tymshft

Two thinkers that I want to investigate further

There are those who look at our business and technological climate and try to understand what will happen – and, more important, what should happen – in the future. Obviously I play at this a little bit, but there are certainly people who do a much better job at this than I do. Or at least they get paid more to do so.

Maria Bustillos summarizes the views of two of these thinkers, Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier.

Morozov:

Morozov is a noted critic and scholar whose influential 2011 book, The Net Delusion, took issue with the idea of the Internet as a tool for encouraging the spread of democracy. He made the useful point that the political dimensions of our new technologies can be as dangerous and as deceptive as they are liberating. Authoritarian regimes, for example, can use online tools to quash dissent quite as easily as dissidents can take to Twitter to organize and to disseminate their views….

To Save Everything, Click Here is a polemic against what Morozov calls “solutionism” and “Internet-centrism.” “Solutionism” is the tendency to assume that technology can solve any problem efficiently and free of unintended consequences (“an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental, and narrow-minded solutions”); “Internet-centrism” is the belief that “the Internet” will fix everything….

Lanier:

Lanier’s new book, Who Owns the Future? is rich in ideas, imagination and humanity. Despite quite a lot of loopy bits, this self-described “book of hypotheticals, speculation, advocacy” succeeds in proposing the beginnings of a possible—even practical—way out of the soup of wealth inequality and economic decline in which we have unhappily landed ourselves in the information age.

Our data has monetary value, Lanier argues; we should all be compensated for it. We’ve been tempted into contributing data and content for free, thereby enabling the development of massive online monopolies….

Bustillos’ article is not solely dedicated to summarizing the thoughts of these two authors; she also pokes holes in their thoughts; in the case of Morozov, she speaks with a few people who simultaneously agree with Morozov and don’t agree with Morozov. Sadly, Bustillos does not devote a great deal of time to Alexandre Koyré.

But the Bustillos article gave me a starting point to begin to read about both of the people she cited. Of course, it’s best to go to the original sources: Morozov is on Twitter, and Lanier used to write for the Huffington Post. (Presumably he decided that they weren’t paying him enough.)

The American Enterprise Institute on the future of the middle class

A discussion on Google+ started with a link to a post on Simulacrum. The post began with a brief discussion of an “unconditional basic income,” in which all citizens/residents would receive some type of income, regardless of what they did or didn’t do.

As any right-thinking person knows, this is a Communistic idea that threatens the very principles upon which the United States was founded.

The author, Lui, believes that the implementation of an unconditional basic income is inevitable due to three reasons, the first of which is the freefall of the middle classes.

As Jaron Lanier points out, Kodak once provided 140,000 middle class jobs, and in the smouldering ruins of that company’s bankruptcy we have Instagram, with 13 employees. It’s an extreme example….

Perhaps an extreme example, but you see these types of dislocations everywhere, not only due to technological advances, but also due to offshore production.

And all the beads we made by hand
Are nowadays made in Japan

(Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Indian Reservation”)

And these days, even Japan is too expensive for manufacturing. And China’s beginning to get too expensive for manufacturing.

However, I wondered if the middle classes truly are in freefall. Yes, there’s a lot of economic dislocation today. In the past, when entire industries have disappeared, brand new industries have sprung up to employ the dislocated workers, and these new industries have been able to support middle class wages. Won’t the same thing happen now? Not necessarily, according to Arnold Kling of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that is demonstrably NOT a Communistic organization.

The economy today differs from that of a generation ago. Mortgage and consumer loan underwriters have been replaced by credit scoring. Record stores have been replaced by music downloads. Book stores are closing, while sales of books on electronic readers have increased. Data entry has been moved off shore. Routine customer support also has been outsourced overseas.

The result is what David Autor calls the polarization of the American job market.

What type of polarization? Well, in decidedly non-AEI terms, there is emerging a 99% and a 1%, with nothing in between.

Perhaps the middle-class affluence that emerged during the latter part of the industrial age is not going to be a feature of the information age. Instead, we could be headed into an era of highly unequal economic classes. People at the bottom will have access to food, healthcare, and electronic entertainment, but the rich will live in an exclusive world of exotic homes and extravagant personal services. The most popular bands in the world will play house concerts for the rich, while everyone else can afford music downloads but no live music.

Well, that’s enough for now. More later.