In 1998 I published The Future and Its Enemies, a book that the world is finally catching up with, for good and ill. The old categories of left and right, I argued, didn’t seem as important as a new distinction:
How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning?
Here’s a talk I gave about the book at the Cato Institute in 1998, followed by a critique by David Frum and a discussion. Everyone is very young.
Because the book came out amid the exuberance of the dot-com boom, many people assumed it was inspired by that optimistic era. It was not.
To the contrary, the ideas arose from the turbulence of the early 1990s, a period of great promise and great disruption—much like ours today. Economic statistics looked generally good but there was tremendous anxiety about layoffs and restructuring, especially among white-collar middle managers. (Here’s a review I wrote of a book on that subject.) The “angry white man” became a political touchstone, exemplified by Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down, whose trailer’s scenes resemble a Trump tirade. Trade and immigration policy, once the concern of policy wonks and special-interest groups, became hot-button issues. In California, an influx of newcomers, including me, fueled the anti-growth measures that would create today’s housing shortages—reversing one of the many things I’d loved about coming to L.A.
Although I’d written an early version of the stasis-versus-dynamism model for The Washington Post in 1990, my ideas really began to cohere around 1993, when my husband spent a term teaching at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern. Although still living in L.A., I used to visit Steve as often as possible. That year marked the centennial of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the great world’s fair held in Chicago. It’s best known today from Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City and inspired the line “thine alabaster cities gleam” in “America the Beautiful.”1
While visiting Steve and reading local media, I became interested in both the fair itself and how its optimistic vision contrasted with the populist resentment that was roiling much of the country in the late 19th century.2 I wrote several things inspired by the Exposition, including a talk at Princeton (attended by a half dozen people, including my husband and his parents) and parts of the proposal for The Future and Its Enemies. Those no longer survive, but the following essay, originally published in the November 1993 issue of Reason, does.3
The original Ferris Wheel, whose cars were the size of buses. It was built to rival the Eiffel Tower as a monument to modern engineering.
This year marks the centennial of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the great fair that brought the world to Chicago. In 1893, 28 million visitors wandered through its classically inspired buildings, sampling oranges at the California exhibit and iced cocoa at the Java Village, riding the first Ferris Wheel (which took 40-person cars 264 feet in the air), marveling at the moving pictures of Thomas Edison’s new kinetoscope.
The fair was a tribute to world cultures, technological progress, and material abundance. It captured the spirit of its age.
But history looks different when you’re living through it. Then, as now, progress was not uniformly benevolent. 1893 was a year not unlike 1993, a time of worldwide recession and long-term economic restructuring.
Farmers, in particular, resented the Columbian Exposition’s display of wealth and optimism. For them, abundance meant not oranges and kinetoscopes but falling crop prices and an uncertain future. The Farmer’s Alliance in Gillespie County, Texas, resolved to ask that the fair’s organizers “let the world of pleasure, leisure, and Style see the men and women in their jeans, faded callicoes, cotton-checks who by their labor and handicraft have made it possible for such an Exhibit. Let the Farmer’s cabin, the miner’s shanty, and the tenement of factory hands be beside those magnificent buildings which represent the State and the Nation.”
In 1893, the farmers’ request, and the resentment and anxiety behind it, went mostly unheeded. In 1993, similar sentiments have thrown the country—or at least the opinion makers who define the spirit of our age—into an anxiety attack over jobs.
We hear the voices of those 19th-century farmers in Ross Perot’s cry to “Save Your Job, Save Our Country” by rejecting free trade with Mexico. They echo in the letter to the editor of The Atlantic that declared, “WalMart is the embodiment of the excessive greed of the eighties and the horrendous devastation that has been its byproduct.” They murmur throughout Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations, whispering not of “the world of pleasure” versus “labor and handicraft” but of “symbolic analysts” versus “routine producers” and “in-person servers.”
The mass production revolution traded the independence of farming for the relative security of factory work. Our current “age of discontinuity,” in Peter Drucker’s prescient phrase, reverses that flow. Technological change, global competition, decentralized institutions, and knowledge-based economics have disrupted—and in some cases destroyed—the stable organizations and predictable careers born of the very changes that displaced the farmers of 1893.
We’ve moved from mainframes to laptops, from union members to entrepreneurs, from overtime to flextime, from Ma Bell to Friends and Family. Temporary work, that bane of social critics who long for assembly-line security, has become the safety net for independence-minded people with skills. It allows them to move across the country, to quit jobs with near-impunity, to break into new industries.
