I might have missed one, but I think everyone you referenced directly in this article is male. This doesn't seem like a coincidence, especially when "[thinking] about how even extreme repression is possible within a constitutional and legal order and may even require it for the regularity of its enforcement." It's old news by now but patriarchal domination somehow feels less visible than race-based segregation, even though when I think through specific examples it doesn't seem obviously less severe (while being very different). Why is that? It's more deeply ingrained in our society? Even highly patriarchal social orders are integrated at the family level?
It’s interesting to consider the rise and fall of the “girl boss” in this context.
If boss is gender neutral is it necessary to add a gender prefix to the term? How closely does the concept follow from female tech executive Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In book and movement? Do leftish real and fictional girl bosses like HRC or Leslie Knope fit the bossist model?
Silicon Valley still hasn’t really had a true powerhouse women CEO in the mode of Musk or Jobs (Carli Fiorina and Meg Whitman are both considered failures, Sheryl and YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki always second fiddle).
Yes! I remember this essay. "Bossism" helps us understand the "small shareholders" as you put it, the weird nerds online who are always rooting for Elon Musk to implant chips in skulls and so on. That is, it works as critique of ideology. But I have to admit I still don't understand why these tech bosses are so suddenly motivated to get their hands dirty with politics (even as they depoliticize what they are doing). Because of neoliberalism, the world is already their oyster. It's hard to imagine any privilege that isn't *already* available to their class, both individually and collectively. What more could they want? As a Leftist, I suppose I could look at this as a positive sign, as bourgeois fear of a "new conjuncture" and all of that, but I'm not sure if I'm convinced by that narrative any more. People are sick of immiseration, but neoliberalism is still locked-in.
Also, shame on you for linking to that Thiel essay, which opens with him confessing that he remains true to the faith of his teenage years: libertarianism. I cannot unsee that.
It is sometimes hard to imagine why those who have everything always want more. It’s not simply that “the world is their oyster” but they think they should shape and remake it according to their whims.
Like the gods on Mount Olympus, they look down on a humanity that they have risen above. Unfortunately having become gods, Musk and others have not acquired either compassion or understanding. Their ideas about the “perfect” world are at odds with the general welfare of most people.
Musk in particular is a very flawed demigod. The ideas that he expresses about space colonies, chip implants, population decline reflect (as many have pointed out) a real lack of understanding of the issues involved. Yet any thoughts that come into his head must be true. And there is always an army of sycophants to cheer him on.
Even when he sounds like an immature adolescent boy who has read too much science fiction.
I wrote a while back about Stanford business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer's book Leadership B.S. (he has another called Power that is rather similar): I think he's basically giving a sketch version of the ideology of bossism in your sense. https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-read-jeffrey-pfeffer-leadership
Recently I saw a video of white American man saying negative things about blacks and he insisted to take distance from them. He was asking a form of apartheid definitely. I can’t find the video but I definitely find the message suspicious, as I see lately more videos about black crime released to the public. This will increase racism and divisions. I noticed that twitter shows me more on my timeline Eventhough I don’t follow those who share this.
I can't find the original video, but the man is Scott Adams. He's best known for an innocuous comic strip about working in an office (Dibert), but in recent years he has become a very outspoken right-wing crank, conspiracy theorist, Trump supporter, and bigot (things which have a lot of overlap). He's kind of a sign of the times - a lot of white men with comfortable lives, who would have had quiet retirements in other eras, are suddenly very fired up with all sorts of reactionary fervor.
And yes, I see it a lot online. I've read that the algorithms in most social media sites tend to support the most divisive, reactionary stuff, because that's what happens when you set them up to "drive engagement." But on top of that, we now have Twitter run by someone who is personally sympathetic to right-wing bigotry; to the extent he can put his thumb on the scale, it can only hurt.
