When Progress Sucks

Salon.com has an interesting article with Jason Lanier, who points out that the Internet is actually destroying jobs and undermining the middle class. He points out how Instagram, for isnstance, helped drive Kodak into bankruptcy: "So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There’s not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society."

Economists speak about "creative destruction," how industrialization for example was ultimately a good thing because it created more jobs even as it drove individual artisans out of business. But the computer revolution, by contrast, is merely destroying jobs without creating anything in its place. That may be the reason why economic conditions continue to get worse in spite of all the new gadgets that keep coming out,