Historical technological change and the human mind. Part 2

In our previous post we have seen how technological inventions can have a direct impact upon our social consciousness. The example of the printing press illustrated the mental leap whereby a once indispensable economic activity becomes absolutely pointless. But equally to the historical evolution of social norms and values, a certain amount of conservative reaction must be expected. Here we shall continue our exposition of the social impact that technological progress has had so far throughout our history. Let’s begin with the nineteenth-century demise of industrial sewing by hand. First, here is some historical context concerning this formerly important economic activity:

“The great majority of women who made their living by sewing in the nineteenth century were not dressmakers but seamstresses, who did piecework for clothing manufacturers or labor contractors. These women received bundles of precut garments from their employers and did the basic construction of the garment. They basted, lined, seamed, trimmed, made the buttonholes, and sewed on the buttons. In most cases they also washed, ironed, and folded the clothing before returning it to the shop for payment of work done. This work was considered unskilled because it involved only straight sewing, a skill the women had learned as girls. There was no training or apprenticeship for seamstresses.”

How much importance is given today to teaching young girls how to perform sewing by hand? Arguably, not too much. And from our historical perspective, this appears to be a positive development – for there are many more important things that women can do today than spend the whole day sitting with a needle in their hands. Nevertheless, one might wonder to what extent those generations could have imagined a world where such a prominent productive activity would become irrelevant? They were born into a world with a particular set of technological capabilities, and that was the only world they knew. But then the sewing machine arrived.

There is a very telling historical account of a woman who was forced to “wake up from the delusion under which she had hitherto labored, that the needle was a woman's best and surest dependence; for here was a revolution that had not entered into her imagination.” A revolution caused by a device that, according to some, could “perform about as much in a day as ten women”. Logically, this would appear to be a reason to celebrate. After all, we could now work ten times less and produce just as much as before! While the social consciousness of the early nineteenth century might not have been capable of imagining such a possibility, today we know that a laptop or an ultrasonic scaler could easily replace the needle as a “woman's best and surest dependence”. And from our perspective, the tasks performed with the former appear to be much more socially important. This is not to suggest that we no longer need clothing, but rather that it would be absurd to abandon our sewing technology - for whatever reason - and return to sewing by hand.

Unfortunately, our contemporary economic system has its own peculiar logic. Thus, leaving aside the inability to envisage the social needs that could be met by women no longer burdened with hand sewing, the question of employment and income arose immediately:

“In the late 1850s each machine was estimated to perform the work of six hand sewers. Alice Rhine calculated that there were 73,290 women displaced by the machines in New York City alone in 1862. This figure exaggerates unemployment since increased production absorbed much of this displaced labor.”

And also:

“Clothing-shops and other establishments went into operation with a hundred machines in each, throwing multitudes of sewing-women out of employment. Steam was called in to take the place of female fingers. The human machine was suddenly discarded, - turned off, without notice or compunction, to seek other occupation, or to suffer for want of it. [...] How all the sewing-women thus suddenly reduced to idleness were to gain a livelihood I could not comprehend. A cry of distress rose up from the toiling inmates of many a humble home around us. The privilege to toil had been suddenly withdrawn from them.”

The social and economic consequences for individuals who have lost their source of income can be devastating. And in a rational world with a rational economic system such technological displacements would be dealt with without difficulty. But historical technological change involves more than the bare material question of making a living. Psychological attachment to a particular way of life can also give rise to resistance and opposition. When new technology threatens someone's economic role, it can also threaten their sense of purpose and identity that has been built around it. But these are merely personal emotions linked to a particular moment in human history. Today not a single sane person will express sadness over the obsolescence of pre-industrial hand sewing. Rather, relief is a much more likely response to no longer having the “privilege to toil” under such primitive conditions.

However, a particular generation may be affected by technological progress in ways that extend beyond the issue of employment. We have already seen this in the case of the printing press in our previous post. It was not only the economic position of the scribes that was under threat; there were also arguments concerning the supposed moral damage that printed works could inflict upon their readers. Another example of such irrational anxiety can be found in the historical demise of elevator operators. Of course, the question of unemployment was also bound to arise:

“The most dramatic example of job loss through automation in the service occupations is that of the elevator operator. [...] The job loss shown so graphically by these statistics was due entirely to the improvement and widespread use of automatic elevators in the post-World War II era. [...] The incidence of job loss through automation is rarely illustrated as dramatically as in the case of the elevator operator.”

We have already argued multiple times that it is not the technology that causes economic suffering for those affected, but rather the market economy. Hence, the issue of employment is not a sufficient reason to halt technological innovation. Moreover, with the advent of self-service elevators, society gained more than just the additional labour time that had previously been wasted on operating those machines. Here is some more historical context:

“First of all, the elevator operator unions were going on strike a lot, and when they did, the average person was stuck. I mean, skyscrapers were built because of the elevator, and then the machine that made vertical life possible would be randomly taken away. In 1943, for example, 250 elevator operators abruptly went on strike in the middle of the day around Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, which stranded an estimated 28,000 people. The Times coverage gives a pretty good sense of the chaos that this caused.”

