I think about this quite a lot, most recently following the news that primary schools would be tasked with identifying children at risk of becoming NEET (Not in Education Employment or Training post-16). Alan Milburn, who has been leading a review of NEETs evidence and policy, told the Guardian “The warning signs are there from a very early, early age. You know, frankly from preschool.” I’ve recently written about Milburn’s review for the London Review of Books, finding it to be a thoughtful, troubling and serious piece of work. But there’s something mad about letting a broad socioeconomic crisis reflect backwards like this, to the point where potentially nursery school teachers are being expected to worry about exclusion from the labour market.

Having studied the evidence that Milburn himself collected, together with the extensive range of reports from think tanks, NGOs and academic studies, I would hazard a guess that the ‘warning signs’ of a four-year-old becoming ‘NEET’ twelve or more years later are not really warnings at all, but basic and uncontroversial symptoms of already suffering multiple forms of deprivation, disruption and exclusion, much of which (though not all) is to do with poverty and class. These might equally be read as ‘warning signs’ that the child might die of heart disease at a below average age, or of living in overcrowded housing, or of becoming dependent on loan sharks. Welcome to British society.

Milburn’s comment is a manifestation of what might be termed ‘progressive neoliberalism’, which came of age in the 1990s around the world, but which has retained (and in many domains, such as education, accumulated) legitimacy in the twenty-first century. This holds that class is something to be purposefully dissolved through competitive dynamics and the establishment of ‘level playing fields’, or what might otherwise be termed ‘meritocracy’. To question this is not to say that educators or policymakers should become fatalistic in the face of class, nor that overcoming its barriers through even a whole-hearted socialism would be straightforward. But we can at least note the reductio ad absurdum of evaluating pre-school children in terms of their future employment prospects.

Jones’s comment has also rattled around my head this summer in relation to universities. Can we agree that the public profile of higher education in the media and public sphere more broadly has now become ridiculous? At the same time that thousands of jobs are being axed from the sector and graduates are getting fleeced by their loan conditions, the fascination with the inner workings, controversies and politics of universities (disappointingly prosaic institutions much of the time) suggests a kind of weird voyeurism on the part of those who feel they have some stake in it all, but don’t really understand, and don’t really want to know, how things actually work.

Contemporary university-porn is rarely about universities anyway. It’s always about something else: inequality, race, gender, political identities, democracy. In her reflection on the Jason Arday tragedy, Sarah Ditum argued that the press was entitled to obsess over what was ultimately a “serious story”, seeing as it reflected on so many contemporary preoccupations. But of course one reason the press couldn’t leave the story alone (aside from race) was that it concerned a topic that the press can never leave alone: universities. Is there no other way to address the social facts of race, social justice, merit, disability and celebrity, other than through the reality TV format known as ‘Cambridge University’? The problem isn’t with universities, it’s a shortage of other ways of discussing and addressing society.

An irony of this present moment is that British universities (which have been around for 800 years) have been elevated into a rarefied and exceptional spectacle, at precisely the moment when they have become most ordinary and frequently dreary. At the same time that the media want to gape at their weirdness and insanity, they are being managed in such a way as to dissolve their specificity into their prosaic economic surroundings, with the use of ‘dashboards’, ‘partnerships’, ‘spin-outs’, customer satisfaction surveys and endless, endless marketing spend. This is what David Runciman was getting at in his discussion of the Arday case: the fact that the real, financially dominant Cambridge University is nothing like the imaginary one that fuels so much excitement.

School as synecdoche

Public discussion of education is rarely about education, but provides a synecdoche of society that allows other agendas and ideologies to be prosecuted. It becomes like a model village, in which one gets the thrill of watching as much larger sociological forces are at work in miniature form. Here’s a Reception class of five year-olds, in which inequality can be observed and tweaked. Here’s Jason Arday standing in for disabled Black people. There’s Nathan Cofnas performing ‘Freedom of Speech’. A huge amount of political, ideological and cultural presuppositions are being projected onto institutions that may never have sought them out. This probably doesn’t make for better education, and it certainly doesn’t make for better politics or policy.

If one were to trace the origins of this problem, a good place to start would be with Lyotard’s 1979 The Postmodern Condition. In that book, Lyotard reflects on the historic shifts underway (driven heavily by computerisation) whereby knowledge takes on a commodity form, broken into chunks to be sold and distributed, meanwhile traditional modern ways of knowing (which once generated ‘grand narratives’) disintegrate. The kind of ‘theory of society’ whose absence Jones was bemoaning becomes superseded by systems and language games. The university then becomes one significant node in global networks of knowledge production and exchange, no longer ‘outside’ of that which it might once have sought to picture.

I’ve often found it illuminating to consider the dual trajectories of education and finance in the years that followed 1979, which have certain things in common. The de-regulation and globalisation of financial markets after the 1970s effectively relieved the epistemological burden on centralised policymakers, much as neoliberals such as Hayek hoped. Rather than create a valid picture of the economy, the financial system would become the circuit board through which sentiments, guesses, expectations and ideas would travel, with bad estimations being found out, and good ones being rewarded. The market becomes a telecommunications network.

The realisation of this cybernetic vision coincided with the birth of ‘critical accounting studies’, which posed the question of whether economic reality was entirely constituted by the codes and calculations via which it was formatted. Interestingly, at the same time as ‘progressive neoliberalism’ was sweeping education policy, so there was a turn to new forms of ‘social accounting’, ‘social impact’ measurement, ‘triple bottom line’ accounting with respect to the financial sphere. If knowledge was primarily performative, rather than representative, it fell to progressives to come up with a way of rewiring the system, and not simply describing it more honestly. This is where the collapse of grand narratives leads on the Left.

In the space of education, the Right was first to try and reformat the system. It was conservatives who raised panics about ‘loony left’ indoctrination, and neoliberals who first introduced a national curriculum (in the UK at least), then later the auditors that continue to govern education on the basis of quantified ‘outcomes’ to this day. But progressive neoliberals were no less enthused by the prospect of opening up society’s circuit board to tweak the dials that would influence outcomes, only now around goals of social mobility, inclusion and the knowledge economy. One of the questions raised by the current NEETs agenda is whether the progressive desire to flatten inequalities of opportunity through intensive behavioral discipline (thereby overcoming the disadvantages of many inner city comprehensives of the 1970s and 80s) has ended up harming an unfortunate minority of vulnerable teenagers, through techniques of isolation and exclusion.

To be sure, universities themselves contributed to the collapse of grand narratives and the preoccupation with immanent codes. Bernard Geoghegan’s fascinating Code: From Information Theory to French Theory tells the story of how structuralists were complicit in a Cold War project that centred the university in the managerial and governmental administration of societies, while at the same time imagining that politics and subversion could be enacted entirely from within the bounds of the seminar room. The idea that classification and encoding are political processes, that can be reprocessed for political purposes, has become far more powerful than the likes of Levi-Strauss or Barthes could ever have imagined. This is not to agree with the notion that French theory led directly to ‘woke’, but that it is in some ways far more influential than that. Whole ideological battles are now fought within and over the terms of language games, that matter as intensely to the Right as to the Left. Mass democratic politics has been replaced by the politics of messaging, communication and memes.

