For several years, I’ve had the not-uncommon feeling that public life and many everyday experiences are getting worse. In this post I want to attempt to identify and articulate the reasons underlying these feelings. The common thread is technology.
There is a looong tradition, going back to at least the Ancient Greeks (in the Western world) lamenting how things were better back in the day. In fact, this lament is so common throughout history that it has recently culminated in a trope–“OK, boomer.”
To be sure, there is a real and misguided tendency to romanticize the past. But for a long time I’ve been agitated by a nagging feeling that this time is different. Many aspects of social life and everyday experience really are worse. Beyond shaking my fist at the sky, I didn’t have a good way of articulating what was underlying this feeling. This is my attempt to do so.
The story begins with two common observations that, taken together, give rise to a paradox: First, we seem to be inundated with customer feedback surveys. No matter how trivial the interaction with a business or institution, we inevitably receive a request to fill out a customer feedback survey. The second observation is that, in many industries, customer service seems worse than ever.
How does this make sense? If we’re constantly filling out customer feedback surveys, we should be living in the golden age of customer service. What explains this paradox?
Let’s begin by examining the first observation…
Part 1: Death by a Thousand Surveys
Our committee was discussing how to get more people to attend our monthly educational event. I don’t know if it was because it was the end of the year and I was burnt out or something else. I managed to start out speaking “professionally,” but my filter failed me shortly after. I couldn’t restrain myself anymore:
“I think we should reconsider giving out surveys after each educational event. I’m concerned that people may have survey burnout. I mean, for the love of Pete, you can’t even order a freakin’ burrito anymore without someone asking you to fill out a survey. Do we really need to impose this on people? Do we really have no idea what makes for a quality educational event?”
On the bus ride home that evening, I realized the situation is actually worse. Not only can you not even order a burrito or receive any kind of service without someone asking you to fill out a customer feedback survey but you literally can’t even take a shit without someone asking you for feedback. As you walk out of the restroom, many fast food chains, gas station, and airports solicit you with some kind of “how did we do/how was your shit?” JFC.
To quote my dad during my childhood, “CAN’T I POOP IN PEACE?”
Why did this annoy me so much? There are many reasonable arguments against me. These are probably the two main ones:
- Non-obligation: Well, no one is making you fill out the surveys. If you don’t want to fill one out, don’t do it. Stop making such a big deal out of it.
- Help us help you: All of these business and institutions want to serve you better. They’re collecting feedback from you to serve you better. Why are you against businesses serving you better?
Let’s start with non-obligation. Yes, it’s true. I’m not obliged to fill out every inevitable survey I get after even the most minimal engagement with an entity. But there’s an intrusiveness to the constant requests that degrades the quality of my day.
To illustrate, let’s take it out of the digital world. Imagine if all day, every day, every single person you interact with asks you to do a small favor for them. Sure, you could say no to each of them. They are only requests, after all. But the constant barrage of requests does something to the quality of our daily experience. Our day would feel different if we weren’t faced with constant requests for favors
But it’s not just the quantity of requests that aggrieves but also the norm violation. Suppose everyone, every day that you interact with asks you for a small favor. There are certain social norms which govern when and to whom it is appropriate to request a favor. In our ‘meatspace’ lives, we don’t just go around willy nilly asking people for favors. We understand that the appropriateness of asking people for favors, even if small, depends on the kind of relationship we have with them along with other contextual facts. The inevitable survey we receive after every transaction violates this norm. It’s indifferent to relationship and context.
Regular norm violations that are not punished lead to norm degradation and, later, obliteration. And that is exactly the situation we find ourselves in now. The norm against (businesses) asking for “little favors” is all but gone.
In the predigital world, businesses adhered to this norm much more rigorously than now. But the digital world has lead to this norm’s obliteration.
But wait! It gets worse!
To understand what’s driving all of this we need to consider two important prescient observations philosopher Jacques Ellul made back in the 1950s. First, as a technology makes an activity less costly, the presence of/demand/expectation for that activity will increase. Second, and relatedly, a technological society is defined by the prioritization of efficiency over all other values. And we live in a technological society. [Note: It’s possible for societies to use technology but not be technological societies. I discuss this distinction later.]
