The Victorians have a lot to answer for

What do you think of when you hear the words Industrial Revolution? The invention of steam power? Of mass production? Of technological advances that now afford us such luxuries as affordable clothing, mass transportation and sanitation?

What about the landscape of the modern working week?

Unless you’re lucky enough to have successfully broken out of it, I suspect you started work at 8 or 9am this morning, and you’ll finish (or finished) at 5 or 6. Monday is your least favourite day of the week, and you can’t wait for Friday to arrive so you can have your two days of freedom for the week.

Why?

Well, these days it seems to be simply a societal construct more than anything else. Once upon a time, in a land before we were all hyper-connected - in a land with no email, no internet, no mobile phones - there was real, tangible value in members of an organisation being sat next to each other. Communication costs were high. Equipment was specialised, heavy and expensive. It made very good business sense to put all of your employees in the same building at the same time.

But who does that really benefit?

Do you enjoy going to the same place to do the same job, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year? Can you honestly say that you enjoy the company of your colleagues? That you enjoy the work ‘social’ events, arranged in a desperate attempt to stop co-workers from killing each other?

Save for the monthly pay cheque, it sure as hell doesn’t sound like it’s you or me benefitting from this arrangement. No, this framework — this 9–5, employer/employee relationship is designed to benefit one thing and one thing only — the employer. Apparently the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. I disagree. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing people that their employer had their best interests at heart. In a world where a posted letter is the fastest form of inter-organisation communication, a company without a centralised workforce is a company without shareholders, without profits, and without a fat-cat owner.

Unfortunately, I’m still not done…

Unless necessity forces it, we only work one job. Why?! Is it because it benefits me or you as an individual? Does it allow us to develop a range of skills, realise personal satisfaction and the best return on our time investment possible? Or does it just make us really good at one very specific thing, that someone else wants you to do for them. Tell me, if someone gave you the financial equivalent of 45 years of your life to invest, would you put it all in the same investment?

So why do we spend 45 years of our life working on developing one skill, giving all our time sometimes to just one company? Most of the time for just enough money to keep us there.

I think you get the picture.

It frustrates me to see such a large proportion of our society disillusioned with their lives, but unable to do anything about it. We follow a well-trodden track through life — from school, through university, and then to these careers often selected before we even have the first clue about how the real world works. We get trapped in the monthly paycheck/mortgage cycle, whose walls are fortified by children, just because “that’s what we’re supposed to do”. “Career”, along with every implication above, is somehow construed as a positive thing. What a trick to pull…

So let’s wind forward the clock. To a world in which the cost of communication is essentially zero. Where automation and machine intelligence facilitates man-management on an un-precendeted scale and at almost zero cost. Where our access to technology is ubiquitous, and our personal range and mobility infinite.

In this brave new world, what sounds like the better deal to you:

Move to an over-populated city. Move for a large, less-than-you’re-worth salary, but big enough that you can pay your large mortgage, required to live close enough to your office. Commute at the same time as every other inhabitant of this over-populated city, 10 times a week, to work in an office where the only thing you share with those around you is your job. Make it to the end of the week, when you can spend what’s left of your pay cheque on entertainment limited to the city that has been chosen for you, by your company.

or…

Live wherever you like. In the mountains, by the coast, in a bustling centre of culture. Work whenever you like, on whatever you choose, alongside people that you get along with. Hedge your time; develop multiple skills, find the work that makes you most happy, and makes your time as valuable as possible. Have the freedom to spend time with your family and travel the world.

It’s not really a decision, is it.

Somewhat paradoxically, it is only because of the Industrial Revolution that I’m able to sit here and wax lyrical about this future of the on-demand economy, and how it’s going to allow us to break free from the cage that the Industrial Revolution has put us in.

One way or the other however, this shift in the way we work will happen. The on-demand economy, with intelligently managed, distributed, and inspired workforces is something of a holy grail of innovation, improving the lives of those on both sides of the equation. In Uber, we’ve only just begun to see the difference that it will make to all of our lives and I, for one, cannot wait to see which industries will be taken by the scruff of the next, and turned upside-down.