Covid made us use what we had
Suddenly everyone is learning to work from home, use conference calling and messaging software and collaborate digitally. Didn’t we start doing this 20 years ago?
Covid-19 is devastating the lives of millions and tearing people apart. I am going to do something extremely distasteful with this: I am going to see what Covid-19 is telling us about our technology, economy and society.
Back in the 70s and 80s, my Grandad worked a few days from home as a graphic illustrator. Since the 90s my Dad has worked from home doing electronic and software design. I, like lots of people in tech, have worked from home either entirely or partly for a lot of my career.
Using collaborative tools from the telephone through tax machine to Google Docs and Skype takes a little getting used to, but why the shock for so many.
Actually, that’s not the interesting point because the answer is just that they’re getting used to it. But the phenomenon of everybody discovering working from home requires a few different tools and skills leads on to something that is interesting:
Why hasn’t this already happen?
Working remotely allows us to to maximise our work time and to focus a lot of time on being productive. It’s better for the environment because of less travel. It reduces the need to build huge buildings which remain empty for most of each 24 hours.
All of this is possible because of the stack of technologies we have available: the internet (and telephony under that), the cloud, apps, VOIP, task tracking and collaborative tools.
Yet society is still shaped around a model which has existed forever: people who do something together do it in the same physical place.
If we, for a second, drop the fact that there are important social and psychological reasons why people like to work together, let’s tackle the question of: why don’t more people work remotely?
Innovation’s bottleneck
When you first learn about technology and first learn how to come up with a cool idea, you wonder why so many things don’t exist.
In the 90s and 2000s, I could ask: Why can’t I buy pet food online? Why can’t I stream a film online? Why can’t I buy concert tickets online?
There were partly technical reasons to these, such as the available bandwidth, but actually these questions hit on innovation’s bottleneck: humans.
Humans are great at adoption around the age of zero to 20. After that, they are quite a liability for any new technology. You can come up with the greatest new technology but getting a 40 year old to adopt it means competing with everything they learned to love when they were 20, and their family and their work.
So we see great technologies and great ideas get stuck just because of the humans.
Forcing through the bottleneck
This can sometimes be solved by an innovation being built an order of magnitude better. Spotify combined the convenience of pirating music on Napster to give you access to the world’s music, but combined with the legal compliance so it wouldn’t be shutdown
It can sometimes be solved with simple economics, such as an initial or surplus supply such as the availability of cotton in England from the 1700s.
But adoption of technology is far more taste-led and human-constrained than is immediately obvious. What we are living through is a forcing through the bottleneck.
It’s not just about VOIP
The adoption of a technology is not just about the technology. In fact, it’s not really much about the technology at all.
A technology ends up being wrapped in a culture. Vinyl starts as a technology, but becomes a culture. In industries like music production and computer programming where you would expect to see lots of very rational decisions, the decisions often turn out to be trend-based.
So what we are seeing is not just a wider use of the technology as-is, but we will see people who haven’t been used to working remotely learning how to make it part of their world. Their culture.
What I am personally finding fascinating to watch is people who haven’t used this technology much, say things like: I’ve tried all of these but there’s something missing.
As I wrote yesterday, I believe this is going to cause technology creators to find new pain points and new ideas. We will be living through creative times.
But it will also force adoption of technologies which might have taken another generation to be adopted.
Or I’m wrong
I think the opposing argument to this ends up being just as true. When we are let out of lockdown, we are going to love real contact with each other all the more.
Hi — thanks for reading. I’m writing a book. I know. Who isn’t? But really, I’m trying to.
Mental Health is almost entirely a reactive approach to managing our mental wellbeing. This is completely the wrong way around. We should be actively managing our mental fitness from the beginning of our careers.
You can sign up for preorders and extracts HERE. Thank you :)
— Dan
