ironed this out, it was nearing 4:00 PM, the hour that the registry closed. One grumpy paper pusher directed me to the individual charged with the weighty responsibility of . . . get this . . . grabbing faxes off the fax machine. This functionary, a loathsome toad of a man, basically represented to me that he would make no trip to the fax machine, some twenty feet away, until he finished his McDonald’s super-sized gut bomb, and that if I’d like him to check the machine on my behalf, I’d have to remain before him on the other side of the counter while he ate. So I essentially had to bear mute witness as he dispatched his vile repast beneath a sign scar whose smudged, ghostly letters read “Women’s Intimates” in order for him to fetch a document that I’d have to stand in yet another line to submit in order to receive my license plates. And I have every bit of twenty minutes to do so.

My purpose, of course, is not to bitch about the hassles of registering my vehicle (though I suppose I did just that), but to illustrate that bureaucracies are indeed a species of evil (evil which some may insist is necessary, but that’s about the best that can be said) for the simple reason that bureaucracies, redacted to their essence, are veritable engines for the production of sites and contexts for the exercise of power.

Admittedly, this power is of the most tinpot sort, circumscribed as it is by the ordained procedures of any one bureaucrat’s particular function, but it is an expression of power nonetheless. And I’m still enough of an existentialist to recognize the rather pathetically Promethean impulse behind my Big-Mac-gobbling exemplar’s actions. His peremptory lack of urgency isn’t an expression of resentment of me; my appearance before him simply occasioned a resentment he feels all along. He is, in fact, in rebellion against the bureaucracy itself and the pretzel logic of his function within it. He feels himself demeaned by a system of relations that have been rendered machine-like as a self-legitimating act, producing a whole laundry list of necessities — and thus opportunities to exploit these necessities — that quite literally did not exist prior to the bureaucracy’s bootstrapping itself into existence. Trammeled by bureaucracy into a machine himself, he can resist, can express his more-than-machineness, only negatively, through hanging fire, goldbricking, imperiously resisting the urgency communicated by the public he deals with, and just generally being difficult.

Imagine, then, new bureaucracies, many created whole cloth to deal with the redistributive project, peopled by such lordlings, and I think it becomes clear why many people of otherwise good will recoil at the very notion. The bureaucracy’s function depends utterly on the occlusion of it staff’s personalities, but this ideal jars against that expressed in the master narratives of marketing, which insist that the addressed individual is the only vibrant, fascinating, fully realized person in a sea of dim jerks. Thus bureaucratic functionaries are, like most individuals in this day and age, a house divided. The dissonances they experience in their own self-relations cannot help but propagate to the bureaucracy itself, which becomes a mis en scène for personality clashes, misanthropic contempt, petty animosities and the like, and thus gummed by such human excesses it lapses into dysfunction.

2. Social life has degenerated into a Realpolitik whose governing logic is that of ends-based pragmatism in service to individual aggrandizement through money and its cognates.

I once heard revealed on a radio interview a rule of thumb for lawyering: Never volunteer the truth; tell it only when forced. If I heard this correctly, then it comes as depressing news, because a quick survey of the current presidential administration reveals one unsettling but incontrovertible fact: most if not all of its members are lawyers. Consider this quote in an article by Garry Wills, which appears in the October 8 issue of The New York Review of Books:

Many objected when Dick Cheney would not name energy executives who came to the White House in 2002, though Hillary Clinton, as First Lady, had been forced to reveal which had visited her. Yet the Obama team, in June 2009, refused to release logs of those who come to the White House. (It later reversed itself, but only in response to a lawsuit [emphasis added].)

And then count all the denizens of K Street in Washington D. C., and the census of those professing the legal arts grows even larger. If the above advice is true, what is one to conclude? Can one count on everyone with a J. D. in D. C. to hew to this advice? Can one bank on never hearing a word of truth until it’s forced from them? Such thinking threatens to send one into a veritable Sahara of paranoia, wandering among shifting dunes of imagined threats.

Wreck's in effect: a future adrift on troubled waters.

