How technology drove the world back
By: You-Yan Wang
Robber barons lined the pockets of America’s first Gilded Age. A century-and-a-half later, they threaten to do the same again. A postbellum period characterized by intense corruption that marred workers’ hopes for prosperous futures, the Gilded Age began with rapid industrialization and the development of the oil, steel, and railroad industries. The mechanism for today’s version lies in the smartphone, everyone’s favorite pastime leisure. By exacerbating the loneliness epidemic and catalyzing the rise of tech barons, the advent of the internet and the dot-com boom of the 1990s accelerated a global plunge into a second Gilded Age.
Droves of working-age men and women flocked to cities and urban centers for a share of America’s new prosperity post-Civil War. There, this ambitious young diaspora was rudely awakened from the American dream by the reality of corruption. As Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle would chronicle, an influx of laborers looking for a piece of the pie succumbed to exploitative industry standards and the scorn of an established bourgeoisie. In hostile territory hundreds of miles away from home and with weakened communal infrastructure, the working man’s isolation was the only thing he knew. Each morning, he left his packed tenement to go toil a day’s labor at an equally crowded factory. Lost in a mix of cultures and an absence of familiar institutions, there wasn’t anywhere to go. Even if communal institutions existed, the time to enjoy oneself and relax was nonexistent in a society that only wanted poor Americans’ physical labor.
Over a century later, the privatization of American leisure time by the phone and television has the same effect of keeping Americans cooped up in their nests. As Robert Putnam wrote in his seminal work Bowling Alone, American social isolation, now an official epidemic, results from the deterioration of our social capital. The bridging kind connects the individual to those with whom they are not immediately familiar—i.e. anyone not related as family, friends, or colleagues. A society with strong bridging capital enjoys cross-aisle cooperation and depolarization. However, the migration of American third spaces—places where people can build bridging capital—from bowling alleys and churches to internet forums like Reddit and X spells grave danger. Filters and algorithms are designed to create echo chambers, which seek to destroy what bridging capital seeks to build. If third spaces and social capital scaffold a society and government centered around trust and trustworthiness, technology has swung a wrecking ball at the structure’s foundation.
The Gilded Age is remembered for robber barons’ ascension to a position above even national governments. With political influence built up over two decades by backing campaigns and nurturing proteges, former dot-com darlings like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have evolved into the same oligarchical power possessed by Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt. Donald Trump’s inauguration was evidence of that. On a dais typically reserved for family and elected officials, Musk, Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Bezos stood only behind the President’s family and before Trump’s cabinet members. The culmination of the technology sector cozying up to the Trump administration after past scuffles demonstrates that big tech has fallen in line. CEOs have recognized that Trump may be “perilous for democracy, [but] good for profits.” Across the Atlantic in Germany, Musk is being investigated for potential election interference for his incessant support of the far-right Alternative for Germany. Having played a hand in Olaf Scholz, or “Oaf Schitz” as Musk calls him, being removed as chancellor, does Musk have too much power?
The technological revolution has imperiled future generations by funneling opportunities for interaction online. As a result, society has handed CEOs and big tech too much influence in a revival of Gilded Age-era social tensions. America climbed out of the first Gilded Age through progressive policy for social mobility; the key now figures to involve technology: the tool that enabled this counter-productive revolution in the first place.
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