Technology, Culture, and Power—What Connects Them All
Journalist Virginia Postrel on Spotting Trends, AI, Her Simple Advice for Young Writers, More
Virginia Postrel is an award-winning journalist, author, and speaker focused on the convergence of culture, technology, and economics. She began her writing career in the 1980s as a reporter for Inc. magazine and The Wall Street Journal. In 1989 she became editor in chief of Reason, a position she held for over a decade—and where I first encountered her work.
Postrel has been a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Forbes, and Forbes ASAP. Today she’s a contributing editor for Works in Progress and also produces a fascinating newsletter here at Substack.
She’s written several critically acclaimed books that defy easy categorization and reward thoughtful reading: The Future and Its Enemies, The Substance of Style, The Power of Glamour, and most recently The Fabric of Civilization.
The current president of the Southern California Handweavers’ Guild, Postrel has also been a guest scholar at the University of Copenhagen‘s Centre for Textile Research and a visiting fellow at Chapman University’s Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy. She serves on the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
I asked her about how she, as a writer, determines her subjects; trends she’s following; and the role of dynamism in our world.
You have a knack for seeing what the rest of us overlook, themes hidden in plain sight. I take The Future and Its Enemies as what we miss about economic growth, The Substance of Style as what we miss about design, and The Power of Glamour as what we miss about aesthetics. How do you know you’re onto a theme worth exploring? What gets your spidey sense tingling?
When I keep coming back to a subject or idea in different contexts, that’s a sign. Certainly that happened with glamour, which is a topic I never considered until I was asked to write a catalog essay by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In other cases, I notice a trend others seem to be missing. It’s not a topic for me, but someone should write a book exploring the ramifications of the large numbers of Asian and Asian-American evangelical Christians at elite universities, for instance.
I like to write about topics that are important but overlooked and subjects that allow me to make connections across disciplines. The older I get, the more my writing is driven by curiosity and the desire to learn, rather than by conviction and the desire to persuade. I want to get excited about a subject and share that excitement with others.
“The older I get, the more my writing is driven by curiosity and the desire to learn, rather than by conviction and the desire to persuade.”
—Virginia Postrel
Can you elaborate on that by focusing on The Fabric of Civilization? How did that come about?
Over a period of 10 or 15 years, I heard talks, read articles, or saw museum exhibits that connected textiles with technology and economic history in ways I found remarkable. I heard a historian give a talk on her dissertation, which was about France’s calico prohibition, for example. I learned that most of the Linear B tablets found at Knossos on Crete were about wool production. I heard jaw-dropping numbers on the tons of brazil wood that Spain and Portugal exported from the New World to be used as a cheap red dye.
There seemed to be an endless supply of choice factual nuggets along with sweeping themes about technology, commerce, and social evolution.
I could tell that textiles were an incredibly rich subject for exploration and that there was ample scholarship that nonspecialists were completely unfamiliar with. Textiles certainly qualify as “important but overlooked.” One of the hardest aspects of coming up with a new book topic is that The Fabric of Civilization was so fascinating and fun to work on. It will be hard to equal.
I’ve read you saying that The Power of Glamour is your most underrated book. Written before the rise of the social media influencer, it would seem to be astoundingly prescient. Tell us how that book connects with life today, more than a decade on.
The Power of Glamour isn’t what it appears. It’s a beautiful object full of four-color pictures but also an intellectual treatise on visual rhetoric, not a book about fashion. My usual nerdy readers didn’t pick it up while the fashionistas found it too difficult. (The Power of Glamour and The Fabric of Civilization both got mixed reviews in The New York Times Book Review. The complaints boiled down to “it hurt my brain.” Does this happen to male authors?)
Before The Power of Glamour came out, when I would give talks on the subject or have conversations about what I was working on, a common reaction would be something to the effect of “How can there be glamour when today’s celebrities are known for sex tapes?” Paris Hilton was a touchstone example of too much information, as were the Kardashians. My response was that there are plenty of celebrities, such as Cate Blanchett, who do guard their privacy. Even Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, who were the paparazzi’s favorite couple at the time, were mostly a mystery.
