We have never been more connected, but there is a loneliness epidemic. We have never been better off, but the divide between rich and poor grows ever wider. We have technology capable of automating many of the most unpleasant jobs, yet even the richest people in the world find themselves working longer hours. How did this all happen?
In Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth argues that flawed economic models are to blame. The Industrial Revolution revolved around a linear production process: stuff goes in, labour transforms the stuff, and more valuable stuff came out the other end. The faster the flywheel could turn, the more value could be produced. This was not necessarily a new idea: labour has been transforming humble wheat and water into glorious bread for millennia. What was new was the idea that human labour could be augmented or even replaced by machines. Machines have a great many advantages over humans. They are more predictable, simple to replicate, and are less likely to unionise.
What the old model failed to take into account was that there is only a finite amount of stuff. This production process required not only the raw materials for the end product, but also fossil fuels to make machine go brr. The model also ignored the costly stuff that came out the other end. Burning these fossil fuels created a great deal of waste. At a small scale, these side effects could be ignored, treated as “negative externalities”. In the 21st Century we can no longer ignore these “negative externalities”. We need a new model.
In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner observes how digital technology got out of hand. 20th Century technology, the Internet in particular, led to a huge boom in connectedness and decentralisation. The 1950s were a time of post-war growth, but people were desperate for stability and calm after the devastation of World War II. Corporations grew larger and larger, with The Organization Man being the model for work. Command-and-control was the order of the day. Over time, the youth began to rebel against this idea. A counterculture was born, as the hippies decided to Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. A group that Turner refers to as the “New Communalists”, mostly upper-middle-class white men based in California, set out to build a modern utopia. What happened next may surprise you.
This loose assortment of idealists began to develop networked technologies, initially at research institutions and gradually spreading out to the corporate realm. Networks seemed like they could help solve many of the problems of the large corporation: information flowing freely across borders, in an increasingly globalised world. These networks required a great deal of infrastructure, something that would only be economically viable if a handful of corporations were given free reign to roll them out without any pesky regulation. Capitalists began to recognise the opportunities of the digital space: greater scale than ever before, which would mean great profits for the winners. A digital arms race began, leading to a huge economic boom in the late ’90s, followed just as quickly by the catastrophic bust of 2000. The first banner ad appeared on HotWired.com in 1994 and it all went downhill from there.
In Moral Ambition, Rutger Bregman claims that our modern woes stem from ambitious people that lack morals and moral people that lack ambition. Crusty old institutions push people into high-paying jobs at law firms and finance companies where they do more harm than good. Jobs that benefit people pay peanuts and have high burnout rates. Who would want to be a nurse in this economy?
So what are we do about all this? Bregman argues that we, the good eggs reading a book called Moral Ambition, should aim bigger. A typical doctor might save 3 lives per year, but a vaccine researcher could save hundreds. By applying your talents to one of the world’s pressing problems you might change the world significantly.
It’s a nice idea but I don’t know if ambition is really the limiting factor here. When you try to have an outsized impact, you may well achieve what you set out to do, but it’s unlikely you will change only one thing. When you live in a world dominated by huge interconnected global systems, it’s hard to tell what impact any change could have. We are surrounded by Chesterton’s Fence.
Perhaps the most impactful change of all would be to do something small. To focus on doing the greatest good for a moderate number. Do things that don’t scale is classic startup advice, but what if we never needed to move beyond that?
There are systems that need to be big. Investing in national (or even international) infrastructure is important. I agree with Kate Raworth here - that this is a job best carried out on behalf of the state, rather than for-profit corporations. Critics might argue that the government is often incompetent. That may be true, but forty years of privatisation have shown that corporations are even less capable when it comes to supplying water or delivering high-speed rail.
There are some systems that need to be even bigger. The climate crisis requires global cooperation. Fossil fuels need to stay in the ground, but for countries that rely heavily on this income, this could be tough. Australia could be a huge exporter of solar power, but the gloomy UK weather means we may need to continue importing energy from elsewhere, even as we switch away from burning old dinosaur bones.
I’m not arguing for full individualism, or for the “back-to-the-land” neotriablism of the New Communalists. As Turner pointed out, that naive approach didn’t really work either. What we need to cultivate instead is community. Billions of influencers shouting into the void won’t change the world. A pack of individuals won’t achieve much if they can’t agree on the basics. We need to recognise that nobody is going to agree with us all 100% of the time. There needs to be space for respectful disagreement, something that doesn’t seem likely in the current online discourse. Learning to embrace small-scale community - online or offline - seems like the antidote to many of the world’s modern problems.
Rather than Bregman’s Moral Ambition, perhaps what we need to foster is a sense of Moral Integrity. Raworth encourages us to think in systems, and to notice that everything is interconnected. Turner looks at how the counterculturalists of the ’60s sought to be a whole and to be part of a greater whole. We cannot hope to achieve global integrity if we cannot first lay down a solid local base. “Think globally, act locally” is not perfect advice, but at least it pushes us in the right direction.