Corporate Anonymity
The Economist‘s blog on American politics is called ‘Democracy in America’, its Asian blog ‘Banyan’ and its European blog ‘Charlemagne’ – names with such earnest symbolic authority that you might think for a second that the Economist had launched a fleet of new aircraft carriers. All Economist blogs are unsigned, which is in keeping with a publication that prides itself on corporate anonymity, but many entries are written in the first person. For example, four recent posts include the following sentences:
For the first time so far in my career, I briefly fell for a hoax.
Whoever he or she is, whatever their colleague may have posted and whether they fell (so unfortunately) for a hoax; regardless of what they make of Mongolia or of European ‘values’ – why is it such a struggle to say who they are? What do ‘our values’ and your ‘real problems’ mean if we don’t know who you are?
It would seem that the publication has grown so powerful that it has acquired sentience.
Is the author suggesting that Fox expresses European values or am I just hearing voices?
Obviously the Economist is Hegel’s self-realizing subject. He predicted it almost exactly, except he called it the “Absolute Economist” or “World Economist”. This is what he meant when he referred to Napoleon as “The Economist on horseback”.
It’s pretty well known that Charlemagne is David Rennie. He was introduced as such on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4