Author: Wessie

This essay was first published at The Pathos of Things newsletter. Subscribe here.

In Britain, where the saying goes that every man’s home is his castle, we like to see domestic space as something to be improved. Even if we have to save until middle age to own a decent home, we do so, in part, so that we can hand it over to builders for six months, after which there will be fewer carpets and more sunrooms. 

But domestic space is also a medium through which external forces shape us, in what we mistakenly consider our private existence. Nothing illustrates this better than the evolution of the modern kitchen.

In one of my favourite essays, former Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic describes how the British middle-class kitchen was transformed over the course of a century, from the early 1900s until today. Beginning as a “no-man’s land” where suburban housewives maintained awkward relations with their working-class servants, it has become “a domestic shrine to the idea of family life and conviviality.” Whereas the kitchen’s association with work and working people once ensured that it was partitioned, physically and socially, from the rest of the home, today the image of domestic bliss tends to centre on a spacious open-plan kitchen, with its granite-topped islands, its ranks of cupboard doors in crisp colours, its barstools and dining tables.

And in the process of being transformed, the kitchen transformed us. The other thing we find in this space today is an assortment of appliances, from toasters and kettles to expensive blenders and coffee machines, reflecting a certain admiration for efficiency in domestic life. This does not seem so striking in a world where smartphones and laptops are ubiquitous, but as Sudjic points out, the kitchen was the Trojan horse through which the cult of functionality first penetrated the private sphere.

A hundred years ago, sewing machines and radios had to be disguised as antique furniture, lest they contaminate the home with the feeling of a factory. It was after the middle-classes began to occupy the formerly menial world of the kitchen that everyday communion with machines became acceptable.

In its most idealised and affluent form, the contemporary kitchen has almost become a parody of the factory. Labour in conditions of mechanised order – the very thing the respectable home once defined itself against – is now a kind of luxury, a form of self-expression and appreciation for the finer things in life. We see the same tendency in the success of cooking shows like Master Chef, and in the design of fashionable restaurants, where the kitchen is made visible to diners like a theatre.

What paved the way for this strange marriage of the therapeutic and the functional was the design of the modern kitchen. During this process, the kitchen was a stage where history’s grand struggles played out on an intimate scale, often refracted through contests over women’s role in society. The central theme of this story is how the disenchanting forces of modern rationality have also produced enchanting visions of their own, visions long associated with social progress but eventually absorbed into the realm of private aspiration.

The principles underpinning the modern kitchen came from the northern United States, where the absence of servants demanded a more systematic approach to domestic work. That approach was defined in the mid-19th century by Catharine Beecher, sister of the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe. In her hugely popular Treatise on Domestic Economy, addressed specifically to American women, Beecher gave detailed instructions on everything from building a house to raising a child, from cooking and cleaning to gardening and plumbing. Identifying the organised, self-contained space of the ship’s galley as the ideal model for the kitchen, she provided designs for various labour-saving devices, setting in motion the process of household automation.

Beecher promoted an ethic of hard work and self-denial that she derived from a stern Calvinist upbringing. Yet she was also a leading campaigner for educational equality, establishing numerous schools and seminaries for women. Her professional approach to household work was an attempt, within the parameters of her culture, to give women a central role in the national myth of progress, though its ultimate effect was to deepen the association of women with the domestic sphere.

Something similar could be said about Christine Frederick, a former teacher from Boston, who in the early-20th century took some of Beecher’s ideas much further. Frederick’s faith was not Calvinism but the Taylorist doctrines of scientific management being implemented in American factories. What she called “household engineering” involved an obsessive analysis and streamlining of tasks as mundane as dishwashing. “I felt I was working hand in hand with the efficiency engineers in business,” she said, “and what they were accomplishing in industry, I too was accomplishing in the home.”

By this time Europe was ready for American modernity in the household, as relations between the classes and sexes shifted radically in the wake of the First World War. Women were entering a wider range of occupations, which meant fewer wives at home and especially fewer servants. At the same time, the provision of housing for the working class demanded new thinking about the kitchen.

In the late-1920s one of Christine Frederick’s disciples, the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, designed perhaps the most celebrated kitchen in history. The Frankfurt kitchen, as it came to be known, was one of many efforts at this time to repurpose the insights of American industry for the cause of socialism, for Schütte-Lihotzky was an ardent radical. She would, during her remarkably long life, offer her skills to a succession of socialist regimes, from the Soviet Union to Fidel Castro’s Cuba, as well as spending four years in a concentration camp for her resistance to Nazism.

For the Modernist architects among whom Schütte-Lihotzky worked in the 1920s, the social and technical challenge of the moment was the design of low-cost public housing. Cash-strapped government agencies were struggling to provide accommodation for war widows, disabled veterans, pensioners and slum-dwelling workers. It was for a project like this in Frankfurt that Schütte-Lihotzky produced her masterpiece, a compact, meticulously organized galley kitchen, offering a maximum of amenities in a minimum of space.

By the end of the decade, different versions of the Frankfurt kitchen had been installed in 10,000 German apartments, and were inspiring imitations elsewhere. Its innovations included a suspended lamp that moved along a ceiling runner, a height-adjustable revolving stool, and a sliding door that allowed women to observe their children in the living area. It was not devoid of style either, with ultramarine blue cupboards and drawers, ochre wall tiles and a black floor. Schütte-Lihotzky would later claim she designed it for professional women, having never done much cooking herself.

The Frankfurt kitchen was essentially the prototype of the fitted kitchens we are familiar with today, but we shouldn’t overlook what a technological marvel it represented at the time. Across much of working class Europe, a separate kitchen was unheard of (cooking and washing were done in the same rooms as working and sleeping), let alone a kitchen that combined water, gas and electricity in a single integrated system of appliances, workspaces and storage units.

