As I say, I wish I didn’t know who they are. And that’s because any of us might, for any particular reason, become Andy Byron or Kristin Cabot: flawed people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anybody can make a bad-but-irrelevant-to-the-rest-of-us mistake on camera and face personal destruction. What such episodes reveal is a pathology in the social body, and the desperate need for a new ethic of privacy.

The “Coldplay-concert-couple” story is fundamentally irrelevant and effectively contentless, telling us nothing about the world, about ourselves; it isn’t particularly funny or tragic or profound. There is no pathos, no insight. True, the current culture on X and other social-media apps is perhaps less immediately destructive than it was during peak woke (circa 2017 to 2021). Still, the viral potential of these kinds of stories is a warning sign that our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance, and control. An obsession with other people’s private lives is a sickness.

Leaking, doxing, spying on private citizens on Reddit, on private Facebook groups, on X, on Instagram, on TikTok — regardless of the moral quality of the subjects under consideration — hurts everyone. Because it makes everyone subject to this omnipresent, collectivized panopticon, and the more these images circulate, the more normal it becomes.

Group chats, dating apps, emails — or in Byron’s and Cabot’s case, simply being in public with no intention to be filmed — should not be subject to public judgment. This species of story is a distraction from serious issues, and runs cover for the genuinely powerful individuals and entities who materially impact our lives.

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Test article

By Matthew Gasda

Clearly, there is something in human nature that is primed to gossip, shame, and ridicule (thoughtlessly, automatically). But new technology allows us to give vent to these sordid tendencies in historically unprecedented ways. We should take seriously the moral warping effect that such stories, and our obsession with them, have on our souls.

The global village is like any village — scolding, punitive, consumed by hearsay, with nothing better to do. While turning someone into a meme might seem fun, it’s severely undignified, and discards the customs and safeguards of a liberal society in order to participate in a sadistic pile-on. So while the particular example at hand might not seem worth this much deliberation, that is my point.

There might be a story here about the hypocrisy of a CEO and an HR officer having an in-house affair that might get lesser-ranking employees fired. But what I see surfacing in the discursive arena is not intelligent critique of HR departments and their culture, but a glee at the immiseration of a random person.

If these trends continue — if algorithms continue to work the way they do, and I can’t imagine they won’t — then more and more victims will be dragged out of anonymity for mimetic sacrifice. And as a consequence, meaningful taboos about privacy, shame, and respect have disappeared, and everyone’s lives and behaviors have become fodder for comment and ridicule.

We sorely need new taboos — not against adultery or sexual immorality or interpersonal deception, because clearly we have plenty of those already. Rather, we need taboos against aggregating ourselves into idiotic, loathsome mobs, incapable of thinking about what the subjects of our ridicule and these digital stonings might suffer. A wiser perspective would admit that we all, at the wrong moment, are liars, fools, cheaters, charlatans, hypocrites. Let who has not sinned click the “like” or “repost” button.

We all sin, and we might have received grace or mercy under the theocracies of older liberal and Enlightenment arrangements. Algorithmic justice and judgment, however, contains neither the virtues of theocratic society — you could at least avail yourself of religious law, with its exceptions and casuistry — nor of classically liberal society: there is no due process, no appeal mechanism. There’s no mediating structure in the global village. It is instinctive, animalistic, rash, cruel.

The force and direction of this collective online judgment should be turned against itself: We should punish not those caught in the panopticon, but the anonymous posters, Redditors, and the like; all who take joy in random acts of scorn. If we want to live in a tolerant, sane society, we should turn off our cameras, step away from mimetic digital village stonings, and reflect on our own haphazard and imperfect lives and selves.

This “should” will not come from above: there is no sign that tech companies will change their products to disincentivize this kind of behavior. Self-regulation, at scale, is, as of now, the only answer. The way we talk, write, act, and respond matters. Culture matters insofar as culture is a layer of software that at least partially governs how we use our phones. We sorely lack codes of conduct surrounding technology and our ability to record, dox, and harass each other.

If our natural response to constant mutual surveillance is not disgust, then it should be; phones come with cameras, but cameras linked to the global cortex are weapons. Using them to film strangers should not be normalized — telling people to put their phones away should. Piling on viral posts about random people who had no intention of going viral should not be normal, either. If Big Tech won’t take them down, then self-restraint is called for. Institutions can help uphold and reinforce these new norms by prohibiting phone usage in as many public spaces as possible.

