It must have been remarkable to be alive between 1880 and 1910. The explosion of technology—then called “the practical arts”—was astonishing. In the course of this time, we saw the commercialization of steel that made possible huge bridges to transverse large bodies of water for the first time and allow the building of skyscrapers that change cityscapes.
Suddenly, we could go anywhere and do anything. There was the Brooklyn Bridge (1883), the Scottish Forth Bridge (1890), London’s Tower Bridge (1894), the Manhattan Bridge (1909), the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge (rebuilt in 1883), and many more besides.
There was the advent of electricity to light up cities and homes. There was internal combustion that allowed for motorcars that changed travel and the practice of farming. There was flight, which made the seemingly impossible possible.
Communications changed first with the telegraph and then telephone, which introduced the first real upgrade in information spread since the handwritten letter carried on horseback.
There was so much more, including indoor plumbing, the wide availability of books, the bringing of precision time into the home with commercial clocks and then watches, the recording and eventual broadcast of sound, and so much more.
Plus, urbanization was changing the perception of progress in one generation. There were textiles everywhere, and new sewing machines, and ice delivery, and migration via beautiful ships. Food was getting cleaner, medicines were getting more effective, and sanitation was becoming a priority.
In these years, economic data (insofar as data can be reconstructed because no one cared to collect any) show astounding increases in output. The U.S. economy was growing a phenomenal amount, perhaps 5 to 8 percent per year or more (we don’t really have good data), and infant mortality was falling.
Social mobility was increasing. Population was exploding throughout the industrialized world. With that, income was growing such that average people could afford new technologies, which is why so many people came to the World’s Fairs in those years.
It was an age unlike anything ever seen in recorded history.
Looking back, technology played a huge role in all of this. It was the completion of the Industrial Revolution in many ways. Humankind as a whole fell in love with the idea of progress because they observed so much in the course of one and two generations.
You know what also played a role? The gold standard. The money they all used did not shrink in value over time. It grew in value: a rising purchasing power year over year. That is simply unthinkable today. In other words, you could save money simply by not spending it and watch it become more valuable over time, even if it was stuffed in your mattress.
Nor was there any income tax. You could keep every penny you made. Litigation was rare. There were no passports. There were not even driver’s licenses! Life was unregulated and free, and it unleashed all human creativity to an astonishing extent.
I recently visited a cobbler shop in town. I heard some loud machines in the back and asked if I could have a look. He agreed and, to my personal astonishment, I saw machines that looked to be a century old. He was still using them. I took a picture and later confirmed that they dated from 1910.
So even in a small town shoe repair shop, the Gilded Age lives and has been in continual operation all this time. Talk about durability! You can see how such machines changed life on earth, and such technology is still around today. We still benefit from all the progress in that time.
A few years ago, I wanted to take a friend to the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industry Museum, the original building in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. I had visited it many years earlier and thrilled at its careful curation of technological progress.
To my sadness, the museum is now gone, all its contents in some basement warehouse somewhere. It is replaced by a preposterous exhibit on the future of technology, all of which looks horrid to me.
In the late 1980s, a Gilded Age ethos was in the air. The database had been invented and commercialized. The computer was available in every home. Word processing was replacing the typewriter. The internet was coming alive. Ronald Reagan credited the “Age of Information” for the fall of Soviet communism. I believed it.
In those days, following the end of the Cold War, I had fully expected something even more spectacular than we saw from 1880 to 1910, an explosion of economic growth, longer lives, more social mobility, and more human flourishing overall.
Jesse Jackson was out there demanding a “peace dividend” to accrue to the population following a dramatic curb in military spending that was no longer necessary. Many people hoped for the end of nuclear weapons globally through the disarmament that both Reagan and Soviet president Gorbachev said they wanted.
There was no reason to believe that all of this would not happen. But it did not happen.
As the web browser was invented in 1995 and the internet was everywhere, I threw myself into the grand project of building a new digital world with universal access to information. A metaphor seized my mind: Just as past generations migrated to settle the frontier, my generation would migrate to the cloud and build a more perfect world. Economic growth and progress would follow.
Here we are 30 years later, and we are in a position to render judgment on the information age. It’s hard to avoid the sad reality that it hasn’t really worked out. Economic growth has been disappointing at best in the course of the new millennium. Wars are everywhere. Population is declining, as is health, even lifespans.
It appears that information technology alone is not enough to cause a big upgrade in the quality of life. This much is clear. It did not work out as I and everyone else believed. There was no new explosion of wealth. There is no evidence of a new optimism in the air. If anything, it is the opposite.
Parents are now restricting access to anything digital. Classrooms are banning all phones. People are ripping out their listening devices from their homes. It’s very common for people today when they want to have private conversations to put their phones on the other side of the room. I see people rejecting commercial food for natural products, turning off their devices, unsubscribing from streaming services, and even returning to radios and turntables for music.
Whereas people once saw their smartphone as a friend, it has more recently been demonized as the spying enemy, tolerated at best and hated more and more. I spotted a friend the other day using an old-fashioned flip phone. He found it on eBay and swears by it.
The National Archives has even given up on collecting data. There is simply too much of it. Isn’t that incredible? We have the ability to collect and know but find it impossible to curate, such that we paradoxically may know less in the future than we knew in the past.
Why did the Age of Information fail to deliver? That’s a big question, and the answer is too complicated to summarize here. It has to do with the size and reach of government and corporate cartels, captured everything, the litigation explosion, and failure to embrace the condition that makes technology wonderful: freedom itself. And we can add peace to the list of conditions. We certainly do not have that.
There is another factor that is more fundamental. As it turns out, information is not the same as wisdom. Information without a concern for virtue and truth is nothing but useless data, just more stuff flying around. Perhaps humankind forgot this point. We are all working to rediscover this today. How is the great question of the day.
