The Inglorious Years: The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society.

• Author: Medlin, Eric

Cohen, Daniel. The Inglorious Years: The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 192 pages. Hardcover, $24.95.

The twenty-first century has felt to many like an unending series of crises. Amid war, pandemics, and economic collapse, there is also the general sense that the world of the twentieth century has disappeared completely. Several assumptions about how economic and social relations should be conducted have been abandoned. The information revolution has taken its place with industry and agriculture as a key development in human history, and we are just starting to fully understand its effects.

Daniel Cohen's newest book, The Inglorious Years: The Collapse of the Industrial Order and the Rise of Digital Society, endeavors to explain those effects of technological and social change on our seemingly chaotic world. Cohen, a longtime professor at the Paris School of Economics and writer of over a dozen books, uses the movements of 1968 as an inflection point. In that year, young people throughout the world rose up in rebellion against the strictures of industrial society. Cohen argues, however, that this rebellion masked a deeper and more insidious change in society. It was not the students that changed the world, but rather technological and social developments.

The West became a service economy, one with endemic low wages and an automatic limit on its growth. Computers and the internet only changed the contours of this service economy, creating new jobs while destroying old ones and making people productive in new ways. Cohen argues that many of the changes of the past two decades can be explained by this new economy: "humans are the new product, that are to be educated, connected, repaired, entertained. The digital world 'industrializes' the service economy, creating a hybrid being of flesh and algorithms" (p. 168).

Cohen's book is at its strongest when it is in his wheelhouse. His exploration of growth in an industrial versus a postindustrial world is particularly insightful. Cohen does a masterful job of explaining the pitfalls of the service economy and how recent technological developments may end up changing that economy forever. According to Cohen, "digital society...