About five months ago I first kicked around the notion of “distributed servantry.” Then, last week, I heard a couple of very sharp women discussing how the future of retail was in the experience, rather than just the purchase of goods, and they confirmed for me that this was the original department store model in the 1800s. It wasn’t about piling it high and stacking it cheap, it was about the personal shopping and the individual attention to Madame’s interest and curiosity and the refreshments and possibly spa treatments.
And this then kicked me back to the aforementioned distributed servantry. We wouldn’t think twice about trying to hire a cook, a chauffeur, a lady’s maid – but Doordash and Uber and Taskrabbit allow us to do just that. The running gag for years has been “Silly Con Valley invents ways to do what your mother doesn’t do for you anymore,” but the telling bit in that is that in the past, ‘all mod cons’ meant you had assorted modern conveniences to make it easier for you to do the dishes, do the laundry, whatever. Contemporary distributed servantry isn’t about making it easier for you to do these things, it’s about making it easier for someone else to do it for you.
And at that point, we’ve established a split between Eloi and Morlocks. Worse, in a way, because servants had to be housed and fed and generally provided for. Your Fiverr person or Lyft driver is out of your life forever soon as the app closes. No problem. Except they aren’t an employee of the little glowing square on your phone either, so it’s not like they’re guaranteed benefits or even a proper living wage. Permanent hustle, always scuffling to keep up, and the perversion of the Protestant work ethic means that that in America, any leisure moment is a moral fault if you don’t have enough money to enjoy it. 70 hours a week is “worth ethic,” 80 hours a week and loving it gets crossed out for 90, and a woman giving birth in the car-share she’s driving to make ends meet is a story of heroic dedication rather than Dickensian horror.
This all works because of a dirty little secret that a lot of people would rather you did not look too closely at. And that is this: the fundamental ethos of the 21st century GOP is exactly the same as the fundamental ethos of Silly Con Valley, and it’s “I GOT MINE, FUCK YOU.” It is the normalization of the absence of empathy. It’s the moral position that it’s okay not to know there’s other people. Hashtags and pieties are a perfectly good atonement for “we accidentally the election” while the tools of social media continue to feed the Nazis, and “the best cure for free speech is more free speech.” Just like the best cure for a hurricane is more water. Racism and sexism coupled to weaponized ignorance and pushed through the internet as a force multiplier might have bent an American presidential election, but holding Twitter and Facebook to account in any way would be bad for the First Amendment. That’s the kind of thinking that will ultimately cost us freedom of speech, but if it’s not a Y Combinator problem, then it’s not a problem here.
It’s disappointing, because from 1999, it looked like the 21st century was going to be a new and exciting and promising place. Then something went horribly, terribly wrong – and you can see the dry run for glorifying ignorance and dismissing knowledge and experience happen all through the Bush campaign coverage of 2000 – and we wound up with eight years of America being consumed by the stupid, followed by eight years of America fighting like hell to stay consumed in the face of reality. And instead of going forward to the 21st, we’re going back to the 19th. We just have apps now.