Fahrenheit 212. The Gaseous Society

Mountain hikers, 1974 | Fortepan / Kereki Sándor | Public domain

Solid

A quarter of a century ago, in his classic book Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman proposed the metaphor of fluidity as a model for understanding the evolution of the contemporary world and a specific phase of modernity. Bauman was interested in the transition from a solid society (“heavy modernity”) to a liquid one (“light modernity”), a change that brought about shifts in many areas, including how we view the world and how we approach life itself. One of the most important effects has been “the dissolution of forces which could keep the question of order and system on the political agenda. The solids whose turn has come to be thrown into the melting pot and which are in the process of being melted at the present time, the time of fluid modernity, are the bonds which interlock individual choices in collective projects and actions.” This loss of solidity had already appeared in postmodern reflection, for example in another classic titled All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, published by Marshall Berman in 1982 and inspired by a still-relevant phrase from the Communist Manifesto.

“The Fordist model was […] an epistemological building site on which the whole world-view was erected and from which it towered majestically over the totality of living experience.” (Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity)

Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman used the metaphor of liquidity to interpret every kind of relationship or social process, from romantic relationships to the mid-life crisis, politics to education. The shift towards a liquid state is expressed in multiple spheres: in objects, in relationships, in art and even in how we see ourselves. “The idea of a fixed, unmoving, final, permanent state,” Bauman writes in Liquid Arts, “seems to us as strange and absurd as the image of a wind that does not blow, a river that does not flow, a rain that does not fall.” In liquid art, artists “focus on fleeting events” which are known from the outset to be “ephemeral.”

The metaphor of liquidity also permeated the understanding of the State and the workings of capitalism. When certain States – such as the UK – or companies ask people to be flexible, it means that they want you “not to be committed to anything forever, but ready to change your tune, your mind, whenever needed. This creates a liquid situation. Like a liquid in a glass, where the slightest push changes the shape of the water. And this is everywhere,” Bauman explained in 2017 to La Vanguardia journalist Justo Barranco.

“What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.” (Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity)

Metaphors

Metaphors help us to think. Thinking of society as something in a liquid state made it possible to describe a modernity that – without giving up the idea of progress – adopted more flexible and fluid forms. The metaphor of liquidity is mobile, dynamic and, if we play around with it, can also include overflowing and turbulent waters. However, the very idea of a liquid flow implies the idea of linearity, of “going somewhere,” in the same way that rivers flow from the mountains to the sea. But is this really what life in the 21st century is like?

Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid metaphor was inspired by flows that ran along their expected courses, channelled by the orography from one place to another, sometimes overflowing their banks. The place this river flowed to over time was modernity. I am convinced that contemporary culture is best represented through the metaphor of a gas, a constantly shifting environment in which millions of candescent molecules collide and bounce off each other. The liquid metaphor, with all due respect to Zygmunt Bauman’s approach, no longer suffices.

“Media producers […] can no longer control what their audiences do with their content once it leaves their hands.” (Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media)

Snack culture

In today’s world, pieces of nano-media content (and us along with them) whizz about like molecules in a gaseous state, colliding with each other to form an endless textual sequence. The explosion of snack culture, a phenomenon marked by brevity, fleetingness, fragmentation, remixability and texts that circulate at high speeds, is the breeding ground for a cultural form that is emerging from the new media ecology and permeating all aspects of social life. The fragmentation and speed of the video clip, which analysts and intellectuals in the latter decades of the 20th century found so surprising, was merely a prelude to a textuality that is taking the cult of brevity and fleetingness to its logical extreme. Snack culture has emerged as an even more crazed, combinatory and breakneck space that is waving goodbye to the golden age of Neo-Television, to use Umberto Eco’s term, to usher in a new cultural landscape. Frenetic TikTok videos, those shards of media material that bounce around social media, make the brief video clips of the eighties look like an interminable silent Soviet film in black and white.

“To put it another way: the barbarians work with fragments of the past transformed into systems of passage.” (Alessandro Baricco, The Barbarians)

Oppositions

In liquid modernity, the oppositions that once gave life meaning – such as the contrast between the private and public spheres – started to show their cracks. As Bauman pointed out in Liquid Modernity, a “colonization of the public sphere by issues previously classified as private and unsuitable for public venting” was then underway. From the moment millions of people began to share their private lives on social media, the opposition between private and public lost its meaning. Where does the private end? Where does the public begin? The filtered selfies that circulate around the digital mediasphere have dissolved this frontier. This opposition – along with others such as the difference between natural/artificial and real/virtual – is less and less effective when it comes to making sense of the world around us.

