The consolidation that began in the late 19th century continued for most of the 20th. By the end of World War II, as Michael Lind writes, “the major sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations.”
.. Plus since TVs were expensive whole families watched the same shows together, so they had to be suitable for everyone.
.. In a way mid-century TV culture was good. The view it gave of the world was like you’d find in a children’s book, and it probably had something of the effect that (parents hope) children’s books have in making people behave better. But, like children’s books, TV was also misleading. Dangerously misleading, for adults. In his autobiography, Robert MacNeil talks of seeing gruesome images that had just come in from Vietnam and thinking, we can’t show these to families while they’re having dinner.
.. Much of the de facto pay of executives never showed up on their income tax returns, because it took the form of perks. The higher the rate of income tax, the more pressure there was to pay employees upstream of it. (In the UK, where taxes were even higher than in the US, companies would even pay their kids’ private school tuitions.)
.. If the company promised to employ you till you retired and give you a pension afterward, you didn’t want to extract as much from it this year as you could. You needed to take care of the company so it could take care of you. Especially when you’d been working with the same group of people for decades. If you tried to squeeze the company for more money, you were squeezing the organization that was going to take care of them.
.. And the second reason is that if you want to solve a problem using a network of cooperating companies, you have to be able to coordinate their efforts, and you can do that much better with computers. Computers reduce the transaction costs that Coase argued are the raison d’etre of corporations. That is a fundamental change.
.. IBM’s big mistake was to accept a non-exclusive license for DOS. It must have seemed a safe move at the time. No other computer manufacturer had ever been able to outsell them. What difference did it make if other manufacturers could offer DOS too? The result of that miscalculation was an explosion of inexpensive PC clones.
.. Gradually the government realized that anti-competitive policies were doing more harm than good, and during the Carter administration it started to remove them. The word used for this process was misleadingly narrow: deregulation. What was really happening was de-oligopolization.
.. Obviously the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups. I suspect it was for most of what happened in finance too. But was it a precondition for globalization or the LBO wave? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility. It may be that the refragmentation was driven by computers in the way the industrial revolution was driven by steam engines. Whether or not computers were a precondition, they have certainly accelerated it.
.. in the early 1980s that the term “yuppie” was coined. That word is not much used now, because the phenomenon it describes is so taken for granted, but at the time it was a label for something novel. Yuppies were young professionals who made lots of money. To someone in their twenties today, this wouldn’t seem worth naming. Why wouldn’t young professionals make lots of money? But until the 1980s being underpaid early in your career was part of what it meant to be a professional. Young professionals were paying their dues, working their way up the ladder. The rewards would come later. What was novel about yuppies was that they wanted market price for the work they were doing now.
.. In 1960, corporate CEOs had immense prestige. They were the winners of the only economic game in town. But if they made as little now as they did then, in real dollar terms, they’d seem like small fry compared to professional athletes and whiz kids making millions from startups and hedge funds. They don’t like that idea, so now they try to get as much as they can, which is more than they had been getting.
.. Not everyone who gets rich now does it by creating wealth, certainly. But a significant number do, and the Baumol Effect means all their peers get dragged along too. [23] And as long as it’s possible to get rich by creating wealth, the default tendency will be for economic inequality to increase. Even if you eliminate all the other ways to get rich. You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top, but unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth, you’re always going to be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity.
The Binge Breaker
Harris is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience. As the co‑founder of Time Well Spent, an advocacy group, he is trying to bring moral integrity to software design: essentially, to persuade the tech world to help us disengage more easily from its devices.
.. He is rallying product designers to adopt a “Hippocratic oath” for software that, he explains, would check the practice of “exposing people’s psychological vulnerabilities” and restore “agency” to users. “There needs to be new ratings, new criteria, new design standards, new certification standards,” he says. “There is a way to design based not on addiction.”
.. . Elman compares the tech industry to Big Tobacco before the link between cigarettes and cancer was established: keen to give customers more of what they want, yet simultaneously inflicting collateral damage on their lives.
.. Harris learned that the most-successful sites and apps hook us by tapping into deep-seated human needs. When LinkedIn launched, for instance, it created a hub-and-spoke icon to visually represent the size of each user’s network. That triggered people’s innate craving for social approval and, in turn, got them scrambling to connect.
.. “Even though at the time there was nothing useful you could do with LinkedIn, that simple icon had a powerful effect in tapping into people’s desire not to look like losers,” Fogg told me. Harris began to see that technology is not, as so many engineers claim, a neutral tool; rather, it’s capable of coaxing us to act in certain ways.