This sounds very alien to the generations that have grown up in a world of self-service elevators. But isn’t that also the fate, for example, of the supermarket cashiers? Will not the future generations, who will only have experienced the self-service check-out, likewise find our contemporary retail strikes to be very alien? And not just the industrial strikes, but the limitations of general opening hours as well. As far as the elevator operators are concerned, while there might have been different arrangements depending on the building, the following restrictions would be incomprehensible to our contemporary social consciousness.

“But even when the elevator operators were working, the human factor was still really inconvenient, because elevators weren’t staffed 24 hours a day. [...] Since the operators, most of the times they would only work between nine to five, the elevators only operated nine to five. Imagine it. You literally had to catch the last elevator the way you might have to catch the last train today.”

While today such a mode of functioning would be labeled as ridiculous, once it was considered to be absolutely normal. And while this historical shift from “normal” to “ridiculous” was only made possible by technological advances, as one might expect, these were not welcomed by everybody:

“You’d think that everyone would say great, finally, let’s get rid of all these operators and go up and down as we please. But that’s not what happened. Instead, a bunch of cities banned automatic elevators, or if an elevator was upgraded to have push buttons, there would still need to be a guy in there whose job was now to just push the buttons. [...] Part of the resistance was about protecting jobs. This technology threatened to throw a lot of people out of work. I mean, they were literally being replaced by a button. But there was another reason that people weren’t so into the automated elevator, and that was, they didn’t trust it. [...] He added that operators on elevators are a safety and protective factor. He said, assaults, robberies, and even murders that have taken place in apartment houses and in their vestibules, could have been prevented if elevators in the buildings were manned by operators.”

How would we react today to a proposal to reinstall human operators in our modern lifts, on the grounds of safety and crime prevention? That would hardly seem like a plausible argument, would it? Yet, one could find even less reasonable objections to the changes brought about by this new technology. And these fall into the category of social experiences. Here are a few descriptions of social interactions that have by now essentially died out:

“In some cases, mostly in the US and especially for elevator operators who worked in luxury hotels or prestigious buildings, they were also required to attend a ‘charm school.’ Here they learned etiquette, how to handle delicate situations and how to provide impeccable service to the most demanding customers. This aspect of the profession also recalls how important the social role of elevator operators was, who contributed significantly to the atmosphere and reputation of important places.”

“With an operator, it was different. If you were inside going out, he could warn you that it was raining. If you were outside coming in, he could observe that it must be raining and it's been a pretty wet spring, hasn't it? [...] And if you were a small boy living in an apartment hotel, you could go out and visit the operators in the evenings and work crossword puzzles together. And maybe they'd let you run the elevator yourself, if no one was aboard, and pull the doors open, and let you punch the button that cleared all the floor indicators. And maybe teach you to do a buck-and-wing, if there were no passengers for 10 or 15 minutes. And, besides, lots of elevator operators were girls. And lots of them were pretty.”

Nostalgia can be as powerful as it is irrational. Consider the recurring tendency of each generation to claim that its childhood was the best. “We had a real childhood, rather than spending our time glued to tablets,” they might say. Yet, this conviction does not stem from the objective superiority of their childhood, but rather from the fact that it was their personal childhood. This is the way that nostalgia works. An adult today might feel sadness when watching younger generations spend so much of their time in front of screens. But this says more about his or her own expectations rather than about the actual experiences of the children. It is somewhat problematic to assume that someone must be experiencing a particular emotion simply because we imagine that we would feel that way in their circumstances.

Children growing up today have never known a world without smartphones and tablets. And this is the environment that they are accustomed to. As a result, they are no less content while growing up than their parents or grandparents were. Therefore, to conclude, previous generations might have felt a similar sense of loss - for themselves as well as for their descendants - when observing the disappearance of once-common social interactions inside of the elevators. For us, however, the historical extinction of their operators is hardly a source of sorrow.

Sources:
1. https://temple.manifoldapp.org/read/a-needle-a-bobbin-a-strike-women-needleworkers-in-america/section/58cf4304-f294-4bc4-8480-f4fb26cc3b3a?utm_source
2. https://readingroo.ms/3/0/1/5/30157/30157-h/30157-h.htm?utm_source
3. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED022906.pdf?utm_source
4. https://humanprogress.org/pessimists-archive-podcast-ep-19-the-elevator/?utm_source
5. https://en.futuroprossimo.it/2024/10/quando-temevamo-gli-ascensori-lezione-sui-veicoli-autonomi
6. https://www.csmonitor.com/1984/0125/012500.html?utm_source

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