The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

Their business model is the opposite of what Henry Ford did when he raised the wage he paid to factory employees to $5 a day, a sum that in the 1920s would afford a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Three decades later, Ford switched his model when he began to invest in automation. On a tour of the plant with Walter Reuther, the auto union leader, Ford pointed at the robots and said: ‘How will you get union dues from them?’ Reuther replied: ‘How will you get them to buy your cars?’69 It was a good question. We might ask the same today of Google or Facebook. The new economy requires consumers with spending power – just as the old one did. Yet much like the farmer who eats his seed corn, Big Data is gobbling up its source of future revenue. ‘It’s not a result of some evil scheme,’ writes Lanier, ‘but a side effect of an idiotic elevation of the fantasy that technology is getting smart and standing on its own without people.’