Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better. The iPhone 6 will dispense with the annoying home button and feature a 4.8-inch screen and quad-core processor. Google is developing Google Glass, which will allow users to text, take pictures and videos, perform Google searches, and execute other essential functions of contemporary life simply by issuing conversation-level spoken commands to a smart lens attached to a lightweight frame worn above the eyes.Yelp has a hundred million unique monthly visitors, up from seventy million at this time last year. The Dow Jones average just reached an all-time high, having passed 14,000 last week, while, according to the Times, corporate profits are enjoying “a golden age”; as a share of national income, they are at their highest point since 1950.
Day by day, problem by problem, American life is being fine-tuned to the point where experts now confidently predict a state of near-complete perfection by Season Five of “Girls.”
In other news, America’s economic and social decline continues. The percentage of corporate profits going to employees is at its lowest level since 1966. Unemployment remains stuck around eight per cent, and the long-term jobless make up almost forty per cent of the total—historically high figures that continue to baffle economists. “We have an unemployment crisis and only a debt problem,” says Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate at M.I.T. The concentration of wealth at the top grows ever more pronounced. From 2009 to 2011—the years of the financial crisis and the recovery—the income of the top one per cent rose 11.2 per cent. The income of the bottom ninety-nine per cent actually shrank 0.4 per cent.
Eighty per cent of Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are. Analysts predict that the figure will pass ninety per cent at some point during Season Three of “House of Cards.”
The good news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies saw its profits increase by thirty-five per cent.
The bad news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies hired a net total of zero workers. Last month, four days after the price of its shares passed a record high of ninety dollars, the company announced that it would eliminate three thousand employees, after having let go four thousand in 2012.
Detroit is experiencing a boom in private investment, with two new clothing stores already open, and a boutique hotel, coffee-bean roasters, and a Whole Foods store planned for downtown.
Detroit is so broke that its firefighters don’t have enough boots and toilet paper. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has announced the appointment of an emergency manager to run the city’s finances.
“It’s almost a tale of two cities,” Rachel Lutz, the thirty-two-year-old owner of the clothing stores, told the Times.
It’s almost a tale of two countries—on the same news day, in the same story, in the same sentence, in the violent yoking together of apparent opposites. “Around the country, as businesses have recovered, the public sector has in many cases struggled and shrunk.” “Although experts estimate that sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, Wall Street does not expect the cuts to substantially reduce corporate profits—or seriously threaten the recent rally in the stock market.” “The wealthiest .1 per cent of Americans now enjoy a life expectancy of 107.3 years and typically die in their sleep, while the bottom sixty per cent can anticipate living only 56.8 years and are statistically more likely to perish in hideous car accidents and firearm incidents, from drug overdoses, or after losing their lower extremities to diabetes.”
All right, I made up the last one. But it’s thinkable, even probable. Things are moving in that direction. Peter Thiel—perhaps the only conservative libertarian tech billionaire who spends much time worrying about this situation, and who also contributes part of his fortune to finding the “cure for aging”—once told me, “Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.”
Inequality is the ur-story behind most of the news on any given day. A whole literature is devoted to the subject. Fine books by Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Larry Bartels, Timothy Noah, Edward N. Wolff, and the late Tony Judt have analyzed the same statistics and trend lines going back to the nineteen-seventies, discussed many of the same economic forces and political policies behind them, and proposed many of the same remedies. You are not reading another lament. Apparently, inequality will go on getting worse no matter what anyone says, wearing us all down until our indignation is reduced to the moral equivalent of a muscle tic.
But I still wonder what the conjunction of perfectibility stories (in a new book, “To Save Everything, Click Here,” the Internet critic Evgeny Morozov calls this impulse “solutionism”) and decline stories means? What relation do they have with one another? What is it like to keep encountering them together? During the Great Depression, Americans with a little extra money found refuge from hard times on the silver screen, bathing vicariously in the bright glamour of Astaire and Rogers, Grant and Hepburn. But when they left the darkened cinema house and returned to their harassed lives, did pundits and hucksters tell those audiences that everything really was getting better and better? Was there a nineteen-thirties version of the continuously improving iPhone and the TED conference? If so, did newspapers devote entire sections to covering them?
My unprovable hypothesis is that obsessive upgrading and chronic stagnation are intimately related, in the same way that erotic fantasies are related to sexual repression. The fetish that surrounds Google Glass or the Dow average grows ever more hysterical as the economic status of the majority of Americans remains flat. When things don’t work in the realm of stuff, people turn to the realm of bits. If the physical world becomes intransigent, you can take refuge in the virtual world, where you can solve problems–how do I make a video of my skydiving adventure while keeping my hands free?—that most of your countrymen didn’t know existed. Morozov puts it this way: “Last year the futurist Ayesha Khanna even described smart contact lenses that could make homeless people disappear from view, ‘enhancing our basic sense’ and, undoubtedly, making our lives so much more enjoyable. In a way, this does solve the problem of homelessness—unless, of course, you happen to be a homeless person.”
The strange thing is that technological romanticism doesn’t divide Americans. In an age when class and wealth determine everything from your food and beverage to your TV shows, news sources, mode of air travel, education, spouse, children’s prospects, longevity, and cause of death, it’s the one thing that still unites us. I know a man in Tampa who was out of work for nine months after losing his job at Walmart, and more than once almost ended up on the street with his wife and two children. Last week, he was finally hired by a food conglomerate to drive from one convenience store to another, checking the condition of snack bags on the shelves. Like the unemployed Italian man in “The Bicycle Thief” who gets hired to put up movie posters and has to pawn his wedding sheets to buy the bike required for the job, the Tampa family had to sell some of their DVDs so the father could buy decent clothes and shoes and pay for gas.
But he didn’t need to purchase a smart phone. He already had one. And in the future, when the price drops below its current fifteen hundred dollars, the unemployed might wear Google Glass, too. Perhaps it will allow them to disappear from their own field of vision.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: George Packer
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