Transcendent Networks
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Maybe you’ve noticed how often we draw on 19th-century Americana these days when we talk about internet culture. We lament the platform monopolies ushering in a “new gilded age.” We refer to Crypto as the new gold rush or the new Wild West, depending on who you ask. Even “fake news” recalls a time when media bent more willingly to the whims of robber barons. The web these days is one long caravan of spectacles and scams, and after all, so is the entire sweep of American history.
I think there’s something more than correspondence in these tropes, which is to say, I’m interested in how we might think differently about the internet if we pushed back the so-called “rise of the network society” by a hundred years or more. Maybe if we paid closer attention to the socialities, spiritualities, movements, publications, and literary discourses of the 19th century, we’d find pre-digital networks that help us build a richer understanding of our own moment.
Grifters
Anyone who read Tom Sawyer in grade school knows that scamming is a deep-seated feature of American psychology. People like Anna Delvey and Billy MacFarland and Elizabeth Holmes are the latest in a long tradition of hucksters who cheated their way to national recognition. As Jia Tolentino wrote in 2018: “Grifter season comes irregularly, but it comes often in America, which is built around mythologies of profit and reinvention and spectacular ascent.”
For Tolentino, who hones in on our sympathetic fascination with scammers, the hoax has a way of simultaneously deflating and reanimating another quintessential myth: the up-by-your-bootstraps meritocracy our politicians and capitalists love to profess. On one hand, we can all see the system is rigged, so why not root for those with the gall to game it? On the other, don’t we all invest our time in social media hoping to “earn” other people’s attention?
It’s unclear exactly what kind of sociological weather signals the recurrence of grifter season. Maybe it’s tied to the spooky pendulum of financial crisis; perhaps it’s astrological. For New York Times critic Amanda Hess, it stems from the Silicon Valley “entrepreneurial fetish” saturating an online economy built on immersive media and user engagement. “In this hyper-visual culture,” she writes, “constructing an image of something can feel like the most important step in conjuring the thing itself.” Reading that made me wish more people were situating today’s grifters in a longer window of cultural history and media ecology. You don’t have to look far for a sense of the similar hysteria which was pervasive in the postbellum United States. Mark Twain, for example, got famous with a hoax story, squandered millions on what today we’d call angel investments, and spent his later years traveling the world giving the equivalent of TED talks.
Last year I stumbled across a book called The Stammering Century, which does exactly this. Published in 1922, it’s a compilation of hot takes by a New York literary critic named Gilbert Seldes who spends upwards of 300 pages skewering the utopian fanatics and wheeler-dealers of the young United States. Here’s how he sums it up:
“[This book’s] personages are fanatics, and radicals, and mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements and figures with the primary forces of the century, and to supply a background in American history for the Prohibitionists and the Pentecostalists; the diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors and the Fundamentalists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and possibly the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious excitements, and the relation of each of these to the others and to the orderly progress of America are the subject.”
I bring up this odd book because even though it reaches back to early days of the United States, it reads like commentary on the social web. Its sociological interest in viral subculture is not unlike Angela Nagle’s in Kill All Normies. Its soapbox personalities spread the kind of memes and moral panics that pop up on Buzzfeed. Seldes describes religious revivalists the same way that Twitter pundits talk about Alex Jones. He describes the confusion and cultural ferment produced by the emergence of mass media, the boom and bust of industrial economy, and the growing pains of national institutions — the same kinds of destabilizations we’ve turned to the social web to answer in the Trump era.
New Transcendentalisms
A lot of the affective qualities of 19th-century spiritual and literary circles feel like they’re present today on YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr, where communities crop up readily around aesthetics, fandoms, lifestyles, beliefs, and identities. I almost want to call these groups “neo-transcendental” because they focus earnestly on recovering a spiritual connection with the self and the outside world. Like Thoreau’s Walden, much of their content is either diaristic or instructional, and it ranges in scope from daily practices to broad philosophies. Veganism, yoga, digital nomadism, minimalism, tiny houses, van life, nutrition, hygge, permaculture, and polyamory are all interest nodes for groups that communicate in this register around what it means to “live deliberately.”
There’s a connection to the commercial side of the Romantic world here, too. Content creators need to monetize their audiences in much the same way that 19th-century spiritualists, reformers, and inventors sustained themselves through writings and appearances. This thread casting Thoreau as the perfect millennial gets at the similarity: “Participates in gig economy. Is an OK farmer for exactly one year. Most accurate job title is ‘Influencer.’” But while the “influencer” label denotes the economic relations inherent to content work, it doesn’t always speak to the ways in which “inspo” transmits values. I think this is where it would be interesting to relate contemporary discourses of self-care and self-expression to an earlier body of Transcendentalist writings which similarly foregrounded practices of inhabiting a body, experiencing space, and relating to others.
The figure of the “influencer” also implies a network of loose, interpersonal relationships capable of conveying ideas across great physical and cultural distances. 19th-century literary and spiritual movements spent a lot of effort trying to manifest this kind of impact. The Stammering Century is full of preachers and commune-builders who traversed lecture halls, newspapers, and other social spaces across the early United States making the case for their movements. Though they didn’t have digital communications tools, they did take advantage of mass media in order to acquire a kind of virtual presence in popular culture. Emerging communication networks amplified the hijinks of radical figures (just like the real Fyre Fest wasn’t the event itself so much as the millions of people snarking on the TL). I think this is something the Transcendentalists understood implicitly: utopian experiments like Brook Farm and Fruitlands were just as catastrophic, but did much to dramatize their image.