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There are secondary benefits, too: public spaces are also just better without everyone being on their phones; 50,000 people all filming the same concert, for instance, aside from having unintended consequences, is stupid and unaesthetic. Each of us doesn’t need to take our own badly framed photos of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” when we visit Vienna. There are professional photos and postcards widely available. We could employ the faculty of memory, too.

Codes of conduct are what we might call counter-mimetics; they do have to be injected into social interaction and discourse, artificially at first, before they catch on. That’s what I’m proposing here. We might think something is amusing and worth commenting on or bad and worth scolding, and maybe, in isolation it is. But on the whole, we’re making life intolerable, anxious, and graceless.

It took several centuries for mounted knights to develop the code of conduct known as chivalry to regulate their unparalleled ability to kill or threaten anyone who didn’t have a horse, mail, and sword; let’s hope we can develop codes of conduct around our phones or whatever next-generation AI devices replace phones.

Privacy is a hard-won social good; give it back to others to protect your own.

Though President Trump appears to have slapped Musk’s wrist at a Cabinet meeting, it’s far from clear if DOGE, having taken on a life of its own, will slow down any time soon. Though billed as an “advisory body”, it is tearing through swathes of the federal bureaucracy with the reckless abandon that Silicon Valley applies to newly acquired firms. Yet critics and fans alike struggle to put DOGE into a historical context, which makes it difficult to see where it might lead.

Liberals have predictably fallen back on references to mid-century fascism, comparing the recent mass firings to the Nazi takeover of German state and society to ensure total loyalty. But this is wide of the mark, as even vocal Trump supporters within government have been sacked like all others. Then, too, as Musk himself has pointed out, a regime that “seeks to limit the size, scope and power of government” probably isn’t a fascist one.

The Right, meanwhile, hails DOGE as a continuation of conservative cost-cutting that aligns with longstanding GOP priorities. This view, too, isn’t quite right. It fails to appreciate the unprecedented scale of DOGE’s disruption, as well as the department’s wilfully indiscriminate approach, making it difficult to class alongside past, more cautious and strategic attempts at government reorganization.

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How, then, does one begin to grasp the deeper significance, and likely logical endpoint of DOGE? There is one historical reference point from the early republic that would seem to explain the aims and designs of DOGE better than most: the faction represented by “Philadelphiensis” — namely, the Anti-Federalists.

Thorns in the side of the authors of The Federalist, the Anti-Federalists opposed the very existence and legitimacy of the federal government, preferring instead the looser ties, lighter burdens, and wafer-thin national authority mandated by the Articles of Confederation, America’s basic law until the ratification of the current Constitution in 1788. They warned against making the change, believing it would lead to “despotism, thraldom, and confusion”.

Here is the thing, though: the Articles of Confederation were put into effect for eight years in the early republic. And they failed miserably, as the myriad fiscal, monetary, executive, and judicial affairs fell into disarray. That turn of events impelled the founders to take up the Constitution now in place, with its vision of a strong federal state.

This isn’t to suggest that Musk or any of his acolytes have ever read the works of George Mason, Melancton Smith, Patrick Henry, Samuel Bryan, Robert Yates, or other Anti-Federalist luminaries; the Muskians don’t read much beyond memes. Rather, it suffices to highlight the stark convergence of sentiment and disposition that unites DOGE with the opponents of the Constitution, and to see both factions as giving expression to a recurring militant anti-centralist tendency in American history.

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Insofar as there are contemporary thinkers who are able to articulate a larger vision around which DOGE’s actions might cohere, there is the writer Curtis Yarvin and the bitcoin investor Balaji Srinivasan. These men aren’t so much direct influences on the boy-hackers ransacking government IT systems, so much as the most advanced expositors of the common worldview that animates Silicon Valley. Examining that worldview reveals striking parallels (as well as notable differences) with Anti-Federalism.

Much like Anti-Federalism, the Silicon Valley ethos is premised on a vehement rejection of centralized power in favor of smaller units of political sovereignty that exist well below the level of the nation-state. But instead of states’ rights, the ideal is the agile tech firm. Such a firm retains the spirit of the small startup (no matter how big it actually gets), remains unencumbered by bureaucratic complexity, and perfectly reflects the Promethean will of its founder.

