Merchants of Social Change II

By Eliot Gabriel Graham

August 18, 2026

The Quango Cats

Instead of general government functions being auctioned off for revenue, as in the case of the rente offices of 17th century France, the US has witnessed a simultaneously more precise, and yet more diffused version of state-function capture. Here, a social welfare state has encountered a sudden infant poltergeist syndrome, limiting its existence to that of a social welfare sector. The political left has created entities, ostensibly public in appearance, for private profit as well as maintenance of social capital and privilege, serving the moral and material gain of an evermore concentrating contingent of the population. A supra-governmental appendage, in effect, this sector, by metabolic instinct, has sprouted moral treasuries that hold deposits of public guilt, issuing certificates of virtue to those suffering from cognitive dissonance, by those who figured out how to monetize that anxiety , accompanying and comprising the rise of the social media industry. More on that in a minute.

For the present analysis, the notion of a proprietary state (if there ever was one) must be suspended. The heuristic lens of civil society, at this stage of analysis, provides more insights. The American shareholder version of civil society, indeed, has always reflected the unique flavor of its market-nation, a flavor profile capable of spawning such a category of cynical governance, which, in the case under review, has sectorized somewhere between orthodox civil society and traditional government. As with the rente offices discussed in the previous issue, government institutions begin as civil society projects, so, as such, the programs of social change will be reckoned as these sorts of projects. In no small way is this a further element of nation development (or envelopment).

A newfangled brew of technology, journalism, and government leads to something of a shadow fifth estate, an extemperanous fifth branch, which necessarily follows the infestation of the fourth estate (journalism) by technology. Nefangled, because this species of phenomenon isn't entirely novel, historically speaking. Absorption of new technology at any point in history generates institutional change. Such as the rente offices, where portions of government function were set on a new balance of public and private that diffused policy accountability. And this is why the rente institution stands as the reference case for the present topic: the degree of diffusion modern social policy has reached in the United States borders on encryption – a state of function conspiracy theory junkies could and would never aspire to understand. For reality's space-time continuum has undergone a tumescence that marks the initial consumption of communication technology, whereby a palimpsest stamp of actual reality is the condition suffered through. Lasting for a spell, this fog dimension requires a new gloss logic as an aid to its deconstruction– in real time.

The Great War, for example, was the logical sum of the Industrial Revolution and its accompanying advancements in communication. On the eve of the war, Germany, France, and Great Britain consumed the most periodicals hitherto, and literacy among belligerents soared leading up to hostilities (Austro-Germany had attained 75% literacy by 1871; likewise for France and Great Britain by 1914). The volksemfänger (people’s receiver), the mass-produced household radio of Nazi Germany was integral to that generation’s belligerency. With the social media / AI booms, as Machine posited in Issue No. 1 (Like Apokálpsis), the analogue historical catalog of the moment would be WW[0]. The tragedy of it all is that real political interests on either side of the aisle, if you like, point in the same direction, one tragically, the other explicitly–the heartbeat, yin-yang onium of politics throughout history. Much to the chagrin, of course, of the noble-hearted liberal, whose identity requires the jealous nurture of distinction.

So, what are the mechanics of this macro phenomenon, whereby liberal elites have carved out a rent-seeking non-profit shadow branch of government for social activism by riding the social media algorithm alligator that exploits the guilty conscience and short attention span market Americans carry as a default disposition? This new virtual space has allowed for a second-degree activism that promotes extreme social views. Lind’s Law of advocacy–where interest groups extend their aims just beyond the reach of reason so as to garner attention and perception of accomplishment –has been put to effective use, social media amplifying a shrill signal further.

It begins with the social media workforce’s crisis of conscience. Moral queasiness squealing from a miasmic peat bog bundle of disordinate income, political guilt, compartmentalized corporate confusion, and ego righteousness pressurizing the activist spirit, panging the bosoms of this cohort. A pressure valve was found, a channel through which oxygen and fuel could conduct–the manifold intakes, as with the office of the rente, of the engine of any civil society project vehicle.

The social media machine has ingested ontological packets of real life pulses, processing them through individual procrustean rollers that sensationalize, hyperbolize, and dramatize consistent with the 67 business model currently under extreme legal scrutiny. Since this is, indeed, a candidate orexigenic for the Bachannalian autophagia mentioned in the previous issue, the physiology of such a business model could reveal the historical novelty in all of this. For it has provided moral succor and financial profit, a seemingly magical alignment of these permanent features of modern sociology (anachronism understood), in a way that advances from the efficiency of the rente office (its self-financing interest-coordinating components). The modern algorithmic model is one designed to commoditize group guilt. Signal boosted by the social tool of drama, a meta institution of modernism deracinated from its origin genre of entertainment, by way of protest logic against the gods, as the Greeks intended it. Or perhaps we have just come full circle.

