I always like running the inflation calculations. For example, a meme constantly circulates with an image of a lady gassing up her car with the price of $0.49 in the background. Sounds cheap!
But that car is from 1970. So assuming 1972 and inflation adjusting, that gas was 2022 dollars worth $3.62. Gas today in AZ is $2.89. So gas is actually cheaper and actually moreso since fuel efficiency is much higher.
I always warn people to run the inflation calcs because it changes the perspective of cost.
In addition to the financial cost of things changing, I think our primary form of currency is also changing. We've stumbled full force into an economy ruled by attention. Friendships, conversations on complex issues, challenging art have become more 'expensive' because they require so much attention and, due to the increase level of distraction coming from our phones, computers, TVs (i.e., the things that have become cheaper financially), we are left reaching into our pockets for spare attention and finding nothing but lint.
Exactly! It only matters because it is extremely limited and flimsy compared to the all seeing eyes of modern tech. We have to choose how to spend it and that can be exhausting!
It's important to understand that all progress comes with a cost, and nothing is without trade-offs! Well said.
However, I might argue that privacy was cheap before, but it's expensive today (depending on your perspective). If I want to hide from the world now, it's gonna cost me dearly.
People once valued privacy a lot more though. Remember when taking random video was definitely a no go zone in bars?
It's funny, an old bud recently asked my permission if it was okay to post old shenanigan pics on an email thread, not even a website. What kid would do that today?
Back on friendship. It's now too easy to connect and disconnect. Used to be a rift with a friend was a serious deal and that required fixing. Now it's too easy to just cut off the relationship online and move on to the next. And too difficult/time consuming to repair it.
And online communication makes it all too easy to take offense, since it requires facility with the written word and the vast majority of people don't know how to write well enough to do that without misunderstanding given even professional writers struggle with being accurately understood.
Add to that online communication makes it incredibly hard to repair a rift even if someone stays around, without in person tone, body language, etc.
I really wish I could live in the past instead. Not because it was perfect, but because there was more opportunity to make things better.
Couldn't have said it better myself! I struggle with the notion of whether or not the future that I find myself navigating through actually sucks in the way I think it does or am I ust getting grumpier with age? Awhile ago I wrote an essay where I took the view that things have always been falling apart and somehow we stumble forward.
I don't think it's getting grumpier -- or rather, I think the grumpiness is legitimate, as you point out in that comment thread.
Things are steadily getting worse in the ways that really matter, which goes well beyond tech benefits and medical advancements to things like connection and maybe most of all, a strong enough belief that things CAN get better that we're actually willing to make a genuine and effective effort. A vicious circle.
The underyling reason for this creeping dystopian malaise, and how I think it can be healed, is quite literally the meta theme of a new podcast/series I'm working on for the Abbey (which is why it's so infrequently updated at the moment). Hopefully I'll find the right words. We shall see. I feel like it's the most important work I've done or maybe will ever do, so you know, no pressure...
I'm glad to connect with you and have subscribed. In addition to the Abbey, my personal (somewhat deliberately obscured for a variety of reasons) substack is here, if you'd like to connect there as well.
Music, obviously. Yes, there are supposed benefits to having so much free/cheap access in terms of discovering new music, but I doubt those benefits are real. I think the algorithm makes people more insulated to new music than they were when they discovered new music by listening to a friend's new album or discovering it in a record store (which also created a vibrant music community in a way that listening on your own to a streaming service doesn't).
And of course the obvious that Spotify, etc. cheapens and devalues music to the point where artists/songwriters/musicians can't make a living and the quality of the whole art form declines. (which is is caused by other, arguably larger, reasons as well, but I'm sticking here to your premise)
Sometimes I think a world in which music can no longer be commodified by its creators -- where it has to be a labour of love because there's no other gain to it -- is a good thing. Other times, I'm not at all sure.
How many great artists would have been able to do what they did without the financial structure that allowed them to focus on it exclusively? Those who had family money, yes -- Graham Parsons and Townes van Zandt, for example. But that's just a handful.
None of (and yes, you know I'm going to bring them up as an example) the Beatles would have been able to afford to make their music unless it also supported them financially. And what an incalcuable loss to the world that would have been, given we also wouldn't then have had most of the best music that came after them, in the same way that we do.
Now that music is "a dime a dozen," we're getting exactly what we pay for, which is to say, not much.
Nice take, Faith. I can't say I'm overly familiar with newer music, and I do tend to stick with a lot of the stuff I grew up with (or listened to in my 20s). I think that's pretty common these days.
