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2018 James McCormick Mitchell Lecture The First Amendment in the Second Gilded Age
Balkin, Jack M.
Balkin, Jack M.
Abstract
We are now well into America's Second Gilded Age. The First Gilded Age was the era of industrial capitalism that began in the 1870s and 1880s and continued through the first years of the twentieth century, leading to the Progressive Era.2 It produced huge fortunes, political corruption, and vast inequalities of wealth, so much so that people became concerned that they would endanger
American democracy.
The Second Gilded Age begins, more or less, with the beginning of the digital revolution in the 1980s, but it really takes off in the early years of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, and it continues to the present day. It is characterized by the rise of social media and the development and implementation of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and robotics. For this reason I call our present era the Algorithmic Society.
If the First Gilded Age is the age of industrial capitalism, the Second Gilded Age is the age of digital or informational capitalism. It too has produced great fortunes and led to concerns that increasing concentrations of wealth and economic inequality are endangering American democracy. Like the First Gilded Age, it is also a time of deep political corruption and despair about the future of American democracy. It has not yet given way to a second Progressive Era, but every day I see signs that this is where
we are headed.