THEORY OF THE NETWORKED INDIVIDUAL #2
An inquiry into the origins of this ‘type’
It wasn’t that long ago – about four and a half years, in the heat of the 2020 primaries, right before Covid – that a resurgent social-democratic project, a decade in the making following a generation-defining financial crisis, looked within striking distance of winning the presidency. And a defeat, it seemed, would prove only a temporary setback, for the left’s continued ascent appeared a matter of demographic destiny, its millennial and zoomer partisans gradually but inexorably replacing more conservative silents and boomers.
That time feels strangely far away today; history has changed its course. The Covid years featured popular backlash, particularly against the BLM protests and criminal justice reforms, as well as reaction from elite interests who, through the intercession of certain distinguished senators from Arizona and West Virginia, managed to kill the most ambitious social welfare legislation since the Great Society. But there was something deeper too: a loss of the old confidence and assuredness, in the face of a growing set of social and spiritual problems not so easily explained by talk of capitalists and distributions of wealth. And in a surprising turn, cultural dynamism has increasingly become the province of the right: edgy online provocateurs building ‘scenes’ with crypto money, social media performances of ‘trad’ gender and family dynamics, a search for rigor and meaning in a revival of Catholicism. There is indeed an ideologically-driven millennial on a 2024 presidential ticket, but he’s no socialist: it’s J.D. Vance, representative of the rising tendency of Catholic ‘postliberal’ thought.
So what happened? An incomplete revolution.
The socialist revival of the 2010s, emerging in response to the 2007-08 financial crisis and the failures of the Obama administration, made legitimate and enduring critiques of establishment economic and political thought. It cast the economic transformations since the crises of the 1970s in a new light, exchanging the delirious exuberance of turn-of-the-century market liberals – for whom the fall of the Soviet Union, the development of information technology, and the rise of ‘globalization’ confirmed the continued rationality and dynamism of the system – for a critical perspective emphasizing the tendencies of unregulated, financialized capitalism toward crisis, class conflict, and the upward redistribution of wealth. This critique informed a new politics, one which jettisoned the aspirational concept of the ‘middle class’ – a signifier of growing prosperity in the postwar decades, which devolved into folksy happy-talk pablum in the mouths of Clinton and Obama – for a more realistic grounding in the ‘working class’. Rhetorically it emphasized inequality – the 99% and the 1% – and employed a more partisan, conflict-driven approach, preferring to polarize and mobilize supportive demographics rather than aspire idealistically to ‘bipartisan’ unity. It advocated for a revival of unions, and for more militant, rank-and-file governance seeking not only higher wages but also improved working conditions, attention to broader social issues, and greater political leverage. And it called for the renewal of the tax-and-spend welfare state, seeing the public sector, with its freedom from the capitalist profit motive, as an effective means of providing affordable essential services like housing, healthcare, and education, and of building large-scale infrastructure to support collective needs. While the more strident elements of such leftism largely lie dormant, these ideas have had lasting influence on both policy circles and popular expectations.
What this socialist revival left more or less untouched, however, was the identity framework, the ‘mode of personhood’, through which continued spiritual investment in the system had been maintained. For all the sincerity of its commitments to redistribution, public institutions, and working-class power, the Bernie/DSA left was in many ways driven by the frustration and despair of young college graduates attempting to restore the viability of a kind of progressive-minded careerism: go to college, study abroad, find your ‘passion’, move to a ‘cool’ city, and eventually build a career that is meaningful and interesting and, guess what, also affords the comfortable, if not glamorous, standard of living that you grew up with and expected. Bohemian artists, policy wonks, leisured academics, investigative journalists, public-interest lawyer-advocates, progressive educators, and many others – all expressing themselves and showcasing their talents, making the world a better place and garnering some well-deserved recognition in the process. Laborist class-consciousness was repurposed to support the more precarious segments of this demographic, as seen in the unionization drives among the likes of graduate students, television writers, and museum workers. But for all the rhetoric of ‘anti-capitalism’, there was little rebellion against the career system, against the desire for individual achievement, visibility, and status. Rather than dropping out of college and moving off the grid, starting back-to-the-land communes and rejecting bourgeois modes of respectability, these young progressives packed themselves into a select handful of expensive, commerce-saturated metropolises, endured the rigors of graduate school at corrupt ‘neoliberal’ universities, and used social media to keep the world abreast of their correct opinions, fabulous social lives, and various professional and personal accomplishments.