On the flip side, if you go back far enough, there were only a very small handful of people who had the leisure time to create great art. Those were almost always supported not from the public, but from patrons such as the Medici. I think the percentage of folks who can even try creating art was very, very small back then as compared to today. I wonder if we're ultimately missing a bigger patronage model, where artists can create without trying to market themselves.
That's what I'm trying to do with my newsletter, really not offering any benefits to "paid" subscribers beyond very old archived posts... but those subscribers are effectively patrons, not customers. It's a drop in the bucket today, but perhaps this can be grown into something much bigger and more sustainable. Let's keep thinking about this.
"we're ultimately missing a bigger patronage model, where artists can create without trying to market themselves."
This. The idea that artists can now do it all themselves is touted as a great and groovy liberating thing, but of course it's not, because not only is that not what artists are good at, but being our own PR person, record label/publisher, agent is asking artists to do multiple full time jobs -- and then when is there the time and space to create anything of value? Not to mention that all of those are in and of themselves highly specialized skills and it's fairly insulting to think anyone could just do them because the technology exists.
And then you get publishers, labels, etc. shooting themselves in the foot by requiring that artists do all of this before they're even signed -- which is the height of absurdity not only because all you then get is artists who are good at doing non-artist things but maybe not so good at doing the actual art, but publishers/labels make themselves irrelevent.
It seems to me that who gets signed/published these days aren't the best artists, but the best PR people -- who should then be doing PR and letting others make the art that they're promoting.
In Canada, we got rid of our penny a couple of years ago. The government said the cost of making the coins was more than their purchasing power was worth.
Automation played a big role in reducing the prices of tangible items. The story is entirely different for non-tangible items such as privacy and others.
How about some of the following as possibilities?
Did outsourcing work to countries with cheaper labor play a role in it? How about streamlining the business processes or using better business processes? Did just-in-time inventory play a role (even though it created a problem during COVID)? Did consolidation of work with a few large companies play a role, where they could squeeze their suppliers due to their buying power for better pricing, which helped reduce the prices?
I debate the one often, but I am unsure if it played a role. Is moving from selling high-margin products to selling more products at lower margins played any role?
Conclusion: You're better off living inside a cardboard box and receiving all of your experiences, education, and human connection via the Internet through VR goggles from Apple. Just like Big Tech planned it!
Silliness aside, as I said previously, the "free, instant communication" one is huge. I still recall buying special long-distance calling card and only calling my family once a week for about 10 minutes back in my teens, because it was so prohibitively expensive. And that was over a crappy phone line that frequently failed to connect, had an echo, and generally basic mono sound. Now I can have a high-definition video call via a smartphone in my pocket. All within just two decades’ worth of technological leaps.
Incredible. I think you had to live through that to really understand it, just like my grandparents' generation lived through television coming into the home (or even radio, really). And, the qualitative difference in early radio and, say, radio during the 50s is night and day. I've heard some of those older broadcasts.
But was that 10 minutes more precious, more valued than a constant stream of transitory communication about trivial things? Genuine question. I know for me, my relationships were deeper and more precious to me when I had to work a bit more for the contact.
I mean, I guess each conversation was a bit more "special" in that it was more rare and you tried to squeeze in as much catching up as possible knowing that you'd only speak in a week at best. But that also meant you didn't have the chance to have a more relaxed, casual connection.
So while it's probably true that we take non-stop free communication somewhat for granted these days, I personally wouldn't trade the ability to see my family at a moment's notice for the rushed chats from the late 90s / early 2000s.
For context: I was (still am) living in Denmark while my family was in Ukraine and New York. I basically only had my mom (Ukraine) and my grandma (New York) on my "to call once a week" list. All other connections were emails or nonexistent.
well, given I don't like my family and they don't like me, I'm good without either. 😎
But seriously, for me it's a constant struggle now to find connection to my chosen family (friends) when the communication is so transitory. I find it more difficult to talk about meaningful, important stuff when people mostly seem to find time to text and message, and then only while they're standing in line at Starbucks or on their way somewhere -- two formats which for me at least, tend to skew towards the everyday and not towards the deeper conversations that my soul longs for.
I miss phone calls, leisurely coffee dates, dinner party conversations long after everyone other than our best friends have gone home and we're on the last bottle of wine and finally getting to the good stuff.... I don't think we get that nearly as much these days, if at all. And because of this, I have far fewer true friends now than at any other point in my life. I'm definitely lonelier with online communciation than I was before.
I love this piece, and have read it in the past as well.
On balance, would I go back to how things were? Yes. I think on balance the internet has made the world worse and will continue to, despite its benefits.
