NOTICE: More content also now added in the Ideas section, which
I've decided not to post directly to this Phlog because some posts
there are likely to be significantly revised and extended over
time. Plus they might appeal to different audiences. Go there to
read about novelty shaded arc lights, and Internet Archive
mirroring.
Now on with the Phlog...
THE MYSTERY OF THE OFFICE
I don't understand what people do in offices.
So many mundane tasks for office workers of the past - payroll,
basic accounting, typing and copying documents - have been
replaced by computers. Another way to view it is that the staff
required for these tasks has been reduced to one small department -
the IT department that keeps these computers working. Besides them,
there are two roles left for human office workers: Interfacing
between computers and humans, and that old limitation of the
electronic brain, creativity.
These areas must have expanded not only to provide jobs to people
who might once have done the job of computers today, but also to
swallow up the expanding office workforce. Manufacturing jobs have
shrunk to a fraction of what they were in the mid 20th century, and
women are now expected to work after marriage. So what are they all
doing? Presumably, a lot have gone into offices.
So the first role that they might take is providing a comfy,
socially-acceptable, interface to computer systems that form the
real gears of a modern organisation. But this implies that more of
these interactions are required than they used to be. In fact far
fewer are required - with computers now interacting directly with
people over the internet in order to accomodate tasks like paying
bills and taking orders. Even things like processing returns and
complaints are outsourced to cheap foreigners with impenetrable
accents by most of the larger businesses. I very rarely interact
with an office worker, yet there are floors and floors of them
working away every weekday, surely there wouldn't be that much work
for them to do if other people are even vaguely like me.
I suppose that means they are being creative then - coming up with
new ideas, designs, software to run on those computer that replaced
their forbearers. But where is that creativity really going? On one
hand the internet presented lots of opportunity for new and
(unfortunately) ever-evolving design, but these people aren't all
programmers. Also at the same time the internet has shrunk the
world. Once two businesses at other ends of the country might have
happily designed and made individual products both serving one
identical need. The trouble of researching, ordering, paying-for,
and receiving an item from some great distance away was enough that
a customer would seek a product available locally. Similar
difficulties made it harder for one business to operate in multiple
distant locations, or to work with distributers so far away.
Certainly many big businesses did manage this, but the difficulty
as well as the limited practicality in niche industries meant that
a lot more duplication of design work was economical to be
performed by multiple businesses serving the same market, whereas
today one business can dominate much more easily. Indeed with the
internet even a small business can now dominate not only a country,
but much of the world, even in a niche industry.
Are we just seing amazing levels of creativity and development
then, unparalleled with past times where these human resources were
less available and more widely distributed. No, frankly. At least
in Australia, that's obvious.
So what are people doing? I can only guess that they _are_ in fact
creating something: bureaucracy. Needless tasks to justify their
own existance. Duplication of effort and unchecked inefficiency,
communications that nobody reads about things that don't matter,
clinging on to a role within the ever-shrinking range of tasks that
their computers don't yet do alone. The net effect being only an
increased drag on the organisation that they serve.
Is this sustainable? It doesn't seem like it. But of course people
say that it is a system that has continued in the face of huge
technological and social changes already, it has survived this long
so it will do forever more. I think this forgets that the office
has only existed for a few generations, being as it is an advent of
only the 19th century, a side-effect of industrialisation. It's
true that it has been ever evolving, but with a speed and
unpredictability that has long defied estimates of what form it
will take in the future. What is there to say that it will be able
to sustain the employment of so many people? Or that it will even
sustain itself against people's own desire to work?
Unchecked inefficiencies building up within a rigid system lead to
the unexpected downfall of the Soviet Union just three decades ago.
Can we be so sure that our own economic structure is truely
flexible enough to avoid a similar fate in the years to come?
- The Free Thinker.