The touchscreen revolution tilts the playing field to the elites

Laptops replace teachers, kiosks replace clerks, tablets replace nurses, and iPhones replace friends. For America’s middle class and working class, this is the future, and increasingly the present, as told by the New York Times’ technology reporter.

“Human contact is becoming a luxury good,” the reporter Nellie Bowles writes.

“As more screens appear in the lives of the poor, screens are disappearing from the lives of the rich. The richer you are, the more you spend to be offscreen.”

Why? Because despite the bottomless hype about the glories of the digital age, the endless subsidies for tech in the classroom, and the outsized reverence we have for Silicon Valley innovators, it hasn’t been healthy for us to move our lives to the Internet and or our ties to screens.

The science isn’t settled, but there’s plenty of reason to believe that hours spent staring at and poking at screens is not good for us, particularly for our children. Perhaps the most telling evidence is the behavior of the very people making and selling the screens.

Wealthy Silicon Valley engineers and executives go to great lengths to limit their children’s screen time. As the recent Times piece spells out, America’s elites are exerting impressive effort to maximize human contact and interpersonal experiences in their own lives. This isn’t easy. It takes money.

For parents, minimizing kids’ screen time requires immersing your children in an environment where social media and smartphones are restricted or shunned. Such environments are very rare for those in the middle class and the working class. Working-class parents simply have fewer resources to tear their kids away from addictive screens. One result: “as wealthy kids are growing up with less screen time, poor kids are growing up with more. How comfortable someone is with human engagement could become a new class marker.”

America’s relationship with tech, screens, and social media, is still developing, but it’s also very familiar. Just as the Bolshevik Revolution echoed the French Revolution, which echoed Oliver Cromwell’s English Revolution, we’ve had reverberating revolutions in postwar American culture: The touchscreen revolution is echoing the globalization revolution, which echoed the suburban revolution, which echoed the sexual revolution.

These swift and radical changes in American culture, all hailed unequivocally as progress, have created a world that is more convenient for the elites. They can navigate the new reality they have helped create, but it can be very trying for everyone else.

The birth control pill, the embrace of no-fault divorce, and changing morality ended the norm of marriage and the moral precept that sex, love, marriage, and family formation all belong together. After a brief spasm of decadence in the early 1970s, the elites have returned to the old norms. They generally finish school, get a job, get married, and then have kids. But the damage has been permanent for the working class. Of women who didn’t go to college, half are unmarried at age 40. Half of all babies born to noncollege women are born out of wedlock. Noncollege men are twice as likely as college-educated men to get divorced.

Sprawling suburbia has been built for cars rather than humans. Local walkable downtowns have given way to inhuman strip malls at the periphery. The old idea of a neighborhood has become scarce. It is less common to bump into neighbors, as picking up a gallon of milk requires a car. There’s a lot less letting kids run around and play and walk to school.

As a result, we’re less likely to find our tight-knit community in a human-scale physical space such as a block or a village. The elites, who can afford two cars, whose office jobs offer flexible work schedules, and who are more likely to be married, can build their institutions of civil society more deliberately when little platoons are less likely to form organically.

Globalization and automation have created an economy in which it’s easier for the highly educated to leverage their skills into high pay. They (probably I should say “we”) then leverage that high pay into a place in elite communities (neighborhoods, colleges, private schools, et cetera) that set their children upon the same path to success. The working-class guy, in contrast, now has less leverage in the economy. The result isn’t merely lower wages but destroyed communities and, as a result, more disability claims, more dropping out of the labor force, less marriage, and more depths of despair.

These rapid changes are sold to us as progress. We’re told that our kids cannot succeed in the modern world if they’re not fluent with the newest tech. We’re told the screens are democratizing and efficient.

But rapid changes to complex systems always create disruptions. The elites who usher in these rapid changes typically benefit from them. The rest of society often finds itself as a stranger in a new land.

 
Timothy P. Carney is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on economic competition, cronyism, civil society, localism, and religion in America. He is concurrently the commentary editor at the Washington Examiner.

Mr. Carney’s forthcoming book, “Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse” (HarperCollins), will be published on February 19, 2019. His previous books include “Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses”