Selective Coverage, Fake Facts and the Conditioning of the Public

In his criticism of the media's coverage of current events in The Brass Check Upton Sinclair stressed its treatment of labor, discussing in particular its coverage of labor strikes. Discussing at particular length the strikes in the West Virginia and Colorado coal fields, and the Michigan copper mines, in the 1912-1914 period, he stressed how the press never missed a chance to associate strikes with violence in the public mind, with the strikers invariably the cause and perpetrators of the violence, rather than the victims they principally were (for, in the terms of the Herman-Chomsky analysis, strikers were "unworthy victims").

In cases this had to do with selective reporting, following the "simple and elemental rule--if strikers are violent, they get on the wires, while if strikers are not violent, they stay off the wires," even when it is a question of a very large strike going on for months. One may add that if there was no violence of the kind they wanted to report they were often prepared to say there was, as Sinclair showed when comparing side by side the Associated Press' coverage with the facts as reported in sworn affidavits vindicated by Congressional investigation in the case of the Michigan strike. The result was "that nine-tenths of the telegraphic news you read about strikes is news of violence," conduct which "irrevocably" engraved "the idea-association: Strikes--violence! Violence--strike!" in the public's imagination.

Looking at the news we see today that the same filthy practice is alive and well, if mainly deployed to malign groups other than strikers these days, with very few batting an eye at any of it.

Convenient Social Virtue and the Supply of Engineers

John Kenneth Galbraith introduced the term "convenient social virtue" in his 1973 book Economics and the Public Purpose. In that book he defined the term as the willingness of society's less powerful members to let themselves be exploited by the more powerful in the name of social good.

Galbraith raised the concept for, among other purposes, consideration of how differently society tends to treat people in different jobs, doctors as against nurses, for example. The conventional think it entirely acceptable that doctors should drive a very hard bargain where their monetary compensation is concerned--but should nurses receiving much, much less ask for a cost-of-living increase this is seen as unseemly, the nurse expected to be fobbed off with praise for her "service to the community" instead.

Other areas where one sees this kind of combination of exploitation with shabby moralizing include, of course, the teaching profession (resistance to which exploitation has led to the unhinged degree of demonization of the teacher seen in contemporary America).

Conventionally we do not think of society as making such demands on members of the far more respected engineering profession. Yet consider the eternal whining about the number of engineering graduates the country produces. As it happens the economy, especially in its current deindustrialized, hollowed-out state, offers plenty of careers that seem far, far more likely to be lucrative to those who have the potential to be engineers--like finance (to say nothing of those old standards, law and medicine)--and indeed is always recommending those careers to them.

In overlooking this they seem to simply think that in spite of the material rewards appearing to lie elsewhere young people will flock to engineering simply because business wants them to, never mind whether it is prepared to compete with other sectors for able young graduates--expecting, instead, that young people will choose engineering out of "convenient social virtue."

Ignoring Status Politics

As I have remarked in the past, the "consensus historians" remain important to American political discourse today. Not the least of the reasons for that is that consensus historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Louis Hartz, and Daniel Boorstin, were the theoreticians of what we today call "centrism."

One of these, Richard Hofstadter, comes in for mention from time to time because of his interest in the ever topical subject of right-wing populism. As with all the historians of that group his work had significant shortcomings that only seem the more glaring with time.* Still, for all those shortcomings, much of their output did have its interesting aspects, which predictably get overlooked. One is Hofstadter's discussion of what he called "status politics"--a politics that, having to do with perceptions of a group's standing in American society, trafficks in the bitterness, paranoia and vindictiveness of groups toward each other. Hofstadter's discussion, arguably, underestimates just how preponderant such politics can become. (Hofstadter thought it a luxury of good times. Today we see how prominent it can be even in bad.) It also seems that he was inattentive to how such politics can be cultivated and exploited for the sake of other agendas--for instance, whipping up part of the public against this group or that to get it to sign on to an economic agenda unsalable in itself. All the same, he at least understood that what the country's culture wars really amount to is politicians telling the public "I can't make your life better, but I can make their life worse. Vote for me!"

In a political milieu of very limited choices it is possible that this works for at least some of the people, some of the time--or at least, that it is sufficiently hard to prove that it does not that they go on playing the game as a matter of course, all day long, all year long, bringing us to where we are today.

