The Tyranny of Convenience

Tim Wu, New York Times, Feb. 16, 2018
[JB full disclosure: I don't have a cell phone!
See below.]

uncaptioned image from article

Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world
today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s
unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s
incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial.

In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more
efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most
powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly
true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one
sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value.

As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, “Convenience decides
everything.” Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like
to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks
instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest is
best.

Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have
used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it
might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a
show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience
— not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of
dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.[JB emphasis]

For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater power of
convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where it is doing so much
to structure the modern economy. Particularly in tech-related industries, the battle
for convenience is the battle for industry dominance.

Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet
our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the
economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more
powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon.
Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.

Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is
worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I don’t want
to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On
the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to
contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most
vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.

But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex
relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted
as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of
smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges
that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what
we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.

It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we
let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.

Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, when labor-saving devices for the home were invented and marketed.
Milestones include the invention of the first “convenience foods,” such as canned
pork and beans and Quaker Quick Oats; the first electric clothes-washing machines;
cleaning products like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the
electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven.

Convenience was the household version of another late-19th-century idea,
industrial efficiency, and its accompanying “scientific management.” It represented
the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life.

However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind
from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would
create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of
devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us.
Convenience would make available to the general population the kind of freedom for
self-cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way convenience would
also be the great leveler.

This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its headiest
depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings of the mid-20th century.
From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics and from goofy entertainments like
“The Jetsons” we learned that life in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food
would be prepared with the push of a button. Moving sidewalks would do away with
the annoyance of walking. Clothes would clean themselves or perhaps self-destruct
after a day’s wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be
contemplated.

The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is
physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of
it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time-consuming
pursuits. Perhaps this is why, with every advance of convenience, there
have always been those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and
because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their
sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them.

By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to sputter. The
prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like society’s greatest aspiration.
Convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about people’s need to
express themselves, to fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with
nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the guitar
was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables or making one’s own
clothes. But such things were seen to have value nevertheless — or rather, as a result.
People were looking for individuality again.

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience
technologies — the period we are living in — would co-opt this ideal. It would
conveniencize individuality.

You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony Walkman
in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology
of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work
easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new
technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self-expression.

Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with his Walkman
and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment of his choosing. He is
enjoying, out in public, the kind of self-expression he once could experience only in
his private den. A new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if
only to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.

So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our existence. Most of the
powerful and important technologies created over the past few decades deliver
convenience in the service of personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR,
the playlist, the Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is
no longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that anyway. It
is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental exertion, required to choose
among the options that express ourselves. Convenience is one-click, one-stop
shopping, the seamless experience of “plug and play.” The ideal is personal
preference with no effort.

We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we
often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies
of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost,
and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get
music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the
iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally
downloading it. Convenient beat out free.

As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts
a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by
immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and
time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in
line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have
never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at which young
people vote).

The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of
individualization are technologies of mass individualization. Customization can be
surprisingly homogenizing. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the
most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in theory should
represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet Facebook seems to make us all
the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial
expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain
range we select as our background image.

I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways,
giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open-source encyclopedias)
where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about
having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are
thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks —
the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience
when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have
been removed?

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive
feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But
climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up
at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes.
We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.

Convenience has to serve something greater than itself, lest it lead only to more
convenience. In her 1963 classic, “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan looked at
what household technologies had done for women and concluded that they had just
created more demands. “Even with all the new labor-saving appliances,” she wrote,
“the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework than
her grandmother.” When things become easier, we can seek to fill our time with
more “easy” tasks. At some point, life’s defining struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny
chores and petty decisions.

An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is “easy” is
that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask. At the extreme, we don’t
actually do anything; we only arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a
life.

We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more of the
time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at least some
inconvenient choices. You need not churn your own butter or hunt your own meat,
but if you want to be someone, you cannot allow convenience to be the value that
transcends all others. Struggle is not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a
solution. It can be the solution to the question of who you are.

Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking
of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient
choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the
noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character
because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws,
with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients,
fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the
runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel against him.

Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the
risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world
and our place in it.

So let’s reflect on the tyranny of convenience, try more often to resist its
stupefying power, and see what happens. We must never forget the joy of doing
something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest.
The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a
life of total, efficient conformity.

Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia, the author of “The Attention Merchants: The
Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads” and a contributing opinion writer.