While the material, political-economic underpinnings of the system – its historical development, its structural composition, its dysfunctional tendencies – have been studied in great detail, the identity framework, the ‘system of personality’, the desires and aspirations which drive the participation of individuals in the system, which maintain the continued striving for its rewards, have not received the same scrutiny. This is understandable to a degree: while it is easy for artists and intellectuals to criticize the predations of industrialists, financiers, and tech overlords, an inquiry into identity and personality entails an uncomfortable look in the mirror, an honest reckoning with one’s entanglement in the system. But such analysis is necessary, not only because there is a contradiction between collectivist aspirations toward ‘socialism’ and ‘community’ and individualist drives toward distinction and recognition, but also because this system of personality increasingly appears dysfunctional, no longer fit for purpose, an impediment to human happiness.
In what follows I will provide a preliminary sketch of what I will call progressive individualism, which I see as a consolidation of the more domesticated and middle-class aspects of the heroic 1960s. I will argue that while this personality emerged organically among the ‘youth’ within the social conjuncture of the postwar decades, it today is a product of institutions and official culture, one providing the patterns of behavior and moral legitimacy that anchor a ‘mode of personhood’ adapted to the needs of this latest phase of tech- and finance-driven capitalism.
Progressive individualism emerges from the mid-century emancipation of the individual from conservative bedrock social institutions: the family, the homogeneous community, the nation, the church, Western civilization. This break was motivated by two broad desires: to overthrow the subordination of the individual to the institution, and the repression of free thought and expression by the constricting force of standards and expectations; and to smash the hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and so on which those institutions enshrined, thus inhibiting the development of true equality among individuals. Freedom and autonomy were valued above all else, while institutional authority in all its forms was seen as oppressive.
This includes the emancipation from the family: from adulthood as defined by marriage and children; from rigid gender norms prescribing roles and behaviors, in the home and in society, for men and women; from parental (especially patriarchal) authority; from sex-within-marriage and sex-toward-reproduction. These changes yield greater scope for the non-gendered (or at least less-gendered) parts of life, particularly white-collar professional work; greater openness to non-normative, individualistic expression and presentation; and the establishment of the autonomy of sex, its separation, facilitated by developments in birth control, from kinship structures, biological reproduction, and heterosexual norms. Religious authority was rejected as well, not only because advances in science and industry undermined Biblical cosmology and the mysteries of Christ, but because the Church’s doctrine of sin and sanctification of marriage and children made it a reactionary political actor, whose chief social role became the repression of deviance in the sphere of sex, gender, and the family.
There is also the emancipation from the conformist social structures and homogenizing identity formations of the WASP establishment (which were taken up also by the aspiring postwar middle classes): the white suburb, patriotic American exceptionalism, the heritage of Western civilization. What had once functioned as sources of stable collective identity were dismissed as chauvinism and narrow provincialism, rigidities constraining the free exploration of a prosperous postwar world, engines of political injustice and spiritual impoverishment. The flight from the 1950s suburbs was an existential search for meaning and experience: away from the stultifying Levittowns, with their cookie-cutter houses and picket-fenced lawns, and their subtle means of inculcating conformity in manner and appearance, and into the whirl of cosmopolitanism and bohemian counterculture, the syncopated rhythms of jazz and the mysteries of non-Christian spirituality. And the political events of the 1960s provoked widespread questioning of the innocent self-understanding of America as a beacon of freedom and democracy, instead casting this ‘enlightened liberal’ self-conception as a cynical means of legitimating imperialist warfare abroad and repressing realities of severe inequality and discrimination at home. Among this budding cohort of progressive individuals, the orientation to such powerful majoritarian structures and identities became a critical, mocking, denunciatory one – and typically for good reason.
