A Wired Depression - Page 2

Maybe we could just have a discussion about how a Depression would affect all Americans in an age that happens to be wired rather than trying to exclude or only discuss its effect on certain classes?

This idea that "the poor can;t afford internet so don;t enter intom this discussion" seems a little, well, 'off' to me.

It's not that they don't factor into the greater picture, because it's certainly going to be a lot shittier for them than it will be for me (I'll lose the internet, they might not eat. I'd take losing the internet). And this sounds really wrong, but wouldn't a Wired Age really only apply to people who are, well, Wired? Isn't it possible that only some of us live in a Wired Age, while others have been left behind?

How does that play today? Our society was different, people were different. Can you see a laid off IT professional digging ditches? I don't think people understand every facet of our society is different; we have different skill sets, motivations, goals. We have great swaths of this country who have little to no concept of manual labor.

I believe the largest private employers in the United States in 1929 were the steel and iron industries. Today? Wal-Mart. Huge difference.

If the economy were that fuckin bad. Then yeah you could see tech guys doing manual labor. But frankly how the fuck would I know? This is all armchair speculation with no background on the subject than the little I have read in history.

I kind of see what you're saying and it has some merit but I think you don't get the "total" picture. We're talking about massive unemployment, a staggaring drop in the standard of living for tens of millions of people who are currently deemed "middle" class. You think the housing market is bad now? Between 29 and 36 new home construction fell something like 87 or 88%.

My point is then we were a nation of producers-of farmers, builders, iron workers, dock workers, miners etc. That's not the case today. Our manufacturing base is severly eroded, ag and construction farmed out to cheap immigrant labor, etc.

One of my favorite parts of World War Z was the chapter describing how the government had to "retrain" people to work in the face of an overwhelming crisis. Could you imagine all the entertainment lawyers having to go out and work on a massive hydroelectric public works project? We live in a consumer driven society today and one, I feel, isn't that well equipped for a crisis on par with the Great Depression.

Perhaps the whole thing is like a rubber band, and will snap back to at least part of the way it used to be. By that I mean, our Government will be forced to pass certain incentives to bring companies such as Nike and other major manufacturers back to the Country to help revive our inner cities. I don't think we'll see lawyers working on hydroelectric plants, but by creating more factory jobs for the lower/working class, there will be higher level positions created for those with more qualifications as well. By putting the focus on our cities, we could see an end to suburban sprawl and a return to when our major cities actually made something, and weren't just there to visit or drive through.

What incentives could they possibly pass?
I mean that seriously. I wouldn't bet on the decency of the big corporation and the fact is a sweatshop in bumfuck, nowhere will probably get even cheaper as a result of this (due to completely maladaptive governments that won't really do anything to take advantage of the crisis or that lack an infrastructure to do so in the first place)

If the economy were really in the Great Depression-like shitter, and no one had any jobs, which is the situation I was assuming we were talking about, you don't think that people would be willing to take a job for far less than minimum wage? This is the whole problem we're facing, I guess, and it's all pretty cyclical. There's no doubt that big corporations may try to take advantage of the situation by creating something along the lines of sweatshops, but there has to be some lax in Govt. regulation if you want to create more jobs. It's a fuckin' catch-22, lets hope it doesn't come to that.

Fuck incentives, make some laws. Let the CEOs of Nike live in China if that's where they want to create jobs.

China's economy is kicking ours' ass, too.

The thing is "far less than a minimum wage" doesn't compete to current salaries in sweatshopland. If there is some law in Govt. regulation then all incentive is effectively eliminated because they still have way cheaper labor elsewhere. And if it all comes to threats, then it's probably worse, they'd easily defect particularly if they can see that opportunities for profits are also higher elsewhere.

And since we are on the apocalyptic scenario here, would Nike even have a market left in the States? I can see places in South America and perhaps Europe/China where they either still have trades or they could be saved in spite of the US doomsday and Nike-like could find markets there, but really, Nike and all those other companies have been pretty much conning the Western World so far with prices that have nothing to do with the cost of their products and are as fictional as their corporative images.
If it's doomsday, I don't see many of them staying that much and only those that provide truly basic stuff (see Colbert's Campbell bit) prospering.

