Are the good times really over for good?
Like Wile E. Coyote, tech companies ran off the cliff long ago; only now is economic gravity starting to assert itself.
Capital Thinking • Issue #1148 • View online
If the 1970s ended up destroying one aspect of an older American Dream—the idea that one could, through honesty and hard work, make a comfortable and decent life for oneself on one salary, without necessarily having to go to college or work in the financial sector scamming fellow Americans—then the early 2020s looks likely to see the destruction of the tech vision that increasingly came to replace it.
Say Goodbye to Your Email Job
This new dream promised far less justice, and far starker division between “winners” and “losers,” but it was still a vision in which if you hustled, moved to the right city, and befriended the right people, you, too, could work an email job “in tech,” enjoying a smorgasbord of perks and subsidies along the way.
I still remember an ex-girlfriend waxing poetic about the new fruits of this late-2010s economy: DoorDash, Uber, all the rest of it, available on-demand through various new apps for people with the fortune and good sense to live in the hip inner cities of the West, rather than the rural hinterlands.
But this entire world had long been backstopped by completely unsustainable subsidies from venture-capital firms and, by extension, through the federal money printer.
The crisis of the ’70s would come to devastate Main Street.
But the people who benefited from this, those who would come to replace the likes of a stodgy Archie Bunker as the model American, now find themselves the proverbial deer in the headlights of another massive economic contraction and restructuring.
In the Trump years, we debated the anger of globalization’s losers, and whether the winners bore any responsibility for that anger.
But in the Biden years, we will increasingly have to debate the rage that is sure to brew among the erstwhile winners themselves, as the app economies and tech boom are crushed. Where will that anger end up leading?
In the end, America might quite soon find itself in a situation where no broad socioeconomic group feels any loyalty or has any stake in the political system.
Instead, anger at having their lives upended and their standards of living destroyed will be the order of the day, from Boise to Bushwick.
Gen. Mark Milley infamously testified before a congressional hearing that he wanted to understand “white rage.”
But who right now is prepared for progressive, multiracial, demisexual rage, as the core social groups driving progressivism in America are hit the hardest by layoffs and the end of Silicon Valley subsidies?
That rage is coming, and it may have no brakes.
*Featured post photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash