July 29, 2013
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If
Thomas Friedman didn't exist, America's high-tech entrepreneurs would
have had to invent him. Come to think of it, maybe they did. The dark
science-fiction vision he celebrates serves them well, at pretty much
everyone else's expense.
Friedman's
vision is worth studying, if only because it reflects the distorted
perspective of some very wealthy and influential people. In their world
the problems of the many are as easily fixed as a line of code, with no
sacrifice required of them or their fellow billionaires.
Case in point: 15 or 20 million Americans seeking full-time employment? To Thomas Friedman, that's a branding problem.
Ayn Rand with a human face ...
Friedman occupies a unique place in the pundit ecosystem. From his perch at the New York Times, he
idealizes the unregulated, winner-take-all economy of the Internet and
while overlooking human, real-world concerns. His misplaced faith in a
digitized "free" market reflects the solipsistic libertarianism of a
technological über-class which stares into the rich diversity of human experience and sees only its own reflection staring back.
Friedman
is a closet Ayn Rand in many ways, but he gives Rand's ugly and
exploitative philosophy a pseudo-intellectual, liberal-friendly
feel-good gloss. He turns her harsh industrial metal music into
melodious easy listening: John Galt meets John Denver. That make him
very useful to those who would dismantle the engines of real economic
growth, the ones which create jobs while protecting life and limb.
Friedman's column in this weekend's New York Times is,
characteristically, a Panglossian panegyric to online technology as the
salve for all economic problems. In it he paints the picture of a
global dystopia where decent jobs are scarce, educational advancement is
unattainable, and people must sacrifice their homes, their possessions,
and their personal lives to serve and amuse complete strangers.
He can hardly wait.
Mi casa es su casa ...
The
framing device for Friedman's vision is the tale of two
twenty-somethings who, like so many Friedman protagonists, built an
Internet company. Friedman's column is called "The Sharing Economy,"
and it celebrates the creators of an online platform called "Airbnb"
which lets people rent out their homes to strangers. Online
marketplaces like Airbnb are very interesting economic phenomena. They
can be useful and even transformative. But they can also be dangerous,
unsafe, and overhyped.
Enter Thomas Friedman.
Digital
libertarians like Jeff Bezos of Amazon see these digital marketplaces
as the electronic realization of a free market fantasy. They promote
platforms like Bezos' "Mechanical Turk" system of online job sharing,
unconcerned about their ability to accelerate the destruction of decent
wages and secure jobs. (They're also blissfully unaware of the
embarrassing contradiction between their own libertarianism and the
fortunes they've earned from government-created technologies like the
Internet.)
Friedman
seems to share a Bezos-like vision of unregulated marketplaces for
every aspect of human activity. He waxes ecstatic about Airbnb, which
he sees as both a practical solution and a broader model for a future
economy. Friedman thinks that renting out your private space, your
personal time, and your possessions will soon become the only way to
make ends meet - that is, unless you possess extraordinary skills, which
could land you a mediocre job at best.
And he thinks that's just fine.
Decoding Friedman
Consider this passage from Friedman's column:
"In a world where, as I've argued, average is over --
the skills required for any good job keep rising -- a lot of people who
might not be able to acquire those skills can still earn a good living
now by building their own branded reputations, whether it is to rent
their kids' rooms, their cars or their power tools."
This
paragraph reads like a Zen koan pieced together from cast-away
fragments of motivational sales speeches. We're left to infer the
meaning of its more obscure phrases from their context, the same way
World War II codebreakers cracked particularly difficult passages in
enemy telexes. So let's try to tease out its meaning, phrase by phrase:
"In a world where, as I've argued, average is over ..." (Emphasis from the original.)
"Average
is over"? Averaging is a mathematical function, inextricably woven
into the fabric of reality as we understand it. How can it be over? It's
like saying that subtraction is over, or means and medians are null and
void. (Watch yourself, standard deviation. Thomas Friedman has his eye
on you.)
What's
he really saying here? The "as I've argued" offers one clue to
motivation, if not meaning: Anything self-referential from this author -
and that's a lot - is a signal that he's floating another potential
"The World Is Flat" book title.
But what's he saying? Our context-driven codebreaking takes us to the next phrase:
"... the skills required for any good job keep rising ..."
Ah,
I see. "Average is over" is connected to job skills. Friedman
apparently means that you can't get a good job anymore if your skill
level is only average.
Why didn't he just say so?
20 Million Startups
What
are the implications of a world in which you must be above average to
get "any good job"? When Garrison Keillor described Lake Woebegon as a
place where "all the children are above average," it was a joke. But
Friedman's not joking. He's describing a world in which ordinary people
are excluded from decent employment - and he's doing it without
expressing regret or demanding change.