* Thus is it the case that Schlesinger Jr. in that early work so important to this current, his six hundred page epic The Age of Jackson, "makes only three passing references to Indians," completely eliding the 1830 Indian Removal Act and all that followed from it in its rather appalling attempt to paint Jackson as some hero of the common man.

From Red Lobsters to Pizzaburgers: Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic in May

Having written quite a bit just now about the absolute dreck to which The New York Times subjects its readership, let us discuss journalism of which we can say something more positive--Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic.

As I have remarked in the past, I consider pretty much every post Doctorow publishes there to be worth reading. (Not skimming, but proper, word-for-word reading.)

Still, sometimes it seems to me that a particular piece of Doctorow's merits special mention, and that the past month had more than its usual share of them.

There was Doctorow's item on the real story behind the bankruptcy of the Red Lobster restaurant chain. In its combination of "shareholder activism" and real estate trafficking, the death of antitrust and the death of the middle class, Doctorow makes clear how the decline of this restaurant chain has been a history of neoliberalism in miniature.

There was Doctorow's discussion of the Democratic Party's "Pizzaburger" politics--as well as the enormous risks those politics entail for the party in these fraught times that testify to what might politely be called the party's extreme dysfunction. (For how else can one speak of a party that so often demands that the electorate ""Hold your nose and vote" even as this approach fails again and again?)

And there is, of course, Doctorow's discussion of progress in climate technology and the expansion of electricity production from renewable energy sources--which apart from being worth reporting on itself, especially given the short shrift that the mainstream media tends to give it, he contrasts usefully with the technological hucksterism of Silicon Valley as a matter of real innovation against the fake kind that the "courtiers" of the press so love to slobber over.

Four years ago I concluded that as the techno-hype of the 2010s about self-driving cars and the rest disappointed very badly we had a real technological revolution in the area of renewable energy--in spite of the press coverage. I am more convinced of that now than ever, even as the hucksters of northern California's Bay Area continue to get all the press.

Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check: The Book's Reception and Legacy

Recently reviewing The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair I limited myself to discussing the book's contents. However, others have addressed the book's reception, not least Robert McChesney and Ben Scott when they wrote the introduction to an edition of the book that the University of Illinois Press published in 2002 that McChesney and Scott also published as a separate article in their own publication.

In that introduction McChesney and Scott report that of all of Sinclair's other books The Brass Check was the only one to compare with his novel The Jungle in repute--until the book was buried, and so deeply that, as they write in their piece, those interested in the criticism of journalistic practice are often under the misapprehension that no one addressed the subject before the 1980s (when such works as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent appeared). Of course, this burial did not simply "happen," but was a reflection of the hostility to Sinclair generally and this book particularly--not least, from the very press institutions which Sinclair attacked, and which would have liked to sue him (indeed, Sinclair challenged them to try if they could catch him in an error of fact), but to his credit and not theirs proved unable to do so for lack of grounds (because, Sinclair and his supporters have been able to say, everything he wrote in that meticulously researched and documented book happened to be the truth).

If, as the book's onetime reputation shows, it did not prevent Sinclair from reaching a significant audience and having an effect on the dialogue that way at the time of its appearance, it did make it harder for the book's effect to endure. Moreover, as McChesney and Scott make clear in their piece there was also the presumption that journalism had been reformed in the Progressive era so that the ills of which Sinclair wrote in The Brass Check had been consigned to the past. Journalism was "professionalized," they said, and a wall put up between management and editorship to protect the autonomy of the professional journalists as they went about their work of reporting the news "objectively."

In hindsight that can seem a thoroughly "centrist" response--reflecting the belief of adherents in that ideology (inherited from the Progressive movement) in "education," "expertise," "professionalism"; in the idea that one could speak of objectivity in such matters in such a way as to not have to deal with touchy matters of "ideology" (a category from which centrism excluded itself, of course). This approach can seem very centrist, too, in the haste to consider a very large, structural, societal problem resolved by some tweaks, over and done with, so that there is no point in talking about it anymore. It also seems very centrist in what was really behind all of the above--a spirit of elitism and exclusion in the regard for "professionalism"; the sort of impoverished, narrow, context-avoiding, theory-averse analytical stance that C. Wright Mills criticized as "abstracted empiricism" as the reality of their "objectivity"; a greater inclination to dismiss problems than solve them (just as with their pretense that the New Deal and post-war boom took care of the problem of poverty); and as the last in particular suggests, a hostility to social criticism and social change that preemptively shuts down talk of a very large part of reality in loyalty to the status quo, not least by treating capitalism and the questions of class inextricable from it as entirely off-limits to legitimate discussion.