But even as this template became a benchmark of modernity and social progress in Europe, the next frontier of domestic life was already appearing in the United States. During the 1920s and 30s, American manufacturers developed the design and marketing strategies for a full-fledged consumer culture, turning functional household items into objects of desire. This culture duly took off with the economic boom that followed the Second World War, as the kitchen became the symbol of a new domestic ideal.

With the growth of suburbia, community-based ways of life were replaced by the nuclear family and its neighbours, whose rituals centred on the kitchen as a place of social interaction and display. The role of women in the home, firmly asserted by various cultural authorities, served as a kind of traditional anchor in a world of change. Thanks to steel-beam construction and central heating, the kitchen could now become a large, open-plan space. It was, moreover, increasingly populated by colourful plastic-laminated surfaces, double cookers, washing machines and other novel technologies. Advertisers had learned to target housewives as masters of the family budget, so that huge lime green or salmon pink fridges became no less a status symbol than the cars whose streamlined forms they imitated.

Despite their own post-war boom, most Europeans could only dream of such domestic affluence, and dream they did, for the mass media filled their cinema and television screens with the comforts of American suburbia. This was after all the era of the Cold War, and the American kitchen was on the front line of the campaign to promote the wonders of capitalism. On the occasion of the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, US vice-president Richard Nixon got the chance to lecture Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev on the virtues of a lemon yellow kitchen designed by General Electric.

In this ideological competition, the technologies of the modern kitchen were still assumed to represent an important form of social progress; Nixon’s PR victory in the Moscow “kitchen debate” was significant because Khrushchev himself had promised to overtake the United States in the provision of domestic consumer goods. This battle for abundance was famously one that Communism would lose, but by the time the Soviet challenge had disappeared in the 1990s, it was increasingly unlikely that someone in the west would see their microwave as emblematic of a collective project of modernity.

Perhaps capitalism has been a victim of its own success in this regard; being able to buy a Chinese manufactured oven for a single day’s wages, as many people now can, makes it difficult to view that commodity as a profound achievement. Yet there is also a sense in which progress, at least in this domain, has become a private experience, albeit one that tends to emerge from a comparison with others. The beautiful gadgetsthat occupy the contemporary home are tools of pleasure and convenience, but also milestones in the personal quest for happiness and perfection. 

The open-plan kitchen descended from mid-century America has become a desired destination for that quest in much of the developed world, even if it is often disguised in a local vernacular. It is no coincidence that in 1999, such a kitchen featured in the first episode of Grand Designs, the show which embodies the British middle-class love affair with domestic improvement. But the conspicuous efficiency and functional aesthetics of today’s kitchen dream show that it is equally indebted to Margrete Schütte-Lihotzky’s utopian efforts of the 1920s. This is a cruel irony, given that for most people today, and most of them still women, working in the kitchen is not a form of mechanised leisure but a stressful necessity, if there is time for it at all. 

Then again, Schütte-Lihotzky is part of a longer story about the modern world’s fascination with rational order. When Kathryn Kish Sklar writes about Catharine Beecher’s kitchen from the 1850s, she could equally be describing the satisfaction our own culture longs to find in the well-organised home: “It demonstrates the belief that for every space there is an object, for every question an answer. It speaks of interrelated certainties and completion.”

This essay was first published at The Pathos of Things newsletter. Subscribe here.

This essay was first published at The Pathos of Things newsletter. Subscribe here.

Somewhere in my room (I forget where exactly) there is a box containing four smartphones I’ve cycled through in the last decade or so. Each of these phones appeared shockingly new when I first removed it from its neat cuboid packaging, though now there is a clear progression of models, with the earliest almost looking fit for a museum. This effect is part of their design, of course: these objects were made to look original at first, and then, by contrast to newer models, out of date. That all have cracked screens only emphasises their consignment to the oblivion of the obsolete.

The point of this sketch is not just to make you reflect on your consumer habits. I think it represents something more profound. This series of phones is like an oblique record of the transformation of society, describing the emergence of a new paradigm for organising human existence. It captures a slice of time in which the smartphone has changed every dimension of our lives, from work and leisure to knowledge and personal relations. This small device has upended professions from taxi driving to journalism, and shaped global politics by bringing media from around the world to even the poorest countries. It has significantly altered language. It has enabled new forms of surveillance by private companies and government agencies alike. A growing number of services are inaccessible without it.

Yet with its sleek plastic shell and vibrant interfaces, the smartphone is nonetheless a formidable object of desire: a kind of gateway to the possibilities of the 21st century. Ultimately, what it represents is paradoxical. An exhilarating sense of novelty, progress and opportunity; but also the countless adaptations we have to make as technology reshapes our lives, the new systems into which we are forced to fit ourselves.

To understand how a designed object can have this kind of power, defining both the practical and imaginative horizons of our age, we have to look beyond the immediate circumstances in which it appeared. The smartphone is a truly modern artefact: modern not just in the sense that it represents something distinctive about this era, but modern in another, deeper sense too. It belongs to a longer chapter of history, modernity, which is composed of moments that feel “modern” in their own ways.

The story of modernity shows us the conditions that enable design to shape our lives today. But the reverse is also true: the growing power of design is crucial to understanding modernity itself.

---

The very idea of design, as we understand it now, points to what is fundamentally at stake in modernity. To say that something is designed implies that it is not natural; that it is artificial, conceived and constructed in a certain way for a human purpose. Something which is not designed might be some form of spontaneous order, like a path repeatedly trodden through a field; but we still view such order as in some sense natural. The other antonym of the designed is the disordered, the chaotic.  