.. Though Harris insists he steered clear of persuasive tactics, he grew more familiar with how they were applied. He came to conceive of them as “hijacking techniques”—the digital version of pumping sugar, salt, and fat into junk food in order to induce bingeing.
.. McDonald’s hooks us by appealing to our bodies’ craving for certain flavors; Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter hook us by delivering what psychologists call “variable rewards.” Messages, photos, and “likes” appear on no set schedule, so we check for them compulsively, never sure when we’ll receive that dopamine-activating prize.
.. Sites foster a sort of distracted lingering partly by lumping multiple services together. To answer the friend request, we’ll pass by the News Feed, where pictures and auto-play videos seduce us into scrolling through an infinite stream of posts—what Harris calls a “bottomless bowl,” referring to a study that found people eat 73 percent more soup out of self-refilling bowls than out of regular ones, without realizing they’ve consumed extra.
..In the end, he says, companies “stand back watching as a billion people run around like chickens with their heads cut off, responding to each other and feeling indebted to each other.”
.. One such guru is Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, who has lectured or consulted for firms such as LinkedIn and Instagram.
.. he quietly released “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention,” a 144-page Google Slides presentation. In it, he declared, “Never before in history have the decisions of a handful of designers (mostly men, white, living in SF, aged 25–35) working at 3 companies”—Google, Apple, and Facebook—“had so much impact on how millions of people around the world spend their attention … We should feel an enormous responsibility to get this right.”
.. Although Harris sent the presentation to just 10 of his closest colleagues, it quickly spread to more than 5,000 Google employees, including then-CEO Larry Page, who discussed it with Harris in a meeting a year later.
.. Harris left the company last December to push for change more widely, buoyed by a growing network of supporters that includes the MIT professor Sherry Turkle
.. Harris hopes to mobilize support for what he likens to an organic-food movement, but for software: an alternative built around core values, chief of which is helping us spend our time well, instead of demanding more of it.
.. Even Fogg, who stopped wearing his Apple Watch because its incessant notifications annoyed him, is a fan of Harris’s work: “It’s a brave thing to do and a hard thing to do.”
.. The hypnosis class Harris went to before meeting me—because he suspects the passive state we enter while scrolling through feeds is similar to being hypnotized—was not time well spent... Harris gives off a preppy-hippie vibe that allows him to move comfortably between Palo Alto boardrooms and device-free retreats...other Unplug SF attendees, many of whom belong to a new class of tech elites “waking up” to their industry’s unwelcome side effects. For many entrepreneurs, this epiphany has come with age, children, and the peace of mind of having several million in the bank, says Soren Gordhamer, the creator of Wisdom 2.0, a conference series about maintaining “presence and purpose” in the digital age. “They feel guilty,” Gordhamer says. “They are realizing they built this thing that’s so addictive.”.. he pruned the first screen of his phone to include only apps, such as Uber and Google Maps, that perform a single function and thus run a low risk of “bottomless bowl–ing.”.. I’m usually quick to be annoyed by friends reaching for their phones, but next to Harris, I felt like an addict. Wary of being judged, I made a point not to check my iPhone unless he checked his first, but he went so long without peeking that I started getting antsy... Harris is developing a code of conduct—the Hippocratic oath for software designers—and a playbook of best practices that can guide start-ups and corporations toward products that “treat people with respect.” Having companies rethink the metrics by which they measure success would be a start... for example, an inbox that asks how much time we want to dedicate to email, then gently reminds us when we’ve exceeded our quota... Technology should give us the ability to see where our time goes, so we can make informed decisions—imagine your phone alerting you when you’ve unlocked it for the 14th time in an hour.. Harris has demoed a hypothetical “focus mode” for Gmail that would pause incoming messages until someone has finished concentrating on a task, while allowing interruptions in case of an emergency... Harris hopes to create a Time Well Spent certification—akin to the leed seal or an organic label.. Harris has experimented with creating software that would capture how many hours someone devotes weekly to each app on her phone, then ask her which ones were worthwhile. The data could be compiled to create a leaderboard that shames apps that addict but fail to satisfy... The biggest obstacle to incorporating ethical design and “agency” is not technical complexity. According to Harris, it’s a “will thing.” And on that front, even his supporters worry that the culture of Silicon Valley may be inherently at odds with anything that undermines engagement or growth... He recognizes that this shift would require reevaluating entrenched business models so success no longer hinges on claiming attention and time... the first generation of Time Well Spent software might be available at a premium price, to make up for lost advertising dollars. “Would you pay $7 a month for a version of Facebook that was built entirely to empower you to live your life?,”.. Harris fears that Snapchat’s tactics for hooking users make Facebook’s look quaint. Facebook automatically tells a message’s sender when the recipient reads the note—a design choice that, per Fogg’s logic, activates our hardwired sense of social reciprocity and encourages the recipient to respond... Snapchat ups the ante: Unless the default settings are changed, users are informed the instant a friend begins typing a message to them—which effectively makes it a faux pas not to finish a message you start... Harris worries that the app’s Snapstreak feature, which displays how many days in a row two friends have snapped each other and rewards their loyalty with an emoji, seems to have been pulled straight from Fogg’s inventory of persuasive tactics... Research shared with Harris by Emily Weinstein, a Harvard doctoral candidate, shows that Snapstreak is driving some teenagers nuts—to the point that before going on vacation, they give friends their log-in information and beg them to snap in their stead... Harris thinks his best shot at improving the status quo is to get users riled up about the ways they’re being manipulated, then create a groundswell of support for technology that respects people’s agency—something akin to the privacy outcry.. Edelman suggests that the incentive to adapt can originate within the industry, as engineers become reluctant to build products they view as unethical and companies face a brain drain...the more working there “becomes uncool,” he says, a view I heard echoed by others in his field. “You can really burn through engineers hard.”.. There is arguably an element of hypocrisy to the enlightened image that Silicon Valley projects, especially with its recent embrace of “mindfulness.”
