Project Society

Description

Chor Pharn:

"Half a century ago, most adults in industrial nations belonged to an institution larger than themselves. They worked in a ministry, a factory, a union, or a firm that promised lifetime employment. They voted for parties that offered plans measured in decades. They paid taxes that built roads, dams, and schools in their name. Even leisure had a collective rhythm: weekend sport, summer holidays, the nightly news at a fixed hour. Life was lived inside a timetable designed by the state and synchronised by mass media.

Historians now call this formation the project society. Between roughly 1914 and 1973, governments and citizens alike learned to think of politics as a series of organised undertakings—wars to win, economies to rebuild, peoples to educate, futures to design. The nation became a workshop. Bureaucracy was its nervous system; the population, its muscle. Liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes alike shared the assumption that society could be planned. Modernity meant not just motion, but mobilisation."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-treaty-of-the-machine-century)

Characteristics

Chor Pharn:

"Project politics rested on four interlocking systems.

First, mass bureaucracies turned administration into an industrial process. In Washington, London, Moscow, and Tokyo, civil services expanded ten- or twenty-fold. Statistics offices, planning commissions, and ministries of labour made the population legible through forms, censuses, and registries.

Second, mass economies harnessed that visibility. Keynesian demand management, five-year plans, and indicative planning all treated growth as a solvable engineering problem. Full employment was the moral core of legitimacy.

Third, mass politics translated social complexity into collective will. Parties, unions, and churches aggregated millions of citizens into manageable constituencies. Voting and striking were complementary rituals of belonging.

Fourth, mass culture supplied the emotional glue. The newspaper, the broadcast, the anthem, the welfare card—each reminded individuals that they were participants in a common project.

Together these layers produced an unusual equilibrium: a world where individual meaning flowed upward into collective purpose and collective purpose returned as security. For roughly a generation it worked. In the West the arrangement delivered prosperity and the middle class; in socialist and post-colonial worlds it promised dignity after humiliation. “Development,” “reconstruction,” and “modernisation” were all synonyms for one idea: that people, properly organised, could master history."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-treaty-of-the-machine-century)

Status

Chor Pharn, on the regional afterlives:

"Different regions metabolised the collapse in different ways. In quick summary:

East Asia rebuilt the project logic inside developmental states. Japan, Korea, and later China fused bureaucracy with industrial strategy, turning planning into export discipline. The mass remained useful because it was well organised.

Europe preserved the shell but lost the animating myth. The welfare state survived, yet purpose shrank to procedure. Integration replaced ideology; Brussels became the high temple of process.

The United States transformed project energy into personal gospel. The moral language of progress was privatised: the entrepreneur, the self-starter, the disrupter. Heroism became a small business.

The Global South, entering the world economy late, inherited the expectations of mass modernity without the institutions to sustain it. Youth bulges met automation; mass education met jobless growth. The riots of today’s Gen Z from Jakarta to Lagos are the echo of promises that can no longer be kept."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-treaty-of-the-machine-century)

Discussion

Contextual Quote:

"The arrival of code

By the early 2000s a new infrastructure began to replace the human one. Supply-chain software, digital payments, and machine learning condensed administration into code. Tasks once performed by clerks, accountants, and mid-level managers migrated to algorithms. The result was machine surplus—the capacity of automated systems to coordinate production and distribution with fewer humans in the loop.

The political implications were enormous. The project state needed people; machine civilisation does not. It needs compute, energy, data, and bandwidth. The feedback loop replaces the assembly line as the primary unit of governance. Where the bureaucrat once counted citizens, the network now counts signals."

- Chor Pharn [1]

Why it unravelled

Chor Pharn:

"By the 1970s the machinery began to seize. Oil shocks, inflation, and global capital flows exposed how fragile the alignment between state, market, and citizen had become. The project society depended on permanent growth and obedient inflation. When energy prices quadrupled and bondholders demanded austerity, governments lost both instruments. Fiscal discipline replaced ambition; planning ministries were quietly dismantled.

Culturally the shift was just as sharp. Television replaced the public square; advertising replaced propaganda. The heroic citizen of the New Deal or the Five-Year Plan became the consumer of choice and lifestyle. Bureaucrats became managers, managers became consultants, and the “public servant” dissolved into a human resource. The world kept its infrastructure of coordination but lost its sense of direction.

Alex Hochuli would later call the social result Brazilisation: islands of efficiency floating above oceans of precarity. Middle-class security gave way to gig work and informal economies, not only in São Paulo but in Detroit and Manchester. The masses who once powered history now serviced it."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-treaty-of-the-machine-century)