Like a Demagogue: WeWork & The Doublespeak Advertising Philosophy of Silicon Valley
Of all the more complex competencies of personality — things like charity, competence, honour; things you can’t entirely pin down through a single archetypal act, or contain in one case— the one which, nowadays, must surely be in the shortest available supply, at least as it has been historically understood, is ‘negative capability’. Originally coined by the poet John Keats, the term can be used to describe those who are “content in the midst of uncertainties and doubts, and not compelled toward fact or reason.” In noted figures of leadership, such as Abraham Lincoln or the Rashidun caliph Umar, negative capability can be the means towards finding a kind of conciliated intellectual enlightenment that makes solvable even the most intractable of problems. In artists, like Elizabeth Robins or William Shakespeare or Keats himself, such contentment can act as the end itself, from whence comes a whole gilded output of artistic product, that makes high and low concerns friendly and ultimately indistinguishable.
Regardless of means or ends, it cannot be accurately said that the Early Digital period is one rich in negative capability. What our day does seem to be exceedingly rich in is the antithesis of negative capability, defined by philosopher Jacob Needham as ‘dispersal’, “a flight from overwhelming emotion.” But that is by-the-by.
Indeed, there’s something about that term negative capability that some, upon a cursory and swift examination, may find distasteful. If inspected without sensitivity, it seems somewhat akin to hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, being so intimately related to the Western public’s prevailing subjects of daily interest — politics and celebrity — is particularly feared and disavowed among common vices. It’s true that, even understood fully and impartially, negative capability can be considered an amoral virtue, rather like charm — as good for artfully avoiding action, or justifying a lack of resolve in fact or reason, as for sailing between two harshly contrasting points towards an otherwise invisible resolution. Manifest in this amoral fashion, negative capability can be virtually indistinguishable from equivocation, relativism and even doublespeak of the most mischievous kind.
More concerningly still, there is a section of our modern world where this less responsible, more misusable form of negative capability remains in rude health. That oasis of negative-negative capability is none other than Silicon Valley. But for the skillful misuse of negative capability, its entire advertising philosophy could not exist.
WeWork
For a whole host of reasons, but one reason in particular, WeWork possesses among the most fascinating stories of all the American start-ups to gain such enormous global profile. It was founded by Adam Neumann, a former captain in the Israeli Navy who prior to stumbling upon the idea for WeWork had founded a children’s clothing company (Krawlers, later EggBaby) and sired a second business idea for women’s shoes with detachable high-heels. Prior to founding WeWork proper, Neumann started up Green Desk with Miguel McKelvey, a shared-workspace business focusing on sustainability. It was for all intents and purposes a beta for what WeWork became. McKelvey would function as Neumann’s co-founder at WeWork, and become the company’s ‘chief culture officer’.
It’s once WeWork began building towards Neumann’s original ambition (to overtake JP Morgan as New York’s largest leaser of office space) where the myth-in-the-making really starts to take off. Investors were beguiled by the way in which Neumann related his company’s utopian ambitions to the tradition of the Jewish kibbutz (he spent some of his childhood in the Kibbutz Nir Am, near the Gaza strip). Billions of dollars in venture capital were accorded to the company, including $10 billion from Japan’s SoftBank. Neumann became notorious for his imperial ambitions with WeWork, consorting with the likes of Jared Kushner, trying (initially with success) to trademark the word ‘we’, and flying high. Then, typical to the Icarus myth, Neumann flew too high. The party-hearty atmosphere he keenly cultivated at WeWork found its way into a perhaps inevitable, abject nadir in a sexual harrassment lawsuit from a former employee. Meanwhile WeWork’s eagerly anticipated 2019 IPO surfaced three consecutive years of spiralling, catastrophic losses, despite it being the highest valued company at point-of-IPO since Uber (also proud owner of many years of consecutive losses against revenue during its “peak investment year[s]”).
Naturally, Neumann thought it best to step down from the chief executive berth. I remember first being told of his departure as my bus (the wrong bus) inched its way forth through mid-morning traffic along the Han river. Turning away from the bulletin, as I looked out of the window the morning sun glistened off of a WeWork insignia, emblazoned on one of the company’s Seoul properties.
