THIS SATURDAY (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.
The telegraph and the telephone have a special place in the history and future of competition and Big Tech. After all, they were the original tech monopolists. Every discussion of tech and monopoly takes place in their shadow.
Back in 2010, Tim Wu published The Master Switch, his bestselling, wildly influential history of "The Bell System" and the struggle to de-monopolize America from its first telecoms barons:
Wu is a brilliant writer and theoretician. Best known for coining the term "Net Neutrality," Wu went on to serve in both the Obama and Biden administrations as a tech trustbuster. He accomplished much in those years. Most notably, Wu wrote the 2021 executive order on competition, laying out a 72-point program for using existing powers vested in the administrative agencies to break up corporate power and get the monopolist's boot off Americans' necks:
The Competition EO is basically a checklist, and Biden's agency heads have been racing down it, ticking off box after box on or ahead of schedule, making meaningful technical changes in how companies are allowed to operate, each one designed to make material improvements to the lives of Americans.
A decade and a half after its initial publication, Wu's Master Switch is still considered a canonical account of how the phone monopoly was built â and dismantled.
But somewhat lost in the shadow of The Master Switch is another book, written by the accomplished telecoms historian Richard R John: "Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications," published a year after The Master Switch:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088139
Network Nation flew under my radar until earlier this year, when I found myself speaking at an antitrust conference where both John and Wu were also on the bill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VNivXjrU3A
During John's panel â "Case Studies: AT&T & IBM" â he took a good-natured dig at Wu's book, claiming that Wu, not being an historian, had been taken in by AT&T's own self-serving lies about its history. Wu â also on the panel â didn't dispute it, either. That was enough to prick my interest. I ordered a copy of Network Nation and put it on my suitcase during my vacation earlier this month.
Network Nation is an extremely important, brilliantly researched, deep history of America's love/hate affair with not just the telephone, but also the telegraph. It is unmistakably as history book, one that aims at a definitive takedown of various neat stories about the history of American telecommunications. As Wu writes in his New Republic review of John's book:
Generally he describes the failure of competition not so much as a failure of a theory, but rather as the more concrete failure of the men running the competitors, many of whom turned out to be incompetent or unlucky. His story is more like a blow-by-blow account of why Germany lost World War II than a grand theory of why democracy is better than fascism.
In other words, John thinks that the monopolies that emerged in the telegraph and then the telephone weren't down to grand forces that made them inevitable, but rather, to the errors made by regulators and the successful gambits of the telecoms barons. At many junctures, things could have gone another way.
So this is a very complicated story, one that uses a series of contrasts to make the point that history is contingent and owes much to a mix of random chance and the actions of flawed human beings, and not merely great economic or historical laws. For example, John contrasts the telegraph with the telephone, posing them against one another as a kind of natural experiment in different business strategies and regulatory responses.
The telegraph's early promoters, including Samuel Morse (as in "Morse code") believed that the natural way to roll out telegraph was via selling the patents to the federal government and having an agency like the post office operate it. There was a widespread view that the post office as a paragon of excellent technical management and a necessity for knitting together the large American nation. Moreover, everyone could see that when the post office partnered with private sector tech companies (like the railroads that became essential to the postal system), the private sector inevitably figured out how to gouge the American public, leading regulators to ever-more extreme measures to rein in the ripoffs.
The telegraph skated close to federalization on several occasions, but kept getting snatched back from the brink, ending up instead as a privately operated system that primarily served deep-pocketed business customers. This meant that telegraph companies were forever jostling to get the right to string wires along railroad tracks and public roads, creating a "political economy" that tried to balance out highway regulators and rail barons (or play them off against each other).
But the leaders of the telegraph companies were largely uninterested in "popularizing" the telegraph â that is, figuring out how ordinary people could use telegraphs in place of the hand-written letters that were the dominant form of long-distance communications at the time. By turning their backs on "popularization," telegraph companies largely freed themselves from municipal oversight, because they didn't need to get permission to string wires into every home in every major city.
When the telephone emerged, its inventors and investors initially conceived of it as a tool for business as well. But while the telegraph had ushered in a boom in instantaneous, long-distance communications (for example, by joining ports and distant cities where financiers bought and sold the ports' cargo), the telephone proved far more popular as a way of linking businesses within a city limits. Brokers and financiers and businesses that were only a few blocks from one another found the telephone to be vastly superior to the system of dispatching young boys to race around urban downtowns with slips bearing messages.
