Broadly speaking, these scandals were contained within org charts. But, over the same period, there was an increasing awareness of how networks of knowledge and power could cross institutional and even national lines. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Occupy movement argued that a global overclass was taking advantage of the rest of us: members of the one per cent may have worked for competing governments or financial firms, but at the end of the day they enriched one another, like pro athletes playing in the same league. It wasn’t only progressives who worried that capital and control were flowing into globalized spaces, accessible mainly to the private-jet set. In 2004, the conservative political theorist Samuel Huntington explored the idea of “Davos men”—“transnationalists” who “view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operation.” Huntington warned that the “growing differences between the leaders of major institutions and the public” weren’t just economic but cultural—he suggested, for example, that members of the global élite tended to be indifferent or even hostile to traditional values, including religion.
These new understandings—both of the powerful and of the diffuse hierarchies within which they operate—are two elements of the Epstein kaleidoscope. Another is a new conception of the public. In the days before social media, public opinion might have been characterized through surveys or “man on the street” reporting, or ventriloquized by leaders who claimed to know what people thought. But the same decades that saw a rethinking of the élite also saw a reinvention of the public as a networked, online entity—a sort of hive mind. Huntington’s analysis, at the turn of the millennium, had contrasted the élite class with a traditional public that cared about God and country. But the new public was stranger than that. Its hive mind could think out loud, surfacing, organizing, and analyzing vast quantities of information in real time, as in the Steubenville rape case in 2012, or the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, in 2014. And yet its thinking was hardly objective. Shaped by for-profit viral and ad-targeting algorithms, it was drawn to ideas that were lurid, divisive, and provocative. It was often—in a word—crazy.
The new public was hyperglossic, with its human subunits constantly typing and posting. Its thoughts explored every possibility: anything that could be said would be said, no matter how horrible or outlandish. And these tendencies collided with an unprecedented growth in accessible data. Increasingly, the hive mind could find pretty much anything it wanted to see in the Earth-size Rorschach blot available for its analysis. End-to-end encryption had been invented, but not widely adopted, and so the powerful often used Gmail and Outlook like the rest of us. Their secret societies weren’t actually that secret. There were endless documents to be WikiLeaked.
As the hive mind sifted through the data, norms began to change, and these shifts raised difficult questions. What should we think about people who had acted badly in the past, but who said they were acting within the norms of that time? What about those who had enabled bad behavior, maybe just by looking the other way? Cancellation was, among other things, a response to the new understanding of power: it recognized that powerful people, despite their differences, found common cause through shared tacit values, and that the maintenance of predatory or unjust values was therefore a malign and damaging exercise of power. And, actually, it wasn’t always so complicated: lots of people had done things that were plainly against the norms of both their time and ours. Before #MeToo, young women who wanted to work in the culture industries were frequently assaulted or harassed, and, if they talked about it, they were dehumanized. Defenders of this behavior suggested that it might have been normal to harass women back then. But maybe it wasn’t—maybe everyone knew it was wrong—in which case the norm that was actually in effect centered on bowing and scraping to powerful people. This was the central norm that needed to be overturned. Commonsense morality had to be reasserted.