Work in the digital age

ˮWork is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter, second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”

No, this is not another cynical remark Oscar Wilde has made Lord Henry say in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

Bertrand Russell wrote this (in 1932), and cynicism aside it is an apt description of work as we knew it throughout most of human history. We put seeds into the ground and harvested what grew out of them, and we made the tools that helped us do that. Trees were felled to create clearings for more agriculture and we made vessels in which to store our crops.  We also made dishes to eat from, not to forget the knives and forks and spoons we use for eating. We made yarns from fibers, weaved them into fabrics and made clothes from these fabrics. From the trees we made furniture in which to store our fabrics and clothes, to sleep in and to sit down on and eat dinner. We made weapons for hunters and warriors and we erected buildings from wood, clay, bricks, and finally from stones. To get around in our world we made all kinds of vehicles …

Over the centuries the things we made became more sophisticated and our world became more complex, but still our wealth depended on things we made or the things we had others make for us. Then we made machines, and “altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface …” became a very powerful activity indeed.

Then came digitization and now everything is supposedly different. We order everything online, and the things we need in our daily lives just materialize on our doorstep, handed over by a delivery person.  This delivery person is the only real person we need to come into contact with when we shop. 

Shortly after Amazon had started its operations in Germany, there where billboards all over the place saying ˮAmazon: ordering machine – Post Office: delivery machine”. I thought it was quite a good campaign at the time, but now, more than a decade later, it has a foreboding in it which I was not aware of then.

Thinking about service companies as “machines” made us all forget about the people who packed the things we bought and who drove the trucks and vans that brought them to us – to say nothing of the people who made them in sweatshops all over the world. 

In those years we have seen enormous change in how we think about work – or should I say how the digital avant-garde wants us to think about work. Technology has changed our workplaces and has given us plenty of opportunities we never had before. I have benefitted immensely from all this myself, so I am the last person to bore anyone with a Luddite rant. But I do have my moments when I can’t help wondering where all this is heading.

Recently my thoughts were triggered by the report about amazon.de and its temp workers, which made quite a stir in the German media. It was also picked up in the English-language press, e.g:  http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-19/amazon-under-fire-over-alleged-worker-abuse-in-germany

In all our digital euphoria, we don’t seem to think in terms of material things any longer. We’re post-materialistic, sharing is the latest trend; nobody owns anything any longer. But we still live by things, and there will always be people who have to take care of the physical side of it all, mine the raw materials, assemble the devices, pack them, ship and deliver them. Last but not least we need people to work in the power industry in order to generate the energy for it all – not just for making and moving things, but also to keep that virtual world going where we all prefer to spend our time, while we are physically moving about the world, using up even more energy, and being catered to by another army of underpaid workers.

So there is still a division between different kinds of work in the world: but it is no longer between those who alternate the position of matter and those who tell them to do so. In the digital world the division is between those who live in the virtual world and make money altering the position of bites relatively to other such bites, and those who are stuck in the material world and enable the physical lives of the lucky cyberworkers.