Adams has been like this for years. He's very much a denizen of the alt-right cultic milieu, though the final boss of his ressentiment is feminism. (The snarky conception of cultic milieu is crank magnetism -- the theory that having one fringe or radical belief brings a person in contact with other people who hold fringe or radical beliefs, and they'll take on each other's beliefs. So a masculinist and racist are both animated by ressentiment, though with different archvillains. The masculinist will also become racist, and vice versa.)
Adams' racism, while not to be excused and his cancellation much deserved, is banal.
For me, nothing will top a series of tweets Adams posted about his stepson, who died of a drug overdose. The upshot: Adams said that had his stepson not took his own life by taking drugs, Adams would have had to kill him. And he extends that to all young men of his stepson's age and circumstances. He literally advocated a final solution for drug users.
Historiographically up-to-date and, I think, moral/politically on target. Can't resist recommending a book by a very old friend of mine (grade school, prep school, college and Brooklyn Heights) about a "boss" in the 20thC U.S. when the South African meaning of the word was unknown and "boss" meant local party monarch (Tweed) or savvy behind-the-scenes manager of a party in national elections like FDR's Mike Flynn: "In With Flynn, The Boss Behind the President."
I like this and think it's both true moral/politically, and up-to-date historiographically. A very old friend of mine, Malcolm Mackay, has written two books on the U.S. sort of "boss," when the word was common in U.S. journalism and had as yet no South-African resonance. The latest is: "In With Flynn, The Boss Behind the President"
Maybe a silly question, but one that I can't let go of - especially as I read your articles about Feb 6 1934, the 18th Brumaire, and the March on Rome.
What are the modern parallels with how the center left acted in the face of each of these coups - I'd be interested to see a throughline of liberal appeasement and what from the last century and half can be applied to things like January 6th.
What might unlock something is an alternate history, if that can be forgiven. If Bernie or any left-ish politician had beat Biden and then Trump in 2020, what changes about the center-left's approach January 6th and the months of election chaos surrounding it? Is there reason to believe that Dem leadership would have defended the result as forcefully, both on the day of and in the months after? Could the press have spun everything to "moderate" tastes, and called for a more centrist fix? Might some Dem figures have opportunistically sought appeasement, and if so what might that have looked like?
I know its hard to be concrete on the Jan 6 what-ifs, but thought it would be interesting to look at the liberal appeasers in mass democracies as a whole, then apply them to our current center-left context.
Does bossism intersect with the (very) recent micro-controversies around Mr. Beast? I'm thinking in particular of MB's tweet that expressed worry about chocolate bar displays in supermarkets, and which asked his millions of minions to tidy-up the store shelves on his behalf. When critics pushed back, legions of weird nerds defended his creepy parasocial crowdsourcing of what should be someone's job (setting up supermarket displays). Reptilian creeps like Thiel and Musk are obvious bad guys, but the ludicrously grinning face of MB might represent a different, more seemingly benevolent form of bossism.
Mr. Beast exploits the natural altruistic feeling of children by giving money away and becoming their hero. He's using the positive association the very young have with generosity and caring to create that parasocial relationship. The weird nerds are often KIDS who lack the sophistication to see what he's doing.
Seems correct in a certain way to me, with MB representing something that seems far more democratic and media savvy than Musk. You gotta think Musk would be equally beloved if he could actually do a good post or not look like a freak on video.
With MB, it went from "liking and subscribing' in order to support his future videos to him making a video out of paying for people's cataract surgeries and offering $10k to some guy on twitter to go and fix his chocolate display, which perpetuates the dream that it could be you - the viewer and participant - next. As long as it gets more views and he breaks even, he'll do it.
There must be some piece in the works about his relationship with his actual employees which I think would answer the bossism question more definitively. On top of youtube he has a national food company now, so his ideology probably becomes more apparent in that relation. Are the workers like his viewers? Will he give them a $10k check for going out of their way? To me that specific interaction sounds like the monarchism of Yarvin with a media savvy kicker - the king recognizing a talented peasant and granting them some backwater holding, then making a 10m view video on it.