WeWork & Non-Descriptive Language
It’s true that a lot of the WeWork story strikes dispiritingly familiar tones:
- The rampant megalomania.
- The notion of work-as-hedonistic-pursuit, which is then synchronised with old-fashioned hedonistic pursuits, with all the id-privileging and lack of philosophical control that implies.
- A public that is continually mis-sold on the actual productive output of a company, with old-fashioned metrics that indicate sustained success being substituted out for abstract valuation which, despite current residency in a Calabasas of the red, is sure to come wildly good in some ever-further tomorrow. Don’t forget what Peter said: “the value of a business is its ability to generate cash-flows in the future.”
However, the most lingeringly fascinating part of the WeWork story doesn’t have to do with procedural event. It has similarly little to do with its CEO smoking marijuana in a $60 million private jet, or with the notion that he believed that a partnership of himself, Kushner and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had the applied knowledge, nerve, vision and resources between them required to “save the world”.
The most fascinating part of the WeWork story involves language, and particularly the way in which WeWork’s method of presenting itself makes skillful use of the amoral kind of negative capability we were talking about earlier. The ‘language’ of WeWork serves as a kind of perfect epitome of what we might call the ‘Siliconite dialect’, in syntax, register and vocabulary choice. Here’s an excerpt from the company’s “Mission” page.
“When we started WeWork in 2010, we wanted to build more than beautiful, shared office spaces. We wanted to build a community. A place you join as an individual, ‘me’, but where you become part of a greater ‘we’. A place where we’re redefining success measured by personal fulfillment, not just the bottom line.”
If we take this passage as indicative enough of the Siliconite dialect, we can begin schematising that dialect as one which, primarily, seeks to rationalise a venture’s pursuit of stratospheric degrees of commercial success via the putative social benefits that said venture intends to deliver, and for which it considers the aforementioned degrees of commercial success ineluctable. In this dialect, the company’s “Mission” is removed from its late 20th century business-only connotations and re-immersed in the righteous glow of the term’s original religious meaning. In this dialect, work and play are made into one another’s direct equivalent. As observed by Sam Adler-Bell, in the particular brand of the dialect spoken in WeWork, the kibbutz itself — the metaphor of the company, of which Neumann was so vocally proud — is re-oriented. In general terms, a kibbutz is synonymous with a kind of agrarian socialism. In Neumann’s opinion of it, what it required to go beyond being a “failed social experiment” was a capital component.
You may, in between rolling your eyes at how stubbornly and eagerly Palo Alto these sentiments sound as they are expressed, have noticed that a great deal of WeWork’s means of talking about itself involves taking words that mean one thing and recasting them so that they mean something slightly different.
This is known as the principle of non-descriptive language. It is rife in business exchange, and native to any speaker of the Siliconite dialect. It is also tremendously popular with demagogues and populists.
Love We, Need We, Use We
From a moral angle, the total ubiquity of non-descriptive language in big tech ad-speak is evidence that a certain kind of ethically nonplussed negative capability (the artistic kind, in other words) reigns in those industries concerned. Using this kind of ad-speak requires that its composer be comfortable sitting in the squall between the term in question’s descriptive definition and its new, slightly altered non-descriptive application.
Adler-Bell makes note of that most pervasive word used in non-descriptive terms by the Siliconite — “share”.
There is more, too, to the non-descriptive use of the word ‘share’. While the word itself does not, per se, abjure the idea of the object shared ultimately being owned by one of its several users, it does suggest a certain equivalence of possession. It suggests that the object shared has been socialised. In accordance with Adam Neumann’s own particular kibbutz philosophy, WeWork’s use of the word ‘share’ skews much closer to the descriptive definition of the word ‘exchange’ or, as pointed out above, ‘rent’.
It is not merely in these kinds of incidental uses of non-descriptive language, either, that WeWork finds currency for the expansion of its brand. Neumann — in his attempt to functionally monopolise the word “We” through trademarking — could be much more deliberate with his own use of non-description. In 2015, WeWork’s then-fledgling CEO referred to the 1970s’ popular sobriquet the “Me Decade”, and then positioned his own outfit as harbinger of the Millennially-helmed“We Decade”. In doing so, he was doing more than engaging in some light happy-days doggerel. He was making a deliberate and, in its show of rhetorical guile, rather artful appeal to those aforenoted Millennials’ prejudices about themselves— that, in spite of the fact of their vast consumption and subsidy of ethically dubious purveyors of convenience, they are the most morally engaged generation in half a century.
