It’s easy to see why Mark Zuckerberg likes Moisés Naím’s The End of Power. Naím’s thesis is that “in the 21st century, power is easier to get, harder to use – and easier to lose.” Zuckerberg understands this (as shown by his strategic acquisitions of potential competitors WhatsApp and Instagram) and grasps that Facebook’s success depends on bridging the gap between old corporate and new grassroots models of power. Facebook is constantly balancing demands for user control – or the appearance of it – against a careful, authoritarian, behind-the-scenes apparatus that maximizes efficiency in ways that benefit the company.
In this sense, Facebook is the perfect test case for Naím’s book. The End of Power lucidly describes and extols the extent to which recent developments have made traditional repositories of power – whether political, corporate, or cultural – newly vulnerable to challenges from smaller, nimbler entities. He warns, however, that the imminent death of the superpower as a structuring global authority is producing less stability than ever before. He suggests that a model where smaller actors have power to veto but not dictate – destroy but not create – is a recipe for gridlock, anarchy, or both.
It’s a muscular account, rich in statistics and case studies. The provocative contradiction at the heart of Naím’s argument is that societies are becoming both increasingly constrained and more anarchic. People are protesting, consumers are boycotting, small governments are vetoing, and voters are over-legislating government’s ability to provide goods and services, even as an emerging global middle class clamours for more of them than ever.
Naím makes the case that this combination of an increasingly inefficient government with a more demanding public is toxic, and that while greater transparency (thanks to non-state entities like WikiLeaks) have led to more informed constituencies, they have also eroded public trust. This, Naím claims, produces a uniquely dangerous kind of disaffected alienation: “If there is a mounting risk to democracy and liberal socieities in the 21st century,” he writes, “it is less likely to come from a conventional, modern threat (China) or a pre-modern one (radical Islam) than from within societies where alienation has set in.”
It’s a fascinating claim, and true in a very particular way, but – like the title, which should perhaps have been The End of Superpower – it appears to misname the phenomenon it describes. Alienation is not the problem because it isn’t new. The problem (if it is a problem) is that it’s no longer alienated. People who felt ideologically or experientially alone in their respective societies are newly equipped to find likeminded people. One reason women were able to rise up and demand equality was not just that they were “coalitions of the angry,” as Naím puts it, but that they entered the workplace and found each other.
In other words, the developments Naím credits with this sea change in power relations – he calls these the “more, mobility, and mentality revolutions” – enabled alienated demographics to escape older definitions of community and the constraints those definitions imposed. What Naím sometimes characterises as alienation writ large – a shift in emotional register or capacity, a universal absence of affiliation – is specifically alienation from the traditional units of allegiance.
That’s a subtle point, but it matters that what Naím frames as an eradication of a particular effect might more accurately be called a substitution of its object. This doesn’t weaken his argument; if anything, it’s consistent with the trend he describes in the rise of niche communities in everything from religion to commerce: if people excluded from full participation in the church are less inclined to identify as Catholics, historically disenfranchised people are also less inclined to identify as patriots, or as families, or with any structuring unit that has historically produced alienation within them.
But that doesn’t mean the end of identification itself. There’s no zealot like a convert, and formerly alienated parties are more likely now than ever before to identify as other things – Pentecostals, in Naím’s example, or radicals, or any other organising ideology that trumps the waning explanatory power of the state.
What emerges from the book – though it’s not explicitly stated – is a sense that definitions of society are drifting from the geographic borders that have historically circumscribed them. Naím’s thinking seems slightly dated in its loyalty to the notion that states are a priori legitimate actors. One of the few mentions of Israel-Palestine in the book frames resistance by the latter as not just illegitimate but traumatic: “In 2004, Hezbollah flew a drone into Israeli air space; the Israeli military downed it, but the psychological effect of the violation, and the message it sent about Hezbollah’s capacities, endures,” he writes. Little thought is given to the psychological effect of the Israeli occupation on the Palestinians.
These are blind spots that, when connected, describe the book’s alienated negative space. “What happens,” Naím asks, reflecting on the rocket, “when any disaffected, delusional, or deranged individual has the capacity to wreak havoc from the sky?” The question as phrased resists application to innocent victims of American drone strikes in Afghanistan – and seems to accidentally imply that death from comfortingly “non-delusional” American drones is preferable.
Naím’s critique is at its most persuasive when detailing the consequences of this trend for issues like global warming which, because they don’t operate on a human timescale, are unsolvable given an economy of power that’s increasingly dependent on (and responsive to) shorter-term incentives. One can agree with this assessment while noting that this has always been the trouble with global capitalism; it seems odd to blame the decline of the superpower for our collective inability to deal with environmental collapse, particularly since the superpowers have themselves been the biggest polluters.
The book is least compelling when it falls into a shopworn tradition — inherited from treatises lamenting the end of monarchy — of predicting that the decay of centralized authority will lead to anarchy. It’s an understandable concern, but its sheer conventionality undercuts Naím’s suggestion that power itself is “ending” or undergoing a historically unprecedented mutation. It would be interesting, frankly, if some new anarchy-adjacent, “powerless” form of social organization came to pass, but if history has taught us anything, it’s that kingdoms might rise and fall, but power finds a way.
The same is true for some of his examples, which present historically familiar strategies as revolutionary or new: in his discussion of “disruptive” philanthropy, for instance, Naím characterizes charitable work by celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Warren Buffett, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as upstart “micropowers” facing off against traditional “megaplayers” Oxfam and the Red Cross. One might object that this, too, is a less a radical innovation than a return to form wherein the unfortunate optics of massive income inequality are tempered by the modern equivalent of noblesse oblige.
That said, The End of Power is admirably restrained in its ratio of prescription to description. To the extent that Naím permits himself to offer a recommendation, it’s that the remedy to the dysfunction between governments and citizens lies in innovative approaches to restoring the public trust. People must find it within themselves to consent to be governed, he says, and governments must in turn find a way to deserve that consent.
Recognising the difficulty of achieving that reconciliation, he notes that the one area where the tendency to creatively disrupt has faltered is in how we govern ourselves. “In short,” he says, “disruptive innovation has not arrived in politics, government, and political participation.” That Naím doesn’t propose a solution and instead ends the book with a call to inventive arms both saves him from being one of the “terrible simplifiers” he condemns, and confirms The End of Power as an intelligent and engaging — if limited — study that (unlike its title) resists overstatement in favor of nuance.