What I don’t think the prophets of structuralism or post-modernism probably foresaw was the degree of entertainment and fascination that would derive from this new politics of code and format. The appetite for a version of ‘grand narratives’ survives, only now via the logic of synecdoche: we get to look down on ‘the economy’ by gazing at financial markets as they fluctuate before our eyes, just as we get to look down on ‘society’ by doing so at controversies surrounding schools and universities. (It deserves mentioning that the systems which have extended most rapidly into everyday life over the past thirty years - digital platforms - remain largely impervious to the public gaze, which no doubt brings its own political pathologies).

Some of this is captured very well in Jane Elliott’s The Microeconomic Mode, which examines how formats derived roughly from rational choice (game theory etc) provide the bases of entertainment spectacles (most notably reality television) in the twenty-first century. Many of these formats put people in hideous positions, rewarding ‘bad’ behaviour, and adding to the spectacle. I think this is roughly what ‘DEI’ now represents for the Right, a kind of all-powerful algorithm that traps people in a gamified socialist dystopia, to be looked upon with an obsessive disgust. At the same time, various political dead-ends have been pursued by progressives, which assume that social reality can be transformed without ever exiting the university campus.

Just pedagogy

The difficulty is that grand narratives - consensus theories of society - are not going to just be resuscitated, no matter how much money is thrown at the think tanks and imagineers of the Left or the Right. Andy Burnham can talk about ending ‘neoliberalism’, but that won’t in itself answer the question of what ‘postneoliberalism’ consists of in any consensual way, nor (as I discussed in this recent ippr round table) will it deal with the capillary power of neoliberalism, the way that dynamics of ranking, competition, strategy and efficiency-saving are wired deeply into many institutions (not least universities).

But what if we made a virtue of making things boring again? What if we actively resisted the elevation of encoded activities into spectacles, the overblown efforts to rewire society through its circuit boards? This has been argued for at various points with respect to the financial sector: it should abandon alchemical ‘innovation’, and be restricted to the humdrum management of credit and debt. Banks should become boring again, losing their synecdochal status for the wider economy, and becoming just banks. There’s an argument that the same thing should happen for education, that the heat should be turned down, the ideologies deflated, and the expectations that schools and universities produce some version of justice (that politicians and citizens admit they can’t) be questioned.

In her lectures on Max Weber, published as Nihilistic Times (which I reviewed here), Wendy Brown seizes a deeply unsexy Weberian argument, that the way to combat nihilism is not to go around deliberately inflating actions with rhetorics of ‘meaning’, but to prevent one localised sphere of meaning from invading and polluting another. Politics, religion and science should be kept separate. None should acquire domination over the other. The alternative is what Brown terms “nihilistic boundary-breaking”, where rhetoric breaks free of its specific sphere of sense-making, and turns into a kind of manic moral register, unmoored from practice, which eventually becomes the basis of meaninglessness. Exactly what pedagogy and research would consist of, if they were permitted to just be pedagogy and research is an open question. But this would at least relieve us of the political expectation that they might be sufficiently potent as to save us from ourselves beyond their boundaries.

Yesterday saw the publication of a fresh ‘revelation’ by Byline Times: the newspaper attacks on Arday were part of a “coordinated targeting by an explicitly anti-black race science network” funded by Peter Thiel. Except that there was no revelation, just a reheating of much that Byline Times has (very importantly and valuably) revealed in previous reports on Cambridge University, James Orr and Peter Thiel. But that wasn’t enough to stop this fresh ‘revelation’ from traveling on social media, as confirmation of what was really going on. The palpable shared sense that many newspapers had developed a herd mentality to bring Arday down was trumped by the frisson that perhaps certain individuals were directing this concert.

This all has the feel of a Dreyfus Affair, only one in which - perfect for the age of the ‘timeline’ - opposing sides retain a sense of vindication regarding two separate times in the narrative. The Right feels passionately vindicated in its portrait of Arday prior to his death; the Left feels passionately vindicated in its portrait of Arday after his death (Stephen Bush’s reasoned argument is that the turning point in all of this should have been the point when he resigned his Chair, whereupon he personally should no longer have been a story). So we have a political version of ‘The Dress’.

As in all Dreyfus-type controversies, both sides have now become swept up in fantasy and paranoia regarding the overwhelming power and cynicism of the other. The Right imagines some monster called ‘DEI’ that penetrates universities like a perfect synthesis of Foucauldian capillary power and a Gramscian alteration of common sense, somehow forgetting that there was nothing remotely secretive or managerial about how and why Arday attained his status (his triumph over adversity was lauded to the hilt across the BBC, Channel 4 and elsewhere). The Left is now indulging in fantasies of media coordination, metaphors (‘murder’, ‘lynching’, and even one ‘assassination’ glimpsed in the wild) that risk tipping into literal explanations, and allegations of culpability that assume some magical foresight of how everything would turn out.

We have grown all too familiar with Rightwing paranoia over the past 15 years. ‘Woke’, ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘the Long house’, ‘the Cathedral’ and so on and so on. The Rightwing imagination, and especially that of the Far Right, has been fuelled by non-empirical claims about universities, George Soros, HR departments, the World Economic Forum, postmodernism, liberal elites and ‘the blob’. Other than track the influence of these conspiracies, understand their psychological appeal, and attack their underlying conditions, there’s not a great deal that the Left or social scientists can do about them, seeing as they are resistant to fact-checking. But the Left and social scientists can and should oppose paranoid thinking within their own networks and institutions.

The nature of paranoia

A paranoid sensibility arises where individuals engage in what Melanie Klein described as “splitting”, whereby they resort to an unrealistic moralism, in which the self is perceived as perfectly innocent and good, while the other becomes identified as wholly bad. This can then become inflated with fantasies of power imbalances, such that the other is assumed to possess sovereignty and violence, while the self is lacking in any agency altogether, thus adopts a position of perfect victimhood. This is one condition of possible fascism.

Project this onto the social and political world, and what results is a complete disintegration of the sociological imagination (or, for that matter, the Marxist one) in which bad things happen and people suffer, without anyone deliberately seeking them. My contention is that, because it attends to institutions, norms, and a plurality of spheres of value, sociology is the only real defence against paranoia in the modern age, and the rise of paranoia tracks roughly against the decline of the sociological imagination, which is not limited to the discipline of sociology. A sociological account of the Arday story would need to do something like what David Simon did for Baltimore in The Wire, and attend to the media, academia and social media as interlaced with inequalities of race and class, in which individuals can be tragically - but not inexplicably - ensnared. Sociology, uniquely, is able to de-personalise and de-moralise injuries and loss, attend to their seriousness, but potentially liberate sufferers from the weight of grief and grievance in doing so.

