TIME FAMINE: THE LETHAL COMBINATION OF HIGH TECH AND BUREAUCRACY

By Tom Kando
   

I have been retired for a few years, but I find myself hurrying more and having less time to do all the things I want to do.

Maybe it’s my age. I am slowing down. I can obviously no longer work as hard as I used to.

But judging from what I hear from others, even from some relatively young people, there is more to  it than that:

It seems to me that life is getting increasingly  time-consuming, not less so. Technology schmecknology! Many years  ago I published a pretty successful  book called
Leisure and Popular Culture in Transition.”   Like many other utopian fools tainted by  the sixties’ Counterculture, I predicted that technology would soon enable  humankind to enter the Age of Aquarius. The workweek would decline to 20 hours. Machines would do the work. People  would devote themselves to poetry and philosophy. The Maslowian hierarchy of needs would be fulfilled.

Ha! What happened? The Internet, social media, computers and bureaucracy.  Do these things  save time? Not mine. I sometimes  find an hour or two to write, but more often I spend my time trying to fix a problem with my blog, my website, my e-mail, a virus, Google+. I try not to spend much time on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media, but just weeding through my e-mail takes a large chunk of my daily time.

Are you planning a trip? Do you have to deal with doctors or hospitals? Do you want to order and buy something? Do you need help with Comcast, or with  some other service provider? Do you need to  deal with Social Security, Medicare, the IRS or another   agency?

Welcome to the age of do-it yourself.

You use the archaic tool called “telephone,” and you are  politely invited by a machine  to visit their website, where you can try to tough  out your problem while   spending countless hours navigating some labyrinthine system.  

Where are the good old days when you could pay a travel agent to map out your entire European trip, when you got paper air tickets in the mail, when the TV repairman came to your house?

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Next time you go to the dentist, to your family doctor or to a lab for some test, check out how many people are in the waiting room and how many are on the other side of  the counter or reception window. You’ll probably  be one of  2 or 3 patients waiting, while there will be  half a dozen or more very busy workers on the other side.
After waiting  half an hour or an hour, you’ll finally meet the first person whose job it is to actually help you medically. Not a nurse, mind you, but a nurse’s assistant. Eventually, someone will take your blood pressure.

But what about the eight  or nine other people  in that office?  Are they chatting and drinking coffee? Absolutely not. They work quite  hard.  They are on the phone and at desktop computers, they are faxing things, they are working on voluminous paper files at their many work stations.  But they are not doing anything medical.  They are dealing with insurance, with bills, with paperwork.

It’s the same thing with Intel, with the Social Security office and with any other office you go to: A majority of the people are working on things OTHER than what the place is FOR, whatever that is. They are dealing with paperwork, with files, with  privacy forms and whathaveyou.

Last time I went to a hospital, they shoved half a dozen pages of privacy regulations in my hands, some of which I had to peruse and sign. My wife works in the medical field. When she gets a new patient’s file which she has to work on, it is accompanied by 25 (!) pages of privacy regulations.
I wish they printed those on soft Kleenex-quality paper, so they could at least be used as toilet paper.

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To me, it seems obvious that life is  getting more complicated and in that regard more unpleasant. Joseph Tainter’s “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which I reviewed on ths blog and in professional journals,  addresses this issue.

Another interesting book, somewhat to the point, is Siva Vaidhyanathan’s “The Googlization of Everything, and Why We Should Worry.”This book is more about the potential monopolization of information that Google could bring about. However, it also tangentially touches upon the fact that in the Age of Google and other similar technologies, it takes a lot of time and resources to participate in the competitive dissemination of knowledge (as an example, think of the frustrations of Search Engine Optimization).

Every once in a while I  come across a charlatan who tells me that technology is simple. It is not. I  sometimes come across people who claim to know how  to  solve a technological problem with a few simple steps, but their claims often turn out to be noise, gibberish.  Humility and the ability to admit  ignorance are rare.

And as to whether technology saves time, my good friend Dr. Abram De Swaan, professor emeritus  and former chair of Sociology at  the University  of Amsterdam, has pointed out  studies which  question the facile assumption that computers are saving humankind time.

The computer  revolution may  save time (increase “efficiency” and “productivity”) for  sellers, producers, service providers and  managers, but it is robbing time from buyers, users, clients  and the rank and file. This is the way of capitalism.
© Tom Kando 2014

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