Also probably worth mentioning that the new version of capitalism bossism - just like the one described 80-some years ago in Polanyi’s analysis of the early industrial system - has been thoroughly dependent on state largesse, subsidies, contracts, and a favourable legal and labor market management system; the pubescent, Ayn-Randian, Neo-monarchist Great Man fantasies are almost cartoonishly pristine illustrations of at least one conception of a Marxist notion of ideology - as a system of thought that functions to conceal failed practice in the ideology’s own terms.
The anti-statist megalomaniac bossism of the Musks and Thiels is itself a function of the evolution of the modern state and the decisions it has made about distributing public resources. It’s no surprise, of course, that such people are totally indifferent to and never speak about anything resembling an actual concrete problem or policy issue involved in actually managing a modern political economy - health care, education, fiscal/monetary policy, labor codes, environmental policy, housing, child care, infrastructure. What the state actually *does* - apart from providing the contracts and conditions for them to become billionaires - is relevant only insofar as it must be obscured and erased.
I see it as a matter of legitimacy: to me, 'bossism' means (to use a distinction that Terry Pratchett once made, I believe between dictators and kings) that someone with sufficient economic power _deserves_ to give orders that will be obeyed, not that they merely are able to do. It can be based variously: Magistrate Olmstead cited Genesis explicitly but Darwin implicitly when he told the striker that she were on-strike against G-d.
In a theocratic State that legitimacy would come from knowledge of an holy book or a religious initiation, and much the same in a Bolshevik one, in a racist State being judged 'pure' would be a prerequisite, in an aristocratic State birth as well.
In *Wages of Whiteness*, David Roediger claims that antebellum working-class White Americans attempted to evade having a "master" by using the Dutch word for master: "baas." Not surprising that some of these dudes want to be a master.
It seems worth doing more work on the underlying conditions that destabilized the status quo here. Is what made the bosses want to get their hand dirty is that there is an advantage in it, whereas industrialists saw less advantage once there were stable rules of the game? Why waste time on that when you could increase capital? But if we're in a new robber baron era with no modus vivendi between the bosses and the state is there a possible gain to be had in re-establishing terms? Did you write something on this or am I misremembering?
Totally unrelated but it's so interesting that everyone seems to need an ideology. Why is that? Why not just go 'I love money, I love winning!' The bosses self concept requires so much more. They see themselves as emperors. They even sometimes imagine they will live forever. And nobody is going to remember them in not too many years, and they are definitely going to die. Does Bossism include all that? I hope you won't abandon this idea, and will expand it. It's SO useful. It's got a lot of potential.
How much are the Afrikaner figureheads of baaskap steeped in Nietzsche? I wouldn't be shocked at all if Thiel was; he'd be the first guy I suspect to use ubermensch in casual conversation and say "It me."
Nietzsche spent his middle age and up until his mental breakdown developing a morality of power (esp. master and slave morality and how they are dialectically linked).
I wonder if the Afrikaners are formed by Nietzsche the way adolescents findf their way to libertarianism by way of Ayn Rand.
Not sure if you've seen this already but a prop in the BAM adaptation of "Sydney Brustein's Window" featuring Oscar Isaac had a reference to Bossism - a campaign poster saying "Wipeout Bossism. Vote for Reform" . You can see the shot of the poster in this NYT review https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/theater/the-sign-in-sidney-brusteins-window-bam-review.html. Not sure if it was a contemporaneous thing(play is set in the 70s) or you have a subscriber/fan in the production. Thought you might be interested!
Are you familiar with the Thiel/Musk courtiers like Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Curtis Yarvin (who I feel like you have written about before)? If so, do you have any set opinions about rationalist and rationalist adjacent worldviews? Specifically if they fit into American fascism or bossism.
