What's Really Going On?

Notes On Post-Industrial Space

• We are trying to figure out how to live in post-industrial space

• The basic attribute of our world is to have lots and lots of people with nothing very obvious for them to do¹

• The first wave of modernity was industrialization — consolidated modes of production, manufacturing at a vast scale, and individuals subordinated to a vision of progress.

• Many states were only too willing to sacrifice excess population to the vision of progress, but, since then, a different consensus has taken hold — the food supply, through forces that we never think about (e.g. the Green Revolution), can in theory comfortably support the world’s population; industrial processes can be somewhat decentralized while meeting a population’s needs; and an excess population (superstructure) can exist without contributing all that directly to industrial processes.

  

  Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, who saved, oh, maybe a billion lives

• What we are currently doing — i.e. how we ‘work’ in post-industrial space — is largely as a kind of metaphor, or shadow dance of, industrialization. We meet in offices, which are meant to be analogies to factories; we organize in tightly-hierarchical units; we ‘ship’ product. Even if, as often as not, that product is somewhat abstract, or digital, or creative, its legitimacy tends to come from its participation in an industrial process (its ‘production value).²

• Our civic life essentially follows the same pattern but with an ever-more disproportionate imbalance between industrial ‘producers’ and ‘consumers.’ The industrial production base gets ever smaller and more remote — by one way of looking at it, the entirety of computer production is that one computer chip factory in Taiwan; while Nvidia represents the entire base of AI manufacturing; and the entire US industrial manufacturing base has been outsourced to East Asia (as we suddenly realized during the pandemic when the supply chains ‘snarled’ and nobody could get anything). Almost everyone else is cast as a consumer. The majority of their waking life is taken up by scrolling on their smart phones. Their cultural engagement is taken up mostly by thinking about figures that are broadcast out to them — depending on your ‘taste,’ you will find yourselves talking about politicians, athletes, Hollywood actors, etc, none of whom you are likely ever to meet. Identity is largely determined through consumption — the first questions when giving your identity to a site, for instance, are about what you like to consume — and, even for ‘producers,’ the image of the successful life is about time spent in luxurious consumption, e.g. the satisfying Crown Royal at the end of the long day.

• People work, of course, but the work ever-increasingly is as a kind of auxiliary services in the long tail of industrialized products — prettifying the design, checking for legal risks, increasing the marketing reach, etc, etc. Michael Lind notes that we are in an age of giantism: the average American works for a company with 500 employees or more. What that means is that almost no one works with the core product. Almost everyone is involved with the accordion-like arms of the company, which can always contract in any kind of economic downturn or corporate merger.

• One response to all of this is to say to hell with it and try to go back to the land — this is the animating impulse for so much of the environmental movement. The idea is to return to a pre-industrial state, with connection to and ownership over the food supply, with a conscious deindustrialization of one’s life, with an identity that is based in connection to earth as opposed to industrial processes. I have nothing against this movement — like everybody else, I find it admirable if quixotic. The world simply has moved too dramatically in a different direction. It turns out to be very difficult to get really close to the earth or the food supply without being, like, a farmer, and then it’s very difficult to not get hooked up to an industrialized agricultural system. My inclination is that it’s more fruitful to find meaningful identity in a post-industrialized, as opposed to pre-industrialized, space.

  

  “What’s going on?”

• In a prophetic essay from 1990, Gilles Deleuze contrasts the ‘disciplinary’ man, the man of industrialized society, with a new man, man in ‘undulatory orbit,’ who is associated with the post-industrial landscape. Industrial man has his life circumscribed by a series of institutions — the school, the factory, the barracks, the office. He is “forever starting again,” given some sort of badge when he reaches the end of one molehill and then sent on to the next one. If his totem animal is the mole, the totem animal for the man of the post-industrialized society is the serpent. “He is never finished with anything.” Think of the Amazon workers, as depicted in a famous exposé, who are never more than two minutes away from their devices, who are expected to be constantly working even late at night or when on ostensibly vacation. If time for the man of the molehill was constantly demarcated — punching in and punching out, the alarm clock, the lunch break, the 2 o’clock slump, the happy hour — active time for undulatory man is basically determined by access to electricity. Either you are on the grid or off, and your worth is determined not so much by your physical membership in the group (“90% of success is showing up”) but by the strength of the signal you are emitting — are you ‘idle,’ in ‘screensaver mode,’ or are you ‘blazing,’ ‘lit,’ ‘red-hot,’ ‘on fire,’ ‘crushing it’?

• Our serpentine existence may have much lacking in it — it seems to have given Deleuze the creeps — but, personally, I like being in undulatory orbit. The point has to do with something else Deleuze discusses — the notion of what generates worth. In the industrialized society, worth comes from what number you have — where are you in the hierarchical ‘pecking order,’ what is your social security number, your credit score, badge number. In post-industrialized society, it tends to come from a password — do you have access to the network or don’t you. That password can be a personal ‘brand’ or, in the identifying systems of modern computing, it can be a fingerprint or retinal scan. But the point is that the password is a vibration that is specific to you — and it becomes possible, not easy but possible, to create identity not based on one’s rank within a structure but through the pulsation of energy distinctive to you, through a kind of personal integrity.

• The kids have it right when they say that when they grow up they want to be influencers. The point is that they’re participating in the two-way traffic of the internet. They are not just consumers in the role assigned to them in the industrial model. They are producers of content. What they produce is mostly junk, but they’re young and the platforms they’re on incentivize junk. They won’t produce junk forever. As

  Ted Gioia
  writes, “The 27 million people in the US working as creators on web platforms….are genuine creators, not just influencers. And they are starting to flex their muscles.”

• One way to think about the shape of a society is as a circle. The initial impulse of modernity is to consolidate and streamline that circle. A modern nation state is, for instance, the perfect evocation of that circle — it has clear borders (defined by guard posts and the reach of the tax collector), it has a delineated center (the capital city, the Capitol building in the capital city), and a homogenized public sphere in which all can be participating at the same time in their duties as citizens. But that idea of the circle appears in culture as well. When 90 million Americans watch Dallas or 120 million watch the Super Bowl, we can picture all those millions as the circumference of a circle and the shooting of J.R. or the Big Game as the hearth center. But that dynamic is unsustainable — and all the more unsustainable as population grows and produces a vast imbalance between the center and circumference.

  

  Who did shoot J.R.?

• The tendency — and this is happening in the realm of culture if not especially of states — is for the circle to dissolve and be replaced by archipelagoes: smaller, looser entities, in which individuals form alliances with each other on the outskirts of the circle and engage in ever-exchanging roles, sometimes as producer, sometimes as audience. Those dynamics — which are of course emerging all over social media — are not exactly capitalistic and are in an uneasy relationship to capital (for the most part, those relationships exists within an economy of tokens as opposed to cash). The archipelago culture is in an immature state. Most of its participants have to dip into capital — into the industrialized circle — in order to make their living. The point for now is that the dynamics of the archipelago are rapidly proving irresistible. The industrialized system is impossibly unsustaining. The archipelago is the new shape. It needs its myths and philosophies at least as much as it needs a viable economic system.

1. As Joseph Brodsky put it to a college audience expecting to hear about poetry, “Demography will play a far greater role in your life than any discipline you’ve mastered here.”

2. I remember how taken aback I was, when I was working on a political campaign, and an older organizer referred to campaigns as an ‘industry’ — and then was taken aback again when I realized that everybody else assumed the same thing.