The last section suggested a better Clara should have phrased her challenge as a choice. She should have pointed out that the new technology had made untenable the old mode of life. “Sparta in the morning, Athens in the afternoon,” no longer worked. The technology this Athens has created had become too powerful. It made the Spartan mode too dangerous, and at the same time too unnecessary. It tinged what had once been honorable with criminality.
The new technology carried within it a possibility for a better society. Not just a social order a little bit better, but one so much better as to be different in kind. But it had also brought about a necessity to choose. It didn’t bestow change. It demanded it.
I hinted that our new digital technology has a fundamental logic which follows this same terrifying template. In every way the particulars are different. And the timeline is different: we are not yet standing on the kind of precipice on whose edge they teetered in 1910. Not yet. Not anywhere close.
In many ways that changes the whole shape of the story. It grays out every stark moral declaration—makes every judgment complicated. In the long, slow, slow transition between two dramatically different eras, the only true story is: transition. This is why our tale must elbow the space for itself to fill a massive tome. Eventually we must elaborate all these caveats.
However, for the purposes of introduction I want a simple, stark moral image. In this way, I want to aggressively change the frame of the discussion. This will motivate the slow and meticulous work I will do later to shade all the tones of gray.
It is also an effort to motivate a heroic response. I am frightened that we have forgotten what it means when technology “changes everything.” Surprisingly, even the most educated and sophisticated among us don’t remember the seriousness of such a challenge. We have forgotten the depths of trauma such a terrifying gift can drag us through. We aren’t enough afraid. Not being afraid, we aren’t mustering the heroic energy to rise to the challenge.
This book is going to be an extended exposition of the required seriousness. As I mentioned before and will return to soon, the ultimate goal is to portray required heroic energy. That goal is more important than generating a precise theoretical description of the problem. One might see it as a story that alternates between theoretical exposition and tales of colorful heroic characters. But another way to see it is as all characters. The seeming theory is really a character portrait of the psychohistorian who could understand it all. I’m not claiming I do. I’m only claiming that I can envision the character who will. And I am envisioning the team of heroes he will muster and organize to rise to the challenge.
That said, we do need at least some sense of the shape of our new problem in order to envision the heroic energy that will be required to rise to its challenge. We need to see how our technology is “everything changing” in an analogous way to previous incarnations of society-altering breakthroughs.
This is the first of three essays that lay out the shape of the problem we are facing. This one is the largest scale: it sketches a problem for which a century might not be enough to fully solve. The next one[TODO: reference] is somewhat more circumscribed: it is a problem for a decade. The third[TODO:reference] is the problem for next year. But before we drill down to our immediate goals, we want to establish the big picture.
The alarm which drove this investigation—the original tip-off—was the rumor that technology “wants.” So one way I express this question is: “why does our new technology ‘want’?” And how is this “wanting” like that of technology before?
Distilling the Essence
Answering this question often means delving down into details of technology that will glaze over the eyes of almost anyone not in love with these machines. What, after all, is “the Internet”? A non-technologist probably has only a vague idea. A technologist could elaborate, but with a level of detail that would render the whole explanation tiresome to the point of uselessness. After all, the only thing we really care about is the essential property that gives rise to the rumors of its political will. Can we boil it down?
In particular, since this work is targeted at non-technologists, I’m assuming that many members of my audience—or even most of it—are puzzled or even repelled by tales of technology’s purported “wants.” They view these rumors of technology’s desires as a strange hippie utopianism. They believe such rumors can be safely dismissed.
We will challenge that reaction. Over the course of this book we will take it apart, slowly and carefully. But in order to convince my audience to embark on such a long voyage, we will start with a simple story to dramatize the warning ignored.
Technology, Simplified
Our first task is to set up our simplified world. Later our narrative will loop back and explain the construction of this story. We will watch our imaginary psychohistorian vigorously interrogate the foggy fever dreams of engineers. In the psychohistorian business, cutting away complexity is everything. Which details which one chooses to keep, and which one throws away, is the whole soul of the art.
We will see how he cuts through the mists to arrive at an essential simplification. We will explain and defend the manner by which this distillation was done. But in the interest of introduction we will skip the struggle. We will ask the reader to trust us. Thus we may merely present the result.
Our picture is a combination of two elements. One came from the opening of Paul Krugman’s book The Age of Diminished Expectations:
The well-being of the economy is a lot like the well-being of an individual. My happiness depends almost entirely on a few important things, like work, love and health, and everything else is not really worth worrying about—except that I usually can’t or won’t do anything to change the basic structure of my life, and so I worry about small things, like the state of my basement. For the economy, the important things—the things that affect the standard of living of large numbers of people—are productivity, income distribution and unemployment. If these things are satisfactory, not much else can go wrong, while if they are not, nothing can go right. Yet very little of the business of economic policy is concerned with these big trends.
