Digital networking creates a subtler but more implacable conformism than bourgeois convention.
Evidence
Today, it seems, the type of the outsider – the idiot, the fool – has all but vanished from society. Thoroughgoing digital networking and communication have massively amplified the compulsion to conform. The attendant violence of consensus is suppressing idiotisms. Botho Strauss pinpoints the difference between contemporary conformism and bourgeois convention of old: ‘For him, the idiot, it’s as if everyone else were speaking in subtle attunement with each other: brought down to the most agreeable level [verträglichsten Stimmungsgrad] … This is a far more implacable convention than any convention known before, in bourgeois times.’ — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 185
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: The ‘violence of consensus’ through agreeable attunement parallels how dress norms in the reader’s article operate as quiet, unenforced conformity — a gentler-looking but binding consensus.
- XREF: connects to: Intrinsic conformity outweighs state surveillance as a threat — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 35; Digital networks that capitalism spawned are replacing capitalism with a new feudalism.; Capitalist cyberspace has normalized precariousness, competitiveness, and casual aggression — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 772 (+2 more)
Related
- Digital consensus is more coercive than bourgeois social convention was (similarity 0.91)
- Intrinsic conformity outweighs state surveillance as a threat (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Digital networks that capitalism spawned are replacing capitalism with a new feudalism.
#expands(0.72) - Capitalist cyberspace has normalized precariousness, competitiveness, and casual aggression
#expands(0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 772 - Electronic communication enduringly exposes once-ephemeral social exchange to scrutiny
#expands(0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 842