Venkatesh Rao

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“We Are Contemplating The Sorts Of Austerities Associated With Wartime Economies”

October 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It is more than a little maddening that Americans freaked out over Ebola, which had very little chance of becoming plague here, yet aren’t a fraction as flustered over a potential catastrophe caused by carbon emissions, a far more likely outcome. Even astoundingly successful capitalist Bill Gates–the sweater-clad, avuncular 2.0 version–has called for serious government curbs on free markets to combat climate change.

In advance of COP 21, Venkatesh Rao has penned an Atlantic piece about the need for a wartime-level approach to reworking the whole of global infrastructure, explaining why it’s possible but not probable to succeed. If death is in the distance but not yet in our faces, are we likely to surrender our luxuries to austerity? Rao acknowledges that a “single cheap and effective solution [could] emerge,” but that’s also not a plausible scenario. An excerpt:

We are contemplating the sorts of austerities associated with wartime economies. For ordinary Americans, austerities might include an end to expansive suburban lifestyles and budget air travel, and an accelerated return to high-density urban living and train travel. For businesses, this might mean rethinking entire supply chains, as high-emissions sectors become unviable under new emissions regimes.

What [Bill] Gates and others are advocating for is not so much a technological revolution as a technocratic one. One for which there is no successful peacetime precedent. Which is not to say, of course, that it cannot work. There is always a first time for every new level of complexity and scale in human cooperation. But it’s sobering to look back at the (partial) precedents we do have.

Of the previous six energy revolutions of comparable magnitude—wind, water, coal, oil, electricity, and nuclear—only nuclear power had anywhere near the same level of early-stage technocratic shaping that we are contemplating. Among technological revolutions outside the energy sector, only space exploration, nuclear-weapons technology, and computing technology have had similar levels of bureaucratic direction.

None of these are true comparables, however, for one critical reason. In each historical case, the revolution was highly focused on a single core technology rather than a broad portfolio of technologies, and a managed transition of infrastructure at civilization scale. In the case of aerospace and computing technologies, the comparison is even weaker: Those sectors enjoyed several decades of organic evolution driven primarily by inventors, private investors, and market forces before technocrats got involved.•

 

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“The History Of Technology Is The Story Of Transitions That Worked”

November 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

World fairs regularly introduced us to greatness–the telephone, the Ferris wheel, the elevator. But they grew impractical as people became more connected, as the shock of the new came directly to you and I wherever we were. In an Aeon essay, Venkatesh Rao makes a convincing case that Silicon Valley is the new world’s fair, one that never closes. An excerpt about the technological significance of the fairs:

“The history of technology is the story of transitions that worked, like the Industrial Revolution. It entered adolescence and began breaking free of the pre-modern social order at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Even as the worldwide mercantilist social order led by Britain began to unravel, the modern industrial social order began to take shape in America.

By the time of the 1967 Montreal Expo, the scenes were safely sequestered again within Cold War institutions, after the world had been violently transformed through great wars, thousands of inventions, and a massive reordering of society along urban lines.

These fairs were equal parts technological debutante balls, theaters of wild futurist speculation, and pure circus entertainment. Cities vied to host them to signal their arrival into industrial modernity. Nations used them as public throwdowns. Corporations used them to spar over emerging markets. Artists, urban planners and architects used them to hawk entire imagined lifestyles.

It was through world fairs that a rapidly developing US announced its arrival on the global stage. From London in 1851, when it stole Britain’s thunder, to Chicago in 1893, when it formally claimed Great Power status, the young nation had taught the world about everything from bloody mechanised killing and newspaper circulation wars to electric lighting and manufacturing with interchangeable parts.

But beneath the pageantry and posturing, these fairs were more than technological Olympics. They spawned both the enduring mainstream folkways of modernity, such as suburban living and business-class air travel, as well as its dead-end subcultures, such as the world of flying-car loyalists. The fairs could do this because, fundamentally, they were large-scale exercises in what futurists call design fiction: indirect explorations of possible futures mediated by speculative, but tangible artifacts.“

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“Consumerism Began Its 150-Year Journey From Real Farmers’ Markets In Small Towns To Fake Farmers’ Markets Inside Metropolitan Grocery Stores”

July 11, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “The American Cloud,” Venkatesh Rao’s broad yet provocative Aeon essay which traces what he feels is the artifice of modern U.S. life–with costs cleverly hidden–not only to A&P founder George Gilman but all the way back to Alexander Hamilton: 

“Every time you set foot in a Whole Foods store, you are stepping into one of the most carefully designed consumer experiences on the planet. Produce is stacked into black bins in order to accentuate its colour and freshness. Sale items peek out from custom-made crates, distressed to look as though they’ve just fallen off a farmer’s truck. Every detail in the store, from the font on a sign to a countertop’s wood finish, is designed to make you feel like you’re in a country market. Most of us take these faux-bucolic flourishes for granted, but shopping wasn’t always this way.

George Gilman’s early A&P stores are the spiritual ancestors of the Whole Foods experience. If you were a native of small-town America in the 1860s, walking into one of Gilman’s A&P stores was a serious culture shock. You would have stared agog at gaslit signage, advertising, tea in branded packages, and a cashier’s station shaped like a Chinese pagoda. You would have been forced to wrap your head around the idea of mail-order purchases.

Before Gilman, pre-industrial consumption was largely the unscripted consequence of localised, small-scale patterns of production. With the advent of A&P stores, consumerism began its 150-year journey from real farmers’ markets in small towns to fake farmers’ markets inside metropolitan grocery stores. Through the course of that journey, retailing would discover its natural psychological purpose: transforming the output of industrial-scale production into the human-scale experience we call shopping.

Gilman anticipated, by some 30 years, the fundamental contours of industrial-age selling. Both the high-end faux-naturalism of Whole Foods and the budget industrial starkness of Costco have their origins in the original A&P retail experience. The modern system of retail pioneered by Gilman — distant large-scale production facilities coupled with local human-scale consumption environments — was the first piece of what I’ve come to think of as the ‘American cloud’: the vast industrial back end of our lives that we access via a theatre of manufactured experiences. If distant tea and coffee plantations were the first modern clouds, A&P stores and mail-order catalogues were the first browsers and apps.”

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