While watching the HBO series "The Gilded Age," I was reminded that for most of my adult life I have been living through America's second Gilded Age. The appellation comes from the title of a 1873 novel of the same name by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. As the Encyclopedia Britannica explains:
The title was a provocation: the word gilded describes something covered in a thin layer of gold, shiny on the outside but, perhaps, cheap or rotten underneath. That’s how Twain and Warner saw the United States. Their book—part comedy, part critique, set in Washington, D.C.—mocked a society that looked bright and successful but that, underneath, was corrupt, driven forward by self-serving politicians and grasping businessmen. The title stuck because it captured the contradictions of the era.
This description might seem just as apt for America since the early 1980s as it does for America of the late 19th century. And, while the cast of characters seems similar, the results are very different. The robber barons of America's first Gilded Age left the country with a sprawling infrastructure of railroads, steel mills, mines, telegraphs and telephones, sturdy physical infrastructure much of which is still in place today.
The robber barons of our current era—the tech overlords who control vast software and information empires—have created ephemeral apps and information products designed to manipulate us and steer us toward a kind of digital indentured servitude, one marked by endless subscription fees and paywalls and constant surveillance of our behavior, both online and off. The tech overlords are in the process of enclosing the digital commons so that everything on it will come at a price, either to our wallets or our privacy.
