The news is not good, even the news about news. Recent articles report that spending too much time doomscrolling or reading negative news is linked to existential anxiety. It is also reported that moving your home during childhood can cause depression. And, in a reprise on old news, it is confirmed that you are lonely because we are all are losing our ‘bridging social capital’.
Relating to others in the contemporary world has become increasingly vexed. We variously crave social connection and its sustaining highs while finding extended social engagement difficult, demanding and enervating. Being in the world has become more contradictory. It is still possible to find all the usual places of sociability: pubs, clubs, family gatherings, live music venues, schools and universities, parks and streets. They all still offer opportunities to connect with others, but all those places have changed, becoming overlaid by more abstract forms of engagement.
Being social is now tangled in layers of technological mediation, body awareness, anxiety, self-consciousness and FOMO. Sharing digital pictures of an event is becoming as important as being there. Swiping sideways is taking over the process of finding a sexual partner. Using self-care exercises or obsessing over shadow-work diaries has begun to replace talking with a friend about one’s hopes and insecurities.
It is an indication of this changed world that such books as Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024) race to the top of best-seller lists. Its subtitle, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, gives some indication of Haidt’s argument. He is not wrong about the fire-hose of addictive content or the surge of suffering as our children face attention fragmentation, sleep deprivation and disengagement from embodied play. The figures are astonishing. A 2022 survey cited in The Anxious Generation found that 46 per cent of American teens—Generation Z—reported that they were digitally connected ‘almost constantly’. This is up from earlier figures of seven hours a day for Gen Y, the millennial generation. However, Haidt’s diagnosis is not helpful. Blaming smart phones for the current mental health crisis is too easy.
Briefing for a descent into mental illness
Yes, as Sherry Turkle wrote about phone life in 2015, ‘we are forever elsewhere’. It is increasingly one of the truths about the cybernetic world. Our presence is forever mediated and extended, while at the same time we live ever more privatised lives, punctuated by some socialising and some shoulder-to-shoulder waving of phones at a music event. The Japanese even have a name for one of the kinds of social withdrawal that Jonathan Haidt describes: hikikomori.
However, instead of working his way through questions concerning the hollowing-out of face-to-face social engagement, Haidt goes straight for the mental illness megaphone. And so, almost inevitably, false sets of debating points flash across social media. If the trend-lines suggest correlation and not causation, as various researchers asked to comment on The Anxious Generation by the New York Times infer, then are not the new communications technologies simply tools that, used wisely, allow us to keep in contact? Haidt’s response is lame. He answers with a question. If it is not increasing phone use that is causing mental breakdown, then what? Thus we are left with scattered discussions akin the to-and-fro exchanges debating the virtues of self-care, salt, mindfulness, fat and vitamin supplements.
Moderation cannot be the answer to everything. It is no wonder that self-help books on being social now abound, and the social media platforms themselves consciously cater for our contradictory social needs. Almost everyone, it seems, needs a little mood juice.
This has opened the way for a concurrent phenomenon: the self-help-meets-science genre. Intellectual translators such David Robson read the research in neuroscience, psychology and sociology, write a book such as The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies that will Change Your Life (2024), and conclude that social connection is good for us. Banal. Yes. But that is what people are reading.
And so we arrive at Robson’s Law 13: ‘Reach out to the people who are missing in your life. Let them know that they are still a part of your thoughts’. Does the mode of reaching out matter? Not much, Robson says. According to the research, physical distance ‘does not need to equal social distance. We now have incredible technologies that can allow instant communication’. This kind of response is indicative. Embodied relations—that is, face-to-face engagement or presence in a way that matters socially—are complicated and time-consuming. So why not such just send a quick text message? It does not take much time or thought, and some distant ‘friend’ might feel connected…at least for a fleeting moment. Such intellectual translations have become at once a symptom of the problem—and part of the cause.
Despite the overwhelming criss-crossing lines of interconnectivity, the never-ceasing possibilities of contact and the foreverness of social connectivity—and for all the research confirming that being directly sociable, face-to-face, is good—we face an epidemic of loneliness. The Tory Party in the United Kingdom even appointed a ‘Minister for Loneliness’. In a tragic irony, its Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport instituted a Loneliness Awareness Week while most of its activities were directed towards enhancing the profitability of online cyber-capitalism.
