SPEAKER 1: We're going to
hear it one more time
from Kurt Andersen.
A novelist, magazine editor,
radio host, talent
extraordinare, who's going to
give us another way to think
about the overall theme of the
conference that is
collaborate and connect.
Kurt's recent novel is
a very good novel.
It's called, Heyday, and he's
going to talk to us now about
the heyday of collaborate
and connect.
I give you Kurt Andersen.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
KURT ANDERSEN:
Happy to be back.
You tell me what extraordinary
era I'm describing.
Everything is suddenly
moving and changing,
discombobulatingly
faster than ever.
Globalization is accelerating.
Wall Street is booming.
Outside San Francisco
astounding fortunes are being
made overnight by nobodies,
plucky nobodies out of nothing.
Miraculous new communications
and imaging technologies have
suddenly appeared transforming
business and everyday life.
New media are proliferating
and they're scurrilous
and partisan.
Marketing spin and advertising
are extending their
influences never before.
A new working class, urban
youth subculture has emerged.
It's rude and stylish.
It glorifies violence.
It creates its own slang.
Its finding its own new
forms of entertainment.
Christian conservatives are
furiously baffling cultural
decadence, and one popular
growing sect insists that
the end days are nigh.
Ferocious anti-immigration
sentiment is on the rise.
Both major political parties
seem pathetically unable to
deal with the looming urgent
issue of the day, and one of
those parties will wither away
and die within the decade.
The president of the United
States has tapped into
patriotic rage to invade a poor
desert country having dubiously
claimed that the enemy nation
represents a clear and present
military danger to America.
It is not the last decade,
or not only the last
decade, it is the 1840s.
The novel that Jim mentioned
that I published recently,
Heyday, takes place
between 1848 and 1850.
And while doing research for it
I was repeatedly flabbergast to
discover how familiar that
moment looks, looking back
from the 21st century.
History may not repeat itself
as a wise man once said,
but it really does rhyme.
I've become convinced that that
moment in the middle of the
19th century, more than
any other, is when modern
American life really began.
And we can see now that that
is when the future that is
our present, really
clicked into focus.
The way we live now is
the way that we started
to live right then.
Consider all the extraordinary
things that had happened and
were happening suddenly,
and all at once.
During the 1840s technology had
jacked up the speed of daily
life in several quantum leaps.
Photography had just been
invented in 1839, and so you
had these unimaginably real
depictions of reality produced
by a little machine.
And the miracle was in
part a function of how
fast it could do it.
A picture as detailed as any
drawing that took hours or days
to make, but done in minutes.
And which, unlike drawings, I
think, relevant to the moment
we're experiencing now, it took
very little skill to produce.
Anybody could do it.
The work of representing the
world was democratized.
All of the mechanical image
making that followed that
invention-- motion pictures,
TV , video are essentially
refinements of this
original quantum shift.
And the telegraph.
Samuel Morse, who by the way
had the first camera in
America, and was an art
professor in New York before
he became famous for what we
know him for perfected the
telegraph, his version of the
telegraph in the early 1840s.
And by 1848, just a few
years later, the whole
country was wired.
Electrically connected from
Boston to New York to
Washington to Chicago and New
Orleans-- the settled country
at that point-- as fast as any
rollout of technologies that
some of you have developed
over the last few years.
Imagine that in the middle
of the 19th century.
And again, as with photography,
the shift was sudden
and profound.
For all of human history,
messages took days or weeks or
months on foot, by horse, on
ship to travel and then like
that, you had instantaneous
communication.
Travel was also suddenly
becoming incredibly faster.
Railroads, although they'd been
in existence for two decades
reached their exponential
hockey stick moment
in the 1840s.
And there was, as we have
seen in our lifetime, an
entrepreneurial mania in
something of a bubble.
There was though, a network
effect that kicked
in around 1848.
Four times as much railroad
track was laid in the year
1848 as had been laid
the previous year.
And there was not yet
consolidation as we've seen
in the last decade as our
technology businesses
have developed.
You can take the train in 1848
across New York state from
Albany to Buffalo, all the way,
but you had to change trains
six times and pay fares to
seven different lines.
