There is a great gap between the overthrow of authority and the creation of a substitute. That gap is called liberalism: a period of drift and doubt. We are in it today.
I think that the pace of technological change is intolerable, that it denies humans the dignity of continuity, states the competence to govern, and social scientists a society about which to accumulate knowledge.
But we’ve had technological change before! some object. And things turned out fine!
Commenter Bob, for example:
I want to say, “Whoa! Have things changed so much? Are things weird?” We don’t need any explanation at all for something that hasn’t happened.
I’m sixty-nine and I’ve seen a lot of things come and go, lots of change. I can’t say that things are weirder now than they were in the past.
Yeah that’s the problem. Postwar America has been unnaturally stable, precisely for the generation who still runs things: the Baby Boomers. Tyler Cowen says that “virtually all of us have been living in a bubble “outside of history,” and on this I agree with him. “Boomer Realism”—the continued cultural power of this aging generation—papers over just how radical the changes of the past two decades (really, decade and a half) have been.
Commenter J-D takes the opposite tack:
As far as I can tell, ‘things feel weird’ is something which has been true in every period of history, because ‘things keep changing’ is something which has been true in every period of history. That’s what things do: they change.
Of course this change is different from other changes, because changes are always different from other changes.
I don’t think that a single quantitative argument could ever be dispositive here. The amount of “change” is a high-dimensional and amorphous concept, unevenly spread between people, generations, countries, and every possible demographic. If you happen to think that “things are normal”—and if you’re uninterested in the fact that other people think that “things are weird”—then I recommend you stop reading this article and go enjoy the normal world.
Acknowledging the impossibility of proving the point quantitatively, there are historical parallels which can inform how we think.
We’ve experienced “rapid technological change” before. The Industrial Revolution is often considered to be a pretty big deal, though the effects certainly weren’t felt as widely as quickly. The Second Industrial Revolution—the period from 1870 to 1914—had a much larger impact. With innovations like electrification, industrialization, mass communication, the telegraph, the railroad, oil and steel, the daily life of most Europeans and Americans became unrecognizable in two generations.
But so what happened then? Did things proceed more or less normally, except that everyone was richer, had more free time and cheaper TVs or phonographs or whatever? Did people think that things were normal?
No. That’s not what happened. This led immediately to WW1 and then the Nazis, to the Russian Revolution and then Communism. In Europe, at least, the weirdness from technological change was undeniable.
But nothing like that really happened in the United States. I’m increasingly convinced that the contemporary American historical perspective is unique in its sense of continuity, a story that goes something like this:
«Veni vidi vici -- we achieved our manifest destiny, according to the plan laid out by the Founding Fathers and through the dedicated application of our spirit of self-reliance, hard work, and technological progress. We’ve got professional baseball records that go back to the 1890s, and presidential biographies that go back much farther, with no sense of a dramatic historical break. The exception, the Civil War, has been neatly historicized as the second Founding, a necessary but circumscribed effort to solve the one little issue in the Founder’s vision.»
This longer historical perspective reinforces the experience of Boomer Realism, I think; a lot of this narrative emerged specifically in the postwar era in which they were raised.
But even though the US avoided radical change, it’s useful to go back and see what the vibe was at the end of the Second Industrial Revolution. Walter Lippmann’s first major book, Drift and Mastery, provides an excellent overview.
The thesis is that the scope of the world has dramatically expanded, that this new world demands more and different things of us and of our relationships.
We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn’t a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange situation...There are no precepts to guide us, no wisdom that wasn’t made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.
Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything makes the anthropological case that human society is almost infinitely variable, that are more ways of collectively organizing ourselves and of individually fitting into a collective than we can fathom, from our thoroughly modern position. But individual humans, embedded in societies inherited from the past and constrained by the mortal cycle of aging and death, are not infinitely malleable.
This, then, is my qualitative case for when things ~~feel weird~~. When we change our environments faster than we can change ourselves, we are necessarily living in an alien environment. And that feels weird.
For Lippmann, this was happening for the first time. He very clearly sees 1914 as anomalous, as the culmination of dramatic changes and expansions that have pushed existing institutions to their breaking point. But he’s still, at this point, optimistic that human ingenuity will be able to rise to the task.
Indeed, what he sees as democracy’s greatest hope is an empirical, pragmatic solution, coming from the “science of administration.”
Yet it is not very helpful to insist that size is a danger, unless you can specify what size...The ideal unit may fall somewhere between? Where? That is a problem which experiments alone can decide, experiments conducted by experts in the new science of administration.
Lippmann, 110 years ago, saw this experimental democracy as the only solution to the dysfunction caused by large-scale technological, social and economic change—and was looking forward to what we would come up with.