A sociological question today is: why does paranoia seem to be on the rise? Or, to flip that around, sociologists might ask why sociology is losing its grip on the public imagination, such that institutions come to appear like fronts for conspiracies, norms come to appear like weapons, exploitation becomes equivalent to victimhood. There are a growing number of important contributions to addressing this, including this excellent paper and book by Fabian Muniesa, Paranoid Publics by Zahid Chaudhary and Doppelganger by Naomi Klein.

There is a lot that could be said about this, but it would seem that a life lived via screens - rather than via print media, broadcast media or in-person conviviality - has a tendency to heighten paranoia and deaden sympathy for (or patience with?) sociological narration, for reasons that are complex. I would posit that it has something to do with what Anna Kornbluh identifies as an aesthetic of ‘immediacy’, which pursues a paradoxical vision of truth, beauty and goodness as unpolluted by mediation, and destroys the tolerance for the necessarily imperfect work of representation, editing, reporting, curating, etc, that distinguishes public culture from private fantasy.

We know that the Left is just as vulnerable to paranoia as the Right, only with less politically serious consequences. The obvious manifestation of Left paranoia is in New Age retreats, mystical critiques of money (sometimes bridging to MMT…), and non-empirical gestures to heartless elites and globalists (sometimes bridging to anti-semitism). But under platform capitalism, Left paranoia also manifests itself in the form of influencers telling their audiences they are “being lied to” and “silenced”, which results in a feedback loop of ‘engagement’ and paranoia, whereby metrics lead content-producers towards ever more paranoid claims, which in turn draw ever greater audiences to subscribe in the hope of discovering some ultimate Truth. These loops both attack and steadily discredit ‘mainstream’ (for which read self-consciously mediated) institutions, by producing fantasies of their omnipotence and malignant intent (It’s amazing how quickly this process can happen. Here’s Owen Jones on his massively successful YouTube channel describing a prosaic DCMS consultation on ways to promote credible sources in online environments as “The Government Want to Shut Me Down”).

Why is Left paranoia different?

One response to all of this is: welcome to the twenty-first century. Perhaps this is how the public sphere works these days. But there are multiple reasons why the rise of paranoia is worse news for the Left than for the Right.

Firstly, we know that Left paranoia eventually meets up with Right paranoia. This isn’t ‘horse shoe theory’, but something that has been empirically tracked in the form of what William Callison and Quinn Slobodian dubbed ‘diagonalism’, a form of mystical eco-libertarianism, that treats all experts as in league with the state, and believes in “doing your own research”. A cluster of New Agey values - anti-vax, wellness, mystical ideals of nature, yoga - can quickly join up with paranoia regarding migration, asylum, and all efforts to govern society on the basis of facts and statistics. The pipeline between the two has been accelerated by the force of digital feedback mechanisms and algorithms, as Klein ably demonstrates, to the point where influencers and audiences may be genuinely unaware that they are making this ideological journey, so consumed are they by the reactions of each other. Yes this is partly about ‘grift’ but it can also take over people’s lives in a profound way.

Secondly, in a battle of paranoid fantasies, the Right’s will win because they are better capitalised, provide more identifiable scapegoats, and have more to gain from a post-sociological society. A society in which all forms of mediation and institutional power have been discredited in favour of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, will not lack institutions, but they will be covert, self-denying and unaccountable. This is roughly the future as desired by the likes of Peter Thiel. The ‘truth panic’ of 2016-20 may have been badly expressed, and overly dominated by aggrieved liberals, but I think the Left has never taken the epistemological crisis nearly seriously enough. Empirical sociology does not need to be expressly ‘leftwing’ (less still journalistic reporting), but the very practice of collecting evidence about society in all its complexities and contradictions is a necessary basis for any socialist (or social-ish) project, which is partly why it has so often been opposed by the Right. If it weren’t for Adam Smith, Karl Marx would have been just another Young Hegelian.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there are actual conspiracies in contemporary capitalist societies, some of which have global reach. Quite what social scientists or the Left should do about this remains an intractable methodological riddle. There are various cases of scholars of elites tipping over into conspiracy theory, most recently David Miller. There is ample reflection amongst social scientists on how to ‘study up’, though the task only gets harder as networks of power become more intricate and more distant. But the task cannot just be abandoned in favour of paranoid fantasy. Questions of high-level agency, coordination and informality have to be handled with care, neither disavowed nor seized with too much relish. It is especially bad news if publications that do important investigative journalism and mundane reporting allow that to become blurred with speculation and fantasy, though a real risk in an age of digital metrics. If power ends up merely a projection of the paranoid mind, then that lets real crooks and conspirators off the hook.

In the paranoid mind, agency flips between absolute and non-existent. In relation to the Arday case, his agency has been demolished by those seeking to elevate his martyrdom, which is both unrealistic and arguably disrespectful. As (Melanie) Klein would have understood, the paranoid mind cannot bear the idea that guilt might be shared around (in case the paranoid subject is crushed by it altogether), so it bestows all of it on the Bad Actor.

I happened to listen to this wonderful interview with Paul Gilroy yesterday, which has nothing to do with Arday, but contained an insight that is both more honest, compassionate and empirical than much of what I think is circulating on either Left or Right at the moment. When it comes to historical crimes (such as actual lynching, which perhaps needs recognising in its empirical specificity and not turned into a meme), we today needn’t feel guilty - but we might feel ashamed. We are not responsible for what happened a century ago - but we are responsible for what we do now. What I think Gilroy is trying to get us to do is to escape the polarised splitting of “I am guilty and therefore beyond redemption” and “I am perfectly innocent”, because between the two lies a perspective on history, and hence on society, as a web of institutions and constructs that is nobody’s fault, but may nevertheless reveal deep injustices that require exposing and repairing.

I want to make a rash prediction about the outcome. Arday will get quietly but rapidly dropped by the various forces in the media who made him a cause celebre over the past six years; his high-profile memoir (an excerpt of which is online, and from what I’ve read is not going to make any claims of fabulism go away) will still get published by Simon & Schuster, but get gleefully trashed by the usual suspects in the usual places, who are now on his case; he will get tacitly shunned within Cambridge University, find that many professional relationships become more strained and collaborations unavailable; and that will be the extent of it. He will keep his job, his PhD and all his other academic credentials.

This prediction may be falsified within a few days or weeks or months. But what interests me here is our society’s fantasy that there must surely be some ultimate epistemological choke-point or tribunal, which in reality very rarely exists. Those outside of publishing and academia are staggered that journalists such as Johann Hari could prosper, books such as The Salt Path could get published, or figures such as Arday could become Professors. It seems obvious that there should have been some fork in the road, where the question of Truth was established. But what if there isn’t? In which case, why do such epistemological fantasies persist?