Yeah I have written about Yarvin in the bossism piece and in the piece on Thiel. Not the specifically "rationalist" part, but I just think they are just thinly veiled apologias for bossism basically
I might have missed one, but I think everyone you referenced directly in this article is male. This doesn't seem like a coincidence, especially when "[thinking] about how even extreme repression is possible within a constitutional and legal order and may even require it for the regularity of its enforcement." It's old news by now but patriarchal domination somehow feels less visible than race-based segregation, even though when I think through specific examples it doesn't seem obviously less severe (while being very different). Why is that? It's more deeply ingrained in our society? Even highly patriarchal social orders are integrated at the family level?
probably yes
It’s interesting to consider the rise and fall of the “girl boss” in this context.
If boss is gender neutral is it necessary to add a gender prefix to the term? How closely does the concept follow from female tech executive Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In book and movement? Do leftish real and fictional girl bosses like HRC or Leslie Knope fit the bossist model?
Silicon Valley still hasn’t really had a true powerhouse women CEO in the mode of Musk or Jobs (Carli Fiorina and Meg Whitman are both considered failures, Sheryl and YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki always second fiddle).
Yes! I remember this essay. "Bossism" helps us understand the "small shareholders" as you put it, the weird nerds online who are always rooting for Elon Musk to implant chips in skulls and so on. That is, it works as critique of ideology. But I have to admit I still don't understand why these tech bosses are so suddenly motivated to get their hands dirty with politics (even as they depoliticize what they are doing). Because of neoliberalism, the world is already their oyster. It's hard to imagine any privilege that isn't *already* available to their class, both individually and collectively. What more could they want? As a Leftist, I suppose I could look at this as a positive sign, as bourgeois fear of a "new conjuncture" and all of that, but I'm not sure if I'm convinced by that narrative any more. People are sick of immiseration, but neoliberalism is still locked-in.
Also, shame on you for linking to that Thiel essay, which opens with him confessing that he remains true to the faith of his teenage years: libertarianism. I cannot unsee that.
I refer to that essay as the Peter Thiel Memorial Bridge. Libertarians have by and large crossed it to alt-right.
It is sometimes hard to imagine why those who have everything always want more. It’s not simply that “the world is their oyster” but they think they should shape and remake it according to their whims.
Like the gods on Mount Olympus, they look down on a humanity that they have risen above. Unfortunately having become gods, Musk and others have not acquired either compassion or understanding. Their ideas about the “perfect” world are at odds with the general welfare of most people.
Musk in particular is a very flawed demigod. The ideas that he expresses about space colonies, chip implants, population decline reflect (as many have pointed out) a real lack of understanding of the issues involved. Yet any thoughts that come into his head must be true. And there is always an army of sycophants to cheer him on.
Even when he sounds like an immature adolescent boy who has read too much science fiction.
I wrote a while back about Stanford business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer's book Leadership B.S. (he has another called Power that is rather similar): I think he's basically giving a sketch version of the ideology of bossism in your sense. https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-read-jeffrey-pfeffer-leadership
Recently I saw a video of white American man saying negative things about blacks and he insisted to take distance from them. He was asking a form of apartheid definitely. I can’t find the video but I definitely find the message suspicious, as I see lately more videos about black crime released to the public. This will increase racism and divisions. I noticed that twitter shows me more on my timeline Eventhough I don’t follow those who share this.
I can't find the original video, but the man is Scott Adams. He's best known for an innocuous comic strip about working in an office (Dibert), but in recent years he has become a very outspoken right-wing crank, conspiracy theorist, Trump supporter, and bigot (things which have a lot of overlap). He's kind of a sign of the times - a lot of white men with comfortable lives, who would have had quiet retirements in other eras, are suddenly very fired up with all sorts of reactionary fervor.
And yes, I see it a lot online. I've read that the algorithms in most social media sites tend to support the most divisive, reactionary stuff, because that's what happens when you set them up to "drive engagement." But on top of that, we now have Twitter run by someone who is personally sympathetic to right-wing bigotry; to the extent he can put his thumb on the scale, it can only hurt.
