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As work has eroded and become more episodic, not only does the creative class share the economic conditions of the working class, that group also now shares the working-class’s sense of alienation from American politics and antagonism toward the economic elite who have gained so much ground over the last decade. You need to look no further than the growth of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. On the streets of New York and in cities around the country, you see highly educated young adults joining with displaced working- and middle-class people who believe the American Dream has become nightmare. They have been joined by public and private union members including 300 airline pilots marching in full dress uniform. All are rallying around their shared position as part of the 99% of Americans – a loose coalition much larger and more diverse than any single class.
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There are two senses of "inevitable" when used with technology. In the first case, an invention merely has to exist once. In that sense, every technology is inevitable because sooner or later some mad tinkerer will cobble together almost anything that can be cobbled together. Jetpacks, underwater homes, glow-in-the-dark cats, forgetting pills — in the goodness of time every invention will inevitably be conjured up as a prototype or demo. And since simultaneous invention is the rule not the exception, any invention that can be invented will be invented more than once. But few will be widely adopted. Most won't work very well. Or more commonly they will work but be unwanted. So in this trivial sense, all technology is inevitable. Rewind the tape of time and it will be re-invented.
The second more substantial sense of "inevitable" demands a level of common acceptance and viability. A technology's use must come to dominate the technium or at least its corner of the technosphere. But more than ubiquity, the inevitable must contain a large-scale momentum, and proceed on its own determination beyond the free choices of several billion humans. It can't be diverted by mere social whims.
But the first part of the book, which focuses on high achievement (Bill Gates, Bill Joy, The Beatles, etc) is more compelling and unified than the second part. The reason I thought that the first couple of chapters would be useful in my course is this. That our success or otherwise is largely contingent on factors over which we have no control and therefore deserve no merit is a familiar premise in a great deal of political philosophy, and its truth is so obvious to me that I find it hard to do more than say it to students. What Gladwell does is a brilliant job (he's a story-teller, not a thinker) of elaborating the various environmental conditions that facilitate (or inhibit) the success of very talented and hardworking people. Using actual stories about actual people that the students have heard of (Gates, if not the Beatles) really helps (or so I conjecture) in getting the students to understand the point which I find obvious and they often find completely counter-intuitive.
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