The missing politics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Call it the information age, the fourth industrial revolution, the cognitive era. Call it whatever you like, but it seems clear we are in the midst of an economic transformation as profound as those that sent medieval serfs to the cities, yeoman farmers to conquer the Western frontier, huddled masses to the United States.

The birth of industrial capitalism in America’s Gilded Age created the outlines of our political, economic, and social order, from the modern presidency to the eight-hour day to the unionized family wage. Facing mass immigration into overflowing cities, dirty and dangerous factory work amid machines of unfathomable power, and behemoth corporations that fundamentally changed the dynamics of economic competition, Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries banded together in myriad political and social movements attempting to tame the beast, from settlement houses to temperance movements to Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party. Whatever their excesses and flaws, these movements preserved capitalism’s essential core of creative destruction while drawing a protective membrane around the social fabric that it threatened.

Today, the transformations of capitalism work on our minds, not our bodies. Their power is no less profound, from the acceleration of polarization to the youth mental health crisis to the usurpation of our basic cognitive processes by AI. Yet there has been a strange passivity in the reaction. Nobody likes social media, but nobody logs off. Suggestions of regulation, restriction, or modification are met with shrugs. We are told technology’s dominance of our private lives, families, and workplaces is inevitable. Everyone else is doing it, and there is no way out. Why this pervasive sense of powerlessness? Digital media is acting on our politics in obvious ways, but our politics don’t seem to be acting much on digital media. What will it take to rouse a coordinated reaction—or has one perhaps just gotten started?