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None of this is to say anyone should feel sorry for financiers—even junior ones—but it’s worth understanding what is really at the end of the road for Millennials who do everything right. The best the job market has to offer is a slice of the profits from driving down labor costs. One of Roose’s subjects found himself working on a deal he believed to be about rehabbing a firm, only to discover that his bosses were more interested in firing workers and auctioning equipment before selling the now “more efficient” company for a quick $50 million profit. Although they’re the natural outcomes of the wage relation, work intensification and downsizing don’t just happen by themselves. The profits have to be made, and the best of the best Millennials end up doing the analytical drudge work that makes superefficient production possible, then crying to reporters over their beers. It hardly seems worth it.
For every Chief Keef or Luger, there are a hundred, a thousand kids doing similar work without hitting it big. The breakdown of what economists call “barriers to entry”—in this case, the costs of recording, editing, distributing, and promoting—means more people can make and publish more content. This is good for anyone who wants access to creative work unmediated by bigwigs in suits, but it’s a boon for those suits too. Free distribution platforms level the distinctions between professional and amateur and allow the latter to pitch themselves to fans and labels. Online platforms don’t compensate everyone who uploads their work, but that doesn’t mean the owners can’t profit. Estimates put YouTube’s value at $70 billion. Even though this new production/distribution arrangement has shrunk the recording industry and allows consumers to access nearly anything they want on demand for free, it still isn’t bad for corporations. It’s just good for different corporations.
Networking platforms are an important part of both contemporary American profit-seeking and child development; it’s like investors built water wheels on the stream of youth sociality. Through social networking interaction, kids learn the practice of what political theorist Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism”: how to navigate the “intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance.”38 Dean writes that this education—and even attempts to resist it from the inside—ultimately serves to “enrich the few as it placates and diverts the many.”39 For all the talk about the crowd and the grassroots and the Internet age of access, for all the potentials of open source and the garage-to-mansion Internet success stories, increased inequality and exploitation have come hand in hand with these technological developments. Not only are many of young Americans’ interactions filtered through algorithms engineered to maximize profits, the younger “digital native” Millennials have never known anything different. They have always been online, and their social world has always been actively mediated by corporations.
It’s on a more fundamental level that the whole enterprise of ethics through consumerism is a waste of time. The market is not a magic desire-fulfilling machine we can reprogram to green the earth and level inequality. It is, rather, a vast system of exploitation in which workers are compelled to labor for their subsistence, and owners reap the profits. The market offers a variety of goods and experiences that seems infinite, but it’s actually very limited. There are many different flavors of Pop-Tarts, but none of them opens a portal to a world where you don’t have to trade half your waking life to get enough to eat.
[...] I have no interest in writing a suburban California survival memoir, either, and I write about myself like a bad bowler anyway, always headed straight for the gutters of historical context rather than for the pins of personal revelation.
cute
“The children of California shall be our children,” Leland Stanford told his wife, Jane, when they decided to build Palo Alto. It’s a grandiose claim, but as applied to me it’s not as inaccurate as I’d prefer. History doesn’t stay put: It works itself under your skin in fragments like shrapnel; it steals into your bloodstream like an infection. I’m a product of my environment, and I’m shot through with its symptoms. If that experience is to be useful rather than obfuscating, then it’s as a place to start, a set of intersections between biography and history.
The rush called into being a new creature: the California engineer, master of water, stone, and labor. These frontier scientists were a superior, more evolved form of the panner, still entrepreneurial (and often motivated by an equity share in the project rather than a wage) but also dependable and often college-educated. California exported these men to English-speaking colonies, from the Hawaiian Islands to British-occupied India and Palestine to South Africa and Australia to foreign-owned mines in South America and East Asia. There they replicated their Golden State experience, turning the water against the land and subordinating the nonwhite laboring populations. California’s cowboy scientists helped transform the colonies for commodity agriculture and the societies for white capitalist rule, increasing the profitability and therefore the plausibility of colonial projects. As Jessica Teisch observes in her book Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise, the “California model” was so adaptable because it reformatted the relationships between capital, labor, and the environment according to a generic formula: Anglos rule; all natives are Indians; all land and water is just gold waiting to happen. Geopolitics took on the character of the gold rush, as European colonial powers engaged in competitive scrambles for colonial territory in sub-Saharan Africa and China.
