The 140 Character Future

To this day I still love biking around town. Unlike driving, biking allows you to see and experience the people and places around you as they pass you by. A couple years ago I was riding through a park when I stopped at a water fountain. As most of us do without even thinking of it, I pushed a button on the side of the fountain and water poured out for me to drink.

A button. Water.

I then got back on my bike and rode on. But as I did something clicked. That moment right there was so incredible. I was so privileged to live in place where I had such convenient access to water. In fact not only water, but other critical forms of infrastructure such as electricity and waste disposal were also accessible to me.

Think about it. We have such an extensive system set up that almost anyone can push a button or turn a knob and water is immediately provided for either consumption or production.

Comparatively, millions of people in numerous parts of the world still have to walk to a water source to get the water they need. Even then, they are constrained by the water they are physically capable of transporting.

A water system’s immediate significance to certain industries is obvious. Farmers can water and grow more crops than they could without such a system. Chefs can easily access water to cook food. Even the more personal uses are pretty clear; we can shower to maintain personal hygiene and drink to keep ourselves from becoming dehydrated.

However, what many of us overlook is the multiplier effect such a system creates. When humans don’t have to worry about finding, transporting, and in many cases processing water, they are freed up to do other, much more productive, tasks. This creates an enormous multiplier effect.

Because when an African-American Baptist minister didn’t have to take a walk every morning to get his water for the day he was able to spend more time organizing and leading a civil rights movement for millions of people facing daily discrimination. Because when a single mother had electricity to power a refrigerator she was able to spend less time shopping each day and instead write her book about a teenage wizard that captivated the world. And because when a nation full of scientists and engineers didn’t have to spend time literally dealing with shit they were able to put a man on the moon within a decade.

Fast-forward to 2015. iPhones, 3Gs and 4Gs, Clouds, emails; the list goes on and on. The important thing is with this new generation of technology we will now be able to… tweet and receive pizza from Dominos. Now, while some claim this to be the epitome of society’s laziness, I see it as part of the next generation of infrastructure.

Seriously.

Put aside the, albeit hilarious, commentary on our society’s love of Twitter and pizza for a moment.

A tweet. Pizza.

Heck, we don’t even need a tweet, we have a button. But the point is we live in a world where food, along with numerous other products and services, has started to become an on-demand piece of infrastructure like water and electricity before it.

The theory is the same; time saved from making a phone call or clicking through web pages frees us up to do more productive tasks. Critics will be quick to point out that these are just seconds or minutes at best, but what they fail to understand is that in this new digital era seconds and minutes are much more valuable than they were even 20 years ago. This is a huge topic in itself, but let’s just the take the fact that Wall Street is spending billions to shave off milliseconds in trade time as evidence of this. And while the economic gains of saving 5–10 minutes ordering pizza might seem less clear, there’s a (albeit controversial) $41 billion bet that providing a car under 5 minutes has significant economic benefit.

Looking to the future, this new infrastructure will have a key feature its predecessors did not. It will be mobile. We see half of it today on the demand side, with smartphones and watches empowering consumers on the go. However, in a decade or two smart cars, drones, and other technologies will enable the supply side to be equally mobile. While the benefits of such an economy can currently only be dreamed of, most people would agree that an entirely mobile society will be significantly different than the world we live in today.

This is the true potential of the digitally connected world we are building. Sure tweets and emojis might seem silly, but to focus on that is to miss the entire point. Bit by bit we are constructing a mobile on-demand layer of infrastructure that will power the 21st century. If we could go to the moon on water and electricity, just think of what we’ll be able to achieve with @dominos 🍕.