Indeed, it is worth recalling that the target of Progressive reformers in journalism of the kind discussed here was sensational "yellow" journalism rather than the fact that journalism was "a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor." The result was that in their view the great evil bedeviling journalism was the capitulation of the press to the temptation to pander toward the lowest common denominator out of simple "commercialism," a view that not only ignores what those seeing the matter Sinclair's way would have regarded as the largest problem, but in fact provides cover for those not wanting that problem raised let alone addressed, while actually punching "down" at the broad public rather than "up" at the elites whose agendas the press was serving in that way that a fundamentally, deeply, conservative centrism is so prone to do.

As with so much else about centrism, its notions about journalism are far from the peak of their credibility circa 2024--just as, I would think, a great many would see in Sinclair's book something very credible and relevant indeed for those interested in the state of journalism in our time.

No, You're Not Wrong to Worry About Rising Prices

In his guest essay "I'm an Economist. Don't Worry. Be Happy," Justin Wolfers, smugly telling the reader that he is an economist over and over again in an "I'm a doctor, trust me" tone, dismisses the public's suffering as a result of the surging prices of recent years. Covering himself with an acknowledgment that he is dealing with averages that may obscure the existence of a little bit of pain here or there, he argues that the perception of suffering from inflation is mainly just a matter of the way people are processing the situation psychologically, the more in as the has American public have not dealt with such a shock in decades. Otherwise people would more rationally appreciate that as the price of the cup of coffee goes from fifty cents to five dollars it is usually the case that the ten dollar bill in their wallet turns into a hundred, and they are no worse off--for as this goes to show "the currency that really matters is how many hours you have to work to afford your groceries, a small treat or a home," and that "none of these real trade-offs have changed." Indeed, he writes, the trend of the past decades all onward and upward for America's economy and the country's working people, a thing he confidently expects to go on indefinitely--envying rather than fearing for the young people who will be twice as rich as people are today forty years from now.

I was aghast at Mr. Wolfers' revolting "I'm a professional" smugness (and misuse and abuse of Bobby McFerrin's hit song), and his use of both to dismiss other people's troubles--but still more aghast at the extreme remoteness of his assessment of the economy from statistically verifiable reality. Contrary to what Mr. Wolfers claims, the reality is that over the past half century the public's purchasing power did not rise in line with prices, but consistently declined relative to many an essential good, as one can see going by the measure he himself suggests, how much people get in return for their hours of work. Let us take as such a basis the median male income--which has the virtue of being a less "processed" number than the inflation figures we see (a fact much exploited by economists inclining toward Wolfers' touted "optimism"), and which can easily be compared with contemporaneous price data .

Consider that in the decade 1963-1972 the median male income equaled 28 percent of the median home sale price.

In 2013-2022 the median male income equaled just 13 percent of that sale price in 2013-2022, and 11 percent in 2022, so that where a house represented about three and a half years of that income, at that later date it represented nine years. (So much for Wolfers' claim that the "hours you have to work to afford . . . a home" has not changed.)

In 1999 (a time in which people already regarded such charges as exorbitant and budget-breaking) the average annual premium for health insurance for a family of four was 21 percent of the median male income.

In 2020-2021 that premium was 45 percent of that income.

In 1968-1969 the average price of tuition and fees at a private four-year college was 28 percent of the starting year's median male income in 1968-1969.

In 2019-2020 it was 87 percent of that income.

And so on and so forth.

Of course, faced with such facts some retort that where many of these goods are concerned the consumer gets more value for their money--but this claim is debatable at best. Can anyone really say, for example, that the college graduate gets three or four times' more value for the proportion of income spent on their education than was the case a half century ago? For instance, as measured by the boost to the incomes of college graduates? Most would consider such claims risible these days (so much so that it is making the young leery of bothering with the commitment). Does the health insurance premium provide twice as much protection, twice as much value for one's health spending, as it did at the turn of the century? I doubt many would say so. People's homes are, to all accounts, bigger than they used to be, but it would be another thing to prove that people are getting as much as they used to for their hour of work here. Certainly there are grounds to think that home prices have risen faster than home sizes, going by the more readily available statistics (the median home perhaps half again as big in square footage terms as it was circa 1970, but more than twice as expensive in the terms discussed here). In any event, it is worth stressing that even were people to prefer the cheaper options standard in yesteryear they are simply not available for, contrary to the "consumer is king" notion of the market propounded by the intellectually orthodox, the reality is that business offers the consumer what it wants them to buy, take it, or take it, with all that implies for people's living standards, and their economic security.