So from the start, the phone was much more bound up in city politics, and that only deepened with popularization, as phones worked their ways into the homes of affluent families and local merchants like druggists, who offered free phone calls to customers as a way of bringing trade through the door. That created a great number of local phone carriers, who had to fend off Bell's federally enforced patents and aldermen and city councilors who solicited bribes and favors.
To make things even more complex, municipal phone companies had to fight with other sectors that wanted to fill the skies over urban streets with their own wires: streetcar lines and electrical lines. The unregulated, breakneck race to install overhead wires led to an epidemic of electrocutions and fires, and also degraded service, with rival wires interfering with phone calls.
City politicians eventually demanded that lines be buried, creating another source of woe for telephone operators, who had to contend with private or quasi-private operators who acquired a monopoly over the "subways" â tunnels where all these wires eventually ended up.
The telegraph system and the telephone system were very different, but both tended to monopoly, often from opposite directions. Regulations that created some competition in telegraphs extinguished competition when applied to telephones. For example, Canada federalized the regulation of telephones, with the perverse effect that everyday telephone users in cities like Toronto had much less chance of influencing telephone service than Chicagoans, whose phone carrier had to keep local politicians happy.
Nominally, the Canadian Members of Parliament who oversaw Toronto's phone network were big leaguers who understood prudent regulation and were insulated from the daily corruption of municipal politics. And Chicago's aldermen were pretty goddamned corrupt. But Bell starved Toronto of phone network upgrades for years, while Chicago's gladhanding political bosses forced Chicago's phone company to build and build, until Chicago had more phone lines than all of France. Canadian MPs might have been more remote from rough-and-tumble politics, but that made them much less responsive to a random Torontonian's bitter complaint about their inability to get a phone installed.
As the Toronto/Chicago story illustrates, the fact that there were so many different approaches to phone service tried in the US and Canada gives John more opportunities to contrast different business-strategies and regulations. Again, we see how there was never one rule that governments could have used if they wanted to ensure that telecoms were well-run, widely accessible, and reasonably priced. Instead, it was always "horses for courses" â different rules to counter different circumstances and gambits from telecoms operators.
As John traces through the decades during which the telegraph and telephone were established in America, he draws heavily on primary sources to trace the ebb and flow of public and elite sentiment towards public ownership, regulation, and trustbusting. In John's hands, we see some of the most spectacular failures as more than a mismatch of regulatory strategy to corporate gambit â but rather as a mismatch of political will and corporate gambit. If a company's power would be best reined in by public ownership, but the political vogue is for regulation, then lawmakers end up trying to make rules for a company they should simply be buying giving to the post office to buy.
This makes John's history into a history of the Gilded Age and trustbusters. Notorious vulture capitalists like Jay Gould shocked the American conscience by declaring that businesses had no allegiance to the public good, and were put on this Earth to make as much money as possible no matter what the consequences. Gould repeated "raided" Western Union, acquiring shares and forcing the company to buy him out at a premium to end his harassment of the board and the company's managers.
By the time the feds were ready to buy out Western Union, Gould was a massive shareholder, meaning that any buyout of the telegraph would make Gould infinitely wealthier, at public expense, in a move that would have been electoral poison for the lawmakers who presided over it. In this highly contingent way, Western Union lived on as a private company.
Americans â including prominent businesspeople who would be considered "conservatives" by today's standards, were deeply divided on the question of monopoly. The big, successful networks of national telegraph lines and urban telephone lines were marvels, and it was easy to see how they benefited from coordinated management. Monopolists and their apologists weaponized this public excitement about telecoms to defend their monopolies, insisting that their achievement owed its existence to the absence of "wasteful competition."
The economics of monopoly were still nascent. Ideas like "network effects" (where the value of a service increases as it adds users) were still controversial, and the bottlenecks posed by telephone switching and human operators meant that the cost of adding new subscribers sometimes went up as the networks grew, in a weird diseconomy of scale.
Patent rights were controversial, especially patents related to natural phenomena like magnetism and electricity, which were viewed as "natural forces" and not "inventions." Business leaders and rabble-rousers alike decried patents as a federal grant of privilege, leading to monopoly and its ills.
Telecoms monopolists â telephone and telegraph alike â had different ways to address this sentiment at different times (for example, the Bell System's much-vaunted commitment to "universal service" was part of a campaign to normalize the idea of federally protected, privately owned monopolies).
Most striking about this book were the parallels to contemporary fights over Big Tech trustbusting, in our new Gilded Age. Many of the apologies offered for Western Union or AT&T's monopoly could have been uttered by the Renfields who carry water for Facebook, Apple and Google. John's book is a powerful and engrossing reminder that variations on these fights have occurred in the not-so-distant past, and that there's much we can learn from them.