In Arday’s case, any academic in the humanities or social sciences will not have a difficult job imagining each individual step in Arday’s journey between first contact with a potential PhD supervisor, and being appointed Cambridge Professor. It’s when you combine all the steps, narrate them as a heroic biography (as he has done extensively, with the help of the BBC and others), then throw in allegations of plagiarism and fabulism, that things become mystifying and maddening. But for the same reason, if there was no one individual step where a duty to Truth was neglected, it’s not clear what the mechanism would be now for Cambridge sanctioning him, at least not on epistemological grounds (some have asked why his PhD wasn’t checked for plagiarism before his Cambridge appointment, which is absurd; he holds a PhD. It’s not an employer’s job to go and re-enact an exam that has already been passed).

As many pointed out in response to the ‘grievance studies’ affair (in which hoax papers on absurd topics were submitted to, and accepted by, journals in cultural studies), academic scholarship is built on a presumption of good faith. Critique begins from a premise of trust, rather than trust being built upon critique. This is something we know from Stephen Shapin’s work, which highlights the importance of cordial and ‘gentlemanly’ relations in the history of science, and from Thomas Kuhn’s idea of ‘normal science’ as the implicitly conservative work of filling in the empirical blanks of already-assumed worldviews. It would be odd indeed if, as a reviewer in a double-blind peer review process, one’s first thought was: is this piece of work a confidence trick? One of the privileges of the professional scholar is to live without paranoia.

Reputation economies

Truth is produced socially, and therefore requires multiple actors to cooperate in its production, without questioning the venture as a whole. The way that this works in academia is via reputation economies, in which credentials are awarded, accumulated and recognised by peers, under varying conditions of anonymity. A bad faith actor can get surprisingly far in such a reputation economy; the main question is why exactly they would want to. Given the number of other more lucrative, lower-effort, quicker gameable systems out there, it would be odd to try and dupe one’s way through academic life, as opposed to becoming a TikTok influencer or a crypto bullshit artist, say.

The Arday story arises in the way it does not simply because of possible bad faith gaming of reputation mechanisms, but because of the way the reputation economy of scholarship has collided with that of legacy media, such as the BBC. Academic credentials are constantly running up against other modes of validation these days, in particular managerial measures of value (‘return on investment’, ‘impact’, ‘student satisfaction’) and platform measures (‘likes’, ‘follows’, ‘views’). In both of those cases, the potential threat to scholarly epistemology is plain. For instance, essays start to get marked with a view to how the mark might make the student feel, rather than to scholarly quality. Papers and books that perform well under the gaze of platform capitalism end up being more cited, and potentially more influential, than higher quality, less ‘engagement’-optimal work. These represent serious threats to Truth as people have come to expect it from the academic world, though they are now mostly just treated with a shrug.

What is unusual about Arday is that he has told a story about his life that appealed to broadcasters and big publishers. Whether or not that story is partly imaginary, part of the criticism being leveled at Cambridge is that they allowed this measure of reputation to overshadow scholarly measures (with the accompanying insinuation that Black Lives Matter had inflated certain reputational assets in the eyes of the media). The statement the university put out to announce his appointment made no bones about this, emphasising his biography and the challenges he had overcome. Should Cambridge have been more sceptical about some of the details? Should the BBC and Channel 4 News? Should Simon & Schuster? At a certain point, all were backing each other up in a cycle of hype and credulity.

As disappointing as many people seem to find this, there is no Truth Police that you can ring if you suspect an epistemological crime has been committed, because there is no equivalent of the criminal justice system for knowledge. In my experience, the cultural niches in which epistemological scepticism - bordering on paranoia - is most entrenched is in the fact-checking practices of US liberal newspapers and magazines, which probe the simplest of factual claims to a degree rarely encountered outside of courtrooms or police interrogation rooms. But I’ve long assumed that this is because the US public sphere is an otherwise anarchic, fantastical and religious maelstrom, in which the pursuit of liberal Truth has to be fought for with almost equal zealotry, as a rearguard action. This is not how scholarship tends to proceed, but I wonder if the idea of the ‘fact-checker’ (a comparatively marginal figure in society’s wider infrastructure of knowledge-production and dissemination) has acquired an outsized status in the public imagination, to the point where people (including many journalists) assume that such choke-points are what modern knowledge depends on.

Establishing guilt for alleged epistemological misdemeanors is, like establishing ‘bad faith’, easier said than done. When I used to run plagiarism hearings for undergraduates, I would occasionally come across a case of a student flatly denying that they had plagiarised, despite apparently incontrovertible evidence. This is a tougher problem to overcome than it might seem. The accuser really needs a confession. Having explicitly set some kind of gold standard for what academic (or journalistic) work should consist of - original, wholly factual etc - they then face the challenge of eradicating all ambiguity or controversy. If the defender clings hard enough to ambiguity or a counter-view, the accuser has few remaining weapons at their disposal. I remember from the Hari case how, following one implausible story being filed to the New Statesman, one of his editors asked to see his notebook where he had recorded what he witnessed. He agreed to share it, then reported that he’d lost it, and that for the time being was that.

Arday is responsible for what he’s said and done. But no single individual or institution is responsible for how he made it to where he made it to, and I suspect that no single individual or institution will take responsibility for punishing him, which (lets face it) is what much of this is about. The ability to move factual claims and credentials from one party to another, largely unquestioned, is (as Mary Poovey showed in A History of the Modern Fact) a feature and not a bug of how modern knowledge and reputation is generated. Dangers lurk wherever such circuits move back and forth between parallel spheres of knowledge exchange, resulting in confusions regarding expertise, fame and money, and how each translate into the others. The irony is that thousands of academics are losing their jobs right now, for reasons that are entirely financial, without anything to do with knowledge or Truth, though will do incalculable damage to the overall social system on which knowledge depends. My hunch is that, unless or until the Arday scandal becomes a more prosaic case about workplace misconduct of some kind, those baying for retribution will be disappointed.

Since Sir Keir’s fate has been settled officially for nearly a month (and unofficially for far longer), the prime minister has had time to offer interviews about his legacy. What policy does he want to be remembered for? Why, scrapping the two-child limit on benefits, of course, which lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. It is the sort of thing Labour should do. Unmentioned was the fact Sir Keir fought such a move for almost two years, even sacking seven mps for calling for it. It could have been announced on day one. Instead, it happened on day 509.

This is just one of countless anecdotes that could have been presented as evidence of what a strange and unlikely Prime Minister Starmer was. Those who worked with him seemed to be baffled by his lack of interest in the rudiments of the job that he had fought hard to gain. There were long murmurings of staff having to effectively guess what the Prime Minister’s decision or view was, in the absence of any signal in either direction.

This phenomenon became shameful with the infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech (which also contained the line about immigration doing ‘incalculable damage’ to Britain). The speech was ideologically appalling, there’s no question, but could have been viewed as a grim (albeit short-sighted) political calculation. What was truly extraordinary was Starmer’s initial mea culpa to a liberal newspaper (The Observer), that he hadn’t properly read the speech before giving it, followed by a further reappraisal to a reactionary one (The Sun) that he didn’t regret the contents of the speech after all. Aside from such indecision, trying to drive a wedge between oneself and one’s speech-writer, when you are the Prime Minister, represents a public demonstration of cowardice that most politicians are too vain to lapse into.