To
be fair, Friedman is an advocate for education - in his own way. But
his education arguments, like his economic ones, focus on the online,
the gimmicky, and the jargon-laden. Friedman's world doesn't seem to
include manufacturing jobs, or construction jobs, or good government
jobs. He envisions a workforce made up almost exclusively of "lateral
thinkers" and "integration" engineers. Students should be trained to "invent" their jobs, says Friedman, who claims that self-invented work will be the best source of future employment.
Based
on the number of people currently seeking full-time employment in the
US alone, 15 or 20 million people need to "invent" their jobs pretty
quickly. That's a lot of Internet start-ups, along with a whole boatload
of "lateral thinking."
Friedman's unrealistic view of the labor force, shared by many tech entrepreneurs, is one in which the middle class is as passé as a Commodore 64. How can formerly middle-class Americans survive in the world they envision?
Average White Brand
According
to Thomas Friedman, tens of millions of un- and under-employed
Americans can "earn a good living online by building their own branded
reputations." (That's right: He went there. He said "branded
reputation.") Using websites like Airbnb, Friedman suggests, they can
rent out "their kids' rooms, their cars or their power tools."
Friedman seems unaware that millions of Americans don't have kids'
rooms. (Lots of people don't have cars or power tools, either.) He
might be astonished to learn that even in New York City, where he is
professionally based, nearly half the population is considered either
"poor" or "near poor." Those who live in ghettoes or other
concentrations of minority poverty don't seem to exist for him.
Airbnb
was co-invented by a kid who needed rent money after graduating from
the Rhode Island School of Design. But there are families that can't
afford to send their kids to the Rhode Island School of Design. And not
everybody can move to San Francisco, where Friedman's plucky young
heroes conducted the business transaction which led to the creation of
Airbnb.
"Three
people stayed with us," said co-founder Brian Chesky, "and we charged
them $80 a night. We also made breakfast for them and became their local
guides."
San
Francisco's one of the most desirable tourist destinations in the
country. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Friedman that not everybody
lives in such a desirable location - or that some of us would rather
not give up a large chunk of our personal space to strangers while
serving as their personal cooks and chauffeurs. What's next? Hiring
ourselves out to millionaires as "faithful family retainers,"
antebellum-style ?
As I read this column my mind kept wandering to the recent Bill Moyers program about Milwaukee, "Two American Families,"
and to a recent visit to my equally hard-hit home town of Utica, New
York. Trust us, Mr. Friedman: There won't be a lot of "Airbnb" tourists
looking to rent beds or cars in Milwaukee or Utica.
hellonearth.com
Friedman
seems blithely unaware of the role of regulation in keeping us safe. Do
we really want to rent cars from strangers without knowing whether
they've been properly maintained? A "branded reputation" is fine until
the brakes give out on a steep incline. And power tools? One broken
chain-saw blade and you could wind up looking like a bit player in a
Tobe Hooper movie.
But
safety, important as it is, barely scratches the surface of the
problem. Friedman's overall vision, his conception of a "new economy,"
is what's truly terrifying.
Any
rational person who has glimpsed Friedman's dystopian future - which he
has pretty accurately envisioned, based on current trends - would
urgently begin seeking out alternatives and solutions. They'd want to
prevent our economy from becoming an electronic marketplace where the
needy and desperate peddle their time, space and possessions to the
well-to-do in a desperate bid for survival.
They certainly wouldn't celebrate this sci-fi dystopia, as Friedman does.
Mirror, mirror ...
There are alternatives
we can pursue collectively: An aggressive government program of job
creation. A return to the days of social mobility. An end to the gross
concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. And, above all,
affordable education for all so that we can restore the American dream
of self-advancement.
Instead
Friedman glorifies globalization and the destruction of good jobs. He's
indifferent to the loss of social mobility and infatuated with mediocre
or at best mildly clever web enterprises. Friedman is the praise singer
of Palo Alto, the griot of Los Gatos, and he's never met a Internet billionaire he didn't like.
Thomas
Friedman is the perfect mirror for the undeserved self-infatuation
which has infected our corporate, media, and political class. He's the
chief fabulist of the detached elite, the unfettered Id of the global
aristocracy, the Horatio Alger of self-deluded, self-serving,
self-promoting techno-hucksterism.
But
give the man his due: When it comes to "building your brand
reputation," Friedman's a master of the art. It helps to have the
perfect platform, of course. As soon as the New YorkTimes is ready to hire 20 million more columnists, our employment problems will be over.
RJ Eskow is a writer,
business person, and songwriter/musician. He has worked as a consultant
in public policy, technology, and finance, specializing in healthcare
issues.