Black Mirror

The transformation of the media and cultural ecosystem, foreshadowed or revisited in many of the episodes of the series Black Mirror, such as “The Waldo Moment,” “Nosedive” and “Hang the DJ,” is affecting all levels of life, from the transience of romantic relationships (did someone say Tinder?) to the new ways of doing politics or understanding the working day. In short, Bauman’s liquid society has evaporated. Like the planet, society has overheated and already exceeded 212 degrees Fahrenheit, that threshold where water turns into steam.

Chaos

In the gaseous society, everything becomes more unpredictable and chaos reigns over order. When the Flemish philosopher Jan Baptist van Helmont (1580-1644) discovered that chemical reactions could produce substances that were neither solid nor liquid, he coined the term gas (from the Latin chaos, and this from the Greek, Χάος) to describe them. Much of the unease in contemporary (cyber)culture stems from our inability to find anything solid to hold onto that might give meaning to a chaotic and bewildering reality.

Cerco un centro di gravità permanente.
Che non mi faccia mai cambiare idea sulle cose sulla gente.
Over and over again.
(Cerco un centro di gravità permanente, Franco Battiato)

Amazon

Life in liquid modernity took place in transient non-places such as shopping malls, those “temples of consumption” that offered what no other place was capable of providing – an “almost perfect balance between freedom and safety.” The crisis of the malls, those immense cathedrals erected in the American suburbs that (not only) the new generations have stopped visiting now that they can satisfy their needs online, is perhaps the best proof of the paradigm shift. Shopping on e-commerce platforms, fast and fleeting, guarantees that the goods are delivered for free (?) to our homes, which are, after all, the “freest and safest” place possible. There will always be a needy driver or rider willing to do their bit to bury the mall.

“It’s like a game. I mean, you go there, you point the gun, and for me that’s the most fun bit, yeah. But it’s not fun, it’s eight hours, but doing it for a while can be fun. (Amazon worker)

Slavery

With each passing day, gasification affects more and more aspects of social life, and the world of work is no exception. Or perhaps I should say the world of “non-work.” Let me elaborate – if liquid modernity was expressed in flexible ways of working, where a worker or employee would hardly ever expect to work all their life on the same production line, this situation has now become exacerbated and taken to its logical extreme. The delivery sector is perhaps the most representative of these new forms of work.

According to the findings of the PLATCOM project, a research study involving workers in the delivery, elderly care, cleaning and driving sectors, many people who work on/for platforms do not consider this work as “a job.” The job is always somewhere else, in another, more formal activity, either current or future, with fixed hours and a contract.

Often, the “last mile” work for the platforms is seen as a hobby to make money and pay the bills. At the same time, some of these non-workers also expressed their dissatisfaction with the near-slavery-like conditions under which they have to work. Let’s not forget – in the gaseous society, another opposition has just evaporated, the one between work and leisure. In the working environment of the platforms, and not just the delivery platforms, discourses that defend freedom (not having a boss, highly flexible hours) exist alongside others that extol slavery (the hyper-exploitation brought about by the new digital, geolocalised, app-based Taylorism). Welcome to the world of slavery.

“The founder of Glovo is cycling across Europe to deliver the dividends to his shareholders.” (El Mundo Today)

New man

While the liquid society ran down like a river from the meltwaters of rocky, solid modernity, the gaseous one is emerging from the evaporation of that watercourse. Rather than diligently identifying the different historical phases (solid, liquid and gaseous) and defining their boundaries, it might be best to think of these models as simultaneous and superimposed, although with one of them always hegemonizing the others.

We could say that, in the early 21st century, the gaseous metaphor is the one that best represents social and cultural dynamics, without this meaning the complete disappearance of the solid and liquid forms. Even today, solid modernity survives in the old Fordist production lines and the dirigiste tendencies of states or corporations that seek to assert a top-down order on society, just as liquid modernity is active in the debates on the reduction of the working day in formal employment. Gaseous forms, however, are becoming dominant in the spheres of media, work, learning and politics. Is this paradigm shift a result of the change from broadcasting to networking, the massive use of mobile devices and the explosion of TikTok?

If only the answer were simple.

“The new man isn’t the one produced by the smartphone – he’s the one who invented it, who needed it, who designed it for his own use and consumption, who built it to escape from a prison, or to answer a question, or to silence a fear.” (Alessandro Baricco, The Game)