Simon Jenkins - We’re over the digital revolution. This is the age of experience
Stepping outside the
bubble of gloom this week I noticed something surreal. Kodak was reviving its Ektachrome film range to meet a surging
demand for high-end traditional film. Was this the same Kodak, I wondered, that
went bankrupt in 2012 after 47,000 job losses, a moment hailed by seers as when the digital revolution finally came of age? It now appeared
that users had found traditional film something unimaginable to those seers –
something called “better”.
Other straws drifted
past me in the wind. Sales of old-fashioned vinyl records have soared to a 25-year peak,
requiring more factory reopenings. Printed books are also recovering, with ebook readers disappearing
from bookshop shelves. Knitting clubs are all the rage, along with gin
cocktails and ballroom dancing. To get a seat on most steam trains, you must
book in advance. Even canals are running out of moorings. As for live
performances of any sort, they are so lucrative that the big profits now lie
with the ticketing moguls and touts.
Only fools would deny
digital its recent and astonishing history, but that is different from how
people feel about it. Many, I sense, have become exhausted by the sheer
relentlessness of the digital revolution, by its endless boasts and by dark
clouds on the horizon. References to the
internet are now dominated by hackers, viruses, trolls, paedophiles, fake news
and cyberwar. I am told most job openings for IT graduates are in gaming,
betting and in protecting computers from each other. An early sceptic, the
technology writer Evgeny
Morozov, warned of the internet’s dangerous rejection of morality.
Algorithms might proliferate as chips grew ever more powerful, but issues of
good and evil were dismissed, as if the great god maths validated all. Witness
last year’s first response of Facebook and Google to the fake news scandal.
They said, in effect, that ethics was not their business.
The internet has come
to look less like an engine of some new personal freedom and more like the same
monopolistic anarchy that drove the railway barons in the 19th century. That
earlier revolution was similarly disruptive, socially and economically. It
proffered fast communication in place of slow. It rode roughshod over privacy.
It upset social relationships, destroyed communities and empowered the state.
The railway was a boon, but it was also noisy, dangerous and ugly.
Celebrities such as
John Ruskin and William Wordsworth excoriated the revolution. Others retreated
into retro. They built local stations to look like country cottages. Euston was
a Greek temple and St Pancras a Flemish town hall. Rampant modernisation
fuelled an opposing culture. New churches had to be medieval in style, novels
gothic and art pre-Raphaelite.
The natural human response was protective, to block out the big, bad,
black-as-soot railway. As revolutions settle
down, they usually require a process of adjustment. In time the railway was
regulated and its image softened. Similarly, we are now trying to discern what
matters online, what is good and what is not. I like online shopping but fear online
banking. I use the gig economy, yet am nervous of it rotting what binds my
neighbourhood together. I am exhilarated by artificial intelligence, but
appalled by the obsession of civil servants with electronic surveillance.
The resurgence of
retro technology is neither negative nor a hipster fad. My landline is simply
better than my mobile, as my FM radio is better than my digital one.
Photographers say that pictures printed from film are superior to digitised
ones. A DJ knows that a vinyl groove holds a deeper bass line.
The sociologist Richard
Sennettpointed out in his study of craftsmanship that we are programmed to
do things with our hands, “to do things well for their own sake”, even if a
computer could do them for us. This may embrace making music, gardening,
painting, cooking and, of course, travelling.
When many white-collar workers
retire, they apparently plunge into an orgy of such activities.
I was pondering the
latest horror story of how the digital future would “hollow out” employment
when I came across an article on how bankers’ wives spent their husbands’ bonuses. The drift was
entirely into the “experience” economy. It was into holidays, interior
decorating, entertaining, bodily improvements and tutors for the children. This
was not to mention the host of gardeners, personal trainers, therapists,
auctioneers, lawyers, doctors and accountants ever more adept at separating
“high net worth” from those who possess it.
Every penny on that
list was going to labour-intensive services. Of course not everyone
is married to a banker, but regular spending surveys from the Office of
National Statistics chart the same move, from things to experiences. This is
the new service economy on which Britain’s post-Brexit prosperity appears to
depend. Digitisation has taken
us past “peak stuff”. We are now heading for “post-digital”, the age of
experience. It is one that employs new technology as the servant, not the
master, of what is desired – as was rightly predicted by the first
computing genius, Ada Lovelace, back in the 19th century. It is the new “economy
of live”, from Ticketmaster to Tinder.
I find this hugely
encouraging. It suggests we are able to digest a revolution without tearing
ourselves apart, surely the ultimate test of a civilisation. It throws our
other discontents into the shade.