By the time the book came out in the fall of 2013, however, a better answer was emerging. Everyone, or so it seemed, was creating a glamorous version of their lives on social media, especially Instagram. “Pics or it didn’t happen,” has become a mantra—but the photos are highly selective. People create a photographic record of an idealized life that invites projection and longing. Influencers are those who’ve successfully monetized that glamour. But it’s a mass phenomenon.
Your writing typically combines economics, aesthetics, social history, and cultural criticism across a wide range of subjects. Is there a common interest that drives you in these different directions? What is the through line that holds your work together?
I’m interested in the meaning of life in a liberal, commercial culture—past, present, and future. I explore many of the themes that interested Adam Smith and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. But I’m doing so as a 21st-century American woman employing journalistic techniques. I am not a philosopher and I have a strong empirical inclination—there are lots of specific examples and illustrative stories in my work.
I’m often addressing questions that have become salient during my lifetime. Yet I’m also engaged with what human beings share across time and place. What makes history so fascinating is how everything is different, yet everything is the same. You see that in The Fabric of Civilization.
“What makes history so fascinating is how everything is different, yet everything is the same.”
—Virginia Postrel
What current trend or phenomenon do you find most intriguing or significant at the moment, and why?
I’m interested in the potential of synthetic biology. A lot of money will be lost before it pans out, but I think it will inevitably be a big deal. I’ve written about how it blurs the usual distinction between nature and artifice and challenges the Romantic notion that equates natural with ethical. I also experienced a culture-war blowback when I wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed about cultivated meat. It took me by surprise because, much as I should know better, I still think of WSJ op-ed page readers as Reaganites who value entrepreneurial innovation and trust markets to sort things out.
I’m also interested in what happens when people’s consumer choices increasingly reflect polarized political identities. I used to think it was great that people could express meaning and identity through buying choices, and that’s still true to some degree. But I think we’ll go crazy if we imbue too many purchases with significant meaning.
I’m interested in ideas of purity and pollution, which are found in every culture yet vary enormously. One of my early Substack posts was a 2022 essay called “Purity, Sorcery, and Cancel Culture,” applying some of anthropologist Mary Douglas’s ideas to recent controversies.
“I used to think it was great that people could express meaning and identity through buying choices, and that’s still true to some degree. But I think we’ll go crazy if we imbue too many purchases with significant meaning.”
—Virginia Postrel
I am still wowed by The Future and Its Enemies and convinced of its essential claims; if anything, they seem more relevant today than when the book was first published. Describe the stasis/dynamism distinction, and how you see it playing out in the daily news.
In The Future and Its Enemies, which came out in 1998, I argue that many political and cultural issues are better understood not as conflicts between traditional left and right but as conflicts between advocates of dynamism and advocates of stasis.
The central value of dynamism is learning. Progress occurs not as marching toward a known goal but as a decentralized process of trial and error with feedback provided through competition and criticism. We neither start from scratch nor seek to freeze what is (or was). We build on the past by identifying flaws—“form follows failure”—and seeking to correct them. Progress is a bottom-up, incremental process. Contrary to what some people assumed because of my Reason job, dynamism isn’t synonymous with libertarianism—it’s compatible with some forms of redistribution, for instance—but it does require less regulation and more tolerance than we’re often accustomed to.
Today when I give talks on the subject, I often define dynamism as a variety of liberalism that foregrounds learning, whereas other versions foreground other values, such as justice, equality, or autonomy. Liberalism in real life, as opposed to liberalism in philosophy articles, values all these things but also constantly makes tradeoffs among them. Liberals argue among themselves about which should take precedence in a given situation.
The drive for stasis takes two basic forms. The first I call “reactionaries.” Their central value is stability. They idealize a steady-state society where things don’t change. The irony is that pursuing this ideal implies a revolutionary turn from our current liberal order, usually toward an idealized past. When I wrote the book, the best examples were often green ideologues, who have since morphed into degrowthers. Today, they’ve been joined by integralist theocrats like Patrick Deneen. Consciously or not, reactionaries oppose the open society. They are illiberal or anti-liberal.
The other stasist camp, which I call “technocrats,” emphasizes control. Technocrats often praises the idea of progress but define it as moving toward a single, known goal. When the book was new, I used to talk about Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the future” as an example of technocratic thinking. The phrase sounds inspiring, but it assumes a single route from Point A to Point B. Deviate from that predetermined path and you fall into the abyss. Technocrats may or may not have liberal allegiances. Bill Clinton does. Xi Jinping does not.
