Geek Heresy (9 page)

So it’s not that technology prevents true connection. The problem is that technology also makes it easy to have thin, empty interactions. In the choice between a challenging intimacy and casual fun, some of us choose the latter. One reason why some people can’t stop fiddling with their phones is something called FOMO – “the fear of missing out.”
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The fear of missing out on a better party, a better evening, a better life.

But again, the technology doesn’t cause this behavior; it just amplifies the underlying personality, turning us into caricatures of ourselves. I have friends whose handsets I’ve never seen. When we sit down for a meal, their phones stay in their purses or pockets. If there’s a ring, they ignore it. At the other extreme, I have acquaintances with whom conversation devolves to a few words between interruptions. Even when they’re not texting, their fidgety glances land on their phones like mosquitos seeking a soft patch of skin. Over time, I’ve come to see FOMO as just one of many causes of smartphone obsession. There’s also ATUS, addiction to useless stimulation; PORM, pleasure of receiving messages; SWAP, seeing work as priority; UTSI, the urge to seem important; and any number of other latent emotional tics that are exacerbated by the technology. The fact that owners of the same kind of device display a diverse range of behaviors is another sign that the technology is amplifying what’s already there, not causing the same response in everyone.

Commentators have thought hard about what made the Walkman and the iPhone such successes, but no one asks why there’s no mass market for the Itchman. This lopsided focus on technologies that “succeed” blocks us from seeing the full picture. It’s like the pundits who forgot Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Claims of the Internet’s democratizing power fail to take into account the many things that the Internet hasn’t democratized, such as wealth, power, and genius.

When evaluating theories of technology, we should look at a wide range of contexts. Our conclusions should come not just from isolated instances or personal experience, but from all kinds of uses in all kinds of circumstances. In this chapter, I examine a smattering of examples: from electronic medical records to corporate knowledge management,
from politics in America to Chinese media censorship. It won’t be comprehensive. But out of these scattershot case studies, a pattern will become clear.

Along the way, I’ll also demolish a few persistent myths. It’s often said that technology is a cost-saver; or that “big data” makes business problems transparent; or that social media brings people together; or that digital systems level playing fields. These kinds of statements are repeated so often that few people question them. Yet none of them is a die-cast truth.

If Hippocrates Were an Economist

One of information technology’s great benefits, supposedly, is its ability to lower costs. Walmart, for example, is famous for its digital stock-keeping. Its databases know exactly what’s on the shelves, and they automatically inform suppliers which stores are low on stock. The system keeps inventories razor-thin and costs low. And it all seems to be about technology – databases, barcode readers, RFID-encoded pallets, and so on.

You might think, then, that some of our greatest cost-control challenges could be solved with IT. A conspicuous target in America is our health-care system. In fact, electronic medical records have firm bipartisan support even in an era of political deadlock. President Barack Obama has called for electronic medical records since before his days in the White House, citing efficiency and cost savings.
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And the GOP Doctors Caucus, formed by Representatives Phil Gingrey and Tim Murphy, states, “Health information technology has the potential to save more than $81 billion annually in health care costs. From drastically reducing medical errors to streamlining administration, health IT is the key to transforming our healthcare system.”
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Unfortunately, cost containment also follows the Law of Amplification. In the American health-care system, very few people are really focused on reducing costs. As a result, every new technology is a white elephant – a “gift” you have to keep paying for. Many of us, sadly, are familiar with this state of affairs. A few years ago, I went to see a specialist
in neuro-ophthalmology because I had lost partial vision in my right eye. After asking me some questions and peering into my pupil, the doctor said, “Well, there’s no clear problem, so it could be nerve damage. If it is, there’s not much we can do. But,” he said, smiling conspiratorially, “since you have good insurance, let’s do an MRI.” I agreed because I had no reason not to. I was lucky to have insurance with no co-pay. When I saw the invoice for the visit, the line item just for the MRI showed $1,800. I was shocked, though grateful that my insurance covered the expense. The doctor’s office never called me for a follow-up, the MRI scan was never consulted, and my right-eye problems persist.

Unlike at Walmart, where digital tools amplify the company’s zealous pursuit of lower costs, in US health care, technology intensifies all the ways in which spending is encouraged. Our hypochondria as patients, our foibles as doctors, our greed as suppliers, and our myopia as policymakers – all are social forces that the technology regrettably amplifies. Even the employers and governments that foot the bill cast their payments as benefits to employees and citizens. They don’t penny-pinch, for fear of appearing cavalier about people’s lives. On top of everything else, our metrics are off. As Princeton University economist Uwe Reinhardt noted, “Every dollar of health care spending is someone’s health care income.”
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That income flows right into our national gross domestic product (GDP), and we want the GDP to rise, don’t we?

Of course, technology also amplifies good health-care trends, and that’s terrific for those who can afford it. But if lowering costs is the goal, more technology isn’t a surefire solution. In the four decades since 1970 – a period during which digital technologies poured into hospitals and clinics – American health-care costs rose in real terms by a factor of five. The increase has been far greater than in other developed countries.
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Information technology was probably not the main cause, but it certainly didn’t turn the tide. (Nor did we get what we paid for: American life expectancy during that period only increased by eight years. That’s fewer than the nine years gained in the United Kingdom and the eleven gained in Japan, even though they spent a lot less.
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)

So lower costs aren’t a function of the technology itself. If anything, digital technologies require additional upkeep. For example, in 2010
when I left Microsoft, the firm employed over 4,000 full-time people to keep its own IT systems running. That’s nearly 5 percent of the company’s workforce. (Similar proportions hold for any large technology company.
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) If technology companies – which work hard to automate everything – have to spend 5 percent of their human resources managing IT, imagine how much more difficult it is for other organizations.

