Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the essay of the week. I wrote this a few years ago, but I think it holds up. It’s an obvious enough point — that much of what is at the ‘cutting-edge’ of innovation in our era is actually long-standing Third World practices — but, strangely, I can’t remember having ever exactly seen this point made. At
, meditates on several works of classical literature.Best,
Sam
THIRD WORLDIZATION
What are the great changes in America in the last ten or fifteen years — the most innovative, disruptive companies, the great leaps forward? Offhand, let’s say Uber, Airbnb, Etsy, the gig economy, the resale market. Randomly browsing the Internet for writing about Uber, etc, I came across a book called The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing The World. That captures the breathless tone of it — everything is new, different, transformative. Except that there are other names for all of these ideas: pensione, marshrutka, flea market; and a set of very old sayings, half-proverbs, half-business maxims, that might as well be mission statements: “every car is a taxi,” “mi casa es tu casas,” “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Travel around the world — especially the poorest countries — and there are all kinds of activities, rideshares, dabbawalas, second-hand markets, pensiones that look uncannily like everything that’s supposed to be high-tech, cutting-edge, coming out of Silicon Valley.
The digital platforms are new — there’s a set of middlemen, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Seamless, Etsy, who collect their commission; and, of course, everything is contingent on Apple hardware. The photos, the reviews, the frictionless payment methods, are a very different experience from what travelers used to do — walk outside a train station in a foreign city and look for the most trustworthy face offering a ride, a place to stay. There’s a level of safety, accountability, efficiency in conducting transactions over apps than there was when people had to connect IRL, but there’s not much point in pretending that the new gig economy is some transformational change — it’s an efficient way of going back to how we used to do it, how the ‘non-developed’ world does it. Dig a little deeper in the stories of the new start-ups and it turns out that the ideas for many of them came from travel outside the U.S. — CouchSurfing, which was for a while a serious rival to Airbnb, originated from the founder’s ‘magical interactions’ with hospitable people on his trip around the world, particularly in Egypt; Zimride, which became Lyft, was named after the carpool system that impressed the founder on a trip to Zimbabwe. In other words, these companies aren’t Silicon Valley innovations taking over the planet, these are Third World ideas spreading to developed countries.
What’s noteworthy about the rise of Uber, Airbnb, et al, is how much more seamlessly they caught on in the rest of the world than in Europe and America. New York City, of all places, was for a long time the only major city to restrict Airbnb — eventually, Los Angeles and its home turf, San Francisco, started to legislate against it as well. Uber’s toughest markets turned out to be Canada, Germany, Denmark, and, more recently, California. At its heart, resistance came from the left, progressives, unionists, Social Democrats, people who believed in a cohesive, well-run state that took care of its workers. The pushback against Airbnb in New York came from the hotel lobby and hotel workers’ unions; cab drivers led the fight against rideshare in California. The antagonist, in other words, was the progressive state as it had developed around 1910 — a particular vision of an accountable, centralized, forward-moving social unit. That whole world seems so far away now that it’s hard to remember how trenchant it was until very recently. I remember traveling in Europe as a teenager and being really surprised by the existence of pensiones. “That whole system of low-budget travel just doesn’t exist in America,” my dad said. At which point, I of course should have dropped out of high school and learned to code, but at the time it just seemed exotic, a cute communal way of doing things in a friendlier country; it seemed impossible that First World travel, unless it was a purposefully quaint institution like a Bed & Breakfast, wouldn’t involve front desks, sales taxes, staff, hidden fees, room service tips, etc, etc. And the same when I was in college and traveling around on my own — it really was efficient to just stand in the street, have a car pull over in seconds and start haggling the price, but this was at the same time that, in my New York, the gypsy cabs were being hunted down and put out of business as a relic of an earlier era.
