There’s some real economics to this. Most Americans stopped learning farming or trades a century ago, and then a vast swath also stopped learning factory work, blue- or white-collar. The manipulation of undigitized, offline objects, stuff with mass like wheat or stainless steel, was no longer a promising field of endeavor.
The traditional professions like law and medicine hung steady, but as everything offered less security, even professors, doctors, lawyers, and accountants found they had to market themselves. Meanwhile, people in retail, advertising, and every kind of customer service did sales, sales, and nothing but sales, and most of us in journalism also ended up shilling for ourselves online.
This is precisely what a cluster of gloomy polymaths predicted in the 1990s. Figures like the eccentric Edward Luttwak, the conservative booster of coups, described a future where capitalism was vertiginously unfettered by government, where corporations would no longer take care of employees from start date to gold-watch retirement. What he called turbo-capitalism would, he wrote, leave many, many Americans in the economic dust. The survivors would work in pixie dust, pixelated dust, the new galaxy of online symbols.
These economists foresaw an all-scab labor force—or “freelancers,” since trade unions too would be all but obsolete. Like scabs, freelancers would assume social and economic risk—not by crossing picket lines but by forgoing the security, benefits, fellowship, and regularity of salaried work. What’s more, our labor would be a form of make-work that economist Robert Reich once called “analyzing symbols”—writing copy, organizing information, making spreadsheets, and otherwise avoiding the world in favor of representations of it. Forget about working in three dimensions. On the internet, are we even working in two?
In 1994, just as economists were fretting, my first cousins Bert and John Jacobs launched a blockbuster T-shirt company called Life is Good. The original shirts featured an irresistible stick figure in a beret called Jake, one of the thousands of doodles they used to toss off when we were kids, when they were known as athletes and artists facing what one uncle archly called “limited prospects.” LPs.