Adams has been like this for years. He's very much a denizen of the alt-right cultic milieu, though the final boss of his ressentiment is feminism. (The snarky conception of cultic milieu is crank magnetism -- the theory that having one fringe or radical belief brings a person in contact with other people who hold fringe or radical beliefs, and they'll take on each other's beliefs. So a masculinist and racist are both animated by ressentiment, though with different archvillains. The masculinist will also become racist, and vice versa.)
Adams' racism, while not to be excused and his cancellation much deserved, is banal.
For me, nothing will top a series of tweets Adams posted about his stepson, who died of a drug overdose. The upshot: Adams said that had his stepson not took his own life by taking drugs, Adams would have had to kill him. And he extends that to all young men of his stepson's age and circumstances. He literally advocated a final solution for drug users.
Thank you for posting the name. I was quite surprised when I saw him.
Historiographically up-to-date and, I think, moral/politically on target. Can't resist recommending a book by a very old friend of mine (grade school, prep school, college and Brooklyn Heights) about a "boss" in the 20thC U.S. when the South African meaning of the word was unknown and "boss" meant local party monarch (Tweed) or savvy behind-the-scenes manager of a party in national elections like FDR's Mike Flynn: "In With Flynn, The Boss Behind the President."
I like this and think it's both true moral/politically, and up-to-date historiographically. A very old friend of mine, Malcolm Mackay, has written two books on the U.S. sort of "boss," when the word was common in U.S. journalism and had as yet no South-African resonance. The latest is: "In With Flynn, The Boss Behind the President"
For the mailbag:
Maybe a silly question, but one that I can't let go of - especially as I read your articles about Feb 6 1934, the 18th Brumaire, and the March on Rome.
What are the modern parallels with how the center left acted in the face of each of these coups - I'd be interested to see a throughline of liberal appeasement and what from the last century and half can be applied to things like January 6th.
What might unlock something is an alternate history, if that can be forgiven. If Bernie or any left-ish politician had beat Biden and then Trump in 2020, what changes about the center-left's approach January 6th and the months of election chaos surrounding it? Is there reason to believe that Dem leadership would have defended the result as forcefully, both on the day of and in the months after? Could the press have spun everything to "moderate" tastes, and called for a more centrist fix? Might some Dem figures have opportunistically sought appeasement, and if so what might that have looked like?
I know its hard to be concrete on the Jan 6 what-ifs, but thought it would be interesting to look at the liberal appeasers in mass democracies as a whole, then apply them to our current center-left context.
Does bossism intersect with the (very) recent micro-controversies around Mr. Beast? I'm thinking in particular of MB's tweet that expressed worry about chocolate bar displays in supermarkets, and which asked his millions of minions to tidy-up the store shelves on his behalf. When critics pushed back, legions of weird nerds defended his creepy parasocial crowdsourcing of what should be someone's job (setting up supermarket displays). Reptilian creeps like Thiel and Musk are obvious bad guys, but the ludicrously grinning face of MB might represent a different, more seemingly benevolent form of bossism.
possible, not that familiar with phenomenon in question
Mr. Beast exploits the natural altruistic feeling of children by giving money away and becoming their hero. He's using the positive association the very young have with generosity and caring to create that parasocial relationship. The weird nerds are often KIDS who lack the sophistication to see what he's doing.
Seems correct in a certain way to me, with MB representing something that seems far more democratic and media savvy than Musk. You gotta think Musk would be equally beloved if he could actually do a good post or not look like a freak on video.
With MB, it went from "liking and subscribing' in order to support his future videos to him making a video out of paying for people's cataract surgeries and offering $10k to some guy on twitter to go and fix his chocolate display, which perpetuates the dream that it could be you - the viewer and participant - next. As long as it gets more views and he breaks even, he'll do it.
There must be some piece in the works about his relationship with his actual employees which I think would answer the bossism question more definitively. On top of youtube he has a national food company now, so his ideology probably becomes more apparent in that relation. Are the workers like his viewers? Will he give them a $10k check for going out of their way? To me that specific interaction sounds like the monarchism of Yarvin with a media savvy kicker - the king recognizing a talented peasant and granting them some backwater holding, then making a 10m view video on it.
Also probably worth mentioning that the new version of capitalism bossism - just like the one described 80-some years ago in Polanyi’s analysis of the early industrial system - has been thoroughly dependent on state largesse, subsidies, contracts, and a favourable legal and labor market management system; the pubescent, Ayn-Randian, Neo-monarchist Great Man fantasies are almost cartoonishly pristine illustrations of at least one conception of a Marxist notion of ideology - as a system of thought that functions to conceal failed practice in the ideology’s own terms.
The anti-statist megalomaniac bossism of the Musks and Thiels is itself a function of the evolution of the modern state and the decisions it has made about distributing public resources. It’s no surprise, of course, that such people are totally indifferent to and never speak about anything resembling an actual concrete problem or policy issue involved in actually managing a modern political economy - health care, education, fiscal/monetary policy, labor codes, environmental policy, housing, child care, infrastructure. What the state actually *does* - apart from providing the contracts and conditions for them to become billionaires - is relevant only insofar as it must be obscured and erased.
I see it as a matter of legitimacy: to me, 'bossism' means (to use a distinction that Terry Pratchett once made, I believe between dictators and kings) that someone with sufficient economic power _deserves_ to give orders that will be obeyed, not that they merely are able to do. It can be based variously: Magistrate Olmstead cited Genesis explicitly but Darwin implicitly when he told the striker that she were on-strike against G-d.
In a theocratic State that legitimacy would come from knowledge of an holy book or a religious initiation, and much the same in a Bolshevik one, in a racist State being judged 'pure' would be a prerequisite, in an aristocratic State birth as well.
In *Wages of Whiteness*, David Roediger claims that antebellum working-class White Americans attempted to evade having a "master" by using the Dutch word for master: "baas." Not surprising that some of these dudes want to be a master.
It seems worth doing more work on the underlying conditions that destabilized the status quo here. Is what made the bosses want to get their hand dirty is that there is an advantage in it, whereas industrialists saw less advantage once there were stable rules of the game? Why waste time on that when you could increase capital? But if we're in a new robber baron era with no modus vivendi between the bosses and the state is there a possible gain to be had in re-establishing terms? Did you write something on this or am I misremembering?
Totally unrelated but it's so interesting that everyone seems to need an ideology. Why is that? Why not just go 'I love money, I love winning!' The bosses self concept requires so much more. They see themselves as emperors. They even sometimes imagine they will live forever. And nobody is going to remember them in not too many years, and they are definitely going to die. Does Bossism include all that? I hope you won't abandon this idea, and will expand it. It's SO useful. It's got a lot of potential.
How much are the Afrikaner figureheads of baaskap steeped in Nietzsche? I wouldn't be shocked at all if Thiel was; he'd be the first guy I suspect to use ubermensch in casual conversation and say "It me."
Nietzsche spent his middle age and up until his mental breakdown developing a morality of power (esp. master and slave morality and how they are dialectically linked).
I wonder if the Afrikaners are formed by Nietzsche the way adolescents findf their way to libertarianism by way of Ayn Rand.
Not sure if you've seen this already but a prop in the BAM adaptation of "Sydney Brustein's Window" featuring Oscar Isaac had a reference to Bossism - a campaign poster saying "Wipeout Bossism. Vote for Reform" . You can see the shot of the poster in this NYT review https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/theater/the-sign-in-sidney-brusteins-window-bam-review.html. Not sure if it was a contemporaneous thing(play is set in the 70s) or you have a subscriber/fan in the production. Thought you might be interested!
Are you familiar with the Thiel/Musk courtiers like Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Curtis Yarvin (who I feel like you have written about before)? If so, do you have any set opinions about rationalist and rationalist adjacent worldviews? Specifically if they fit into American fascism or bossism.
Yeah I have written about Yarvin in the bossism piece and in the piece on Thiel. Not the specifically "rationalist" part, but I just think they are just thinly veiled apologias for bossism basically