It seems that pattern recognition is not in vogue among the
commentariat. Our species is not really that creative when it comes to
social phenomena. All one has to do is take a look at the relatively
recent history (600 years) to spot remarkable similarities between the
new techno class and Ottoman Janissaries (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissaries ) :
- Both present about 0.01% of the (then) current world population
(making a wild assumption that today there are 5-700,000 techies on the
planet making 6-digit salaries);
- Both are recruited from the unsuspecting population into the realm
that sets them wide apart in their future lives, socially above the
originating environment;
- The recruitment criteria was not related to their social attributes,
but to their innate qualities (able bodied in the impressionable young
age then, high IQ today);
- Both started as 'tools' (see below) to become a grave danger for the
system that created their class.
There are differences, though - for example, smart phones instead of spoons.
------
Today’s Tech Oligarchs Are Worse Than the Robber Barons
(
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/11/today-s-tech-oligarchs-are-worse-than-the-robber-barons.html
)
Yes, Jay Gould was a bad guy. But at least he helped build societal
wealth. Not so our Silicon Valley overlords. And they have our
politicians in their pockets.
Joel Kotkin
08.11.16 5:00 AM ET
A decade ago these guys—and they are mostly guys—were folk heroes, and
for many people, they remain so. They represented everything traditional
business, from Wall Street and Hollywood to the auto industry, in their
pursuit of sure profits and golden parachutes, was not—hip, daring,
risk-taking folk seeking to change the world for the better.
Now from San Francisco to Washington and Brussels, the tech oligarchs
are something less attractive: a fearsome threat whose ambitions to
control our future politics, media, and commerce seem without limits.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Uber may be improving our lives
in many ways, but they also are disrupting old industries—and the lives
of the many thousands of people employed by them. And as the tech boom
has expanded, these individuals and companies have gathered economic
resources to match their ambitions.
And as their fortunes have ballooned, so has their hubris. They see
themselves as somehow better than the scum of Wall Street or the trolls
in Houston or Detroit. It’s their intelligence, not just their money,
that makes them the proper global rulers. In their contempt for the less
cognitively gifted, they are waging what The Atlantic recently called “a
war on stupid people.”
I had friends of mine who attended MIT back in the 1970s tell me they
used to call themselves “tools,” which told us us something about how
they regarded themselves and were regarded. Technologists were clearly
bright people whom others used to solve problems or make money. Divorced
from any mystical value, their technical innovations, in the words of
the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, constituted “a traditional action
made effective.” Their skills could be applied to agriculture,
metallurgy, commerce, and energy.
In recent years, like Skynet in the Terminator, the tools have achieved
consciousness, imbuing themselves with something of a society-altering
mission. To a large extent, they have created what the sociologist Alvin
Gouldner called “the new class” of highly educated professionals who
would remake society. Initially they made life better—making spaceflight
possible, creating advanced medical devices and improving communications
(the internet); they built machines that were more efficient and created
great research tools for both business and individuals. Yet they did not
seek to disrupt all industries—such as energy, food, automobiles—that
still employed millions of people. They remained “tools” rather than rulers.
With the massive wealth they have now acquired, the tools at the top now
aim to dominate those they used to serve. Netflix is gradually
undermining Hollywood, just as iTunes essentially murdered the music
industry. Uber is wiping out the old order of cabbies, and Google,
Facebook, and the social media people are gradually supplanting
newspapers. Amazon has already undermined the book industry and is
seeking to do the same to apparel, supermarkets, and electronics.
Past economic revolutions—from the steam engine to the jet engine and
the internet—created in their wake a productivity revolution. To be
sure, as brute force or slower technologies lost out, so did some
companies and classes of people. But generally the economy got stronger
and more productive. People got places sooner, information flows
quickened, and new jobs were created, many of them paying middle- and
working-class people a living wage.
This is largely not the case today. As numerous scholars including
Robert Gordon have pointed out, the new social-media based technologies
have had little positive impact on economic productivity, now growing at
far lower rates than during past industrial booms, including the 1990s
internet revolution.
Much of the problem, notes MIT Technology Review editor David Rotman, is
that most information investment no longer serves primarily the basic
industries that still drive most of the economy, providing a wide array
of jobs for middle- and working-class Americans. This slowdown in
productivity, notes Chad Syverson, an economist at the University of
Chicago Booth School of Business, has decreased gross domestic product
by $2.7 trillion in 2015—about $8,400 for every American. “If you think
Silicon Valley is going to fuel growing prosperity, you are likely to be
disappointed,” suggests Rotman.
One reason may be the nature of “social media,” which is largely a
replacement for technology that already exists, or in many cases, is
simply a diversion, even a source of time-wasting addiction for many.
Having millions of millennials spend endless hours on Facebook is no
more valuable than binging on television shows, except that TV actually
employs people.
At their best, the social media firms have supplanted the old
advertising model, essentially undermining the old agencies and archaic
forms like newspapers, books, and magazines. But overall information
employment has barely increased. It’s up 70,000 jobs since 2010, but
this is after losing 700,000 jobs in the first decade of the 21st century.
Tech firms had once been prodigious employers of American workers. But
now, many depend on either workers abroad of imported under H-1B visa
program. These are essentially indentured servants whom they can hire
for cheap and prevent from switching jobs. Tens of thousands of jobs in
Silicon Valley, and many corporate IT departments elsewhere, rent these
“technocoolies,” often replacing longstanding U.S. workers.