No, trying to blow these facts off with talk of consumers getting more for their money in that way simply will not do, leaving us with that pronounced long-term trend of the purchasing power of a year's or an hour's earnings falling in relation to many of the essentials of daily living. Moreover, contrary to Wolfers' analysis, it is the case that the pandemic-related inflationary shock that is the occasion for his writing has exacerbated the unfortunate trend, in a way likely to remain the case over the long term.

Amid that hard daily reality for hundreds of millions of Americans who were financially battered long before the pandemic-sparked inflationary surge--and the worse being experienced by billions across the globe--Wolfers' sanguine view of the relation of price to income may strike some as not only false and condescending, but an artless attempt at gaslighting the public. Alas, however one labels or explains it such "journalism" is par for the course with a paper that puts notorious science-bashing trolls on its staff while snarling at subscribers that they are intolerant of views other than their own when they question the decision, and snarling at everyone else when they open their mouths to express an opinion that they are just a pack of Know-Nothings spreading "fake news."

The Mainstream Media's Centrism and the Reality of Climate Change

In our time the mainstream media's failures of reportage, as judged by any reasonably objective standard, have been legion, with one of the most notorious of those failures its coverage of climate change--because it has been a matter of the media treating a matter of material reality verifiable and verified through an overwhelming amount of physical science research activity as "debatable."

One can, of course, see this as a matter of the profound ignorance of the media's personnel about scientific matters, and the very real efforts of certain business interests to muddle understanding of the issue, undermining the awareness of what they themselves recognized as fact behind poses of what is euphemistically called "skepticism."

However, one can also see it as a matter of the extent to which the media is deferential to powerful business interests in manifold ways. Where this is concerned editors and journalists operating within the mainstream are little better than "courtiers" of such interests, and indeed act much as if they were even when they are not simply because of the prevalence of centrist ideology in this media.

Consider certain aspects of the centrist ideology relevant here. There is the reality that the "pragmatic" centrist is not interested in figuring out objective reality, let alone solving pressing real-world problems. (Thus does the centrist believe, for example, that in society no one is more powerful than anyone else, that power is something "everyone" has so "no one" has it--a position any sane person should find risible.) What does concern them is the problem of maintaining "consensus" among those interests in society they see as legitimate and therefore as counting. Where people who do "count" are concerned they have a lot more respect for business than they do for scientists, and are as respectful of the concerns of the right as they are disrespectful of the left, regarding as they do the latter as illegitimate "ideologues" (centrists adhering to the pretense that "ideology" is a purely leftist sin).

Naturally the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change impresses a centrist media less than it might someone whose primary concern was what is actually going on in the world, as centrists attend instead to what people say they think about that evidence. Moreover, in considering what they say their according so much more weight to the opinions of business relative to the opinions of scientists, and the opinions of the right as against the left--opinions that deny the problem entirely, or treat the problem as comparatively trivial, or anything else they come up with as they throw everything against the wall and see what will stick--has meant a treatment of the very existence of climate change as "debatable" decades after this position lost any intellectual credibility it may ever have had, and resulted in their giving an immense platform to "inactivism" in all its forms.

Taking all this into account one sees centrists' highly touted respect for expertise prove, at best, highly qualified, and at worst a piece of colossal hypocrisy--experts for whom they demand respect to be respected insofar as interests they respect much more do not oppose them; while the "both sidesism" that is supposedly a default mode for journalism is, as seen here, just a cover for letting powerful interests attack those promulgating facts that simply happen to be "inconvenient" from the standpoint of their bottom line. After all, we all know that on most issues, so far as the media is concerned, only one side is to be given a chance to speak--and any other is to be shut right out of "the conversation" without apology.

