Pushpins and Ribbons
Yesterday, I began pushing thumbtacks into my mental bulletin board and tying colorful bits of string between them. That’s right, I Beautiful Minded it and I’m going to get even more Beautiful Mind-y today. Because it seems to me that a lot of economists, socialists, theologians, and former Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles such as myself all sense that we’re in the midst of a shift. From what seems clear. To what, less so.
By the way, I make absolutely ZERO claims of special insight. I have none. I’m simply ruminating. I am a cow with cud. But I suspect we’re all trying to wrap out heads around something; it seems clear that we’re in the midst of a phenomena happening all at once, from many directions, and it all feels related. Break out your pushpins and ribbons, folks, because shit’s getting weird.
Today, I’m going to just lay out a little history, at least the way I understand it. Again, I reiterate that I am, at best, a moron. I may have some things wrong here, but I think the general thrust is correct. I’m sure many of you will let me know all the ways in which I am wrong. However…
At the heart of the matter are two contradictory claims, both of which might be true: the world has never been better and the world has never been worse. On the plus side, fewer people are living in poverty and abject misery than at any other time in human history. People are, generally, experiencing longer lives, with more material comforts. One’s chance of expiring from some random disease has decreased. One’s chance of dying in childbirth has plummeted (except in the US, ‘natch, where maternity deaths are on the rise). Despite recent clashes in various places we hear about on the news, we live in a time of relative peace. All good.
On the other end, we’ve got newly-minted existential threats like nuclear proliferation and climate change. Loneliness and despair are on the rise. People are simultaneously more and less connected than they’ve ever been, resulting in a persistent sense that we’re losing “community,” which exacerbates the problems of loneliness and despair. Little seems to be holding us together either as neighbors or nations. We’re also seeing a rise in authoritarianism which is, maddeningly, being cheered on from those who stand to gain the least from a new man in the high castle. We’re overworked, overstimulated, and miserable.
What connects these two claims is the technological revolution. How far back one wants to take this “revolution” is obviously debatable. Do we take it all the way back to the invention of various Industrial Revolution contraptions, my favorite of which is called “the spinning jenny,” invented in 1764 by James Hargreaves, which allowed multiple strands of thread to be spun into yarn at once, transforming the textile industry.
One could also move the timeline up to the invention of the transistor in 1947, which kicked off the Computer Age. For the first time in human history, people began deferring to the intelligence of a creature greater than ourselves. It’s a trend that has only accelerated since. “Computer,” it is to be recalled, was originally a job title. Computers computed, most famously in the early Jet Propulsion Laboratory years figuring out missile trajectories and thrust ratios, by hand. By the early NASA years, however, the computer as occupation slowly ceded to the computer as object, the result of which was the popular movie Hidden Figures, and an Academy nomination for Octavia Spencer.
The next significant development, I would argue, arrived in 1985, with the creation of America Online, the first widely adopted system for connecting people around the world via personal computer. With this new technology, the world simultaneously shrunk to the size of a desk and expanded to the size of the universe. Within a couple decades, humans had uploaded our collective consciousness to server farms across the globe. In a very real sense, we became transhumans.
In gaining the world, though, what did we lose?
What connects all of these events and the consequent upheavals, dislocations, and perplexities is technology. One could have lived for centuries in, say, China, bound by the same customs and mores of previous generations. One might have inhabited the same village one’s entire life, rarely traveling more than a few miles in any direction. Generation after generation would have performed the same work, in the same manner, alongside generations of neighbors. No more.
A handful of decades after that first transistor found its way into its first “speech amplifier,” the human project has undergone a radical shift. A teenager in Ghana now listens to the same pop song as one in Germany. Oddly, this hasn’t resulted in a much-speculated-upon global monoculture; rather, it seems to have, in some sense, had the opposite effect. Although we know more about everything than ever, we are less certain than we’ve ever been about anything. That villager in China probably couldn’t have told you the name of Ross’s monkey on Friends, but there’s no doubt they knew when snow was coming, even without the aid of an app.
What happens to the human brain when its capacity for absorbing new information becomes saturated? Have we now filled our minds with so much clutter that we’ve chosen to offload those parts of ourselves that no longer seem necessary? If so, what are those parts? Vaguely worrying, no?
Why does our growing interconnectivity leave so many of us feeling more isolated than ever? Again, we can look to the Industrial Revolution as the harbinger of this phenomena. Once industries became mechanized, the cost of production plummeted, making once dear goods more affordable to the masses. The downside was that artisans and craftspeople were suddenly priced out of the market. At the same time, all those factories needed workers to operate all those lathes and spinning things. In the United States (as well as in much of the rest of the world) what had been a primarily rural and agrarian nation became an urban and mechanized one as people left their villages for the promise of the big city.
Old social contracts broke and reformed, but that deep sense of displacement, I suspect, has never quite left our species. Since abandoning the hunter-gather lifestyle in favor of an agriculturally-based one a thousand centuries or so ago, humans have generally lived in small communities and closely-tied family groupings. The concept of “land” meant something different than having enough space to put in a pool.
The human species reorganized itself into a more urban creature, which put it into contact with new kinds of people with new kinds of ideas. Those people might have come from a village ten miles from yours or ten thousand miles from yours, all of them brought to the same place by the same promise – technology.
Those who controlled the technology – steam engines, presses, electrical illumination – began to exert the sort of power and influence formerly only available to nobility and heads of state. In the US, capitalism quickly overtook mercantilism as the dominant economic model. What comes with capitalism? Capital. Over time, that capital accumulates in fewer and fewer hands until those without decide to take what they feel is theirs. Revolutions abound.
Are we in a pre-revolutionary time now? I have no idea, but I can certainly understand why a few young dudes might take it upon themselves to gather in Boston tavern and complain about the cost of tea.
Or, to use a more recent example, eggs.
It’s not the economy, stupid. Or, rather, it is the economy but not the economy you think. Because we no longer live in a free and fair marketplace of ideas, if we ever did. Increasingly, the state of the world is defined, not by that which improves, but that which addicts. The slaves we created to compute our sums have figured out how to compute us.
I imagine I’ll be exploring this idea more deeply in further pieces. Let me know if you’re enjoying it so that I don’t descend into a shadowy cave you find yourselves unwilling to plumb by my side. And yes, the cave allusion is a reference to Plato. I don’t know if we’ll make any headway, but at the very least, we will wind up with a crazy-ass bulletin board.
I love this train of thought. Keep going. You're connecting the dots in a very easy to understand manner.
I'm enjoying this new occasional series on slow fading of humanity.