The Internet Destroyed The Middle Class

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Want to know what is the biggest threat to our way of life? What is destroying the middle class? The answer is...THE INTERNET!

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”
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I know right? Once eBay was established my sports cards were worth crap! I was destroyed! Time to close pin them to my bike spokes!
 
Technology allows less people to do more work. Tangible skills are more important now than ever.
That's why programmers and engineering majors are in high demand.
 
Oh, this argument again.

This is like complaining that cars destroyed the horse and buggy industry. No.

As technology changes, jobs change. People need to be able to adapt, and we need to focus on providing the education opportunity for that to be possible, but that isn't the fault of the internet. How many jobs were created managing and running Instagram, Facebook and other social media networks? A lot. The problem is time lag - jobs are there, it just takes people a while to be able to convert their skills, if that's even possible. But that doesn't mean we should just halt innovation.
 
Wasn't Kodak's function replaced by Sandisk/other memory card makers (and their role in the film industry by Sony/RED etc)?

Instagram don't accept mind power photos so you must take photos with something and the camera industry seems to be doing fine. :p
 
And here I thought the rapid concentration of wealth in a tiny percentage of the population throughout the entire western world leading to a rapid concentration of power in a tiny percentage of the population was ending the middle class.

Governments are busting unions for corporate backers for crying out loud, and that's in multiple countries.
 
I live in Rochester, home of Kodak and using them as an example is really bad. I actually talked to one of the executives there who was pushing for further digital camera research in the freakin 80's. Kodak had the technology but it was the majority vote that decided it was just a fad and would go away and still kept going on with film. I'm sure the "technology killed the middle class" thing can be said about other companies, but NOT Kodak. That was just poor foresight and not understanding how to adapt.
 
I guess it's time for a 50 yr old steel mill worker to learn how to program (?)
 
While Kodak may have invented the first digital camera they still had a huge portion of their company in the film business, it's not the Internet's fault that they didn't see this coming and change their business model. Kodak was a dead duck long before Instagram became as popular as it did, lets ignore the fact that every smart phone in existence has a camera built into it, that has almost all but destroyed the point and shoot digital camera market, the last bastion for it are the rugged cameras that can be taken underwater, or can be beat up fairly well.

BroHamBone said:
I know right? Once eBay was established my sports cards were worth crap! I was destroyed! Time to close pin them to my bike spokes!
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There is some truth in this, however it also has to do with over-saturation of a market where people believe there will be value as a result lots of people have them, hence no demand, whether it's baseball cards, comic books, or toys, there are people who found out "oh shit my star wars toys would have been worth how much if they were unopened? I'm going to buy the Episode 1 toys" ... meanwhile every other person has the same thing, so now there's no demand because the supply side is too high.

I will say the internet has tweaked the supply side to unreasonable levels on collectables though, before wherever your lived was more or less your supply, very few people actually went to trade shows and what not. Now with the internet the world is your supply. I remember collecting Don Mattingly baseball cards when I was a teenager, I think I saw his rookie card for as high as $100 in a comic/collectables store, this was 20+ years ago, now with ebay, you're lucky to get $10 for it.
 
It's called evolution. Our economy is constantly changing. I'm sure there were a lot of great companies that made covered wagons. Things change. Kodak didn't die because of the internet, they died because they couldn't adapt to the change to digital. Canon and Nikon seems to have done alright with adapting.

Things change. If you can't change with them, you get left behind.
 
Master a trade (plumbing, carpentry, construction, etc.) if you want a decent paying career that can thrive in the internet age AND withstand an electromagnetic pulse, coronal mass ejection or zombie apocalypse.
 
I think the paradigm is that as unskilled manufacturing moves offshore the Middle Class is shifting to being composed of skilled workers only (which right now is a smaller population) ... the days of living and working in a small radius are over ... the modern workplace is 24x7 and global in nature ... for people who can operate in that environment there are still jobs ... the 9-5/M-F blue collar job is gone though and is unlikely to come back ... that isn't necessarily a bad thing ;)
 
Where's that infographic about distribution of wealth...

american-wealth.jpg
 
WorldExclusive said:
Technology allows less people to do more work. Tangible skills are more important now than ever.
That's why programmers and engineering majors are in high demand.
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programming jobs are going overseas. They must adapt and learn something else or be left behind.

I would suggest welding
 
I agree completely with Rizen, and DeathPrincess. It's not that the jobs are gone, they've just shifted into technical jobs that take a different set of skills to employ.

For example, to say "well instagram only employs 13 people." Sure it does, but the "use of instagram" employs many many other jobs. For example instagram itself is only a name and an idea and some code. There has to be a hosting company, domain registry, and a server to put it on. Then that server must have managed staff, and also employs the people generating the power, and the hardware to create and run that server.

Then there's the phones instagram pictures get posted from and the mining jobs for the lithium and gold on in phones. Then the manufacture, production, and sale of the phones. Then there's front end of the web developer to maintain instagram, the dba, which at this point becomes expensive RDMS that costs huge money. You employ people @ say ORACLE to have provided that software and to update it with security flaw patches etc.

Instagram, although I never use it myself has probably generated the need for more jobs than ever possible through Kodak. The middle class is alive and well, but typical punch press jobs propped up by a Union are less and less available because you probably shouldn't be able to press a button and make 17.50/hr with benefits and a pension.
 
Cheetoz said:
programming jobs are going overseas. They must adapt and learn something else or be left behind.

I would suggest welding
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Low level programming jobs are going overseas, not senior positions or people who are in a position of authority or creativity.
 
That isn't a destruction of the middle class, but rather an evolution of capital. New products and technologies have been doing this since antiquity. This is nothing new. Hell, what do you think the Gutenberg Press did to the legion of scribes that were employed at one time. It took years for a single scribe to produce a copy of a previous work and was only accessible to the extremely wealthy. The Gutenberg Press changed all of that.
 
sfsuphysics said:
While Kodak may have invented the first digital camera they still had a huge portion of their company in the film business, it's not the Internet's fault that they didn't see this coming and change their business model. Kodak was a dead duck long before Instagram became as popular as it did, lets ignore the fact that every smart phone in existence has a camera built into it, that has almost all but destroyed the point and shoot digital camera market, the last bastion for it are the rugged cameras that can be taken underwater, or can be beat up fairly well.


There is some truth in this, however it also has to do with over-saturation of a market where people believe there will be value as a result lots of people have them, hence no demand, whether it's baseball cards, comic books, or toys, there are people who found out "oh shit my star wars toys would have been worth how much if they were unopened? I'm going to buy the Episode 1 toys" ... meanwhile every other person has the same thing, so now there's no demand because the supply side is too high.

I will say the internet has tweaked the supply side to unreasonable levels on collectables though, before wherever your lived was more or less your supply, very few people actually went to trade shows and what not. Now with the internet the world is your supply. I remember collecting Don Mattingly baseball cards when I was a teenager, I think I saw his rookie card for as high as $100 in a comic/collectables store, this was 20+ years ago, now with ebay, you're lucky to get $10 for it.
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It wasn't even ebay and the internet that started the boom in speculation on trading cards and comic books. That began happening in the 80's as more and more people started buying for the sake of collecting after people had been hearing for years about comics from the 50's and 60's worth an arm and a leg due to rarity of parents tossing out their kids collections and such. The internet started to get more popular, prices on cards and comics shot through the roof, then once people realized the supply was massive due to the companies producing so much product(it wasn't uncommon to find cards and comics from 3-5 years prior still collecting dust on store shelves), the market for all of that stuff crashed(more like, became realistic). The crap like all of those pricing guides for stuff, and even PSA ratings just artificially drove prices even higher.

As far as Kodak, that was just an epic management fuck up of extraordinary proportions. It also had nothing to do with the internet. When kodak did finally enter the digital camera market, they halfassed their consumer and "prosumer" products with garbage, costing them big time.

Complaining that the internet has ruined the middle class because businesses drove themselves into being all but obsolete, would be about on par with claiming that the advent of commercial air travel wrecked the middle class by making travel across the ocean via boat obsolete.
 
lilbabycat said:
Where's that infographic about distribution of wealth...

american-wealth.jpg
Click to expand...

There is nothing wrong with wealth inequality. The word inequality here is being used as a pejorative not as a neutral descriptor. If everyone was wealthy, then no one would be rich.
 
What really matters to an economy is the effeciency of converting raw materials, energy, and man hours into finished products.

When you have a new technology change that, the product should become cheaper. And although it may employ fewer people, there is now money freed up by consumers to be put into other things. So technology hasn't killed our economy or the middle class.

The abandonment of our softcore defensive trade policies that saw the US skyrocket economically from 1850 to 1960 is what's killed the middle class and our economy.
 
The link between instagram and Kodak is incorrect. Instagram is a form of distribution, not manufacture.

The others were more correct in that Kodak was replaced by digital products, memory manufacturers, etc.

Kodak didn't lose 14,000 jobs to instagram, they lost 14,000 jobs to memory manufacturers running clean room factories in Singapore, Taiwan, and other little 3rd World countries in Asia.