Wu isn't wrong to say that John is engaging with a lot of minutae, and that this makes Network Nation a far less breezy read than Master Switch. I get the impression that John is writing first for other historians, and writers of popular history like Wu, in a bid to create the definitive record of all the complexity that is elided when we create tidy narratives of telecoms monopolies, and tech monopolies in general. Bringing Network Nation on my vacation as a beach-read wasn't the best choice â it demands a lot of serious attention. But it amply rewards that attention, too, and makes an indelible mark on the reader.
Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!
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"Choice may be the cornerstone of individual freedom but, as the history of humanity shows, the urge to surrender to something larger and to transcend the self can be just as urgent, if not more so."
The White House announced a sweeping executive order Friday to promote competition throughout the U.S. economy, in the most ambitious effort in generations to reduce the stranglehold of monopolies and concentrated markets in major industries.
The order â whose details POLITICO first reported last week â also includes elements designed to lower the price of prescription drugs, protect consumers' privacy and increase scrutiny of abusive business tactics in the tech industry.
The effort marks a major push by President Joe Bidenâs administration to focus on competition as part of the economic recovery from the pandemic. It also offers a response to progressivesâ criticisms that the federal government has focused too much on supporting banks and other corporations without concern about the effect on consumers, who have watched their choices dwindle over the years.
Biden plans to sign the order at 1:30 p.m., the White House said.
The orderâs impacts could be felt in industries including agriculture, airlines, health, broadband and banking. Previously unreported elements include a provision urging the Federal Communications Commission to reinstate its Obama-era net neutrality rules, as well as a call for financial regulators to allow data sharing among financial companies.
It dives into the specifics on some policy issues â for instance, by calling for over-the-counter sales of hearing aids, urging the Food and Drug Administration to allow imports of prescription drugs from Canada, and ending "exclusivity arrangements" in which landlords "stick tenants with only a single internet option," according to a nearly 4,000-word White House fact sheet issued Friday morning.
The White House said order will include initiatives to require airlines to refund fees to passengers who receive shoddy Wi-Fi service or baggage handling; restricting businessesâ ability to foist noncompete agreements on employees; challenge occupational licensing requirements that limit competition in industries like health care; and guarantee farmers and motorists the right to repair their own vehicles without voiding warranty protections. The last provision would also have implications for consumer products like Appleâs iPhones.
Top White House officials said the order seeks to ensure small businesses and consumers have access to fair markets.
âThe overarching objective with the executive order is to make sure the president is encouraging competition in industries around the country,â White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday.
Taking aim at just one industry the order will cover, Psaki added: âIt doesnât sound right to most people that there are three shipping companies that are dominating the market and upping and increasing costs for suppliers, small businesses, people across the country. That doesnât sound right or fair, because it isnât.â
Background:
The executive order builds off one that former President Barack Obama issued in 2016, which encouraged agencies to consider competition in their decisions and rulemakings. That order â largely the work of Jason Furman, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers â came near the end of Obamaâs presidency. Few agencies followed through on the White Houseâs prodding, and those that did saw their actions largely overturned by former President Donald Trumpâs appointees.
Bidenâs order goes a step beyond Obamaâs by offering pointed suggestions for steps to take, rather than leaving implementation entirely to the agencies.
The new order is the product of months of negotiations among White House officials, particularly Tim Wu â who served on Obamaâs National Economic Council and is now a Biden aide focused on technology and competition policy â along with the Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission and other federal agencies.
While the White House can command executive branch agencies like the Departments of Transportation and Agriculture to take action, the order styles its directions as âsuggestionsâ to avoid the appearance the administration is inappropriately seeking to direct independent agencies like the FCC or FTC. That could avoid the kind of blowback that Trump faced when he pressed both agencies to crack down on social media companies.
A Columbia University law professor and antitrust advocate, Wu is considered one of the founders of the New Brandeis movement in antitrust, along with Lina Khan, a fellow Columbia professor whom Biden named FTC chair last month. Wu and Khan have both argued that the federal government should use a variety of tools beyond antitrust enforcement, particularly agency rulemakings, to promote competition.