On a personal note, I bought a house and land in the middle of nowhere because basically I wanted my own home and that was where I could afford it. I THOUGHT that the internet would mean I could still be connected, and I suppose I am -- I am having a substantial conversation with you online right now, after all -- but overall, it's left me isolated and far from communities where I might be able to engage more deeply and in person. And that goes back to your housing comment -- because living in an urban area or a more vibrant rural area is a financial burden beyond what I'm willing to shoulder.
I don't see a way out of all of this, and that depresses me more than I like to admit, so I mostly push it away because there's no real point in stressing about something I can't fix.
Everything is so disjointed and everyone is pulled in so many directions that even when you do have those precious monents of connection, tech inevitably intervenes 😒
And as much as we try to convince oureslves that online is the same, it's fundamentally not. Though as Daniel points out, it is still connection. My problem is when it's the ONLY connection, which for me and for many people I know, it mostly is. Even people in urban areas seem to no longer have time for in person friendships. Thinking about it, I have as little in person friendship experience now as I did when I lived in LA, where few people had time for lunches, coffees, etc that weren't work related.
maybe when our consciousness has evolved in live entirely in a computer, it will be, but we are still hard wired to need physical interaction to be healthy and whole. (and I say that as an introvert who reluctantly realises that people need people)
Oh yeah, I can definitely relate to craving deeper, more slow-paced conversations instead of quick texts and messages.
But that's exactly the point: My long-distance calls were closer to the rushed quick texts/messages side of that spectrum, precisely because time was limited and we were always on the clock.
I prefer the modern luxury of having the option to segment my relationships a bit. There's definitely a large circle of friends that are in the "quick text once in a blue moon" category. But I also have people in other countries I can have longer video calls with for hours that allow for deeper conversations.
I do remember feeling pressured on long distance calls to make every minute count and being stressed out about that as more of a game show situation than a relaxed encounter, for sure.
I always like running the inflation calculations. For example, a meme constantly circulates with an image of a lady gassing up her car with the price of $0.49 in the background. Sounds cheap!
But that car is from 1970. So assuming 1972 and inflation adjusting, that gas was 2022 dollars worth $3.62. Gas today in AZ is $2.89. So gas is actually cheaper and actually moreso since fuel efficiency is much higher.
I always warn people to run the inflation calcs because it changes the perspective of cost.
In addition to the financial cost of things changing, I think our primary form of currency is also changing. We've stumbled full force into an economy ruled by attention. Friendships, conversations on complex issues, challenging art have become more 'expensive' because they require so much attention and, due to the increase level of distraction coming from our phones, computers, TVs (i.e., the things that have become cheaper financially), we are left reaching into our pockets for spare attention and finding nothing but lint.
Bingo: there's only one type of attention that matters (for now), and that is human attention.
Exactly! It only matters because it is extremely limited and flimsy compared to the all seeing eyes of modern tech. We have to choose how to spend it and that can be exhausting!
Here's what's cheap today that used to be worth a lot more:
-privacy (no need to elaborate)
-civil discourse
-friendship (see civil discourse)
-things that cost more to repair than replace (see friendship)
Such is my lament against surveillance and polarization.
It's important to understand that all progress comes with a cost, and nothing is without trade-offs! Well said.
However, I might argue that privacy was cheap before, but it's expensive today (depending on your perspective). If I want to hide from the world now, it's gonna cost me dearly.
People once valued privacy a lot more though. Remember when taking random video was definitely a no go zone in bars?
It's funny, an old bud recently asked my permission if it was okay to post old shenanigan pics on an email thread, not even a website. What kid would do that today?
Great points. Kids today are hardly concerned with privacy.
I also wasn't when I was a kid, but I also didn't have hundreds of recording devices pointing at me 24/7 (and thank the gods for that little gift!).
Back on friendship. It's now too easy to connect and disconnect. Used to be a rift with a friend was a serious deal and that required fixing. Now it's too easy to just cut off the relationship online and move on to the next. And too difficult/time consuming to repair it.
And online communication makes it all too easy to take offense, since it requires facility with the written word and the vast majority of people don't know how to write well enough to do that without misunderstanding given even professional writers struggle with being accurately understood.
Add to that online communication makes it incredibly hard to repair a rift even if someone stays around, without in person tone, body language, etc.
I really wish I could live in the past instead. Not because it was perfect, but because there was more opportunity to make things better.
Couldn't have said it better myself! I struggle with the notion of whether or not the future that I find myself navigating through actually sucks in the way I think it does or am I ust getting grumpier with age? Awhile ago I wrote an essay where I took the view that things have always been falling apart and somehow we stumble forward.
Then Andrew and I got into an interesting nuanced back and forth:: https://punditman.substack.com/p/peril-and-progress
I forgot how fun that was! Nuance wins again.