By using non-descriptive language to apportion such flattery where it can have such an enveloping effect — for whose delighted preoccupation is more absolute than an insecure person recently-complimented? — Neumann got away with a much greater feat of non-descriptive language.
The ‘We’ in question was treated through non-description to suggest a benign, consumptive collectivism, when in fact the principles of business behind the initiative thrives most from a scenario in which the entrepreneurial-competitive model is extended all through civilian life. It is for this reason that Neumann’s attempts to purloin the word ‘We’ represents the most indicative and spectacular aspect of the story of “Neumann the Siliconite Demagogue” — a man who offers you a communitarian notion of ‘We’ with one hand, while reserving the fruits of that same concept for himself with the other hand.
“‘We’ Generation”, in descriptive language, might mean something like “a pluralistic generation with common goals, where personal initiative is sometimes ceded to collective interest in order to ensure the latter is best preserved”. In non-descriptive language as used in given circumstances, “‘We’ Generation” means something like “ambitions to a business empire with the word “We” as prevailing suffix”.
And Neumann was successful at pushing that word into his own pocket, at least at first. He then sold ‘We’ for $5 million. To his own company.
(CEO = Populist) = ???
Some people may find it useless in a practical sense, or simply distasteful as a show of attempted rhetorical power that serves more to glamourise the intellect of the analyst than anything else, to be discussing Siliconite diplomacy in terms that are outrightly political, let alone to be ascribing terms like ‘demagogue’ to a fallen start-up founder as I have. However, even should we give reference only to the Siliconite’s ability to embroil itself in large affairs, and address vast numbers of people as well as affect them, we should see that there is plenty of similarity to be seen.
The first of those similarities is in a name. There is one word in the Siliconite dialect which is not non-descriptive, one word which is usually performed exactly as the term itself suggests: “disrupt”. There can, even in this rare straightforward display of big tech’s crude philosophy, be seen a glint of what’s non-descriptive, at least in the sense that we are, following the incredible excesses of the valley’s progeny, expected to look upon “disruption” and those who perform it not merely in toleration but in admiration. We are expected to perceive disruption not merely as a means (and in the hands of the proper iconoclast with a worthy end in mind, it can be a mighty means indeed) but as a noble end in and of itself, or at least a pseudo-end that’ll do until we think of a proper one[1].
The Siliconite entrepreneur disrupts. They whip up excitement. They see emotions as a, if not the, prime currency of their pursuit. They feel exorbitant pride in their ability to overturn established norms of personal, and sometimes political, conduct. What is the etymology of the word ‘demagogue’? A leader of the commons, δημαγωγός, a rabble-rouser. There is no performative aspect of a disruptive tech enterpreneur’s modus operandi which could not be transposed, verbatim, to describe a demagogue.
Perhaps needless to say, the demagogue also finds ample use of non-descriptive language highly useful to their ends. Both left- and right-leaning demagogues in recent years have made much non-descriptive hay of the word ‘democracy’, which has been promiscuously reclaimed from its original meaning, and recast variously to mean ‘the exercise of the will of those dubbed most intelligent on political grounds’ or ‘the sovereignty of the will of the most moral’, as opposed to ‘the exercise of the will of a simple majority.’ The word ‘people’ has likewise been used non-descriptively — à la ‘the people’s vote’ — to imply differences in human worth as related to voting choice. And so the tradition streams back through history, from Hitler’s invocation of the non-descriptive ‘aryan’ and ‘German unity’, Governor Eyre referring to perfectly legal congregations of disenfranchised black Jamaicans as ‘the mob’, the ‘immediate prosperity’ of Stanisław Tymiński, the Communist ‘infestation’ spoken of by Senator McCarthy.
Considering Big Tech as a Political Concern of Its Own
If we take non-descriptive language as a manifestation of negative capability, then we can see above that the most immediately dangerous use of said negative capability is the political kind, when it is harnessed to direct ends. The negative capability and non-description most identifiable within the Siliconite dialect is more of the artistic kind — prized for its idealistic, even aesthetic values, exploitative in aim, as opposed to maniacal, and self-renewing in nature, as opposed to finite.