The New York Times Does its Part--for Climate Inactivism

The climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann has written of climate "inactivism"--a shift on the part of opponents of action on the problem of climate change from relying principally on denying the existence of climate change to ward off such action to a more variegated and in many respects subtler strategy. Yes, the inactivists admit, climate change exists after all, and yes, it is caused by humans--but it is a small problem, too small to worry about so much about it for now; or we've blown our chances to do anything about it and so can only "grieve" over what we have lost; or any number of other things that all have in common the effect of undermining the will to do something about the problem in one way or another (the trivializers by encouraging us to brush it off, the doomists by breaking our wills), which is after all what the opponents of action are really after. And just as when the preferred strategy was denialism, and the mainstream media indulged this with its very selective "both sidesism," that media has been complicit in the promotion of inactivism every step of the way. (It is no accident that expert-on-nothing Jonathan Franzen was able to publish a high-profile piece of doomist propaganda in The New Yorker, that the media so loves giving time to Bill McGuire and his counterblasts at those calling out doomism as "appeasers" as, contemptuous of those pointing out how doomism has counterproductively demoralized the public, he tells us that the only thing we have to fear is an insufficiency of fear itself.)

The New York Times has been no exception to this pattern via figures like "hippie puncher" Bret Stephens. Perhaps mindful, perhaps not, of the banality that "You never get a second chance to make a first impression," he made that first impression on the paper's readership in 2017 with a piece of denialism that outraged it by, in the tradition of "concern trolling," smarmily employing that "singularly obnoxious rhetorical trick" of pretending to share climate activists' goals while working to undermine those activists' efforts. Then as if publishing such a piece were not bad enough in itself the Times' public editor Liz Spayd answered the outrage that column provoked with an astonishingly sanctimonious piece that implicitly equated their readers' questioning the appropriateness of their publishing in their pages the scientifically baseless climate denialism-behind-a-front-of-concern of a very well-known right-wing ideologue playing the all too familiar game--and indeed their simply not taking "at face value" Stephens' long-beyond-bankrupt attack on climate science as an expression of honest "skepticism"--with intolerance of views other than their own that made them stereotypical "contemptuous liberals" all but justifying the sneering of conservatives like Stephens at their kind. ("You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" she all but said.)

All of this was quite controversial at the time, with many across the media remarking the Times' open disrespect for its readers (dare I say, the contempt of which Ms. Spayd accused them?) in a vile cause. One reader particularly prominent in the dialogue, the aforementioned Dr. Mann, canceled his subscription in reply to Spayd's reply. Of course, all this has not altered the Times' conduct a whit, the paper continuing to not just publish Stephens, but often shove his columns in the faces of its readers, which one can, not incidentally, interpret as being in line with the shift in strategy that Dr. Mann described. When Stephens shifted from what he referred to as his "agnosticism" on the subject of climate change to accepting its reality he went from denying the problem existed at all to instead denying that anything should be done about it in an item in 2022 that, very heavy on page-filling graphics that the reader has to keep clicking through, grabs the reader's attention with the remark that "Yes, Greenland's Ice is Melting," after making them click the down button several times to get much more, only then shows the byline as that of Stephens, making yet another case against action on the problem; a piece in which Stephens, while saying "Okay, you've got us, global warming exists," also says, "but we had best leave resolving the problem to the market," certainly not doing anything such as would inconvenience Big Oil et. al., so that nothing really changes, in what Molly Taft called a "bad faith climate conversion" all too much of a piece with the "concern trolling" that sparked the controversy of five years earlier.

Had the editorship of the Times' presented the piece so that its nature was evident at the very top--so that from the first the reader saw that this was just another column by Stephens, and his essential argument clear at a glance, so that those who actually care about the issue would not have looked any further--his writing about his "bad faith conversion" would have been one thing. However, instead they put on a lavish production that gave every impression of being for the sake of forcing on the unsuspecting another round of the inactivism of a Stephens whose outlook and conduct had not discernibly changed one iota in the five years since his hiring, and I do not doubt that this factored into the particular annoyance many felt with the article, with Stephens, and with the paper that hired him and kept him on its payroll in a display of open contempt for its ostensible audience that just goes on and on in a manner all too telling of how the media really works--and accordingly, just who counts with it, and who does not.

The Materiality of Life and What it Means for What the Real Revolution in Artificial Intelligence Will Look Like

Back in the 1980s Alvin Toffler promulgated visions of an "information age" which would see the birth of an information civilization in which work, wealth, consumption and everything else would be increasingly "dematerialized." Material goods would still exist, of course, but the point was that we would become much, much more efficient at extracting, processing and consuming them, as we substituted information for "crude matter." Indeed, reading Toffler's books The Third Wave and Powershift it seems clear that we were supposed to be on the road toward a world where our manufacturing would become so successful in replacing the scarce and expensive and awkward with the abundant and cheap and convenient; and rigidity with flexibility; as to approach an ideal of cost-effectively making anything out of anything else, an object underlined by the bold declaration opening the preamble of the "Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" he coauthored with like-minded colleagues George Gilder, George Keyworth and Esther Dyson: "The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter . . . physical resources . . . losing value and significance" in economic and political life, for "[t]he powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things."