The author has the skewed viewpoint of someone how spends too much time social networking which fosters an overvalued sense of worth.

Some people get so absorbed in something their world shrinks to the point that it excludes what falls outside it's borders. If it isn't on Facebook, it isn't important, because everything is here :rolleyes:
 
"The Internet Destroyed The Middle Class"

Does it suggest that Middle Class should stop using internet ?
 
Corrupt government? NOPE.
Rich too rich? NOPE.
Jobs overseas? NOPE.

Internet teaching people? YEP!
 
sfsuphysics said:
Kodak was a dead duck long before Instagram became as popular as it did, lets ignore the fact that every smart phone in existence has a camera built into it, that has almost all but destroyed the point and shoot digital camera market, the last bastion for it are the rugged cameras that can be taken underwater, or can be beat up fairly well.
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Disagree. Anyone who actually cares about picture quality wouldn't be using thier phone as a camera, unless they have no other choice.

The low-end point & shoot market may have shrunk due to smart phones, however this has caused the quality of point & shoots to improve, while also lowering the prices.

My 4 year old point & shoot still takes better pictures, under most conditions, than almost any smart phone. That's mainly due to the much better lenses on point & shoot cameras vs phones.

My newest point & shoot blows away any smart phone camera with its 16x optical zoom, optical image stabalization, full 1080p 60fps video, etc.
 
The abandonment of our softcore defensive trade policies that saw the US skyrocket economically from 1850 to 1960 is what's killed the middle class and our economy.
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This and other factors, yes.

Take the entertainment industry, it is completely overvalued in all it's glory. I include all forms here from Hollywood to NASCAR and all those inbetween. Just because they make money move don't imagine that they generate product with the exception of coffee mugs, sippie cups, T-Shirts and oh..... BTW all that shit is made where? By whom?

See, Someone must be making something and digital rights are not enough to sustain a Global Superpower. We need more tangible durable goods manufacturing in the US and we need people who want to do this work.

I'll offer an example of sorts. I work in IT, I make a moderate 75K a year which is OK for this area's cost of living. Anyone who works in IT knows what you have to do to stay employable. It's a never ending learning process.

My wife is a barber, she makes at least 50K a year and then she makes her tips. Those tips add up to alot of money. She did 9 months of schooling, pays $65 to renew her license every year, and just has to smile and stand up alot when she works.

How many of you would have thought that my wife and I make anything near the same income?
I know I have to put up with a lot more stress and crap at work. She get's the occasional asshole customer or a coworker that is a jerk, but not that often.

I am 53 and I am getting so tired of the never ending evolution in IT and the increasing oversight and demand and the fact that we really aren't paid well at all when you finally realize what so many tradesmen like my wife make. I often wish I had just become a barber myself.
 
lcpiper said:
This and other factors, yes.

I am 53 and I am getting so tired of the never ending evolution in IT and the increasing oversight and demand and the fact that we really aren't paid well at all when you finally realize what so many tradesmen like my wife make. I often wish I had just become a barber myself.
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You will see the trades starting to make a resurgence I believe. There is a great need in this country for trade and technical schools/universities. You can still make a good living working with your hands and the one thing people seem to forget is, you can't sit on your ass waiting for the work to come to you, you have to go where the work is.
 
Methadras said:
There is nothing wrong with wealth inequality. The word inequality here is being used as a pejorative not as a neutral descriptor. If everyone was wealthy, then no one would be rich.
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Whooooooooooooosssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

there goes the point.
 
How about all the people who were employed at Blockbuster Video?

The internet making old business models obsolete really has nothing to do with ruining the middle class. How about all of the jobs that the internet created? Don't those matter too?
 
Rizen said:
Oh, this argument again.

This is like complaining that cars destroyed the horse and buggy industry. No.

As technology changes, jobs change. People need to be able to adapt, and we need to focus on providing the education opportunity for that to be possible, but that isn't the fault of the internet. How many jobs were created managing and running Instagram, Facebook and other social media networks? A lot. The problem is time lag - jobs are there, it just takes people a while to be able to convert their skills, if that's even possible. But that doesn't mean we should just halt innovation.
Click to expand...

This is simply wrong there it is not about lag there is what amounts to job cannibalism.

What applied 100 years ago does not fit a modern largely automated environment. It takes far fewer people to manage information than it did thirty years ago. The number of people working at all social media networks is less that the number of need to manage telephone calls 30-50 years ago, jobs that all went away.