Thus, into this space step the cybernetic platforms themselves. The process began slowly in the 1960s with standalone natural-language software such as Eliza, set up to emulate a Rogerian psychotherapist (its programmer Joseph Weizenbaum has since turned against AI as an ‘index of the insanity of our world’). But over the last decade the process has sped up, replicating across everyday life. In 2021 a WhatsApp chatbot was launched across the world to offer loneliness advice as the COVID pandemic further pushed digital therapy into the world. Last month, a new Artificial Intelligence version of ChatGPT was released with enhanced voice activation (version 4o, where ‘o’ means ‘omni’). It is intended to streamline your interactive possibilities with your new computer companion (CC, where ‘cc’ should mean ‘conviviality crisis’). It joins Replika with its 2 million users and 500,000 paying subscribers. According to Replika’s website, users ‘talk to Replika’s chatbot to lift their moods, work through life’s hardest challenges, and stave off loneliness’. Intelligent Social Agents such as Replika, Woebot, Character.AI, Nomi, Kindroid, and Kuki now cumulatively have almost a billion active users. Loneliness is in the air, and apart from talking to robots, it seems that all that can be offered are facile suggestions for sending a text message to a half-forgotten ‘friend’ who might feel better for a moment.
Abstracting the social
This abstracting of the social has been one of the recurrent themes in Arena over the past few decades. As Richard King has documented in these pages andin his recent book Here Be Monsters (2023), relationships are becoming ‘increasingly abstract and life-worlds more precarious’. In the language of the street, the social fabric has been shredded.
What does this mean about social engagement? Why has social engagement become so complicated? What is this thing called ‘the social’? To understand those questions, and to avoid putting all the emphasis on mediating technologies, we need a broader perspective. When, fifty years ago, Raymond Williams wrote the now classic volume Keywords (1976), the concept of ‘society’ was explored, but the ‘social’ was not included. Then, it was one of those relatively taken-for-granted concepts that he did not treat as needing to be interrogated.
Keywords tracked the etymology of socially orienting concepts and exposed their histories in ways that the original dictionary word-collection process could not, seeking to understand the patterns and changes of meaning so that we could understand our current world. ‘Culture’ was, as Williams argued, one of the most complicated words in the English language, and the term ‘society’ was traced across the last few centuries:
Society is now clear in two main senses: as our most general term for the body of institutions and relationships within which a relatively large group of people live; and as our most abstract term for the condition in which such institutions and relationships are formed. The interest of the word is partly in the often difficult relationship between the generalization and the abstraction. It is mainly in the historical development which allows us to say ‘institutions and relationships’, and we can best realize this when we remember that the primary meaning of society was companionship or fellowship.
In that archaeology of the term are some hints that can help us with understanding ‘the social’, which now surpasses ‘culture’ in complexity. Like many of these kinds of concepts—what might be called big concepts—‘society’ goes through an abstraction process. Across the twentieth century, and intensifying in its later half, this occurred just as sociality itself was stretched across time and space. That is, the social relations of everyday life were materially abstracted from the practice of people doing things in place to also being framed by everywhere-platforms: computer-mediated communications systems and algorithmically directed organisational systems.
In relation to big social concepts like society, state, nature, class, the unconscious, society, economics and the social, common usage turns out to be the least important initiating process for changes in meaning. Shifts tend to happen as lived social processes are translated into words by intellectual contestation and emerging common imaginaries.
Just as the concept of the state slowly shifted from the standing of the prince (status) to the organisation of political life—reworked by intellectual debate, regularised practice, and then common usage—society stretched from the more embodied sense of companionship, across classed understandings of the ‘good society’, to being used to describe systems of common life. Philosophers, political theorists and intellectually attuned practitioners were central to this process. This is important to note here, because it will become central to my argument about what is happening to the meaning and practice of ‘social’.
There is no such thing as society?
Cutting a long story short, we get to Margaret Thatcher speaking as British prime minister in a 1987 interview in Women’s Own. At that time the idea of a social life in common was under deep challenge, just as the practice of social engagement itself was becoming more layered. This interview is where Thatcher infamously says, ‘there is no such thing as society’. I have quoted one passage in full because lifting the usually quoted sentence out of context makes critique too easy. After all, she was speaking to family-oriented magazine:
There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.
What is so bad about that? Strangely, the phrase ‘living tapestry’—later unfortunately reduced in her words to individuals and families—could be treated as a surrogate for the complexity of the social. However, it has been energetically criticised by the Left as an orienting slogan of neoliberalism, and indeed it is one. For all that, however, it is also important to be clear here that the neoliberal attack was then actually on the state-society nexus, not the social itself, even if the social has become collateral damage. The sentiment comes from the methodological individualism of the right-wing philosopher Friedrich Hayek, and was part of a decades-old discussion on the Right. Margaret Thatcher, like Winston Churchill before her and Liz Truss after her, openly supported Hayek’s views.
