80 Books & arts The EconomistFebruary 22nd 2020
2 doesn’t?” writes Joanne McNeil in “Lurk-
ing”, a memoir of using, rather than mak-
ing, the internet. She is almost apologetic
about this judgment, noting that her lapse
from reasoned criticism to diatribe is re-
served for this single platform, a “digital
cesspool” that is “one of the biggest mis-
takes in modern history”. The passage
comes after more than 200 pages of remi-
niscences about the internet of yore—a
place where people could choose to be
“private or public, anonymous or named,
factual or make-believe”. Ms McNeil covers
niche New York chat rooms; the web’s early
suburbs, known as GeoCities; and the
proto-social networks of Friendster and
Myspace, guiding readers, Virgil-like, to
the Zuckerberg inferno.Mon semblable, mon frère
What happened? How did the web become
“a hell that is fun, ruled by idiots and
thieves”? The key is the smartphone, which
brought the internet into everyday life.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in
2007, “the internet” and “real life” were still
separate domains; people had to “get on-
line” to move from one to the other. That
was a disincentive, and anyway many had
better ways to spend spare time than sit in
front of a screen. A decade later, smart-
phones in hands, the distinction had evap-
orated. Suddenly anyone could be online—
and they were, everywhere and all the time.
The people behind the internet contin-
ued to believe that most users were ver-
sions of themselves, “white, male, age 25 to
34, college-educated”. In reality the inter-
net is more diverse, says Ms McNeil, taking
in women and users of other ages, lgbt
folk, ethnic minorities and all combina-
tions thereof. True—but her idea of diver-
sity is itself a narrow one. In fact, in the per-
iod she chronicles, the average internet
user became poorer, older, less white and
less likely to speak English. Seen through
this lens, bemoaning the decline of “the in-
ternet” is a bit like complaining that flying
has lost its glamour, or that a favourite bar
has been overrun by strangers. Nobody
goes there any more—it’s too crowded, as
Yogi Berra once quipped.
America developed the internet, power-
ful American companies still run big
swathes of it, and jobsworth American
workers like Ms Wiener merrily push pix-
els around inside those behemoths. Yet
just 6% of the world’s internet users are
American. A vanishingly small proportion
ever hung out in the aolchat rooms or
LiveJournal blogs of Ms McNeil’s lost nir-
vana. And the cultural influence of those
early American users is steadily waning.
Perhaps the starkest example of this is
the rise of TikTok, an app that lets people
create and share short, goofy videos. It is
owned by ByteDance, a giant Chinese start-
up; last year, several American senatorsspeculated that it might pose a national-se-
curity risk. TikTok denied allegations that
its moderators took account of Chinese
sensitivities, insisting it had never been
asked to remove content by China’s gov-
ernment (and would not comply if it were).
TikTok is unusual. When your home
market is small or poor (as in much of the
world), or hived off into a separate silo (like
China’s), it is hard to build global firms. Allthe same, even if the business of the inter-
net remains anchored in California, its cul-
ture—the movies and music, flirtations
and conversations—is expanding all the
time, confounding the Silicon Valley types
who thought they owned it. There is no
longer such a thing as “the internet”, but
many internets, belonging to many people,
distinct but overlapping. It is not dying, as
Ms McNeil fears, just respawning. 7H
e was bornin a Bavarian village in
1829, fleeing anti-Semitism with his
family at 17. From New York he caught a
steamer to California, a newly minted
American citizen, with a view to expand-
ing the family’s dry-goods business. But
these were the heady days of the Gold
Rush, and the young man dreamed of
making it big. His initiative paid off so
well that you may be wearing his in-
vention now: his name was Levi Strauss.
Technically, the entrepreneur who
went by “Uncle Levi” didn’t invent the
copper rivets on denim “waist overalls”
that became his firm’s stock-in-trade.
The idea came from a tailor in Nevada
who bought cloth from Strauss to make
work clothes for labourers. In 1872 Jacob
Davis persuaded him to jointly file for a
patent for an “improvement in fastening
pocket openings”, and to shift from
selling fabric to finished trousers. The
rest is a history of marketing genius—
documented in the largest-ever public
display of artefacts from the Levi Strauss
& Co. archive.
“Levi Strauss: A History of American
Style” at the Contemporary Jewish Muse-
um in San Francisco deftly weaves to-
gether corporate, cultural and social
trends to tell the story of one of the coun-
try’s most famous exports. When Strauss
died in 1902 he was eulogised as one of
San Francisco’s foremost philanthropistsand a pillar of the Jewish community.
Nobody could have anticipated that the
firm he bequeathed to four nephews
would define America’s style and become
a global juggernaut. It did that by cannily
roping its product to two mythic Ameri-
can figures: the cowboy and the rebel.
Levi’s 501 jeans were tough. The oldest
pair on display dates to 1890; another was
used to tow a car. Marketed originally to
farmers, mechanics and miners, they
became the garb of choice for Western
horsemen. It wasn’t long before John
Wayne and Clark Gable were wearing
them into the sunset, followed by glam-
orous hoodlums played by Marlon
Brando and James Dean.
The brand’s advertising rode the
countercultural wave, capitalising on its
status as a badge of coolness and free-
dom. Marilyn Monroe wore Levi’s; Andy
Warhol immortalised them. Even Albert
Einstein was spotted in a Levi’s bomber
jacket. Jeans that graced the haunches of
the famous—including Patti Smith,
Madonna and Beyoncé—fill the gallery
and span the decades.
At any given moment a big chunk of
humanity is wearing blue jeans, the
show’s curators observe. Levi’s have been
coveted behind the Iron Curtain and
fetishised in Japan; they have been
ripped, embroidered and covered in ink.
Not too shabby for a kid from Bavaria.Rhapsody in blue
Jean historySAN FRANCISCO
How American denim conquered the world