The New Neoliberal Man

As I remarked previously, I have found Richard Sennett an interesting if at times limited informant about our times. Coauthor of the very valuable study of working-class perceptions in The Hidden Injuries of Class , he was rather less impressive in his twenty-first century study of neoliberalism, The Culture of the New Capitalism, with his weaknesses in analyzing the "big picture" of neoliberalism's "political economy," if glaring in hindsight, reflective of his credulousness at the time. Thus on the very eve of the crash that produced the Great Recession from which the world never really recovered, he was flogging Thomas Friedman's line that what it was then common to call "globalization" was natural, inevitable, unstoppable as the rising of the sun; and that it was bringing about a genuine revolution in wealth creation that for all its dislocations was so beneficial that one would be insane to stop if even if they could.

In reality neoliberalism did not just "happen." It was instead the outcome of the political battle the world went through in the 1970s and 1980s as American and Western Big Business confronted stagnation and inflation, and a greater militancy from the public at home and the developing countries internationally, pushed back against them; while in the scrum the interests of finance prevailed over those of manufacturing in the making of policy. The result was not a revolution in creating wealth, but, as the financiers reorganized the world economy as a digitally hyper-integrated, creditism-fueled casino in the interests of footloose capital, in appropriating wealth, with the reality of technological stagnation obscured by the flourishing those technologies most relevant to the process. Thus have we had an epoch where information technology has yet to lead to a productivity revolution in the physical world, but finance has reaped the bounty of an age of "fintech"--with the reality underlined by the combination of extreme economic stagnation (it is possible, even probable, that when one cuts the exceptional and conventional wisdom-bucking China out of the picture global per capita Gross Domestic Product has barely budged in a half century), with the explosion of the largest fortunes that recently gave the world its first trillionaire.

Getting this wrong (the less forgivably given Sennett's leftist credentials) it is not so surprising that Sennett got much else wrong. Correctly acknowledging the "New Economy" ideal of "dynamic" firms casting aside the bureaucratic structures that the older industrial companies created to cope with the stresses of the marketplace, he notes that companies structured in the new way suffer from grave deficits of functionality, like a lack of "institutional knowledge." Yet he fails to grasp that the New Economy can only ever be a fantasy peddled by cynical or obtuse management theorists to that species of vicious idiot known as the activist shareholder. Equally, in conceiving as the kind of individual who can thrive and survive in this exceedingly insecure milieu--an individual who can accommodate themselves to a situation where the institutions in which they work cannot provide a "life narrative," where previously acquired skills and past service count for nothing, and loyalty and trust are nonexistent--he fails to recognize that this "New Neoliberal Man" is similarly a fantasy, the age-old employer's fantasy of workers without human needs whom they can accordingly use as what they really want instead, "animated instruments" which can do the work they want done. As the idiot hucksters of Silicon Valley so much responsible for the delusions of the New Economy run the con that is the existing artificial intelligence "boom" on the even bigger idiots of Wall Street and everywhere else, it is well worth remembering that credulousness in the fantasy has had very dire consequences before for the economy--and seems likely to do so again given the state of "actually existing artificial intelligence." Yes, the "generative programs" can and do create very entertaining trailers for movies that don't exist--but until they can reliably drive a truck, or fix a toilet, or tend to the needs of the bed-ridden, the technology's actual utility will have very definite limits, and, as Cory Doctorow had it, its spread be a matter not of AI "being able to do your job," just let the aforementioned hucksters convince your boss that it can.