Saved by the Dirt

I find the idea intriguing, so, it is well worth our attention. Writing in the Financial Times on Saturday columnist Janan Ganesh suggested that the war in Ukraine is putting “Silicon Valley in its place.”

By that he means that we have all been sold the idea that tech is the present and the future, that tech will and should control our lives, and that we can be freed from the nitty gritty of everyday life to live in something called the metaverse. Fair enough, tech has done wonders for our lives, but its promise, to save us from the indignity of having to deal with the more mundane aspects of human life, is overblown. 

Why, some people imagine that we can dispense with energy, with oil and gas and coal, to replace it all with solar panels and wind turbines? Everyone with a lick of sense understands that this reverie has nothing to do with reality, and yet we keep pushing it. In truth, it and the policies enacted by its proponents, especially in Germany, have fostered war in Ukraine.

So, Silicon Valley’s image is taking a hit. Ganesh writes:

Silicon Valley’s self-image as the Middle Kingdom of the business world (or just the world) comes out in different ways. Executives in retail or manufacturing don’t philosophise obiter dicta with the confidence of Sheryl Sandberg and Mo Gawdat. Wall Street doesn’t yearn to extend everyone a line of credit in the way Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone to have the “human right” of an internet connection. It is only necessary to cite that particular example of digital messianism to see that it is well-intentioned. But it is also built on a conceit: tech as the industry of industries; the shaper of events.

A conceit-- fancy that.  The conceit in question is not your bloated self-esteem but is an elaborate metaphor, a figure of speech that has gotten out of control.

It is a less tenable conceit than it was a month ago. Tech is relevant in Ukraine; see the propaganda war. But next to the existential role of energy, which keeps Russia solvent, and has the west scrambling for alternative sources, what stands out is the modesty of its bearing on events. Silicon Valley is giving history a nudge here and there, no doubt, but not setting its essential course. That is still the role of people who dig stuff out of the ground for fuel.

The importance of energy. The importance of Europeans learning to defend themselves, to replace social spending with military spending. These are the lessons of Ukraine. One will add that it’s not just digging stuff out of the ground. It’s also about planting things in the ground. Ganesh does not mention it, but the Ukraine war, one that the Biden administration helped instigate and that it is working to allow it to continue, is going to produce a famine, food inflation and perhaps mass starvation. 

So, Ganesh suggests that the war's lesson is that we should recover our interest in the old economy:

In truth, if any business has wisdom worth sharing, it is the one that has to penetrate cultures as dissimilar as Kuwait and Santa Barbara: face to face, on the ground, over years. It is the one that is caught up in the most intimate way with matters of war and peace. Yet there it is: ever detached from the zeitgeist. Who reading this can name the CEO of ExxonMobil?

A good point. We know, as well as we know our own names, who runs Google and Microsoft and Facebook and Twitter. We do not know who runs ExxonMobil or any other oil company. How many young people, coming out of college, want to work in the fracking industry?

In his masterly history of oil, The Prize, Daniel Yergin, concedes that in the future political power will “come as much from a computer chip as from a barrel of oil”. Perhaps a Taiwan crisis will bear out his point. For now, though, 32 years after he wrote, the striking thing is the resilience of the barrel (or gas pipe, or nuclear plant) as a decider of events.

The present crisis is not just a lesson for preening tech bros. We almost all live what might be called the immaterial life: a life of service sector employment and contactless everything. It is a culture in which the importance of the tangible is easily lost. I grew up around some rather heavier lines of work than tech or media and I still needed a brute reminder of what makes the world turn.

Frankly, it might just be wish fulfillment, but how many of us are just a bit fed up with “preening tech bros.” How many of us want to grant more value to working the fields, working the mines, working the transportation networks. Fair enough, we all know that an army of hysterical high school students will soon be marching on Washington and the world’s other capitals to proclaim the importance of not getting dirty, of repealing the Industrial Revolution, of not touching the pure and pristine earth. They will tell you that it’s obscene and pornographic to drill holes in the earth.

Just in case you think that I am late to this party, I wrote, on this very blog, some eleven years ago, that we could all be saved by DIRT.