Peer Relevance

Reading Anne Lister’s¹ 1820-1824 diaries² has left many impressions on me, one of which is the amount of time she spent making social visits. It’s clear from her entries that she enjoyed the company of very few of her acquaintances, but that was not the purpose of the visits. It was rather to make them enjoy hers. I found this mind-blowing.

Anne Lister participated in a culture of self-promotion, the practice of advertising oneself as worthy of opportunities or support, should the occasion arise. Whenever some new resource becomes available, the job interview for its manager has already been done, many times. Whether that resource is a husband, business, or property, it can best be handled in-network. The network knows all.

The upper-class women of pre-Victorian Yorkshire had a very detailed view of their network: who was married to whom, who was in which businesses, who was engaged in legal strife, who was facing financial peril, and so forth. It occurred to me that elite women were the internet of the age, because they had the time and the means to travel and gossip.

This constant networking gave Lister’s class an advantage in situational awareness, because news passes relatively quickly among people who travel frequently. The sources are known and trust can be attributed. Compare this to the lower classes, who were dependent on random travelers for news and were subject to Chinese whispers as a result. While the poor are very well networked at a local level, they were politically ineffective at a regional or national level. And thus, a very small number of people in pre-Victorian Britain were able to out-smart a very large number of people, and to exploit them to smithereens.

We face a similar situation in modern times, namely, federalisation means many decisions are made at levels beyond our reach. Federalisation is largely a positive phenomenon: it levels the playing field such that entrepreneurs cannot force communities into bidding wars to soften environmental regulations or tax liabilities (race to the bottom phenomenon). We therefore cannot complain about federalisation. However, these decisions take place at a national or even transnational level — levels at which ordinary people cannot effectively organise.

One would think that the modern internet would have been the great equalizer. Now, all classes have access to the same information. However, the Chinese whispers problem has simply been transformed into ‘false news,’ and its propagators have been emboldened by the monetisation of rage-bait. We are back where we started.

I suppose that fundamentally, there is no substitute for face-to-face networking. The problem, of course, is that for people who do not control resources, there is no practical advantage to networking. If the people around you are employees at different businesses, there is little you can do for each other. If you are not making decisions that matter to anyone but yourself, you are not a potential node in a meaningful network. The stability of capitalism relies on the compartmentalisation of its losers.

Situational awareness depends on networking and networking depends on peer relevance. Peer relevance depends on resource control. The implication is clear: we need to develop local resources. Ordinarily, this is forbidden to us, since we are, by definition, not the class that owns real estate and that controls capital. However, the game has changed since Lister’s time. Our economy is becoming increasingly virtual. Real money is tied up in assets that do not physically exist. Meta, the social media company, for example, has a market capitalisation of 1.5 trillion dollars although it owns less than 200 billion in real assets. Its value lies in its ability to attract and hold attention.

Legal advice is virtual capital. It is something you pay to access. Medical advice, financial advice, computer advice — all virtual capital that anyone can create. If you have had a legal battle, you likely know much about the relevant laws and the case precedents. You can share your story with others. It is not legal advice, it is your personal experience.

My own experience is that professional legal and medical advice is not necessarily good advice. Professionals often rely on their authority and gaslighting skills as much as any knowledge they might have acquired decades ago. A potential client must therefore research his case before consulting a professional, and this consultation might well occur among peers.

This creates nodes in a network.

Imagine the following after-school program: a bored retiree opens her apartment each afternoon to neighborhood children. Here are computers without internet access, pillows for pillow fights, ingredients that parents have provided for baking projects, and so forth. The catch is that this is an English-only environment. Children thus sharpen their language skills. This only requires a retiree who knows English. This is a program that would cost parents hundreds of Euros each month, but can be had for free through simple coördination of existing resources. The parents have cause to meet each other, and the coördinator gains situational awareness.

When the time comes to resist a proposed law or proposed real estate development, there is a network that knows who has connections to government, who is a good writer, who has the time to organise a protest, which local businesses have something at stake, etc.

This is simply a different world than one in which irrelevant people complain and shrug their shoulders.

Here is what you do:

1. Join one international organisation. Could be Greenpeace or the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example. Give their voice power by increasing their size.
   
2. Join a national organisation. Could be Komitee für Grundrechte und Demokratie. Could be Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte. Whatever matches your interests and priorities.
   
3. Join a local organisation. Here, because you’ll participate personally, let your imagination be the limit. Use the examples listed above as springboards. Detail a legal or medical case on your blog so that others can find you. Find a place where you can teach a class in your favourite topic. Take in the laundry of single moms. Host a bicycle repair day in your courtyard or driveway.

Make yourself relevant.

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Footnotes

1. Anne Lister was a Tory landowner and lesbian, who is the subject of the BBC television series Gentleman Jack
2. The Secret Diaries of Anne Lister, 2010, Elena Whitbread, Ed., Virago Modern Classics