Digital growth coincided with inequality levels unseen since the Gilded Age

Evidence

The US, the UK, and most of Europe entered the second decade of the twenty-first century facing economic and social inequalities more extreme than anything since the Gilded Age and comparable to some of the world’s poorest countries. Despite a decade of explosive digital growth that included the Apple miracle and the penetration of the internet into everyday life, dangerous social divisions suggested an even more stratified and antidemocratic future. “In the age of new consensus financial policy stabilization,” one US economist wrote, “the economy has witnessed the largest transfer of income to the top in history.” A sobering 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund warned of instability, concluding that the global trends toward neoliberalism “have not delivered as expected.” Instead, inequality had significantly diminished “the level and the durability of growth” while increasing volatility and creating permanent vulnerability to economic crisis. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 133

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the tech-utopian narrative that digital economic growth broadens prosperity — a through-line the reader tracks in their platform/surveillance reading. — connects to: The meritocracy myth masks structural inequality and justifies tech wealth — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 673; Gilded Age social Darwinism and ‘network effects’ both excuse capitalist concentration as fate — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 340; Postmodern urban redevelopment coincides with deepened inequality and infrastructural decline — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 581 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Gilded Age social Darwinism and ‘network effects’ both excuse capitalist concentration as fate #qualifies (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 340
• Postmodern urban redevelopment coincides with deepened inequality and infrastructural decline #corroborates (0.72) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 581
• Surveillance capitalists parallel Gilded Age industrialists in exploiting law to escape constraints #complicates (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 341
• Surveillance capitalism’s lawlessness echoes the Gilded Age robber barons #exemplifies (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 339