Learn to Code

A few weeks ago I drove through an old town in the Appalachian Mountains, a town with an interstate offramp not too far away but not so close as to suggest that the interstate considered the place important. It was mostly small houses scattered around a valley, with a modest town center clustered near a large building that loomed over everything else like a brown brick Colossus of Rhodes. It was a formidable structure, built to last, with four great smokestacks from which there rose no smoke. The faded white logo of a long-dead company lingered on the brick. You could see people around town. Some of the storefronts looked open and some cars drove here and there. I thought about how the nearest “big town” was almost forty miles away — too far for a standard work commute or an easy grocery trip. I thought less about how this town had died than about how it managed to survive. It was not a dead place — it was just deeply wounded. A once vigorous animal now bleeding out slow in a quiet thicket, weak and angry.

If you’re looking for a portrait of America’s 21st Century desolation, you could do worse than George Packer’s The Unwinding. This 2014 nonfiction book is a collection of interviews with a cast of characters from all corners of the post-industrial story - from the itinerant Wal-Mart stock guy fighting an opioid habit to the real estate shark who prowled the suburban waters for easy prey in the wake of the 2008 crash - stitched into a mosaic of the vast land between the wealthy coastal urban centers. Packer is a real writer — precise and empathetic with a keen eye for where to focus. He’s one of our best. But it’s clear from the outset that he intends to squeeze the wreckage of deindustrialization into a mainstream liberal framework such as one finds at outlets like The Atlantic, where Packers often contributes. On one side is the supposedly “conservative” gorilla of Big Capital with its nasty banks let off the leash by Raeganite Republican deregulation. On the other is a Roosevelt-by-way-of-The West Wing fantasy of the “Working Class Democratic Coalition,” then led by the Change agents of the ascendant Obama administration. And in the middle — in those sad dilapidated towns - are the lumpenproles, many of them future Trump voters either too dumb or too blinkered by propaganda like Fox News to know who really wants to help them and who wants to hurt them. If only they read The Atlantic.

But like I said, Packer is a real writer. He explores, he digs, and whether he likes it or not, he reveals something more than he intends. You can feel the suspicion gnaw at him that the liberal establishment he favors is not so distinct from the financialized world of global capital he sees carving out the nation like an animal carcass. He finds his favor shifting toward outsiders or various stripes, from the Occupy Wall Street protestors (soon to be absorbed and redirected by the liberal establishment) to the Ayn Randian iconoclast Peter Thiel. He senses a shadow stalking the forest behind the foresaken landscape he so skillfully paints, something beyond the simple red/blue dichotomy he started with, yet he cannot see its shape. What he does see is an unraveling of the national fabric, since in this atomized post-industrial state, what do “Americans” really have in common?

There’s a similar arc in George Orwell’s 1937 nonfiction work The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell sets out to explore the dismal conditions of the British working class in the industrial north regions - and beyond that, to figure out why on Earth they seemed to have no interest in Socialism. Britain was already sliding into the deindustrialization that the United States took on later, and so these regions that seemed like they should be fertile ground for the People’s Revolution were half-dead husks such as we now see in the American Midwest —dispossessed and more or less ignored. The book is in many ways an anthropological survey by an educated Englishman venturing across the tracks to see what makes these down and out Tories tick - the 1930s British version of the clueless safaris undertaken in the wake of the 2016 election by urban journalists who lit off to the American hinterlands to see what was up with this “white working class” they heard such tales about. But like Packer, Orwell is a real writer. He painted a vivid and empathetic picture that transcended his ideology. He had already begun his disaffection with the Socialist cause in the wake of Stalin’s Holodomor in the Ukraine — the manifest cost of forcing a population into an antihuman materialist way of being. As seen in Animal Farm, he finds his dichotomies under intense stress. These people he saw yearned for something class struggle could not provide.

Both Orwell and Packer set out to produce leftist polemics. “Why aren’t these filthy depressed Brits socialists? Why don’t these stupid white Rust Belters realize it’s those evil Republicans that deregulated the banks?” But their gifts as writers were so great that they stumbled upon observations that spoke to something more profound than the predatory nature of capitalism or the friction between the classes. They ended up producing poems of spiritual decay, portraits of a people stripped of promise and a land drained of enchantment. Something closer to T. S. Eliot than Howard Zinn. What they stumbled upon was a crisis of purpose that was eating away at the soul of that core productive population that fuels every functional society. This was a crisis brought about by a hubristic modern assumption that man could be retooled, repurposed, or replaced like any other raw material — by forces and entities beyond the political demarcation lines laid out for them. To these forces, ties of community and culture and faith and shared history were unfortunate holdovers from a less enlightened time, unsuited to the new world. And so the wealth of nations needs not worry too much about swift and merciless human reconstitution or replacement. The whole world is open for business. May the best “material” win.

The economist Adam Smith extolled competitive free trade but he also placed an emphasis on national specialization. The nation state was becoming the primary unit of organization in the wake of Europe’s calamitous 17th Century, and Smith believed that these nation states would naturally focus on what they did best, thus offering some protection for their labor from outside competition. But though he may have been a genius of system theory, Smith was unable to foresee the impact of important technological advancements, such as those in travel and transport.

