What a Polish novel from 1899 taught me about living through a technological shift

This article was originally published on Substack.

If you’re trying to wrap your head around how a technological shift warps the social fabric, here’s a non-obvious suggestion: a Polish novel from 1899.

It’s titled “Ziemia Obiecana” (or “The Promised Land”). It was written in 1899 by Władysław S. Reymont, one of the Polish most acclaimed writers, a Nobel laureate.

“The Promised Land” describes a story of three up-and-comers, living in Łódź, Poland at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; a truly fascinating place in time and space. Across one (albeit unusually long for that period) lifetime, you could observe Łódź growing from a village of under 1,000 people to an industrial powerhouse with population of 500,000.

The city attributed its growth to its position in the middle of Europe, an odd mix of cosmopolitanism and capitalism, and - most importantly - the arrival of industrial textile machinery. Steam-powered factories took work that once depended on human touch and turned it into a relentless, high-volume process. Entire trades became obsolete in a decade.

Reymont dropped the three main characters, coming from completely different backgrounds and nationalities, into this fever dream with one common goal: wanting to build something for themselves. They weren’t alone: looking around, you could see other builders trying to participate in something so big and crazy, it surpassed their comprehension. Don’t think, just jump in.

Those three entrepreneurs would do everything they could to be on the winning side of this boom, but this implies there was also the losing side. And this book showed the game as a zero-sum one, I am afraid. People wary of this breakthrough, left their homes to pursue the future that was supposed to reach them one way or another, only to get (sometimes literally) brutally swallowed by the machinery.

Photo by Grzegorz Gałasiński.

The roaring beasts of steam and iron manufactured a world of contrast where big chimneys puke out fumes that don’t have to travel too far away to reach rural outskirts, where scarecrows protect the crops. Where a new sense of Polish nationalism emerged - though Poland existed in hearts, not on maps - only to dissolve in an international soup. Where customs gave way to cold capitalist calculation.

What Reymont captured masterfully is that feeling of the world shifting from beneath you. Most of what you hold dear and familiar: gone. Woken up in a completely new and strange land that only sentimentally references what you were used to. You are forced to reinterpret your place in the world, in the fear of being obsolete.

Consulting history always reassures me that our fate is not unprecedented. What remains constant is people’s excitement mixed with disorientation, anxiety, opportunism. Reymont’s perspective isn’t exactly comforting but familiar. He shows how in a technological upheaval it feels risky to just stand still. You have to start running and at a dangerous pace, sometimes looking ridiculous in the process.