These contrasts are deeply modern. If we wind the clock back a few centuries – and in many places, much less than that – a hard distinction between human order and nature or chaos becomes unfamiliar. In medieval Europe, for instance, design and its synonyms (form, plan, intention) came ultimately from a transcendent order, ordained by God, that was manifest in nature and society alike. Human designs, such as the ornamentation of Gothic cathedrals or the symbols and trappings of noble rank, drew their meaning from that transcendent order.

In practical terms though, the question of where order came from was really a question about the authority of the past. It was the continuity of customs, traditions, and social structures in general which provided evidence that order came from somewhere beyond society, that it was natural. This in turn meant the existing order, inherited from the past, placed constraints of what human ambition could fathom.

To be modern, by contrast, is to view the world without such limitations. It is to view the world as something human beings must shape, or design, according to their own goals.

This modern spirit, as it is sometimes called, was bubbling up in European politics and philosophy over centuries. But it could only be fully realised after a dramatic rupture from the past, and this came around the turn of the 19th century. The French Revolution overturned the established order with its ancient hierarchies across large parts of Europe. It spread the idea that the legitimacy of rulers came from “the people” or “the nation,” a public whose desires and expectations made politics increasingly volatile. At the same time, the seismic changes known as the Industrial Revolution were underway. There emerged an unpredictable, dynamic form of capitalism, transforming society with its generation of new technologies, industries and markets.

These developments signalled a world that was unmistakably new and highly unstable. The notion of a transcendent order inherited from the past became absurd, because the past was clearly vanishing. What replaced it was the modern outlook that, in its basic assumptions, we still have today. This outlook assumes the world is constantly changing, and that human beings are responsible for giving it order, preventing it from sliding into chaos.

Modernity was and is most powerfully expressed in certain experiences of space and time. It is rooted in artificial landscapes, worlds built and managed by human beings, of which cities are still the best example. And since it involves constant change, modernity creates a sense of the present as a distinct moment with its own fashions, problems and ideas; a moment that is always slipping away into a redundant past, giving way to an uncertain future. “Modernity,” in the poet Charles Baudelaire’s famous expression, “is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.”

---

Design was present at the primal scenes of modernity. The French Revolutionaries, having broken dramatically with the past, tried to reengineer various aspects of social life. They devised new ways of measuring space (the metric system) and time (the revolutionary calendar, beginning at Year Zero, and the decimal clock). They tried to establish a new religion called the Cult of the Supreme Being, for which the artist Jacques-Louis David designed sets and costumes.

Likewise, the Industrial Revolution emerged in part through the design activities of manufacturers. In textiles, furniture, ceramics and print, entrepreneurs fashioned their goods for the rising middle-classes, encouraging a desire to display social status and taste. They devised more efficient production processes to increase profits, ushering in the age of factories and machines.

These early examples illustrate forces that have shaped design to this day. The French Revolution empowered later generations to believe that radical change could be conceived and implemented. In its more extreme phases, it also foreshadowed the attempts of some modern regimes to demolish an existing society and design a new one. This utopian impulse towards order and perfection is the ever-present dark side of design, in that it risks treating people as mere material to be moulded according to an abstract blueprint. Needless to say, design normally takes place on a much more granular level, and with somewhat less grandiose ambitions. 

Modern politics and commerce both require the persuasion of large groups of people, to engineer desire, enthusiasm, fear and trust. This is the realm of propaganda and advertising, a big part of what the aesthetic design of objects and spaces tries to achieve. But modern politics and commerce also require efficient, systematic organisation, to handle complexity and adapt to competition and change. Here design plays its more functional role of devising processes and tools.

Typically we find design practices connected in chains or webs, with functional and aesthetic components. Such is the connection between the machine humming in the factory and the commodity gleaming in the shop window, between urban infrastructure and the facades which project the glory of a regime, between software programmes and the digital interface that keeps you scrolling.

But modernity also creates space for idealism. Modern people have an acute need of ideals, whether or not they can be articulated or made consistent, because modern people have an acute need to feel that change is meaningful.

The modern mind anticipates constant change, and understands order as human, but by themselves these principles are far from reassuring. Each generation experiences them through the loss of a familiar world to new ideas, new technologies, new social and cultural patterns. We therefore need a way to understand change as positive, or at least a sense of what positive change might look like (even if that means returning to the past). Modernity creates a need for horizons towards which we can orient ourselves: a vision of the future in relation to which we can define who we are.

Such horizons can take the form of a collective project, where people feel part of a movement aiming at a vision of the future. But for a project to get off the ground, it again needs design for persuasion and efficiency. From Napoleon Bonaparte’s Empire Style furniture, with which he fitted out a vast army of bureaucrats, to Barack Obama’s pioneering Internet campaigns, successful leaders have used a distinctive aesthetic style and careful planning to bring projects to life.

Indeed, the search for effective design is one of modernity’s common denominators, creating an overlap between very different visions of society. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the ideals of communist artists and designers diverged from those dominant in the capitalist west. But the similarities between Soviet and western design in the 1920s and 30s are as striking as the differences. Communist propaganda posters and innovative capitalist advertising mirrored one another. Soviet industrial centres used the same principles of efficiency as the factories of Ford Motor Company in the United States. There was even much in common between the 1935 General Plan for Moscow and the redevelopment of Paris in the 1850s, from the rationalisation of transport arteries to the preference for neoclassical architecture.

But horizons can also be personal. The basis of consumerism has long been to encourage individuals to see their own lives as a trajectory of self-improvement, which can be measured by having the latest products and moving towards the idealised versions of ourselves presented in advertising. At the very least, indulging in novelty can help us feel part of the fashions and trends that define “the now”: a kind of unspoken collective project with its own sense of forward movement that consumerism arranges for us.