The other is from The Mythical Man Month. Its author, Fred Brooks, has a long history (reaching back to the nineteen seventies!) of grappling with the problem of raising productivity in software development. He is also exceptionally good at explaining his struggles. His vividly written book has become a deserved classic of the genre. In a retrospective written in the nineteen nineties he wrote:
… modules of code should be encapsulated with well-defined interfaces, and… the interior of such a module should be the private property of its programmer, not discernible from outside… [This] is the only way of raising the level of software design.
Can we unite these two elements? Krugman says his profession can’t wrap its mind around big problems. They avoid problems like productivity, income distribution or unemployment. The whole field has become like those distracted procrastinators who avoid their life’s largest difficulties by fussing with their messy basement.
So let us forget about the hard stuff and think about the basement instead! The idea is to start with something we are sure we know how to think about. So what’s the big principle in cleaning a messy basement? Well, it helps if you sort the stuff carefully and put it in boxes. Then you write on the outside of the boxes what they have in them. The clearly labeled boxes help you find stuff more easily the next time you go looking for it.
That is exactly the principle that is central to Brooks’s celebrated work. He tells us that software works better if you put things in boxes and label the boxes. Isn’t it funny how this familiar principle showed up in this unexpected place?
Maybe it isn’t so funny. One might observe that when digital technology transforms the economy, it does it in a particular way. It transforms organizational tasks which previously soaked up immense amounts of human energy. Grocers who once sweated over stocking plans and planned product placement now defer to software computations in the central office. Dispatchers who once directed trucks or taxis are supplanted by algorithms in the cloud. Secretaries who once designed schedules and arranged appointments are supplanted by automatic calendaring software. Longshoreman who scurried about sorting the cargo of ships are supplanted by mechanized container unloading equipment.
All of these examples of automation are quite different from the great achievements of automation in the past. In particular, they solve a different problem. The great achievements of the past—the spinning jenny, the steam engine, the light bulb, the Model T—were all advances in the realm of manufacture. They were about making things—better, faster and more cheaply.
The most recent advances, however, live in a different realm. They aren’t about making things. They are about organizing them. They are about handling the operational tasks in our world better, faster, and more cheaply. In other words, our new technology’s goal is to automate organization.
So what is the big principle in the automation of organization? If we frame this question in the context of the Nature of the Changing Economy, it seems very intimidating. So let us bring it down to earth. All of us have had to tackle organizational tasks at one time or another. Take, for example, trying to make a dent in the mess that has accumulated in the basement.
This seems like an almost childish thing to talk about. It may have something to do with the basement, but what does it have to do with the economy? Well, insofar as the economy is being transformed by software, it has a great deal to do with the economy. The art of software design is essentially the art of putting tasks in boxes and labeling the boxes. Good software is like the basement of a woodworking neat-freak. Envision peg-boards for the tools with the outline of each tool marked out with white tape so there can be no doubt where the hammer goes. Not only that, you know which peg is for the big hammer, which one for medium hammer, and which one for the small hammer. Bad software is like the basement of a dyslexic junk hound. Tchotchkes are stuffed in boxes any which way. All the labels are illegible or wrong.
By way of contrast, let us compare this task to another one we all know and love: the problem of how to tame an unruly lawn. Mowing the lawn represents the manufacturing economy. We are manufacturing shorter grass! Silly perhaps, but this story is all about silly. As our psychohistorian narrator firmly believes, the sillier the better.
Old economy thinking
So, let us start with a conflict which illustrates a pattern of “old economy thinking.” Suppose I need my lawn mowed. The kid who I usually hire to push my clunky old mower around the yard shows up to work with a shiny, spiffy new lawnmower of his very own. He has broken his piggy bank to buy it: he is very proud of himself and shows it off to everyone on the block. His beautiful new lawnmower mows the lawn twice as fast as the old one did. As a result, he can mow twice as many lawns in the same time. Pretty soon he is raking in the cash.
He is making so much money, he can afford to lower his lawn-mowing rates. So he begins to steal business from the other lawn-mowing kids on the block. The other kids get upset. “He’s cheating!” they cry. They gang up on him, beat him up, and smash his new lawnmower.
The original kid, recovering in the hospital, appeals to the adults on the block for justice. “The other kids were jealous of my success!” he cries. “They had no right to hurt me or my lawnmower. You should protect me so that nothing like this can ever happen again!”
