There is a scene in the 2nd episode of HBO’s The White Lotus that struck me as both jarring and familiar. It occurs at lunch time at the Hawaiian vacation resort that is the setting for the mini-series. Rachel Patton (Alexandra Daddario) a freelance journalist on her honeymoon, stops by the table of Nicole Mossbacher (Connie Britton), the CFO of a popular search engine, there on vacation with her family.
Rachel is worried. She has just gotten hitched to a real estate mogul who urges her to give up her career (it’s just “disposable garbage…clickbait” he tells her) and enjoy all luxuries that come with marrying into wealth. Though her job is low-paying and, as she puts it, “mediocre”, she fears abandoning it will relinquish whatever personal autonomy she has achieved. She looks up to Nicole, a successful professional woman with a family, and, after introducing herself, asks for her wisdom.
Nicole is happy, and somewhat flattered, to be approached as a mentor. “You’ve got to keep your own orbit going,” she advises, “don’t give up your power.” Rachel thanks her, and Nicole adds, “Women have a lot to navigate and I just think it’s really important to support women."
Then, like a bolt out of the blue, just as this warm encounter is about to end, the interaction between these characters darkens dramatically. Rachel shares that she wrote a piece praising Nicole, naming the publication where it appears. “That was a fucked-up piece,” Nicole tells her. She feels the article made her “come across as some Machiavellian gorgon, using the victimization of the other women in my company just to further my own craven ambitions.”
Rachel is taken aback, thinking her piece did nothing but praise her idol, though she admits the profile was “re-purposed content”, based on another publication’s work. “That’s bad journalism,” Nicole snaps. Then, without missing a beat, the two smile warmly, wish each other a happy stay, and part.
Seamless dissociation
What struck me about this scene is that it captured an experience rarely portrayed in popular entertainment. There are those moments, especially in working life, when the person you are speaking to transforms without warning—almost like a friendly dog that turns vicious. Then, just as suddenly, perhaps out of social convention, the situation goes back to friendliness. You’ve witnessed a shift from one to personality to another, but the person you’re speaking with seems unaware that the switch has occurred.
There is an amusing story Liza Minnelli tells about such an abrupt change of persona. She describes an early experience performing on stage with her mother, Judy Garland. At first, she felt the warmth of motherly affection. But once the performance got going, her mother “was like a lioness that owned the stage and suddenly found someone invading her territory…the killer instinct of a performer had come out in her.”
Minnelli relates that later she and Garland howled with laughter about this twist in personality. It was as if another self had overtaken her mother in the midst of their duet. “You’re a force to be dealt with,” Garland commented. “I created it and now I’ve come up against it.”
A self for every social role
What accounts for such momentary schizophrenia? In both of these examples, one of the characters shifts from one social role to another. In each, the bonding, nurturing self gives way quickly to the professional one. Both Mossbacher and Garland have images they need to cultivate. Their public selves, concerned with reputation management, play by competitive rather than the cooperative ethics.
In my own experience working for various employers, such shifts result from similar causes. The natural social bonding that occurs between people who work together can grow cold quickly when a professional imperative intervenes. A typical scenario: a person you work for, and are friendly with, announces there will soon be “restructuring” or “downsizing.” Your previously warm interactions grow cold; the boss adopts a game face.
New forms of class animosity
One of the impressive aspects of The White Lotus mini-series is the fact that, underneath the requisite melodrama, there is a sophisticated awareness of contemporary class alliances and antagonisms. At the resort, we see interactions between the wealthy clientele and the service staff, as well as the staff and the employees they supervise and other social dynamics.
This aspect of the series makes the clash between Nicole and Rachel particularly contemporary. Each is representative of a relatively new class created by the information economy. Nicole, as the CFO of a major search engine, is a member of what media theorist McKenzie Wark has named the “vectoralist class.” These are new members of the ruling class. They are distinguished from, say, the real estate barons that populate the show, rather like old money is from new. One is based on property; the other, on the control and/or ownership of information.
Rachel, the freelance writer, is from what Wark terms “the hacker class.” These workers earn their precarious living through supplying not just the code or programming, but “content” that populates the networks the vectoralists control. In Wark’s words, hackers “turn the same old information into new.” Rachel’s article about Nicole is a case in point: her piece “re-purposed” an older article, rewriting, tweaking, supplementing, etc., to make it new.
In this light, you can almost read Nicole’s scolding of Rachel as the super-egoic voice of the Google algorithm; it’s no secret that the search engine’s technology ranks totally original “content" higher than the “re-purposed.” Of course, Rachel was probably ordered to reuse the older story by her employer. The person who assigned the piece, no doubt, didn’t have the budget for the labor time involved in original research or interview. Rachel's low pay is probably the standard for “hack work.”
In any case, though Nicole, as vectoralist, is in a more powerful position than Rachel, the animosity the former displays hints at the small power the precariously paid freelancer nevertheless possesses. What Rachel writes contributes to the public image the powerful CFO presents. Those who live by information can also die by it. How investors perceive the C-suite executives of a corporation can affect stock recommendations.
As William Davies points out, in an information economy “reputation” becomes a kind of social capital—one that has economic consequences. Davies comments: “If a reputation can be invested in and grown over time, it is equally possible to be ‘shorted’ by this quasi-financial market—harmed by trolling or concerted online attacks.” Though Rachel’s piece is by no means an attack, in a reputation-intensive economy Nicole is sensitive to even the possibility that this portrayal could provoke sneers.
The future is dissociated
Such dynamics lead me to wonder, as we all become increasingly sucked into the information economy, whether our own dissociation will increase. Science fiction tales are already envisioning a future where our private selves become public to such a degree that even casual conversations are regularly invaded by “the professional self” and take on an artificial, promotional tone. How can they not? After all, we’ve got reputations to manage.