---

Above all though, design has provided horizons for modern people through technology. Technological change is a curiously two-sided phenomenon, epitomising our relative helplessness in the face of complex processes governing the modern world, while also creating many of the opportunities and material improvements that make modern ways of life desirable. Technology embodies the darkest aspects of modernity – alienation, exploitation, the constant displacement of human beings – as well as the most miraculous and exhilarating.

Design gives technology its practical applications and its aesthetic character. A series of design processes are involved, for instance, in turning the theory of internal combustion into an engine, combining that engine with countless other forms of engineering to produce an aeroplane, and finally, making the aeroplane signify something in the imagination of consumers. In this way, design determines the forms that technology will take, but also shapes the course of technological change by influencing how we respond to it.

Technology can always draw on a deep well of imaginative power, despite its ambiguous nature, because it ties together the two core modern ideals: reason and progress. Reason essentially describes a faith that human beings have the intellectual resources to shape the world according to their goals. Progress, meanwhile, describes a faith that change is unfolding in a positive direction, or could be made to do so. By giving concrete evidence of what reason can achieve, technology makes it easier to believe in progress.

But a small number of artefacts achieve something much greater. They dominate the horizons of their era, defining what it means to be modern at that moment. These artefacts tend to represent technological changes that are, in a very practical sense, transforming society. More than that, they package revolutionary technology in a way that communicates empowerment, turning a disorientating process of change into a new paradigm of human potential.

One such artefact was the railway, the most compelling symbol of 19th century industrial civilisation, its precise schedules and remorseless passage across continents transforming the meaning of time and space. Another was the factory, which in the first half of the 20th century became an aesthetic and political ideal, providing Modernist architects as well as dictators with a model of efficiency, mass participation and material progress. And probably the most iconic product ever to emerge from a factory was the automobile, which, especially in the United States, served for decades as an emblem of modern freedom and prosperity, its streamlined form copied in everything from kitchen appliances to radios.   

I will write in more detail about such era-defining artefacts in later instalments of this newsletter. For now, I only want to say that I believe the smartphone also belongs in this series.

Obviously the smartphone arrived in a world very different from the factory or car. The western experience is now just one among numerous distinct modernities, from East Asia to Latin America. For those of us who are in the west, social and cultural identity are no longer defined by ideas like nation or class, but increasingly by the relations between individuals and corporate business, mediated by an immersive media environment.

But the smartphone’s conquest of society implies that this fragmented form of modernity still sustains a collective imagination. What we have in common is precisely what defines the smartphone’s power: a vision of compact individual agency in a fluid, mobile, competitive age. The smartphone is like a Swiss army knife for the ambitious explorer of two worlds, the physical and the virtual; it offers self-sufficiency to the footloose traveller, and access to the infinite realms of online culture. It provides countless ways to structure and reflect on individual life, with its smorgasbord of maps, photographs, accounts and data. It allows us to seal ourselves in a personal enclave of headphones and media wherever we may be.

Yet the smartphone also communicates a social vision of sorts. One of its greatest achievements is to relieve the tension between personal desire and sociability, since we can be in contact with scores of others, friends and strangers alike, even as we pursue our own ends. It allows us to imagine collective life as flashes of connectivity between particles floating freely through distant reaches of the world.

It is not uniquely modern for a society to find its imagined centre in a singular technological and aesthetic achievement, as Roland Barthes suggested in the 1950s by comparing a new model Citroën to the cathedrals of medieval Europe. The difference is that, in modernity, such objects can never be felt to reflect a continuous, transcendent order. They must always point towards a future very different from the present, and as such, towards their own obsolescence.

The intriguing question raised by the smartphone is whether the next such artefact will have a physical existence at all, or will emerge on the other side of the door opened by the touch screen, in the virtual world. 

This essay was first published at The Pathos of Things newsletter. Subscribe here.

Who should we call the first “Instagram billionaire”? It’s a mark of the new Gilded Age we’ve entered that both women vying for that title belong to the same family, the illustrious Kardashian-Jenner clan. In 2019, it looked like Kylie Jenner had passed the ten-figure mark, only for Forbes to revise its estimates, declaring that Jenner had juiced her net worth with “white lies, omissions and outright fabrications.” (Her real wealth, the magazine thought, was a paltry $900 million). So, as of April this year, the accolade belongs to Jenner’s no less enterprising sister, Kim Kardashian West.

Social media has ushered in a new fusion of celebrity worship and celebrity entrepreneurship, giving rise to an elite class of “influencers” like Jenner and Kardashian West. Reality TV stars who were, in that wonderful phrase, “famous for being famous,” they now rely on their vast social media followings to market advertising space and fashion and beauty products. As such, they are closely entwined with another freshly minted elite, the tech oligarchs whose platforms are the crucial instruments of celebrity today. Word has it the good people at Instagram are all too happy to offer special treatment to the likes of the Kardashians, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga – not to mention His Holiness the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church (that’s @franciscus to you and me). And there’s every reason for social media companies to accommodate their glamorous accomplices: in 2018, Jenner managed to wipe $1.3 billion off the market value of Snapchat with a single tweet questioning the platform’s popularity. 

It’s perfectly obvious, of course, what hides behind the embarrassingly thin figleaf of “influence,” and that is power. Not just financial power but social status, cultural clout and, on the tech companies’ side of the bargain, access to the eyeballs and data of huge audiences. The interesting question is where this power ultimately stems from. The form of capital being harvested is human attention; but how does the tech/influencer elite monopolise this attention? One well-known answer is through the addictive algorithms and user interfaces that turn us into slaves of our own brain chemistry; another invokes those dynamics of social rivalry, identified by the philosopher René Girard, whereby we look to others to tell us what we should want. 

