February 2025

The other day I received an email from what might be one the few colleagues still checking into Twitter (most seem to have moved to Bluesky, as have I). The email was just a link with the subject title Did you see? I hadn’t.

Gosh, I wrote in response (which I gather they found a little understated).

My colleague was pointing to this tweet, where Adam Tooze described my fairly recently published book, Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World 1870-2008 as ‘the sort of book that changes how you see the world’.

I mean. Well. Gosh.

https://x.com/adam_tooze/status/1864041896005267954 The link is to Chartbook where Adam quotes from Claire EF Wright’s review of Virtue Capitalists in The Economic History Review.

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One of my Sunday routines is usually to post a photo here. Sometimes that’s easy, since I’ve taken something in the past few days, and sometimes that involves trawling through my archive to select something, sometimes from years ago. One problem with that is that there are just so many photos, and it is hard to keep track of everything I’ve posted here in order to avoid duplicates. It would be easier if I had enough discipline to put each photo selected in my Sunday Photoblogging album at Flickr, but I can neglect doing that for weeks, months, and even years at a time. So I’ve spent much of today going through Crooked Timber and making sure that all those photos are in that album. Well, it turns out there are 467 of them, which is an awful lot of Sundays. Quite an instructive exercise for me: there are some I like a lot, and others where I wonder why I selected it at all. There are influences I can detect such as Kertesz, Leiter, Gruyaert (not that I’m fit to be mentioned in the same sentence) but also E. Chambré Hardman, who use of natural frames I’ve often copied. Anyway: here’s the complete set, assuming I haven’t missed any out, which I probably have.

Last week, I finished reading an advance copy of Cory Doctorow’s Picks and Shovels. No spoilers about plot specifics, but the novel has a lot to say about two things. First, how Silicon Valley used to be a place where exit was possible and a good thing. If you didn’t like your boss, you went out and found somewhere else, or founded a company yourself. California didn’t recognize no-compete agreements, and the foundation myth of Silicon Valley is the Traitorous Eight. Eight engineers found William Shockley, a hateful unpredictable jerk and a pioneer of “racial realism,”  such a horrible person to work for that they all left to do their own thing, founding an engineering culture and start-ups that begat start-ups that begat start-ups.

The second theme of Cory’s novel is how easy it is to get trapped nonetheless. There is a cult-like aspect to many organizations, a quasi religious fervor. Once you get pulled in, you reconstruct your whole identity around a particular set of values. You may start in a place where it seems that there’s a strong alignment between the organizational culture and what you yourself aspire to.  You may discover that you are wrong, or the place may change. The wrong people end up taking over, or becoming influential. You find yourself in workplace conversations that leave you feeling weird and disturbed. But you aren’t sure what to do. Leaving would involve giving up on the values that you thought you shared, giving up, in a sense on your fundamental understanding of who you are.

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“The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” In one form or another, this observation has been made many times over the last century or more.

What is true of people is true of nations. In the past 25 years or so it was often claimed (and , admittedly, often denied) that, in the modern world, the United States was the “indispensable nation”. Whatever the rights and wrong of this claim, it has become obvious that, whether we like it or not, the rest of the world will now have to dispense with the US as a defender of democracy, guarantor of global order, or even (as in Margaret Thatcher’s words about Gorbachev) a state we can do business with.

Anyone whose experience of the US began in the last eleven days would have no trouble recognising an archetypal kleptocracy, like Putin’s Russia or Mobutu’s Zaire (with a touch of Mao madness). The boss rakes off billions in tribute while his cronies scramble to please him, put each other down and collect their share of the loot. Regime supporters commit all sorts of crimes with impunity, while opponents are subject to both legal victimisation and threats of extra-legal terror against which they can expect no protection.

In dealing with such a regime, the only strategy is to buy off the boss, or a powerful underling, and hope that they stay bought long enough to deliver on their side of the bargain This approach is politely described as “transactional”, but without the implication that the transaction will necessarily be honoured. Dealing with kleptocrats can be highly profitable, as long as you get in and out quickly enough, but there’s no possibility of “doing business”, either commercial or political, in the ordinary sense of the word.

The problem is that for nearly everyone who matters, the last eleven days seem like an aberration. For decades, the US has been seen as the central pillar of a “rules-based order”, on which assumptions about the world were largely based. That’as true even for critics who pointed out that the rules were drawn up to favor the US, and that the US often breached them without any real consequences. And it’s true even though you can point to precedents for everything Trump had done.

But all that is over, and can’t be restored.

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