The Beau Idéal Has Been Disconnected: A Technology-Capitalist Realism Perspective on Immediate Modernity’s Anxiety Pandemic

Within immediate modernity, increases in the multitude of psychological, social, emotional and behavioural disruptions affecting human actors, categorised under the (reductive) label of ‘anxiety’ are reaching an apex. This peak can be conceptualised both by frequency of disruptions, which may be defined as ever-present, and by the volume of negative effects over humans’ ability to exist in present reality. Some scholars have argued the permanence of contemporary anxiety represents rebound, a ‘hangover’ from prolonged technological social change and innovation, which alongside positive advances has heralded unintended, unavoidable and unpredictable uncertainties. Others have focussed on impacts arising from impermeable associations between evolving modern life and accelerated capitalist agenda, associated sensemaking, and the intensified embedding of capitalist principles within macro and micro social interactions. Associations occur within and between actors and the technological connective mediums utilised by humans in routine modern life. Despite some existing scholarship in the above domains, few efforts attempt to deconstruct and apply theories holistically as a mechanism of interrogating and contextualising a contemporary anxiety pandemic. To react to a gap in social sensemaking, this transdisciplinary scholarship approaches this task: firstly, by conceptualising contemporary reality using the term immediate modernity, giving language and definition to the unique pro-anxiety social landscape within which human actors are presently situated; secondly, by evaluating and distilling selected theoretical fragments salient for comprehending rapid technological societal advances and their human effects; thirdly, Mark Fisher’s notions of capitalist realism are reconfigured using the synthesised perspectives and applied to interrogate the theme of technological-mediated anxiety in immediate modernity. Drawing theoretical synthesis together, some novel perspectives are presented on immediate modernity’s anxiety pandemic as the beau idéal disconnect theory, describing the hegemonic culture within immediate modernity where anxiety is ever-present and inexorably interlinked with technology-capitalism, yet enduringly and reductively defined as ‘progress’. Applications for theory to further interrogate, visualise and give language to linkages between anxiety and technology-capitalism within contemporary and rapidly accelerating society are put forward.