TechTakes

I think there's definitely something to be said for the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit. Most of those big consumer innovations were either the application of novel physics or chemistry (refrigerants, synthetics, plastics, microwaves, etc) combined with automating very labor-intensive but relatively simple tasks (dish washing, laundry, manual screwdriving, etc). The digital age added some very powerful logic to that toolset, but still remains primarily limited to the kinds of activities and processes that can be defined algorithmically. The ingenuity of software developers along with the introduction of new tools and peripheral capabilities (printers, networks, sensors) have shown that the kind of problems that can be defined algorithmically is a much larger set than you would first think, but it's still limited.

Adding on to this, it's worth noting the degree to which defining problems algorithmically requires altering the parameters of that problem. For example, compare shopping at a store with using a vending machine. The vending machine dramatically changes the scope of the activity by limiting the variety of items you can get, only allowing one item per transaction, preventing you from examining the goods before purchasing, and so on. The high-level process is the same; I move from having no soda and some dollars to one soda and less dollars. But the changes that are made to ensure the procedure can be mechanized have some significant social tradeoffs. Each transaction has less friction, but also less potential. These consequences are even more pronounced if your point of comparison is an old-school sofa fountain where "hanging out waiting for the soda jerk and drinking together" is largely the whole point and while that activity requires more from you it also gives more opportunities to interact with and meet people and to see friends outside of work or school. Even if you don't want to spend the time or be social (or even like me get severe social anxiety sometimes!) this still leads to a world where there are more and larger blocks of time that you can't be expected to trade away to your job or other obligations. Your boss is likely to fire you for being late to work, unless that tardiness comes from the ferry you and your coworkers rely on being late. Because it's inevitable friction in a necessary part of working (can't work if you can't get to work) and because it can't be put entirely on the individual (even if you do want to blame the employee for taking the "wrong* boat so you really want to fire the whole team?) the system is basically forced to give you more grace than it otherwise would want to.

This is another way to frame the problems with more recent "innovations" - while social media and the gig economy both arguably empower individual consumers and producers of both cultural output and of services like taxis, they do so in ways that fundamentally change the relationship and individualize the connections between consumers, producers, and the system that they interact through. And because nobody has as direct a connection to the owners and operators of that system, they have more power to increase their profits at the expense of everyone who actually has to use the system to function.