Is this a natural sign of political decay, part of an historical cycle? By and large it appears as if the communication technology aspect of it is consistent with times past, but the novelty here seems to have implanted itself within the free-market-liberal-democratic-republic cortex of its operating social society. The United States is the most open society in the history of the world, providing freedom in, heretofore, the greatest range of civic life, communication and vocation perhaps constituting the most advanced manifestations of which. Using cannily crafted algorithms, social media, a juggernaut sired of the American market-nation, has mapped itself so effectively onto these nodes of modern life, it effectively conducts them now, converging the institutions of social and business into the Socioeconomic. Whereas Economic Sociology concerns itself with the social effects of economic exchange, the Socioeconomic begins with the social, precisely what the social-business model algorithm was engineered to target. And this is a paradigmatic problem, requiring, therefore, not just macro solutions, but the shifts in logic commensurate with ontological turns in history, a rearrangement of the furniture of the mind. So, the short answer to the political decay question is: yes; the populism movement the world is currently suffering through is the direct effect of new communication technology on society. Whether this decay is terminal, though, is a question that requires a microscopic understanding of how institutional decay works.

One could anticipate that rent-seeking and mission creep would evolve in downbeat harmony with this new social technology. And they have, of course. The populism movement (viz. UK and USA) of the past 15 years is a symbiotic whiplash, representing, seemingly paradoxically, the rejection and absorption of social media. (Accounting for traditional media’s ongoing struggle to interpret the genes of Trump.) The immemorial drags of rent seeking and mission creep have created a bottleneck of societal energies (as alluded to in the previous issue), a phenomenological surplus, accounting for the nearly ubiquitous palpable static tension suffered by everyone outside of the bubble of modern privilege. Inordinate incomes maintained by institutional rent-seeking constitutes the material substance of such surplus. The non-profit homeowner profiled at the top of the previous issue is personification of this phenomenon. And it’s to this emergent demography the present analysis now turns.

There is research to be done examining the extent to which European Absolutism was inspired by Imperial China (either real or imagined), with its merit-based examination system, producing the degree-holding mandarin class, one of the salient inputs, undoubtedly, in the spectacular civilizational involution it experienced during Ming/Qing overlap. (Machine enjoys taking a longer view on things.) The rente intendant identikit of Issue 7 would be the French version of the mandarin. The group of your correspondent’s post-graduate colleagues (ibid), further, would be the nascent American iteration, conceptualized as the Quango class.

The Quango Class

Quango is a clunky acronym. It stands for QUasie Non-Governmental Organization. It's as protean and prosaic as it sounds. A nice, fat blob of gobbledygook qua category. The term is more common in the U.K. And if you’ve spent any amount of time in sniffly Old Blighty, this won’t come as a breathtaking surprise. Things such as the Education and Skills Funding (ESFA); HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC); a swathe of mini-quangos under the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) (think Tate); and, the oft-advertised “World’s largest quango”, the National Health Service (NHS), though this is being trimmed down. As civil societies are the living artefacts of nation states, it stands to reason that countries would exhibit different forms of institutions operating within them, ever more uniquely as a function of higher levels of development. The United States quango primarily comes in the form of the Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE), which are financial service corporations at the federal level, and a few more with general scope that handle affairs of the capital, Washington, D.C. (more on this later). The GSEs are the obvious quango counterparts, but Non-profits, divinely, hold primus inter pares in the civil society triangulated mush-space created by itself, the quango, and the non-governmental organization (NGO). They siphon off massive amounts of energy from the U.S. socio-economy. All under the guise of public service.

The young Seattleite (go ahead, pronounce it like a native) homeowner profiled previously was, and certainly still is, a member of this horde, one who counts themselves among the capital accumulating rung. For the timeline of this demography’s genesis is conspicuous enough to assert causation, simul hoc ergo propter hoc. Between 2007 and 2017 the nonprofit sector of the American economy grew three times as much as its obverse, for-profit sector, from employing roughly 10.5 to 12.5 million (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics - BLS). Enter a vanguard class of two million highly-paid personnel indirectly representing the public interest on specific issues, right in time for the social media content boom. Social righteousness reionized with new money, new technology, and a new level of a modern moral problem: cognitive dissonance. It’s a smirker ethos, one projected out of a stew of perceived social liberal competence and moral superiority. In order to certify the patent of such a smirk, necessary is a conceptual plenum of the roots of civil society, along with its initiation and developmental track in the United States.

Civil Society as an Idea and Interpretation

Civil society is the scope of social life between government and business, traditionally family and what’s now regarded as private life. It’s not overly recherché to track this concept back to its Greek origins, for it reveals how particularly modern the idea is, and is required, therefore, for one to sufficiently comprehend its overall reach. Classical Greek city-states were autochthonously referred to as poli (πόλη), hence affairs of these poli constituted the idea of politics, then (πολιτική), and what has now evolved into the discipline recognized as capital ‘P’ Politics. The source codification, of course, is Aristotle’s eponym treatise. The phrase he uses for “civil society” here bears this out–κοινωνία πολιτική, (Common City) “society/community political”. which Cicero processed, and Leonardo Bruni rebirthed as societas civilis. Classical Greeks didn’t distinguish between politics and civil society, reflected in a single term for both ideas. Renaissance Italian Humanist like Bruni, whose political geography, incidentally, was a Republican mirror of the period they were rediscovering (Venice, Genoa, Pisa, inter alia…), added, as proximity dependents of Roman civilization and its public “thing” (res publica), their dimension to the idea of city activity, hence the philological carom into civilis. This quick backlog is worth the exercise because it provides two interesting insights. Number one: civil society is based on the comportment of those participants of cities, the seed element of a “state”. And number two: the culture of civil society is an evolving and expanding marker of a liberal state.