The White House order will include these items:
Airlines and shipping: The Transportation Department will issue rules aimed at boosting transparency of airlinesâ fees for baggage and Wi-Fi service while helping consumers recover those costs when their trips are delayed or the service is substandard. The agency had proposed similar rules in 2016 that would have forced airlines to disclose baggage and change fees before passengers buy their tickets, but the Trump administration canceled the rulemaking.People familiar with the executive order had said they expect it to suggest efforts to encourage competition at major U.S. airports with capacity constraints, such as New Yorkâs JFK International and Ronald Reagan Washington National near D.C. However, the fact sheet does not mention this issue. The order also tasks the Federal Maritime Commission, which regulates ocean shipping, and the Surface Transportation Board, which oversees trucking and railroads, with seeking ways to bring down shipping costs.
Agriculture: The USDA will undertake several rulemakings aimed at protecting farmers and ranchers against unfair practices by large meatpackers and other agribusinesses. The rules seek to make it easier for the agency to challenge unfair and deceptive practices by meat processors and would allow farmers to more easily file complaints with USDA or sue under the Packers and Stockyards Act. People familiar with the order said it would also tighten the rules for so-called poultry grower tournament systems, in which contract farmers are paid more or less than their peers in the same area depending on how closely they meet buyersâ standards. The agency is also moving forward with rules that seek to increase food access through alternatives to supermarkets, like local farmerâs markets, and increase consumer transparency about where meat is raised.
Labor: The order takes aim at noncompete agreements â contractual provisions that attempt to prevent workers from switching jobs within the same industry â and urges the FTC to make rules barring or limiting them. About one in five Americans today is bound by noncompetes, particularly in tech and health care, where the clauses are common. The order will also urge the FTC and the Justice Department to challenge overly broad job licensing requirements imposed by state governments, a move the administration says could make it easier for workers to obtain new licenses when they move to a new state. During the pandemic, about half of U.S. states agreed to modify their occupational licensing requirements to allow out-of-state physicians and health care workers to work in the state or offer telehealth services.
Financial Services: The order is also expected to support open banking regulations, which seek to allow data sharing among financial firms to increase consumer convenience and price transparency. New regulations could provide more clarity about the consumer protection and cybersecurity obligations of financial apps that have access to data from customers' bank and brokerage accounts. Under the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, consumers have the right to access their own financial data. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has yet to issue standards that would govern consumer requests and transfers, however, although it started a potential rulemaking on the subject in October. Progressive groups have called on the Biden administration to adopt a strong interpretation of the law that would make it easy for consumers to switch among banks and take advantage of innovative upstart technology firms that provide lending and investing services.
Right to repair: The order will also task the FTC with establishing rules on when consumers can bypass manufacturers to seek repairs on products they own, a concept known as âright to repair.â The widespread issue affects farmers seeking to fix their own equipment, as well as consumers who want to use cheaper independent mechanics rather than car dealerships for auto repairs â or small repair shops instead of Apple for cracked iPhone screens. In a May report to Congress, the FTC suggested it might undertake such a rulemaking that would clarify when repair restrictions violate the law. Manufacturers have fought against âright to repairâ proposals, saying they could expose customers to substandard repairs or even violate their privacy by undermining devicesâ security.
Mergers: The order would urge the FTC and DOJ to update guidance on how they review mergers, potentially pulling back on guidelines the Trump administration approved last year. Those guidelines focused on so-called vertical mergers, which involve companies that are not direct competitors but are in the same supply chain, and which have typically attracted little scrutiny from regulators. The FTCâs two Democrats opposed the Trump-era update, calling it overly deferential to business. Changes to those guidelines could affect several pending deals, including Amazonâs proposed purchase of MGM Studios and UnitedHealth Groupâs deal to buy Change Healthcare. The order will also recommend that federal banking regulators work with the Justice Department to update guidance on bank deals. The DOJ partners with the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to vet bank mergers, but hasnât changed how it looks at potential tie-ups since 1995.
Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freudâs unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economistâs incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial.
In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience â that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks â has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value.
As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, âConvenience decides everything.â Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I âprefer.â) Easy is better, easiest is best.
Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience â not to own a cellphone, not to use Google â has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.
For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where it is doing so much to structure the modern economy. Particularly in tech-related industries, the battle for convenience is the battle for industry dominance.
Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes â and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.
Given the growth of convenience â as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life â it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I donât want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isnât wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to lifeâs drudgeries.
But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.
It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.
Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when labor-saving devices for the home were invented and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first âconvenience foods,â such as canned pork and beans and Quaker Quick Oats; the first electric clothes-washing machines; cleaning products like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven.
Convenience was the household version of another late-19th-century idea, industrial efficiency, and its accompanying âscientific management.â It represented the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life.
However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would make available to the general population the kind of freedom for self-cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way convenience would also be the great leveler.
This idea â convenience as liberation â could be intoxicating. Its headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings of the mid-20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics and from goofy entertainments like âThe Jetsonsâ we learned that life in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared with the push of a button. Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes would clean themselves or perhaps self-destruct after a dayâs wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be contemplated.
The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time-consuming pursuits. Perhaps this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them.
By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like societyâs greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about peopleâs need to express themselves, to fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing oneâs own vegetables or fixing oneâs own motorcycle. But such things were seen to have value nevertheless â or rather, as a result. People were looking for individuality again.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience technologies â the period we are living in â would co-opt this ideal. It would conveniencize individuality.
You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self-expression.
Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of self-expression he once could experience only in his private den. A new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.
So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our existence. Most of the powerful and important technologies created over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no longer about saving physical labor â many of us donât do much of that anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves. Convenience is one-click, one-stop shopping, the seamless experience of âplug and play.â The ideal is personal preference with no effort.
We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course â more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free.
As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at which young people vote).
The paradoxical truth Iâm driving at is that todayâs technologies of individualization are technologies of mass individualization. Customization can be surprisingly homogenizing. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select as our background image.
I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open-source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks â the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed?
Todayâs cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.
Convenience has to serve something greater than itself, lest it lead only to more convenience. In her 1963 classic, âThe Feminine Mystique,â Betty Friedan looked at what household technologies had done for women and concluded that they had just created more demands. âEven with all the new labor-saving appliances,â she wrote, âthe modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework than her grandmother.â When things become easier, we can seek to fill our time with more âeasyâ tasks. At some point, lifeâs defining struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions.
An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is âeasyâ is that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask. At the extreme, we donât actually do anything; we only arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life.
We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient â not always, but more of the time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at least some inconvenient choices. You need not churn your own butter or hunt your own meat, but if you want to be someone, you cannot allow convenience to be the value that transcends all others. Struggle is not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the solution to the question of who you are.
Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance â with natureâs laws, with the limits of our own bodies â as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the runnerâs legs and lungs begin to rebel against him.
Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world and our place in it.
So letâs reflect on the tyranny of convenience, try more often to resist its stupefying power, and see what happens. We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity.
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In 1956, two psychologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, would conclude that televisionâs representation of celebrities was carefully constructed to create an âillusion of intimacyââto make viewers believe that they actually were developing a relationship with the famous people on TV. Certain techniques particular to variety but also the chat shows produced this effect: recourse to small talk, the use of first names, and close-ups, among others, acted to close the gap between the audience and the guests, engendering the sense in the viewer of being âpart of a circle of friends.â The two coined the term âpara-social interactionâ to describe this âintimacy at a distance.â
So it is that, for many people, celebrities have become part of their built attentional environment, allowing them regular glimpses into that other world inhabited by magical creatures who look something like us, yet are beyond us. Our deities are of course nothing like the God of Abraham, or even His saints. They are, rather, more like the pagan gods of old, prone to fits of anger and vindictiveness, petty jealousies, and embarrassing bouts of drunkenness. But this only lends to their illusion of accessibility, and at least for commercial purposes makes them more compelling to follow.
From: âThe Attention Merchants. The epic scramble to get inside our heads.â by Tim Wu (2016)
How Trumpâs lawyers lost their mindsâââa theory
The process of lawyering has potentially powerful effects on oneâs conscience and character. To be someoneâs lawyer â especially a personal lawyer â is to agree to take their side in a deeply unconditional way. It is to inhabit your clientâs world, not in an impartial or balanced manner, but with the stated goal of advancing their interests.
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But these are just the normal problems of representation, occupational hazards really. In some lawyers, however, there is a different, much more dramatic effect. Some â very eager to serve â go beyond partiality and undergo a wholesale transformation of character, becoming completely submissive to their client/master. Worse, they can become a zealously unhinged version of the client, distilled and fortified, like an exaggerated outgrowth of his darkest intentions. That can be bad enough in a divorce proceeding. But when such a supplicant/submissive attorney has Donald Trump as a client, the effect is almost like an explosion, leading in directions at best dangerously unethical and at worst criminal.
Donald Trump has always preferred this latter kind of lawyer â the kind whose submission to him is total and unconditional. Those who give balanced advice, point out the lack of evidence, or urge caution â as good counsel are supposed to â are fired. The effect is to select for the kind of lawyers most likely to undergo the transmutation just described, and become the kind of client-supplicant worms that are Trumpâs revealed preference.