Stafford Beer, 50 years ago, spent his career developing exactly these techniques, and desperately tried to get everyone to listen. He thought there was still time to install an architecture of effective governance, to use modern communication and computation technology to allow society to adapt as quickly as we have changed our environment.
This didn’t happen, of course. Our “ship of state” is still being steered with 18th-century technology — and it is manifestly unable to maintain any coherent bearing amidst the maelstrom of a 21st-century technological environment.
With our highest level of social organization so manifestly useless, lower units bear the strain of adaptation. Our meso-level institutions are also losing their capacity — everything from education to media to health care and housing — which in turn leaves individual people and their intimate relations as the only mechanism for adaptation.
So many of the Millennial cohortmates are desperately scrambling to hold themselves together, to grasp fragments of the social past and technological present to shore against their ruin.
Or less poetically, to accomplish enough professionally, financially, socially and romantically to achieve the once-standard goal of homeownership, marriage, parenthood and community.
Many are falling through the cracks. Gender-segregated online communities are the refuge of the miserable, and they at least provide the comfort of someone else to blame. The platforms deserve plenty of blame, but at the end of the day, Facebook is other people.
Meanwhile, at the top level, we are witnessing a multi-year car crash, watching in horror but unable to do anything to stop the octogenarian-in-chief from sailing our ship of state straight into a hideously loud, orange iceberg. The “radical new idea” proposed today by Ezra Klein is a return to the electoral institutions of the 1960s.
American culture is premised on progress. This culture has delivered, when it comes to technological progress—though far more in terms of bits than atoms, of late, and recent “AI” trends seem likely to further exacerbate this gap. But our political and social institutions have not progressed. So, we drift.
Like Beer’s insistence of designing a machine whose output is liberty, Lippmann has no patience for celebrating the simple overthrow of the past:
What nonsense it is, then, to talk of liberty as if it were a happy-go-lucky breaking of chains...the iconoclasts didn't free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim.
In a real sense it is an adventure. We have still to explore the new scale of human life which digital technology has thrust upon us. We have still to invent ways of dealing with it. Of course, people shudder and beg to be let off in order to go back to the simpler life for which they were trained. Of course, they hope that competition will automatically produce the social results they desire.
Later Lippmann will of course abandon this optimism in favor of technocratic elite governance as the only viable method for governing a country so vast, populous and dynamic. And honestly, given the information-technological constraints of the 1920s, he might have been right. But we have the internet, and cybernetics, and more compute than anyone dreamed possible. The only way to save democracy is not to reify our quill-and-parchment 18th-century institutions but to invent a 21st century democracy.
For the real Lippmann heads, here’s a bunch of fun quotes from 1914 that still struck me as relevant today.
News: We are blown hither and thither like litter before the wind. Our days are lumps of undigested experience. You have only to study what newspapers regard as news to see how we are torn and twisted by the irrelevant: in frenzy about issues that do not concern us, bored with those that do.
Clickbait: It is said that the muckrakers played for circulation, as if that proved their insincerity. But the mere fact that muckraking was what people wanted to hear is in many ways the most important revelation of the whole campaign.
Conspiracy Theories: It is possible to work yourself into a state where the world seems a conspiracy and your daily going is best with an alert and tingling sense of labyrinthine evil.
Cancel Culture: There must be some ground for this sudden outburst of candor, some ground beside a national desire for abstract truth and righteousness. These charges and counter-charges arose because the world has been altered radically, not because Americans fell in love with honesty. If we condemn what we once honored, if we brand as criminal the conventional acts of twenty years ago, it’s because we have developed new necessities and new expectations.
Urban Alienation: I might possibly treat my neighbor as myself, but in this vast modern world the greatest problem that confronts me is to find me neighbor and treat him at all. The size and intricacy which we have to deal with have done more than anything else, I imagine, to wreck the simple generalizations of our ancestors.
Left/Liberal Divide: To expect unionists then to talk with velvet language, and act with the deliberation of a college faculty is to be a tenderfoot, a victim of your class tradition.
MAGA: [Woodrow Wilson writes]: “restore our politics to their full spiritual vigor again, and our national life...to its purity, its self-respect, and its pristine strength and freedom”
Office Life: He spends his time in an office where he deals the day long with papers and telephones, the symbols and shadows of events.
The Reactionary Impulse: Though [the reactionary] remedy is, I believe, altogether academic, their diagnosis does locate the spiritual problem. We have lost authority. We are 'emancipated' from an ordered world. We drift.
Incel-ism: Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
Great piece, well written!
Not sure how upgrading our 18th century governance processes would do anything other than accelerate the great unmooring. These may be the only flow restrictors left which shield us from the full force of the firehose of technology.