The Internet Is Not the Answer (12 page)

What’s
making its way to us
,
however, is more than just an image of an Uber limousine blinking across our mobile screen. It’s the creative destruction inflicted by distributed capitalist networks like Uber or Airbnb, in which anyone can become a cabdriver or a hotelier. And Marc Andreessen—whose Mosaic Web browser opened the Internet’s moneyed second act—is right. Uber is certainly going to be a “killer experience” for its early investors, who stand to make 2,000 times their initial outlay.
¹²⁰

But while a lucky handful of investors turned $20,000 angel investments in Uber into $40 million fortunes, the consequences of this casino-style economy are much more troubling for the rest of us. And the most important Internet story isn’t Tom Perkins’s “successful one percent.” It’s the other 99% who haven’t invested in Uber, don’t own Bitcoins, and aren’t renting out spare rooms in their castles on Airbnb.

CHAPTER THREE
THE BROKEN CENTER

The Future

“Everybody’s private driver.” Thus Uber boasts about its radically disruptive black limousine service. But there were no Uber cars at Greater Rochester International Airport in upstate New York when I arrived hungry and cold one gray afternoon in the winter of 2014 on a drafty United Airlines plane that had rattled all the way from Chicago. Nor were there any UberCHOPPERs available at the airport to twirl me on a three-thousand-dollar helicopter ride to downtown Rochester.

That was fortunate, really, because Rochester’s downtown—a landscape of boarded-up stores and homeless people wheeling their earthly possessions in rusty shopping carts along empty streets—resembled a picture from the dystopian future. From
Blade Runner
, perhaps, Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie about a twenty-first-century world in which human beings and robots have become indistinguishable. Or from
Neuromancer
, William Gibson’s 1984 science fiction novel, the subversive classic about an electronically networked world that not only popularized the word
cyberspace
but also may have foreseen Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web five years later.
¹

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” Gibson—known on Twitter, perhaps not uncoincidentally, as @GreatDismal—began
Neuromancer
. And, like Gibson’s dismal image of the future, downtown Rochester was tuned to a dead channel. The heart of this industrial city had been ripped out and not even the most nostalgic of Instagram photographic filters could have brought it back to life. It was a broken place, a town that time had forgotten. Best known for its high unemployment and crime rates—the city’s notorious number of robberies being 206% above the US national average and its murder rate almost 350% higher than that of New York City in 2012
²
—the only buzz in the dead sky above downtown Rochester was from police choppers. No wonder the city is now known as “the Murder Capital of New York.”

“The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” you’ll remember Gibson once said. And there are few places where the future is less
evenly
distributed than in Rochester, a rusting industrial city of some 200,000 souls on the banks of Lake Ontario in upstate New York. No, Rochester’s downtown definitely wasn’t worth a three-thousand-dollar private helicopter ride—unless perhaps you had, like me, come to the city in search of a quarter century of failure.

One of the most ludicrous Silicon Valley cults—its most “striking mantra,” according to the
Guardian
³
—is its religious veneration of the idea of failure. Peddled by thought leaders like Tim O’Reilly, it’s the idea that business failure is a badge of success for entrepreneurs. Idolizing failure is the hottest new meme for the alpha geeks of the Valley. The bigger their success, the more exaggerated their claim to being serial failures. “How I Failed,” O’Reilly thus titled a much-hyped 2013 keynote speech at one of his own successful events.
⁴
But O’Reilly has some stiff competition in this failure Olympiad. Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, advises entrepreneurs to “fail fast.”
⁵
Paul Graham, a multimillionaire angel investor, calls his incubator of startup Internet ventures, which has hatched many successful startups, including Alexis Ohanian’s Reddit, “Failure Central,”
⁶
while Dave McClure, another wealthy angel, not to be outfailed by his successful rival, talks up his equally successful 500 Startups incubator as “Fail Factory.”
⁷
Indeed, the cult of failure has become such a mania in the Valley that there is now even an entire event, a San Francisco conference called FailCon, dedicated to its veneration.

But, of course, winner-take-all entrepreneurs like Reid Hoffman, Tim O’Reilly, and Paul Graham know as much about failure as Michael and Xochi Birch know about running a village pub. And so to find failure, a genuine Failure Central, I’d flown 2,700 miles east, from San Francisco to Rochester. But, on my arrival, the only hint of “failure” in the airport terminal was the glossy cover of a technology business magazine displayed in the window of an airport bookstore.

Silicon Valley had come to Rochester. Or, at least, to this bookstore. The image was of an energetic young entrepreneur with a dark goatee and black-framed glasses dressed in a hoodie, frayed jeans, and old sneakers. The guy, who might have been outfitted to hang out at the Battery, was wielding a sledgehammer with which he was energetically smashing some plastic objects into smithereens.

REALLY
CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
, the magazine’s headline screamed in letters as black as the dude’s goatee and glasses.
⁸

One doesn’t need to be a semiotician to grasp the significance of seeing this picture—with its “move fast and break things” message—in Rochester, of all places.

Much of Rochester’s industrial economy had itself been smashed into smithereens over the last twenty-five years by a Schumpeterian hurricane of creative destruction. The significance of that magazine cover was, therefore, hard to miss: the sledgehammer mirrored the destructive might of the digital revolution; while the plastic objects being destroyed represented the broken city itself.

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. And if the people of Rochester knew the value of anything, it was that of a picture. As the global headquarters of the Eastman Kodak Corporation, pictures were to Rochester what cars once were to Detroit or what the Internet is today to Silicon Valley. Known as “the World’s Image Center” and “Snapshot City,” Rochester had built its prosperity on the many millions of “Kodak moments” captured by all of us over the last 125 years.