Especially in the context of US health care, digital tools just amplify what is already an outrageous system of accounting. Recent exposés show that patients are billed excessive prices routinely: $24 for a niacin tablet that comes to 5 cents at drug stores; $333 for a chest X-ray costing less than $30; $49,237 for a neurostimulator that wholesales at $19,000 and might cost only $4,500 to manufacture.
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In this climate, hospital administrators will be happy to install electronic medical records and pass on the costs to patients and taxpayers at a markup.

Managing “Knowledge Management”

So, contrary to popular belief, digitization by itself doesn’t necessarily reduce costs. What about improving organizational behavior? Won’t computers solve our knowledge-management problems? And won’t “big data” make traditional decision-making obsolete?

As with cost cutting, information technologies
can
improve knowledge exchange and transparency, but they don’t do so automatically. Curiously, a group of people who I thought would resist that message turned out to be sympathetic. They understood exactly what I was saying.

One of them was Jorge Perez-Luna. He’s held titles like chief information officer and VP of IT at telecommunications companies including AT&T, Motorola, and Nextel. At one company, Perez-Luna was asked by his CEO to implement a computerized order-tracking system for their sales office in Brazil. The office was consistently underperforming, and the boss wanted a fix. He thought that by installing a database to track sales, he could find the problem.

Perez-Luna sent a small team on an exploratory mission. They found that “one employee had a drawer full of signed contracts, all of which were uncollectibles” – outstanding payments due from customers. “And he wasn’t an exception.” It turned out that salespeople were rewarded for signing deals, but they didn’t follow up with customers. Managers set quotas for new contracts, but there were no processes in place to handle uncollectibles. The sales staff didn’t know how much income they were bringing in, and they didn’t have any reason to care. As Perez-Luna put it, “payments to the company just weren’t being prioritized.”

Perez-Luna reported back. Without plugging that managerial hole first, he told his boss, technology wouldn’t do much good. He recommended more oversight and a shift in priorities. Not only had he saved the company money by avoiding an expensive digital solution, but he had identified the true problem. “I’m an IT guy,” he said, “but some of my best friends have training in anthropology. They are good at seeing the human issues behind technology.”

New laptops don’t necessarily make employees more productive. State-of-the-art data centers don’t cause better strategic thinking. And knowledge-management systems don’t cause rival departments to share information with one another. Yet CIOs everywhere are asked to perform exactly that sort of wizardry. The more experienced ones are careful not to promise too much. Technology can improve systems that are already working – a kind of amplification – but it doesn’t fix systems that are broken. There is no knowledge management without management.

In large organizations such as universities, governments, and corporations, one hand frequently doesn’t know what the other hand is doing. To break down silos, it’s tempting to set up Web portals and internal social media sites, but the real issues are almost always those of management, internal politics, and even limited human attention. Unless those social problems are dealt with, technology doesn’t have a base to amplify. Especially in a world where everything is already digitized, knowledge-management systems and online clearinghouses are rarely the bottleneck. To clear organizational obstacles, the counterintuitive
solution in an age of bountiful technology is to focus on building effective human relationships.

Reach Out and Touch Your Tribe

Speaking of relationships, technology is often believed to enhance them. Nokia’s tagline is “Connecting People,” and AT&T once used the slogan “Reach out and touch someone.” There’s no doubt that communication technologies help people connect, but there are at least two ways in which this could happen. Option A says that better tools help us communicate with people we are already inclined to communicate with. Option B says that better tools cause communication to occur where none previously existed or was desired.

Amplification votes for option A: We use new tools to communicate more with people we want to connect with anyway. A host of evidence supports this conclusion. For example, a Pew Research Center study shows that, on average, about 92 percent of our Facebook friends are real-world acquaintances, not random people we’ve connected with because of the Internet.
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Other studies show that people collaborate more with those they are physically close to already.
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Despite email and Twitter, a single flight of stairs between offices can inhibit working together. All of this is to say that we use electronic communication to strengthen – amplify – preferred relationships.

Option B leads to the misguided belief that more connectivity brings
everyone
closer together. As one utopian put it, “People will communicate more freely and . . . the effect will be to increase understanding, foster tolerance, and ultimately promote worldwide peace.”
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This may sound horribly naïve, but the author, Frances Cairncross, is hardly an intellectual lightweight. She has been a journalist for
The Guardian
and
The Economist
and has held top posts at Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council as well as the British Science Association.

It’s easy to see that more communication tools don’t lead to better relationships or mutual understanding where neither previously existed. Consider that the United States has never before had as many
communication options as it has now. In the 1970s, having a television meant access to ABC, CBS, NBC, and maybe a staticky PBS. Today it means cable service, Internet streaming, and access to hundreds of channels. In the 1970s, most households had landlines, but only the Yellow Pages for one town or city. Today you can look up just about anyone online and call them on the move. In the 1970s, only the geek elite used email. Today everyone texts, tweets, and posts to Instagram. Yet none of this extra connectivity seems to be bridging the chasm between the political left and right. If anything, the gulf is widening.

What is actually happening was predicted by MIT professors Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson as early as 1996 – two years before Google and eight years before Facebook. “Internet users,” they wrote, “can seek out interactions with like-minded individuals who have similar values” while minimizing interactions with those whose values differ.
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Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson called this phenomenon “cyberbalkanization”; psychologists call it “selective exposure.”
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Online, you can find self-reinforcing groups of white supremacists on the one hand, and free-loving hippies on the other. And the effect goes well beyond the Internet. Thus liberals watch Jon Stewart, while conservatives watch Glenn Beck. Gone are the days when Americans all tuned into Walter Cronkite and heard the same news with the same commentary. The danger of cyberbalkanization is that people become radicalized, intolerant, and “less likely to trust important decisions to people whose values differ from their own.”
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