On the unbearable happiness of a future we can believe in: Response to Thomas Friedman

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to op-ed piece by Times writer Thomas Friedman, “The Next America,” December 5, 2018:

Friedman has devoted himself to preaching the gospel of novelties in our lifestyles consequent upon technology and capitalism as a twinned machine of innovation, improvement, and (what many cheerleaders follow Joseph Schumpeter in calling) "creative destruction." All we really need to do is, along with our governments and their more or less enlightened leaders, is to get with the program of technological advancement. It cannot fail to be the cure for all of society's ills.  

Is that really true (it is not a new idea), or is something being left out of this picture? Today's neoliberal capitalism does offer advantages for most of us in our role of consumers. But what about the roles of worker and debtor? These are, by all accounts, less happy today.  

Inequality has grown, and the police state has brought new and improved forms of oppression. The wealthy are getting wealthier and expanding their power--that of a few hundred individuals, in fact--over the world. Authoritarian states have been empowered, not least in this country. Where, also, more of the non-rich live in squalor. Democracy, in any meaningful sense, is an idea whose time it has come to remember, as it is now little more than that.  

Friedman preaches a funny utopianism that is not about social life directly, but about technology and its power to remake society.  

If there were a company selling the American dream as a kind of religion, in which all apparent social problems are really those of individual faith and will, I would nominate Friedman for its pulpit.