The iPad of the 19th Century
The New York Times reported yesterday that nationally people are at a ‘low mood’ when they think about the future of the economy and the nation.
There are short-term fixes, but in a longer sense, we are undergoing a massive transformation in the kind of nation we are, driven largely by technology.
And when technology changes, there is little you can do, except understand what is going to happen and try to get on the right side of history.
A little more than a 150 years ago, 80% of the population of the US worked on farms. That was what was necessary to provide the food the nation required.
The introduction of technology to agriculture (as above) suddenly changed the world of farming – one that had, until then, been little changed since the time of the Romans.
Steam driven and later gasoline driven technologies, applied to agriculture suddenly made most of the former farm workers redundant.
Today, 2% of the population work on farms, and that 2% provide more food than the 80% do.
The other 78% suddenly found themselves unemployed.
But there were greater, and even more interesting ramifications to the industrialization of agriculture. Changes we often overlook, but changes which have great parallels to our own situation today.
The industrialization of agriculture not only meant fewer people or families working the land, it also meant an avalanche of produce and meat and dairy at vastly lower prices. (Like content and intellectual property and video and journalism today).
This flood of cheap food caused a massive deflationary cycle worldwide. As the global markets flooded with cheap American food, it became more cost effective, in England, for example, to import cereals from America, and later with the development of refrigerated ships, meat and even dairy produce. As a result, more and more English land was actually taken out of production (America was England’s India, in a way), and the former farmworkers and agricultural workers of England were also laid off.
In fact, England experienced a period of sustained deflation from the end of the Napoleonic Wars through the 1920s. The combination of international trade and mechanized agriculture was a killer for an economy based on agriculture.
Now instead of steam-driven reapers we have an Internet that effectively does the same thing. TV stations that once employed 500 people can be more efficiently and more productively run with 50 or fewer. Craigslist took the place of classified advertising in every newspaper in the country. What do you think? 100,000 jobs? Probably. And it’s also cheaper and far more powerful a way of selling things. Borders Bookstores just went into Chapter 11, while Amazon thrives. Yet Amazon probably employs 10% of the staffing of Borders.
And as these industries continue to succumb to the inevitable consequences of online everything, more and more people are going to find themselves out of work – and not temporarily.
The massive wave of dislocated agricultral workers in the 19th century found new employment in the new factories that the machine age suddenly spawned.
And there were not a few ‘billionaires’ (at that time) who arose from simple working class beginnings to build vast empires on that new technology – Andrew Carnegie or John D Rockefeller among many. The Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of an earlier time.
But people who had spent their lives threshing grain for a living were, initially, unequipped to deal with factory work. So they had to be educated to do it. Today’s public school systems were the vehicle for that education. What the public schools taught, more than anything else, was how farm children could become good factory workers. The schools were (and are) to a large extent, mini-factories. Arrive on time. Do your task well and get rewarded.  When the bell rings, lunch. When the bell rings. Home. It was a kind of conditioning.
The Internet revolution changes the face of our culture as much as the industrial revolution did – and in the end will dislocate as many people.
They will need new lives and new careers.
Fortunately, as the industrial revolution gave rise to factories, as well as destorying the agricultural world, the Internet Revolution also gives rise to new business models while destroying the old – businesses that exist entriely online.
At the turn of the 19th Century, public education began to prepare former farm workers for the industrial world. Public education has yet to make that same transition. Jeff Jarvis’ Tow Center at CUNY is a notable exception – where they are teaching journalists to be first and foremost entrepreneurs.
Here at nyvs.com, we are trying to do the same.
To skill you in what you are going to need not just to compete, but to succeed in the new world of iPhone-driven economies.
