Some themes to apply to current times.
Solid times
One of the themes of mine is the return of various concepts, institutions and practices that were thought to be obsolete, or that some institutions tried to make so. The return of cash money or its nearest digital equivalent, the return of arctic conflict, telephony, the middleman, the nation-state. Sweden recently “In Case of Crisis or War” advised its citizens to have cash on hand in case of a national emergency. It is a country that prided itself when moving away from cash during the 2010s. More than the specific element, it is the desire for qualities of enchantment, firmness, centralisation, authority, the opposite of social liquidity.
Frame loss
Much what we call a crisis is just the sharp realization of events causing frame loss. Concepts that helped us make sense of the world are redundant. An example is neoliberalism, which has not been applicable for decades, but survived as a zombie idea. Neoliberalism in the sense of public austerity, tax cutting, reducing public spending, and allowing the business cycle to work uninterrupted. It is hard to see in the policies of governments since the financial crisis and before then, still less in the USA decisively abandoning globalization. The result is the end of all of those conceptual frames, such as neoliberalism, antiracism, and decolonization which which have been the background noise of social critique for decades.
De-competition
The promise of capitalism is that you stand or fall on your talents. Learning to risk is vital to that, at a personal and institutional level. We no longer have that. We decided on the end of risk, now collectively owned. Society no longer distributes risk.
Meanwhile, the U.S. actively tries to move down the global value chain and outclass Vietnam in t-shirt manufacturing.
Narco-states to state narcos
Cartels have neither capacity nor desire to replace the state. Nobody goes into a life-of-crime because they want to be in charge of bin day . State-criminal collaboration is the norm, called , grey conflict or geocriminality {Thorley, 2024}. To some extent, this goes back to the Second World War when the Soviets collaborated with organized crime groups on provisioning {Belton, 2021}. The difference now is that they collaborate on geopolitical aims.
Turf and territory
The role of digital technology has flipped. It was naive to imagine tech like Ai is somehow resistant and liberating.
Techno Localisation. Digital drug sales are going through a time of decomposition. Markets are more localised, using image boards to create contacts between people. The time of the big integrated, sophisticated systems appears to be past. These systems create centralised vulnerabilities and people like to avoid that. The Russian darknet market Hydra was a model of integration – drug sales, distribution, testing and enforcement were brought together in one system.
Back to the middleman
The middleman has a role in sociological theory as functionally mediating social and economic processes and sometimes being the scapegoat of them {Bonacich, 1973}. For example, a society that abhors money lending and anathematizes it still needs credit. Christ may have boosted the moneylenders from the Temple but someone needs to front up the promise of some readies. Therefore, medieval European Christianity effectively licensed the Jews in this role. As in that case, ethnic groups often fill the role. They are typically outside the status hierarchy and so able to trade, rent, lend and conduct necessary but taboo activities. One function is to mediate elite/mass relations. Middlemen ethnic minorities – Chinese in many territories , Koreans in Los Angeles , etc – take on this risky role where they become the focus of popular resentment. This is sometimes quite intentional – Soviet policy effectively did so, using ethnic middleman to soak up grudges.
The internet was supposed to have eliminated middlemen but it had initially just the opposite effect. The middleman – the company that buys from a producer and sells to a buyer – should in theory become unnecessary. Every so often someone tries to do this: we can sell our own houses, we can become our own hoteliers, bankers, lenders etc. But middlemen exist for a reason, and the various roles characterised as middlemen perform a range of social and economic functions. Populism leverages suspicions of the middleman. Direct democracy and direct economics are favoured, as are media that speak directly to you.
Psychological quakes
Above all, this is a mental, psychological shift, just as supposed neoliberalism was {Sharma, 2024}.
The importance of psychology in politics comes out. In group identification, rage at loss and a vicarious desire to get one’s own back. We can see that in the addition of various types of masculinity in Donald Trump’s political coalition from geeks to incels. Personally matters in the sense that Trump is an avatar of these desires. The prevalence of conspiracy thinking at a high level is noticeable as are actual conspiracies. Scientists, public officials and major digital companies conspired to play down a plausible laboratory origin of Covid describing people who did pay credence to that being as being conspiracy theorists themselves. Some conspiracies take place surprisingly in the open, for example the Kinahan cartel that operate in plain sight in Dubai.
In these days power matters more than economics.
There is some hope in the return of concepts like pluralism and a firm liberalism.
Belton, Catherine. Putin’s People. 1st edition. London: William Collins, 2021.
Bonacich, Edna. “A theory of middleman minorities.” American sociological review (1973): 583-594.