Alas, from the standpoint of the 21st century's third decade things look quite different from Toffler's vision of a dematerialized information age. As we have been reminded again and again since that supposed overthrow of matter physical resources still have immense, even decisive, significance in economic and political life. We were so reminded amid the commodity price boom that, not least by enabling the recovery of Russian power, helped redraw the geopolitical map, while plunging much of the world into a crisis of food and fuel prices. We were so reminded again as the pandemic, disrupting work processes, underlined the continued importance of persons doing physical labor to produce physical things and render physical services at particular physical locations, with the subsequent price shocks showing how little capacity we still had to adapt to a situation in which those persons did not perform those tasks in the same old ways. We had another reminder in the way that the entirety of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with a manufacturing "value added" fifty times that of Russia, failed to match Russian production of plain old artillery shells--showing how far from that perfect fungibility of productive capacity real-world manufacturing remains. And we had perhaps the most fundamental reminder in the way that "overshoot day" came earlier and earlier each year, as the failure of business to become more efficient at using and making goods and services accelerated and deepened the ecological crisis on just about every front.

All this is something to keep in mind as we consider the revolution in Artificial Intelligence (AI) supposed to be imminent, if not already ongoing, the more in as the more astute analysts of information technology have for decades stressed particular areas where the technology has proven of limited utility, and which have thus translated to its effect on the economy being a far cry from the hype. Chief among these is the capacity of machine intelligences to "sense" the world around them so as to navigate it safely and handle objects in it with dexterity, especially in situations where the environment and the task is complex, variable and requires a steady stream of responses tailored to the individual situation--robots useful on assembly lines producing high value added items like cars, but a robot which can do your laundry elusive.

Back at the height of the "tech boom" euphoria Robert Gordon lucidly pointed this out as thus far limiting the impact of the innovations of the "New Economy," and likely to go on doing so. It is a testament to his grasp of the issue that surveying the possibilities of automation many years later after that particular boom of techn-hype went bust Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne acknowledged these same problem areas as the critical bottlenecks to automation--if in the expectation that progress was being made here, enough so as to trigger something like panic in some quarters. However, a decade on it still seems that this has been an area where, again, progress of the kind they thought was happening has proven slow indeed, exemplified by the failure to produce the really viable self-driving car in the years since that Frey and Osborne seem to have been rather sanguine about in their study, never mind a robot that can do your laundry.

Indeed, it seems telling that the recent surge of hype about artificial intelligence has had nothing to do with any breakthrough producing machine intelligences capable of observing, navigating, manipulating the world around them with human-like versatility, reliability and efficiency. Rather that hype has revolved around Large Language Models--and while at one end of the discourse some people dismiss them as "glorified autocompletes," and at the other some scream that they are Lovecraftian demons to which Silicon Valley has opened the portal, no one denies their limitations in interacting with the physical world. One result is that these artificial intelligences so ill-suited to physical tasks yet (their proponents say) becoming as good as, if not better than, humans at many mental tasks have inverted the cliché about what those "technologically displaced" in the job market must do to go on getting a paycheck--the truck driver not having to "learn to code," but the now superfluous coder needing to learn to drive a truck.

Of course, AI that really does prove to be good enough to replace coders would be consequential, the more in as a stronger artificial intelligence of that type can be used in cases where innovators figure out ways to design the physical activity out of tasks--just as we did with filing. Rather than an office robot that picks through a filing cabinet to get a desired manila folder, computers store electronic files in electronic memories, and it is far from clear that we have done all we can here. (Consider, for instance, how "generative" artificial intelligence may be able to replace physical TV and film production by conjuring up video from a prompt the way Sora is intended to do--a capability that may by the time you are reading this item already have reached the consumer in a crude form.)

Nevertheless, in this material world what will really, really matter is what will happen when--if?--the progress of artificial intelligence reaches the point at which a robot can be counted on to pick up your socks off the floor, add them to the pile of clothes already in the laundry hamper, then take them off for laundering and bring them back to you clean and dry.