That is not, however, to say that the widespread use of non-descriptive language by big tech concerns is not a threat to wider public welfare. It does not mean that said examples of negative capabilities have no political significance or meaning. It does not mean that the companies in question are not, in and of themselves, political concerns. Quite the contrary, in all three cases.
What is most concerning about the dense network of similarities between populist demagogues and disruptive tech entrepreneurs regards what history tells us about the conditions in which demagogues typically appear. When populists come on the scene, it is a sure sign of a democratic majority that has lost its ability to reason in its best interests. Because a majority that has lost such an ability tends to resort to select chapters from the use of force, mining prejudice for decisive action, populist figures will emerge initially to serve those aggressive interests and conduct the instruments of state accordingly. What almost inevitably follows is an unraveling of constitutional limits on executive power, as the demagogue ascends from people’s mouthpiece to executive proper.
The way in which private citizens, with huge vested business interests, have been given means to take up these platforms of demagoguery, and have harnessed those old techniques with such historical fidelity and with such capital success, speaks to the innate politicism of big technology. In soft power, in indirect social influence, now in method, they must be regarded as a phenomenon that runs parallel with government.
It is no coincidence that, following the bulk of two decades in which the influence of these large companies, and their dialect, saturated modern life, in-earnest political demagoguery has taken root and begun to boast with branches again.
It is no coincidence, either, that common instances of non-descriptive language have become part of the common vernacular, not even attributable to any singular demagogue, for now demagoguery can be the leisure pursuit of the common individual. Witness the way in which terms like ‘feminist’ are used in non-description, both by those whom assume the term for themselves and those who use it as a third-person pejorative; the way in which non-description has rendered unto a term like ‘racism’ a seemingly infinite elasticity of usage.
This kind of non-description, however, is not rooted in the negative capability that motivates both the virtuous poet or the upright politician. This is the kind that is rooted in that other term we saw earlier: dispersal.
A Return to Meaning
History and historicism are one thing, and already possess baskets full of detractors, many of them perfectly fair-minded. Interpolative history[2], wherein an historical holding pattern from one sector of study (in this case, statecraft) is mapped onto another (in this case, big business), is even more apt for contention. Nevertheless, the warning signs in this vogue of non-descriptive language — how easily it is naturalised and how effortlessly it abets consumption and bestows power upon producers — present dire forecasts for our society if we do not heed them. A prevailing business culture that so flagrantly uses such an amoral tool is one thing. A prevailing business culture comprised of multiple world-straddling monopolies, who are themselves motivated by a deliberate appetite for monopolism, which cannot be held in check even by the means that are traditionally used to adjudge if such a venture is a success and should be continued?
Given the power these companies possess, the culture they form is nothing if not a direct threat to the sanctity of democratic institutions and traditions.
I was of late reading Joan Didion’s imperial 1967 essay Slouching Toward [sic] Bethlehem. She posits within that essay that the creatural chaos of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene during that year’s Summer of Love was primarily enabled by the way in which the participants used a vocabulary of almost entirely contingent nouns not distinct enough to trap meaning; that this lack of what constitutes mastery over language obstructed the participants’ ability to reason and appraise value independently. In short, her point: without mastering language, there can be no independent thought.
The greatest genius of demagogues, at least as far as guarantees their ends, is that by creating a knowledge environment in which all language values are contingent, and mainly controlled by them, they can impair the ability of large numbers of people to think independently, and reason cogently in communication with one another. There is virtually no metric available to suggest anything other than that they have been exceptionally successful in doing so thus far. It all comes down to the will of the word — they who have it, the world is theirs.
[1] This ultimate end which, in the case of many big tech companies, has simply amounted to performing as many horizontal mergers as possible before trust busting begins, and generally expanding their influence.
[2] I cannot link to any source giving definition to this term for, to the limit of my knowledge, it does not yet exist. ‘Interpolative history’ can be defined as an attempt to parse, analyse or forecast a set of new historical data points in light of a series of known historical data points that are not from the same field as the new points.