So this is going to come off as more than a bit cynical, but, for what it’s worth, I don’t intend it to be.
Sometime in 2014, Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, proposed the following:
“The biggest impact on the world will be universal access to all human knowledge. The smartest person in the world currently could well be stuck behind a plow in India or China. Enabling that person — and the millions like him or her — will have a profound impact on the development of the human race.”
I’ve heard some variation of this “stuck behind a plow” sentiment more than a few times of late, and it occurred to me that this the 21st century version of the “rags to riches” story. It is, in other words, a story that promotes certain virtues–hard work, resilience, thrift, etc.–by promising that they will be extravagantly rewarded. Of course, such extravagant rewards have always been rare and rarely correlated to how hard one might be willing to work. Which is not, I hasten to add, not a knock against hard work and its rewards, such as they are.
The “rags to riches/stuck behind a plow” narrative is an egalitarian story, at least on the surface. It inspires the hope that an undiscovered Everyman languishing in impoverished obscurity, properly enabled, can hope to be a person of world-historical consequence, or at least remarkably prosperous. It’s a happy claim, and, of course, impossible to refute–not that I’m particularly interested in refuting the possibility.
The problem, as I see it, is that, coming from the would-be noble enablers, it’s also a wildly convenient, self-serving claim. Who but Google could enable such benighted souls by providing universal access to all human knowledge?
Never mind that the claim is hyperbolic and traffics in an impoverished notion of what counts as knowledge. Never mind, as well, that, even if we grant the hyperbole, access to knowledge by itself cannot transform a society, cure its ills, heal its injustices, or lift the poor out of their poverty.
I’m reminded of one of my favorite lines in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Before he ships off to the Congo, Marlowe’s aunt, who had helped secure his job with the Company, gushes about the nobility of work he is undertaking. Marlowe would be “something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle.” In her view, he would be “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways.”
Then comes the wonderfully deadpanned line that we would do well to remember:
“I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit.”
