End of an Era

I want to put a thesis to you, Toby, about what's been going on

I went for a jog and here were some of the stray thoughts I had:

That it’s been a long time since I’ve seen an app, or a technological product, that I’ve been impressed by. That ‘enshittification’ is now a named idea — and everybody has noticed how Facebook, Google, even dating apps, have become progressively less interested in the user’s experience and increasingly just stuffed with ads and junk. That there’s a general sense of disillusionment and torpor that radiates through the society even if, by superficial economic metrics, there’s no particular reason for it.

I found myself swiftly getting out of my depth and concocting a far-ranging theory for what’s happening in the society at the moment. The idea, basically, is that we’re getting to the end of an era — call it the era of ‘Software’ — and find ourselves facing a precipice without any clear notion for how we might get to the other side.

In this view, the structure of history would be that the key turn was in the 1810s or 1820s with the Industrial Revolution, which we might call in retrospect the era of ‘Hardware.’ This is of course a completely uncontroversial point. The premise of that era was to extract raw materials — as often as not from remote colonies — and then to have relatively skilled, tightly organized factory workers make stuff out of them.

That era of history continued almost perfectly unbroken, following an apparently inexorable logic of progress, until there was a sudden severing in, give or take, the 1970s and a new era began, which was the era of Software.

In retrospect, several different things happened, almost all at once in the ‘70s, although their impacts wouldn’t be clear for a while afterwards. First was the movement of capital offshore and the exportation of the Industrial Revolution. The ‘70s was, optimistically, the ‘global decade,’ but what that mostly meant was capital circumventing the unions. Shortly thereafter the industrial heartland of the United States became not Detroit or Chicago but Southeast Asia. And with that the basic core identity of Western society decisively shifted. For the previous century, the core social unit was understood to be the labor collective — identity was above all in a sense of solidarity with fellow workers and the social religion of that period of time came to be Socialism (or its more sedate variant Social Democracy). Once the union, or collective, was circumvented as a social entity, the basic social unit was understood to be the individual. This was at the time a widely remarked-upon phenomenon and was described through a number of names — Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade,” Christopher Lasch’s “Culture of Narcissism,” Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone.” In almost perfect parallel to this phenomenon was a decisive technological shift — the emergence of personal computing.

It’s stunning in retrospect that personal computing took so long to develop — a quarter-of-a-century after the advent of the computer — and the explanation seems to be, simply, that nobody thought of it. The corporate mindset was entirely that sophisticated tools belonged in some equivalent of a factory, and the computer, maybe the greatest achievement of the Industrial Revolution, was understood to be a part of the same dynamic. Steve Jobs’ insight (which, tellingly, seems to have come in part from an LSD experience) was that computers could be individualized — and that, in the course of time, there would be an entire class of people that would define themselves through their computers.

Steve Jobs with Apple II, 1977

Personal computing, in a critical sense, managed the bridge from industrialization to the peculiar post-modern era that came after it. Jobs flooded into software. The infrastructure of modern Western cities had been built — there was really no more innovation on that front — and prosperity came from white-collar people in offices making nebulous digital stuff. This was, in time, the laptop class, or the users of iPhones. The ethic was to be all about individuality with work going into the creation of the great digital ‘cloud.’ I’ve been very moved ever since I saw it by a video of a man sentenced to life in prison in the 1970s and then paroled in the 2010s and filmed soon after his return to New York City. The city itself wasn’t really that different but he was struck of course by all the earpieces that everybody had. His assumption, naturally enough, was that everybody had become some sort of secret agent, but he could be forgiven for having missed the paradigm shift: in the intervening period, the state — or the ethic of solidarity — had largely withered away and everybody had become an individual agent using a digital commons to, in different ways, express themselves. Or, as the dyspeptic union leader Frank Sobotka puts it in Season 2 of The Wire, “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”

Otis Johnson. Perplexed.

The question, ultimately, was whether that merry-go-round of pocket picking was really sustainable, and the answer seems to be….not really. We’ve been going through a bit of buyer’s remorse recently for having sent all those factories and jobs to the Third World but there’s no going back. As Bruce Springsteen puts it, singing about the decline of Youngstown, “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do.” Prosperity was there in the domain of software but it turned out to be less labor-intensive than was really needed to sustain a full society. GM at its height employed 600,000 people. Instagram, a similarly massive company in terms of wealth, employs 450. The persistent Silicon Valley fantasy of turning truck drivers into software engineers betrays the massive sense of guilt that the real-world jobs went away without enough digital work to replace it. And, meanwhile, the tech companies seemed to run out of ideas all at around the same time. The world’s libraries had already been digitized — all that was left was to squeeze consumers ever more to get access to them. The search engines had already been invented — what was left to do was to populate them with ads and manipulate the searches. Everybody all had an Apple laptop and an iPhone and maybe an iPad as well — the only real profit was in constantly changing the outlets so that everybody had to keep buying new cords.

If we all at this moment were to do a collective vipassana the epiphany that might come out of it is to give up on the gospel of growth — to be, more or less, stewards of what we already have. But that of course is not going to happen — growth was too baked in to the inexorable progress of the Industrial Revolution and then became more or less the religion of the Software Era, as socialism had been the religion of the era preceding it. The tech companies certainly are fully committed to the idea of growth — although without much sense of the direction it was going to come from.

The most obvious — and darkest — timeline for where we’re going is about AI replacing essentially all of the functions of white-collar work. This has been what sci-fi writers have been writing about for a long time, and it is now a bit close for comfort. AI tools are already being used in battlefields in Ukraine and Gaza — and it’s like a fact of nature that what is first used in war will make its way into civilian economies. Or as Michel Houellebecq puts it, the society as a whole has more or less given up on meiosis — what we are interested in now is mitosis as a means of generating intelligence and replacing ourselves. (This is also the thesis of Benjamin Labatut’s The MANIAC.)

But I don’t quite think we’ll get there — and in large part because, as is already becoming clear, AI conflicts with our core ideology of individuality. AI strikes us as being a replacement of our own minds and expressiveness, and whatever social benefits AI may bring with it seem to us of comparatively less value. Resistance seems to be hardening towards AI in ways that I didn’t expect a couple of years ago and I would attribute it to that basic clash of values. All the other machinations of the tech companies — data harvesting, invasion of privacy, hoovering-up of attention — got past us because we were, first, so smitten with the technology and then, second, because, however ominous the practices, they didn’t seem to intrude into a core identity. But AI does. Of course if the technology is so unbelievably cool, it may get past our scruples once again, but somehow I don’t quite think so.

The outlet for growth that seems more congenial to our values is in the domain of Oculus, Second Life, the Metaverse, etc — the idea being that there is a whole realm of digital fantasia in which people can express a version of themselves. That idea is not particularly an insult to core individuality, in the way that generative AI is, but it does reorient our sense of selves in a slightly different direction — towards multiplicity, towards having several avatars going at once. The technology isn’t quite there for that to happen — I think most of us are a bit put-off by Oculus and the Metaverse is still a ghost town — but once somebody figures out a way to really make money in that space, I expect it will open up a new commons in which people participate not as digital replicas of their real-world selves but as multiple distinct personalities. We’ll see what happens in terms of the development of technology, but if I try to think in macro-terms this is where I get to. It’s fairly clear that the Era of Software is coming to an end now — just as the Industrial Revolution came to an abrupt end in the West some time around the 1970s. Growth will happen in some direction, and the way to understand the likeliest direction is to think through what our core identity, and core values, are — and what the current gospel of individuality is likeliest to evolve into.