Imagined Communities | Leevi Leivo | Negotiator 66

Summary

The episode digs into Benedict Anderson’s classic Imagined Communities and how a shared language, media and capitalism built the nation state. At the heart of the discussion is the tension between the durability of the nation state and newer transnational communities: the climate movement, sports fandoms and online platforms. Leivo separates a community from a network and argues that the greatest problem of our time is communitylessness and the ill-being that follows from it. Sami Miettinen brings in the Overton window, identity politics and the effects of anonymity on public debate and podcast communities. The episode closes by asking whether perfect machine translation would break the foundation of nationalism altogether.

Chapters

• 00:00 — An imagined community requires certain elements
• 00:49 — Introducing Leevi Leivo of Puheenaihe
• 01:10 — Puheenaihe’s mayoral election series begins
• 02:01 — Benedict Anderson and Imagined Communities
• 02:52 — The birth of nationalism and the French Revolution
• 03:29 — A shared language and the rise of the press
• 04:42 — Fukuyama, capitalism and the media combination
• 05:14 — Dunbar’s number and the limit of tribal community
• 05:51 — Social constructionism and the construction of knowledge
• 06:58 — From the village to an abstract Finnishness
• 07:44 — Halla-aho, Helsinki and foreign identities
• 08:11 — The strengths and durability of national identity
• 09:37 — The benefit of globalisation without a community
• 11:05 — The euro as an imagined community, and the recovery fund
• 12:22 — Fukuyama’s universalist national feeling
• 13:00 — The EU without a common language or public sphere
• 13:43 — Sport as a transnational community
• 14:26 — Television created Liverpool fans in Finland
• 15:33 — YouTube channels and platforms as channels of interaction
• 16:58 — The essential difference between community and network
• 18:16 — Ferguson, the tower and the square
• 19:00 — The erosion of traditional communities in working life
• 20:53 — The Clubhouse experiment and Finnish-language rooms
• 22:25 — From feeds towards community-based social media
• 23:42 — The active creation of culture in a nation state
• 25:00 — Identity politics fragments the nation state
• 26:00 — Sofi Oksanen and Estonian national feeling
• 27:00 — The climate movement as a transnational community
• 28:20 — Religious features in environmental thought
• 28:57 — ESG investing and the capitalist’s villain cloak crumbling
• 29:43 — Identity power without capital
• 30:35 — From class politics to identity politics
• 32:21 — Piketty and the changed logic of voting
• 33:30 — Parallel communities are better than none at all
• 34:35 — The Overton window and Finnish consensus
• 35:30 — An interviewer’s generosity towards disagreement
• 36:22 — Who you dare invite as a guest
• 38:03 — The format dilutes extreme polarisation
• 39:00 — Legislation as the nation state’s backbone
• 40:10 — The monopoly on violence and Ahtisaari’s observations
• 41:31 — City states and the zone of anarchy
• 42:41 — The same democracy, taxation and currency
• 43:17 — A wish for a YouTube community rather than just media
• 44:10 — Communitylessness and rising ill-being
• 44:44 — Anonymous comments and genuine identities
• 46:46 — Fandom is not an equal community
• 47:04 — The matrix, conspiracy communities and the red pill
• 48:01 — The internet makes the like-minded easy to find
• 50:02 — Machine translation could break nationalism
• 51:01 — Totalitarianism restricts shared platforms
• 51:38 — Closing thanks and building an empire

Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Kuvitellut yhteisöt | Leevi Leivo | Neuvottelija 66. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.