But I think there’s a further factor here which needs to be explored, and it begins with the idea of charisma. In a recent piece for Tablet magazine, I argued that social media had given rise to a new kind of charismatic political leader, examples of which include Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, Jordan Peterson and Greta Thunberg. My contention was that the charisma of these individuals, so evident in the intense devotion of their followers, does not stem from any innate quality of their personalities. In stead, charisma is assigned to them by online communities which, in the process of rallying around a leader, galvanise themselves into political movements.

Here I was drawing on the great German sociologist Max Weber, whose concept of “charismatic authority” describes how groups of people find coherence and structure by recognising certain individuals as special. And yet, the political leaders I discussed in the Tablet piece are far from the only examples showing the relevance of Weber’s ideas today. If anything, they are interlopers: accidental beneficiaries of a media system that is calibrated for a different type of charismatic figure, pursuing a different kind of power. I’m referring, of course, to the Kardashians, Biebers, and countless lesser “influencers” of this world. It is the twin elite of celebrities and tech giants, not the leaders of political movements, who have designed the template of charismatic authority in the social media age. 

---

When Weber talks about charismatic authority, he is talking about the emotional and ideological inspiration we find in other people. We are compelled to emulate or follow those individuals who issue us with a “calling” – a desire to lead our lives a certain way or aspire towards a certain ideal. To take an obvious example, think about the way members of a cult are often transfixed by a leader, dropping everything in their lives to enter his or her service; some of you will recall the scarlet-clad followers of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in the 2018 Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. Weber’s key observation is that this intensely subjective experience is always part of a wider social process: the “calling” of charisma, though it feels like an intimate connection with an exceptional person, is really the calling of our own urge to fit in, to grasp an identity, to find purpose and belonging. There’s a reason charismatic figures attract followers, plural. They are charismatic because they represent a social phenomenon we want to be a part of, or an aspiration our social context has made appealing. Whatever Rajneesh’s personal qualities, his cult was only possible thanks to the appeal of New Age philosophy and collectivist ways of life to a certain kind of disillusioned Westerner during the 1960s and ’70s. 

Today there’s no shortage of Rajneesh-like figures preaching homespun doctrines to enraptured audiences on Youtube. But in modern societies, charismatic authority really belongs to the domain of celebrity culture; the domain, that is, of the passionate, irrational, mass-scale worship of stars. Since the youth movements of the 1950s and 60s, when burgeoning media industries gave the baby-boomers icons like James Dean and The Beatles, the charismatic figures who inspire entire subcultures and generations have mostly come from cinema and television screens, from sports leagues, music videos and fashion magazines. Cast your mind back to your own teenage years – the time when our need for role models is most pressing – and recall where you and your chums turned for your wardrobe choices, haircuts and values. To the worlds of politics and business, perhaps? Not likely. We may not be so easily star-struck as adults, but I’d vouch most of your transformative encounters with charisma still come, if not from Hollywood and Vogue, then from figures projected into your imagination via the media apparatus of mass culture. It’s no coincidence that when a politician does gain a following through personality and image, we borrow clichés from the entertainment industry, whether hailing Barack Obama’s “movie star charisma” or dubbing Yanis Varoufakis “Greece’s rock-star finance minister.”

Celebrity charisma relies on a peculiar suspension of disbelief. We can take profound inspiration from characters in films, and on some level we know that the stars presented to us in the media (or now presenting themselves through social media) are barely less fictional. They are personae designed to harness the binding force of charismatic authority – to embody movements and cultural trends that people want to be part of. In the context of the media and entertainment business, their role is essentially to commodify the uncommodifiable, to turn our search for meaning and identity into a source of profit. Indeed, the celebrity culture of recent decades grew from the bosom of huge media conglomerates, who found that the saturation of culture by new media technologies allowed them to turn a small number of stars into prodigious brands.

In the 1980s performers like Michael Jackson and Madonna, along with sports icons like Michael Jordan, joined Hollywood actors in a class of mega celebrities. By the ’90s, such ubiquitous figures were flanked by stars catering to all kinds of specific audiences: in the UK, for instance, lad culture had premiership footballers, popular feminism had Sex and the City, Britpoppers had the Gallagher brothers and grungers had Kurt Cobain. For their corporate handlers, high-profile celebrities ensured revenues from merchandise, management rights and advertising deals, as well as reliable consumer audiences that offset the risks of more speculative ventures.

Long before social media, in other words, celebrity culture had become a thoroughly commercialised form of charismatic authority. It still relied on the ability of stars to issue their followers with a “calling” – to embody popular ideals and galvanise movements – but these roles and relationships were reflected in various economic transactions. Most obviously, where a celebrity became a figurehead for a particular subculture, people might express their membership of that subculture by buying stuff the celebrity advertised. But no less important, in hindsight, was the commodification of celebrities’ private lives, as audiences were bonded to their stars through an endless stream of “just like us” paparazzi shots, advertising campaigns, exclusive interviews and documentaries, and so on. As show-business sought to the maximise the value of star power, the personae of celebrities were increasingly constructed in the mould of “real” people with human, all-too-human lives.

Which brings us back to our influencer friends. For all its claims to have opened up arts and entertainment to the masses, social media really represents another step towards a celebrity culture dominated by an elite cluster of stars. Digital tech, as we know, has annihilated older business models in media-related industries. This has concentrated even more success in the hands of the few who can command attention and drive cultural trends – who can be “influencers” – through the commodification of their personal lives. And that, of course, is exactly what platforms like Instagram are designed for. A Bloomberg report describes how the Kardashians took over and ramped-up the trends of earlier decades:

Back in the 1990s, when the paparazzi were in their pomp, pictures of celebrities going about their daily lives… could fetch $15,000 a pop from tabloids and magazines… The publications would in turn sell advertising space alongside those images and rake in a hefty profit.