Consider for a moment how a business might have acquired customer feedback in the pre-digital age. It would have been incredibly costly. You’d probably need to hire and pay people to go out into the world and speak directly with customers and record their answers on a piece of paper. Then someone would have to manually tabulate all the survey answers from those many pieces of paper. It was incredibly time consuming and (therefore) costly. Given the costs, customer feedback campaigns were not something to be done willy nilly.
Compare that to the cost of sending out and analyzing customer feedback surveys now. Everything is digitized and automatic. It’s virtually free to send a survey to every customer’s phone or email for every individual interaction. Results are also automatically calculated and analyzed on cheap software. This is one of many instantiations of Ellul’s observation that as a technology reduces the costliness and increases the efficiency of an activity, the expectation/presence of that activity increases.
A related point here has to do with Ellul’s second observation regarding the nature of a technological society. Recall that a technological society is one in which efficiency is prioritized over all other values. What does this mean in concrete terms? Look at how much more efficient it is to conduct customer surveys now. From the point of view of a technological society, there is no question about whether or not to do it: Technology has made frequently surveying all customers very efficient, therefore we should do it.
But if you lived in a non-technological society the conclusion wouldn’t follow automatically–even given access to the same technologies. In such a society, you would also have to ask, what other values might we displace if we constantly conduct customer surveys? And here you might think about norm degradation surrounding asking for favors and what value we place on that norm relative to the efficient and timely gathering of customer attitudes.
One of my favorite points that Ellul makes is that, within a technological society, the person who questions the deployment of a new technology that increases efficiency necessarily appears to be a madman. They are “constantly put on their back foot.” On what rational grounds can one argue against efficiency? As he puts it, within the context of a technological society it’s like arguing against 2+2=4. How can you possibly oppose doing something more efficiently? Are you mad?
Yes. Yes, I must be. I place more value on pre-digital norms surrounding asking for favors than asking as many people, as frequently as possible, “how satisfied were you by the customer service call/burrito/shit on a scale of 1 to 5?”
But wait! It gets worse!
The other pernicious aspect of all this is the asymmetry in time, effort, and expectations. Customer surveys offload customer research and quality control onto the customer. The effort (if you can call it that) for a business to send and run analytics on a service quality survey is orders of magnitude less than the time and effort they are asking from you.
Ok, maybe you get to enter for a chance to win a free burrito or some shit. But notice the asymmetry in expectations. If we ask a business to do even the most trivial thing, they will charge us for it. Now, they expect us to do quality control for them rather than sending someone out and doing it.
I think this asymmetry in expectations combined with the offloading of labor is a big part of the feeling that gnaws at me. We are witnessing the restructuring of the social contract from “we provide service, you pay us money” to “you pay us money, provide free labor and data, and we will provide the lowest level of service we can get away with.”
But wait! It gets worse!
Let’s turn to the second argument against me: The ol’ “help us, help you.” How are we supposed to serve you better if you don’t tell us how we’re doing and how we can do better?”
My sweet child. Do you really believe that these businesses are collecting this data to serve you better? The purpose of customer surveys is to optimize extraction and to identify just how little service can be provided without causing significant defection.
Where do you think airlines got the data to come up with the stratification of service levels to assist you when they delay or cancel one of their flights? Or to charge extra for anything more than one carry-on bag? Or to charge you for the privilege of choosing to sit beside your family member or friend during a 6 hour flight?
Customer survey data is used to benefit them not us. If it benefits customers in any way, this is just a fluke convergence of interests.
If the primary purpose of survey data were to improve the customer experience, why does service in just about every industry feel much worse than it was 20 years ago? With the never-ending swarm of customer surveys, shouldn’t we be living in a golden age of customer service?
Instead we see longer hold times (when was the last time you called a business that wasn’t experiencing “longer than average hold times”), outsourced call centers with less authority to solve problems, automated systems designed to frustrate you into giving up (this is a well-documented business strategy here, here to name a few), and elimination of human contact points. How many times have you (I!) yelled into the phone, “I JUST WANT TO TALK TO A FUCKING HUMAN BEING.”
