How The Jetson’s Lost to Black Mirror

Before I get to the monopoly-themed news of the week, I want to go over a note I got from a reader about the piece I wrote the other day on ‘economic termites,’ which are all the scummy unnoticed corporations that nickel and dime us constantly. That essay seemed to resonate in a way I didn’t expect. Anyway, here’s what he sent me, it’s about his local mechanic’s view of electric cars.

Was at my local mechanic. Great people. Small family owned shop that supports local causes is honest as the day is long etc. 31 years in business. I was thanking him supporting the library and asking him if the shift to electric worried him…..well he had worries and unloaded. And it struck me it was all about termites sucking him dry.

For instance, you can fix a car now with scanning the error codes. Back in the day you trouble shot with your knowledge ( and the manuals ) but now he needs a minimum of two systems to be able to diagnose the cars he repairs. Those are subscription services which keep raising there support fees …now a 1,000 a month

Quick books has switched to a subscription model. His equipment used to do alignments and what not like wise requires support fees and recently went end of life so they want him to by new rather then repair…etc etc

He never got around to telling me if the electric car worried him. It was all about being nickel and domed by the high tech side of his business

This note led me to think about how we used to see the future, and why we now fear it. In the 1960s, our vision of future was best exemplified by the TV show The Jetsons, healthy families living with the technologies of “jetpacks, flying cars, robot maids, moving sidewalks.” And why wouldn’t we have thought that? Most people had lived through massive leaps in technology that unambiguously did improve lives, everything from jet airplanes to antibiotics. I mean, polio had pretty much ended in the U.S. the year before the Jetson’s launched.

The futurist iconic show for our age is not The Jetsons, but Black Mirror, which is a dystopian show about how technology can tear us apart as social beings. If you think about technological advances today, it’s not hard to see why. There are still very cool things being invented. For instance, we pretty much cured cystic fibrosis in 2019, and advances in cancer treatment are remarkable. But the bigger innovations seem problematic. Smartphones and the internet are incredible technologies, but we deployed them in ways to addict us, to turn us into the digitally controlled assets of Wall Street. That’s not inevitable, it’s just a choice to structure our markets in a particular way.

The result is Americans are now quite cautious about things like artificial intelligence and electric cars. It isn’t because of anything inherent to the process of scientific or engineering advancement, we still love our rockets and innovation. It’s just that Black Mirror style plots probably deliver a higher return on equity in the short-term than The Jetsons, and Americans know that unless we change our power structure, technology is more likely to bring us more junk fees than robot maids.

And now the good and bad monopoly-themed news of the week.