Thanks to social media, the Kardashians were able to cut out the middle man. Instagram let the family post images that they controlled and allowed them to essentially sell their own advertising space to brands… The upshot is that Kardashian West can make $1 million per sponsored post, while paparazzi now earn just $5 to $10 apiece for “Just Like Us” snaps.

Obviously, Instagram does not “let” the Kardashians do this out of the kindness of its heart: as platforms compete for users, it’s in their interests to accommodate the individuals who secure the largest audiences. In fact, through their efforts to identify and promote such celebrities, the social media companies are increasingly important in actually making them celebrities, effectively deciding who among the aspiring masses gets a shot at fame. Thus another report details how TikTok “assigned individual managers to thousands of stars to help with everything, whether tech support or college tuition,” while carefully coordinating with said stars to make their content go viral.

But recall, again, that the power of celebrities ultimately rests on their followers’ feeling that they’re part of something – that is the essence of their charisma. And it’s here that social media really has been revolutionary. It has allowed followers to become active communities, fused by constant communication with each other and with the stars themselves. Instagram posts revealing what some celeb had for breakfast fuel a vast web of interactions, through which their fans sustain a lively sense of group identity. Naturally, this being social media, the clearest sign of such bonding is the willingness of fans to group together like a swarm of hornets and attack anyone who criticises their idols. Hence the notorious aggression of the “Beleibers,” or fanatical Justin Bieber fans (apparently not even controllable by the pop star himself); and hence Instagram rewriting an algorithm to protect Taylor Swift from a wave of snake emojis launched by Kim Kardashian followers. This, surely, is the sinister meaning behind an e-commerce executive bragging to Forbes magazine about Kylie Jenner’s following, “No other influencer has ever gotten to the volume or had the rabid fans” that she does. 

In other words, the celebrity/tech elite’s power is rooted in new forms of association and identification made possible by the internet. It’s worth taking a closer look at one act which has revealed this in an especially vivid way: the K-Pop boy band BTS (the name stands for Bangtan Sonyeodan, or Beyond the Scene in English). Preppy outfits and feline good looks notwithstanding, these guys are no lightweights. Never mind the chart-topping singles, the stadium concerts and the collaborations with Ed Sheeran; their success registers on a macroeconomic scale. According to 2018 estimates from the Hyundai Research Institute, BTS contributes $3.6 billion annually to the South Korean economy, and is responsible for around 7% of tourism to the country. No less impressive are the band’s figures for online consumption: it has racked up the most YouTube views in a 24-hour period, and an unprecedented 750,000 paying viewers for a live-streamed concert. 

Those last stats are the most suggestive, because BTS’s popularity rests on a fanatical online community of followers, the “Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth” (ARMY), literally numbering in the tens of millions. In certain respects, the ARMY doesn’t resemble a fan club so much as an uncontacted tribe in the rainforest: it has its own aesthetics, norms and rituals centred around worship of BTS. All that’s missing, perhaps, is a cosmology, but the band’s management is working on that. It orchestrates something called the “Bangtan Universe”: an ongoing fictional metanarrative about BTS, unfolding across multiple forms of media, which essentially encourages the ARMY to inhabit its own alternate reality. 

Consequently, such is the ARMY’s commitment that its members take personal responsibility for BTS’s commercial success. They are obsessive about boosting the band’s chart performance, streaming new content as frequently and on as many devices as possible. The Wall Street Journal describes one fan’s devotion:  

When [the BTS song] “Dynamite” launched, Michelle Tack, 47, a cosmetics stores manager from Chicopee, Massachusetts, requested a day off work to stream the music video on YouTube. “I streamed all day,” Tack says. She made sure to watch other clips on the platform in between her streaming so that her views would count toward the grand total of views. […]

“It feels like I’m part of this family that wants BTS to succeed, and we want to do everything we can do to help them,” says Tack. She says BTS has made her life “more fulfilled” and brought her closer to her two daughters, 12 and 14. 

The pay-off came last October, when the band’s management company, Big Hit Entertainment, went public, making one of the most successful debuts in the history of the South Korean stock market. And so the sense of belonging which captivated that retail manager from Massachussetts now underpins the value of financial assets traded by banks, insurance companies and investment funds. Needless to say, members of the ARMY were clamouring to buy the band’s shares too. 

---

It is this paradigm of charismatic authority – the virtual community bound by devotion to a celebrity figurehead – which has been echoed in politics in recent years. Most conspicuously, Donald Trump’s political project shared many features with the new celebrity culture. The parallels between Trump and a figure like Kylie Jenner are obvious, from building a personal brand off the back of reality TV fame to exaggerating his wealth and recognising the innovative potential of social media. Meanwhile, the immersive fiction of the Bangtan Universe looks like a striking precedent for the wacky world of Deep State conspiracy theories inhabited by diehard Trump supporters, which spilled dramatically into view with the Washington Capitol invasion of January 6^th.

As I argued in my Tablet essay – and as the chaos and inefficacy of the Trump presidency demonstrates – this social media-based form of charismatic politics is not very well suited to wielding formal power. In part, this is because the model is better suited to the kinds of power sought by celebrities: financial enrichment and cultural influence. The immersive character of online communities, which tend to develop their own private languages and preoccupations, carries no real downside for the celebrity: it just means more strongly identified fans. It is, however, a major liability in politics. The leaders elevated by such movements aren’t necessarily effective politicians to begin with, and they struggle to broaden their appeal due to the uncompromising agendas their supporters foist on them. We saw these problems not just with Trump movement but also with the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon in the UK, and, to an extent, with the younger college-educated liberals who influenced Bernie Sanders after 2016. 