The stasis-dynamism dichotomy was inspired by the left-right coalitions I was seeing in the 1990s in opposition to international trade, immigration, big box stores, urban growth, biotechnology, and, of course, the internet. The conservative Weekly Standard magazine ran a cover story called “Smash the Internet,” with an appropriately violent image, while leftist Kirkpatrick Sale was giving speeches where he literally smashed a computer with a sledgehammer.
There were also left-right coalitions in favor of dynamism, particularly around the internet, as well as trade, immigration, and biotech. One of the most consequential was the collaboration between Republican Chris Cox and Democrat Ron Wyden on the safe harbor provision included in the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
Known as Section 230, this is the provision that declares that the person who posts content, not the website that hosts it, is legally responsible for it. Section 230 allowed platforms to ban pornographic material—the primary concern in 1996—without incurring liability as publishers who’d be responsible for every sentence their users wrote.
Without this provision, much of what we’ve come to value online, from social media to Wikipedia to Substack, would either not exist or be full of undesirable content that would drive off many users. Section 230 came out of the dynamist understanding that in 1996 we had no idea how the internet might evolve and it was best to create simple rules that permitted unanticipated innovations rather than to dictate an outcome.
Our politics and culture took a turn after 9/11, when foreign policy disputes led back to more traditional coalitions of left and right. So I was wrong in the short term about the trend but right in the long term.
The Future and Its Enemies starts as a political trend book, with an analysis of these seemingly unlikely coalitions. Most of the book, however, is an exploration of how dynamism works: How can you have an idea of progress that isn’t aimed at an ideal state? What conditions are necessary to foster a dynamic, learning society? And while I’ve talked in general terms here, it’s full of anecdotes and examples. I did, after all, get my initial training at The Wall Street Journal, and even my most theoretical writing still reflects that background.
In modern democratic systems, technocrats dominate political discourse: Got a problem? Get a plan. You see this when some new thing is described as scary because it is “unregulated.” But since most technocrats in our society are also liberals, they sometimes harbor sympathies for dynamism. (These categories are blurrier in real life than in my model.)
Or they may be allies on particular issues. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein is a hard-core technocrat but his “supply-side progressivism” requires lifting restrictions that limit “creation of the goods and services [progressives] want everyone to have.” In practice, that means a more dynamist approach, where people can build and experiment without multiple layers of permission.
When a new technology arises, it matters greatly whether technocrats align themselves with dynamists or with reactionaries. We were lucky in the 1990s that both political parties included people with positive views of the emerging internet, including people with a dynamist understanding of its potential.
I’d love to hear more on that, specifically related to AI.
The opposite is true today. Reactionaries are in ascendance in both parties, and technocrats are listening to them. Plus there are always businesses seeking to use regulation to hinder their competitors. The result is that instead of regarding AI as an exciting potential tool for enhancing human creativity and fostering prosperity, our public discourse tends to frame it as at best a job-destroyer and at worst the Terminator.
The good news is that concerns about international competition, particularly with China, are leading Washington policy makers to have second thoughts about cracking down on AI’s development. If your society decides to cut itself off from the processes of learning—from dynamism—it will inevitably fall behind.
I should note that successful new technologies, including the power looms that provoked the original Luddites (and the spinning machines that benefited them), do destroy some jobs even as they create others and raise the general standard of living. I’m convinced that one reason that our public discourse is so gloomy is that journalism itself was one of the biggest losers from the internet’s development.
Classified ads disappeared, replaced by Craigslist and then by more specialized sites. Display advertising collapsed, especially as ecommerce ate into department store revenue. Many local newspapers went out of business, throwing staffs out of work. Others are barely hanging on. Even the seemingly invulnerable glossies of Conde-Nast have had to retrench. People who would have once been sources for paid journalists became bloggers posting free content. Meanwhile, commercial pressures encourage politically and culturally polarized takes—because those stories attract the largest audiences.
“If your society decides to cut itself off from the processes of learning—from dynamism—it will inevitably fall behind.”
—Virginia Postrel
All in all, the past 20 years have been a terrible time to earn a living as a writer. And that’s not even getting into what’s happened in TV and film. The people who still have jobs are naturally influenced by working in an industry where the benefits of new technology have largely gone to consumers and a few, mostly new companies.