Yes, this Nobel Prize winner was a key player in the rise of neoliberalism, but something else much more profound was happening. In repeatedly using Thatcher’s phrase or blaming everything on neoliberalism—which certainly needs to be deeply criticised for what it is actually arguing and doing—a quiet revolution was largely misinterpreted, including by the Left. A profound shift in the dominant nature of social relations was accompanied by an emptying-out of the meaning of ‘the social’.
Writing at the same time as Hayek, a key figure here in the longer-term transformation of the concept of ‘the social’ was the economic sociologist Karl Polanyi, often now drawn upon by sections of the Left to criticise capitalism as it changes. Most relevant here, he described the process by which we began to treat the domain of economics as if it has been disembedded from the social: that is, the realm of economics being treated as if it is no longer framed by social needs. The ‘as if’ dimension of the disembedding here underlines what needs to be made explicit. This is what Polanyi and his followers never developed and often seem to forget: namely, that in practice the economy can never actually be disembedded from the social as such. Such a claim is a contradiction in terms. To engage economically is to engage socially, but with a narrowed emphasis on the use of resources rather than the broader range of human practices.
Expressed more carefully, as a few writers have pointed out since, contemporary capitalism lifts out that thing called ‘the economy’ from more embodied relations of sociality, not from the social per se. In other words, ‘the economy’ is reified as if operating according to its own independent logic. And thus other domains of the social such as politics and culture come to be treated in practice as secondary to economics.
Something was basically changing, but not as Polanyi described it. What Polanyi needed was a theory of the abstraction of the social, including the way in which the extraction and exploitation of resources was layered, from the exploitation of embodied labour to the appropriation of value via trading in abstracted time, with the latter coming to reframe the former. More than that, he needed a way of understanding the ways in which even our embodied relations with others were becoming increasingly abstracted and stretched across time and space. With this kind of approach, he could have argued for the increasing dominance of more abstract ways of managing and exploiting resources. This is not a disembedding from the social, but a reconstituting of older formations of the production of value and meaning. It was through this process that economic questions were prioritised and lifted out of cultural and political questions.
Let me put the point more crudely so that the double revolution in thought and practice is clear. This concept of ‘the economy’, as a thing or domain with a definite article ‘the’, simply did not exist as a meaningful construct before the twentieth century. It was not part of the intellectual imaginary.
Political economists before the twentieth century, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, did not use the concept. Smith never used the nominating noun ‘the economy’. Instead, he used the adjective ‘economic’ to describe frugality or efficiency, and the concept ‘political economy’ to signify a methodological approach to efficient development. Marx, similarly, tended to use concepts such as ‘political economy’ to name methods and discourses, and he never used the concept of ‘the economy’ (die wirtschaft) with the definite article to mean a separate encompassing domain of practice. His focus was the social relations of economic activity.
However, as economic practice started to be treated as more consequential than other forms of social relation, the concept of ‘the economy’ began itself to take on a life of its own. This revolution was part of the process of distorting the meaning of the social itself. The process is self-confirming, but it has had many champions.
The self-confirming imaginary of a post-social world
In the same year that Margaret Thatcher was echoing Hayek in suggesting that there is no such thing as society, a French theorist, Bruno Latour, was beginning to redefine the social in such a way as to parallel Hayek, albeit from a left perspective and in a completely different field. In a 1987 article with Shirley C. Strum called ‘Redefining the Social Link: From Baboons to Humans’, Latour suggests that many elements or properties contribute to the social connectivity. These elements, ‘are not connected to the purely social and can include economic, biological, psychological, etc.’. In one way, the point sounds completely self-evident, but it begs a question. Why were Latour and Strum arguing against a thing called the ‘purely social’ when nobody at that time held to such an empty abstraction? The social is—as different writers in this journal have long argued—no more and no less than the relations of people to others, including non-human others, as we live in and act upon the world. In the language of such writers, all these different relations are conducted across different levels of abstraction, from the embodied or face-to-face to the cybernetically mediated. The problem is with the ravaging dominance of more abstract levels of social interrelation, not their existence as such.
Latour went on to become globally the most cited writer in the social sciences and humanities, his displacing of any entity that could be described as ‘the social’ striking hundreds of thousands of social researchers as a revelation and an obvious truth. He influenced research programs and eventually social policy. His later book Reassembling the Social (2005) became the bible of this process. ‘Society’, he says there, has been transformed due in large part to the expansion of the products of science and technology: ‘It is no longer clear whether there exists relations that are specific enough to be called “social” and that could be grouped together in making up a special domain that could function as “a society”. The social seems to be diluted everywhere and yet nowhere in particular’.
Thus a skewed description of very real processes of change became the basis of a whole new approach called Actor Network Theory. This theory posited that humans, in making our world, are connected by longer and shorter networks of connection, and that researchers should simply follow the networks. We should be suspicious of anything called a social explanation, Latour said. We are dealing with no more than ‘a skein of weak ties, of constructed, artificial, assignable, accountable, and surprising connections’.