“Fraternal” Organizations
Venkatesh Rao tweeted recently, “We’re gonna see a new institutional underground of reimagined secret societies, lodges, fraternities, sororities etc.” Which makes sense! Trade unions, immigrant mutual aid groups, and other societies offered cohesion in the face of alienation. Though they sound musty and mysterious today, fraternal orders provided a highly coded social space where 19th-century men made professional connections, organized mutual aid, and conducted politics. (Some orders, like the Odd Fellows and their counterparts the Rebekahs, maintained separate affiliations for men and women. And women of course created many kinds of public institutions beyond this format.) More formal than the so-called “third space” of cafe culture, this participatory structure outside the home is not unlike what the co-working industry provides for isolated freelancers.
It’s interesting to watch how this history of association flows into new social and spatial contexts enabled by the web. Though Freemasonry was a global institution, it remained a quasi-private sphere. Now firms like WeWork and The Wing build group identification through things like exclusivity, iconograpy, and networking, but they also sell the result as a subscription service. Their mechanisms of social reproduction produce commodities for the global market.
These projects link up with other elements of the 19th-century cultural milieu. With its “WeLive” spaces, the We Company is drawing on the even more integral experience of the commune (by way of the kibbutz, in its Israeli founder’s experience) to achieve a complete financialization of private life. The Wing’s #girlboss makeover of the fraternal institution shreds the historical separation between the public sphere and the feminized domestic one — but it also disregards many of the more solidaristic structures through which women cooperated to influence public life in an era of “republican motherhood.” Even online white supremacists channel the history of secretive association — which were exclusively male spaces and in many places shared both members and iconography with terrorist vigilante groups like the Klan. This is all very crazy to me, and worth thinking more about.
History and metaphor
There are a lot more examples like the ones above. I’d argue the current turn toward astrology, wellness and self-care resonates deeply with the blurring of healing practices and spiritualism that took place alongside the formalization of medicine. On a darker note, the communicative register of the alt-right bears a direct connection to the violent white supremacy which spread virally throughout the 19th century and had its roots in even earlier forms of folk politics.
I think it makes sense to refer to institutions like the print newspaper, the fraternal organization, or the utopian commune as pre-digital network technologies which formed collective identity and coordinated both belief and action. To draw on Shannon Mattern’s history of the hardware store as a “social infrastructure,” these connective spaces also “gave shape to the community” in ways that in ways remain familiar from our online interactions today. Sometimes even the terminology lines up: Methodist preachers in the West were known as “circuit riders” because the church dispatched them on horseback to rural communities, rerouting them dynamically across a vast territory like packets over a network.
But before we take these analogies too far, we should be wary of distorting our view of the past to fit a contemporary metaphor. As my friend Toph Tucker said recently in an interview, “it is striking how in the history of technology, in an age of hydraulics people see the body as regulated by fluid humors and the equilibrium among them. Or in an age of machines it gives you the gears and mechanical. And in our modern information age, we view it as code or computation or information processing. But from the broader historical perspective, when you see how every age projects its technological advancements onto its metaphors for itself, it’s not clear we’ve escaped those metaphors towards any kind of transcendent whole truth.”
In other words, to say “the Great Awakening was a social network” is to make one of those simplifications that’s more of a crutch than a thinking tool. When you look back in time you’re dealing not only with many kinds of “technologies” (each with their own lifespan and affordances), but also with ideologies, communities (imagined or otherwise), and discourses. These things are always influencing each other in unique and unpredictable ways.
I don’t really have a good answer for navigating all this, but I’ve found a good example in “Bunk” by Kevin Young, which traces “the rise of hoaxes, humbug, plagiarists, phonies, post-facts, and fake news” from Barnum’s circus through the Trump administration. Instead of playing a matching game between past and present, Young takes a multiply networked society as a historical fact and digs into the interactions between new media and ideological formations like whiteness and racism. He’ll zoom in on the cultural politics of individual deceptions, like spirit photography, but also pull way out to dissect much broader dynamics, like the Romantic mindset “in which pseudoscience and pseudospirituality got spliced together with the reactionary eugenics of Europe and America.” Throughout the text he pays close attention to the particular orientations of individuals, from Edgar Allen Poe to Rachel Dolezal.
I’m sure that fifty years from now our experience of the world will be mediated through new kinds of interfaces whose antecedents are only vaguely apparent to us now. I suppose what will create a useful sense of the past in the present is not a uniform set of historical references, but a quality of observation that remains alive to the multiplicities, consistencies, and contingencies in social experience. “Of hoaxes,” Young writes, “there’s never a shortage — but it’s also true that the weather of a particular time and place can influence what grows in a drought of facts. It is that weather the hoax measures.”
Thanks for reading! There’s definitely a good amount of armchair history in the above, so please let me know if you spot a mistake or if you have any recs for further exploration. You can read more in the Are.na channel to the left, or email at hello@leo.cafe
