Where Have All the Slackers Gone?

What happens in a society that has gone from negative to positive reinforcement of power?

“Where have all the cowboys gone?” asked the indie one hit wonder Paula Cole in 1997, as Gen-X was beginning to settle into the routine of corporate jobs and families. Had she any foresight, she’d be asking a different question about where to look for romance (has she ever met an actual cowboy?), and how the next two and a half decades would destroy what’s left of it.

The early ‘90s still produced a rich counterculture, and what I miss perhaps the most from it is the figure of the slacker. The slacker was often, but now always, an overeducated, intelligent, sensitive person, usually, but not always, a young man, who decided to opt out of society driven by power and greed. These figures are familiar to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the cultural artifacts that were produced or popular in the ‘90s – the novels of Charles Bukowski and Herbert Selby Jr., David Foster Wallace’s essays, the films of Gus Van Sant, and alternative music of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. 

The slacker knew, whether through his liberal education, or intuitively, that he lived in a society best described by the French philosopher Michele Foucault in his seminal 1975 book, Discipline and Punish. In it Foucault set out a theory that the way power operates in the modern society is not any different than it was in the pre-Enlightenment one, what with its horrific torture inflicted in the name of king and Christ, and that the only thing that changed were the methods of enforcing power, which went from centering on punishment to centering on discipline. No more ritual beheadings or drawing-and-quarterings, but measurements of performance, evaluations, grading, constant surveillance in the forms of cameras and punch cards, and other inducements to perform the role of the gainfully employed citizen of the late capitalist world. No more executioners and henchmen, but teachers, administrators, managers, sedative medications, mental institutions, and publicly administered courts, police, and prisons as the last resort.

The result of the omnipresent disciplining apparatus of surveillance and measurement is its internalization, which Foucault called the Panopticon, after the prison design developed by the 18th Century English theoretician Jeremy Bentham. The panopticon is designed in such a way that the prisoners can be constantly monitored, which eventually leads to the inmates internalizing the feeling of being surveilled and results in self-policing. Foucault argued that just like inmates of such a prison, the modern citizen has internalized the values of constant and continuous discipline imposed on him by the contemporary administrative apparatus and thus polices himself; measures himself, grades himself, induces himself to perform better, and so on. 

What’s more, power in such a society no longer comes from the top, it comes from everywhere: from the schools, the media, your parents, your partner – everyone exercises power over everyone in some way. And so you are forced to perform better – to earn better grades, enter a better college, look better through constant dieting and exercising, dress better, and so on.

The ‘90s slacker knew all of this and that no change was coming, because he also knew that he lived in a society that has gone from revolution to revolts, to theorizing about the possibility of a revolution or revolt, to understanding the impossibility of either. And so the only thing was to opt out. Drift around. Get by but not conform. Or to at least escape internally, into the music, into the literature, to keep a corner of his soul free, if he could not keep all of himself free.

Fast forward to today, and culturally we have taken the last step towards the full embrace of the capitalist world order. Today’s youth not only doesn’t understand the impossibility of revolting against the established world order, it doesn’t even know that it should. It has embraced capitalism full on. The capitalist project of assimilation, about which Herbert Marcuse sounded the alarm in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man has been completed.

We are now in what the contemporary Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes as an “achievement society.” He posits that instead of a negative reinforcement that induced us to self-policing described by Foucault we are now in the era of a positive reinforcement that induces us to self-policing in more pernicious ways. Instead of a constant threat of being banished from society for nonperformance, we are told that we can be all that we can be, we are free to do anything – as long, of course, as that anything corresponds with the current societal values. As long as we work hard and apply ourselves, no one is stopping us from achieving whatever we want. That is positive reinforcement that leads to the headlong rush of being exploited by so many young workers, and to slogans “Thank god it’s Monday.” The flipside of a mentality that all roads are open is that failure is now solely on you. You can’t get a girlfriend or a job or a lifestyle you see on Instagram? That’s your fault, and your fault only. That means you didn’t work hard enough, did not go to the gym enough, did not study enough, was not the entrepreneur of the self, failed to create your brand. 

In the ‘90s, the counterculture was breathing its last gasps, without knowing it. For the members of that counterculture, selling out was the biggest sin. Today, in the society of positive reinforcement, there can be no talk of selling out. On the contrary, everyone is in a rush to sell out as soon as possible, which is seen as success, and material success is seen as the best, nay, the only type of self-realization. Our heroes today are not explorers or social reformers or artists, but businessmen. And the fact that they have abdicated any responsibility to the society that has enriched them, speaks volumes. That men like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos are lionized today is insane by all historical standards. At least Andrew Carnegie, who was as rich as they are, and universally hated for the way he exploited his workers, built a library in every American city as a mea culpa. Musk and Bezos are sending rockets into space instead. Instead of movies about outsiders, we are now treated to movies about consumer products. Our heroes create sneakers, not poems, and our bookstores overflow not with literature but with self-help books on how to find success.

These success stories, which previous generations would scorn, drive scores of young men and women into a frenzy of self-exploitation on all fronts. The crazy mythology of “having it all” is the result of the positive reinforcement mentality described by Byung-Chul Han and results in what he calls “the burnout society,” the title of his most famous book and a term so well-known that it hardly needs unpacking. What’s to be done? Han, unlike most theoreticians, offers some recipes on the personal level, a version of “tune in, drop out.” Put away your phone, garden, meditate. In other words, make some mental space away from the madness. There are no solutions offered on the societal level, itself a telltale sign. Where have all the cowboys gone is not a viable question. I miss the slackers though.