If You Have To Ask You’ll Never Know
After watching the Murdochs’ committee hearing yesterday I went out for dinner with some former colleagues. They’d all been watching it too. These are mostly senior research people, client-facing and so steeped in business: I was interested to hear how the Murdochs’ performance (and the scandal in general) was playing with them, since they’re outside my Twitter ‘filter bubble’.
Some of what they said surprised me. I was a little shocked that the Cameron “second chance” line - which seemed to me remarkably weak - had gone down well, for instance. But I was more interested in their perceptions of the Select Committee hearings. There was broad agreement from them that the Committee had done a poor job, and that it was irritating hearing business people asked questions by people who didn’t understand “business issues” or “how companies work”. This wasn’t meant as an exoneration of the Murdochs, though - they all felt wrongdoing was clearly afoot and had hoped for more penetrating questions.
The conversation soon rolled onto other matters and industry gossip, which I was even MORE interested in so I didn’t press for details. But the attitude niggled at me - there was something familiar about it.
I thought it might be a manifestation of what K-Punk calls “capitalist realism” - as I understand it, the attitude that this is Just How Things Are and that the only correct critical stance to take is one of knowing resignation. It has not, in general, been a good two weeks for knowing resignation. But that wasn’t quite the vibe I was getting. It reminded me more of the financial bloggers I read - and tried, somewhat feebly, to understand - during the 2008 collapse, which were full of frustration about how little regulators and media understood what was actually happening. This applied to the many bloggers unsympathetic to the big banks as well as bankers’ allies.
Even that didn’t quite fit - the chains of command in organisations, even big global ones, aren’t as complicated as the “financial innovation” and shadow banking systems under discussion then.
Then it struck me. The way my ex colleagues were talking reminded me of music fans, and music fans in a particular circumstance - a subculture confronted with the outsider who doesn’t “get it”. The other week I wrote a piece about AraabMUZIK for the Guardian, and got this kind of disdain full-bore, from committed trance fans who’d ignored my caveats I was writing about the casual listener’s perception of trance music and focussed on the fact that I obviously didn’t listen to the stuff much. They were right! And had I been a trance fan I’d have been annoyed too. The piece didn’t get it.
The great thing about not-getting-it arguments is that you don’t often need to explain WHY someone doesn’t get it, because if they got it they’d know, and because your fellow fans who do get it hardly need reminding. Well, I say “the great thing” but actually it’s really annoying - the textual rolled eyes and raised eyebrows as you try and get clarification on something, the infuriating feeling of an in-group closing off on you. But at the same time you understand why it happens - subcultures have something precious and exciting, they don’t want or need the mainstream joining in.
This was the vibe I was getting from James Murdoch’s testimony. His father was alternately theatrical, sentimental, forthright (when he wasn’t just playing or being old). Murdoch Jr, on the other hand, was patient, monotonous, obfuscatory, and utterly business-like: he sounded for the most part like he was on a conference call. There was also, though, a slight note of pitying frustration at having to answer such apparently shallow questions.
(I’ve read the argument - and I think it’s a strong one - that the select committee was all about laying a minefield for the inquiry: getting a body of evidence out of the Murdochs whose real use will be in its cross-checking with later revelations. But that’s not strictly relevant to this post.)
Murdoch was talking in the idiom of business, and the people who “get it” - the markets, according the the New York Times, but also my more critical and frustrated former colleagues - understood. Since I started working with business-minded people it’s often struck me that business works like a subculture. Initially I just thought this in terms of its manias and fads, then I saw it in terms of its jargon, but subcultural identity runs deeper than jargon. Jargon can be explained - identity can only be “got”. If you have to ask, you’ll never know. In the eyes of my ex-colleagues, most of the select committee (for all their own business acumen) were essentially noobs, and there’s nothing more awkward than a noob.
The internet has done funny things to subcultures. It’s made it much easier for people to find one another and form virtual enclaves. But it’s also made those enclaves porous, far more visible, vulnerable to outsider activity, not just mockery. It’s easy to feel familiar with the surface detail of a subculture - there’s no sense of exoticism, as there might have been the first time a 70s kid saw a skinhead or glam band on Top Of The Pops. Some people suggest this means the end of subcultures as anything meaningful but I suspect it doesn’t feel like that: what it’s actually meant is that subcultures have become more defensive and initiatory, the figure of the newbie more important and divisive.
There is more than one business subculture. There’s the populist one written about by people like Barbara Ehrenreich, full of gurus, life coaches and blogging tips, with a few genuine entrepreneurs thrown in. This is what people are mocking when they mock “biz speak”, usually. My sense is that it’s related - but increasingly distantly - to the culture formed at the higher echelons of business, where people talk a different, less garish language. It was this language, in its endless strategic monotony, we heard from James Murdoch.
The populist business subculture sits in easy reach - it lives on the internet, and so it’s accessible and permeable. The powerful business subculture - though perhaps I’m stretching the word too far now, talking about the language and styles and mannerisms of an elite - is less easy to locate, you only notice it’s there when you come into contact with it more frequently, when you start to “get it”. So the select committee hearings were a rare way of seeing it. In his grey, Autonish way, James Murdoch was something exotic, a skinhead on Top Of The Pops.
