Fordlandia: showing us how incremental the internet age really is

I picked up Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (affiliate link) at the local library both because it was listed as a top ten business book of 2009 on some list somewhere and because the premise seemed so bizarre: Henry Ford once owned a chunk of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of Delaware and attempted to build a rubber plantation there!

As it turned out, the plantation story was fascinating enough on its own, but I was blown away even further by what was basically the background material for the story, which talked about the sheer impact that Ford had on the way things worked in the beginning of the 20th century.

The industrial revolution on its own was pretty huge, but most of what I knew about it was from the brief talk Clay Shirky gave about the use of gin as a universal coping mechanism to handle the sudden influx of free time that city workers found themselves with.

Ford not only brought a new means of production to the world, but he seemed to recognize that workers were as much a part of the factory as the thousands of tools he’d built to fashion the cars, and he took extraordinary steps to make sure the workers were in, well, good working order as well.

This not only included higher than usual wages ($5 a day!) but he also had a whole department that visited employees and their families in their homes to make sure they were spending their money wisely and learning basic life skills like keeping flies off the food.

There’s an incredibly fine line between fascism and Ford’s style of capitalism, but some of his experiments and theories were unbelievably audacious. Forget factories; he’d build whole towns in the most extreme cases of vertically integrated manufacturing I’ve heard of to date. For example, cars had wooden floors, so Ford harvested and milled lumber. Cars were metal? Ford had foundries. Oh, and this was all done in the same factory at River Rouge.

I can’t express the degree of change that Ford tried to and in many cases managed to implement on society that go far beyond the assembly line – not due to length or time restrictions, but simply because I don’t understand them fully and the book’s been retured – but I’m left with this impression:

For all the hype and talk about the degree that the internet has changed modern society over the past 15 years, it’s a mild incremental process compared to the upheaval that must have happened between, say, 1879 and 1929, a span which would encompass Edison’s light bulb, Ford’s work, and, to a lesser extent, the airplane (I chose that 50 year span to go against the, oh, now 63 years that have passed since the transistor was invented in 1947.)

For example, there’s a clip at the 52:34 mark of the Code Rush documentary (available here) where someone (analyst David Readerman?) stands at a town’s main intersection and points to the banks and stores and claims they might be all gone in 2 years, replaced by the internet: “I don’t know why [The Gap]’s even renovating this store. Why aren’t they investing the money in their website?” That didn’t happen, but if the change was “Ford big” it might’ve.

Maybe that change is still coming, awaiting only one more big (or even small) thing to bring the stars into alignment, but it’s left me wondering:

What Big Change could result in a remoulding of the world on the level that happened not even a hundred years ago? And if it’s coming from the tech community, are those Two Guys in a Garage that we kept hearing about working on the prototype as I write this?