Welcome to a post-virus world where Superman is a techie
• The changes to our daily lives have been swift and profound, thanks to Covid-19 lockdowns
There is a meme doing the rounds, a simple image of a question with multiple-choice answers. It reads: “Who led the digital transformation of your company? A) CEO B) CTO or C) Covid-19.” Covid-19 is circled. After talk about digital readiness for decades, it took the novel coronavirus three months or so to completely change the world, prepared or not.
Knowledge workers, with the exception of those on the front line, are working from home wherever possible. Many firms have had to scramble, and many more to fundamentally rethink what productivity looks like when you’re judged on output and not proximity. If you’re a people manager inclined to clock watch and micromanage, you’re probably in a hell of your own making right now.
We talk about the need for businesses to be agile, to respond quickly as conditions change, but this situation is proving the point that agility is a people thing as much as it is a systems thing.
Netflix and other streaming consumption is through the roof, but so is the user-base growth of services such as Zoom and Houseparty, which have grown exponentially. It underlines the idea that whether it is at work or for social, people want and need face-to-face interaction. Incidentally, The New York Times has done a great feature on how our internet use has changed in response to the virus, so if graphs and stats are your thing I highly recommend it.
Many labour-heavy industries locally have been resistant to mechanisation and automation in particular, for obvious and utterly understandable reasons. No-one wants to be in charge of the shift that sends millions of unskilled workers back to a state of unemployed despair, especially not in a country with inequality of gargantuan proportions. Now, as reported in Business Day on Monday, the Minerals Council SA is issuing dire warnings for the mining industry and its workers if we don’t see a return to work at the end of the 21-day national lockdown.
Was there a way for us to shift towards automation, to retrain workers en masse before this, that could have limited the damage? Australia and Canada, with their extensive social welfare, decided it needed doing. Could we have?
Should we be asking the same questions about digital transformation of schooling, or why internet access has been so tremendously slow to penetrate beyond the urban middle class?
To be clear, I do not intend to be flippant about lives and incomes. Real people are dying of Covid-19 and many more just-as-real people will die from the broader effects of Covid-19, which in some countries will include preventable starvation. Many entrepreneurs are living on a knife’s edge as a result, and the billionaires’ funds and loans won’t be able to save them all.
Obviously, inequality and social woes have existed before this, but the pandemic is showing them to us in undeniable technicolour right now.
And that other scourge of digital — fake news — is now a punishable offence (as I wrote last week), and we’re starting to see it play out in real life. YouTube and Facebook are taking bold steps to shut down disinformation.
Yesterday, Whatsapp (owned by Facebook) announced an interesting shift: if you want to forward a message that has been already forwarded five or more times you will be able to do so only one contact at a time. This is a further restriction of last year’s “five-contacts” limit.
Messaging services such as Whatsapp and Messenger are considered “dark social” in that we cannot see what is being said within them, compared with Twitter, which is inherently public. It’s hard to counter or even respond to fake news on dark social, because you cannot even assess the claims therein. So Whatsapp’s decision to restrict highly frequently forwarded media is the digital equivalent of social distancing.
It’s not a cure, but it will probably go a long way towards slowing down the spread of what the World Health Organisation is now calling an infodemic.
I don’t make a habit of enjoying other people’s misfortune, but we’re all locked in our houses so I let myself have this lockdown treat as my sole schadenfreude moment of the week: the earbud-in-nose guy who created a fake viral video about contaminated Covid-19 tests in SA, was arrested.
Whether these changes will be long-term or not (hell, whether the pandemic will be longterm or not) is a matter of debate, but for now the changes to our daily lives have been swift and profound, with many technology firms emerging as new potential superpowers.
I am looking forward to writing on something else to viruses, anything else, as much as you’re looking forward to reading about it, but in the midst of the pandemic we must choose what elements of our new lives we want to keep and what we can’t wait to throw in the bin along with our face masks when they have served their purpose.
Is there any difference between speculation and gambling? Speculation is a venture based upon calculation. Gambling is a venture without calculation.
All business is more or less speculation. The term “speculation”, however, is commonly restricted to business of exceptional uncertainty. The uninitiated believe that chance is so large a part of speculation that it is subject to no rules, is governed by no laws. This is a serious error. Let us first consider the qualities essential to the equipment of a speculator: 1. Self-reliance: A man must think for himself, must follow his own convictions. Self-trust is the foundation of successful effort. 2. Judgment: That equipoise, that nice adjustment of the facilities one to the other, which is called a good judgment, is an essential. 3. Courage: That is the confidence to act on the decision of the mind. In speculation, there is value in Mirabeau’s dictum: Be bold, still be bold, always be bold. 4. Prudence: The power of measuring the danger, together with a certain alertness and watchfulness, is important. There should be a balance to these two, prudence and courage; prudence in contemplation, courage in execution. Connected with these qualities is a third: promptness. The mind convinced, the act should follow. Think, act, promptly. 5. Pliability: The ability to change an opinion. “He who observes,” says Emerson, “and observes again, is always formidable”.
The qualifications named are necessary to the makeup of a speculator, but they must be in well-balanced combination. A deficiency or an over plus of one quality will destroy the effectiveness of all. The possession of such faculties, in a proper adjustment is, of course, uncommon. In speculation, as in life, few succeed, many fail.
INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL WOES HAVE EXISTED BEFORE, BUT THE PANDEMIC IS SHOWING THEM IN TECHNICOLOUR
THE DECISION TO RESTRICT MUCH FORWARDED MEDIA IS THE DIGITAL EQUIVALENT OF SOCIAL DISTANCING