> Meanwhile, the growth of software corresponds to a drop in the number of required human touchpoints for a given transaction. When travel was booked by phone or in person, there was a direct financial reward to being a good conversationalist in the travel business; rhapsodizing about the beauty of a beach was a good way to upsell customers on a nicer hotel a bit closer to it, and sussing out whether someone was more interested in beaches, landmarks, or bars meant figuring out exactly what to pitch them. All this work is now silently and efficiently happening on the backend of the big online travel agencies, with no human interaction required.The pre-Internet white collar economy was basically a universal job guarantee for personable people. That's increasingly going away, to be replaced with a more neoliberal attention economy with a more extreme distribution of outcomes.
My usual theory for the increasing around of grift, particularly in politics, is that various disintermediation efforts which were in theory supposed to make government more democratic actually mean there is less incentive than ever for working hard to fix anything, but big rewards for torching the commons for your own gain.
I don't think this runs contrary to the article's thesis but actually works hand-in-hand together with it to explain why so much public life-- politics, obviously, but also academia and public intellectualism-- consists mostly of charismatic psychopaths insisting we have to "burn it all down and click here to donate to my campaign or subscribe to my Substack)" instead of offering any useful advice.