For instance, Smith believed that the extreme difficulty of transporting unsalted meats to Britain from overseas would continue to protect the British beef industry. But by the early 1900s, the dawn of cooled transport brought American and Argentinian beef into the British market and swiftly decimated the local industry. Most of the displaced beef workers were funneled into the furnace of British urban manufacturing, where a pair of strong hands could be reduced to simple if brutal motor functions easily enough. So far so good for a while, until British manufacturing collapsed a half century later.

Neoliberalism, a direct descendant of Smith’s systems theory, is the leviathan that rules the modern world. It is the thing hidden in plain sight that flummoxes people like Orwell and Packer because it has eaten the 19th Century “class and capital” framework that still influences modern leftists - notice I say leftists and not liberals. It is the system that fused the Enlightenment liberalism that emanated from Europe with the emergent power of interconnected global industrial markets. It has been a happy marriage, for what Liberalism and Global Capital share is a prime directive of corrosion. These are both fundamentally egalitarian systems, and so both seek to dissolve barriers — national borders, gender binaries, ethnic identities, financial guardrails, etc. Any and all limitations on individual liberation and capital access. The present day “Open Borders” crowd as natural bedfellows with Commodore Perry’s flotilla that opened Japan up for trade by force of cannonade.

Let’s bring this back to those desolated post-industrial towns. Like so much of the systems theory that has conquered the world over the last couple centuries, this neoliberal market thinking is either reluctant to or incapable of effectively factoring the human animal into its calculations, despite its claims of understanding “human nature” and “incentive structures.” (Being able to compare itself to the even more deluded communist ideology — the logical extension of egalitarian liberalism - for the last century surely aided its own delusions.) Smith understood on some level that cultures form around occupations, and societies and nations are built upon those cultures. A factory town or a farming town develops a distinct way of being in relation to its means of work, and yanking the means of work from such communities amounts to cutting out their heart, and instructing them to drive their truck on down to the “Coding Workshop” at the local learning annex is adding insult to injury.

The less disingenuous “free marketers” — libertarian conservatives and the like - will push back and say that industries change over time. How many scriveners or carriage drivers have you met lately? And besides, open competition drives achievement and creates wealth. And of course they’re right about all that. But the human element remains, and humans can’t be swapped and retooled like widgets in a software program. Whatever the educated observations on which Smith based his idea that native industries would retool to remain competitive, this idea proved wrong when the rate of change reaches a certain threshold. Like so many things - and I will say this many times throughout these writings - it’s a matter of degree. A matter of speed and scale. The unraveling of the social fabric that Packer and Orwell saw as they surveyed the wreckage of deindustrialization was something worse than depression or oppression. Nations can survive bouts of these and come out stronger on the other side. That social fabric is the invisible glue connecting large groups of people — the destruction of which be hidden by wealth for a while but only for so long, since that wealth was itself generated in large part by a social cohesion and its resultant energy that systems theory has not been able to adequately account for.

"It was one of the quietest revolutions we’ve ever had,” Russo said. “If a plague had taken away this many people in the Midwest, it would be considered a huge historical event.” But because it was caused by the loss of blue-collar jobs, not a bacterial infection, Youngstown’s demise was regarded as almost normal. – The Unwinding, by George Packer

On the macro level, one can imagine future historians or curious extraterrestrial archaeologists settling on something like the following narrative. Sometime around the peak of its power and prosperity, the American Empire decided to dismantle the industrial engine that had created its might, packed it all up in shipping boxes, and sent it around the world, most notably to a slumbering but proud and ancient power that would then use that industry to rival the Empire on the global stage. America constituted itself as perhaps the first true “post-industrial” nation, one whose biggest biggest physical export became “waste paper” — also known as trash.

The Empire did this for the same reason most empires give the game away. Like the Roman nobles who eventually far more gold from their plantations in Spain than they did the dregs around the Palatine, its elite became disconnected from its core population as it derived its wealth more from the outer provinces. In this case, yes, the mostly white working class that had formed the core of the American population throughout the most robust periods of its history. This population — along with anyone else who wants to preserve some shred of that once vibrant nation — is faced with a choice given current trends. Either slowly fade and die, or start lighting fires. Recent evidence suggests both may be happening, and either one spells doom for the Empire.

Journalists and coastal urbanites are right about one thing — this population contains within it a chaotic, potentially violent energy, as all desperate populations do. And a failure to account for them could bring the whole neoliberal “free market” order crashing down, since massive complex systems require stability and cooperation at a very foundational level. Trump was a reminder that deindustrialization has social and political costs. Groups of people tend to act in their own self-interest, sometimes in ways that flummox people like Orwell who see things in materialist terms. Whether consciously or instinctively, the American deindustrialized population in the core of the country sensed that no one in power really advocated for them anymore. Not the libertarian GOP free marketers suggesting they take coding classes, not the data scientists explaining why they actually were better off than their parents, not the neoliberal progressives who stand poised to completely open the borders to third world labor meant more as ammunition for demographic warfare than actual labor. So they lashed out at the ballot box. The regime had better convince these people that they factor into whatever post-industrial story it’s are trying to tell, or they may find other means.

I suspect the American regime won’t do this, and won’t even pretend to do so in an effective enough manner. Because these people don’t factor into that story. The powers that be may tell them that it’s nothing personal. These people are just outmoded, like dysfunctional diodes, and the faster their light flickers out the better. And besides, they have refrigerators, iPhones, and Netflix accounts. No one is starving.

But empires typically don’t die of starvation — they die by suicide. Less a quick gunshot to the head, more a slitting of the wrist. Slower, decadent, and quiet.