The Rhetoric of the "Knowledge Economy": Legacies

The term "knowledge economy" was more or less synonymous with the "information economy"--certainly in the usage of Alvin Toffler and his cohorts, for whom "knowledge" was "refined information." In this "knowledge" or "information" economy as Toffler explained the term the creation of wealth, and the organization of human society, would increasingly shift away from centering on the production, storage, movement, processing, ownership, buying, selling, exploitation, of things to centering on the production, storage, movement, processing, ownership, buying, selling, exploitation of knowledge, not least because knowledge would be used to substitute for things--enable the engineers and administrators of the world to economize on the labor, energy, raw materials required for every unit of economic output--in a radical fashion. From reducing the number of parts and the assembly required per piece of good, to creating replacements for rare and expensive materials from abundant ones, one key aspect of this was supposed to be the change civilizations energy base from relying on an extraction and burning of finite fossil fuels to, through a higher state of the art, the renewable energy of the sun. In the process this drastic "dematerialization" of our economic life was supposed to lead to other changes, down to the operating "code" by which that economy is organized, with the synchronization and centralization and hierarchy and drive toward "bigness" that made modern life so rigid and stifling replaced with the opposite, a flexible, decentralized world of flattened structures where "small can be beautiful."

Toffler estimated that this really new economy--indeed, the new civilization that economy brought about in as profound a revolution as the Industrial revolution had been--would be well-established on the Earth by 2025, the very year in which I am writing this post. However, it is clear that the decentralized world he imagined never came, just as the dematerialization that he anticipated never came, because the requisite productivity revolution that replaced so much of the material with KNOWLEDGE never came. Indeed, it seems symbolic of the reality of the era that after the Great Recession the Obama administration bet not on the "knowledge economy" and the technologies of the future but the shale boom yielding oil and gas sustaining the fossil fuel-driven technological base of the past--a story too little told or appreciated--as the consequences of that decision endure in a 2025 in which the energy transition Toffler envisaged has scarcely begun, and indeed yet to prove itself a genuine transition rather than a false start of the kind we have seen in the past. It seems symbolic of the reality of 2025 that the very "tech billionaire" who was the face of the "information" technology with which it is common to identify the "information" age has also become America's largest private owner of farmland--pouring the proceeds of his piece of the purported knowledge economy into amassing vast holdings of the oldest, most foundational, of natural resources. It also seems symbolic of the reality that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the knowledge economy besotted nitwits of the board rooms were reminded just how much of the hard, tiring, dirty, boring old drudge labor of the kind they discounted keeps the world running, and presented grand visions of the automation of the world--of which next to nothing has come five years on in the very year in which the knowledge economy was supposed to have been a well-established reality. And symbolic of the same reality, too, that the robotization of drudgery what has excited the idiots who have created the biggest bubble in history with their "THE SINGULARITY IS NOW!" foolishness has been "large language models" which cannot flip a burger or hook up a house to an electric grid or drive a truck but may, according to recent reports, be beginning to displace the highly touted knowledge workers of the software world, all on the basis not of some transcendence of the resource throughput-expanding industrial economy but the exacerbation of that model's strains as the data centers powering it ramp up world electricity consumption, driving the burning of yet more of the world's finite supply of fossil fuels (and its still more finite capacity to absorb the resulting pollution).

Indeed, as things stand in the actual 2025 the rhetoric of a knowledge economy seems to have been an extravagant piece of technological hype that deflected calls for the address of social and environmental problems, and generally served as propaganda for neoliberalism--for we only had to let capitalists do their thing, and it would deliver abundance and sustainability and FREEDOM together! Indeed, it entailed a particular devaluation of the physical labor and even much of the mental labor that keeps the world running as it exalted instead the well-graduated legal or technical professional, the business executive, the financier, and above all the startup -founding entrepreneur as the creators of value, the makers from whom others are mere takers, justifying and defending economic and social inequality. Indeed, it is easily recognizable as part of the long libertarian-right tradition of devaluing working people and their contributions as it valorizes instead the possessors of property, wealth and power (before George Gilder there was Joseph Schumpeter), given a modern veneer because instead of speaking of the divine right of property they spoke of knowledge, and skills, and EDUMACATION! as the driving forces in that way that sets the Tim Taylors grunting behind their fences as at the Big Thinks of Good Neighbor Wilson, all as the unconvinced were likely inhibited about challenging the claim, for who dares to question the value of EDUMACATION!? And altogether the package seems to have been at best a delusion, at worst a cynical lie that useful idiots helped to promulgate, and to have in any case played its part in creating the disastrous situation the world faces today as we consider a near half century of such thinking and its associated politics paralyzing action on global problems that have been permitted to worsen--with a stagnant world economy that has left per capita Gross World Product outside China pretty much where it was before the Volcker shock, and much of that public actually even worse off than such a figure suggests given the ways in inflation may have understated the rise in the cost of living, the increased inequality with which income and wealth are distributed, the social rot attendant upon the associated changes, and ecological decay as a world economy which had just breached the "limits to growth" in the 1970s is now approaching a rate of consumption that would require two whole Earths to sustain it. As indeed was inevitable given that the neoliberal model, certainly when one appreciates its insufficiently appreciated finance-centricity, not only did neoliberalism not yield the productivity revolution promised but that it was in every respect inimical to everything that would enable such a productivity revolution to happen, from the long-term thinking and planning required, to the state support required to get business over the bridge between the idea and its successful commercialization, to the disruption that inevitably means many rentiers being made unhappy as the value of the assets they hold declines in a world where the state of the art moves on. The best that one may be able to say for it is that it has been a learning experience--from which far too few seem to have learned anything.