When the Quicksilver Mining Company took over at New Almaden, workers quickly realized they faced a new, worse order. The American owners took a holistic orientation toward the workers, extending the mine’s control over their lives. Quicksilver instituted a company store, monopolizing commerce in “Spanishtown” and jacking up prices for new, inferior goods. The owners claimed title to everything on company land, including the homes workers built for themselves and even the firewood they were accustomed to harvesting for use and sale. Quicksilver banned independent peddlers, merchants, and water carriers, as well as Mexican-run taverns and restaurants. In their place, a company saloon served expensive rotgut. The new mine owners changed the compensation metric to one they controlled and started paying monthly instead of biweekly like the Brits had. Real wages fell, and workers ended up in perpetual debt, borrowing to pay for essentials such as food and funerals. By 1865, New Almaden’s Mexican laborers had had enough of U.S. capitalism, and at least 600 of them (along with some white coworkers) halted production and issued a set of reform demands. The Quicksilver company petitioned the genocidal state militia, which in turn petitioned the Northern California regiment of the Union Army, which, having finished defeating slavery, came to San Jose to intimidate the state’s largest Mexican-American community back into the mine. What had been a relative haven for the state’s Spanish-speaking population during the war and gold rush years became a trap. As much as anywhere this was the birthplace of the Mexican proletariat, forged in contrast and service to the new white owners of California.
now San Jose
At New Almaden we can see the steps in the proletarianization dance: the alienation of indigenous and peasant populations from the land, the formal establishment of white racial rule, scientific management continually optimizing for maximum profits, looming soldiers. It all adds up to a laboring class with no legal way to reproduce their lives except to sell themselves hour by hour to an employer, on the employer’s terms.ii Anglo-American settlers found themselves correspondingly enfranchised, whether squatting on land until the government recognized their claims or getting grants legitimately by joining a militia gang and murdering Indians on the state’s behalf. California’s agriculture was ranch-based, with amber waves of grain and large herds of cattle, so there was no significant yeoman tradition. Instead, California smallholders saw their titles as speculative investments that they could sell or rent to planters and other capitalists, less territory than an increasingly valuable entry in the expanding U.S. property register. After the Homestead Act, for example, mill owners encouraged their employees to register timber claims and then lease them to the company. That didn’t always work out so great for the small speculators, as I’ll explain in the following chapter, but they weren’t wrong about the land’s potential value. It soon came to outshine even the gold.
After paying out to the easterners and Europeans who helped finance the rush of ’49, the relatively small California capitalists were looking for new opportunities. They found a big one in Nevada with the Comstock Lode’s first hit, in 1859, an exploding sequence of silver bonanzas to end all silver bonanzas that helped codify the membership of the West Coast aristocracy and its important institutions. What few cattle operations were left over from the Mexican period failed frequently in the 1860s in the face of natural disasters and falling prices, which aided the squatters and their U.S. government in efforts to transfer land claims to the Anglos. Wheat boomed, along with oats to power the horses and other draft animals who dragged the farm equipment. Santa Clara Valley farmers could rely on natural aquifers, which allowed them to skip the costly irrigation systems that much of the rest of the state required. Lucky for California’s remaining planters, there was still some money on the West Coast—after all, the state’s big industry was money mining. The Bank of California opened in 1864 as the nation’s first commercial bank, successfully investing deposits in Comstock silver claims and reinvesting in California agriculture. The state now had a new capitalist class to mirror its new working class, and they doubled down on commodity crops, plowing mining money into monoculture (mostly grains, but also wine grapes) and triggering boom-and-bust cycles. By the end of the 1860s, California agriculture topped gold in terms of both employment and output value. In only 20 years the gold rush had started, finished, and transitioned the state to a new economic foundation.