“You press the button, we do the rest,” Kodak’s founder, George Eastman, promised when he introduced his first handheld camera in 1888. And that’s exactly what we all did throughout the industrial age—
press the button
on our Kodak cameras and rely on high-quality Kodak film and Kodak imaging and processing services to
do the rest.
We paid for all this, of course—exchanging cash for the developed photographs that then became our property. And so for more than a century, millions of Kodak moments had made Rochester wealthy and famous. But now a darker kind of Kodak moment had transformed Rochester from the World’s Image Center into a picture of failure.

Paul Simon sang about Kodak’s bringing us lovely “bright colors” in his 1973 hit “Kodachrome.” The song was Simon’s tribute to what David Wills, the author of
Hollywood in Kodachrome
, described as the “spectacular” Kodak color film first introduced in 1935, a stock, Wills says, “synonymous with sharp detail and brilliant color” that produced “crisp” images and had “minimal grain.”
⁹
For seventy years, Kodachrome accurately captured the world’s moments. It was used to take many of the twentieth century’s most detailed and memorable pictures—from Neil Armstrong’s 1968 snaps of the lunar landscape to the official images of many Hollywood stars.
¹⁰
But Simon’s lyrics could equally apply to Rochester, where Kodak’s control of the global picture business had enriched the city with the brightest colors
of all: a thriving local economy and tens of thousands of well-paying jobs.

We haven’t stopped taking pictures. The problem is actually the reverse. We took 350 billion snaps in 2011 and an astonishing 1.5 trillion in 2013—more than all the photos ever taken before in all of history. “Pictures are more sexy than words,” explains Joshua Chuang, the curator at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography.
¹¹
“I snap therefore I am,”
¹²
adds the
Wall Street Journal
’s Ellen Gamerman, about a culture in which we are using our camera phones so obsessively that if just the 125 billion photos captured in the United States in 2013 were turned into four-by-six prints, they would extend to the moon and back twenty-five times.

The saddest thing of all about Rochester is that the more photos we take, the fewer jobs there are in Snap City. Don’t take my Kodachrome away, pleaded Paul Simon in his song. Since then, however, the digital revolution has taken away not only Kodachrome, but most of Kodak, too. When Simon wrote “Kodachrome,” Kodak controlled 90% of the film sales and 85% of the camera sales in the United States.
¹³
Twenty-five years later, Kodak halted the manufacture of its Kodachrome film, ending a seventy-four-year history of production. And in September 2013, a few months before my arrival in Rochester, an emaciated Kodak emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy having sold the vast majority of its assets and laid off most of its employees.

Things look a lot worse in black-and-white, Paul Simon sang. Yes, much, much
worse
. “An entire city,” cultural critic Jason Farago writes in an epitaph for Rochester, “has lost its center.”
¹⁴
The Kodak collapse was “a tragedy of American economic life,” mourned the US judge who presided over the company’s exit from bankruptcy. The real tragedy, this judge explained, was that up to fifty thousand Kodak retirees, many of whom had worked their entire lives at the company, would either completely lose their pensions or, at best, get a payout of four or five cents on the dollar.
¹⁵
To borrow a word from Sequoia Capital chairman Michael Moritz, life has indeed become “tough” for Rochester’s old industrial working class.

Another bankruptcy judge, whose grandfather had actually worked for Kodak, put the tragedy in even more somber terms. “The bankruptcy proceeding has been a sorrowful thing,” he explained, “like losing a family member.”
¹⁶

I had come to Rochester in search of Kodak. I wanted to see for myself this broken place, this epic fail that had torn the heart out of the city. But even with the help of the latest networked mapping software from Google and Apple, failure can sometimes be hard to track down.

Coming to an Office Near You

“In a half a mile, turn left onto Innovation Way,” the voice instructed me.

If only finding innovation were that easy. In my search for Kodak, I was navigating a rental car around the “Rochester Technology Park”—a cluster of low-rise office buildings next to a freeway on the outskirts of the city. And my driving directions were being broadcasted from my iPad by an automated female voice.

“In a quarter of a mile, turn right onto Creative Drive,” the voice of the Google Maps algorithm continued in her mechanically unflappable way. “Then, in eight hundred yards, turn right onto Initiative Drive.”

Rochester Technology Park had been carved up into identical-looking, hopefully named streets like Initiative Drive, Innovation Way, and Creative Drive. But as I drove up and down looking for a Kodak research laboratory that, I’d been told, was located in the complex, I realized that it wasn’t just Kodak that was hard to find. Initiative, innovation, and creativity were equally elusive. The sprawling technology park contained a lot of flat office buildings, but it seemed to be missing the most essential ingredient of all: people. In my search for Kodak, I barely saw a living soul. Nobody seemed to be there. It appeared hopeless, in a greatly dismal William Gibson kind of way. As if Silicon Valley had been transported to Rochester but somebody had forgotten to bring the humans. As if human workers had been replaced by robots.

Perhaps they had. “It is an invisible force that goes by many names. Computerization. Automation. Artificial Intelligence. Technology. Innovation. And, everyone’s favorite, ROBOTS,” wrote the
Atlantic
’s Derek Thompson in 2014 about our increasing concern with the elimination of jobs from the economy.
¹⁷
As if to mark (or perhaps mourn) the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Web, it seems as if 2014 is the year that we’ve finally fully woken up to what the
Wall Street Journal
columnist Daniel Akst dubs “automation anxiety.”
¹⁸
The cover of the one business magazine that I’d read on the flight from Chicago to Rochester, for example, featured the image of a deadly tornado roaring through a workspace. “Coming to an office near you . . .,” it warned about what technology will do to “tomorrow’s jobs.”
¹⁹