The same with the telegraph.
There were lots and lots and
lots of companies and then over
the next decade they began
consolidating into a very few.
And by the way, those train
lines, just in New York state--
I don't know if you know this--
ran on schedules geared to four
different time keeping schemes.
Wherever the headquarters city
of each railroads was, was
the time that they followed.
Today we take for granted
synchronized one hour time
zones as a kind of natural
fact, but it was only after
trains and the telegraph
connected these different
cities and made time zones
necessary that America's time
zones were reduced from
more than 100 to the
4 that we know today.
And that took some time, which
suggests that society takes
time to adapt to
new technology.
In the 1840s people were
thrilled and frightened
by what these new
technologies were doing.
A stock phrase at the time
was about the annihilation
of time in the space.
A writer at the time predicted
quote, "that as distances are
thus annihilated, the surface
of our country would, as it
were, shrivel in size until it
became not much bigger than one
immense city." Transatlantic
steam ship service started in
the late 1840s, and then, in
1849 from the east coast
to the west coast.
Trade and business were being
transformed, internationalized,
globalized-- a word
that did not yet exist.
And in Heyday, my novel, one of
the main characters who's a
young Brit and has quit his
father's textile firms, Knowles
and Company, to immigrate to
America, and finally
to California.
Acquires an Indian blanket
there, a bayetta.
Unbeknownst to him, quote,
"this very bayetta had started
six years ago as Knowles and
company cloth, dyed with
Mexican cochineal, then
exported from Manchester to
Bilbao, and then from Spain to
Mexico where a Navajo indian
had unraveled the cloth and
rewove the threads
into this blanket.
The Navajo had traded
several blankets to a
Mexican for brandy.
And the Mexican, now mining up
in California, had in turn
traded this one to a Maidu, one
of the local Indians,
for a pinch of gold.
And then, into my
characters hands."
What China is today, this
rising industrial and trading
power, money mad and reckless,
and cutting corners, wheeling
and dealing, doing it on the
fat, on the cheap, and as fast
as possible, that was us then.
As the historian, the
University of Georgia
Historian, Stephen Mihm, calls
it, "it was adolescent
capitalism." We were the
adolescents in 1850
as China is today.
America in the 1840s, for
instance, was filled with
pirated copies of British
and European books.
And American factories were
producing counterfeit
medicines, adulterated foods--
chalk was put in milk, arsenic
in candy, plaster in sugar and
flower, coffee beans mixed in
with-- or rather dried peas
mixed in with the bags
of coffee beans to
make the weight.
It was also during the late
1840s this same extraordinary
moment that the archetypal
American migration, the wagons
of pioneers rolling into the
West began really, in earnest.
Which was maybe one of
our first great ad hoc
collaborative social networks.
What had been really an
insignificant trickle in the
early 40s, maybe dozens of
people a year, increased 20
times in the middle of the
decade, and then by another
order of magnitude in
the year 1849 alone.
Just as that western exodus
reached full speed, American
cities became real, bona fide,
world class metropolises
for the first time.
In 1800 New York had
had 60,000 people.
It was the largest city, but by
the middle of the century it
had grown to a half a
million in 50 years.
Between 1840 and 1850 the
sleepy, inconsequential little
town of San Francisco turned
into a big city almost
literally, overnight.
The largest place west
of Chicago and modern
California was born.
San Francisco and modern
California came to be, thanks
of course, to the discovery of
gold, and that discovery, that
accidental discovery was just
one of the amazing
transformative events that
occurred in one month at the
beginning of 1848.
January 24 gold discovered
150 miles northeast of here.
9 days later the treaty
was signed that ended the
U.S. war with Mexico.
Which by the way, was our first
elective war, our first foreign
invasion, our first
war for empire.
And thus, winning that war and
signing in that treaty-- in one
stroke the United States was
extended from the Texas
border to the Pacific.
At that same moment, the same
amazing month in London, a 29
year old German named Marx and
his 27 seven year old textile
manufacturer pal, Engels,
published a pamphlet that they
called, The Communist
Manifesto.