thoughts on the processing of words
The heart of the matter was mistakes. When typing on a typewriter, you made mistakes, and then had to decide what, if anything, to do about them; and woe be unto you if you didn’t notice a mistyped word until after you had removed the sheet of paper from the machine.
.. For some few writers the advent of word processing was a pure blessing: Stanley Elkin, for instance, whose multiple sclerosis made it impossible for him to hold a pen properly or press a typewriter’s keys with sufficient force, said that the arrival of his first word-processing machine was “the most important day of my literary life.” But for most professional writers — and let’s remember that Track Changes is a literary history of word processing, not meant to cover the full range of its cultural significance — the blessing was mixed. As Rice says, now that endless revision is available to you, as a writer you have no excuse for failing to produce “the perfect book” — or rather, no excuse save the limitations of your own talent.
.. Kirschenbaum also wonders “who was the first author to sit down in front of a digital computer’s keyboard and compose a published work of fiction or poetry directly on the screen.”
Quite possibly it was Jerry Pournelle, or maybe it was David Gerrold or even Michael Crichton or Richard Condon; or someone else entirely whom I have overlooked. It probably happened in the year 1977 or 1978 at the latest, and it was almost certainly a popular (as opposed to highbrow) author.
.. Wallace, for instance, always wrote in longhand and transcribed his drafts to the computer at some relatively late stage in the process. Also, when he had significantly altered a passage, he deleted earlier versions from his hard drive so he would not be tempted to revert to them.
.. “Every impulse that I had to generalize about word processing — that it made books longer, that it made sentences shorter, that it made sentences longer, that it made authors more prolific — was seemingly countered by some equally compelling exemplar suggesting otherwise.”
.. Thomas Hobbes says in Leviathan (1650) that in comparison with the invention of literacy itself printing is perhaps “ingenious” but fundamentally “no great matter.”
As We Become Cameras
A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).
—Susan Sontag, “The Image-World” (1973)
Before the industrial revolution, it was uncommon for clocks to have minute hands. Only a very select class could afford a private timepiece until the 20th century.
.. These days, time is so common it is invisible.
.. Still, our time-appetite is never sated: Stock traders are working hard against physical barriers to coordinate their process below the millisecond.
Like images, a capitalist society requires time.
.. Glass failed because it was a tool for creating an order of magnitude more images before they were ready to be consumed.
.. Skeptics rightly asked “Are you taking a video of me right now?” because there was no conceivable place to view such images. Our appetite hadn’t grown large enough, nor had the software to cater to it. Beme, Snapchat, Facebook, and likely dozens of others are building that consumption software right now.
.. What happens when images are integrated as fully into our reality as time?
.. We are approaching a world in which visual and auditory presence at a distance—seeing as another, instantly—is not a rare luxury good, but a basic assumption of society and industry.
.. Sontag’s image-world is dark and instrumental: images are class succor and control. Logical enough from the perspective of 1970s photography, in which camera ownership and image distribution were limited to the relatively powerful. The era we are in the midst of, with a profusion of cheap, miniature, wearable, networked cameras and screens, is quite different.
.. As they become ubiquitous, I doubt we will think of these things as cameras much longer. We hardly think of the tiny quartz wafers inside every integrated circuit as “clocks,” if we think of them at all. Cameras will become equally invisible facilitators of remote vision.