The second Gilded Age: Why the 2020s feel like the 1890s
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Issue #225: an ode to details + the Three-Round Rule of Editing
Let’s rewind to 1876. On Valentine’s Day that year, a quirky inventor in Boston submitted a patent for what would become the phone. He wasn’t the only one—Elisha Gray submitted a similar patent the same day, and contested Bell’s. Patents in the late 1800s grew nearly 400% (and so did patent litigation).
That was the beginning of the Gilded Age (roughly 1870 to 1900 in the U.S.), a period of explosive economic, cultural, and technological change in nearly every dimension of life. New tools changed how we connect, communicate, and make art: the telephone, phonograph, trains, cars, the Kodak camera. The creators of these tools (or those who built infrastructure to help them scale) lived in Gothic villas with armies of staff that insulated them from the world. The top 4,000 families in the U.S. were as rich as everyone else combined.
Today, instead of the telephone and phonograph, we have lightning-fast user-generated video and AI-enhanced art. Instead of The Breakers, industry titans live in hyperminimalist glass-and-concrete mansions in northern California. Global income inequality is even more pronounced than it was 150 years ago. In the U.S., income inequality is higher than in any of the G7 nations. The divide between the <1% and everyone else is getting wider.
Mark Twain, who coined the term “Gilded Age” in an 1870s satirical novel, chose the word “gilded” instead of “gold” to signify that the sheen was only skin deep, like body paint instead of lasting wealth. Underneath the surface of progress and glamour, a lot of people were unhappy and angry. Anarchists expressed their rage by throwing bombs and assassinating industrialists. Railroad workers went on strike, and so did farmers.
The parallels between then and now, once you’re aware of them, are hard to unsee: lookalike contests (a form of cheap entertainment that imitates/idolizes people in power) in place of small-town Vaudeville impersonators; the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson and its revolution-tinged fallout, an echo of the attempted assassination of anti-union steel magnate Henry Clay Frick by a labor activist; the rise of labor unions — which some credit as helping to end the first Gilded Age.
I’m borrowing some of this argument from sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Is this what it feels like to live through the second Gilded Age?
— Harris Sockel
⚡ 1 story, 1 sentence
- ChatGPT is known to evade questions about names appearing on U.S. terrorism watch lists. (Cassie Kozyrkov)
- The idea that “55% of communication is nonverbal” took off 20 years ago, but it’s a misinterpretation of experiment results — and as it turns out, the importance of nonverbal communication changes based on context. (Elaine Hilides)
- I love this ode to minuscule, make-or-break details by software engineer John Salvatier: “The more difficult your mission, the more details there will be that are critical to understand for success.”
🧠Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Everything you write deserves three rounds of edits. The first round is for you, second round is for your fans, and third round is for your haters. (Neil Strauss via Tony Stubblebine)
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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