Whether Andy Burnham has now resuscitated some sense of hope, or merely of relief, the fact remains that much of his appeal is that he is simply able to do politics in a conventional sense. Many of the things that now seem exciting and impressive about Burnham as an individual leader are things that were taken for granted about Tony Blair and even David Cameron: having a plan that a leader appears to believe in, is willing to argue for, will take flack for (Burnham is still something of an unknown quantity here), and which others can then position themselves in relation to, either as opponents or supporters. Quite how radical Burnham will end up being remains to be seen, but some of the appearance of political radicalism is merely the shock of politics being done purposefully and enthusiastically, signalling how dysfunctional British politics had become in the decade following the Brexit referendum.

If Starmer offers anything to political theory, it’s as a kind of ‘negative political theology’, an avatar of what happens when politics is denied, refused or relegated. Starmer’s absence could be felt and witnessed across three different aspects of political leadership: appetite, destination, ideology. It wasn’t clear why he wanted to be Prime Minister (appetite), it wasn’t clear what he wanted to do with power (destination) and it wasn’t clear why or with what justification he wanted to get there (ideology). It was this triple vacuum that made him such a bewildering figure, psychologically as much as politically. There weren’t even any significant stories of psychological frailty, sensitivity, rage or rupture, that usually leak out from centres of political power, simply because politicians are such unusual psychological specimens. It felt like there was no there there.

Applying my negative political theory, it becomes clear that very few Prime Ministers fulfill all three aspects of political leadership. Tony Blair was never short of appetite for power, something that ultimately led him into some terrible company, and he was always extremely good at outlining a sense of political and policy destination. Decision-making seemed to come naturally to him - so naturally, that he fell short on my third dimension, of offering any justification for why he was doing what he was doing. Every time he was challenged on the moral basis for his decisions or his policy agenda (be it in relation to inequality, Iraq, or his own pursuit of power), he always fell back on a kind of confessional Schmittianism: look, you’ve got to take a decision, and that was the decision I took, when I took it. On Iraq especially, he seemed to run out of words when pushed as to why Britain didn’t sit things out along with most of its NATO allies, offering only that he’d had to make a decision, and accepted that many people disagreed with it.

Blair found (and clearly still finds) the very notion of ideology to be outdated and constrictive. This was partly a reflection on the times, when various sociologists, political scientists and social theorists were parading claims that the old ideological conflicts of the twentieth century were giving way to a new era of ‘governance’, ‘evidence-based policy’ and ‘third way’ syntheses of Left and Right. But it was also a reflection on his psyche, that he believed that politics was a space of doing and deciding, rather than of moral reasoning or narrating. I’ve always remembered Blair’s curious vacuum of justification, when asked in a BBC documentary, why he chose to go into politics. All he could muster as an answer was that he visited the House of Commons on a school trip, and the building made a certain impression on him. This was echoed in Cameron’s equally underwhelming response that he thought he’d be “good at it”.

Gordon Brown, in some respects Blair’s foil, was possessed of a different diad: a highly self-confident set of goals and policies (destination), a fiercely moralistic sense of why things needed to be done (ideology), but a faltering desire and self-belief (appetite). Evidence of the latter was the recurring problem of his political career, from the moment he could have fought harder for the leadership in the nineties, through the various moments when he could have resigned in the 2000s, through the 2007 cancelled election and so on. It is also why he has had by far the most dignified post-Prime Ministerial career of the past twenty years.

Over the past decade, the triad has disintegrated into utterly inadequate monads, producing an increasingly irate public. A Prime Minister who possessed only appetite (Johnson) was followed by another who possessed only ideology (Truss). To the extent that Sunak was effectively a quasi-IMF/Bank of England pick, dropped in like a Bocconi University technocrat to stabilise a joke nation state, he was really limited only to a predetermined destination, namely austerity. Following this triple-whammy, Starmer arrived offering none of these attributes at all, and demonstrating to his colleagues' obvious shock that he had no intention of suddenly unveiling or acquiring them. In that regard, Starmer’s elevation and his pitch to the public were symptomatic of the misunderstanding I discussed here, of believing that people despised politicians because they wanted all politics to disappear completely.

We have no way of judging Burnham yet, though undoubtedly he’s made a good start, even reversing Labour’s dire performance in opinion polls. But the starkness of the contrast with Starmer suggests that he is offering the various dimensions of political leadership that Starmer so obviously lacked. His willingness to lean in to ideological narratives and contrasts, offending those of a more technocratic and centrist sensibility, already marks him out from the Blair-Cameron style to a surprising extent. It’s hard to know why someone in his position would speak out against ‘neoliberalism’, or what he hopes to gain from doing so, but such lack of instrumental rationality may ultimately be to his benefit. Meanwhile, his flurry of policy announcements and goals signals a set of objectives: listen to him speak for 2 minutes (about the length of a TikTok video…) and you can repeat back what he wants to do as Prime Minister, regardless of how realistic all of it is. And nobody would doubt his hunger to be Prime Minister, given the ruthless and frankly quite opportunistic way in which he has maneuvered his way into the job. These attributes (or at least a couple of them) ought to be the least we should expect of political leaders, but so starved have British voters been over the past ten or more years, that the appearance of a leader wanting to lead has become refreshing.

Tooze is an exceptional public intellectual, a figure of understandable fascination to many, myself included, for his breadth of knowledge, work-rate and ability to straddle multiple public spheres that are often ignorant of each other or worse. Nobody else could take a typically acidic Perry Anderson slap-down and turn it into a fertile source of reflection on the nature of contemporary epistemology and historiography. To remain sufficiently genial to succeed in a ‘very online’ capacity, while relentlessly serious, is no easy feat.

But I am also interested in MrBeast, someone whom Tooze resembles in the superficial sense that both exploit the global reach of the internet to a degree that few rivals in their fields have ever matched. There is something else to the analogy. I’ve noticed while listening to Ones and Tooze that one of Tooze’s favourite words is ‘ginormous’, a word I distantly remember being told as a child not to use because it was made up (a fusion of gigantic and enormous), but has perhaps now become lingua franca. Be they in war, finance, ecology or industry, Tooze is drawn to ginormous things and vast numbers. A recurrent theme in Ones and Tooze is the ginormous scale of development that has been witnessed in China over the last thirty years, whose scale - the rate of urbanization, the quantity of concrete that has been poured, the CO2 emissions that have resulted - is almost impossible to fathom.

According to Kant’s definition of the ‘sublime’, the human mind experiences a form of pleasure from witnessing vast and over-powering phenomena (think of a thunder storm or mountain range) because it suffers a brief terror that it is unable to process something of such scale, before being thrown back upon itself and finding that its own powers of reason remain in tact. There is relief in the discovery that no quantity of sense data is sufficient to overpower reason. There has long been a sense that you don’t ‘get’ China until you have witnessed or attempted to reckon with a socioeconomic scale that has never been encountered before in history. And yet you live to tell the tale, indeed there is a sense that you must.