And a few days after that--
still this same month--
democratic revolutions broke
out first in Paris, successful
in three days; and then
across the continent.
By the time the year was done
in 50 places across Europe.
And the speed of that
revolutionary wave in 1848 was
hastened, in no small measure,
by the fact of the telegraph,
which could send the news of
the success in Paris on to
Milan and Vienna and so forth.
Talk about connect
and collaborate.
But technology and the Gold
Rush really comprised our
second American revolution, it
seems to me, not political
overthrow, clearly.
The Gold Rush was this
revolutionary ratification of
the most wild and fantastical
version of the American dream.
The desire for instant fortune
and for easy prosperity and
extreme liberty bordering on
and extending over into anarchy
in California for the first few
years after the Gold Rush.
For the first time, think of
this, ordinary people could
with hardly any capital, and
working in small collaborative
groups or alone could get rich.
That was unprecedented.
And in California, innovation
and best practices spread
with unprecedented speed.
It was, I think, the first
flash mob that ever
existed in the world.
That suddenly, when this news
of the discovery of gold
reached the east in the end of
August of 1848, by September
and October ships were leaving
Boston and Washington and
New York to come here.
And tens of thousands of people
came during the next year.
There were radically modern
new modes of thought as well
happening right at this moment.
Charles Darwin was quietly
constructing his theory of
evolution, in part, by
connecting and collaborating.
Collecting data and samples of
mollusks and other things from
correspondence all
over the world.
In American politics,
abolitionism, the idea that
slavery should simply be
abolished was just beginning to
move from being this freaky,
left wing outlier of a
position to the mainstream.
Feminism officially launched in
August of 1848 in upstate New
York at this convention
of reformers.
And talk about connecting and
collaborating, they decided on
the meeting on one day in
August, 10 days later the
meeting existed, and they
issued this shocking
declaration that men had
tyrannized women and that women
should have the vote.
Sudden technological progress,
plus suddenly large cities
equals, among other
things, modern media.
As players in the digital
revolution you all know about
Moore's Law-- computers
microprocessing power doubles
every 18 or 24 months.
There was a comparable dynamic
operating back then with steam
power and the new
rotary presses.
During the first half the 19th
century printing speed doubled
every several years, over
and over and over again.
Which meant many more and
many cheaper newspapers
with larger circulations.
The invention of the modern
magazine, Scientific American,
Harpers, the Atlantic Monthly
all started in this decade.
And in 1846 a half a dozen of
these new New York papers
created a little cartel to take
advantage of the new telegraph
to collect news and
call themselves the
Associated Press.
Nearly all the dailies
then were partisan.
The so-called sporting papers
provided these lurid, low down
gossipy coverage of celebrities
and sex and crime.
There were suddenly many,
many more cheap books
than ever before.
There had been only 100
new book titles published
in America in 1842.
In 1855 there was 1,000.
Modern marketing was
being invented.
The first national brands, the
first department store, the
first ad agencies, the first
presidential campaigns in which
marketers rebranded these upper
class candidates as rustic
men of the people who
lived in log cabins.
And 1848, of course, was the
beginning of a golden age
in American literature.
Melville, Poe, Whitman--
I could name more.
One of those great young
writers, Henry David Thoreau,
who was really laying the
groundwork for environmentalism
as we know it today was
altogether disgusted by this
new zeitgeist that he
encountered in the new
technology so he went off to
live in the woods alone.
And he wrote in Walden, which
he began in late 1840s, "I
delight to come to my bearings,
not walk in procession with
pomp and parade in a
conspicuous place.
Not to live in this restless,
nervous, bustling, trivial 19th
century, but stand or sit
thoughtfully while it goes by.
What are men celebrating?"
Well, it seems to me they were
celebrating, more or less, the
awesome arrival of the new, of
modernity, of connection and
collaboration of an
unprecedented kind.
And they were thrilled and
slightly terrified by
the shock of the new.
And they knew nothing better to
do then to gather together at
the Google Zeitgeist
Conferences of their
time and celebrate.
Here now, 160 years later in
this restless, bustling,
trivial, 21st century,
some of us still are.
Thank you very much.
