Alone, and Not Free

Yesterday's Daily Pennsylvanian features a guest column by Celeste Marcus, a junior who's studying intellectual history, titled "Netwerk it -- a world without inwardness." The central idea is that Penn students' preoccupation with networking is preventing them from developing any kind of individuality or inner life. This prompted some thoughts which I submitted in this letter to the editor:

It was depressing to read Celeste Marcus's column about the pressures toward conformity operating on Penn students today. It barely resembles anything I remember from when I attended in the early '80s.

Does the problem stem from a higher level of insecurity about job prospects, as so many employers have come to prioritize "flexibility" over long-term relationships with employees? Or does it have something to do with the much greater ease with which a person can be scrutinized in the age of social media?

One thing Marcus doesn't address is the ideological aspect of this "bubble." An inevitable consequence of commodification of people, as of anything else, is that everything ends up being judged by a uniform standard of value -- which means that alternative values are ruled out. This can result in an inability to think outside of a single ideological framework.

And the last sentence in the essay is only half true: "We will not be lonely, but we will not know ourselves." As Brene Brown has noted (https://www.fastcompany.com/40465644/brene-brown-americas-crisis-of-disconnection-runs-deeper-than-politics), as people increasingly cluster into cultural and ideological bubbles, they are also becoming increasingly lonely -- because in a bubble, you're not accepted unconditionally, but only to the extent you're seen as conforming -- and you may even feel compelled to conceal your true self.

It's not for nothing that in his first diary entry, Nineteen Eighty Four protagonist Winston Smith says he's writing for a future time "when men are free, and they are not alone." Seemingly Winston is never alone -- he's surrounded by coworkers in the Records Department. But in reality each is alone, because he isn't free to be himself around the others -- only to put on the face the system wants to see on him. Therefore none can actually be known by anyone else. This is also the situation for people involved in totalistic cults in real life.

While the corporate world's culture may not have a single identifiable face like Big Brother, it's evident that its conformist pressures, which are apparently much worse than they were thirty years ago, can create a similar superficial connectedness in which people are really, to paraphrase Orwell, "alone, and not free."