Cloud city

The Victorian squalor of the internet

In 2020, we were more online than we’ve ever been before. We all thought we knew what it meant to shop online, or hang out online, or do work online, or rely on online entertainment, but man we had no idea. Vast swathes of activity—public and private, commercial and otherwise—were suddenly handled via the internet rather than face-to-face as they’d been done before.

It is also quite possible that in 2020 we were less online than we’ll ever be again, or very nearly so. There will of course be something of a return to pre-pandemic normal as vaccines roll out; I’m as eager as anybody to visit family and friends, and see live sports and music. But many of the shifts we experienced during the pandemic will stick. Having gone through this strange online experiment, we will become ever more accustomed to doing things in an online way, and ever better at it, and the tools we use to do them will get better too. You don’t have to think that doing things online is better than doing them in person to believe this. This isn’t a dispatch about the disruptive power of the internet, but the internet does embody many of the attributes of a disruptive technology, in Clayton Christensen’s sense of the idea: it’s clearly inferior to the existing technologies used by market leaders along most of the metrics those leaders care about, but it’s super cheap and with enormous scope to improve along metrics that will eventually come to be seen as critically important. 

What are these superior existing technologies? Narrowly speaking, we’re talking about the highly sophisticated “be in a room with someone else” technology. Face-to-face conversations or meetings are generally far superior to those conducted online (for reasons that are not always easy to describe!). Communication occurs more naturally, you can read others more easily, there is more scope for spontaneity, interactions are more emotionally satisfying, etc, etc. But once online meetings become good enough, it’s hard to justify not using them given the advantages they have in terms of allowing people to participate from anywhere. And at the point at which that switchover occurs (which the pandemic has brought forward) there is still enormous scope for the online experience to improve.

But “in-person activities” is unhelpfully imprecise. Humankind relies heavily on one technology in particular to facilitate people being in rooms with other people: the city. The city is what the internet is in the process of disrupting, and it’s where we will see the most dramatic effects of the pandemic-induced acceleration of this disruption. But this isn’t a dispatch about the impending demise of the city, either! For a few reasons, the most important of which is that I’m not really sure the city is going anywhere. I am however interested in the lessons that the history of urbanization may hold for our imminent relocation to the cloud. 

Because right now, the unfolding history of the internet looks intriguingly analogous, to me anyway, to the growth of cities in the early industrial age. When we’re all simultaneously wowed and disgusted by this thing, that may be because we’re in the digital equivalent of Manchester, circa 1830 or so.

Back up.

Four hundred years ago, as the commercial revolution in northwest Europe laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution to come, London was home to fewer than a quarter of a million people, which was good enough to make it one of the largest cities in Europe. No other British city came anywhere close; the biggest had populations in the tens of thousands. More than 90% of the population of England and Wales lived in rural areas at that time. But by the end of the 19th century, the urban share of the population had risen to more than 60%, and about 6.5m people lived in London, which was then the largest city in the world. Since the first stirrings of industrialization, few demographic trends have been more intimately associated with the process of economic development than urbanization.

Why did cities begin growing so explosively? The boom occurred as a consequence of a confluence of technological, social and economic factors. Land reform and agricultural innovation raised the productivity of food production, allowing rural areas to sustain larger urban populations while freeing some labor to populate those urban areas. Over roughly the same period, employment opportunities in cities arose thanks to expanding trade, commercial activity and industry. These activities concentrated in cities because of high overland transport costs (especially relative to the cost of transport over water) and increasing returns to scale. If you were a merchant, you needed to be near a port, and it helped to be near other merchants, and financiers, and the expanding consumer market growing up around you. If you were manufacturing goods, it was also useful to be near water transport and a large pool of labor. Manufacturers of equipment used in other industries found it attractive to locate near those other industries and vice versa. And in an environment in which new opportunities arose thanks to tinkering and innovation—the spread of useful knowledge which could not easily be learned from a book or a classroom—tinkerers and entrepreneurs needed to be where the ideas were.

Scale was crucial to the process of industrialization. The new, increasingly mechanized factories could produce lots of stuff in a highly efficient manner: which made most economic sense when the resulting goods could be sold to mass markets connected by rivers, canals and sea lanes. Instead of making a little bit of a thing in a lot of places, you made a lot of a thing in one place and then sent the thing elsewhere. The one place then got really big relative to the lots of little places where cottage industry had operated before. Cities were an enabling technology, which brought together the large amounts of money and resources and labor and ideas needed to produce at scale.

This all makes cities sound like an amazing improvement over the pre-industrial status quo, which is not at all in keeping with the way I described the internet above. What’s important to understand is that early industrial cities were horrible, horrible places.

Not across the board. As mentioned above, they brought people together in unprecedented ways, which made them exciting and rich in opportunity, economic and otherwise. They were liberating places. People flocking to them from the countryside suddenly found themselves free of the rigid traditions and oppressive hierarchies of rural life. You could get up to a lot of wild stuff in cities, not all of it good.

This feature, though, was part of what made cities so unpleasant. Fast-growing industrial cities felt lawless and dangerous, places the naive could tumble into and never escape. The governing institutions which had served towns well enough when they were small were soon overmatched, and confronted by massive problems they’d never had to deal with before: like the need for enormous quantities of new housing, choking congestion and pollution, and unfathomable quantities of refuse and waste. Industrial cities were in some respects unlivable. Mortality rates were staggeringly high in the best of times, when epidemics of one kind or another weren’t sweeping through to claim lives in their thousands.

