A brief history of social passivity
The long decade of the nineties
On January 1, 1990, all the elements of the radical devaluation of work that characterized the last decade of the twentieth century were already in place.
- The reforms of labor law that laid the foundation for precariousness for the generations that entered the workforce since then. Spain, for example, was at the forefront since 1984 thanks to the agreement between the González government and the unions to modify the status of the worker.
- The defeat of the British miners in 1985, the first of a long series of union-organized burials in the European industry, which in Spain would have as its high point the Asturian general strike of 1992.
- The signing of the Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Canada in 1987, which was the first stone of the globalization and relocation of industrial employment that would start in 1991 with the incorporation of Mexico into the treaty, the famous and systematic rupture of the value chains, the boom of the maquilas, the meteoric rise of China and the expansion of the German and French industry in the countries of Eastern Europe.
- And the first draft of Fukuyama's speech on the end of History in 1989, which would give lyrics to the insistent message of the nineties: every man for himself, there are no possible alternatives.
The cultural change that took place then was brutal. The imaginary went from being shaped by the great speeches, to being shaped by the banal shouting of Berlusconism, that dense mud of corridor politics, tasteless spectacle, media control and corruption that marked the decade throughout Europe.
Were the nineties as horrible as we want to remember them? Why the current nostalgia?
Because the expectation of a better life for the family seemed viable. In the middle of the decade it is beginning to be evident that the fall in employment were not temporary, while the percentage record of young people undertaking higher education was being broken year after year.
And yet the morality of work and the value of knowledge were desapearing.
With the closure of industries and the generalisation of temporary contracts, working hard was no longer the way to earn a place in life.
Furthermore, between an increasingly vulgar ideology that despised and silenced collective causes and saturated worn-out universities, the students had less pulse the more they became. The new students cohorts showed no signs of having a vocation to change anything. Which was already an obvious sign of something that was in bad taste to point out: going to the University had ceased to be the result of a vocation. And as the vocation disappeared and with it the desire and need to learn and not just to pass exams and get a job, the cultural level of graduates was increasingly lower. But it didn't matter too much either, in fact, it was ceasing to be socially valued.
MBAs were multiplying. Their value depended on the people you knew and the companies you were associated with, because the new indicator of personal success was the agenda, the last social elevator, even if it was based on political prebends and opaque business.
The short decade of the 2000s
From 1997 onwards, cyberculture began to emerge from fringe. After the dotcom boom, the first attempt to take over the Internet by capital funds, the network still retained its structure of distributed communication.
Increasingly larger egalitarian deliberative spaces appeared on a distributed structure. Among them was the "blogosphere" which, from 2001, with the fall of President Estrada in the Philippines, by projecting itself onto the mobile network, it demonstrated its capacity to promote, articulate and coordinate massive mobilizations on all continents.
But, very opportunely, from 2007 onwards, the space of the blogosphere and its mobile tentacles would be taken over by Facebook and Twitter. The monopolistic model of Amazon in commerce, of Google in web services and of Wikipedia in basic knowledge repositories, is imposed in the deliberative space that fuels the creation of social fabric. What is presented then as a democratization is in reality a re-centralization of physical structures that will end in media and cultural recentralization on the one hand and in the concentration of large masses of personal data on the other.
And so, while technological development begins to be oriented towards large AIs (the cloud and Big Data are already emerging during those years), cyberculture returns to passivity, although it is a tremendously noisy and violent passivity.
The first decade of the crisis
The social responses to the financial crisis that began in 2008, those of millennial politics, will take their form in the centralized model of social networks.
From the Spanish 15M (known as indignados in the English speaking world) and the Greek Oxi onwards, what we see are generational movements, sometimes very relevant even electorally, like Podemos, which confuse the expression of discontent with action against its causes. Movements which believe they do not require a previous social organization and which are therefore based on passivity.
The mood of a social layer becomes politically represented without having existed before as a socially organized force... [They] did not come to the elections after having done something, but as instruments to express a discontent that had not yet been articulated in action and even less in alternative construction. So much so that Podemos presented itself to those European elections [2014] with the effigy of Pablo Iglesias as its logo (...)
That not doing and therefore not organizing was not a weakness for any of them precisely because it connected them to the bulk of their voters. Voters who did not see themselves capable of belonging to and promoting a movement that would break the status quo. Podemos was called Podemos, which means «We can», for a reason. A voter willing to do anything... except the sacrifices of a real commitment to change things.
That is to say, the exclusively political and electoral character reflected the passivity of its social base. At the time, the common interpretation was more accommodating. It was understood that once the capacity to modify the political map was demonstrated, the organization and daily mobilization would emerge almost automatically. It was said that Podemos had given twice to give the first and demonstrate that indeed yes, it was possible to change the political agenda and the institutional structure. Its base would be built from there.
Foquist fantasies of radiating nuclei aside, the sad truth is that after an effervescence of circles and groups of sympathizers, not even Errejón managed to turn that into an organized and active social base outside of the endless assemblies of self-expression and the battles to gain personal relevance. The thing was so parodic that in the local elections that followed it was common that were the parents of the Podemos candidates -many of them retired- who put up the posters in the streets and not their children who were supposedly fighting the electoral battle. (...)
There was no shortage of triumphalist declarations and promises, but in the end the discursive bases (...) presented indignation as a form of action in itself. They were already expressing political impotence before doing politics.
The 2020s, first approximation
In the 2020s, with the pandemic and the development of war, the expressionism of the political culture of the previous decade has exacerbated polarization, and thus, social passivity. From South Africa to the US, Europe and Japan, the vicious circle of polarization, identity politics and atomization, has further sterilized the ground in which social responses should germinate.
Today it seems that it has been the materialization of the impotence and the expressionist and identity-based exacerbation of the discourse of the previous decade that has fueled - often from the same feelings among the same type of public, as Naomi Klein pointed out - the rise of the extreme right... which replicates 10 years later, in a broken-down way, the steps of the milennial left from a decade ago.
And now have became common to blame the Internet and the screens for social passivity and atomization, the calls to ban them in classrooms, the accusations against social networks of hindering affinity relationships, of being harmful to the mental health of women teenagers, and undermining social coexistence for commercial interest, etc.
Now, it can be done. The media is echoing it. After all, big capital is already in AI and there is not much at stake on social media for it.
But the AI world has an even more brutal commitment to social atomization. The dreams of capital invested in innovative consumer products are about eliminating screens making AIs weareble and turning their whisper into a sort of permanent dialogue with a machine deity... of mediocrity and conformism.
The horizon that technological development points to is not going to make it easier for us to face passivity and atomization. The 20s look like the 90s with broadband, superprocessors and ChatGPT.
What if we had alternative media in front of us and we didn't know how to see them?
But maybe it's just that the time has passed when it made sense to ride the technological wave to go against the current of social passivity and organize alternatives.
Maybe the emphasis should no longer be on videos and podcasts but on face-to-face communication in meetings, events and spaces.
Maybe we should reconsider messaging systems: stop treating them as means of communication and gradually reduce their use to means of alarm and contact.
Maybe the effort to feed deliberation now requires real newsletters, in paper, sent to the home or a post office box and not blogs.
That is, perhaps we will find the ability to do things together when our own way of communicating requires a commitment on the part of the person who wants to receive it: giving their address or renting a post office box to receive our articles, taking time to read them, taking a day off work to be able to attend a meeting or a talk...
Perhaps it is time to give up everything that the Internet has paved the way for, in order to go out into the open spaces again and build a new world under the sun.