There was probably a similar kind of shock when personal computers started to come out. Progress meant larger mainframes, bigger projects with government or corporate-funding — it meant ICBMs or the moon. The personal computer was democratic, down-and-out, but in the teleology of technological thinking, it was interpreted as progress, the next step. And that’s the narrative about the gig economy — no one exactly saw it coming, but the smart guys in Silicon Valley are driving everything towards a future that we can barely imagine. And, meanwhile, I see a different reality all around me. In America, the new bike lanes are starting to feel like certain Asian cities — car traffic is in lanes, with stoplights and cops and tightly-enforced rules, but the bike lane feels like driving through Delhi, bicycles racing through red lights, salmoning in the opposite direction, motorized bikes following rules of their own communication carried out through horns as in the concert of Indian roads. Everybody in my circle is shying away from any food made by corporations, anything imported, anything that uses pesticides — anything that stems from the centralizing agricultural revolution in the early part of the 20th century — and has moved instead to the great new frontier of buying local, visiting a farmer’s market, connecting one-on-one with a farmer. It’s not a surprise that so much of the innovation of the new economy comes from immigrants — and immigration is not, as in the model accepted in the early part of the 20th century, a kind of accelerated, dynamic assimilation. Immigration is about bringing ideas from other parts of the world, ideas that are in many cases deeply developed in the culture, but when transported to the First World are suddenly ‘disruptive.’
This is the future, and it’s no shock that the Baby Boomers are so annoyed about it and were for a while trying to ban Airbnb and Uber, no matter how futile the effort. They wanted something unified, cohesive, but also something that the First World was initiating. Peter Thiel’s quote, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” is deeply resonant. That was the generation of the Great Society and the Moon landing. Their fantasies — and I think it’s not fully appreciated how insane the Silicon Valley elders’ fantasies are — look like something out of a ‘60s comic book, Ray Kurzweil’s longed-for Singularity, Jeff Bezos’ space pods, Elon Musk’s rockets, all the driverless cars that no one actually wants. And, meanwhile, Bezos presides over the largest souk in the world and Thiel and Musk developed a form of cash payment that looks a lot like the kind of under-the-table transaction that people make all over the world to avoid tax inspectors. Crypto, which is the real frontier, reminds me of the grey market currencies that everybody uses in a place like Cuba or Uzbekistan to avoid dealing with the government exchanges. I was born in 1985. The trajectory my parents envisioned was all about institutions. Instead, I’ve been an Airbnb host, I’ve worked freelance, never more than a year in any one job, I’ve gotten very into Buddhism, the profoundest experiences of my life have come from medicinal plants used by indigenous people for millennia, I’ve felt happiest and most comfortable in places like Gabon and India. I like the gig economy, just as I like bike lanes and organic food and buying used and taking cars by ride app. But I’ve been around the world enough to know that the gig economy fundamentally isn’t Silicon Valley’s latest, greatest idea, these are living techniques that have been developed in the Third World for a long time, this is colonization in reverse.
I couldn’t disagree more. Uber and Airbnb disrupted institutional protections that were created out of needs that over time we forgot. Uber drivers make significantly less money than taxi drivers. Airbnbs aren’t subject to the same standards that hotels must uphold in terms of safety.
These disruptions are just workarounds for regulations that were created for real reasons. The gig economy makes earning a living more precarious.
I don't know that Third Worldization is anything new. "Third World" literature throughout the 20th century by Westerners is quite rich, from Rudyard Kipling and Pearl S. Buck to J.G. Ballard and all the "developing country" writers the publishing industry is trying to popularize now. Those phenomena were referred to by different names, certainly, but it was basically the same thing: exotic inspiration for use in the "First World." But there is a definite increase, and I think you're right about the discomfort of the Boomers. (Though I think in the Bay Area, there is less of a disdain towards imports: we love our San Francisco Chinatown. Or we did when I was growing up.) And I think you're right about under-the-table innovations making a bigger difference.
The questions that come to my mind are: 1) is this increase symptomatic of a bankruptcy of inspiration and ideas in the West?; and 2) even if it might look like reverse colonialism (which is happening in other parts of the West) could it also be symptomatic of a kind of transglobal brain drain? After all, Zimride was not founded by Zimbabweans but inspired by them. (I'll admit I'm asking them slightly rhetorically, since I would say yes and yes: but they are big issues as well, with a lot of angles to them)
By the way, if you haven't already and ever felt like it, I'd be interested in reading about Gabon. I hear it's a beautiful country, safe by African standards and has beautiful beaches. Capital: Libreville, language: French. But don't know much else besides that.