Unfriending: Digital Capitalism

Photo by Valiant Made on Unsplash

My previous blog post describes friendships as informal schools for social solidarity. The mutual care, trust, affection, and intimacy we enjoy with our friends both sustain us and make us more complete persons. They also help us learn the practices of neighborliness and social responsibility that all social institutions need.

But friendships do not thrive in a vacuum. They need support from the very institutions—educational, economic, political, and religious—for which they school us in solidarity. If friendships do not receive such support; if instead the social environment undermines genuine friendships, then, no matter how sincerely we try to cultivate them, we’ll run into barriers.

Hostile Environment

“Distrust.” Photo by Rolf Dietrich Brecher from Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I believe American society has become a hostile environment for friendship. One sign is a frequently cited breakdown in public trust: trust in other people, trust in political and religious leaders, trust in scientific expertise, indeed, trust in any social institution. A recent New York Times opinion piece by M. Anthony Mills warns that institutional trust itself, rather than any policy issue, might be the new battleground of a highly polarized politics: “Could we be entering a new political order polarized around institutional trust?” he asks. If so, that “would bode ill not only for expert institutions” (such as the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) “but also for democratic society.”

Another sign is the diagnosis I’ve mentioned before from the U. S. Surgeon General that loneliness has become a national epidemic. We can add to this a recent report called “The Belonging Barometer.” It shows strong correlations not only between a sense of belonging in one “life setting” (such as friendship) and belonging in other life settings (such as the local community or the nation) but also between the absence of belonging in one life setting and alienation in others.

Destructive Tendencies

Obviously these are sprawling topics, and I can’t do them justice in a few paragraphs. Yet, continuing from previous posts, let me draw some connections that too few commentators note. In my view, we cannot separate the current crisis in friendship—including the “male loneliness epidemic” mentioned in my post on Friendship—from two destructive tendencies of capitalism: it is anti-work, and it plunders so-called nature.

Capitalism is anti-work, I’ve claimed, because commodification of labor power, competition for jobs, and consumerist compensations alienate workers from their work and each other. A society whose economy thrives on such alienation can hardly promote solidarity and friendship. I’ve also suggested that capitalism requires the plunder of so-called nature. The exploitation of labor power “pays off” because capitalism continually finds new ways to put natural resources to work without having to pay their real costs, their environmental, social, political, and indeed economic costs.

Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

Such appropriated resources include what Jason Moore calls the “Four Cheaps”: unpaid human work (e.g., childcare), food, energy, and raw materials. From a capitalist perspective, plants, animals, and the entire biosphere can hardly be worthy recipients of human affection and intimacy. They’re simply economic resources to use or even abuse and then discard when they’re no longer profitable. To the hard-nosed capitalist, friendship with an animal, such as mine with our dog Ruby, makes no sense/cents. We can trace many of the ills of genetic engineering, factory farming, and destructive climate change back to this dynamic.

The Fifth Cheap

Now, however, such unfriending effects have a new dimension. In its current digital phase, the global capitalist economy has added a fifth element to the Four Cheaps it appropriates. The new fifth cheap is personal data, which massive digital enterprises like Amazon and Google target, vacuum up, store, disseminate, and manipulate, largely without either compensation or suitable government regulation. Every day, when we email, smart phone, travel, shop, browse the internet, interact on social media, and publish or read blog posts like this, we continually provide information about ourselves to anonymous corporations that reap huge profits from it. As a paper titled “The Economics of Personal Data and Privacy” enthused more than a dozen years ago, “We live in a consumer data-driven and consumer data-focused commercial revolution, in which individuals are at the same time consumers and producers of a most valuable asset: their personal information” (p. 8).

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Yet we have little knowledge about how this “asset” is extracted and even less control over how it is used. It is the fifth cheap, on whose appropriation the digital economy heavily depends. This is the key to what Shoshana Zuboff has brilliantly analyzed as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and its threats to democracy.

Many critics bemoan digital violations of privacy, rampant misinformation, breakdown in civil discourse, addiction to social media, and personal branding run amok. But these are side effects of capitalism’s latest essential appropriation of “nature.” Now it appropriates our personal identities and our attachments to others, the very matters that friendship traditionally has nurtured. Where friendships foster trust, digital capitalism promotes transactions; instead of affection, affectation; rather than intimacy, self-promotion. This is not an environment where mutual care—the lifeblood of friendship—can thrive. Digital capitalism is not simply anti-work. Nor is it only anti-Earth. It is, I submit, anti-friendship.

Company of Friends

That doesn’t mean digital capitalism makes friendships impossible. Nor does it mean we must completely escape the current economy to have genuine friends. But it does require us to consider carefully why and how friendship matters. And it makes the call for economic transformation all the more urgent.

Chinese Garden of Friendship, Sydney, Australia. Photo by Maksym Kozlenko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We need an economy where satisfying work abounds and all creatures can flourish. We also need an economy that does not undermine friendship. One place to heed the call for economic transformation is in the company of friends. And, yes, here I include our animal companions. By befriending us, they remind us of the good work and new earth for which so many of us long.