As those of you familiar with this column will know, I am always eager to distinguish between an option and an obligation.
For instance, a dinner party is usually more enjoyable than an indoor drinks party. Yet in one respect a drinks party wins out: the moment you accept an invitation to a dinner party, you are committed. By contrast, when you accept an invitation to a drinks party, you can bunk off at short notice and spend quality man-time watching YouTube documentaries about steam engines instead. A dinner party is an obligation, while ‘drinks’ is an option.
This is also the principal distinction between a restaurant and a café. In a restaurant you are obliged to eat, in a café it’s an option. In some countries I confuse the two. I sit down hoping to have a cup of coffee and a sticky bun, only to be brought a nine-course tasting menu. In Britain anything with unlaid tables outside is usually a café; in Spain it’s not so clear-cut.
Along with the useful phrase ‘enshittification’, we need a phrase for that ineluctable process by which technologies and behaviours first emerge as an attractive and novel alternative only to end up as an imposition. I propose ‘Joni Mitchell Syndrome’, or JMS: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’
Ticket machines at railway stations are an example of JMS. They arrived as a welcome alternative option to the manned guichet, and often they were: if you knew precisely what ticket you wanted and some dithering nitwit was holding up the queue at the ticket window, they were great. That was wonderful until some tragic accountants decided they could now close down the manned ticket office. Suddenly, if you were unsure about which ticket to buy, there was no one to ask.
Wiser, more conservative people often have a more realistic idea of the longer-term, second-order downsides of seemingly well-intentioned ideas
The same thing applies to self-checkout tills and other forms of self-service. This dismal race to the bottom happens when a new form of technology brings with it the promise of cost savings – indeed where cost-cutting is the primary justification. Alas, costs are easily measured but opportunity costs are not – hence people in procurement and finance will lay claim to every penny saved in costs, but are never held to account for the revenue lost through foregone sales (e.g. it is difficult for customers to do a large family shop if they have to scan their shopping themselves). Cost-cutting is visible, immediate and quantifiable; value destruction is the opposite. Any email which arrives from donotreply@company.com is a manifestation of this problem. ‘We have significantly reduced the cost of customer service by ignoring our customers.’
This risk of JMS is often the best reason to give Luddites a proper hearing. Their stated reasons for disliking some new technology may be silly post-rationalisation but the underlying instinct might be sound. This also explains why Luddites tend to be older. Wiser, more conservative people often have a more realistic idea of the longer-term, second-order downsides of seemingly well-intentioned ideas, because they have been mugged by reality in the past.
It has played out many times. Mobile phones were great until people expected you to answer them. Email, social media, parking apps, open-plan offices, self-checkout tills at supermarkets, messaging apps, the spreadsheet, presentation software, sourdough bread, 24-hour rolling news and even smartphones are the grey squirrels of the innovation world. They arrive as a novelty and end up destroying the very thing they were meant to improve.
In the tech world, messaging apps are a case study in JMS. We used to have a limited number of ways to reach people, and could be confident that anything important would arrive via one of these channels. Now everyone labours under the solipsistic delusion that whatever random channel they choose to use (Instafart, Wankchat, Arsebook Messenger) is the must-read medium for everyone else. ‘I’m at the church and there doesn’t seem to be a wedding happening.’ ‘Oh, we had to cancel – didn’t you see it on Tossgram?’ ‘No, because I’m 60 years old and I have a fucking job.’
Expanding university attendance was an exercise in JMS. Attending university is no longer an exciting option; it’s an obligation. And perhaps worst of all in the long catalogue of JMS decisions is the two-income household. This began as an option: ‘If we both go out to work, we’ll be able to have a nice car and a holiday’, and ended up with ‘Unless we both go out to work we cannot afford a place to live’. A woman’s right to work became a woman’s requirement to work. The two-income household ultimately meant that the typical family lost 40 hours of discretionary time each week for no improvement in discretionary income. The only beneficiaries were HMRC (which now had twice as many people to tax), landlords and property owners, who could hike house prices and rents, and banks which got two mortgage slaves for the price of one.
The most significant JMS threat comes from AI, in the need for our nerd overlords and their running-dog lackeys in consulting firms to find paid uses for the technology to justify the gargantuan sums invested. We already face AI solutions imposed on us unasked so companies can generate artificially high-user statistics to justify their AI costs to investors.
But ultimately these investments can only really be justified in the short term by the promise to gut the human payroll. Theoretically you could sell AI on the promise of massive value creation achieved through enhancing what humans already do well. But that’s too slow. Faced with the need for an expensive technology no one yet wants to buy, AI will be foisted on companies with the promise of immediate cuts to the wage bill.
And for reasons I have never understood, frontline workers always seem to be first in the firing line for job losses when new technology emerges. The factory of the future, according to an American joke, has a staff of just two, a man and a dog. The man’s job will be to feed the dog, and the dog’s job will be to make sure the man never touches the machines.
If only. If my experience of corporate governance is anything to go by, there will also be five finance people to measure the utilisation rate of the man, two compliance officers to approve the safe use of the lead, three procurement people engaged in gradually reducing the size of the food bowl and eight people in HR to make sure the man doesn’t misgender the dog.
It is these jobs which AI should really replace, of course. But, seriously, don’t hold your breath.
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