Recycling People

Back in the late 1960s, as the Gods of Technology came for my dad’s TV repair shop with their “solid state” components that didn’t break, he got out ahead of them.

He loaded me into our car, he drove from New York to Los Angeles in three days, and he started to remake himself as a security expert. He ordered cards saying he was in burglar alarms, but when they returned they read only “Fred Blankenhorn, burgler.” 

He used the cards anyway, despite the typo, and the conversation starter got him in. He got into burglar alarms, bought a lock shop, and he kept the family together. (He is pictured near the end of the 1970s, on Balboa Bay in Newport Beach. Dad passed away in 1999.) 

When I drove by the Tower TV 5 years after we moved, the store I had grown up in was gone, replaced by a real estate office. I don’t know what happened to the poor guy who bought it.

The point is my dad was blessed with great foresight. Most men and women are not. The changes my dad saw coming for him, meanwhile, now come for millions with every economic cycle. Stevedores were replaced by containers in the 1970s. Secretaries were replaced by word processors in the 1980s, and client-server technology came for their middle management bosses a few years later. My career of journalism, they say, has been destroyed by the Web. Travel agents, insurance salesmen, and car salesmen are just order takers. Even that real estate office is threatened by clouds and devices that make the customers smarter than the salesmen.

We have a word for it. We say people have been “Ubered.” Taxi drivers got Ubered. Delivery men are going to be next, and truck drivers. Transportation is going to become systematized, made safer, trillions of dollars in savings will result.

What will happen to the people?

This is the most important question of our time. What happened to the car salesmen, the insurance salesmen, the middle managers and secretaries displaced by the cloud and app economy, anyway?

Have you been to a Trump rally?

Technology has been doing this, in one way or another, for over 250 years. The weavers displaced by machines 200 years ago sought to destroy mechanized looms in the name of a fictional character they called “Ned Ludd.” John Henry was a steel-driving man, who beat the steam-driven pile driver in a race but then keeled over, dead, of a heart attack.

He was the lucky one.

Ever since that California trip I have followed technology. It’s my hobby. It’s also my living. I was lucky. I married a good woman who became a computer programmer, working in transaction processing. She has mad skillz. Our family is fine. But many of my friends in journalism are not. I tell them “It’s not just a job, it’s an indenture.” It’s not funny.

Thanks to Moore’s Law, the pace of technological change accelerates. It’s cumulative, like global warming. And we should be thankful, for without it we would have no hope against global warming.

But what about the people?

When Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff heard there would be layoffs at IBM recently, he tweeted an invitation for IBM resumes. Maybe a few will get to work with him. Most won’t. He doesn’t need them all. When states like Indiana and, now, Georgia, have moved to deflect the fear of change with “religious liberty” laws that are a thin mask over anti-gay bigotry, Benioff has swooped in, with powerful allies in technology and local industry, threatening to pull out of those states if they don’t stop it.

They stop it.

But what about the people? You go to college, you get a business degree, you rise into middle management, or you get into car sales, real estate sales, maybe insurance sales. You buy a house in the suburbs. You raise a family. And then one day an app comes along and “poof” – it’s all gone.

The times they are a changing.

Experts like P.K. Agarwal talk about getting more young people STEM degrees – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. But what about their parents, the ones who sent them to college with the money they made pushing papers? They can’t handle the bills, let alone their own retirements.

The benefits of technology, I’ve written, flow mainly to the users. You hold a supercomputer in the palm of your hand, connected to unimaginable calculation power without wires, and you use it to play games. That’s fine. We learn through play. But the biggest benefits of this great new world we’ve built increasingly flow into fewer-and-fewer hands.

Mark Zuckerberg, for instance. He doesn’t feel rich. His money is tied up in his business, in maintaining control of his business. Tech entrepreneurs have been saying this for a generation. It’s not real money, they say, just the view of investors on the business’ value. But Zuck’s worth over $47 billion now. It’s an enormous hoard of money, more wealth than you can reasonably get your head around.

The Gods of Technology are now richer than Croesus, and most, like Zuckerberg, are too busy making more to recycle it. Bill Gates is trying to recycle his, but such money has a pernicious habit of growing. Call it Billster’s Billions. He’s “losing” – the world’s greatest philanthropist gets richer every year.

In the original 1947 film of The Bishop’s Wife, an angel played by Cary Grant is called to serve a bishop played by David Niven who wants to build a great cathedral. Niven’s character thinks Grant’s angel is there to help him build it. The angel reminds him that he was asked for guidance. “That one big house can make a lot of little ones,” he says.

There is much that needs to be done in the world, urgently. Our energy systems are destroying the planet’s ability to sustain life. We have launched a Great Extinction that rivals the one which killed the dinosaurs.

Meanwhile, the technology which is our only hope of meeting these challenges piles up wealth in ever-greater piles, on ever-fewer plates, while more-and-more people are made economically useless by that wealth. We talk about recycling aluminum cans, and glass bottles, and cardboard boxes.

Recycling people is the great challenge of our time. You hear them demanding recycling. You hear them seeking to tear down the old order at Trump rallies, the 99% demanding wealth be redistributed at Sanders rallies. The center cannot hold. It’s the politics of the moment.

But underneath all that is the same economic story my dad started with 50 years ago, and the fact that we as a society still haven’t solved it.

How do we recycle the people whose careers technology displaces?