Should the adults listen to him? Absolutely. Not only was what happened to the kid unfair, it also damaged the public interest. When a kid can mow lawns twice as fast for less money, everyone on the block benefits. He put considerable investment and risk into obtaining his lawnmower. It provided a benefit for everyone. Yes, he also made a lot of money from his new lawnmower. Maybe he was a little obnoxious about showing it off. But nonetheless, his good fortune was good fortune for everyone. Therefore, his investment deserved to be protected from the destructive jealousy of the other kids. The rich kid should be protected, and the jealous kids should be punished.
New economy thinking
Now, let us move to another story that will show a parallel situation in the context of the “new economy.” Suppose I decide to hire a kid to help me clean my basement. This kid works very hard, sorting all the stuff in the basement, building appropriate-sized boxes for various categories of stuff, and carefully labeling all the boxes. His hard work is useful to me: it helps me find things more easily.
But one day, there is trouble in my little paradise. My little helper cannot come. So I hire another kid to help out. But this kid is different. He is careless: he puts things in the wrong boxes, and mislabels the boxes. Worse, he is devious: he discovers that if he puts things in the wrong boxes deliberately, and labels the boxes in a scrawl only he can understand, then he can make extra money off me. I will need his help to be able to find things again. He can make me pay.
Worse still, he is ambitious: he realizes that if he puts the potting soil in a place where only he can find it, then pretty soon I will be forced to ask him to take charge of organizing the gardening shed as well. Thus he can double the amount of money he can make off me. There is nothing I can do about it.
So how do we think about this situation? Well, in order to answer that question, it is important to ask first “what is the result I am trying to achieve?” If I hire someone to clean my basement, the result I want is a well-organized basement. I want it to be easy to find things. The kid who worked hard to sort things accurately and label the boxes clearly helped me achieve my goal. The kid who deliberately mislabeled the boxes and misplaced the potting soil did not help me achieve my goal. He hurt my interests. The problem was not merely because he over-charged me, took over my basement, and hatched devious designs on my gardening shed. Much more simply, the problem was that he failed to deliver to me the basic effect I wanted and needed. I needed a basement where I can find things easily. He didn’t give it to me. By contrast, the first kid, the one who built me a good system of well-organized, well-labeled boxes, did give me the effect I needed.
There is nothing terribly subtle or difficult about these ideas. They may sound difficult when the discussion is strewn with terms like “APIs” and “networking protocols”, “proprietary document formats,” “Document Object Models,” and the like. But these are just fancy words for labeled boxes. Or—perhaps all too often—mislabeled boxes. The only really deep concept here is the observation that it is useful to ask the question: “what is the fundamental goal we as a society are trying to achieve?”
We are entering into an “organization economy.” In such an economy, we want to achieve the goal of being well-organized. The central value of such an economy is no more complicated than the admonition we have all heard a thousand times from our mothers: “it is nice to put things away where they belong so it will be easier to find them again later.”
The Hard Part
But if it is all so easy, why does it seem so hard? It seems hard because it is hard. It is not hard because anything about the situation is complicated. It is hard for quite another reason. I want to illustrate it with the rest of the story. This is the point where the narrative turns darker.
Let us suppose that the first kid I hired to clean my basement returns from his vacation. He ventures downstairs to view the state of his handiwork. When he sees the ruin of all his hard work, words fail him. He grabs the second kid by his shirt collar and drags him to the adults to face judgment. “He’s cheating!” he cries. He doesn’t say much else. Unfortunately this first kid isn’t eloquent. Though he is a good, honest worker, he is not exactly the articulate type.
The second kid replies: “He is just complaining because he is jealous of my success! I invested in making an organization system, that’s obviously great because I’m making lots of money. He has no right to handle me this way or damage the valuable ‘intellectual property’ I have created. You should protect me so that nobody can ever treat me like this again!”
Now when the adults hear these words, they remember their earlier trauma. They remember how the kid with the new lawnmower got beaten up by a jealous gang for making lots of money off his investment. They remember how that violence made everyone poorer. They remember how they pledged to the kid on his hospital bed that nothing like that would ever be allowed to happen to him again. This recollection plunges them into a state of fear and confusion.
The first kid begs for the right to re-label the boxes correctly. It is hard to deny such a heartfelt request. On the other hand, the adults remember the hard lesson they learned about the importance of protecting the rights of the kid with the new lawn mower. They learned, at great cost, that protecting his interests was also protecting their own.
