Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (3 page)

For a happy couple of centuries before industrialism and the modern era, the business landscape looked something like Burning Man, the famous desert festival for digital artisans. The military campaigns of the Crusades had opened new trade routes throughout Europe and beyond. Soldiers were returning from faraway places after having been exposed to all sorts of new crafts and techniques for building and farming. They even copied a market they had observed in the Middle East—the bazaar—where people could exchange not only their goods but also their ideas, leading to innovations in milling, fabrication, and finance.

The bazaar was a peer-to-peer economy, something along the lines of eBay or Etsy, where attention to human relationships and reputations promoted better business. There was no middleman, no central platform through which exchanges were conducted, except for the appointed time
and place of the bazaar itself.
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Since people transacted back and forth, all sorts of interdependencies developed that in turn fostered more and better commerce. Pete the wainwright bought oats from Joe the oat seller, who needed to provide a good product not simply because he wanted to keep a customer but because he needed good wagon wheels. To give Pete bad oats meant risking more than future business; it meant that the craftsperson making Joe’s wife’s wagon wheels would be sick on the job. This was a bound community of commerce, where transactions were informed by a multiplicity of values.

The quality of goods and services was maintained by a system of guilds covering each of the major trades. It wasn’t a perfect scheme, as guilds often favored the children of existing members, but it was characterized less by competition among members than by the standardization of prices, the training of apprentices, and the exchange of best practices. Members of a guild could decide to make a rule, say, to take Sundays off. This would ensure a shorter workweek for all members without putting anyone at a competitive disadvantage.

Thanks to the emergence of the bazaar, Europe in the late Middle Ages enjoyed one of the most rapid economic expansions in history. For the first time in many centuries, the economy
grew
. People ate more, worked less, and became quite healthy—and not just by the standards of that era.
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The problem was that while the merchant class was gaining wealth, the aristocracy was losing it. Noble families had enjoyed the spoils of feudalism for centuries by passively extracting the value of peasants who worked the land. They never worried about growth because they didn’t need to. Things had always been just fine with them as the lords over everyone.

As the new trading economy grew, however, all this began to change. With many former peasants going into business for themselves, the aristocracy lost its monopoly over value creation. The people’s economy was growing while the aristocracy’s remained stagnant or even shrank. The nobles had no way to keep up. They looked at this new phenomenon of growth and wanted some of it for themselves. They got their growth, but
through forced and artificial means. Where the growth of the peasant economy could be considered natural, or even appropriate, the aristocracy’s efforts to usurp it were less so. It’s one thing for growth to help peasants achieve subsistence. It’s another for those who already own pretty much everything to use growth purely as a means to prevent others’ enrichment. But that’s exactly what happened.

The nobles still had the power to write the law, and in a series of moves that took place in different countries at different times, they taxed the bazaar, broke up the guilds, outlawed local currencies, and bestowed monopoly charters on their favorite merchants. In exchange for stock, kings granted certain companies exclusive control over their industries. The peer-to-peer, or “P2P,” nature of the economy changed—not overnight, but over a couple of centuries—to the top-down economy we know today.
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Instead of making and trading, craftspeople had to seek employment from one of the chartered monopolies. Instead of selling their wares, people now sold their hours. Counterintuitively, perhaps, business owners learned to seek out the least qualified workers. A skilled shoemaker might demand pay befitting his expertise. An immigrant seeking day labor could be gotten on the cheap and was easily replaced by another if he protested his hours, conditions, or compensation. But how could a bunch of unskilled workers create a viable product? Welcome to the industrial age.

What we now call industrialization was actually an extension of the aristocracy’s effort to usurp the growth it witnessed in the peasants’ marketplace and to imitate it by other means. Industry was really just the development of manufacturing processes that required less skill from human laborers. Instead of having to learn how to make shoes, each worker could be trained in minutes to do one tiny part of the job. In the long run, many industrial processes have ended up more efficient than production by individual craftspeople, but that’s most often because their total costs are hidden or externalized to others. (The government pays for wars to procure cheap oil and roads to convey mass-produced products, while we all pay for the environmental stresses caused by corporate agriculture, and so on.) Prices may be low, but the
costs
are high. It was never really about
efficiency anyway; industrialization was about restoring the power of those at the top by minimizing the value and price of human laborers. This became the embedded value system of industrialism, and we see it in every aspect of the commercial landscape, then and now.