Well, I guess we're just fucked then if it gets to that point.

Question: Are corporations in Western Europe more highly regulated? Is their culture less greedy?

I think something many people have trouble wrapping their minds around is the fact that the lives we live aren't guranteed. We aren't guranteed to always be so economically and socially comfortable that we have tons of time to sit on our asses and cruise YouTube or Blog. These sorts of things are luxuries that have been afforded by a modern world that requires much less of us (as a whole) in terms of manual labor and self-sacrifice. We don't have to till our fields or make our own clothes or build our own houses.

An anecdote: Durring Hurricane's Ike and Gustav, you couldn't buy bread here. The trucks couldn't make their deliveries and the bread in stock was quickly bought up, resulting in just about every local store having no bread for over a week, Wal-Mart included. It wasn't just bread, either. Dairy and meat were effected, too, but they were restocked a bit more quickly.

Do you have any idea what it's like to walk into a major grocery store and see absolutely no bread, milk, eggs, or meat? And to be told that it's going to be at least a week before anything comes in? It's a pretty fucking sobering experience and goes a long way towards making you realize that everything we take for granted it ultimately pretty fragile.

Another example: After Hurricane Katrina, the damage to cell towers combined with the influx of evacuees to higher ground resulted in cell service being next to non-existant for almost a month. You pretty much couldn't get a call out or get one received. Our internet was also completely down for over a week, which was light compared to others.

My point, and this may entirely be a personal deal, is that in the face of shit getting really bad, convienance is the first thing to go. And the vast majority of modern wired technology is technology of convienance, not necessity. Yes, it may be so ingrained into our society that it is required for certain things, but it ultimately isn't a matter of basic survival.

Do I think things will ever get as bad as I'm talking about? I like to hope not, but I've seen firsthand what happens when the shit hits the fan and in order to make it you will drastically alter your way of life if you have to.

PRECISELY Banks - the problem is we in the first world have become so consumer driven, so used to the immediacy of modern middle-to-upper-class lifestyles that when the shit really goes down and people have to properly fend for themselves - you know, like everyone on the rest of the planet has had to basically all along - a lot of spoiled westerners are going to last about as long as a pampered shitzu left in the wilderness to fenmd for itself.

I mean, thats what got me into this thread in the first place, people around here are trying to speculate aboput what a Depression might look like and they're discussing cutting back their bandwidth - sums it up perfectly for my money.

See, there's another thing there. One way or another, the modern world also includes a great deal of numbness and a sort o basic addiction to just be entertained. I don't think for many people convenience will be the first thing to go and I seriously doubt a lot of them will have any sort of awakening as a result of this.

Not long ago I was in Cuba and people of younger generations sort of implicitly no longer give a fuck about communism or whether Cuba will get better or anything. There's still a lot of smart people and hopeful people. But I got a deep sensation that many of them had given up already and so, they have their systems of knowing when stores have something to go there fast and they get their school stuff done with as much ennui as you can imagine, but that's it, and there's all the party and fun you can imagine.
And they come from generations, even before Castro, of believing they are actually worthy and proud and striving to do the best they can (one of the reasons that revolution actually succeeded and didn't collapse as many others around the world did).

I don't really see a lot of time passing from hypothetical collapse to Western World going into a basic stuck fuck-it mood, since it's already part of the zeitgest of our times. I can see systems of knowing what to do, and co-ops and whatever happening for food and whatnot... I also see a proliferation of youtube content and of flash games and of any type of time-consuming thing just to get to the next day. It's not like the actual infrastructure for that isn't already in place.

That being said, I'm not exactly sure the world will collapse as it's expected/implied in this thread. And if it actually does, you should expect some sort of anarco-capitalism to emerge from it and not really think of it coming back. After the Depression and pretty much any other big historical event, the world never returned to what it was and if this goes to hell, then what we know of the world is over, entirely.

I've been reading of Somalia a lot lately. It's interesting that in a way, even though they are still entirely screwed up and up-to-fuckedupness in African standards, the country got quantifiably better after the government's collapse. There are lots of IT companies and some entrepreneurs have done everything from lighting up the streets to opening schools and we are talking of Somalia, of all places.
Any type of big crisis will still leave a lot of extremely rich people in the Western World, and there's no doubt a lot of them will step with varying degrees of altrustic to entirely selfish reasons. And considering how the only constant in all present governments is a sense of inefficiency, I doubt they'd survive. It wouldn't even be a revolution or a dissolution, just a transition to de facto irrelevancy.

And if we are talking of a full hypothetical Depression scenario, it'd have to be a McCain win. I can very well imagine what Katrina like carelessness would do in a Depression. I can imagine drug dealers and clever CEOs being more "loved" in certain regions than all politicians.

edit: note that my "it'd have to be a McCain win" was in reference to full hypothetical horrible scenario. I'm not entirely sure the world is collapsing and if it truly is, I'm not entirely sure an Obama administration could simply solve it.

Something I'm not reading a lot of and only hinted in a few posts: if you're so wired [and individually you're not, relatively] and given how this makes you part of the global instant economy, there's a good chance in this scenario that it will be the world that will offer to bail you out.

This is mostly out of self-interest of course -- protecting the investments we've made in your country plus the maintenance of overall investor confidence in global markets.

But business is business and there will be strings attached. Leaving that aside, would your country even accept such an arrangement? Knowing that the well being and lifestyle of its citizens rests in foreign hands?

Of course, that's pretty much the case now, but an explicit bailout by other countries that have, in the past, relied on the US plus the inevitable conditions (e.g., drop all agriculture tariffs), would it be accepted?

Markets are tanking but that doesn't mean these countries have run out of money. It could be that your future will include being more integrated with the world and less dominant than you've ever been -- both in media and commerce.

I'll throw Aussie markets onto that bonfire. They're calling today on the Australian stock market Black Friday

Worst market crash since '87,

Back to Devin's original question, I think that you would be surprised how fast people can adapt to changes in their environment. If things really do get so bad that your average American citizen has to choose between food and shelter or cell phone and internet service, then the vast majority of people will choose to eat and keep their home rather than stay 'wired' out on the street somewhere.

I know that right now there are ALOT of people that spend way too much money on gadgets and entertainment, and then struggle to make rent at the end of the month, but up until recently there has been enough easy money available (credit cards, sub-prime housing loans, etc.) to support that type of lifestyle. As that easy money dries up I think that reality will set in quickly.

Except these people still hold your financial future in their hands.

The world is holding onto your IOUs and if you really tank and their own citizens are suffering, then they'll want something in return for not making you eat your children to pay for your net connection.

Maybe it'll mean dropping your idiotic patent regime and freeing up a whole raft of technology to really get HD and decent cell technology going.

Perhaps your infinite extension on copyright will be negotiated away and Steamboat Willie will finally be able to get into porno.

It might mean that accepting terms from the wider world will become the impetus for better and cheaper and greater connectivity.

Wait, I thought it was global warming I was supposed to panic about. Now I have to exchange my swimsuits for a parka? Crap.

I think we might have to take a step back economically to take two steps forward. At least I hope that the next president will be at least competent enough to steer things in the right direction.

Iceland is for sale, the country is bankcrupt
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...m=320308801162

Cable TV prices are outrageous, I hope people start cancelling so they can be adjusted. We're due for a correction here, very soon.

Cable TV? Seriously, guys. If we hit another Great Depression, all of this is over. It doesn't matter if you're middle class right now and have been since you were a kid, there's a good chance you'd be sleeping outdoors and depending on churches for soup. How much of this country at this point is based on retail? Stocking shelves and ringing up registers, transportation, marketing, sales & consulting, business law, advertising, etc, etc, etc, if nobody can afford to buy shit I wonder what percentage of the jobs in all those skyscrapers would disappear. That would be incredible, cities full of empty locked up skyscrapers. Fuck manual labor, with the country as built up and automated as it is today we'd be lucky to get any public works projects that employ people on the scale they did before. Hydro-electric dams? Already built. Bridges? We got 'em. In Boston during the Depression the city would hire 15,000 people to shovel snow for a day, is that the only type of stuff people would be looking at?

As for the Internet? Anyone here who's lost it for a short amount of time knows that the first little bit is like drug withdrawal, and then once that's over you usually don't give a fuck. Most of us will have much more important things to care about. The only good news out of all this is that Hollywood did its best business and was at its highest levels of greatness during the 1930s. So long as the price of tickets plummets the Industry will still be around, if not much else will.

I'm skeptical.

Haha, that was my response. Oh no, it's a depression ... I guess I'll have to pirate Dexter instead of paying for Showtime. That's not how it worked in the Great Depression. I remember hearing stories from my great grandma about how during the great depression they were so poor she only had 2 pairs of underwear. Just trying to get enough money to pay for food was a huge problem.

And yet today we're saying, "I guess I'd have to give up cable TV in the case of total economic collapse."

It's because the vast majority of us have nothing to measure it against. No one here has experienced something on the level of the Great Depression, so none of us know what it's going to be like now if it happens. To be honest, it's difficult to comprehend.

So what will happen when only the rich upper class can afford access to the internet?

Well yeah, that's what the thread title and subject is all about.

There is a difference between what is the first stupid and overpriced form of entertainment would you drop and talking about how a Depression would play out in a wired and global world that is very different from the 1920's and 30's.

I think questions would be, how does the instantaneous transmission of information affect how this would play out. Would we get kinds of 'flash mobs' when someone would say that they are offering work? Would there be government sponsored information jobs? While traditional manual labor may be less prevalent now-a-days we could certainly still do a lot of public works with information. Whether it's just supervising digital to analog conversion of archived works, building a new national health care infrastructure, or any number of things. There are still new kinds of projects that can be commissioned that benefit everyone and would put many back to work.

While a lot of Great Depression public works helped build the foundation for our economic growth through the present, what could we build that would help propel us economically in the future and how does that change from the older technologies?

Couple of CIA World Book facts:

Internet users:
223 million (2008)

Internet hosts:
282 million (2007)

Telephones - mobile cellular:
255 million (2007)

Telephones - main lines in use:
163.2 million (2007)

Television broadcast stations:
2,218 (2006)

Population
303,824,640 (July 2008 est.)

Labor force:
153.1 million (includes unemployed) (2007 est.)

Current Unemployment Rate:
6.1% in Sep 2008 (BLS.GOV)
source

Interesting ideas. I guess it would depend somewhat on where and how joblessness manifests. If it hits blue-collar America first, a lot of those workers are folks with skilled trade backgrounds - the people who probably would benefit the most from more traditional public works projects, rather than the more technologically-oriented stuff you suggest. I suspect that a lot of these folks are on the other side of the digital divide - they're the ones who don't regularly use computers, maybe never learned to type, etc. Even data entry type stuff might not be a valid option for some.

That's not to say I'm dismissive of the idea. On the contrary, I think it has a lot of merit to serve a certain segment of the unemployed population. But I'm guessing that blue collar America would get hit first and hardest, and these workers would need to be accounted for in a way that would accommodate their skills.

Charlie Stross had a good post on his blog about this topic recently. The comments are worth a read too.

I recommend that blog highly, by the way. He's an SF author, but touches on many subjects with intelligence and wit.

Devin, excellent topic. To answer your initial question directly, I think that some people will be forced, through economic circumstances to give up these things and others will choose to. I know I just paid a $140 (two months' service) cable bill the other day, and I'm really beginning to doubt that it's worth it.

You will all have to forgive me for viewing this through my usual filter, but I'm sitting in a library right now and, as we're talking about the exchange of information here, it seems apt.

During times of economic hardship, library use goes through the roof. My colleagues in the 1930s were up to their eyeballs in people who needed help/entertainment/education/distraction and, based on what's happening around me every day, I'd say there isn't going to be a dull moment around here for quite some time. The internet has been added to the mix, but, from where I'm sitting, it's the same problem all over again.

Libraries are local, free, and give you access to all of those things that, from the perspective of a family budget, fall outside of the limits of bare necessities. Problem is, some of these things are very nearly necessary - you need a way to look for a job and read the paper, you need some books or other entertainment for your kids, and it'd be really nice to have something to amuse you on Saturday night if you can't afford to go to a movie/go out to eat.

Companies that provide entertainment, information, and communication resources to us thrive on our greed. They do well as long as we insist upon owning something, whether it be a cell phone, our own high-speed internet connection and computer, or 250 channels. I think that times of economic hardship force us to step back and realize that, no, we don't really need to own these things to have access to information, but that we can support organizations that allow us to collectively own these things. Economically disadvantaged people have already learned this lesson; the rest of us just have to get on board. We can still have wireless internet and every book, newspaper, and magazine we could possibly want to read, we just have to make a change in the way we think about "owning" these resources.

Brass tacks: keep an eye on the way that your communities fund/support your local public libraries and go get a library card. There's a really obnoxious tendency toward privatization and individualism in our culture right now that is undermining the presence of public services that we really, really need.

There are plenty of public works type projects that the government could invest in to create jobs. You are right, we don't really need anymore roads, but we do have a lot of 'dirty' power plants that could be renovated to be more environmentally friendly. We do also need more clean power plants in general, maybe not dams, but perhaps reinvestment in nuclear power plants.

If there is a large contingent of unemployed white collar workers, then build a new national laboratory to actual find solutions to our energy problems rather than just talking about our energy problems. Put out of work scientists and engineers to use.

We already have a nice telephone system and a nice cable system, but our fiber network is not nearly to that level. Why not expand our fiber infrastructure so that when we do come out the other side of the depression (if there is a depression) we will again have the most technologically advanced society in the world.

I think that the we learned a lot about how to deal with a problem on the magnitude of the great depression during the great depression. If our leaders take those lessons to heart, then hopefully any depression that does strike (if it does strike) will be much less severe than the great depression. Knock on wood.

Seriously important point, MissZooey, but I'll be honest...I'm not really looking forward to a library clogged with folks who can't afford to loiter at the local AMC let alone drive there in their Panzers. My town is in the midst of a nasty struggle as the town council is attempting to hijack funding for the library to put towards another soccer field. Hilariously, if you're the type to find the Third Reich funny, most of the people in town are siding with the town council.

I personally put a very high premium on libraries(and museums, natch) and am reminded almost daily that they are an underappreciated and undersupported yet vital element of an enlightened culture. I don't see the general populace as even having an inkling of what our culture would be like without these pillars...I've even found a way in my mind to romanticize librarians as being the reincarnated souls of the scroll keepers in Alexandria. And in a childish, yet emotionally apt I believe, parallel I see these "suddenly I've got to get me some free entertainment" types as no different than that 35 year old asshole who starts wearing a Batman shirt in 1989.

Where were these people when a society that needed more mall space let too many town libraries descend into ruins? Where were these people when our enemies closed in around us? Where was Gondor whe....

They got nothing to do now? I say give 'em a stick and hoop and let 'em remember what the fuck grass and trees look like.

Oh my god, am I a militant library extremist?

My internet connection at the library sucks, no, I'll be going to Panera instead :-)

Oh, they're already there and we could deal with them if we had more money/better facilities/etc.

My city's threatening to cut $2,000,000 from the library system's budget and close four of the branches. But, hey, let's put more cops on the street! Preventative medicine, people, come on.

That's very darling and it's certainly the sort of stuff we put in our recruitment literature, but I just spent part of my morning sneaking a young woman back to our staff bathrooms so she could vomit in peace. And, weirdly, I kind of feel like that's part of what I went to school for, too.