It is said that, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown’s idea of globalisation and Britain’s place in the world was upended by an early visit to China, whereupon he got to see with his own eyes the ginormous scale of what was growing there. Facts on their own hadn’t achieved this. Merely knowing that Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world does not lead to an encounter with the ‘sublime’, any more than being told what a Turner painting is depicting. You need to see it or, short of that, you need lots of numbers with zeroes to really get a sense that at a certain point, as Stalin famously said, quantity has a quality all of its own.

Getting people to grasp that we are living through a period in which - with enough scale thrown in - percentage changes also become epochal changes, seems to me a central ambition of Tooze’s public education work. The global economy has a ‘sublime’ force, something that for the likes of Friedrich Hayek defeated efforts by economists to model or know it. But if one is willing to give up on modelling, merely stand back and collect some vast numbers, it turns out that reason is not entirely defeated after all, much as Kant argued. A form of masochistic pleasure ensues.

Crisis of measure

In their work on ‘post-Fordism’ a number of Italian Marxists have argued that, once value comes to reside in affective labour and creativity, a ‘crisis of measure’ occurs. The workplace can no longer be governed by Taylorist principles of time and motion, once output is relational, psychological and experiential in nature. This prompts the optimistic visions seen in work such as Hardt and Negri’s Empire, resting on the idea that value will inevitably become socialised, once it can no longer be calculated.

It strikes me that the platform capitalism that developed from the mid-2000s onwards may suffer from a ‘crisis of measure’ (or at least, an extreme privatisation and centralisation of measure), but not a crisis of quantification. As I argued in this article on surveillance of pulse-rates, quantification is endlessly available to us, while measure (authoritative, normative, public yardsticks of comparison) is often absent. Measures, after all, needn’t necessarily be quantitative, so long as they resolve disagreements and establish mutually agreed differences (I have sometimes used the example of a ‘riders must be taller than this line’ signs on fairground rides, to illustrate this point to students).

There is a possible relation here to the political woes confronting liberal democracies in the twenty-first century, whereby people are presented with a mass of numbers about themselves and other people, but a shortage of authoritative measures and models to confirm what is just or unjust, normal or abnormal. We no longer live in an age of ‘class’ (rooted in a theory of how society works) but of ‘inequality’, in which everyone is doing better than some people, but less well than others. The repeated finding that supporters of the radical Right experience ‘relative deprivation’ (not material deprivation, but an aggrieved feeling that someone else is doing better than them) is perhaps a symptom of an age in which quantity has broken free of measurement. (I explored how theories of modernity were giving way to a rush of data concerning wealth and capital, including the way this elevated a historical consciousness over a sociological one, in this LRB piece of a few years back).

The era of globalisation that began circa 1990 occasions its own particular crisis of measure, arising from the fact that billions of people and things were now interacting via the same trading, informational and cultural platforms at global scale. Obviously many measures persist: the OECD, World Economic Forum, World Bank et al were all, in their own way, founded to ensure that global capitalism remained within the purview of economic and statistical measures. But a chart showing comparative GDP or national competitiveness misses the fact that, as Tooze relentlessly emphasises, when numbers get much bigger, something changes qualitatively, culturally and politically. One needs to open oneself up to the lack of measure (to the sublime) in order to gain an honest encounter with global capitalism, and the way to do so is to front up to ‘numbers with lots of zeros’. As an aesthetic, this is perhaps most associated with the photographs of Andreas Gursky, whose career roughly coincides with the era of post-communist globalisation.

One articulation of this ‘crisis of measure’ is the notorious Chris Anderson essay, The End of Theory, published in 2008 to announce the age of ‘big data’ (one of those essays like ‘the End of History’ which, despite being hated by academics and the Left, serves a necessary purpose of expressing an enemy episteme succinctly). Anderson was correctly pointing out that the sheer quantity of data now being accumulated by internet platforms with global reach presented new epistemological opportunities. One of the opportunities he didn’t explore, but which may turn out to be most consequential, was the intensive training of AI models. ‘Theory’ becomes unnecessary, Anderson argued, once everything becomes about pattern recognition in large data sets. Quantification is sufficient.

But even under these conditions, numbers don’t just float around untethered from each other: they are connected by algorithms of one kind or another. An algorithm isn’t quite a theory or a model, but a rule with which to reason, such as a financial balance sheet. It doesn’t determine or control numbers, but it processes them in real-time. The survival of the mental algorithm, in the face of overwhelming sense data, is roughly the Kantian sublime.

Spectacular algorithms

What is it that both frightens and excites about China’s extraordinary development? I wonder if it is the presence of an algorithm, turning big numbers into even bigger numbers, without any over-arching meaning or purpose, but nevertheless according to a mathematical rule. That rule was most simply distilled by Karl Marx as M-C-M: money gets turned into commodity, which gets turned into more money. The sublime horrors of 1840s Manchester were not enough to defeat the human mind, which noted that at its core was a set of numbers being fed in, and larger numbers coming out. Keep adding more and more and more zeroes, and eventually you get to twenty-first century China. But the same algorithm knits everything together.

Because Tooze is distantly influenced by critical accounting studies, which in turn is inspired by Michel Foucault (see this Tooze paper, which somewhat reflects on this inheritance), he aims to follow and deploy the algorithm that is actually formatting and performing things, rather than the one adopted by the outsider and the critic. Hence why his exploration of the global capitalism is via the lens of non-Marxist economics, financial accounting practices and macro-finance (and hence partly his beef with Anderson). These are more like ‘technologies’ that convert number X into number Y, and which knit global capitalism together into something more than sheer chaos. But they don’t satisfy the demand to know what is really going on or why, to the extent that a theory or explanation does.

Part of what makes global capitalism awesome, then, is that it doesn’t collapse - not under the weight of its own contradictions (though there is always that) but under the weight of its own gigantic scale. Algorithms invented in renaissance Italy to enable merchants to record who owed how much to whom still work no matter how many zeroes are added to everything, to the point where they become a form of spectacle in their own right. Capitalism becomes both terrifying and spectacular, wholly unethical yet technologically magnificent.

This is also what MrBeast understands. YouTube is what Kevin Munger terms an ‘apparatus’, not unlike a market, in which a number of people - content creators, viewers, YouTube’s owners - come together to share data, attention and money, according to an algorithm designed and overseen by the platform. It works if the numbers concerned are very small, but works equally well if the numbers are extremely big.

