This is Not Normal. William Davies
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distinction between the reporter and the reported is muddied.
Herd-like behaviour and thinking is one effect of this. Just as financial markets are subject to irrational bubbles of sentiment (where it makes sense to buy something because everyone else is buying it), news and opinion become subject to virality and collective surges of sentiment that rise and fall like the prices of stocks. The critic (who plays such a pivotal role in the liberal vision of the public sphere, as seen by Kant and Habermas) risks being ignored or unfollowed, and is therefore replaced by the troll, who denounces and attacks for spectacular effect. This means the rise of a new type of celebrity evaluator – Piers Morgan, Brendan O’Neill, Simon Cowell – who commands clicks and views by issuing judgements crafted for maximum controversy. Similarly, a new type of celebrity rationalist – Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Toby Young – emerges, to perform a pastiche of enlightenment for the benefit of fans and anti-fans.
The quest to be rated, liked and clicked is unrelenting, in what Gilles Deleuze perceptively identified in 1992 as the new ‘societies of control’. The value of a given statement is in how appealing (or shocking or funny …) it seems right now, and not how successfully it serves as a description of the past or as a promise for the future. In this post-liberal scenario, the data archive and the algorithm are what knit together society’s past, present and future, and not public speech or writing. This is what I mean when I refer in a number of essays to the switch from a society of ‘facts’ to one of ‘data’. Whether Johnson speaks the ‘truth’ or not becomes an irrelevance, and the ‘public record’ becomes outmoded.
Leaders such as Johnson are not trusted by the public. They are not expected to keep their word. Such politicians prosper under conditions in which words are no longer expected to be kept. The experience of neoliberal reforms, and of austerity in particular, demonstrated that finance – and not democracy – now determines which promises will be kept. Johnson and Brexit appeal specifically to those who believe public institutions are riddled with self-interested elites and need to be ripped up. The autumn of 2019, when liberals enjoyed a wave of apparent victories via the Supreme Court and vigorous parliamentary autonomy, was a mirage. The popular fury at this assertion of constitutional norms and regulations ensured that Johnson’s victory the following December was all the greater.
The impossible task confronting liberals over recent years, not just in Britain but around the world, has been to make the case for analogue techniques of record-keeping and norm-keeping, against the torrent of digital media and the outrageous, unruly, hilarious practices that it facilitates. Not only does the liberal come to appear humourless, puritanical and conservative in their commitment to public procedure and facts; they also appear slow. While the demagogic leader-entertainer is constantly changing the subject and shaping the mood, the liberal is still talking about something that happened yesterday or last year. The resentment aimed towards the ‘mainstream media’ and ‘liberal elites’ rests on the idea that their commitment to rules and facts is a cultural quirk (a symptom of over-education), and that society no longer relies on such things to cohere.
Once public institutions and norms lose credibility, so do the divisions that separate them. Liberalism was built on a series of separations: between public and private, between state and market, politics and media, and between the three branches of government (executive, legislative, judiciary). These separations have been declared a deceitful sham by feminist and Marxist critics among others, on the basis that they work in the interests of patriarchy and/or capital. But they are also undone by neoliberal policy reforms, which seek to bring all of social and political life under the gaze of a blanket financial audit. In the context of the ‘internet of things’, and the fusing of credit rating with platforms, neoliberalism could yet issue in an infrastructure not unlike that of the Chinese ‘social credit’ scoring system, where all behaviour – public or private, social or economic – can be captured as proof of character.
As these structural shifts are underway below the surface, so once-separate public institutions and jurisdictions begin to blur into one. Just as the separation of business and state was dissolved under the reforms of the 1980s and ’90s, and as the distinction between journalism and political campaigning fades, the very idea of power being ‘held to account’ by an independent, separate judge or critic of some kind becomes less plausible and then suspicious. What does the judge want? What is their agenda? Whose side are they on? Deteriorating trust in public institutions breeds animosity towards outsiders and those perceived as disloyal. This is how the collapse of liberalism produces the conditions of nationalism, and even of fascism. The assertion of a single national (or ethno-national) ‘people’, which unites government, media, business and public around a common destiny, is the ultimate PR victory. Who gets eliminated or discarded, in order for this bubble of mutual rating and liking to be achieved, is another question.20
Real-time Sociology
The essays collected in this book, which are grouped together in three chapters, were all written during the interregnum between Britain’s 2016 referendum and its 2020 departure from the European Union. This was a disorientating and fast-moving period in the nation’s politics, when many of the most dependable building blocks of liberal democracy seemed to be disintegrating. From the first piece, a blogpost written the morning after the referendum, through to the last, a column written after Johnson’s 2019 election victory, they are all efforts to make sense of what is unfolding, in something close to real-time. What they inevitably lack in quantity of hindsight, I hope they make up for in their immediacy, which grants a sense of how things appeared at the time.
There are various preoccupations throughout, that have already been highlighted: the abandoning of liberal economic rationality, the declining authority of empirical facts, the mainstreaming of nationalism, the hatred of ‘liberal elites’, the effect of big data and real-time media on our politics, the new mould of celebrity leaders, the crisis of democratic representation. These are all linked in ways that I’ve endeavoured to show. The over-arching theme is of a shift from a liberal polity based around norms, laws, expertise and institutions to a neoliberal one based around algorithmic surveillance and financial calculation.
The task for the kind of ‘real-time sociology’ that I was engaged in with these essays is to straddle the fast-moving world of the news cycle (which has grown significantly faster in the twenty-first century) with the search for underlying structures and conditions.21 This is not unlike the kind of ‘conjunctural analysis’ that Gramscians have long aimed at, and for which Stuart Hall’s work has been the model. Hall always encouraged us to pay attention to the new and unprecedented, and not simply view history as a predictable unfolding of underlying mechanics. Many of the essays in this volume perform a kind of brokerage service, moving between unfamiliar and shocking political events and familiar social and political theories, including many of the classics – Marx, Hirschman, Arendt, Foucault, Weber. In scurrying back and forth between my Twitter feed and my bookshelves, the hope is that we can understand what’s going on, without either wishful thinking or denial of the genuine conjunctural novelty.
There are obvious risks attached to theorising events like this. You can make a bad call, miss the wood for the trees, be duped by hype or by paranoia. I’ve never pretended to be much good at predictions, which I leave to the quantitative political scientists (my estimations of Theresa May’s electoral prowess were as wrong as anyone’s). But I think it’s important that we at least try to relate the flux of the present to the underlying conditions, which are more durable. When everything appears to be changing and unprecedented, it’s all the more important to find the continuities and precedents, without downplaying the shock of the new. One of the most dramatic transformations to have taken hold of public life in Western democracies in the twenty-first century is the way it potentially becomes ‘consumed’ as a constant ‘stream’ of content, relying on a combination of outrage and humour to hold and sway its audience. All academic disciplines offer a pause button of sorts, because they necessarily require slow and careful consideration of a moment in time, and can’t dwell in perpetual flow. But only sociology helps to explain where the acceleration arose from in the first place, on the assumption that something must be driving and structuring an apparently chaotic and reckless process.
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