The firm ideal informs Silicon Valley’s understanding of all social and political order. If DOGE is “moving fast and breaking things” in Washington, it is with the goal of accelerating the process of effective decentralization. And if Srinivasan has gone the furthest in envisioning what this new normal could look like, in his treatise The Network State (2022), it is arguably Yarvin who has dwelt most fully on how state dissolution might be realized.

Yarvin has written of the sudden breakup and collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev as an instructive example for how a similar disintegration of federal power might be enacted in the United States. (“Maybe we could get to the same place in the same way?”) In Yarvin’s telling, the path to liberation goes through a paradox: the oppressive nexus of power that is the American government can only be undone by granting an even more awesome and unlimited power to a single autocratic figure, referred to in his writings as a “CEO”.

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This CEO could then be tasked with either disciplining or annihilating the civil service as functional body in what would amount to an “American perestroika”, which Yarvin defines, simplistically, as “any restructuring that renders the whole American government accountable”. That echoes the benign-sounding rationale that Musk has also employed in his defense of DOGE, telling reporters: “That’s what democracy is all about.”

The CEO figure, in this scheme, isn’t expected to be a manager or a builder, but a raider and a destroyer in the vein of GE’s Jack Welch, who hollowed out the once great industrial giant. Or indeed, Musk’s own slashing and burning at Twitter, now X, which has led to declining functionality, revenue, and engagement.

Seen from this vantage, the DOGE austerity blitzkrieg starts to make much more sense. The Anti-Federalists couldn’t accept the practical arguments, prompted by the failures of the articles, for a government that could assume greater responsibilities over financial management and national defense, viewing these as usurpations. Just so, DOGE rejects the premise that the “administrative state” has any business providing vital services that a large complex economy can hardly do without: basic research for the treatment of diseases, the collection and dissemination of weather forecasts, the prevention of financial fraud, the provision of assistance to vulnerable economic sectors, and much else of the kind.

These are, of course, the very functions that DOGE has either obliterated or severely undermined. (This, even as Musk built his own fortune off of such government assistance — and continues to do so even now.) But as many angry town halls and protests are asking: “who voted for this?” Are the American people really prepared to watch as their two-century-old national constitutional government goes the way of the old Soviet Union, rendered a relic of history?

Already, broad constituencies are banding to reassert the same logic that led the Founders to abandon the Articles of Confederation in favor of the stronger state envisioned by the actual US Constitution: veterans, farmers, consumers, workers, small business, bond holders, entitlement beneficiaries, and many others are threatened by DOGE’s dramatic gutting of state capacity and fiscal functionality. Furthermore, DOGE’s tinkering around with federal payment systems isn’t at all reassuring, as any disruption to Social Security and Treasury bond payments would all but seal America’s drift toward failed-state status.

Contra Yarvin, it should be remembered that what followed Gorbachev wasn’t a period of flourishing, but a protracted collapse in living standards and a power vacuum that led to oligarchs, warlords, and gangsters ruling the roost. It didn’t kill the Soviet deep state, but allowed it to come back later with a vengeance.

Nineties Russia, with its rapacious private client networks operating under a fatally weakened central state, is a more honest picture of what a quasi-anarchic “Network State” would look in practice than Srinivasan’s techno-utopia. Yet this is the direction in which DOGE is dragging the United States.

While the current grassroots ferment against DOGE is heartening, what’s needed is a new political narrative that connects the ideal of a strong, stable, reliable, and competent federal government to the survival of the American nation as a cohesive entity handed down by the founders. For what Fisher Ames said at the 1788 convention of Massachusetts resonates ever more today: “The Union is essential to our being as a nation. The pillars that prop it are crumbling to powder”.

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There is, after all, a reason why the Anti-Federalists, despite honorable contributions to American life, chiefly the Bill of Rights, are not generally seen as high-ranking founders, while those who endeavored to solidify the foundations of the federal union are venerated almost unequivocally as nation-builders: the Federalists, of course, but also Lincoln Republicans, New Deal Democrats, and the GOP’s postwar Nixon-Eisenhower tradition.

To be sure, government bloat, waste, and overreach are perennial problems that definitely need fixing. But they call for a judicious approach that recognizes the many intricate interdependencies that exist between the federal government and various sectors of American society. Or as Trump himself put it recently, what’s needed is a “scalpel” not a “hatchet”.

But what our Silicon Valley overlords are up to isn’t a genuine search for efficiency, but rather destruction for the sake of it. Left unopposed, these latter-day Anti-Federalists might finally trash the federal union as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary next year. What comes after could well be too grim to contemplate.