I would not want to go back to 2000, when I stepped down as editor of Reason. But when I left the nonprofit world for life as a freelancer I had no idea that Reason’s business model—begging for money from rich people—represented the future for almost all journalism.
Which approach is winning, stasis or dynamism?
Stasis is on the rise, but it’s more complicated than it looks at first. For instance, Donald Trump’s core appeal is to people who want to close America to trade and immigration in pursuit of a static notion of greatness anchored in the 1950s. I sometimes say that if you’re reading The Future and Its Enemies today, just substitute “Donald Trump” whenever it says “Pat Buchanan.”
Yet Trump also appeals to people who want to escape the technocratic rules that make building—literal and metaphorical—so difficult. Some people vote for Trump as a way of overthrowing technocracy. They see him as a force for dynamism. With its emphasis on bottom-up experimentation and the importance of dispersed knowledge, dynamism has an anti-elitist element. I think they’re badly misreading the man and his agenda, such as it is, but they aren’t stasis supporters.
I’m also quite hopeful about coalitions pushing to open up housing markets. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that concerns about climate change haven’t simply translated into an excuse for anti-growth, anti-technology, anti-market thinking. The degrowthers are out there, of course, pushing stasis with whatever issue is handy. But so is a burgeoning “progress movement” that includes people thinking about how to create energy abundance while addressing climate concerns.
What do you find is the most challenging part of a writing project? What about the most exciting were the most energizing?
For a book, the most challenging element is usually figuring out the organization. I take on huge topics but write normal-size books. Figuring out how to create a structure that tells me what to leave out as well as what to put in, and that gives the reader a coherent arc to follow, is tricky. Accomplishing it in the proposal makes writing the book much easier.
For articles, I spend the most time thinking about leads and am consistently bad at endings.
As the former editor of a major monthly magazine, you have worked with hundreds of writers over the years. What’s one thing you do differently than other writers you know and have worked with?
I have no idea. I only know how I work. When I was commissioning articles, or even working with Reason staffers, the writers sent me completed drafts.
I suspect I do more “unnecessary” research than most writers—especially those who’ve grown up with the internet’s demand for quick takes. I always know much more than I put in the story, and when I read old articles that I’ve largely forgotten I’m often impressed with how much I put into them. I’m definitely too slow for contemporary conditions.
If you were mentoring a younger writer, what is the single most important piece of wisdom you would give them?
Be curious. Your job is to learn and share what you’ve learned.
I greatly enjoyed reading your essay on Willa Cather; in fact, it influenced my decision to read My Antonia in June as part of my 2024 classic novel goal. How can novelists tell us about the world we live in? And who are two or three you’d recommend for understanding your particular vision of the American experience—its dynamist expression?
I once created a syllabus for a never-realized class called “Glamour, Escape, and American Dreams, 1870–1970.” The readings included The Great Gatsby and Cather’s The Song of the Lark, both of which I’ve since taught in actual classes at Chapman University. It also included a wonderful work that is too long for most college classes nowadays, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I wouldn’t say these books are exactly about dynamism, but they are all great stories of ambition in America.
A complementary work, which I taught at Chapman, is the movie Minari. It was critically acclaimed and nominated for six Oscars—Youn Yuh-jung won best supporting actress—but I find that most people I talk to about it haven’t heard of it. It’s a wonderful film that students loved. Filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung was inspired by Willa Cather’s work and her statement that “Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.” I put Cather and Minari on the syllabus without knowing of their connection.
“Be curious. Your job is to learn and share what you’ve learned.”
—Virginia Postrel
Final question: You can invite any three authors for a lengthy meal. Neither time period nor language is an obstacle. Who do you pick, why, and how does the conversation go?
This is a tricky question because you have to think about how well the people would converse with each other, not just who you find interesting. With that in mind, I’d love to listen to Adam Smith and David Hume converse with each other and maybe throw in Ben Franklin for some American perspective.
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Thanks for this. I only knew Virginia Postrel as the editor of Reason. I appreciate this introduction to her work and her thought.
Incredible interview. Although I don't recall ever seeing the author's name, I quickly became aware of her work because a close friend of mine was RAVING about The Fabric of Civilization. Now I want to read her entire bibliography after this post!