Empty Fields

There is a certain stillness that you only experience during heatwaves in otherwise cool climates. Spain might function in 30 degree heat, but in places like England, not only do the people shut down, so do all the animals. Squirrels stick to their dreys, birds remain in their roosts, even the few lizards and snakes hide from the sun. The strangest things are the insects. I've spent many afternoons batting away wasps and flies in Greek tavernas, but in England, they all go quiet. Heat turns the sky silent.

Dogs suffer most, of course, with the possible exception of their owners, by which I mean me. I'm up at the crack of dawn to walk my furry friend before the heat rises, and this plays havoc with my night-owl body clock. At least there's plenty of open space out here in the countryside.

If I walk for a few minutes, I'm away from the village and peering at what looks like rolling, green forest. An optical illusion. Most English agricultural fields are separated by thick hedgerows of shrubs and trees, relics from centuries past that now serve as habitat for all kinds of useful pest-eating wildlife. Combined with the undulating nature of the land around here, it's often hard to see the fields at all, and the hedgerows look like unbroken canopy. A few miles north, all change — the Fens are flat as a pancake and you can see everything.

But you won't see many people, if any. Before mechanization, fields teamed with workers. Almost any corner where three or more fields met had small dwellings on them, little hamlets where workers and their families lived (serfs, in an even older era). Occasionally, you come across vestiges of these communities, particularly in upland areas where stone is abundant. Tiny derelict homes that make you wonder how one person lived in them, let alone three generations at once. Homes for bats now.

The bats have better lives than the humans did. I'm not romanticizing. Labour was harsh, pay terrible, evictions common, medical care available from the nearest butcher. It's little wonder that some young men decided that holding muskets against French cannon was a better career path. Eventually, mechanization reduced the need for farmworkers, and people migrated to the cites to work in factories. This was much worse.

A basic tenet of capitalist progress is that every job technology makes irrelevant is replaced by another with better working conditions. Better yet, that new job has higher productivity, which grows the economy and makes the worker richer. Win-win. This has been largely true in the rich world, throughout the long boom since the end of World War Two. It hasn't been true in South Asian sweat shops, African mines, or coffee plantations. And it wasn't true in the first place to experience massive technological progress — England in the Imperial Era.

Both sides of the political divide forget that England's rise began with the exploitation of its people. Peasants were forced off the land and moved to cities, factory workers were forced into shocking conditions and filthy slums, being destitute was effectively criminalized. Friedrich Engels once noted that the life expectancy of the poor in Liverpool was nineteen years. The unchecked capitalism of empire turned people into expendable resources. And when technology reduced the value of labour, that labour had to shrink itself into a smaller slice of the economy. Such was the First Industrial Revolution. We're now in the Fourth.

But are we still in the long boom? Is the rich world still special? Will my son know an England where technology creates wealth and opportunity for everyone, even if it temporarily creates disruption? Would moving to America, Germany, or Switzerland help? I don't know. But every dollar in tech is gambling on us living at an inflection point. AI will either revolutionize everything, or its failure will crash the markets. One of those is worse, which one depends on how you answer my questions.