Where Is Our Nickelback?
Have you ever stood on the bank of a famous river and tried to see the thing itself. Maybe it was the Thames, the Nile, some postcard stretch of water you were told you had to visit. You stand there on the muddy edge, watching it slide past. Which part is the river. The bank under your feet or the water that never stops moving. Maybe it is the shopping trolley half submerged, the floating plastic bottle, or the shrieking hen party drifting past on a boat. We talk about the Thames as if it were a single solid thing, but what we are really naming is a pattern that holds together across endless change.
“Society” works in a similar way. We talk about British society, civil society, the social fabric, as if there were one continuous object running underneath our lives. From a distance it looks that way. Up close, it is a tangle of institutions, dissolving clubs, emerging networks, friendships, group chats, workplaces, apps, emptying high streets and full servers. The name makes it sound like a thing. What actually exists is flow.
We like to imagine that the moments when we say “this is really me” are fixed points we can anchor ourselves to. Falling in love, choosing a career path, becoming someone who runs and posts prolifically on Strava, joining a religious community. These are meant to be the scenes where the script drops and something unrepeatable shows through. Roland Barthes suggests something less comforting. When you find yourself inhabiting these scenes, it feels like truth, but it is also a role you step into, like the river.
The point is not that it is all fake. It is that our most intense experiences arrive with pre‑made poses attached. To be a lover, a citizen, a Strava god is to step into a role that language has kept warm for you.
Civil society, in eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal thought, was supposed to give those roles somewhere to live. If the state and the church were no longer going to directly shape people’s moral lives, what would. The answer was a dense network of voluntary associations and public spaces where people would meet, form habits, absorb norms and become particular kinds of subjects together.
That picture still exists in pockets. A pre Covid era university campus would have felt like that. For a few years you are dropped into something that looks a little like the nineteenth century ideal of civil society. Societies, choirs, sports clubs, political groups, late night arguments in shared kitchens. You can almost believe that this is what life will be like. Then you leave and discover how quickly those banks fall away. The groups disperse. The rooms empty. What is left is a thin scattering of group chats and an algorithmic feed.
Here a different picture takes over. Instead of thick organisations you join, you get platforms. Instead of meetings you travel to, you get timelines that come to you. Instead of a sense that you choose which social worlds to inhabit by walking through certain doors, there is a sense that your social world appears, ready made, on the screen you already live inside. You still meet people, still fall in love, still argue about politics, but the routes by which those encounters happen are different.
What has changed is the machinery that decides which roles are emphasised and which are harder to reach. On the old banks, the work of shaping people was done, for better or worse, by institutions and scenes you could point to. You knew which paper you were reading, which club you were in, which people were in the room. Now a great deal of that work is done by systems you never see. Your feed is not a neutral surface. It is ordered. It learns. It presents some kinds of lovers, citizens and enemies far more often than others.
The Batman and Robin of modern philosophy, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, suggest a shift from society to network (rhizome). Society suggests something like a body. It has organs, an inside and an outside, a relatively coherent life. The network is more abstract. Networks consist of nodes and links, flows of information and desire, connections made and broken by logics that do not look like old‑fashioned membership. You do not so much “belong” as pass through.
You can feel this shift in the background of a remark Margaret Thatcher made decades ago. “There is no such thing as society.” At the time it sounded like pure ideology. It still is ideology, but it also names something that has happened. The thick world of clubs, unions, churches and local organisations that civil society once referred to has been steadily eroded.
Fast forward from Maggie Thatcher to the year 2001. So many moments from that year still sit in the collective memory. The shock of 9/11. The completion of the Human Genome Project. The appearance of Wikipedia and the first Harry Potter film. There was a feeling, at least in some parts of the world, that history was moving in a certain direction, that there was a single stage where events played out in view of everyone. And there was the birth of a group that would tie our collective humanity together for the next twenty five years, Nickelback.
Nickelback went from international superstars to one of the most hated bands on the planet. They became a meme, an easy shorthand for bad taste. To roll your eyes at them was to participate in a joke that seemed to belong to almost everyone. You could be in different countries, on different political sides, and still high five each other while laughing “yeah, fuck those guys”. It felt, strangely, like a small exercise of collective judgement. There was still one river of pop culture wide enough that everyone could throw something in and watch it float by.
Today it is much harder to find our collective Nickelback. Not because the music has got dramatically better, but because the river has been split. Different groups are watching different streams, assembled by different systems. Outrage flares, but often inside sealed pockets. The thing that everyone in one feed agrees is terrible never appears for the people in another feed. The punchlines do not quite line up. You can feel like you are watching the whole of “what people are like now” when really you are floating in one narrow channel.
In his short text, Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze argues that we are moving beyond disciplinary societies into societies of control. More continuous, diffuse forms of power based on codes, modulation and networks rather than fixed enclosures. A social world organised less through visible institutions and more through continuous adjustment. Social scores, recommendations, nudges, personalised suggestions, risk profiles. You are connected to more people and more content than ever, but you have less control over the terms of that connection. The platforms decide who you should talk to, which posts matter, which conversations you will even know exist.
Which brings the question back to the riverbank. When you stand there and say “this is society”, whose experiences are you actually looking at. When you say “this is what people are like now” or “this is what we all think”, which current are you actually watching. The name suggests a single thing. The reality is a set of flows routed through infrastructures that most of us have very little say over.
We are still stepping into roles that language keeps ready for us, but the stage we step onto is less and less the thick, local civil society of clubs and halls and more and more a shifting network of platforms and feeds. Maybe that is why the moment we are in can feel so frightening. Among all the chaos it feels like there is less to hold onto or bind ourselves to than ever before. We find ourselves saying things we never imagined we would say, “Where is our Nickelback?!”
More confronting still is the erosion of the illusion that there was something stable and situated there in the first place. We look and suddenly realise we are not on the river bank, but floating on the river itself. It is only because we are floating too that things seem stable and unmoved.
The river has not stopped moving. If anything it moves faster, and the banks feel further apart. The hard part is learning to see the patterns without pretending that the water is one solid, stable thing.