Politics is what happens when the third person enters the room, the mustachioed, Oberkampft/Williamsburg/Shoreditch-era hipster received as a response, as he was mopping up a plate of greasy bistro brunch on a chalky Parisian sidewalk. (Or, a simple pair, with varying intelligences.) All politics, in other words, is complex socializing, whose overall complexity is a function of the size of the group, or, indeed, variance of intelligence. Basically 2 raised to the power of n–the number of subjects in a sample, or overall difference in intelligence. Conversely, this means, potentially speaking, first-order socializing will always be the least political, that is, one-to-one encounters. About town assumes the labor of politics.

Forming networks is the basis of city life, which, by its very nature, is a sophisticated form of resource allocation. And it was a classic metropolitan life that the Greek city-states shared–a common politics, regardless of the respective ruling systems adopted. (Metropolitan means citizen of a metropolis, μητέρα=mother.) So the virtue of the city, replete with dynamic intercourse between market and state, town and country, was institutionalized by the Greeks, then maintained by the Romans, fossilized by the Eastern Romans (Byzantium), reinvigorated during the European Renaissance, and subsequently broadcasted around the world in the centuries to follow. So it was to be that the metropolitan model, indeed, found its way to the British enterprise of the American colonies.

As a market nation, American civil society developed with its shareholder spirit, that is, shares of society’s capital available for public capture through the volition, inclination and, above all, the willingness of each individual. Membership in voluntary organizations was the overarching expression of American civil society in its first phase of development. A nation nebulizing its way towards a logic compatible with its territorial container. (The European stockholder model, par contre, assumes a stake in the nation’s estate, hence the rente office in the case of France.) As these efforts of voluntary organizations became institutionalized as government programs, particularly during President LBJ’s Great Society, association membership dropped off perforce, because, in simple terms, there was no longer need for such advocacy at the demotic level. These remits were now professionalized and orchestrated at escalated institutional levels, capitalized, as it were, to Washington, D.C as federal social service institutions. (Perhaps there is an institutional dimension to the etymology of “capital”.)

An attempt at the account of the transition to a more concentrated civil society is found in an article titled, Disconnection and Reorganization: The Transformation of Civic Life in Late-Twentieth-Century America by Skocpol et al. (Studies in American Political Development, 19 Fall 2005), where the period of the 1960s-70s is considered ”an era of civic transformation from membership groups to professionally managed organizations” (155). Their analysis begins with the premise that “[c]ivil society is as much a product of political institutions as vice versa” (p. 139). Machine would posit, consistent with the Hellenic genesis of Politics, that the nation-state political determines the contours of civil society more reliably than the opposite, making it a more suitable independent variable. Skocpol goes on to pursue the subject through the two primary academic paradigms of the field, civil organization theory and social capital theory, before setting out a novel research approach: a longitudinal analysis of self-reported association membership of Massachusetts State Senators. Instead of defaulting to ostensibly unreliable social surveys, the authors uncover a trove containing 80 plus years of consistent membership data from these Senators. Their research concludes that civic reorganization theory offers better insights into the shift experienced by civil society in the last half century, than social capital theory, because a vanguard emerges from the data that Skocpol attributes to this change; Senators appear lead the way of non-membership affiliation, anticipating the behavior of the population at large.

The reconfiguring of a civil society based on the natural willingness, which underpins volunteer associations, to a mandated, professionalized one, is to prioritize society over community, Gesellschaft (social culture based on rational will) over Gemeinschaft (social culture based on natural will), respectively. A nation can only maintain stasis with such an arrangement when moral and material intelligence, and therefore trust, are of a sufficient level. The American nation, as previewed above, is one founded on the principle of self interest, a principle that necessarily runs contrary to the culture of trust. Over the last decade Trump and social media have reconstructed so-called communities, leveraging communication technology to intercede on behalf of the profit motive. Feral intelligence, indeed, was required to recognize and exploit this institutional cleavage. (Social media is inherently political, explaining its congeniality with demagogues.) So the shift from Gesellschaft to Gemeinschaft of American civil society in the late 20th century, the phenomenon signalled by Skocpol’s Senators, is still churning its way through the general public, track lit by social media. To close out the thought, and this section, Skocpol’s conclusion will be utilized, but updated by the reader (if it pleases them) through replacing “public officials” with “members of the public”:

And what does it mean that public officials may now find themselves closely tied to nonprofit agencies in each individual district, but not often tied to one another or to broad cross-sections of fellow citizens in shared civic endeavors? (p. 156)

*

III

The Machine Cats

The Baseball Caps

***