But this doesn’t mean online celebrity culture has had no political impact. Even if virtual communities aren’t much good at practical politics, they are extremely good at producing new narratives and norms, whether rightwing conspiracy theories in the QAnon mould, or the progressive ideas about gender and identity which Angela Nagle has aptly dubbed “Tumblr liberalism.” Celebrities are key to the process whereby such innovations are exported into the wider discourse as politically-charged memes. Thus Moya Lothian Mclean has described how influencers popularise feminist narratives – first taking ideas from academics and activists, then simplifying them for mass consumption and “regurgitat[ing] them via an aesthetically pleasing Instagram tile.” Once such memes reach a certain level of popularity, the really big celebrities will pick them up as part of their efforts to present a compelling personality to their followers (which is not to say, of course, that they don’t also believe in them). The line from Tumblr liberalism through Instagram feminism eventually arrives at the various celebrities who have revealed non-binary gender identities to their followers in recent years. Celebs also play an important role in legitimising grassroots political movements: last year BTS joined countless other famous figures in publicly giving money to Black Lives Matter, their $1 million donation being matched by their fans in little more than a day.

No celebrity can single-handedly move the needle of public opinion, but discourse is increasingly shaped by activists borrowing the tools of the influencer, and by influencers borrowing the language of the activist. Such charismatic figures are the most important nodes in the sprawling network of online communities that constitutes popular culture today; and through their attempts to foster an intimate connection with their followers, they provide a channel through which the political can be made to feel personal. This doesn’t quite amount to a “celebocracy,” but nor can we fully understand the nature of power today without acknowledging the authority of stars.

This essay was originally published by Tablet Magazine on 21st April 2021.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, the tone of politics has become much quieter, and not just in the United States. It’s amazing how much room this man’s personality took up in the public conversation. But we should remember that what silenced Trump was not losing an election in November 2020. It was being kicked off social media after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The decision to take away Trump’s megaphone was the natural outcome of a phenomenon that emerged around 2015, when politics was transformed by a new type of charismatic leader, unique to our own era, who emerged from a culture increasingly centered around social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. But Trump is just one example, albeit a dramatic one. On the left there is also Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Opposition in the United Kingdom. There is the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg and the cult philosopher Jordan Peterson. These men and women “went viral,” their individual charisma spread by a new, decentralized media system, and they galvanized movements that defined themselves as fighting against the established order.

Some of these figures’ time in the limelight is already over. But others will take their place, because the forces that gave rise to them are still here. To understand their appeal, we only have to turn to the influential German sociologist of the early 20th century, Max Weber. It was Weber who popularized “charisma” as a political term. And it is Weber’s concept of charismatic leadership that seems more relevant now than ever before.

Born 157 years ago tomorrow, Weber lived at a time when Western societies, and Germany especially, were being transformed by industrialization at a frantic pace. The central aim of his work was to understand how modern societies evolved and functioned in contrast to those of the past. Hailed as a brilliant young intellectual, Weber suffered a nervous breakdown around the turn of the 20th century, and subsequently produced a gloomy account of the modern world that was to be his greatest legacy. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1905, he argued that the foundation of modernity was an ultrarational approach to organizing our lives and institutions, especially in pursuit of profit—a culture he compared to an “iron cage.”

It is against this backdrop that we find Weber’s most famous ideas about charismatic leadership. There was, he observed, a weak point in the iron cage of rationality. The modern principle that the right to govern comes from the people created an opening for charismatic politicians to gain immense power by winning the adoration of the masses. In his influential 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation, Weber suggested the best example of this was the 19th-century British politician William Gladstone. But after Weber’s death in 1920, his theory of charismatic leadership achieved new renown, as it seemed to predict the dictatorships of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin.

A century later, Weber’s vision of “dictatorship resting on the exploitation of mass emotionality” fits nicely into the current moment, and may even have fed the reflexive portrayal of Trump as some sort of proto-fascist ruler. But in fact, this understanding of political charisma as purely a tool of modern demagogues is a misreading of Weber’s ideas.

Weber believed that charismatic individuals shape the politics of every era. A charismatic leader, he wrote in the posthumously published Economy and Society, has “a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” For Weber, the crucial element is to understand that charisma has a social function. He didn’t see charisma merely as a character trait belonging solely to the leader. He saw the desire to follow charismatic individuals as a necessary ingredient that binds groups of people together. Hence, when he laid out the three forms of authority that organize all societies, he included “charismatic authority” alongside legal structures and tradition.

What’s more, this mutually binding power of charisma doesn’t only sustain societies, according to Weber—it also transforms them. He actually thought the purest example of charismatic authority came from religious movements led by prophets, of the kind that shaped the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Here Weber describes charisma as a “revolutionary force,” because of the way prophets unite their followers with a sense of confidence and conviction that can shatter existing structures of authority. Charisma is like a spark that ignites sweeping social and cultural change.

This is the Weberian insight that opens the door to understanding the charismatic leaders of our own time. To grasp what makes an individual charismatic, we shouldn’t just focus on their personality: We should look at the people who are brought together by their mutual recognition of a leader.

Today, the social basis for much political ideology and activism comes from online subcultures, where people develop common worldviews based on spontaneous and widely shared feelings, like the sense of being betrayed by corrupt elites. It is from these virtual communities that political movements emerge, often by discovering and adopting a charismatic figure that galvanizes them. Through the rapid circulation of video clips and social media posts, an individual can be turned into a leader almost overnight.

