If you are a regular reader of my work you will know that there are two things that I like- old movies and making fun of most of the ideas that come out of Silicon Valley. Well, today we are going to combine both of these things as we talk about ‘disruption’, the tech overlord phrase for decimating an entire functioning sector of the job market and then selling it back to us packaged in an app. Remember how in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s stripes shirt and red suspendered Gordon Gekko types would buy undervalued companies, gut them and then flip them for a profit? Well those slick haired marauders have nothing on todays breed. Don’t let the hoodies and jeans fool you.
But before we get into that we’ll cover the old movie part.
See, it was while watching a DVD billing of old detective movies that the effects of this so-called disruption really hit home. So you have your private eye, your gumshoe, out on a case and scouring the streets of the nocturnal metropolis for clues. He goes to a club. There’s a uniformed guy on the door, there’s a hat-check girl, a coat-check girl, there’s a glamorous dame walking around selling cigarettes. Despite it being a quite night there’s a torch singer and a full jazz ensemble backing her. There’s a litany of beer pourers and cocktail shakers and glass polishers behind the bar. When the hardboiled P.I. asks to use the phone he’s pointed to a booth and when he picks up the receiver his call is patched through by an operator. When he buys the daily rag he does so from a newsstand on the corner. When he goes to the library to squint at some microfiche he is assisted by librarians and kindly bespectacled archivists. When he goes to the bank there’s a row of tellers, when he buys groceries there’s an aproned server at the checkout ready to ring him up.
After a while I had to press pause as all of this hit me. All of these jobs, all of these roles are now either entirely gone or have been automated away to a shadow of what they once were. This is what we mean by ‘disruption’. And don’t forget that these newspaper pedlars and bartenders and librarians and all the rest of it were able to put food on the table and eventually buy houses with what we are now led to believe is the type of work that is beneath citizens such as us. We have progressed beyond this apparently. Progressed beyond wages commensurate to the cost of living and jobs that though boring are stable. But this may well be a topic for another time.
The point is that out gumshoe, even if he did style himself as an existential loner and someone outside the societal norm had a whole vast latticework of social interactions and nodding-terms acquaintances that we today have lost. Hard to share a joke with the teller when your branch has closed and you do all of your banking through either an ATM or an app. Hard to flirt with the nice young lady ringing up your groceries when she has been replaced by a row of self-service checkouts, the cheery robotic voice a haunting and mocking reminder for what could have been. And it’s hard to talk sports with some guy you end up sitting next to on a train when he is a phone zombie scrolling through his own personal hand-held enchanted window for the entire duration of the journey.
It’s almost all gone, all of these little moments of contact and connection that our grizzled detective would have completely taken for granted. The question is how. And why.
Apping Mankind
Disruption in this Silicon Valley sense is based on the notion that if you keep living exactly how you are living now, soon you will find yourself living in the past. Which has merit to it and also plays to our desire to not be out of touch stick-in-the-muds (though as I get older this desire is certainly waning. If being left behind also means to be left alone that is a trade off I am now willing to discuss).
The world is fast, they leas us to believe, and dynamic and cutthroat and you have to keep up- if not race ahead- if you want to claim your place and make your mark. Which of course is an incredibly self-servicing and convenient belief for the would-be disruptors as this weltenshauung in and of itself has a disruptive effect on the pre-existing social order. Stability and firm foundations may well be necessary- or at least preferential- for an individual to lead a good life but they sure as anything aren’t sexy. You can’t get existed about them. You can’t get VCs interested in investing in them. You can’t make billions in a mere matter of years, months even, with things that are mere sturdy and dependable.
What you need is risk, hype, flash, change. What you need is disruption. What you need is to take a pre-existing field, say taxis or food delivery, turn it into an app, secure a ton of funding and then undercut and undermine the fusty old real-world industry until everyone who once had a stable job in it now works for you via the app as an ‘independent contractor’ on a lower wage and with less rights and job security. All while the app itself is run by a surprisingly small staff in a fusball table and smoothie bar equipped open plan office. Disruption. But hey, at least the stockholders are seeing nice steady returns.
Now make no mistake, this is no anti-capitalist tirade here (I would like to think at this point that I have pit out enough work to show that I am nuanced enough to not be unequivocally pro or anti hardly anything). Perhaps the world does have to change, perhaps progress does inevitably have to occur. I’m not sure on this but I am willing to entertain it, if not fully concede it. But people don’t change. And the second order effects of all of this disruption have a terrible cost on the human spirit. They make life into a nasty and brutish dog-eat-dog existence which then morally justifies and perpetuates further disruption. We turn on each other to try and get an edge in this ruthless job market rather than pointing the finger at those who undermined untold scores of jobs with a mere handful of coding springs and rounds of funding.
Alienation breeds further alienation. And without the solace of the kindness of strangers and the nods and eye contact and smalltalk of those similarly trying to make it through the day it can soon feel like all is lost. And so you sink further into the machine as both your heart and your wallet slowly empty year on year.
Disrupting Disruption
Someone once said- and I don’t remember who- that presenting a problem without then offering a solution is despicable. I’m paraphrasing. But this is a very prevalent contemporary sin and certain one that I have been guilty of. So though I have no ready to hand list of bulletpoints as to what to do about all of this, I do have a general idea as to the direction that is needed.
Now I am not naive enough to say that anyone should walk away from this whole business of smartphones and the internet and screens entirely (though my heart does sometimes cry out for this). I am not saying that huge personal sacrifices should be made to try and spite some t-shirt and jeans wearing Silicon Valley billionaire who wouldn’t even notice anyway. I am not necessarily saying to fight the bad, unless you feel a particular calling to do so. Instead you should champion the good. Those local real world jobs staffed by local real world people still exist. You can use their services, you can talk to them.
So much of disruptive technology is based on the premise and the hook of convenience and we are seemingly willing to trade away an awful lot of both our happiness and of the world around us for just a crumb of convenience. It’s a sad truth. But the other side of the coin is that you gain an awful lot if you put up with just a little more inconvenience. Rather than going to the nearest self-service supermarket offshoot I walk a little further to the local butcher, the fishmonger, the fruit and veg shop. I make more of an effort to talk to people. When I happen upon a local bookstore (they are vanishingly rare but they still exist) I make a purchase and I make some smalltalk. Same as with record stores.
These little acts, these little interactions are the things that life is made of. I would like to think that I don’t need to explicitly state this obvious fact, but I accept that I do. Because if there is anything that Silicon Valley has disrupted it is our sense of priorities and our common sense. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Because, no matter what, you always have a choice.
I shall continue to intermittently ruminate on this budding thought, in short… we are losing our local culture to the global profit of convenience. Only what we do in real-time to preserve meaning, will remain.
It looks to me that in the last several decades, and I don't think the blame is exclusively on Silicon Valley, the concept of dignity being an integral element of work has disappeared.
All these jobs you list in your essay 50, 70 years ago, while not sexy, would certainly give a person a sense of dignity in most cases. You're a waiter and you do your job right. You're paid fairly. In may parts of the world you actually got an education for it. There was a way to advance (from a café waiter to high class restaurant, or cocktail maker, or doing high-end parties, etc). You work your hours, have a right to breaks, sometimes in the law, sometimes in an unspoken covenant with the boss (smoke breaks), and doing your job well was met with a base level of respect from the rest of society.
It feels like this disappeared, and now those of us doing "traditional" jobs cannot shake the feeling of being a sucker, while the rest sell their soul for the chance of becoming the next Tik Tok sensation...