Out of this rejection of traditional institutions emerges the sovereign individual, possessing a distinctive emotional complex grounded in its dual and often contradictory imperatives to both independence and authority. Volatile and dynamic, it encompasses both libertine and moralistic dimensions: on the one hand an exhilarating release from propriety, a wild outpouring of feeling and desire, a disposition toward spontaneity and instinct; and on the other hand the stern sermonizing of a revivalist preacher, condemning sin, evangelizing for freedom and justice, speaking one’s truth in the face of a corrupt official hierarchy. The instinctive, libidinal dimension manifests on the one hand in the cultural sphere, in the casting off of the confines of the analytical mind, artistic convention, and conventional morality in the art, music, and poetry of the counterculture, and on the other hand in the sexual revolution, in sex for pleasure, exploration, and self-revelation. The moralizing dimension manifests in the critical ‘activist’ posture characteristic of liberal rhetoric and social movements since the 1960s: finding one’s voice, speaking out with righteous passion, raising consciousness and confronting nonbelievers in protests and demonstrations, imposing the dictates of personal conscience on the external world. Despite its instability, this emotional complex has proven enduring because it generates a powerful synthesis of consciousness and pleasure-seeking, discipline and liberating structurelessness, operative both in private and in public: the personal is political.
This individualistic orientation was nurtured by the expanded accessibility of college education and the increased social significance of the career system. A convergence of interests in the postwar period – the corporate demand for white-collar job skills, the national-security need for cutting-edge science and technology, and the ‘civilizational’ desire to build a humane democratic culture attesting to the superiority of American capitalism to Soviet communism – made what had once been an aristocratic extravagance into a rite of passage for middle-class youth, offering not simply ease and refinement but the promise of upward mobility. The college academic environment rewarded autonomy, independent thought, and achievement-drive, and the college campus, as a place for free exploration and self-direction, for finding friends and finding interests, inculcated a taste for freedom, mobility, and self-determination. And the fruits of this experience – not only the credential but the network, the skills, the dispositions – were instrumental for navigating the rapidly expanding career system, and enjoying not simply an income premium but various social and spiritual benefits: the choice of one’s profession, the ability to find meaning and earn status and recognition though professional work, and the acquisition of contacts in ‘professional networks’ and of a professional ‘epistemological viewpoint’ providing a creditable and legitimate perspective through which to understand the world. The incentives for investment in education and career, and thus in ambitious, mobile, and self-determining individualism, continued to grow through the end of the 20th century, with the end of the postwar boom badly hitting manufacturing employment while making little impact on the professions.
This individualism was encouraged also by the dominant cultural authority of mass media and popular culture, which replaced the aristocratic gentility and country-club propriety of the WASP establishment. While this ‘changing of the guard’ had begun in the 1920s, with the arrival of the radio and the cinema, and the novel prominence of entertainers like athletes and movie stars, the watershed moment marking mass-media ascendancy was the famous televised Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960, which vaulted the youthful, relaxed, and charismatic upstart above his stiff and stodgy opponent and into the White House. The power of mass media and popular culture consisted not in some capacity as vehicles of propaganda, but in their ability to elicit a performative, outward-facing mode of personality. Increasingly, to be was to be represented in audiovisual media, in the sights and sounds of the culture industry, and this tendency compelled an emphasis on ‘performance’ that would have been foreign to the secure and self-assured WASPs: a demand on the individual personality to marshal its resources to produce externalized, concentrated, commoditizable expressions of the self. In so doing it rewarded elements of the new progressive individualism: youthful brashness and provocation, the flouting of existing rules and conventions, the centrality of the self and the ‘personality’, the creation of new forms, fashions, and sounds. Emerging from Hollywood and pop music, Playboy and Madison Avenue, this profusion of sights and sounds demonstrated the incredible vitality of the new individualism, cementing its dominance in a way that conservatives struggled enormously to respond to, being easily dismissed as old, uncool, preachy, repressed.
