{"id":2504,"date":"2017-09-18T04:34:44","date_gmt":"2017-09-18T12:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2504"},"modified":"2017-09-18T04:34:44","modified_gmt":"2017-09-18T12:34:44","slug":"the-new-victorians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2504","title":{"rendered":"The New Victorians"},"content":{"rendered":"

About five months ago I first kicked around the notion of \u201cdistributed servantry<\/a>.\u201d 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\u2019t about piling it high and stacking it cheap, it was about the personal shopping and the individual attention to Madame\u2019s interest and curiosity and the refreshments and possibly spa treatments.<\/p>\n

And this then kicked me back to the aforementioned distributed servantry. We wouldn\u2019t think twice about trying to hire a cook, a chauffeur, a lady\u2019s maid – but Doordash and Uber and Taskrabbit allow us to do just that. The running gag for years has been \u201cSilly Con Valley invents ways to do what your mother doesn\u2019t do for you anymore,\u201d but the telling bit in that is that in the past, \u2018all mod cons\u2019 meant you had assorted modern conveniences to make it easier for you to do the dishes, do the laundry, whatever. Contemporary distributed servantry isn\u2019t about making it easier for you to do these things, it\u2019s about making it easier for someone else to do it for you<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And at that point, we\u2019ve 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\u2019t an employee of the little glowing square on your phone either, so it\u2019s not like they\u2019re 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\u2019t have enough money to enjoy it. 70 hours a week is \u201cworth ethic,\u201d 80 hours a week and loving it gets crossed out for 90, and a woman giving birth in the car-share she\u2019s driving to make ends meet is a story of heroic dedication rather than Dickensian horror.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cI GOT MINE, FUCK YOU.\u201d It is the normalization of the absence of empathy. It\u2019s the moral position that it\u2019s okay<\/em> not to know there\u2019s other people. Hashtags and pieties are a perfectly good atonement for \u201cwe accidentally the election\u201d while the tools of social media continue to feed the Nazis, and \u201cthe best cure for free speech is more free speech.\u201d 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<\/em>. That\u2019s the kind of thinking that will ultimately cost us freedom of speech, but if it\u2019s not a Y Combinator problem, then it\u2019s not a problem here.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019re going back to the 19th. We just have apps now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About five months ago I first kicked around the notion of \u201cdistributed servantry.\u201d 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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The New Victorians”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2504"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}