Comment by the_other
10 days ago
I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis.
For sure, we can shop faster, and (attempt) research and admin faster. But…
Shopping: used to be fun. You’d go with friends or family, discuss the goods together, gossip, bump into people you knew, stop for a sandwich, maybe mix shopping and a cinema or dinner trip. All the while, you’d be aware of other peoples’ personal space, see their family dynamics. Queuing for event tickets brought you shoulder to shoulder with the crowd before the event began… Today, we do all this at home; strangers (and communities) are separated from us by glass, cables and satalites, rather than by air and shouting distance. I argue that this time saving is reducing our ability to socialise.
Research: this is definitely accelerated, and probably mostly for the better. But… some kinds of research were mingled with the “shopping” socialisation described above.
Admin: the happy path is now faster and functioning bureaucracy is smoother in the digital realm. But, it’s the edge cases which are now more painful. Elderly people struggle with digital tech and prefer face to face. Everyone is more open to more subtle and challenging threats (identity theft, fraud); we all have to learn complex and layered mitigation strategies. Also: digital systems are very fragile: they leak private data, they’re open to wider attack surfaces, they need more training and are harder to intuit without that training; they’re ripe for capture by monopolists (Google, Palantir).
The time and cost savings of all these are not felt by the users, or even the admins of these systems. The savings are felt only by the owners of the systems.
Technologgy has saved billions of person-hours individual costs, in travel, in physical work. Yet, wemre working longer, using fewer ranges of motions, are less fit, less able to tolerste others’ differences and the wealth gap is widening.
> I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis.
"Quality of life" is a hugely privileged topic to be zooming in on. For the vast majority of people both inside and outside the US, Time and Money are by far the most important factors in their lives.
Costs (time/money) are metrics to help analyse your situation/progress. They are not quality of life.
If you had a huge pile of money but still lived in a shack in a slum, you’d still have a terrible quality of life.
If you argument were true, and people are saving time (or money) due to these new systems, why is the wealth gap widening?
Setting aside time, is money not downstream from quality of life? Meaning, in a better world one might not need to care as much about money? I believe that time and quality of life are congruent - good quality of life means control over one’s own time.
Yes, this is true. There used to be a lot of local book stores, for example. Amazon optimized that away, while ruining social fabric.
Independent book stores are booming in quantity since the initial Internet crash.
Be careful about making narratives that don’t line up with industry data.
There’s a lot of brick and mortar retail going on. It just doesn’t look like the overbuilt mall infrastructure of the 1970s-1980s.
Two decades ago, in the Bay Area we used to have a lot of books stores, specialized, chains, children's, grade school, college slugbooks, etc. Places like Fry's had a coffee and a book store inside. The population grew, number of book stores went down to near zero.
RIP literacy in America. We hardly knew ye.
Recall that the arXiv was established in 1991, many years before the dotcom bubble. Many scientists still use arXiv prominently for research.