Same for manufacturing. If it took the same number of people now to make a car versus the number it took 35 years ago the US would be awash in auto manufacturing jobs but instead hundreds of thousands (probably millions of workers when supporting industries are included) jobs have been replaced by what amounts to a handful of programmers and robots. Yes people have to build and maintain the robots but that number is extremely small compared to the number of workers displaced.

The facts are whole categories of workers have and will be increasingly displaced and this tread is only going to accelerate those jobs are going to be gone and not replaced. For instance when automated auto is made practical and that will be sooner than many think truck drivers disappear like telephone switchboard did.

Kodak is a bad example though. Kodak got bloated and lazy many of the companies Kodak broke off because they were supposedly a drag on Kodak are doing quite well because the got out from under Rochester.
 
lcpiper said:
This and other factors, yes.

Take the entertainment industry, it is completely overvalued in all it's glory. I include all forms here from Hollywood to NASCAR and all those inbetween. Just because they make money move don't imagine that they generate product with the exception of coffee mugs, sippie cups, T-Shirts and oh..... BTW all that shit is made where? By whom?

See, Someone must be making something and digital rights are not enough to sustain a Global Superpower. We need more tangible durable goods manufacturing in the US and we need people who want to do this work.

I'll offer an example of sorts. I work in IT, I make a moderate 75K a year which is OK for this area's cost of living. Anyone who works in IT knows what you have to do to stay employable. It's a never ending learning process.

My wife is a barber, she makes at least 50K a year and then she makes her tips. Those tips add up to alot of money. She did 9 months of schooling, pays $65 to renew her license every year, and just has to smile and stand up alot when she works.

How many of you would have thought that my wife and I make anything near the same income?
I know I have to put up with a lot more stress and crap at work. She get's the occasional asshole customer or a coworker that is a jerk, but not that often.

I am 53 and I am getting so tired of the never ending evolution in IT and the increasing oversight and demand and the fact that we really aren't paid well at all when you finally realize what so many tradesmen like my wife make. I often wish I had just become a barber myself.
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I know quite a few chicks that work at a place like super cuts only make like 11 an hour plus tips.
 
roaf85 said:
I know quite a few chicks that work at a place like super cuts only make like 11 an hour plus tips.
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They open their own shop they make a lot more.

Be a plumber - people aren't going to stop pooping. And when you gotta go that plumber is worth his weight in gold. (I know this is the internet and you guys would all rather just go outside and then wipe with a pinecone but not everyone is badarse like you guys!)

Be an electrician - power isn't goin out of style!

Be a mechanic - my father worked on Cat and heavy equipment for 40 years. 28 of it as his own little one man business. He grossed over 6 figures working in a rock mine the last 8 years he worked.

In short if you can actually do something (a trade) and have some gumption you will be fine.
 
Tyler-Durden said:
Master a trade (plumbing, carpentry, construction, etc.) if you want a decent paying career that can thrive in the internet age AND withstand an electromagnetic pulse, coronal mass ejection or zombie apocalypse.
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In other words, college students, learn how to do something that can't be done through a wire.
 
JayteeBates said:
They open their own shop they make a lot more.

Be a plumber - people aren't going to stop pooping. And when you gotta go that plumber is worth his weight in gold. (I know this is the internet and you guys would all rather just go outside and then wipe with a pinecone but not everyone is badarse like you guys!)

Be an electrician - power isn't goin out of style!

Be a mechanic - my father worked on Cat and heavy equipment for 40 years. 28 of it as his own little one man business. He grossed over 6 figures working in a rock mine the last 8 years he worked.

In short if you can actually do something (a trade) and have some gumption you will be fine.
Click to expand...

You can't open your own shop if there are like 100 hair cut places in an area. I have a supercuts, great clips, hair masters, garbos whatever you call it next to me and all are around the same 10-14 for a hair cut.

Yea there are places I could pay upwards of 25 to 30 for a hair cut, but why? Maybe if you are a teenager or some shit, but if you have ever been to a super cuts or great clips they are busy all the time and that is mainly do to the low prices they charge, but you wont see any of the stylists driving Lambos. They get paid shit.

Plumbers don't make what you think. Sure there is a demand for some plumbing but most plumbing jobs are probably only 1 to 2 hr jobs. And most are unionized so they are pretty much all charging the same rates. Without new construction it is hard for a lot of plumbers to make it just solely of trying to chase 1-2 hour jobs a day.

Most new homes don't have plumbing issues. It isn't related to pooping, most pooping goes down indestructible PVC piping, most copper piping has no issues, toilets are pretty much non issues, depending on shower valves and faucet valves they should go for years and years.

About the only thing you need a plumber for is toilet hardware.

Can almost say the same with electricians.

A carpenter is a far better trade.
 
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