Even so, Chaplin’s fate in 1936 was essentially the same as that of a mill worker in 1836, or a peasant in 1736, or at any earlier time in human history. The ordinary person–a category which includes the huge majority of humans since time began–had a horrid, tedious, unsatisfying existence, with precious little say in how to run his or her life.
This is very different from our experience today–so when did the big change occur? Some say the Beatles reflected this change in society, but the landscape had actually shifted a decade before they arrived on the scene, with Hollywood marking and magnifying the upheaval. In 1953 Marlon Brando played motorbike rebel Johnny Strabler in The Wild One, and throughout America movie audiences were electrified by the young star’s raw charisma and assertiveness. Mothers, intoxicated and paralysed by Brando’s animal magnetism, let their small children run up and down the aisles, shouting, ‘Vroom-vroom!’ Two years later, Rebel without a Cause introduced James Dean as high school gang leader Jim Stark, portraying a teenage world of knife fights, drag racing, stolen cars and death by speeding. The picture indelibly presented young people at the centre of their own universe, existentially responsible for their own destiny, heroically deciding how to live…and how to die.
This really was something novel–individualistic youth culture. And it happened not just in America, but in Britain and Europe; and it cropped up in music, plays and books as well as films. The Beats of the 1950s–with their poetry, long hair and propensity to drop out, go on the road and experiment with drugs–prefigured the hippies and punks of later decades. John Osborne’s ferocious 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English and American theatre, introducing the foul-mouthed working-class antihero, the ‘angry young man’. Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider came out in the same year, highlighting the impact on society of many influential outsiders, including Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The golden age of youthful individualism came to full fruition in the sixties, with psychedelic drugs, music and lifestyles, student revolts, and rejection of authority in every part of life. That spirit of personal liberation was eventually transmuted by baby boomers not just into new creative spheres but into business, which became much more radical, decentralised, individualised and personally rewarding. The grey-suited, white-shirted, conformist ‘organisation man’ gave way to colourful semi-hippy entrepreneurs, doing their own thing, running their own show. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer and launched the Macintosh during a famous advertising slot in the 1984 Baseball World Series, in which the new computer was touted as the rebel alternative to Big Brother IBM. This was an explicit reference to George Orwell’s 1984, in which Big Brother, the dictator modelled on Stalin, crushed the spirit of Winston Smith, the ordinary citizen whose sole crime was to explore his individuality. Steve Wozniak later used the fortune he made from Apple to subsidise his favourite rock bands, before starting another high-tech venture.
Individualism–painful and pointless as it could often be–replaced the image of the hapless victim crushed by the heartless organisation. Since then the view that everyone can take charge of their life, realising their own success and happiness, has had a good run, becoming pretty universal. Don’t you feel that you have a self, that you have inner depths, in almost the same way that you have arms and legs? Don’t you feel that your personality can be developed in any way that you choose, that you can rise above whatever your parents achieved or strike out on new, personal paths? In our society, ‘I did it my way’ is not just a line from a song but the title of endless autobiographies, because we feel an automatic identification with the individualist, the maverick, the rebel. Everything has become personalised–we have personal computers, personal trainers, personal iPods. This is a universe away from Chaplin’s revolving wheel, and the fate of humanity generally down the ages.
But here’s the thing. Just as control by society was replaced by control by the self, another huge change is coming–indeed, it is already here, but we are only beginning to appreciate it. Consider this for a moment–when youth culture catapulted around the world, often in highly subversive ways and without the help of official media, how did the same dirty jokes and sexual lore suddenly turn up everywhere, decades before the Internet had been invented? How, in 1968, did identikit student revolts spread from California to Paris to Tokyo and, in paler imitations, to thousands of other campuses within a matter of days? The following year, how was it that several hundred thousand young people suddenly converged on the muddy fields of Woodstock, in the middle of nowhere, when there was no advertising, no promotion, no television coverage? What is the paradox of identical individualism, of feeling pressured to do your own thing, of ‘groupthink’ masquerading as personal discovery? How do fads–from hula-hoops to hoodies–explode and then fade away?
The search for individual expression is genuine enough, but it takes place within groups and it is spread by networks. And, in many ways, networks are the antithesis of the lone individual. Even when they are spontaneous and anarchic in origin, networks favour big concentrations and bind people together in ways that no individual intended or can control. The World Wide Web may be democratic and open to all, but a few websites get the lion’s share of its traffic, and a very small number of people get most of the financial rewards, usually to their immense surprise. Nobody intended that to happen; and nobody can prevent it. It’s just the strange way of networks.
So it’s pretty clear that complete individualism is something of a delusion. It’s important, it’s valid, it’s liberating and it’s changed the world–mainly, in our opinion, for the better. But it’s not the full picture. It’s not a reliable guide to how the world works. To understand our world, we need a new way of thinking–which is what this book aims to provide.
This time the academics–a new type of scientist–have already done the heavy lifting for us. Now we should follow them into a world where our individual efforts are only part of the picture, a place where our success and happiness are determined by far more than our own talents and achievements. This is still a world of individuals, but it’s also a world of networks–the hidden background that shapes our lives. It’s a strange land, puzzling and confounding, but it’s also very exciting. Whereas the heroic individualism of Dean and Brando gives us the illusion of determining our fate, the new territory we’re about to explore shows the strings that are tugging us this way and that. By understanding the real nature of our world, by cooperating with the network forces around us and harnessing them to our ends, we can swap the delusion that we can control the world as individuals for the reality of creation, in collaboration with other people. When we understand our century’s network society properly, we can run our lives slightly differently and benefit enormously. For example, we’ll see that maintaining a large circle of casual acquaintances who come from different backgrounds with contrasting attitudes and lifestyles, or who live a long way from us, can provide knowledge and insights that have the potential to change our lives. We’ll also see how vital it is to choose the people we collaborate with much more carefully than most of us do. And once we understand the insidious way that groups can operate, we’ll be much more cautious about thinking in the same way as our colleagues, or about staying in an organisation (or a relationship) that makes us unhappy.