With digitization, companies have transferred to users part of the work that they provided and that they have assumed naturally without receiving anything in return. It is known as “ghost work”.
The ordering machine hangs on the back wall of the shop, right next to a counter where employees are dressed as Austrian mountaineers. In the queue that has been made in front of the machine, the young people are the fastest. They comfortably scroll through the menu, scroll back and forth. Families are slower, and some take a long time. In front of us, a couple discusses in front of their children which of the two does worse. The employees of this well-known fast food establishment in Barcelona wait for the orders to arrive and watch the queue in silence. They don't seem affected at all. From time to time, when the queue gets too long, one of them comes out of the bar to clear the traffic jam.
Economists predict that the number of jobs that will be lost to automation in the next ten years will be very significant. Almost all in the service sector. And what makes the situation in this place that serves sandwiches, salads and pizza extraordinary is that the employees indifferently watch as the customers learn to destroy their way of working (something that, from the faces they make, they don't seem to appreciate too much). .
The day this apprenticeship ends, the company will dispense with the waiters. They will no longer be needed because customers will have replaced them. They will be the ones who will do all the work. They will enter the establishment, place the order and sit at a table where a small lighting device (or a vibrator) will be installed to announce that the food is ready to be picked up at the counter.
What is happening in this restaurant chain is not exceptional. Mobile phones have been used for years to make reservations in bars and restaurants. We contract hotels and rooms, we fight with flight reservations and, if these are cancelled, we venture into the maze of claims. We have assumed (in many cases with enthusiasm) the work that the employees of the travel agencies did. Later the agencies, a great majority, closed.
We remotely carry out complex operations with banks, such as contracting and signing a credit policy. And if one day we enter an office, it is for something exceptional and we almost apologize for it. The list of activities in which we lose hours includes insurance, enrollment in colleges and universities, healthcare... Not counting the apps that take up –literally– what used to be our free time.
Capitalism is that flexible. Activities that were previously done in the family environment (cooking, cleaning, repairing, taking care of children) have been outsourced and we pay for them. And, in parallel, we have gone from paying for services that were previously offered to us to assuming them as our own activity without hardly realizing it. And without charging. It is our free work every day.
In 1981, the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich called these unpaid economic activities “ghost work” (shadow work) (beginning with women's work in the home and ending in services). In 2015, the concept became part of the economic literature when an editor from Harvard Magazine, Craig Lambert, reported in a book how the digital world and automation were allowing companies to save costs by transferring work that they assumed to users. of natural form.
This week, Rana Forohaar, a popular commentator for the Financial Times, wondered if the rise in “ghost work” might not have to do with the economy's chronically low productivity in recent years. The cost-cutting obsession is one of the usual suspects. But what is now raising questions is the excess of expectations that have been placed on digitization and on the ability of people to combine all that work. Either paid or unpaid.
Multitasking , the apparent human ability to juggle several tasks at once, was first described in an IBM paper in 1965. As soon as it was published, psychologists warned that multitasking could cause wasted time and errors due to lack of attention. But the advent of the internet popularized that ability. It was argued that although the older generations had difficulties adapting, the younger ones, those born with the Internet, handled different tasks with natural ease. Today no one would sign something like that. Years of working remotely during the pandemic lockdowns have not borne out that claim.
Cal Newport, a Georgetown computer science professor, is the strongest in his arguments. For the author of Deep Work, translated here as Focus, the digital world (that of email, instant messages and remote meetings) is not as easy as thought. According to him, it is not surprising: very little time has passed to correctly use technologies that appeared in the second half of the 90s. He thinks that multitasking is virtually impossible. And that one cannot jump from one place to another without a cascade of cognitive changes that immediately lead to low productivity.
As I write this article, I am in conversations via messenger with five other people and will have responded to at least six phone calls. By the time you finish the article, you may not remember some of the things I said or how I said them. But that's multitasking.
