History Is Not a Straight Line

In The You On AI Field Guide

Applied to AI, this historical awareness produces a sobriety neither triumphalists nor catastrophists possess. The triumphalist narrative is a progress narrative: AI is the next step in a linear ascent from abacus to calculator to computer to language model, each step producing more capability, more democratization, more flourishing. The catastrophist narrative is a decline narrative: AI is the next step in a linear descent from authentic human culture to machine-mediated simulacrum, each step eroding depth, autonomy, meaning. Both narratives are linear, both assume direction is set, and both are wrong—not because evidence supports a third direction but because evidence supports no direction at all. The outcome is genuinely undetermined, shaped by choices not yet made.

Solnit illustrates with the labor movement's trajectory after industrialization. The power loom arrived, wages collapsed, children entered mills, working conditions deteriorated. If a historian in 1830 had drawn a line through those decades, it would have pointed toward permanent catastrophe—a disposable labor underclass serving an ownership class that had captured all productivity gains. That is not what happened. What happened was decades of organizing, striking, legislating, institution-building that reversed the trajectory so thoroughly that by mid-twentieth century, the factory worker in a developed economy had protections and security unimaginable to the 1812 Luddite. The reversal was not automatic, not the natural consequence of technological maturity, but the product of sustained political struggle by people who refused to accept that the initial trajectory was permanent.

The AI transition is in its early decades. The initial trajectory—work intensification, gain concentration, the flight of senior engineers to the woods—points in an alarming direction. If a historian drew a line through these data points, the line would point toward extraction and precarity. Solnit's historical framework says: the line is not the future, the line is the present's momentum, and momentum can be redirected by institutional effort. The effort is not guaranteed to succeed—the labor movement could have failed, nearly did fail multiple times. But the possibility of redirection is enough to demand the attempt, and the attempt is what separates the people who make history from the people who watch it happen.

Origin

Solnit's non-linear view of history emerges from her reading of social movements, indigenous histories, feminist historiography, and the Annales School's attention to the longue durée. Her work consistently highlights the reversals: the post-Reconstruction suppression of Black voting rights after emancipation, the 1950s reassertion of gender norms after women's wartime economic participation, the neoliberal rollback of social democratic gains. Each case demonstrates that historical gains are not automatically preserved, that each generation must fight to maintain what previous generations won, and that the belief in inevitable progress is the luxury of people insulated from the reversals.

The framework also draws on disaster research's finding that catastrophe does not produce linear deterioration but oscillation—periods of mutual aid followed by institutional reassertion, moments of possibility followed by their closure. The pattern is not a line but a rhythm, and the rhythm's shape depends on who participates during the windows of openness.

Key Ideas

Gains Can Be Reversed. The labor protections won in the mid-twentieth century have been eroded by decades of neoliberal policy. The internet's early promise of democratized communication has been captured by platform monopolies. Every gain is contingent, requiring continuous political effort to maintain.

Technologies Are Neutral to Outcomes. The printing press, radio, internet, AI—each is compatible with multiple political economies, from democratic to authoritarian. The technology does not determine the outcome; the institutional arrangements surrounding it do, and those arrangements are products of political choices.

Progress Narrative Produces Passivity. If history is marching toward justice, there is no need to organize, fight, build institutions—the good outcome is guaranteed. The narrative is emotionally comforting and politically disarming, which is why it is popular among those who benefit from the status quo.

Initial Trajectory Is Not Fate. The first decades of any technological transition reveal an initial trajectory shaped by the existing distribution of power. That trajectory can be redirected through institutional effort—labor laws redirecting industrialization's gains, civil rights legislation redirecting post-slavery trajectories, environmental regulation redirecting pollution patterns. Redirection is possible but not automatic.

The Undetermined Decade. The 2020s are to AI what the 1810s-1830s were to industrialization—the period when the initial trajectory is visible but not yet locked in, when institutional interventions can still redirect the flow. The question is whether enough people who understand the stakes will participate in the redirection before the trajectory hardens into institutional permanence.