Now, humans are enterprising, and the problems created by cities inspired people to look for ways to turn a profit by reducing others’ misery. The dustmen of London, for example, came through neighborhoods to collect household refuse (a good portion of which consisted of ash and cinders from the fires which heated homes and blackened the air). They’d then cart loads of refuse back to dust yards and separate it out for recycling and resale; the absurdly rapid growth of industrial cities translated into soaring demand for bricks, for instance, and ash was an important brickmaking ingredient. The next time you’re walking through a London neighborhood jammed with Victorian brick homes, spare a thought for the coal fires and the dustmen which made them all possible.

Yet while we can admire this ingenuity and resourcefulness, the city dwellers of the industrial age came eventually to understand that private initiatives simply weren’t going to cut it. Not every disgusting thing that the people and animals of the cities produced could be collected and resold at a profit, for one thing. And even those that could did so irregularly and unevenly. When demand for bricks flagged, the dustmen came around less often and the dust piled up. Many steered clear of poor parts of the city at all times. Dust, too, was only part of the problem. City streets became rivers of mud, horseshit, dead animals and other awful things. Cesspools groaned under the pressure of accumulating human filth. When richer households sought to de-stink their properties by connecting their privies and water closets to sewers, the filth then ran into public waterways, many of which were the primary sources of local drinking water. 

Many urban problems simply had no solution that wasn’t based in collective action. During downturns, large-scale industrial urbanization translated into concentrated mass unemployment. Elites in the early 19th century were strongly disposed against taking steps to ameliorate the suffering of the jobless masses. But they were also strongly disposed against being murdered by a mob or having their fortune expropriated by revolutionaries. Cities brought people together, and as they did so they helped people organize: into roving bands of gangs, on occasion, but also into political movements and reform campaigns. (Sometimes it was hard to tell the mobs from the movements.)

As societies were confronted by these problems and weighed how to address them, they faced many obstacles. Some were technological. Providing a metropolis with all the things its inhabitants needed and removing all the things they didn’t presented innumerable technical challenges. There were problems of scientific understanding. Management of the problem of water-borne epidemics was complicated by ignorance of microscopic pathogens.

But what most impeded efforts to transform cities from disgusting death traps into rich centers of culture, production, and life were the shortfalls in sociological understanding. Elites had first to realize that what happened in some corners of a city did not stay contained in those quarters; epidemics, hardship, revolutions all came spilling out into their world, threatening lives and livelihoods. Urban elites didn’t have to like the people who shared their city, but they reluctantly came to accept a sense of shared humanity and the interconnectedness of all city-dwellers’ fates. Urban societies then had to conceive of and accept the legitimacy of collective action, undertaken by the state, to solve problems that states had never been asked to solve before. It was a novel and controversial idea that local governments should collect money from citizens via taxes and fees, take responsibility for the construction of huge components of the built environment, and develop the capacity (and hire the staff) to administer critical public services.

It all seems very obvious and appropriate now that we should pay tax to a local government in order that it should arrange to collect our garbage, clean our streets, and whatever else we need it to do. But this was not at all obvious to everyone in the early 19th century. Many people worried that handing such responsibilities and powers and resources to governments was a very bad idea indeed that would have any number of destructive effects. Of course at no point was there unanimous agreement about any of this; some people never accepted that government should do such things, and indeed there are many people who feel this way today. But enough people were persuaded that the intellectual arguments were won and over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries states provided for public utilities and transport, public education, public recreational facilities, and all sorts of social services. Cities, as a consequence, were better able to perform all the functions that drew people to them in the first place: the bringing together of people to come up with new ideas and produce valuable goods and services and experience life together. (If you’re interested in all this, I wrote a short essay last year on how the sanitary revolution enabled cities to realize their full potential.)

Does our experience with the internet to date seem so very different? I don’t know what being online will feel like 20 or 50 years from now. As someone who fondly remembers the Before Times, I like to imagine there’s a future in which all the internetish things which make the world function happen in the background, leaving us to live quite pleasant lives in the warmth and comfort of meatspace. I suppose that makes me something like the Victorians and Edwardians who lamented the “dark satanic mills” which defaced the English countryside, because I suspect that the internet is going to feel ever less as it did in its first decades: a thing apart from normal life, which you purposefully access in order to complete some task, before returning to the realm of the real. It will simply be the place where ever more of our lives happens, in some way or another.

And because of that, I think we may need to revise some of our ideas about what is and is not appropriate governance of the internet. We are learning ever more about the ways in which the fantastically great economic and social potential of the internet is constrained by, well, congestion and pollution and public-health threats and violence and disorder and inequality and all sorts of ills for which we can find analogues in Victorian cities. As the lines blur between our offline and online lives, these pathologies spill out into the physical world. Ugly things, having gestated in dark corners of the web, suddenly appear in our streets, threatening institutions we’ve relied upon for hundreds of years. The wild spaces of the internet are a very real and increasingly important social sphere. As we gape befuddled at the chaos, unsure how to keep the malignant parts of the online world from destroying the benign bits and the offline world, we need to remember that we’ve been somewhere like this before. 

So far, because we haven’t known what else to do, we have hoped that prevailing norms would be enough to contain these harms, or that private businesses using new technologies might find ways to make the internet livable. But they haven’t really, have they? And while I recognize the absolutely valid concern that fiddling with the internet too much might drain it of its wild anarchic creativity and prevent us from realizing its full potential, I think we must also consider that the internet’s pathologies are actually the thing that most limits its capacity to make our lives better.

The internet, once, was a place you might visit occasionally, to do a bit of shopping or get the news. Without really realizing it, though, we’ve begun what amounts to a mass migration into the cloud. We’re there most of the time: visible to those online even if we’re not actively paying attention, always a pocket vibration away from a conversation with our neighbors scattered around the world, working and playing and living in the ether. We need to see it this way. Who’s going to clean up this town? It’s got to be all of us, working together and building collective institutions.