Looking Back at Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave

The name Alvin Toffler (1928-2016) does not seem to be spoken much these days, but in the latter decades of the twentieth century that associate editor of Fortune magazine was one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the day. The Accenture study of the top business intellectuals at the turn of the century, when he had been associated with figures like George Gilder in missionary work for the digital age, and Newt Gingrich when he became Speaker of the House at the head of the 1994 "Republican Revolution," actually ranked Toffler at #8 on their list--well ahead of figures like Lester Thurow, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Alfred Chandler and John Naisbitt. Indeed, looking back one is struck by how references to him came up even in pop culture, figures from cyberpunk "godfather" Bruce Sterling to comics giant Alan Moore making casual mention of Toffler's work and even quite specific reference to his ideas in their essays and interviews.

Toffler's very considerable reputation rested heavily on the strength of the ideas he set forth in such bestselling books as Future Shock and The Third Wave (1980)--the latter apparently the single work that did most to popularize and shape conceptions of the "information age." The book's wide influence makes it well worth looking back at what Toffler had to say in that particular book about the matter, starting with just what he meant by the term "Third Wave" in the first place.

As Toffler explained it, human civilization had emerged and overspread the Earth in three waves. The first wave was the agrarian civilization that started well before the dawn of recorded history. The second was the Industrial civilization that emerged in the Western world in the seventeenth century. The third was the "information civilization" that he saw as similarly emerging by the middle of the twentieth century.

Each civilization has its "hidden code" of operating principles. Toffler did not have much to say about First Wave agrarian civilization, but much of his book does address the differences in code between the Second and Third Waves--the industrial and information civilizations--that reflect the organization of their basic economic activities, and in the process color their broader societal organization and cultures in the substructure-structure-superstructure mode familiar to the student of sociology. Toffler identifies the Second Wave, industrial, civilization with the working up of raw materials by using "simple electromechanical principles" using large amounts of materials, energy, and low-skill, repetitive, labor. Making the most of this saw the organization of the work process on the basis of the principles of centralization, concentration, synchronization, standardization, specialization and "maximization"--the exploitation of "economies of scale" that made for a drive toward bigness of facility, of enterprise, of output and run and market. Thus was the old merchant subcontracting manufacturing work to artisans working in their own homes replaced by the factory where the workers were all expected to come to one facility at the same time for the same shift (concentration, centralization), where instead of each making a complete good by themselves the production task was broken up into different steps carefully distributed among the workers, one of whom did their same piece of the task over and over and over again (specialization) so that the next worker could do their own bit of it in turn (synchronization). The result was an elaborate arrangement of people and equipment that could only be changed with difficulty and expense, creating an incentive to avoid such change as much as possible, while for the sake of plain and simple profit amortizing the investment over as much production as possible with the existing arrangement--in the form of as long a run of the same product as possible (standardization, maximization). The case in the cotton cloth-producing textile mill of the eighteenth century, it was as much the case in a twentieth century "integrated" steel mill where armies of workers use vast amounts of coal-derived coke and iron ore to produce in blast furnaces the metal undergirding virtually all the products that distinguished modern life. And its logic culminated in the way electrification and the internal combustion engine remade energy, transport, the daily terms of living and work, and everything having to do with them, from the assembly line to the auto-suburban-consumerist version of middle class existence to the massification of culture and politics as seen in ways from the ascent of the business corporation and nation-state to the status of the era's master institutions, to ideologies such as capitalism and nationalism.

By contrast with that resource processing-oriented Second Wave industrial civilization the Third Wave information civilization was centered on the substitution of "information" (or to use Toffler's preferred term, the "refined information" that is "knowledge") for those inputs of materials, energy, labor the Second Wave civilization used so lavishly.* Of course, substituting information for other inputs is what technological progress had always been about, arguably even before one could speak of agricultural civilization, while innovation of that kind had become systematized and deliberate in the Second Wave--with the codification of the scientific method, the "invention of invention," and the increasingly institutionalized and intensive pursuit of invention in an age of mass scientific education, and formal private and public research efforts. What made the Third Wave different was this form of civilization being centered on this as a result of two factors--the increasing awareness of the practice and its possibilities, and the ecological crisis as the Second Wave civilization hit the limits of expanding in its resource-profligate old way. (Consider, for instance, how oil consumption was doubling every decade or so in the post-war boom years. Had the growth of that consumption continued at the same rate we would be burning through over two billion barrels of oil a day now--twenty times the actual rate of production, a practical impossibility even before we get to the environmental effects.) Of course, that new form of civilization was supposed to be just emergent, but the expectation was that as it developed, the activity of work, creation of value, possession of wealth would increasingly consist of the gathering, processing, storage, movement, usage, ownership of information relative to the gathering, processing, storage, movement, usage, ownership of things.