To appreciate the difficulty of this problem, imagine how this situation would appear to the first kid. He was the one who cared more than anything about properly organizing the basement. He worked hard and honestly to do the very best job he could. But it was to no avail: all his hard work was ruined. It wasn’t even accidentally ruined—it was ruined on purpose. However, when he tries to protest about this betrayal of his values, not only is he not listened to. He is also treated like a jealous, violent gang leader. Since he is not a sophisticated kid, he cannot figure out why any of this is happening to him.
Wants to be Free
Now our first kid is confused and upset—it seems to him he being accused of a crime he didn’t commit. If there is any crime here, he is the victim of it. He feels misunderstood. He dimly understands that he is being so accused because standards and values from a fundamentally different situation are being wrongly applied.
In particular, defending the lawnmower and the investor’s exclusive use of it is the right thing for the adults to do—the lawnmower “wants to be owned.” The pegboard, in contrast, “wants to be free.” After all, what use is a well-organized pegboard if it isn’t available to anyone who wants to come downstairs to find a tool on it? Even more pressingly to our conscientious organizer, what good is a pegboard on which one cannot freely add new pegs and outlines? If the “freedom” of the pegboard is thus curtailed, our faithful worker cannot do his job properly!
The problem is that the lawnmower’s “desire to be owned” is mistakenly generalized to this new situation. By extension, the criminality of thwarting that “desire” is being pinned on our protagonist. So, in order to defend himself, he keeps repeating “it wants to be free! it wants to be free!”
This is not the most effective way he could make his case. A large part of this book will be taken up with the task of building up a serious vocabulary to use to communicate this idea. Ultimately our goal will be to give a name to the damage the second kid is doing. We will fully analyze the misunderstanding which caused the adults to be confused in their judgment of the situation. However, since this effort will take awhile, we will defer it until later. For now we want to express the simplest conclusions in the language of our parable.
Echoes of Haber’s accusation
We began with the image of Haber angrily denouncing Clara as a traitor to the fatherland in front of all their friends and associates. The pain of this accusation drove her to suicide.
Notice how this scene is echoed in our new parable. Again conscientious engineers are raising an important concern about the perils of unfamiliar technology to the attention of their society. Instead of getting the hearing they deserve, they are being accused of a kind of treason. In this telling, “jealous of an entrepreneur’s success” is the new incarnation of “traitor to the fatherland.”
History Rhymes
But in what way is this story similar? It is said of history that it does not repeat, but it rhymes. Think of the feeling when one can’t remember a song or poem—yet one still remembers the meter? Like forgetting the words to the national anthem one might sing “… whose broad stripes and bright stars da da Bum ba ba Bum. Da da Dum da da Dum da da Bum. Bum. Bum. Bum! Bum!” One continues like this, not quite making out the words, until it becomes clear the end of the next round is “… our flag was still there.” Or rather: Our. Flag. Was. Still! There! So much fun to sing that out clear and loud! The clarity is delicious, emerging as it does from a blizzard of nineteenth century verbiage about long-forgotten victory in obscure altercations. The meter communicates its message even when the particulars of battle history being described is utterly lost.1
In a similar way this story, when I first looked at it, seemed to me like a second stanza. I didn’t know the words. But I knew the meter. It was going to match that of the first stanza. That made me dreadfully worried. A song that starts with an accusation of treason against a concerned engineer concludes with ending beats that… aren’t good. Maybe if we blindly play this tune out to the bitter end, our flag won’t still be there.
But the problem is how to extract the story of “da da Dum ba ba Bum.” It is impossible to make out the words, only the meter. And that only as raw intuition about where the beats should go. There is a sense of structure, but no meaning.
Eventually we will figure out structure that makes this decoding task possible. It will enable a hunt for the narrative of the second stanza of this epic tragic poem. Filling it in will be the task of this book. It will be a lot of work.
For now we won’t even attempt such an ambitious goal. We just want some idea of where we will end up. We want to know the finale of the verse. We want to know, even if it is horribly out of context in our own time. Even if it is an inappropriately black and white opinion in an era that must be shaded with gray. We want to know what the dogmatic conservative historian of 2200 will say about us. We must remember to keep in mind that this opinion will probably—like most conservative dogmatism—be expressed in a way that is thoughtless, stupid and inappropriate. Yet with those caveats in mind, we still want to know.
The Choice
Economists have been trying for decades to reconcile the glowing forecasts for the effects of digital technology with the lackluster results they can measure. The intellectual response to the mismatch has fallen into two camps. One group thinks the technology isn’t everything its cracked up to be. The other thinks the benefits are real but aren’t measured properly. Or perhaps that they will be realized if only given enough time.