This system of personality, forged in the crucible of the postwar decades, largely persists today, shaping values and guiding aspirations, at least in liberal and metropolitan spheres. It retains a moral legitimacy from its contributions to the great social movements of the 1960s, particularly the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the protests against the Vietnam War. And the aesthetic touchstones of 1960s urban cool – NYC artists’ lofts, fashion photography, music-driven subcultures, novelty and youth, Warhol, transgression – still inspire much of the style and sensibility of contemporary culture. But this progressive individualism persists in a strange way: in a kind of ‘zombified’ form, or perhaps, to borrow a concept from art criticism, as a ‘mannerist’ tendency – an affected and self-conscious use of a style from the past. For the past half-century has witnessed the dramatic reorganization of the economic and technological substrata of society, which has in turn reshaped the various systems of social relations. And these structural changes have caused the conditions which gave rise to this personality, and many of the battles which shaped and defined it, to disappear.
Thus the intent in sketching this ideal type is not to criticize it on its own terms – to lament the excesses of the 1960s, and the delusions of the professional and cultural elites who fly its banner, as in the ‘culture of narcissism’ critique of Christopher Lasch, or the family-church cultural conservatism of someone like David Brooks. It is instead to argue that whereas in the mid-century this personality evolved in concert with the possibilities of the time, to solve the problems of the time, today it is ‘maintained’ by a vastly different constellation of forces, to serve vastly different ends. What emerged organically from the ground up, from energetic and idealistic young people rebelling, at a time of unprecedented economic prosperity, against a rigid, discriminatory, hierarchical establishment, is now in a period of stagnation propped up by a variety of institutions – educational, therapeutic, cultural, medical, advertising – through which established adults inculcate young people into functional and normative modes of behavior.
I will work to provide a more in-depth account of this soft institutional power in the next entry in this series. For now, I will conclude by arguing that this attempt to stabilize and maintain a post-1960s liberal system of personality is not primarily – as more conservative critics might have it – an ideological offensive of human resources representatives, diversity officers, and other associated villains, but a rather desperate attempt to habituate people to the demands of twenty-first-century capitalism: to the precariousness of the freelance ‘gig economy’ in the context of rising costs of living; to the peculiar ego-delusions demanded in the activities of self-promoting entrepreneurialism; to the ‘network’ mode of social relations, characterized by both the abundance and transience of relationships, mediated increasingly by alienated public-facing internet presences; to the ‘opportunities’ presented by the new economy in which ‘lifestyle’ is democratized while ‘life’ becomes progressively unattainable; to an ossified political-economic establishment which makes ‘politics’ less about agency in public affairs and more about social visibility and performance; and to the spiritual bleakness of a society in which the striving for individual status, for the success of one’s career-consumer-brand, takes precedence over collective values and aspirations, to say nothing of the existential questions of the transcendent sphere. Progressive individualism no longer threatens established values; it reinforces them and encourages participation in established institutions. It is no longer the ethos of empowered and rebellious youth, but a means of activating today’s newly low-agency young people and channeling their energy into conventional aspirations, without them complaining too much about the increasingly circuitous and isolated paths they must walk.
The 2010s were a period of ‘materialist’ analysis, of the rediscovery of Marx and a tradition of rigorous critical analysis of capitalist dynamics. It was productive for challenging the hegemony of markets, the insistence upon the superiority in all contexts of private investment and private ownership. And by reviving histories of labor and anti-colonial movements, it inspired the belief that another way of life can be imagined and fought for. But the material is only half the equation, and a break of similar proportions must also occur in the ‘immaterial’ dimensions of identity, culture, social life, and spirituality. There remains too great an attachment to careerism, to status-display, to the false promises of an expressive hyper-individualism no longer threatening to establishment institutions. The greater seriousness with which the post-liberal right has approached these questions accounts for its surprising vitality in the post-Covid period, but the various revivals and returns it proposes are, at best, limited, and hamstrung by a traditionalist nostalgia. The leftist remedies of workerist collectivism, however, are themselves stuck in the past in their own way, products of a bygone industrial proletarian period, and untethered from the restless mobility and independence at the heart of the American spirit. There must instead be a revival of a modernist spirit in the striving for the new, a return to first principles, one in tune with the needs and possibilities of the present, which severs itself from the glory days of the 60s and all other idealized pasts. Otherwise, the new world which began to be conceived in the previous decade will remain forever half-formed, and never brought into being.