At present, MrBeast has half a billion YouTube subscribers and is worth $2.6bn. But he got to this scale by basically just reverse engineering the algorithm that would get him there, producing whatever attracted the most eyeballs, achieving the kind of exponential growth of audience, revenue, money to hand out, and then more audience, that is also seen in other forms of global capitalism. As Max Read’s observation attests, part of what makes this spectacular and irresistible is sheer scale: the fact that MrBeast is so famous, such large sums of money are at stake, so many people are willing to participate in his games. Ultimately the viewer is a spectator on a set of algorithms, those that underpin the games he creates, but also the remarkable coordinating algorithm of the global ‘apparatus’ that makes it all possible.

The question is what does crisis even mean or look like, if numbers can just grow and grow indefinitely, thanks to algorithms that are indifferent to how many zeroes there are? The apparent crisis of the ‘attention economy’ that has been mastered by MrBeast is manifest in by the fact exponential growth of short-form video content, and exponential increase in the time spent attending to it, runs up against the limits of what is expected of the human brain: concentration, ‘normal’ sleep patterns, a capacity to narrate and interpret in a way rooted in humanist ideas of meaning. There is a sense at large right now that short-form video is devouring all other forms of cultural, social and political expression. Call this a panic, but what if we’ve barely started?

From what I understand of Tooze’s project, crisis lies in a different set of vast numbers, those that make up climate, something that (according to Paul Edwards’ Vast Machine) only exists as an ‘object’ thanks to the Cold War capacity to collect meteorological data at a scale never hitherto possible. It’s not the contradiction underlying ‘M-C-M’ that will eventually blow up, but the fact that human society as we know it can only exist within a relatively narrow quantitative range of temperatures. Never have numbers taken on such historical and existential urgency than where it comes to climate. In each case, the vortex of ‘number goes up’ eventually takes us somewhere that we never chose to be.

One legitimate response to Turness’s argument is sheer cultural pessimism. Are we now going to move from a broadcast media ecology based around reporting, fact-checking, on-the-ground filming, and some idea of objectivity (no matter how flawed), towards a platform-based one, based around people sitting behind microphones pontificating, reacting, emoting and generally declaiming? While the public appetite for clips of Gary Lineker, Piers Morgan, Emily Maitlis and Joe Rogan performing some authentic ‘take’ for the camera cannot be inexhaustible, I am somewhat fascinated by the fact that it does not yet seem to have been sated.

To take football as a salient example right now, the ‘progress’ from BBC Match of the Day to various Lineker-adjacent video podcasts seems to be that while the former has paid for copyrighted clips and highlights, the latter liberates Alan Shearer to use the ‘f’ word. Equally, on Newsnight, Emily Maitlis was equipped with data, editorial support, professional footage, a wide range of guests, whereas now, on the News Agents, she loses all of that but gets to… use the ‘f’ word. Maybe the BBC could see off the challenge that Turness identifies, simply by relaxing its rules on swearing.

I am bewildered, and not a little concerned, by what will happen should the drift from ‘news’ (as we understand it) to ‘affective reaction’ continue in this direction indefinitely. The statistics here are startling, some of which I covered in my piece on TikTok for the LRB last summer. (Since 2013, for example, the proportion of adults in the UK and US who consume no conventional news media at all has risen from 8 per cent to 30 per cent; the average British TikTok user dedicates more than 42 hours a month to watching videos which rarely last longer than thirty seconds.)

And yet one can see from a brutal, Schumpeterian perspective that a form of platform-driven creative destruction is under way, and that the victims are likely to be bureaucrats, middle-managers, administrators, and (the worry must be) editors, investigative journalists, researchers and fact-checkers. Legacy media institutions are hierarchical and burdened by levels of public accountability that platform-based content producers are not to the same extent, which is not to say that there aren’t some excellent new Substack-based investigative and journalistic operations out there. One can also imagine the sense of liberation that arises when ‘talent’ (as I am here choosing to describe football pundit Alan Shearer) gets to do its thing, unconstrained by bureaucrats creaming off money and not even letting it say the word ‘FUCK’.

From the consumer’s side, the extraordinary popularity of ‘media persona I recognise speaking into microphone with other media persona I recognise’ as a genre of ‘television’ (albeit, generally viewed on a phone for a few minutes at a time) also speaks of a zeitgeist of what Anna Kornbluh terms ‘immediacy’, which in this instance means appearing to cut loose from professional ‘media’. In short, we are living through a moment when both the producers and the consumers of culture are impatient for the middle-men to get out of the way, something which has both troubling and understandable elements.

Disintermediating knowledge

Now imagine a situation in which Alan Shearer is told to go out and seek funding to produce football-based content, in competitions where he has less than 5% chance of success. In the unlikely event that he wins said funding, the BBC immediately takes 40% of it simply to cover the costs of continuing to be the BBC. Alan Shearer naively assumes that the remaining 60% will allow him to produce content, but soon discovers that this is not necessarily the case, and that he might end up having to do this in his spare time on top of other administrative duties. Alan Shearer has now discovered what it is like to be a scholar working in a British university.

It’s a bad analogy in lots of ways, most of all because celebrity is not constitutive of what an academic researcher does, and (save for a few superstar scientists) the balance of power is generally not in their favour. But it is worth recognising that universities have ended up in the worst of all worlds, in which their operating costs are now so high that nearly half of them are running deficits, which means they are forced to cream off an even higher percentage of revenue to day-to-day operations, taking even more money away from the activities that were their original raison d’etre. Financial and legitimation crises reinforce one another in a vicious circle.

This has already been widely discussed when it comes to tuition and tuition fees. Take this table from the Milburn NEETs review:

When I saw this, a naive question popped into my head: how exactly did we get here? Academics are paid significantly more than primary school teachers, but many of them also teach to rooms of 100+ students, who are expected to conduct much (traditionally most) of their own learning, and whose ‘contact time’ is less than half of the working week (I appreciate this characterization best describes the humanities and social sciences). Is it not possible to imagine a version of university that is lower cost, and better for students and society, and better for academics?

Higher education in the UK faces quite enough crises right now, which have already been analysed extensively. I don’t mean to add to this. But it is curious right now how, in one respect, universities are not only failing to keep up with tendencies at large elsewhere in economy and society, but actively pulling in the opposite direction. Despite the rhetoric of ‘impact’, ‘public engagement’, ‘networks’ and so on, and their vast splurge of (student applicant-aimed) marketing content that is now being pumped into social platforms, the massive power-grab that is underway on the part of centralised senior managers is in many ways reminiscent of a bloated twentieth century bureaucracy. A vast amount of money, time and energy now goes into simply continuing to operate.

As I reflected in my post-mortem on the Goldsmiths Political Economy Research Centre, the freedom we were granted a decade ago to just do stuff produced an unusually efficient research culture. One might even call it ‘content production’, the point is that it involved very few people, and all of them were doing something that added directly to the value of what was produced. This has basically disappeared from higher education.

