Daily Archives: October 8, 2010

IT.

I’m not an expert. But I did have creds, you know, before I left the industry.

And I’m not basing any of this on hard fact or statistics, mostly because I’m too lazy and busy with other shit to gather it or them.

So call all of this woolgathering. It’s an old word meaning an indulgence in aimless thought.

Which is what this is. Aimless thought- so indulge me.

IT. Information Technology.

Over the last several years, I’ve been working and thinking and listening to people and watching the news and reading stuff and today it all kinda coalesced into this-

I think we’re at the BEGINNING of a new age. A technological revolution. Call it the IT AGE, call it the March of Technology, call it whatever you want. I realize, I know, we’ve had computers and IT for years but the paradigm has shifted and grown ominous.

This isn’t about the happily texting and sexting.

It’s more about the Industrial Revolution that shoved us as a people from agrarian farm folk into towns and factories and office cubicles.

I think the IT AGE revolution is gonna completely strip the gears and bitch-slap our lives as we used to know them.

And I think it’s gonna hurt more than we know.

Smaller, faster, and more portable means no reason for a fixed address. Why have an office building when all your employees can work from wherever via laptop and internet teleconferencing? And let’s don’t forget IM and tweeting.

If you think the residential collapse was bad, wait for commercial real estate to tank. That’ll be a fun ride.

Anyway.

Besides office buildings standing empty, think about the way you shop. Amazon and the everything stores online, self checkout at the grocery store. They all add up to more for less. More shopping and less employees.

And as those jobs go away, they ain’t comin’ back. Not never.

So what’s the answer?

There isn’t one. Like the farmers generations ago standing in their fields and staring at the factories and cities they didn’t want to live in and wondering what was gonna happen, we’re caught up in something way bigger and massively more generational than we could possibly hope to alter or change.

So anyway.

Aimless thoughts, woolgathering really, on a really pretty day working outside building a deck.

Forgive me