Expanding H-1Bs, not surprisingly, has become a priority issue for
oligarchs such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and a host of tech firms,
including Yahoo, Cisco Systems, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel,
firms that in some cases have been laying off thousands of American
workers. Most of the bought-and-paid-for GOP presidential contenders, as
well as the money-grubbing Hillary Clinton, embrace the program, with
some advocating expansion. The only opposition came from two candidates
disdained by the oligarchs, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
Now cab drivers, retail clerks, and even food service workers face
technology-driven extinction. Some of this may be positive in the long
run, certainly in the case of Uber and Lyft, to the benefit of
consumers. But losing the single mom waitress at Denny’s to an iPad does
not seem to be a major advance toward social justice or a civilized
society—nor much of a boost for our society’s economic competitiveness.
Wiping out cab drivers, many of them immigrants, for part-time workers
driving Ubers provides opportunity for some, but it does threaten what
has long been one of the traditional ladders to upward mobility.
Then there is the extraordinary geographical concentration of the new
tech wave. Previous waves were much more highly dispersed. But not now.
Social media and search, the drivers of the current tech boom, are
heavily concentrated in the Bay Area, which has a remarkable 40 percent
of all jobs in the software publishing and search field. In contrast,
previous tech waves created jobs in numerous locales.
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This concentration has been two-edged sword, even in its Bay Area
heartland. The massive infusions of wealth and new jobs has created
enormous tensions in San Francisco and its environs. Many San
Franciscans, for example, feel like second class citizens in their own
city. Others oppose tax measures in San Francisco that are favorable to
tech companies like Twitter. There is now a movement on to reverse
course and apply “tech taxes” on these firms, in part to fund affordable
housing and homeless services. Further down in the Valley, there is also
widespread opposition to plans to increase the density of the largely
suburban areas in order to house the tech workforce. Rather than being
happy with the tech boom, many in the Bay Area see their quality of life
slipping and upwards of a third are now considering a move elsewhere.
Once, we hoped that the technology revolution would create ever more
dispersion of wealth and power. This dream has been squashed. Rather
than an effusion of start-ups we see the downturn in new businesses.
Information Technology, notes The Economist, is now the most heavily
concentrated of all large economic sectors, with four firms accounting
for close to 50 percent of all revenues. Although the tech boom has
created some very good jobs for skilled workers, half of all jobs being
created today are in low-wage services like retail and restaurants—at
least until they are replaced by iPads and robots.
What kind of world do these disrupters see for us? One vision, from
Singularity University, co-founded by Google’s genius technologist Ray
Kurzweil, envisions robots running everything; humans, outside the
programmers, would become somewhat irrelevant. I saw this mentality for
myself at a Wall Street Journal conference on the environment when a
prominent venture capitalist did not see any problem with diminishing
birthrates among middle-class Americans since the Valley planned to make
the hoi polloi redundant.
Once somewhat inept about politics, the oligarchs now know how to press
their agenda. Much of the Valley’s elite–venture capitalist John Doerr,
Kleiner Perkins, Vinod Khosla, and Google—routinely use the political
system to cash in on subsidies, particularly for renewable energy,
including such dodgy projects as California’s Ivanpah solar energy
plant. Arguably the most visionary of the oligarchs, Elon Musk, has
built his business empire largely through subsidies and grants.
Musk also has allegedly skirted labor laws to fill out his expanded car
factory in Fremont, with $5-an-hour Eastern European labor; even when
blue-collar opportunities do arise, rarely enough, the oligarchs seem
ready to fill them with foreigners, either abroad or under dodgy visa
schemes. Progressive rhetoric once used to attack oil or agribusiness
firms does not seem to work against the tech elite. They can exploit
labor laws and engage in monopoly practices with little threat of
investigation by progressive Obama regulators.
In the short term, the oligarchs can expect an even more pliable regime
under our likely next president, Hillary Clinton. The fundraiser
extraordinaire has been raising money from the oligarchs like Musk and
companies such as Facebook. Each may vie to supplant Google, the company
with the best access to the Obama administration, over the past seven years.
What can we expect from the next tech-dominated administration? We can
expect moves, backed also by corporate Republicans, to expand H-1B
visas, and increased mandates and subsidies for favored sectors like
electric cars and renewable energy. Little will be done to protect our
privacy—firms like Facebook are determined to limit restrictions on
their profitable “sharing” of personal information. But with regard to
efforts to break down encryption systems key to corporate sovereignty,
they will defend privacy, as seen in Apple’s resistance to sharing
information on terrorist iPhones. Not cooperating against murderers of
Americans is something of fashion now among the entire hoodie-wearing
programmer culture.
One can certainly make the case that tech firms are upping the national
game; certain cab companies have failed by being less efficient and
responsive as well as more costly. Not so, however, the decision of the
oligarchs–desperate to appease their progressive constituents–to
periodically censor and curate information flows, as we have seen at
Twitter and Facebook. Much of this has been directed against politically
incorrect conservatives, such as the sometimes outrageous gay
provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
There is a rising tide of concern, including from such progressive icons
as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, about the extraordinary market,
political, and culture power of the tech oligarchy. But so far, the
oligarchs have played a brilliant double game. They have bought off the
progressives with contributions and by endorsing their social liberal
and environmental agenda. As for the establishment right, they are too
accustomed to genuflecting at mammon to push back against anyone with a
10-digit net worth. This has left much of the opposition at the extremes
of right and left, greatly weakening it.
Yet over time grassroots Americans may lose their childish awe of the
tech establishment. They could recognize that, without some
restrictions, they are signing away control of their culture, politics,
and economic prospects to the empowered “tools.” They might understand
that technology itself is no panacea; it is either a tool to be used to
benefit society, increase opportunity, and expand human freedom, or it
is nothing more than a new means of oppression.
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