One may expect from all of the foregoing that third Wave civilization would have a very different code from its Second Wave predecessor, and indeed Toffler anticipated that it would be virtually the opposite of that of the Second Wave industrial civilization he wrote about. Rather than centralization, concentration, synchronization, standardization, specialization and "maximization" he anticipated that its principles would be decentralization, dispersal, flexibility, adaptiveness, and variety and even smallness of scale. Thus instead of everyone showing up to a centralized workplace at the same time one might have people telecommuting from home, and not necessarily all working at the same time, in a more idiosyncratically arranged work process during which the workers, supplying more than repetitive physical labor under the direction of an overseer had to coordinate with each other and solve problems as the group worked on highly customizable and customized products. Seemingly most plausible in areas such as the creation of software or the provision of financial services where the essential products are intangible, the same principles carry over to material production, with steel an example worth considering again--the mini-mill with its electric arc furnaces as against the giant integrated operations that characterized past steelmaking, the work being done to produce "green steel" today, suggestive of a Third Wave approach even to heavy industry. So too does it go with the renewable energy sector, which had a particularly important place in Toffler's predictions--Toffler anticipating that where the Second Wave civilization had been powered by a voracious consumption of finite fossil fuels, the Third Wave civilization would ultimately be renewables-powered, with this feat the simpler to bring about in a world where the substitution of information for things brought about a significant "dematerialization" of life. For example, the idea of replacing individual ownership of gas-burning cars with "Transportation as a Service" accessed through conveniently on-call self-driving electric cars can seem exemplary of Toffler's thinking (even if he did not make that particular prediction).

All that said, when we compare the world we actually live in with the world of his anticipations, how does it measure up? Consider such matters as the spread of telecommuting, and the "energy transition" to renewable energy. One might hail Toffler as a prophet for discussing such contemporary-seeming things in 1980--but the reality is that the world went very little way toward these developments compared with what he predicted. The frenzied, awkward, improvisation in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic showed us how, in spite of the advances in telecommunications, there had been very, very little shift toward telecommuting in the decades since he wrote, while the ferocious resistance of employers to continuing in the practice any longer than they thought they absolutely had to made clear that they had every intention of keeping the workplace "Second Wave" to the extent that they had anything to say about the matter. Meanwhile the energy transition has been a far slower thing than Toffler anticipated. Where he characterized Big Oil, Gas and Coal as dinosaurs likely to fall in the 1980s, and predicted that we would have a renewables-powered civilization by 2025 (just next year!), the fact remains that any such transition remains far closer to its beginning than its end as the fossil fuel industry, as colossal, profitable and powerful as ever, fights back with the help of innumerable partners, allies and hirelings across the world of business, the media and politics.

In all this it seems that we would seem, at best, a long way from the "dematerialization" Toffler described--and indeed thinking about the state of the world it has seemed much more Second Wave than Third in the material foundations of life. One may take from this different conclusions--perhaps that there was really no civilizational shift ongoing the way Toffler thought there was, what he thought a Third Wave civilization a mere tweaking of the Second, which some have simply sought to play up because they thought it would serve their particular political agendas. Or perhaps such a shift is ongoing, but much more slowly than he anticipated--perhaps because he underestimated the force of the opposition to some of the associated changes.

In either case the lack of change is reflected at those structural and superstructural levels. Where Toffler saw the dominance of the large corporation and the nation-state giving way to more diverse, idiosyncratic and commonly smaller entities in economic and political life that arrange and rearrange themselves as immediate requirements dictate, the reality is that we still live in a world of the same sorts of organizations as before, with the same ideologies leading to the same politics and conflicts as before. Thus is one of the key divisions of our time the resurgence of that old division between capitalists of more cosmopolitan mind and the globalization they pursued so ardently, and the resurgence of nationalism now threatening to tear the global economy apart. It also seems to be all too telling that amid the multiplying and intensifying trade wars one of the most conspicuous recent acts has been a massive tariff on imports of those electric cars that were supposed to help take us into that new age of renewable energy, an action all too likely to further slow that already far too much delayed energy transition.

* This definition of information comes from Toffler's later, less well-remembered, but still bestselling 1990 book Powershift, which can be described as rounding out a "trilogy" he began with Future Shock and continued with Third Wave.