Immaterial world

Kodak's filing for bankruptcy protection should give us pause for thought when it comes to our brave, new online world, says Jason Walsh.

Peering into the metaphorical crystal ball for 2012 — in reality looking back over the trends of the last few years — one striking phenomenon is the increasingly rapid rate at which all we considered solid has not so much melted into air, as been shredded into tiny pieces by the behemoth that is the internet.

Speaking recently to Roy Greenslade, former Daily Mirror editor and now professor of journalism, for a forthcoming news story, I was struck by his pessimism. Greenslade says newspapers' business models are finished, wrought low by an internet culture that has rendered them a historical curiosity.

Clearly I am not happy about this. True, I am not a disinterested observer of the decline of the press, but there is more going on here than newspapers failing to make a profit on the web. The internet, or rather how we use the internet, has blown a hole in more than mere newspapers.

Eastman Kodak, the company that brought photography to the masses, filed for bankruptcy protection on January 19, finding its lunch had been thoroughly eaten by the digital photography it had invented and consequent online photo sharing that sees fewer photographs printed. The loss of jobs is certainy lamentable, but the issue at stake is not the profitability of any one particular business. Bookshops, the music industry, film… almost all forms of cultural endeavour are under enormous pressure from people who genuinely seem to think they should be able to consume everything they want at no cost, something that represents a distinctive break from the industrial age.

Speaking for myself, conservatism, even of a small-c variety, does not come easily. Progress — social, economic and, eventually, industrial — has been the watchword of human development for as long as we have existed. That the speed of technological development has increased to a blistering pace is no reason to reject it.

Similarly, traditions need not be thoughtlessly defended simply because they exist. Tradition builds over time for a reason and its overthrow can be a refreshing and vital experience. And yet, it is difficult to escape the feeling that our brave new world is more random destruction than creative destruction.

I cannot find it in myself to mount an argument for preserving things as they are simply because I happen to approve of some or other aspect of them, but there is nonetheless a case to be made for restating the essential reasons why we do things in the first place. It is lamentable that our public sphere is so shrunken that incredibly vague collective activity, such as watching the same television programmes or buying books in a shop, count as participation in society, but we will miss these things when they are gone.

Those who argue that the music industry, bookshops, newspapers and the rest have outlived their usefulness may have a point, but it should not be forgotten that these people are making an ideological argument. That the ideology is inchoate and often heavily disguised does not mean that it is not present. Underlying it all is a disregard for production and, ultimately, labour. This need not be so.

The recent revelation that production of Apple's iPhone could be undertaken in the United States for a mere $65 more in costs hints at what has gone wrong. It is an item of faith that Western countries cannot compete with China in manufacturing and that the decline of industrial production is a somehow naturally occurring social and economic phenomenon. In truth, we didn't need the example of Apple to know this is untrue: Germany already gave the lie to that particular ahistorical assertion.

But, despite an economic catastrophe intrinsically linked to the fetishisation of immaterial financial services, we remain under the spell of the idea of a "post-industrial society". Since the events of 2008 plenty of people have belatedly popped-up to tell us that, correctly as it happens, that an economy cannot function solely on the basis of financial services, but the internet ideology that sees goods, be they cultural, such as music or news, or material, like iPhones, merely as preexisting items to which we "add value" remains the dominant idea in our culture. This is why so many of us think we can have it all for free: we have no real understanding of just how things are made in the first place.

We get the innovation we deserve. Technology is as much reliant on social forces as it is a driver of them. Make no mistake: that we get Twitter and Facebook, but not missions to Mars is a matter of choice. There were a mere fifty-four years between the first powered human flight and the launch of Sputnik, but it seems that in the network age our horizons have significantly lowered.

Image: Curtiss SB2C "Helldiver" production line in 1943. Via Ryan Crierie. CC licenced.