Thread by @oren_cass

1/ Weekend reading 🚨

The new @AmerCompass collection begins from a simple premise: the information revolution of the past 30 years has brought about the most consequential technological transformation since the industrial revolution 200 years ago. 🧵

americancompass.org/collections/lo…

2/ An important thing to understand about the industrial revolution is that it actually made people pretty miserable for a pretty long time -- decades of stagnant to declining wages, declining health and life expectancy, people literally got shorter!

3/ Eventually, policymakers caught up, recognizing that the state needed to play a different role in an industrial economy than it had in an agrarian one. Indentured children in factories and mines were not the same as children working on the family farm.

4/ Modern societies created the welfare state, public-health and environmental regulation, organizing rights and labor standards. But this took about 50 to 100 years. The U.S. didn't really catch up until the 1930s, in the face of a crippling economic depression.

5/ We are now roughly 25 years into the information revolution, and cutting-edge innovations have matured into the world’s most valuable corporations. "Move fast and break things" is less cute when the things being broken are local labor markets or our democratic politics.

6/ Our politics is stuck on "Big Tech" and concerns with the power of certain massive companies. Those concerns are important! But take them away... break everyone up... ensure freedom and competition... and the information era's challenges would be just as big. Sometimes bigger.

7/ Markets now operate in new ways and new places. The labor market no longer requires traditional employment. People living side by side no longer encounter the same information, products, or even prices. In short, assumptions on which we've built our society no longer hold.

8/ I think it's a safe bet that, 50 years from now, people will find ludicrous our resigned acceptance in the early 21st century to children's nearly unfettered access to hardcore pornography, or a third-party market in real-time access to a phone's location.

9/ I suspect (and hope) targeted advertising will be illegal and firms will face something akin to strict liability for their data-storage and -sharing practices; measures that, combined, would vastly reduce the incentive to develop and retain detailed profiles of individuals.

10/ As we found ways to do 100 years ago, we will once again have to find ways to ensure that employers treat workers as people, not interchangeable supply-chain inputs to be ordered, surveilled, discontinued, and written-off as the market demands from day to day.

11/ To start, we have to notice what the information revolution has changed in kind, not merely degree; understand the challenges created; and consider how public policy might respond-- which may look as different from industrial regulation as that looked from British common law.

12/ @AmerCompass has published dueling essays by @RowanWingham @neil_chilson on Frictionless Exchange, Matthew Crawford @petersuderman on the Attention Economy, and @wellscking @AlecStapp on All-Knowing Algorithms. Also, podcast discussions with each pair: americancompass.org/collections/lo…

13/ If you're looking for a more luxurious, peruse-on-the-tablet-at-the-beach experience, the entire Lost in the Super Market project is also available for download as an @AmerCompass Reader (PDF booklet): americancompass.org/wp-content/upl…

14/14 Or, if this thread isn't enough from me, you can start with my Foreword, on Governing after a Revolution. That is all.
americancompass.org/essays/governi…