Despite the headline (“Trump Damaged Democracy, Silicon Valley Will Finish It Off”), which probably wasn’t chosen by Joel Kotkin, the author of the intriguing and alarming piece it introduces, Kotkin has very little to say in it about Trump, but he has a lot to say about our future. Cheery reading, it’s not.
Two main themes emerge. The first concerns the impact of the Silicon Valley giants on, in the broader sense of the word (this is not a First Amendment issue), free speech. That this is rapidly becoming a topic is the result of a certain carelessness on their part, a carelessness that might be the product of too little exposure to differing views, but, like it or not, it has become a topic:
Both Facebook and Google now offer news “curated” by algorithms. Bans are increasingly used by Facebook and Twitter to keep out unpopular or incendiary views, and especially in the echo chamber of the Bay Area. This is sometimes directed at conservatives, such as Prager University, whose content may be offensive to some, but hardly subversive or “fake.” The real crime now is simply to question dominant ideology of Silicon Valley gentry progressivism.
Even at their most powerful the industrial age moguls could not control what people knew. They might back a newspaper, or later a radio or television station, but never secured absolute control of media. Competing interests still tussled in a highly regionalized and diverse media market. In contrast the digital universe, dominated by a handful of players located in just a few locales, threaten to make a pluralism of opinions a thing of the past. The former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris suggests that “a handful of tech leaders at Google and Facebook have built the most pervasive, centralized systems for steering human attention that has ever existed.”
…In a future Democratic administration, as is already evident in places like California, the tech titans will use their money, savvy, and new dominance over our communications channels to steer and even dictate America’s political and cultural agendas to wield power in ways that even the likes of J.P. Morgan or John D. Rockefeller would envy.
Food for thought, I would think.
And then there’s the question of what the current automation wave will do to the labor market. Forget all the dismissive talk about Ned Ludd (who was, at least arguably, sort of right for two generations so far as his own class was concerned, and disastrously wrong thereafter) and buggy whip manufacturers (this time round, we’re the horses), and concentrate on what the politics and the economy of the future, particularly the relatively short-term future, are going to look like, because they are going to be something of a roadblock on the road to technotopia.
The problems in the heartland are well-known, but surely things will be different in ‘the Valley’, and in the economy that it is creating.
Kotkin (my emphasis added):
Rather than expand opportunity, the Valley increasingly creates jobs in the “gig economy” that promises not a way to the middle class, much less riches, but into the rising precariat—part-time, conditional workers. This emerging “gig economy” will likely expand with the digitization of retail, which could cost millions of working-class jobs.
For most Americans, the once promising “New Economy,” has meant a descent, as MIT’s Peter Temin recently put it, toward a precarious position usually associated with developing nations. Workers in the “gig economy,” unlike the old middle- and working-class, have little chance, for example, of buying a house—once a sure sign of upward mobility, something that is depressingly evident in the Bay Area, along the California coast, and parts of the Northeast….
That’s not great news for those of us who believe in the connection (sporadic speculative bubbles notwithstanding) between home ownership and sustainable democracy.
Kotkin:
Rather than expand opportunity, the Valley increasingly creates jobs in the “gig economy” that promises not a way to the middle class, much less riches, but into the rising precariat—part-time, conditional workers. This emerging “gig economy” will likely expand with the digitization of retail, which could cost millions of working-class jobs.
For most Americans, the once promising “New Economy,” has meant a descent, as MIT’s Peter Temin recently put it, toward a precarious position usually associated with developing nations. Workers in the “gig economy,” unlike the old middle- and working-class, have little chance, for example, of buying a house—once a sure sign of upward mobility, something that is depressingly evident in the Bay Area, along the California coast, and parts of the Northeast….
Unlike their often ruthless and unpleasant 20th century moguls, the Silicon Valley elite has done relatively little for the country’s lagging productivity or to create broad-based opportunity. The information sector has overall been a poor source of new jobs—roughly 70,000 since 2010—with the gains concentrated in just a few places. This as the number of generally more middle-class jobs tied to producing equipment has fallen by half since 1990 and most new employment opportunities have been in low-wage sectors like hospitality, medical care, and food preparation….
Not at all coincidentally, the Bay Area itself—once a fertile place of grassroots and middle-class opportunity—now boasts an increasingly bifurcated economy. San Francisco, the Valley’s northern annex, regularly clocks in as among the most unequal cities in the country, with both extraordinary wealth and a vast homeless population.
The more suburban Silicon Valley now suffers a poverty rate of near 20 percent, above the national average. It also has its own large homeless population living in what KQED has described as “modern nomadic villages.” In recent years income gains in the region have flowed overwhelmingly to the top quintile of income-earners, who have seen their wages increase by over 25 percent since 1989, while income levels have declined for low-income households.
That’s ominous enough on any number of grounds, not least political grounds. Now think about what will happen as automation grinds its way through the top quintile, either annihilating previously well-paid jobs or (to use an ugly word) ‘deskilling’ them, with consequences for pay that don’t need spelling out.
As for the consequences for politics, well, I’ll shamelessly quote from a piece I wrote for NRODT in 2016:
[W]hen we reach the point where even those who are still doing well see robots sending proletarianization their way, there’s a decent chance that something akin to “middle-class panic” (a phenomenon identified by sociologist Theodor Geiger in, ominously, 1930s Germany) will ensue. Many of the best and brightest will face a stark loss of economic and social status, a blow that will sting far more than the humdrum hopelessness that many at the bottom of the pile have, sadly, long learned to accept. They will resist while they still have the clout to do so, and the media, filled with intelligent people who have already found themselves on the wrong side of technology, will have their back.
Unless they are blocked, banned, ‘fake newsed’ or otherwise muted.