Yeah, they were at that new mall. And, when they come crawling back, I plan to provide excellent service with only a teeny twist of the knife.

I think so. Don't worry about it, brother.

Edit -

Fine by me. See you when Panera goes under/starts charging for internet access.

Hey I do support my local library, but you guys don't serve hot paninis yet right?

My local library has juice and cookies on Wednesdays for kids. So there is that.

If nobody buys from China, then China won't be any better off than anyone else.

What scares me about McCain is his toxic anti-spending mantra. In the face of economic collapse, when literally the only entity that can still borrow on good credit is the federal government, belt-tightening is the last thing you'd want to do. If the feds don't provide new jobs and new spending, nobody else will, because they can't. This is what happened during the Great Depression, and the mistake made by Hoover (and Roosevelt, at least until WWII) was worrying about maintaining a balanced checkbook. Unfortunately, with the bailout and the national debt passing $10 trillion and what not, I don't think that's going to be very popular. You already see people railing against Obama's second proposed stimulus.

The Panera by me only lets you be online for 30 minutes between 11AM-1PM so I almost never go there (even though I tend to get more work done if I leave my house) since I inevitably feel like going at around 10AM and I know I'll only be able to work for an hour before it tells me that I've been connected too long.

I know I could just clear my browser cache and change my MAC ID on my card and get back on but it's not worth the hassle (plus, I spilled soda on my laptop once and it's taken me a year to get the sticky keys to completely go away).

As far as libraries go, I find it kind of interesting the way that DRM on modern media hurts companies. What will libraries do if you never own and always rent stuff?

"...we used to DREAM of living in a corridor!
Would of been a PALACE to us!

We used to have to live in a paper bag in a septic-tank..."

...you were lucky...

My neighbor told me the her connection was cut off at Panera the other day. It's never happened to me, and I've worked almost the whole day over there at some points.

The library connection next to my house has gotten better, it was just super unreliable for a while, so I always have that as a backup.

Yeah, it's pretty funny that the only thing a government can do when in a Depression is furiously and frantically spend even more than before just as a bailing action. The difference is we got away with it here last time but it doesn't fly in the third world because they can't borrow the money. Could the industrialized nations have that same problem this time around? Then we'd all be utterly fucked. It's amazing to think about a worldwide society that has walked on the moon and invented a vast array of incredible technologies, and then the population ends up not using any of it ever again because nobody can afford it due to the financial system that they came up with and stuck to. I mean, think about it. We create this society. We invent all this technology. We have all these plans for the future. But imagine if this Depression happens on a global level and then suddenly none of it is possible or available anymore because a financial system, a non-physical, totally theoretical financial system that is only there because we say it is, says we can't because the system got fucked up. If it really goes down then we need to start thinking outside of this box we've built for ourselves.

Well, I imagine post-industrial societies would get it from the same place they got it from last time: borrowing from the wealthy, whether they be countries (China, probably) or individuals. Remember War Bonds?

It's because we've stuck to the idea of growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of a cancer cell, rather than one of a stable, long-term vision for society. We've all gotten myopia because recklessness now is profitable in the short-term, but we've forgotten what happens when you throw caution to the wind in such a systematic way. I suppose we're about to find out.

This was on the last page in response to Ripoll's latest attempt at humor, but I think there are a lot of parallels with the current generation of twentysomethings to that Silent Generation (which I think is what Ed was talking about) of people who came of age in the late 40s and 50s and were in their 30s by the time the Boomers started tearing shit up. I've personally felt that we're the closest to that generation who was raised in relative prosperity (even if they were born in World War II), yet felt a deep emotional disconnect with and saw lack of intellectual stimulants in the society around them as they got older, or were dissatisfied about the opportunities they were given as a result of the post-war boom. I'm talking out of my ass here, but there have been definitely more similarities to that generation than any other prior.

It's the Don Draper generation, to use a bad analogy.

Edit to clarify.