Of course industrialism wasn’t sold to us as the disempowerment of workers, but as the triumph of technology. As far back as Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition in 1851—the original World’s Fair, really—the public was dazzled by exhibits featuring wondrous new technologies that seemed to run without any human workers at all. Attendees marveled at the mechanical looms used to make rugs in India but were never exposed to the laborers who operated them, lost fingers to them, or were displaced by them. Instead, manufacturers proudly demonstrated how their machine-produced rugs showed no evidence of human craftsmanship. Today’s technology fairs, from the Consumer Electronics Show to South by Southwest, offer audiences the latest in digital gadgetry with nary a mention of the labor going into their assembly, the death of slaves mining for the “conflict minerals” they require, or the agricultural regions destroyed by the pollutants released in their production.

Let’s call it the dumbwaiter effect. Remember the ingenious little hand-operated elevator Thomas Jefferson invented for his servants to deliver meals up from the basement kitchen to the dining room? Today we think of it as a time- and energy-saving technology. But for Jefferson, it had less to do with saving his kitchen staff needless walks up staircases than with distancing himself and his guests from the harsh realities of slave labor—at least while they were eating. With the dumbwaiter, food simply arrived as if from a
Star Trek
replicator. No human effort, or discomfort, needed to be recognized. This became an important strategy as the rest of human society became increasingly dependent on unseen labor.

While mass production disconnects workers from skills and the creation of value, mass marketing now disconnects workers from the people they’re serving. Mass-produced products may have lost their handcrafted quality, but they made up for it with consistency. The real obstacle to their adoption was the lack of a human connection between producer and
consumer. Instead of buying oats out of a barrel from Joe the local oat miller, we were supposed to buy oats in a box, shipped from hundreds of miles away. At best, the relationship with the craftsman was replaced by one with the human salesperson—who was really just a surrogate consumer at the wholesale level. Manufacturers had to substitute something for the lost human bond between consumer and producer, or supersede it where it still existed.

This is where branding came in. Putting, say, a Quaker on the box of oats gave consumers a new face to look at—and one more consistently friendly than that human miller’s. Unlike the real craftsperson, the brand icon could be embedded with whatever mythology the marketer chose and forge an even deeper connection with the consumer. Of course, brand mythology had little or nothing to do with the product or its manufacture. If anything, it was a way of distracting consumers from the reality of the factory, its conditions, and its great distance away. Meanwhile, expositions and world’s fairs have always celebrated the machines of industry over the humans who operated them. The Victorian exhibition displayed mechanical looms with no laborers, and the 1964 World’s Fair conveyed people on moving sidewalks while showing them peopleless, automated factories. In today’s computer-animated TV commercials, shiny parts fly together into a completed appliance or vehicle as if by magic. Consumers may as well be buying their cookies, cars, and computers from the machines themselves.

Finally, mass media—itself the product of industrial-age technologies, from the printing press to the satellite—gave manufacturers a way of spreading their brand mythologies across the country or around the world. Thanks to this advertising, consumers could forge relationships with brands before they had even arrived on the store shelves. That Quaker may as well have been an old friend smiling from the package. Or better.

But this last stage of industrialism came with a human price as well. Just as mass production devalued human labor, and mass marketing separated consumers from producers, mass media isolated human
consumers from one another. Those fashion and perfume spots promising friends and lovers are not intended for those who already have friends and lovers. Advertisements work best on lonely individuals. So it’s no coincidence that mass media tend to atomize us, creating millions of markets of one person each. That’s how the television evolved from a hearth in the living room watched by the whole family to a television in each bedroom and a cable channel or YouTube stream for each person. They don’t call the stuff on television “programming” for nothing—only in this case, it’s humans being programmed, not machines.

In a snapshot, the transition from peer-to-peer, artisanal economic values and mechanisms to those of the industrial age looks something like this:

We’ll trace each of these developments more fully, but for now what’s important to notice is that each industrial innovation diminished the value of one human element after another. Identifiably crafted products, such as the manuscript, gave way to mechanically reproducible ones, such as the printed book. Instead of relating to products through the human who made them, people relate to the brand on the package, and so on. People are disconnected from the value chain. This was by design, even if the intentions behind that design have been submerged and forgotten. Remember, industrialism’s primary intent was to subvert a rising middle class and their peer-to-peer market system. Merchants and craftspeople were creating value from the bottom up and threatening the passively earned income of the aristocracy. The object of the game was to get people out of the way, because they create value independently, demand compensation, and value their relationships over their purchases. And the game remains the same to this day.