I don't think it's getting grumpier -- or rather, I think the grumpiness is legitimate, as you point out in that comment thread.
Things are steadily getting worse in the ways that really matter, which goes well beyond tech benefits and medical advancements to things like connection and maybe most of all, a strong enough belief that things CAN get better that we're actually willing to make a genuine and effective effort. A vicious circle.
The underyling reason for this creeping dystopian malaise, and how I think it can be healed, is quite literally the meta theme of a new podcast/series I'm working on for the Abbey (which is why it's so infrequently updated at the moment). Hopefully I'll find the right words. We shall see. I feel like it's the most important work I've done or maybe will ever do, so you know, no pressure...
I'm glad to connect with you and have subscribed. In addition to the Abbey, my personal (somewhat deliberately obscured for a variety of reasons) substack is here, if you'd like to connect there as well.
https://theredabbess.substack.com/
Music, obviously. Yes, there are supposed benefits to having so much free/cheap access in terms of discovering new music, but I doubt those benefits are real. I think the algorithm makes people more insulated to new music than they were when they discovered new music by listening to a friend's new album or discovering it in a record store (which also created a vibrant music community in a way that listening on your own to a streaming service doesn't).
And of course the obvious that Spotify, etc. cheapens and devalues music to the point where artists/songwriters/musicians can't make a living and the quality of the whole art form declines. (which is is caused by other, arguably larger, reasons as well, but I'm sticking here to your premise)
Sometimes I think a world in which music can no longer be commodified by its creators -- where it has to be a labour of love because there's no other gain to it -- is a good thing. Other times, I'm not at all sure.
How many great artists would have been able to do what they did without the financial structure that allowed them to focus on it exclusively? Those who had family money, yes -- Graham Parsons and Townes van Zandt, for example. But that's just a handful.
None of (and yes, you know I'm going to bring them up as an example) the Beatles would have been able to afford to make their music unless it also supported them financially. And what an incalcuable loss to the world that would have been, given we also wouldn't then have had most of the best music that came after them, in the same way that we do.
Now that music is "a dime a dozen," we're getting exactly what we pay for, which is to say, not much.
Nice take, Faith. I can't say I'm overly familiar with newer music, and I do tend to stick with a lot of the stuff I grew up with (or listened to in my 20s). I think that's pretty common these days.
On the flip side, if you go back far enough, there were only a very small handful of people who had the leisure time to create great art. Those were almost always supported not from the public, but from patrons such as the Medici. I think the percentage of folks who can even try creating art was very, very small back then as compared to today. I wonder if we're ultimately missing a bigger patronage model, where artists can create without trying to market themselves.
That's what I'm trying to do with my newsletter, really not offering any benefits to "paid" subscribers beyond very old archived posts... but those subscribers are effectively patrons, not customers. It's a drop in the bucket today, but perhaps this can be grown into something much bigger and more sustainable. Let's keep thinking about this.
"we're ultimately missing a bigger patronage model, where artists can create without trying to market themselves."
This. The idea that artists can now do it all themselves is touted as a great and groovy liberating thing, but of course it's not, because not only is that not what artists are good at, but being our own PR person, record label/publisher, agent is asking artists to do multiple full time jobs -- and then when is there the time and space to create anything of value? Not to mention that all of those are in and of themselves highly specialized skills and it's fairly insulting to think anyone could just do them because the technology exists.
And then you get publishers, labels, etc. shooting themselves in the foot by requiring that artists do all of this before they're even signed -- which is the height of absurdity not only because all you then get is artists who are good at doing non-artist things but maybe not so good at doing the actual art, but publishers/labels make themselves irrelevent.
It seems to me that who gets signed/published these days aren't the best artists, but the best PR people -- who should then be doing PR and letting others make the art that they're promoting.
The whole thing is a giant clusterfuck.
In Canada, we got rid of our penny a couple of years ago. The government said the cost of making the coins was more than their purchasing power was worth.
I'm pretty sure the situation is the same in the US, although there aren't very many pennies minted these days.
Automation played a big role in reducing the prices of tangible items. The story is entirely different for non-tangible items such as privacy and others.
How about some of the following as possibilities?
Did outsourcing work to countries with cheaper labor play a role in it? How about streamlining the business processes or using better business processes? Did just-in-time inventory play a role (even though it created a problem during COVID)? Did consolidation of work with a few large companies play a role, where they could squeeze their suppliers due to their buying power for better pricing, which helped reduce the prices?
I debate the one often, but I am unsure if it played a role. Is moving from selling high-margin products to selling more products at lower margins played any role?
