Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian

The nation-state form was dysgenic. It worked against the dictates of evolutionary advance and survival. In an era of hypermobility, it served evolutionary interests to escape national constraints. Scales would fall from the eyes of the new global elites, they predicted. The elites would cease to see national identity as anything meaningful, and the conceit that they owed anything to their so-called fellow citizens would be laughable. They would understand that one’s countrymen were actually “the main parasite and predator,” their brains contaminated by the idea that they were owed a share of someone else’s hard-earned income.10 Sovereign individuals knew they had no obligations to anyone but themselves.

!!!

If you were a school-age child in the United States, you started every morning by pledging allegiance to the flag, but what about adults? Mouthing the national anthem at the occasional baseball game, showing a passport at the border if you happen to travel, filing your taxes every April, voting every couple of years. By contrast, most Americans clicked the icon of their favored social media platform once, twice, dozens, or even hundreds of times every day. For half a century, intellectuals had criticized the displacement of civic identity by consumerism.26 Srinivasan flipped the script. Why shouldn’t consumerism swallow patriotism? Aren’t companies ultimately more benign than the murderous twentieth-century state? What was the body count of Facebook or Google compared to those of Mao Zedong or Adolf Hitler? If the social media companies were dictatorships of a new kind, with power centralized in a CEO, nobody seemed to mind.

Again, this was not quite so wild as it sounded. Political historians have written for decades on the “invented traditions” of modern nationalism: the way that modern nations were, effectively, brought into existence through the creation of mass rituals and pageantry, the codification of language in dictionaries and folk stories in anthologies, the writing and performance of national poems and plays, the

The German philosopher taught that the master is always dependent on the slave. Neither island nor cloud can exist without its underclass. Beyond the masses of app-mediated gig workers, even the vaunted artificial intelligence programs work only because of the often repetitive routines and efforts of labor both skilled and unskilled.78 From Honduras to Dubai, the waged service class is the easiest for the visionaries to forget and the hardest for them to live without. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Singapore initially thought it had flattened the curve, until it was hit by a wave of infections from the migrant workers living in cramped quarters away from the public eye. The city’s leaders had seemingly forgotten they existed. The cloud floats because the underclass holds it up. Time will tell if they drop their arms one day and make something new.