Isn’t it boring? No wonder people prefer to watch bogus videos about voter fraud, or join their local Black Trans Lives Matter protest, when the alternative is this kind of technocratic tedium. Yes, we need 143-page think-tank reports and ingenious policy wonkery and “cross-government data architecture” and all that. But eventually you want something which inspires, something which treats socio-economic questions with the beauty, drama, tragedy and pathos they deserve. You want something like the historian RH Tawney’s 1926 cult classic Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

We hear a lot at the moment about the prospect of a more communitarian society, which acknowledges that we have responsibilities as well as rights. In Tawney’s book this is not just a theory, but a vision. For the medieval mind, he writes,

The property of the feudal lord, the labour of the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the warrior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were to be sublimated into service, vocation, and chivalry, and the ritual which surrounded them was designed to emphasise that they had undergone a rededication at the hands of religion. Baptised by the Church, privilege and power became office and duty.

I too had to Google it: Ithuriel is an angel in Paradise Lost whose spear instantly uncovers the reality behind a disguise – “for no falsehood can endure / Touch of celestial temper”. For Tawney, the medieval order revealed the truth of social relations. The rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, are shown to be part of one human society, in which we owe each other justice and love.

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Maybe this makes him sound like one of those sentimentalists who imagine the Middle Ages as an era of cheerful peasants, dignified craft guilds, virtuous monks and splendid cathedrals. Not so. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism describes the feudal system as “exploitation in its most naked and shameless form”. Guilds, Tawney writes, were monopolistic schemes, often corrupt, and the vast majority of workers weren’t members in any case. Catholics who want to praise the glories of Christendom will have to reckon with the fact that the pinnacle of financial immorality was the Vatican. As for the cathedrals, Tawney quotes St Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the greatest spiritual master of the time: “The Church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked.”

And yet… there was, Tawney argues, “a certain tarnished splendour” to the Middle Ages. The Church, as its central institution, stood for “the ideal, at least, of social solidarity,” and upheld two fundamental points: “that economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding.”

Tawney admits that these lofty notions were endlessly flouted. But not always. Church law levelled heavy penalties, including excommunication, against usurers who exploited the vulnerable. Institutions like the Mounts of Piety enabled the poor to borrow money and goods without incurring ruinous debts. Social stigma and the law often worked on the side of economic justice: businessmen who formed cartels or drove up prices might easily find themselves in the courts — or in the stocks.

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“At every turn,” Tawney writes, there were “limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs.” Of course, there are “limits, restrictions, warnings” that set the boundaries of economic life in 2020. But they hardly derive from a coherent moral framework. The World Economic Foundation, home of the “Great Reset”, may believe that neoliberalism should be abandoned, but it is also keen to assure us that “The Great Reset … is not a revolution or a shift to some new ideology.” (The horror — imagine, a new worldview!) “Rather, it should be seen as a pragmatic step toward a more resilient, cohesive, and sustainable world.” Not much moral, let alone spiritual, idealism here. For the WEF economic reform is just another way to “meet systemic global challenges,” to quote the soul-crushing bureaucratese.

The word “reset”, often used this year by both Left and Right, itself makes society sound like an electronic device, not a living, breathing community of people torn between passionate virtues and vices. Like so much political language, it colours the world in grey. Parts of Liz Truss’s speech on inequality the other day were quite sensible. But it was hardly inspiring. The government is committed, apparently, to “delivering fairness through modernisation, increased choice and openness”. Fairness is not an urgent moral demand or a dream of solidarity, but yet another solution to be “delivered” via the most useful apps.

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A different idea of fairness appears in a prayer for landlords, quoted by Tawney, which was included in a prayer book issued by King Edward VI in 1553: “We heartily pray thee to send thy holy Spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes after the manner of covetous worldlings; but so let them out to others, that the inhabitants thereof may… be able truly to pay the rents.”

A political question — housing inequality — is here treated both on practical terms, and as part of a cosmos illuminated by spiritual realities.

There are some hints at a moral and spiritual awakening today: in the urgent rhetoric of the new socialists, in the rise of quasi-spiritual leaders like Jordan Peterson, in parts of the environmental movement, in the increasingly blurred lines between religion and politics, even in the furious exchanges of the culture wars. But they are only hints. It’s been rightly said that the big question of politics today is Who are we? Another question lurks around the corner: What kind of universe do we live in?