and others like him (including, famously, the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener) believed that computers would have to come under democratic control or they would lead to disastrous imbalances in society. He involved the Norwegian Iron and Metal Union in discussions and, in the late 1960s, they established the right of workers to share control of the way new technology entered the workplace. This became national policy under the Data Agreement between unions and employers in 1975.
A tradition of ‘participatory design’ was established throughout Scandinavia where (in principle at least) workers guided the design of new technologies. Like object-oriented programming, these initiatives did not inevitably produce egalitarian results.
For example, one of the first ‘desktop publishing’ (DTP) systems emerged from a participatory design project aimed at ‘work enrichment’, under workers’ control, at the offices of the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet at the start of the 1980s.20 Not long afterwards, DTP was helping newspaper owners to get rid of print staff and journalists in droves. The idea of working from home, which became such a very mixed blessing, started here, with the ‘telecottage’ movement – first in Sweden and then Japan – aimed originally at keeping rural communities alive and even promoting a population shift from towns to the country.21
These and similar initiatives became by imperceptible degrees part of the post-1980 drive, and especially after the rise of the Web, to commodify the computer, gain competitive advantage and boost sales, under the rubric of ‘usability’.
THE RETURN OF MEDIEVAL ECONOMICS
The ‘great compression’ ended during the 1970s, giving way to what economist Paul Krugman has called ‘the great divergence’ of incomes and wealth within and between nations, at around the same time as computers and digital electronics began to become a major force in economic life.
By the late 1970s, there was much talk in political and journalistic circles about ‘the coming of the microchip’ – the first of a wave of similar frenzies accompanying the arrival of the internet (and especially, the World Wide Web) in the 1990s, and social media and cloud computing two decades after that.
Computers and electronics have been blamed for the Great Divergence, and are certainly implicated in it. But other, explicitly anti-egalitarian forces were also at work. These included the warlike and anti-democratic policies of Richard Nixon (US President from 1969 until 1974, when he was forced to resign), and in particular the ‘Nixon shock’ of 1971: his decision to deal with the inflation caused by the US’s war in Vietnam by allowing the dollar to ‘float’ against other currencies. This effectively demolished the post-War Bretton Woods system whereby global currencies had remained relatively stable, and plunged poorer countries into debt from which they have never recovered.
This deliberate lurch into inequality imposed its own timeless logic on the new technologies as they developed. But via them, it also had a huge impact on the world of work and consumption – as well as on the environment.
It has been argued that social inequality shapes societies according to a kind of built-in ‘grammar’, so that all unequal societies down the ages segregate people in the same kinds of ways, and develop similar social mechanisms for controlling them, with similar consequences.22
The scene today looks modern, and very different from even the recent past, if you consider only its ephemeral features (the fashions, the devices that people use, their job titles and so on). But if you look past them at the social structures underneath, and their environmental consequences, we are witnessing something very like a lurch back in time; not quite back to the Dark Ages, but certainly back to the 16th century and perhaps even to the 13th century.
Until the 17th and 18th centuries, the severest environmental impacts were confined to northwestern Europe and its immediate periphery. Today the same kinds and patterns of impact, and the oppressive social quirks that go with them, are observable globally.
Global inequality today is about the same as it was in the late Middle Ages in the first, tiny capitalist economies, in northern Italy and the Low Countries (modern Belgium and the Netherlands): around 0.7 on the Gini scale, which would award a score of zero to a society where wealth or income were distributed completely equally, and a score of 1.0 to a society where a single individual owned everything. The Gini index is a relatively blunt instrument, but many analysts of past inequality have used it, making it possible to compare a wide range of societies over time.
Various studies have found that this ‘north-European norm’ of 0.7 is without precedent in world history. No previous society had ever sustained anything like it for very long – not even ancient Rome23 or Egypt.24 But among the capitalist states that emerged in Europe from the 15th to the 19th centuries, coefficients of 0.7 or higher were common. A demographic historian, Guido Alfani, has worked out that:
in Paris at the beginning of the 14th century, the Gini index of wealth inequality was about 0.7; in London, it was 0.7 in 1292 and 0.76 in 1319. [Then, in the 15th century, in Italy, the coefficient] for the cities of Pistoia, Pisa, Arezzo, Cortona, Prato, and Volterra … was about 0.75. In Florence it was higher, reaching 0.785.25
In 1800, before European expansion had started in earnest, global inequality was insignificant. According to many historians, life was generally better for Chinese and Indian peasants than for their British counterparts.26 By 1820 (after the end of the Napoleonic wars) things were changing. The global Gini coefficient was somewhere around 0.50, and rising steadily.27 Branko Milanovic and Christopher Lakner have estimated that, by 2008, global income inequality was around 0.705, but possibly as high as 0.76, when adjusted for under-reporting of top incomes.28 One could say that Boccaccio’s Florence had taken over the world.
FOR ELECTRONICS, READ TEXTILES
The inequality embodied in something like an iPhone could not be more different from the egalitarianism that made it possible, but it is not without precedent. Whereas today’s most insecure workforces survive by assembling electronic devices, in late medieval Europe they were producing fashion textiles. Rapid obsolescence and highly atomized, precarious workforces were and are characteristic of both industries.
By the 16th century, entire populations in Europe depended for their very existence on this kind of textile production, and fashion textiles had become an ‘engine of growth’ of greater significance even than agriculture. Their production was organized for maximum profit on the ‘Verlag’ or ‘putting-out’ system: what we now call ‘outsourcing’.
All over Europe, merchant entrepreneurs were bypassing guild-based workers, who knew their trades from end to end, and employing networks of mainly rural, often largely female and/or juvenile workers, each specializing in some tiny part of the process but unable to comprehend let alone influence the course of the events on which her or his life came to depend. For the first time, there was ‘no such thing as a job for life’ for whole categories of the population. As now, livelihoods could and did vanish in a moment, with a change of fashion or of international prices, or the capitalist’s discovery of another, cheaper source of labor elsewhere. Outsourcing was already the name of the game, and so was obsolescence.
It can now sound naive to suggest that the biggest profits from any product should be found at or near the place where it is produced (the world’s richest countries might then be in Africa, for example). But that was always the case in traditional societies and the tendency is by no means passé. It still applies, very emphatically, to the work of top-echelon barristers, management consultants, surgeons, artists and financial advisers. It is still the case to some extent where labor still has strong negotiating power. But as one descends the gradients of power the