What is remarkable about this paradigm is how much the standard relationship between leaders and followers has been reversed: These new movements are not created by their leaders, even though the leaders may command tremendous devotion. The followers “choose” their leader. The movements exist first in an unrealized form, and conjure up leaders that allow them to fully manifest and mobilize themselves.

Weber spoke of charisma being “recognized,” emphasizing the way leaders inspire their followers with a sense of purpose or spiritual “calling.” People gravitate toward individuals who give them a language to express their shared feelings and an example to follow. But what matters most is that, through this collective recognition of a figurehead, the followers cement their own social bond.

When we look at the charismatic leaders who have emerged in recent years, we don’t in fact see authoritarian figures who control their movements and bend their followers to their own distinct political visions. What we see are leaders who rise suddenly and unexpectedly, and whose actual beliefs are less important than their ability to embody the emotions that unite their devotees. Today it is the leaders who are shaped by the attitudes of their movements rather than the other way around.

Thus, Trump’s followers were never all that interested in how effectively he turned campaign slogans into reality. What held the MAGA movement together was not the content of Trump’s rather inconsistent and half-hearted declarations about policy, but the irreverent drama of rebellion that he enacted through the political theater of his rallies and Twitter posts. His leadership gave birth to intense internet communities, where diehard supporters cooked up their own narratives about his struggle against the establishment.

The point isn’t that Trump had no real power over his followers, which of course he did. The point is that his power depended on—and was limited to—the role of culture war icon that his movement created for him. Trump was effective in this role because he had no apparent strategy apart from giving his audience what it wanted, whether photo-ops brandishing a Bible, or nods and winks at online conspiracy theories.

Likewise, Sanders and Corbyn were both old men who unexpectedly found themselves riding tidal waves of youthful support. But their sudden rise from relative obscurity led to some awkward moments when some of their more strongly held views did not align with the wishes of their followers. Sanders’ campaign for president changed significantly from 2016 to 2020, as the mass movement that chose him as its leader molded him into a champion of their immigration preferences, which he had previously opposed. Similarly, in his time as leader of the British Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, Corbyn had to abandon his lifelong opposition to the European Union because he was now leading a movement that cherished EU membership as one of its core values.

Finally, consider two cases from outside the realm of official politics. Greta Thunberg is treated as a modern saint who has inspired millions to march through the world’s cities demanding action against climate change. But Thunberg’s enormous presence in the environmental movement is not matched by a unique philosophy or any organizational power. She went viral on social media during her 2018 strike outside the Swedish parliament, and her fame now rests on being invited by political and religious leaders to shout at them on camera about how her generation has been betrayed. “I understand that people are impressed by this movement,” Thunberg told the Times in 2019, “and I am also very impressed with the young people, but I haven’t really done anything. I have just sat down.”

Then there’s Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. Thanks to a few viral videos about free speech in 2016 and a series of controversial media engagements thereafter, Peterson went from teaching Christological interpretations of Disney films to being hailed as the messiah of the anti-woke movement. Peterson has continually stressed that he’s interested in psychology, not politics, yet what followers find captivating are his filmed broadsides against social justice ideology, which have been viewed millions of times on YouTube.

All these figures have been imbued with a certain magical status, which deepens the shared identity of their followers. Movements have gathered around them as totems embodying a fight against injustice and a spirit of revolt. Consequently, they command strong emotional attachments, though their followers are only interested in them insofar as they stay within the limits of the movement they were chosen to lead. The power of their charisma depends, therefore, on conforming to parameters set by the imagination of their followers.

Obviously, individual personality is not irrelevant here. Charismatic figures are generally regarded as authentic, based on the perception that they are not trying to meet social expectations or simply advance their careers. Seen in this way, it makes sense that a generation accustomed to the shifting trends and constant self-promotion of social media would warm to old-timers like Sanders and Corbyn, who had been stoically banging the same drum for decades.

Interestingly, both Trump and Thunberg have often had their personalities pathologized by critics: Trump on account of his “narcissistic personality disorder,” Thunberg on account of her autism and single-minded commitment to her cause. But supporters see these same qualities as refreshingly direct. This kind of appeal is necessary for leaders who want to offer their followers the personal “calling” which Weber saw as key to charisma. No one is inspired to take on the establishment by people who look and sound like they belong to it.

Nonetheless, following Weber’s lead, we don’t need to think about charisma as something that’s simply inherent to these influential personalities. In the sudden explosion of hype surrounding certain figures on social media, we see how the conviction that an individual is special can be created through collective affirmation. This is the virtual equivalent of the electrifying rallies and demonstrations where followers have gathered to see figures like Trump, Corbyn, and Thunberg: The energy is focused on the leader, but it comes from the crowd.

So what does all this tell us about the future of the new charismatic movement politics? Weber insisted that to exercise real power, charismatic authority cannot keep relying on the spiritual calling of committed followers. It must establish its own structures of bureaucracy and tradition. According to Weber, this is how prophetic religious movements of the past created lasting regimes.

But the way that today’s charismatic leaders are chosen for their expressive qualities means they usually aren’t suited to consolidating power in this way. There is a remarkable contrast between the sweeping legislative program being enacted by the uncharismatic Biden presidency and Trump’s failure to deliver on most of his signature proposals.

This does not mean that the movements inspired by charismatic figures are irrelevant—far from it. They will continue to influence politics by reshaping the social and cultural context in which it unfolds. In fact, the potential for these movements is all the more dramatic because, as recent years have shown, they can appear almost out of thin air. We do not know who the next charismatic leaders will be until after they have been chosen.