Conclusion: You're better off living inside a cardboard box and receiving all of your experiences, education, and human connection via the Internet through VR goggles from Apple. Just like Big Tech planned it!
Silliness aside, as I said previously, the "free, instant communication" one is huge. I still recall buying special long-distance calling card and only calling my family once a week for about 10 minutes back in my teens, because it was so prohibitively expensive. And that was over a crappy phone line that frequently failed to connect, had an echo, and generally basic mono sound. Now I can have a high-definition video call via a smartphone in my pocket. All within just two decades’ worth of technological leaps.
Incredible. I think you had to live through that to really understand it, just like my grandparents' generation lived through television coming into the home (or even radio, really). And, the qualitative difference in early radio and, say, radio during the 50s is night and day. I've heard some of those older broadcasts.
But was that 10 minutes more precious, more valued than a constant stream of transitory communication about trivial things? Genuine question. I know for me, my relationships were deeper and more precious to me when I had to work a bit more for the contact.
I mean, I guess each conversation was a bit more "special" in that it was more rare and you tried to squeeze in as much catching up as possible knowing that you'd only speak in a week at best. But that also meant you didn't have the chance to have a more relaxed, casual connection.
So while it's probably true that we take non-stop free communication somewhat for granted these days, I personally wouldn't trade the ability to see my family at a moment's notice for the rushed chats from the late 90s / early 2000s.
For context: I was (still am) living in Denmark while my family was in Ukraine and New York. I basically only had my mom (Ukraine) and my grandma (New York) on my "to call once a week" list. All other connections were emails or nonexistent.
well, given I don't like my family and they don't like me, I'm good without either. 😎
But seriously, for me it's a constant struggle now to find connection to my chosen family (friends) when the communication is so transitory. I find it more difficult to talk about meaningful, important stuff when people mostly seem to find time to text and message, and then only while they're standing in line at Starbucks or on their way somewhere -- two formats which for me at least, tend to skew towards the everyday and not towards the deeper conversations that my soul longs for.
I miss phone calls, leisurely coffee dates, dinner party conversations long after everyone other than our best friends have gone home and we're on the last bottle of wine and finally getting to the good stuff.... I don't think we get that nearly as much these days, if at all. And because of this, I have far fewer true friends now than at any other point in my life. I'm definitely lonelier with online communciation than I was before.
Faith, I think you might really enjoy this piece I did with Edem Gold a while back. It's all about what you're shining a light on:
https://goatfury.substack.com/p/america-nigeria-and-the-paradox-of
I love this piece, and have read it in the past as well.
On balance, would I go back to how things were? Yes. I think on balance the internet has made the world worse and will continue to, despite its benefits.
On a personal note, I bought a house and land in the middle of nowhere because basically I wanted my own home and that was where I could afford it. I THOUGHT that the internet would mean I could still be connected, and I suppose I am -- I am having a substantial conversation with you online right now, after all -- but overall, it's left me isolated and far from communities where I might be able to engage more deeply and in person. And that goes back to your housing comment -- because living in an urban area or a more vibrant rural area is a financial burden beyond what I'm willing to shoulder.
I don't see a way out of all of this, and that depresses me more than I like to admit, so I mostly push it away because there's no real point in stressing about something I can't fix.
Everything is so disjointed and everyone is pulled in so many directions that even when you do have those precious monents of connection, tech inevitably intervenes 😒
Yeah. :-(
And as much as we try to convince oureslves that online is the same, it's fundamentally not. Though as Daniel points out, it is still connection. My problem is when it's the ONLY connection, which for me and for many people I know, it mostly is. Even people in urban areas seem to no longer have time for in person friendships. Thinking about it, I have as little in person friendship experience now as I did when I lived in LA, where few people had time for lunches, coffees, etc that weren't work related.
maybe when our consciousness has evolved in live entirely in a computer, it will be, but we are still hard wired to need physical interaction to be healthy and whole. (and I say that as an introvert who reluctantly realises that people need people)
Oh yeah, I can definitely relate to craving deeper, more slow-paced conversations instead of quick texts and messages.
But that's exactly the point: My long-distance calls were closer to the rushed quick texts/messages side of that spectrum, precisely because time was limited and we were always on the clock.
I prefer the modern luxury of having the option to segment my relationships a bit. There's definitely a large circle of friends that are in the "quick text once in a blue moon" category. But I also have people in other countries I can have longer video calls with for hours that allow for deeper conversations.
In my book, it's a clear win!
I do remember feeling pressured on long distance calls to make every minute count and being stressed out about that as more of a game show situation than a relaxed encounter, for sure.
It's the in-person that I miss.