This is the second post in my “beef” series about political and philosophical ideas. Today’s topic is deindustrialization.

In light of the massive application of tariffs by Cheeto Mussolini, I would like to talk specifically about American deindustrialization. Trump is a boomer that is stuck in the 70’s. His whole worldview is based on watching Deathwish too many times. He believes that all of the United States is New York City in the grips of the crack/AIDS epidemic, and all of his racism and homophobia flow from that.

My beef with deindustrialization isn’t that it happens. it’s that politicians like Trump are obsessed with reversing it. They want America to make macho bullshit with fossil fuels when the US succeeds at making ‘soy boy’ shit like drug patents and software.

Deindustrialization in a nutshell.

Deindustrialization happens when industrial activity declines somewhere. Usually because manufacturing jobs and factories move overseas where production costs are lower. The result can be job losses, economic shifts, and changes in the social fabric of communities that were heavily dependent on manufacturing. In the American sense, it is the shift to a service economy. According to economists, the jobs lost from manufacturing are replaced with jobs in industries like healthcare, finance, education, technology, and so on.

“Those jobs aren’t coming back.”

Steve Jobs famously told President Obama that when asked what it would take to make the iPhone in the US.

2012 was the ascendance of the smart phone. Like the Internet before it, the smartphone changed everything. But, it is nearly impossible to make one in the United States. And if you started the process of making All American Smartphones today, it would likely be more than a decade before one hit the market.

What Jobs was referring to was globalization. What he actually meant was that the capital class wasn’t going to buy American labor anymore.

Globalization and Corporate Consolidation

Globalization concentrates power among a small number of international companies.

Movement of Manufacturing: As communities deindustrialize, many manufacturing jobs are outsourced to countries where labor and production costs are not based on respect for humanity or the environment. This moves economic power away from local communities to large multinational corporations. These companies often control not just production but also distribution, marketing, and regulation.

Loss of Local Ownership: Deindustrialization gives corporate control over local sources of income. With the local economies highly dependent on corporate entities, no one, worker or consumer, has access to ownership or decision making.

Concentration of Wealth: Corporate money concentrates at the top. This moves capital out of communities and empowers corporate owners. Centralization of power shift wealth and decision-making toward large corporations and billionaire owners and leave the rest of us behind.

Tech and Digital Centralization

Advances in both the complexity and the capability of technology centralizes wealth and power in the hands of big tech.

Tech Giants as centers of power: Deindustrialization shifts the economy toward service and tech industries. This grows a few big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft. These tech companies dominate entire sectors of the economy the way that large factories used to dominate small towns. Vast amounts of data gives these companies control. That control influences our economy, culture, and politics.

Surveillance and Control: Big tech profits from surveillance and control. Access to our personal information and insight into our behavior has transformed big tech into the digital version of a coal mine, where data becomes the raw material of profit. The tech user is both the product and the labor force, both the worker and the consumer. We create the profits for big tech, and they provide nothing to society or to us as individuals.

Power is no longer measured in land, labor, or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it. As long as the most powerful tools (not weapons) are in the hands of those who would hoard Them, no alternative cultural vision can succeed. Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, other alternate systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing process. –Radical Software - Volume 1, Issue 1