In an interview published in Real Clear Future, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) compared the digital revolution to the industrial revolution. This thought experiment caught my attention, because I have given considerable thought to that exact same comparison. I disagree with Senator Sasse on many political matters, but this son of rural Nebraska who earned a U.S. history Ph.D. from Yale certainly has one of the keenest minds and one of the most unique perspectives of any current American politician.
Sasse views the current digital revolution as one of the four fundamental stages in human societal evolution throughout history: “You have hunter-gatherers, you have the rise of agriculture, and then you had the rise of the big tool economy: industrialization, urbanization, mass immigration both across the seas and most fundamentally from the American countryside to cities, as you go from about 86 percent of the public working on the farm at the end of the Civil War to almost 60 percent of the public working in big cities by World War II. And then now this new thing, the digital economy, the mobile economy, the knowledge economy, the service economy—the post-industrial economy, fundamentally.” He argues that “Industrialization is the only real analog for this moment.”
How does the trajectory of the digital revolution resemble the industrial revolution? Well, like the Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroads (which received government funding), the Internet started with public subsidization (the government-funded ARPANET project), but later became a chaotic private economic competition that was sometimes bad for workers and consumers, and then veered toward monopolies that carried their own problems and risks. The resulting centralization of power and money allowed the corporate winners of this competition to become a class of “robber-barons” who spent their money to influence the American political system. We may be seeing similar developments today, as tech companies try to avoid regulation and attempt to influence the boundaries of public debate in their own self-interest.
The industrial revolution also disrupted traditional modes of work life. Independent artisans were transformed into wage-earning factory workers, and many resented their loss of independence. In an era of exponential population growth in rural areas, many desperate surplus workers from the American countryside and from foreign nations migrated to fill U.S. industrial jobs, despite long hours and hazardous working conditions. The urbanization and immigration of the first era of globalization created considerable social and cultural turmoil that made a generation of American intellectuals fear the potential implications of growing ethnic and class conflict. Recent political developments in the United States raise similar concerns in our own age.
In the late stages of the industrial revolution, a publically funded infrastructure project created the interstate highways of the 1950s, making control and ownership of the railroads a marginal issue (railways still existed alongside the interstate highway network, and remained important to commerce, but became less centrally relevant to the nation’s social and economic life). Railroads and factories also became subject to more workplace safety laws and other regulations, and they had to pay higher wages to their increasingly unionized workforce. Over time, the pitched battles between Pinkertons and strikers gave way to a formalized collective bargaining process and the Treaty of Detroit. Over time, the reactionary nativism and ethnocentrism that fostered an early-20th-Century revival of the Ku Klux Klan gave way to the election of America’s first Catholic president and the rise of the civil rights for racial minorities.
We may see a similar unfolding of history this time – if digital reformers have the same will and vision to bend their era’s revolution toward human needs that their industrial reformer predecessors did. I’m not the first to propose a “new Progressive Era” as a solution for our “new Gilded Age” – Robert Putnam discussed it in his book critiquing the late-20th-Century decline in social capital over two decades ago, but perhaps then the time was not yet ripe. The original Progressive Era reformers had to tame the industrial revolution, make it more humane, more fair, and less destructive of the environment. It took several decades before reforms made the industrial revolution more humane for regular people. In the meantime, Gilded Age Americans experienced one of the more corrupt, chaotic, and Social Darwinist periods of their history during the final few decades of the 19th Century before the reform movement truly picked up steam. Perhaps the speed and ubiquity of the digital transformation makes the time horizon in which fundamental change is possible narrower in our time, but I doubt it – after all, the transformations of the industrial age probably seemed just as sudden and unstoppable to late-19th-Century Americans as those of our own age seem to us.
Taming the digital revolution’s disruptive economic consequences may seem impossible, but it once seemed inevitable that all of the nation’s wilderness would be plundered for short-term economic gain, and it appeared naïve to think that any forests or wetlands would be conserved in the interest of sustainability and public recreation. It also seemed naïve to think workers’ wages would ever be substantially increased or that their required working hours would ever be reduced, given the economic incentives of the competitive industrial economy. But the history of the industrial era indicates that if enough countervailing forces gather and work together to combat the powerful interests, concessions can eventually be extracted, and reforms can eventually be achieved.
It is important for instinctive tech-pessimists to remember that the industrial revolution, after a century or two of changes and reforms, facilitated one of the greatest improvements in standards of living and average life expectancies in human history. It also had some dark sides for our world, including very serious environmental damage that has contributed to climate change, but it (probably) ended up being a net benefit for humanity. Hopefully, 100 years from now, we can say the same for the digital revolution. I’m still too much of a digital skeptic and tech dissenter to be certain of this. Nevertheless, because humanity has no realistic way to turn back the tide of this revolution, we have no choice but to try to make this revolution serve the interests of individual rights, human dignity, and the common good.