But today’s leaders suggest that economic dynamism is either a natural disaster like the Mississippi floods—an unstoppable force against which we are powerless—or a conspiracy of the elite against the masses. The former is the position of most Clintonites, the latter of self-styled populists. In 1993, we see only the faded jeans and calicoes, the tenements and shanties. It is not fashionable to talk about Ferris Wheels and cocoa.
The fashions that dictate a scared new world stem partly from the understandable desire for the products of dynamism without its costs. Politicians who promise utopia, who speak of “electronic superhighways” while pretending they can be built without upheaval, only feed resentment on the part of displaced workers who feel they’ve been conned. Yet talking only of the inevitability of economic change, without mentioning its benefits, drives the fearful into the arms of those who peddle the politics of stasis.
The question no one, least of all Perot, will ask is, What should your country sacrifice to save your job? Consider IBM. In late July, the company said it would eliminate 35,000 jobs by the end of 1994. Since 1986, it has slashed its payroll from more than 400,000 employees to about 250,000.
That’s quite a shock. For decades, IBM represented security. Although it required constant upheaval in the personal lives of its organization men—people joked that the initials stood for “I’ve Been Moved”—it promised lifetime employment and the prestige of association with a progressive big company.
A 1951 IBM ad touts the company’s computer as a way to replace engineers doing routine calculations with slide rules.
It also offered a sense of purpose. In the old days (not coincidentally, Ross Perot’s formative business years), IBM was the future. It was moving America into the age of data processing, a future where “black boxes” with spinning tape drives manned by brainy guys in white shirts would make the world clean, efficient, and orderly. (To social critics, of course, the guys in white shirts represented conformist “mass man,” consigned to live a bland, unfulfilling existence in “little boxes made of ticky-tacky.”)
But that wasn’t the future we got. Instead, long-haired California misfits exploded the centralized mainframe and put a computer on everybody’s desk. Nowadays the biggest question facing computer users isn’t whether the data-processing department will accept their job order but whether to wait six months to buy an even better machine at an even lower price.
Despite its best efforts to keep up, and at times they were very good, the old IBM couldn’t adapt to a decentralized, often chaotic market in which desktop machines took on the power of mainframes and brand loyalty was nearly nonexistent. “Everything I learned at IBM is worthless,” a laid-off engineer told the Los Angeles Times. It remains to be seen whether IBM can reinvent itself or whether, like the Sears catalog, it belongs to the ages.
The anxiety peddlers never ask, Would you give up your laptop to preserve 150,000 jobs at IBM? Do you wish the Mac had never been invented? If you could, would you wipe out desktop publishing, saving not only all those IBMers but also untold numbers of typesetters and paste-up artists?
The personal-computer revolution, like the industrial revolution, is not a natural disaster, though it may feel like one to those whose jobs flooded out. It is, like the transportation revolution that made possible oranges in Chicago, a technological response to the desires of millions for a better life.
Those desires do not please our social critics. In an age of mass production, they railed about the alienation of the worker. Now they complain about the service economy and the shortage of high-paid, workingmen’s jobs even as they denounce frivolous consumption and planet-threatening growth. They long for dark, satanic mills.
It is easy to be nostalgic for the world we have lost, easier still when voters can be bought with nostalgia for the jobs they once held. But the age of discontinuity, too, recalls earlier ages. It asks a familiar-sounding question: Are we better off than we were 100 years ago? Who was right—the farmer or the fair?
The Atlantic recently published a series of 30 high-quality photos from the World’s Columbian Exposition. Highly recommended.
It gets a negative reference in The Fountainhead, echoing the modernist belief that the White City was a beaux arts abomination that set back architectural progress in America for a generation. Ayn Rand may have been unconventional in many ways, but her views of architecture reflected modernist orthodoxy. ↩︎Given the role of inflation in this year’s election, it’s worth noting that the late 1900s were a period of serious deflation, which is equally annoying to people—including farmers—who need debt financing. The value of the dollars you pay your loans back in is greater than the value of the dollars you borrowed. It’s the reverse of what happened to homeowners with mortgages in the 1970s. ↩︎That issue’s cover story, a feature by the great Glenn Garvin on immigrants in California’s informal economy, is well worth a read. ↩︎
Virginia Postrel is a writer with a particular interest in the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. Author of “The Future and Its Enemies,” “The Substance of Style,” “The Power of Glamour,” and, most recently, “The Fabric of Civilization.” This essay was originally published in Virginia’s newsletter on Substack.
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