Yet such anxieties about creeping paranoia should be tempered by another unsettling but incontrovertible fact: there is a tremendous utility in this lawyerly advice. It’s chief virtue is that it sets in motion as version of what French theorist and historian of philosophy Michel Foucault calls “microphysics of power,” an opportunity of a particular duration resulting from what one says or does and its effects. A commonplace of stock-market trading is that there’s money to be made on “the way up” (as a stock price ascends) as well as “on the way down” (as a stock price descends). This saying gets closest to what “microphysics of power” entails — a kairos, a seasonability to a particular advantage which from moment to moment undergoes alterations and variations until such time as the advantage disappears. The concept of microphysics of power considers an opportunity’s specific duration as a concatenation of moments, each of which is a complex of particular configurations and possibilities for action whose outcomes are more or less predictable. When, for instance, a sponsoring senator or congresswoman insists that a particular legislative bill must be passed into law in two weeks because she knows that beyond such time other legislators will have had time to study the bill and consider its more distasteful elements, she is employing a strategy that proceeds from microphysics-of-power type calculations.

I’m afraid that microphysics of power has become the dominant method of ethical calculations these days. As Facebook backer, PayPal founder and Ayn Randian Peter Thiel put it, “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”

A few years ago, the student newspaper of the university where I did my graduate work conducted a survey of undergraduates, asking them what lengths they’d go to secure a good grade. The answers the paper got, and which it published, formed a veritable textbook on penny-ante Machiavellianism. Some students blithely claimed that they’d flirt with, or even sleep with, professors or graduate assistants to get an A, or, barring this, would even make spurious accusations of sexual harassment or assault for the same end. And I in my time teaching occasionally would informally canvass my students on the same subject. The answers they gave me — brashly, unapologetically — were but variations on a single theme: Good is what gets one the grade; bad is what one gets caught doing. What unites a towering venture capitalist like Peter Thiel and the lowliest co-ed, then, is the casual sociopathy which underlies contemporary notions of success.

3. Technologically mediated sociality, rather than becoming the means by which radical democracy takes hold, is simply a testament to that very idea’s impotence.

Of my three theses, this is the one I advance with the most tentativeness, because the last word on social media generally has yet to be written. But if the so-called Twitter Revolution following the recent election in Iran reveals anything, it’s that far from clarifying the situation on the ground social media (in this case, Twitter primarily) tend to make it foggier. The very nature of the technology has an obfuscatory effect, if for no other reason that “microblogging” itself, even in the most politically placid moments, creates a deluge of tweets, tweeted links, re-tweets, re-tweeted links and so on, and so on, ad infinitum. To modify nineteenth-century political economist Thomas Malthus’s famous argument on the perils of population growth, a person’s reading proceeds geometrically while tweeted content expands exponentially. One thus can easily find himself overwhelmed by the ever proliferating volume of information on Twitter and related media.

As part of this inforrhea comes an intractable redundancy in the form of re-tweets, a vexing problem for those trying to get a sense of what’s happening at street level during times of political ferment. This June 17, 2009 BusinessWeek story quotes one Mike Edwards, a social network researcher at Parsons The New School for Design, who observes:

“There is this romantic notion that the people tweeting are the ones in the streets, but that is not what is happening. . . . The hubs are generally not people on the ground, and many are not in the country.”

So yesterday’s game of Pete and Repeat becomes today’s game of Tweet and Re-Tweet — only now quite a bit more than a schoolyard diversion, but with about the same amount of conclusiveness (i. e., not much).

What’s more, we face a very McLuhanesque danger in which the medium quite literally becomes the message; all these romantic imaginings of spontaneous uprising are projected onto the technology, which consequently acquires a sort of messianic aura in the process and turns reportage into gospel. Perception management thus becomes more a bottom-up that a top-down affair purely as a consequence of situational constraints: a handful of tech-enabled eyewitnesses tweet their observations, which provokes a frenzy of re-tweets from which reporters, barred access to the scene of the action, cherry-pick with nothing to guide them but their intuitions as to the information’s reliability. The net effect is, then, that rather than offering immediacy, events like Twitter Revolutions introduce added layers of mediation, such that it is incredibly difficult to evaluate information sources. Call it crowd-sourced propaganda; it’s certainly not objective reportage.

Prophets of social-media enhanced news reporting also tend to overlook the class element of their rosy prognostications. A trip to any library serving poor inner-city neighborhoods quickly reveals what social media’s revolutionary potential means to large portions of the citizenry. It means waiting an hour for a half-hour turn on a computer that was obsolete four years ago. This, I think, the dialectical image of the Twitter Revolution, which is really just an internecine power struggle between a monied superclass and its tech-savvy auxiliary. The former seek to preserve oligarchy; the latter to establish technocracy. But no matter how one slices it, the fact remains that it’s one elite contingent against another, the first armed with money and credit, the second with Blackberries and iPhones. And while this Olympian battle rages, those of the valley and plain wait their turn at a clunky desktop, hoping to look on.

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