NOTICE: More content also now added in the Ideas section, which 
I've decided not to post directly to this Phlog because some posts 
there are likely to be significantly revised and extended over 
time. Plus they might appeal to different audiences. Go there to 
read about novelty shaded arc lights, and Internet Archive 
mirroring.

Now on with the Phlog...

THE MYSTERY OF THE OFFICE

I don't understand what people do in offices.

So many mundane tasks for office workers of the past -  payroll,
basic accounting, typing and copying documents - have been 
replaced by computers. Another way to view it is that the staff 
required for these tasks has been reduced to one small department - 
the IT department that keeps these computers working. Besides them, 
there are two roles left for human office workers: Interfacing 
between computers and humans, and that old limitation of the 
electronic brain, creativity.

These areas must have expanded not only to provide jobs to people 
who might once have done the job of computers today, but also to 
swallow up the expanding office workforce. Manufacturing jobs have 
shrunk to a fraction of what they were in the mid 20th century, and 
women are now expected to work after marriage. So what are they all 
doing? Presumably, a lot have gone into offices.

So the first role that they might take is providing a comfy, 
socially-acceptable, interface to computer systems that form the 
real gears of a modern organisation. But this implies that more of 
these interactions are required than they used to be. In fact far 
fewer are required - with computers now interacting directly with 
people over the internet in order to accomodate tasks like paying 
bills and taking orders. Even things like processing returns and 
complaints are outsourced to cheap foreigners with impenetrable 
accents by most of the larger businesses. I very rarely interact 
with an office worker, yet there are floors and floors of them 
working away every weekday, surely there wouldn't be that much work 
for them to do if other people are even vaguely like me.

I suppose that means they are being creative then - coming up with 
new ideas, designs, software to run on those computer that replaced 
their forbearers. But where is that creativity really going? On one 
hand the internet presented lots of opportunity for new and 
(unfortunately) ever-evolving design, but these people aren't all 
programmers. Also at the same time the internet has shrunk the 
world. Once two businesses at other ends of the country might have 
happily designed and made individual products both serving one 
identical need. The trouble of researching, ordering, paying-for, 
and receiving an item from some great distance away was enough that 
a customer would seek a product available locally. Similar 
difficulties made it harder for one business to operate in multiple 
distant locations, or to work with distributers so far away. 
Certainly many big businesses did manage this, but the difficulty 
as well as the limited practicality in niche industries meant that 
a lot more duplication of design work was economical to be 
performed by multiple businesses serving the same market, whereas 
today one business can dominate much more easily. Indeed with the 
internet even a small business can now dominate not only a country, 
but much of the world, even in a niche industry.

Are we just seing amazing levels of creativity and development 
then, unparalleled with past times where these human resources were 
less available and more widely distributed. No, frankly. At least 
in Australia, that's obvious.

So what are people doing? I can only guess that they _are_ in fact 
creating something: bureaucracy. Needless tasks to justify their 
own existance. Duplication of effort and unchecked inefficiency, 
communications that nobody reads about things that don't matter, 
clinging on to a role within the ever-shrinking range of tasks that 
their computers don't yet do alone. The net effect being only an 
increased drag on the organisation that they serve.

Is this sustainable? It doesn't seem like it. But of course people 
say that it is a system that has continued in the face of huge 
technological and social changes already, it has survived this long 
so it will do forever more. I think this forgets that the office 
has only existed for a few generations, being as it is an advent of 
only the 19th century, a side-effect of industrialisation. It's 
true that it has been ever evolving, but with a speed and 
unpredictability that has long defied estimates of what form it 
will take in the future. What is there to say that it will be able 
to sustain the employment of so many people? Or that it will even 
sustain itself against people's own desire to work?

Unchecked inefficiencies building up within a rigid system lead to 
the unexpected downfall of the Soviet Union just three decades ago.
Can we be so sure that our own economic structure is truely 
flexible enough to avoid a similar fate in the years to come?

- The Free Thinker.