Tweets Are The New Day Trades
“The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.”
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
Over the past few hundred years, as the prevailing narrative around capitalism goes, technological developments have enabled opportunistic and rapacious individuals to seize disproportionate power and influence. Over time, they’ve perfected mechanisms that allow them to continue to benefit from the system while obfuscating their involvement and avoiding responsibility for negative externalities. What’s worse, most capitalists have amassed great wealth not through creating genuine value for others, but through rent-seeking activities that exploit the system’s loopholes. Their behavior has spread like a cancer, with governmental constraints arriving woefully late to help curb their destruction. A select few profit while the disenfranchised masses suffer in obscurity.
Many don’t buy this simplistic narrative, the merits of which have been litigated to death, too often at rhetorical levels of sophistication most at home in a college dormitory. Much more compelling is the idea that the narrative above applies disturbingly well not to economic capital, but to social capital. Read it again, subbing in Instagram superstars for railroad tycoons: where does the metaphor strain or break? To what extent are we living through the era of social robber barons?
Human pursuits are mediated along two dimensions, the physical and the social. To put it crudely, your success is determined by how well-equipped you are to manipulate objects or people. The SAT consists of a math and a verbal section for a reason. From the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, our understanding of the physical world burgeoned, culminating in what Eric Weinstein has dubbed the “twin nuclei problem”. We reached an endgame of sorts: since the advent of nuclear fission and gene therapy, it’s been tempting to consider the material world effectively conquered and infinitely fungible. What a dream, to be free of our corporeal constraints to a degree thought impossible in any other era. Given this seeming victory, there is a tacit postmodern assumption that this development provides us at last with our greatest opportunity yet as a species: to forge ahead into Oppenheimer’s “different country”, to take the express lane up Maslow’s pyramid, bypassing former inconvenient truths like resource scarcity, the threat of actual physical violence, biological sex, even the notion of objective reality itself.
Just as we’ve broken down the physical world into its base components and can recompose it into anything our wills desire, we’ve followed a similar trajectory in the social dimension. Digital messages and postmodern deconstruction represent the twin social nuclei, our newfound mastery over human discourse’s building blocks and its base substrate. And just as the robber barons and corporations rushed in to take advantage of the lag between technological developments and society’s reckoning with them, social media companies and individuals with vast online audiences are now doing the same. Teen suicide, emotional isolation, and FOMO are the carbon emissions, thalidomide, and trans fats of today.
Material capitalist transactions can generally be categorized as wealth creation or rent-seeking. Similarly, social capital transactions can be divided respectively into good-faith dialogues and a kind of perverse bargain hunting. Good-faith dialogues endeavor to build mutual understanding between parties and solve real human problems through communication. Of course, all exchanges fall short of this ideal to some degree, but the implicit acknowledgement of this goal has long been sacrosanct in civilized societies.
In contrast, social capital bargain hunting is characterized by a reflexive habit of seeking out discursive transactions that will increase one’s social capital at a low cost, regardless of their corrosive knock-on effects. Tweets are the new day trades. Virtue signaling and Rob Henderson’s astutely observed luxury beliefs fall under this rubric. Blue check marks are the CEOs of social “companies” — their employees (followers) may secretly recoil at the forced corp-speak in their posts, but they grin and bear it for the ideological job security. Activist groups like Black Lives Matter are the “mutual funds” that allow social capitalists to pool their rhetorical resources to externalize, de-risk, sanitize, and hide their unscrupulous social wealth creation. Just as the material capitalists controlled the means of production, social robber barons in academia and on Twitter have seized the means of epistemological production in order to tear down capitalism and subjugate the linguistically disenfranchised. Who says you can’t destroy the master’s house with the master’s tools?
And so the question seems to be, given these parallels between our domination of the physical and social worlds, what lessons can we learn from mistakes already made, often at catastrophic human cost? In the new attention economy, how can we bypass an era of social slavery that began slowly with device addiction, preferred pronouns, and bankrupt activist degrees? What does the anti-trust legislation look like that will reign in social media companies and leave room for ideological competition? And how long do we have to solve these problems?