Like a Demagogue: WeWork & The Doublespeak Advertising Philosophy of Silicon Valley
Of all the more complex competencies of personality — things like charity, competence, honour; things you can’t entirely pin down through a single archetypal act, or contain in one case— the one which, nowadays, must surely be in the shortest available supply, at least as it has been historically understood, is ‘negative capability’. Originally coined by the poet John Keats, the term can be used to describe those who are “content in the midst of uncertainties and doubts, and not compelled toward fact or reason.” In noted figures of leadership, such as Abraham Lincoln or the Rashidun caliph Umar, negative capability can be the means towards finding a kind of conciliated intellectual enlightenment that makes solvable even the most intractable of problems. In artists, like Elizabeth Robins or William Shakespeare or Keats himself, such contentment can act as the end itself, from whence comes a whole gilded output of artistic product, that makes high and low concerns friendly and ultimately indistinguishable.
Regardless of means or ends, it cannot be accurately said that the Early Digital period is one rich in negative capability. What our day does seem to be exceedingly rich in is the antithesis of negative capability, defined by philosopher Jacob Needham as ‘dispersal’, “a flight from overwhelming…