This debate, astonishingly, reveals a surprising ignorance of history. No one seems to be considering a third possibility. Maybe the lackluster performance is exactly what we should expect to see. It is the expected result from sufficiently transformative technology. The promise contained within such technology is not automatically realized. It can only be unlocked by a society that wants it more than anything else. It is all too easy to want something else more.
In particular, our previous parable of a little household economy illustrates exactly what it else it is that we might want more. Our distracted professor does want to use the skills of his dedicated organizer to achieve a cleaner basement. But also he wants something else more. He is hanging onto the lessons he learned from his previous experience defending his lawn mowing employee. These lessons are emotional as well as intellectual. They constitute a moral order: a modern variant of “sweetness and honor.” Our professor does not want to question these cherished values. So he insists on applying them to his basement cleaning project as well.
However, these values don’t work nearly as well when applied in this new situation. One might even say that they permit—or even encourage—behavior that might strike an unbiased observer as bordering on criminality. The manipulative kid so twists the task he is given to do that it is hard to see how his service supports a stable household economy. Our professor might be in danger the way Haber was: he might be defending a social order that is doomed to disintegrate.
Remember, we suggested that Clara might have explained to Haber that he must choose. Sparta or Athens. Morning or Afternoon. He had come to a point where he could not have both.
Our parable suggests the professor has also come to a point where he must choose. He can elevate the lessons of the lawn-mowing world above all other values. Or he can have hope to win wealth from his new organization economy. But he cannot have both. As we said earlier, when technology “changes everything” it does not bestow change. It demands it. In particular, it demands a choice.
What Is At Stake?
Now, we should quickly remind the reader that such a stark moral declaration represents the opinion, spoken in hindsight, of our observer from 2200. He might be able to afford such black and white judgments much more easily than we can. Throughout this book we will work hard to envision the distant future’s opinion of us. Then we will studiously ignore it. This might seem schizophrenic, but following Walt Whitman’s lead, we will be unabashed about containing multitudes.2 We are seeking to envision the future’s opinion so we can understand our responsibility in relation to it. But that doesn’t mean we should be controlled by those opinions—any more than we would expect someone at the dawn of the industrial revolution to be controlled by our modern angst.
As I said earlier, this is a problem for a society to grapple with over the course of a century. We don’t have to completely deal with it all now. It may take more than one generation to handle—or even fully comprehend.
To describe the sense of urgency that originally motivated me, I’ve focused on the fight between the Habers. But that fight did not happen at the very dawn of the industrial revolution. By then it was at least late morning. To capture our predicament accurately, we will have to push earlier. This work I am leaving until later. Pushing perspective earlier in time is difficult. To do this in a sure-footed way, we will need more intellectual structure. This structure that we have yet to build.
Once we get there, we will see that our true problem is more accurately described as the problem of founding. In other words, an eighteenth rather than nineteenth or early twentieth century challenge. However, we additionally have a challenge that they did not have in the eighteenth century: of an exceedingly complex society ruled by experts. As I will explain later, there is the curious property of experts that they need to see perfectly clearly or they can’t see anything at all. So they need to hear the summation made by the historian of 2200. However, the emotional impression given by such a perspective is not particularly useful for the immediate political challenges we face. As a result, we end up with the difficult task of containing multitudes. Founding is a problem of negotiation, which is itself a problem of tact. Yet our imagined future historian, like ultra-conservatives everywhere, will be deeply tactless.
For that reason, I caution the reader not to take this short account as a guide to action. It is supposed to provide orientation to a big picture. Later we will elaborate our position within this frame. We will describe the immediate problems which cry out to be managed. But we need to add more structure to our worldview before we are confident enough to explain immediate challenges, let alone prescribe action to handle them. As I mentioned earlier, this is the first of three introductory essays, which progressively narrow their focus. Soon we will tighten our field of view to focus enough to discuss immediate problems. Only after building a great deal more structure will the scope widen again to return to problems on this plane.
- Even our president got confused. He described the referenced battle as part of the Revolutionary War. It wasn’t. (This was only his minor blooper: he also talked about how that army “took over airports” leading to jokes about how “the Redcoats are in a holding pattern over La Guardia”) But who even remembers the War of 1812? For all that I might wish to indulge delight over displays of Trump’s ignorance, I admit that this is a common mistake. The battle which was the subject of our national anthem is truly obscure and forgotten. Heck, even the war of which it was a part is lost to memory. ↩︎
- A dear old friend of mine once said that I was unique among the people he knew in my willingness to acknowledge, matter-of-factly, my own internal multiplicity. This tendency is not so much in evidence in this book; I have material for another in which it is much more central. But it still comes up occasionally. ↩︎
