Slavery, Rome & The Internet

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The rapid expansion of the Roman Republic brought home an unforseen and extremely disruptive dividend:

slaves

By the time that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and transformed the Republic to an Empire, there were so many slaves pouring into Rome that slavery rapidly became a foundation of the Roman economy.

There were agricultural slaves, household slaves, industrial slaves, doctors as slaves. It was pretty pervasive.  So much so that by the end of the 1st Century CE, nearly one-third of the population of Rome was slaves.

Slavery made life quite simple for the wealthy and the middle classes – they did everything no one else wanted to do. But is also was a very disruptive force in what had been a fairly equitable society prior to the expansion of the Empire.  It simply made redundant a good 15%-20% of the population.

Those who would formerly have held jobs that slaves took instead found themselves unemployed, and in fact unemployable.  It created a permanant ‘mob’ class of the perpetually unemployed, who instead had to be endlessly entertained and fed by the empire – Bread and Circus.

Last night I had dinner with two friends, both of whom were, until recently , very well paid and well employed journalists on the TV side. Both have found themselves made redundant by downsizing, driven by the Internet.

Yesterday, I fielded a phone call from a friend of a friend; a newspaper journalist with 20+ years experience, who also now finds herself unemployed.

The answer to all of them, and to  many thousands more is, unfortunately, ‘this is not going to get better.  This is an industry at the end of the line.’  Newspapers, TV stations, Tower Records…. more and more careers, more and more jobs are simply being eliminated by the fact that the web does it faster and cheaper – often for free.

Whole swaths of the economy are being wiped out by the web, never to return.

We don’t have slaves.

What we have instead are web sites.

Web sites that perform our menial tasks, or otherwise, and do it better than armies of laborers or craftsmen used to do it.

How much simpler it is to go to iTunes and download the songs you want instead of going over to Tower Records, flipping through the bins and buying the CDs yourself.

But that simplicity means that the thousands or the tens of thousands who once worked at Tower, at the record companies, at the recording studios, at the printing facilities for the album jackets, and on and on, are not only no longer employed, they are no longer employable.

And they never will be again.

Like those who used to earn their livings as newspaper reporters, or typesetters, or who drove the delivery vans for the Chicago Tribune or those who were cameramen for local TV stations, and more and more are coming every day.  Travel Agents.  Local book stores. Real estate agents. And we are just at the beginning.

As slaves disposessed a whole class of workers in ancient Rome, so now the web is disposessing a whole class of workers in modern day America.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Paul Krugman noted with some degree of alarm, that despite the seeming resurgence of the economy, the one quarter that is not recovering and is showing no sign of recovery is the 10% unemployment number.

This is not surprising.

The economy, driven more than ever by the Internet, is not only going to recover but going to expand, but it is going to do so without taking along a class of workers who find themselves displaced now and forever by our own class of digital slaves.

For Rome, the ‘mob’ became a constant problem and preoccupation for the Empire, and increasingly, as they grew in power and numbers, the source of constant internal rebellion and strife.

The ‘mob’ here is only in its very embryonic state. Perhaps we can avoid the pitfalls of Rome.  But even if our own digital slaves don’t carry with them the ethical issue, they carry the same power to disrupt economies that they did 2,000 years ago.