No disrespect to any academic administrators, least of all the ones that work on the front-line helping students and staff, but it is a recognised fact that managerial ranks have grown bloated at the same time as centralisation of control has progressed. The amount that universities spend on marketing, chasing the chimera of student satisfaction, collecting data about themselves, and inflating executive pay (in addition to factors outside of their control, that fall under ‘cost of living’, taxation and satisfying the regulator) mean that the overhead of running a university just keeps on rising. A sign of how far things have got is that the one policy intervention that really confronts this - arguing for the scrapping of the National Student Survey, the eradication of exploitative precarious academic jobs, and the elevation of academic voice within governance arrangements - is a recent report from Policy Exchange (a rightwing think tank).

If this were a business sector (and we have weathered decades now of being told that it is) it would be ripe for disruption - some obviously bad, but some possibly less bad. The richest member of the Blair family has already spotted a gap in the market for a ‘human capital’ investment and matching platform. I’ve often wondered what would happen if a large global employer - PWC, say - were to respond to the crisis of university assessment by simply declaring that they would ignore all university paper from now on, and set their own entry recruitment tests. And then, of course, there is Peter Thiel luring people out of university with bags of cash.

But all of those examples relate to the function of universities as educators and accreditation agencies. What of research? How much of the £9bn UKRI every year spends on ‘research’ actually goes on research? How much money in fact goes on rendering that spending auditable, and on covering the rising costs of those who keep tabs on the researchers? How much time and money is spent reviewing the vast number of unsuccessful grant applications, a number that has risen primarily because managers have compelled academics to up their rate of application? And how much money is spent preparing REF submissions (and mock REF submissions, and pre-mock REF submission meetings, and etc etc), and administering the REF itself? All of this is a form of ‘overhead’.

Two cheers for mediation

The problem with the above type of argument is that it gets seized by the wrong actors, and used as the basis for an even greater power grab at the centre, and a hollowing out of valuable activities. ‘Dis-intermediation’ right now means bringing in AI, producing mass disillusionment. Universities will no doubt take some lessons from the video-podcast economy, not that hierarchy, audit and bureaucracy have become excessive, but that live in-person lectures are outmoded. We’ve been told enough that we need a ‘Joe Rogan of the Left’, but I dread the day when the current crisis of universities is deemed to require a ‘Joe Rogan of the Humanities’.

A lot of mediating labour is necessary, both in news and in academic research. Peer review, fact-checking, editorial oversight, maintaining procedural integrity are all interruptions in the production of ‘content’ and its transmission to ‘consumers’. Scarce resources need to be allocated according to some criterion of value, that someone needs to apply. But it’s not clear that these processes are what accounts for the bloated, conservative nature of the heavily centralised institutions concerned.

A paradox of institutional integrity arises, both in the media and in universities. Especially in these post-Brexit, post-Trump times, large liberal institutions are stuck in a mode of permanent apology, guiltily scouring their activities for evidence of ‘bias’ and misdemeanor, spending ever more money trying to root out minuscule instances of fraud, while their accusers revel in their own corruption and aren’t even interested in the facts anyway.

Meanwhile, the public is moving on, not towards providers who satisfy this phony demand for moral rectitude and financial prudence, but on the contrary to a more decentralised, liberated, ‘Fuck you’ economy, where Alan Shearer and Emily Maitlis appear to be themselves, and the hypocritical cycle of BBC-bashing and self-bashing is out of their eye-line. It would be odd if, at some point, this post-bureaucratic, post-audit ethos doesn’t come for universities, whereupon there will be considerable cause for concern, but also some sense of inevitability.

The piece began because I found myself reading training manuals and thinking: this sounds oddly like Nietzsche. The characterization of punishment, morality and shouting ‘no!’ as human inventions to be judged in terms of their results is common to both Steve Mann’s Easy Peasy Puppy Squeezy and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. I had also been reading B. F. Skinner over the past year, as research for my next book, and recognised the same critique of words such as ‘intention’, ‘good’, ‘self’ and so on. For Skinner, these are all misleading fictions that obscure what really influences what we do, which is a mixture of conditioning and immediate environment.

Dog training - but also other forms of post-human control and cybernetics - requires one to try and step outside a world of rules, moral oughts, guilt and accountability, and inhabit a world as envisaged by Skinner, in which there are just rewards and penalties, which occur alongside different behaviours. Central to the message of the modern trainer is that shouting, punishing and lead-yanking, which are such familiar ways of responding to unruly behaviour, are both unkind and (more importantly) ineffective. In a curious way, radical behaviourism represents one possible exit from the kind of punitive, self-lacerating morality opposed by Nietzsche - it’s just that this perhaps becomes more obvious when we are dealing with dogs than with adult humans.

Similarly with children, one of the major effects of the behavioural and neurosciences on ‘parenting’ and pedagogy in the last twenty years has been to inculcate far greater sympathy for children who struggle with discipline, on account of emotional dysregulation, which is now treated as contextual and neurological, rather than moral. No doubt there is a further analogy with AI to be developed, although I note anxiously that OpenAI’s Chief Scientist believes the risk is not that AIs become like unruly animals for us to control, but that they come to view and treat us as we currently treat animals.

There is a much celebrated short paper by Gilles Deleuze from 1990, Postscript on Societies of Control, which argues that over the course of the twentieth century, techniques of ‘discipline’ had been gradually superseded by those of ‘control’. Disciplinary power, as mapped most famously and extensively by Michel Foucault, involves norms, examinations and penalties. It serves to construct an internal moral subject, capable of self-discipline, obeying a timetable, and keeping promises. It is the modern architecture of morality, as criticised by Nietzsche.

Control, on the other hand, replaces periodic judgement and punishment with constant behavioural modulation. It nudges, adjusts, optimises, manages. It is never done. It is the power exhibited by algorithms, credit-scoring technologies, self-tracking and fitness culture. In place of rules (and saying ‘no!’) it tweaks and modulates thanks to constant feedback, in the tradition of cybernetics.

Discipline can succeed or fail. You can be guilty or innocent, pass or fail. But control is never perfected - as is the case with dog-training. Dogs simply cannot inhabit a society of discipline, for reasons that Steve Mann and others recognise. Shouting ‘no!’ at them will either produce fear or excitement, but not obedience. They don’t do rules, but they can repeat patterns. But the message of my piece is that humans can never really exit spheres of moral meaning and evaluation, and in that sense can never fully inhabit the Skinnerian or cybernetic world of stimulus and response. We train our dogs partly to alleviate those self-punishing feelings of guilt and responsibility, which is evidence that humans remain - for better or worse, but mostly for better - somewhat stuck inside norms of judgement and accountability.

In that sense, if you’ll forgive a little more navel-gazing, this piece continues the themes of some of my books (including The Limits of Neoliberalism and The Happiness Industry), which are, in one way or another, studies of the limits of a positivist, behaviorist worldview, and the unavoidability of interpreting actions via intentions, meaning, authority and humanism. My next book, The Reaction Economy: Searching for Humanity in a Society of Screens (out with Princeton next Spring) will develop this further. As pragmatists would see it, we cannot ever really step outside of the human sphere of interpretation and understanding that we inhabit, so maybe we should stop pretending we can. Such is the case for dog ownership.