As a consequence, Orwell also underestimated how intrusive Western states and companies could become. This was in part because his views on the limitations of capitalism were formed by what he observed in mid-20th century Britain—that is, a nation caught in stagnating, late Industrial Age capitalism. The highest goal of that aging structure was efficiency, which meant that companies sought profits by having managers squeeze a little more money out of existing systems and workers. Hence he thought that industry could only succeed through ever-greater repression of labor. “Unless there is some unpredictable change in human nature,” he concluded, “liberty and efficiency must pull in opposite directions.”
Orwell could not see that with the dawn of the Information Age several decades later, efficiency would become far less economically significant than innovation and adaptiveness. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and myriad other late-twentieth-century companies did not offer faster typewriters. They created entirely new products, such as handheld computers and applications for them. They were hardly efficient in doing so, because innovation is necessarily a wasteful process, producing many more failures than successes. For example, the extraordinary ups and downs in the career of Apple’s Steve Jobs of Apple were beyond anything Orwell witnessed in his own country. Nor were these new companies built on repressing their employees: They could compete only by lavishing money, stock options and other benefits on workers capable of imagining and developing attractive new products.
But Orwell likely would have been fascinated about the next step these innovative new corporations took. Nowadays they produce goods that intrude far deeper into private life than ever was done by the titans of 20th century industry.
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