| Summary: | This article addresses the contrast between collective and individualistic responses to crises. While liberal individualism was instrumental in an environment of capitalist competition and free trade between states, it is dysfunctional in a world where global threats require cooperation and mutual consideration. To address this problem, the article investigates the forces that shape individualist subjectivity. These began in ideas, developed into ideologies through law and economics, and then shaped the infrastructure of everyday life: finance, debt, transport, urban form, and communications media. The key technological revolutions of the past one hundred years or so have shaped detached individualism. The mass-produced automobile, and the associated suburban development that it facilitated, contributed to physical dispersion of people and groups, splitting them off from each other. Digital communications have further split people from real, physical groups, instead aggregating them into virtual communities of big data. This has fragmented social contacts and attachments, by separating people off from the known communities within which decisions can be made and actions framed. These separations cumulatively lead to splits within the person, of cognition from intention, of deeds from consequences. Subjectivity is splintered. The conclusion turns to existing and possible future counter-tendencies that enhance more collaborative forms of being together. These include the critique of liberal ideology; building an ethics and politics of conviviality; resisting privatisation and debt, while promoting the common and cooperative; reasserting access and equity in housing and urban space; and re-embodying subjectivity.
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