Market-Driven Devolution
Not all great inventions deserve to shape our world. Those that are designed for mass consumption abide by metrics that will ensure their sustained economic growth. When innovators use these economic principles to reshape industries, we get exploitative monopolies. Many of these monopolies prey upon more base instincts through the Western promise of individualization through ownership.
Last week, I wrote about the smartphone. It was created to revolutionize the communication industry by accelerating the vicious cycle of convenience on a global scale. The negative effects of smartphones are most deeply felt in the mind, where things are hardest to prove. We are watching humans adapt to these devices real-time and the results are troubling to say the least. This could be described as devolution if one wanted to be dramatic (and I do). As our market-driven ingenuity becomes more technologically advanced, it reaches deeper into our inner world. But this process began a long time ago, with the shaping of our outer world. One of the most impactful inventions in this regard is the personal automobile.
Henry Ford came at the right time. He didn’t invent the personal vehicle, but he found out how to make them quickly enough so that everyone could have one. Ford privatized transportation right when American cities were poised to explode. American oil fields proliferated at the same time, promising to redefine the energy sector and offer a window into the consumerism that was about to sweep America. General Motors invented the idea of planned obsolescence in the 1920s and 30s by annually selling new models whose only updates were cosmetic. After World War II, American development shifted to building commuter cities fed by suburban residences. The idea was that people would live outside of the city, and the city would be easy to get in and out of by driving. Families rapidly saw the need to own multiple cars. The car became a safe space, a personalized piece of property that one could use to take trips or get anywhere on their own accord. The vision for the future was set, all auto manufacturers had to do was continue increasing demand and American infrastructure would follow.
At the 1939 world fair, GM presented the above demonstration as the “City of Tomorrow.” Its looks authoritarian, grand, even somehow promising to the American who lived 85 years ago. Those promises fade when put beside a modern manifestation in Los Angeles, a city famous for its congestion. Imagine yourself trying to go on a walk through the City of Tomorrow. One has to look very closely to even notice where walkways are available in this diorama. The car noise would be almost unbearable, and the few trees visible are in unwalkable places, where only drivers would briefly see them. Almost everyone in this very familiar diorama is either in their cars or in a building. There are no public spaces because it’s all been claimed by cars. Three years prior to this world fair, Shell Oil commissioned the same artist to create their City of Tomorrow, which looks identical. Our infrastructure of pavement, highways, and parking lots is the dangerous, ugly, and congested reality that was pushed by oil men and manufacturers as they did what public companies do, expanding market share.
Just the other day, the governor of North Dakota noted that our cities have been built for cars, not for people. His exact verbiage comes from a comically underground “anti-car dependency” movement started by urban planners, architects, and designers. Their enemies are automotive and oil lobbies that partner together against good urban design. American culture is highly car-dependent, meaning that going anywhere at all is highly inefficient unless you have a car. This comes across as an unimportant observation unless one considers how different car-centric infrastructure is from transit-centric infrastructure.
Many Americans consider Europe the ideal place to visit. They go to enjoy a different pace of life surrounded by beautiful art and architecture. What sets Europe apart is the fact that it’s so easy to get around each city, and so easy to travel from city to city. The cities there are artistically designed for the people who will experience them outside on the ground level. People walk from the hotel to the gelato shop to the park to the convenience store. Transit is clean, safe, and efficient. Cyclists are given the infrastructure they need to travel safely, rather than a last-minute painted bike lane that both cyclists and drivers abhor.
In most American cities, things like biking to work, walking to the grocery store, or crossing town using transit seem entirely unreasonable and beyond unpleasant. This is the future that companies like Shell and GM created. When instating planned obsolescence, GM CEO Alfred P. Sloan Jr. stated “the primary object of the corporation … was to make money, not just to make motorcars.” In the process, public companies sold us an idea of ownership that shaped our outer world by devolving both urban design and the transportation industry. Those are problems that self-driving cars won’t fix.
When venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya was asked by a Stanford Business School interviewer how to change the world, he said “get the fucking money.” When the interviewer then asked how to get the money and not be corrupted by it, he simply said “I don’t know.” We live in an age where every startup hopes to be a worldbuilder. I for one am tired of their promises.
Human ingenuity is a beautiful thing. It has the capacity to change the way we communicate, travel, work, think, or do anything. But when innovators and entrepreneurs think on the scale of global markets, they make our world look like money, and money is a dirty copy of something real.