In his words, Latour became a little ant writing for other ants, seeking to render the world as flat as possible and to trying to get rid of concepts such as ‘society’—concepts that name materially more abstract forms of relations. Thus, like Margaret Thatcher, his critical focus became the words we use rather than the processes of abstraction that actually change the dominant forms of social relations.
He and Thatcher were inadvertently half-right. The nature of social relations was being flattened in both reality and appearance, as hitherto particular and incommensurable relationships of kin, neighbourhood, object and role were subjected to the generalising effects of the market and mediating technologies. But Bruno Latour vastly generalised this process to dissolve the character of ‘the social’ itself. Thus, his networked description of the changing world turned into a methodology that explained itself and flattened a world that was receptive to the idea that networks explained everything.
Latour’s work confirmed what had been happening in the social sciences more generally. The wild success and spread of his approach coincided with the increasing application of social studies to the instrumental shaping of social behaviour, as mediated through state- and corporate-social processes. This was quite distinct from the role to which a distinct discipline of sociology—modelling the social whole—had been applied in the twentieth century. Rather, such network theories mirrored the remaking of the world, while their techno-scientific cousins—science-oriented intellectuals—were remaking the practices of the world by designing and building new platforms of abstract sociality. Because they did not see the parallel process—and, crucially, even if the interpreters critically described the changing world—they tended to do this in one-dimensional terms, with the interpreters either confirming the work of the techno-scientists as given or celebrating it in cyborg manifestos.
Some interpretative theorists such as Hannah Arendt bemoaned the way in which the political was seen as social, threatening contemporary political life. Some pronounced ‘the death of the social’, abolished in its simulation by mediated representation (Baudrillard). Some described a post-social age (Nicholas Rose). While yet others talked of the social being liquified (Zygmunt Bauman) or now made predominantly by networks (Castells). However much these descriptions contradicted each other, taken together they confirmed an unsettling and displacement of the social.
The consolidation of the post-social turn
It was also in the 1980s and 1990s that theories of the post-social began to fold back into and steer social practice. Two examples will serve to illustrate the process: the rise of business studies and the development of global report-writing for bodies such as the United Nations.
The now classic text Our Common Future (1987), more commonly known as the Brundtland Report, is our first point of reference. The report has become the reference point for almost all thinking on sustainability today. While its intention was to bring ecological issues to bear against an emerging dominant emphasis on economics, its long-term effect has been threefold: to separate out the economic from the social as in effect a non-social domain; to align economics with growth and centre economic thinking in United Nations practice; and to relegate the social to a grab-bag of extra things that were perceived to not fit into the categories of the economy and the environment. Thus was born what was to become called ‘the triple bottom line’ (TBL) of sustainability—economic, environmental and social sustainability.
In the early 1990s, a business writer, John Elkington, seized upon this three-domain model and translated Our Common Future into a form that could be taken up by industry. A field was developed that ironically become called Corporate Social Responsibility. Despite its name, the social was relegated to the least important part of the TBL, with economic concerns predominating while the environment and the social were treated as externalities—namely, things that should be taken into account as a growth economy is super-charged. Elkington’s books sold millions. The term ‘triple bottom line’ became part of global economic lexicon, and infused platforms such as the Global Reporting Initiative. The TBL and its variants have dominated cyber-capitalism ever since. Taken together, these unintended centrings of the economic displaced the social to the margins, hollowing out its meaning while appearing to give it continuing life.
What this brief archaeology of the concept of the social shows is the complex interweaving of parallel lines into a compelling imaginary that makes it hard to think outside of. It also shows how concepts and ideas are formed in practice and how, even as their users might seek to ameliorate or criticise a dominating practice, they tend to confirm the contours of that practice by describing it in flattening or one-dimensional terms.
The hollowing-out of the social is a complex process. The concept of the social has become a floating adjective, variously attached to things like ‘social media’, ‘social distancing’ and ‘social capital’. These phenomena are of course ‘social’, but they are not meaningfully defined by the adjective. Even as we use the adjective ‘social’ loosely for such processes, those kinds of conceptions push towards a separation from social presence and a joining-together of people at a distance, instrumentalising our relationship to each other. This confusion as to what the social is has been as prevalent on the radical and critical Left as it has been on the Right. It is not merely poststructuralist and flattening approaches that fall short. Even the most sophisticated approaches have been unable to fully foreground this process and adequately reconstruct a politics around it. In the meantime, new waves of fetishism, commodification and cybernetic abstraction remake the actualities of social life.