At this point you may be thinking, I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill. I mean, c’mon! We’re just talking about customer surveys. If this is your biggest concern in life, you’ve got it pretty good. No one cares, work harder. Blah, blah, blah. I get it.
Fair enough. But I’ve got different grievances. These ones aren’t survey related. I promise!
Part 2: Optimized Extraction and The Death of Las Vegas
Vegas’ growth and eventual dominance as a favored travel destination is primarily due to its historical business strategy: Provide excellent value. Rooms and meals were cheap or even comped because casinos focused primarily on making money from gambling. That business model is dead. I
I used to live in Las Vegas from 2007 until 2014 and returned every summer to teach at UNLV until 2018. I’d had the good fortune of living in Vegas in the last decade of its historical business model. Last August I returned to Las Vegas with my wife and daughter–this time as a tourist. I was competing in the World Masters BJJ Championship which was taking place at the Convention Center on the Strip. Not wanting to deal with stressful transportation to the event, I rented a room walking distance to the event center.
Please indulge me as I tell you about my trip. I promise it will be relevant…
First of all, unlike when I lived there, the hotel casinos now charge for parking. So, right off the bat, before you’ve even checked in you’re hit with additional fees if you rented a car or drove. But this is only first assault of the new business model. At check in you’re then hit a daily “resort” fee on top of your room fee. At our hotel it was $50.00 per DAY on top of the advertised room rate I’d booked.
So, in addition to the usual grumpiness that comes with a long travel day, I’ve already been hit with not unsubstantial additional fees.
Then as I walk from the check in to my elevator I’m approached by wandering hotel staff trying to rope me into a time share sales meeting. Dude! Can I just get to my fucking room?
Next thing I notice in the room is that there is no coffeemaker. This is to ensure that in the morning you stumble out of your room and purchase overpriced coffee from the coffee shop in the lobby. Of course, this is the case for every guest in the hotel. Ah! yes, the best way to start your day is to stand in a 20 min line first thing in the morning before I’ve had any coffee.
Out of respect for the reader’s time I won’t list every offense. What I’ve said so far should be sufficient to illustrate the new Vegas business model. Deception, nickel and dime, optimize extraction. If I sat down and tried to create a worse customer experience, I’m honestly not sure if I could do it. What I’d experienced was very different from the Vegas I’d known. I can assure you I will never go back to stay on the Vegas Strip.
OK, so why am I telling you this?
Concentration of Capital
Part of this story is obviously about a particular kind capitalism but it’s also about the technology that enables it. The capitalist part goes something like this:
Back in the 1970s, Milton Friedman popularized the idea that the sole purpose of a business is to maximize shareholder wealth. It took a while for this idea to become entrenched in business schools and among executives, but over time it became the norm. It’s worth noting, that this norm wasn’t aways the default: CEOs coming out of WWII explicitly recognized broad stakeholders and social responsibility–workers, communities, and long-term stability–even if they imperfectly recognized this in practice.
Another part of this story involves concentration of capital in fewer and fewer organizations over time, leading to progressively greater power to control and shape an industry. Large financial organizations leverage market power to buy smaller competitors and to impose barriers to entry through regulatory capture–both of which effectively eliminate competition (and therefore competing business models from which consumers may choose).
Prior to 2008, most major casinos in Vegas were still owned by their founders or founder families. They followed the tried and true old Vegas business model of providing value. Most importantly, they took a long-term view of their business. This wasn’t necessarily benevolence: they likely want to pass on a strong business/legacy to their children.
But around 2010 a few private equity firms bought up the major casinos. These firms are governed by different incentive structures which lead to different priorities on different timelines. Basically, all incentives point to business strategies that increase quarterly profits–regardless of how that might affect long-term business.
First, the primary shareholders are not local and have no tangible connections to the Las Vegas community. The scope of who matters in decision-making shrinks to shareholders only, a la Friedman. Second, the median length of time for a S&P 500 CEO to stay at a company is 4.8 years. They’re making decisions for an institution that will outlive their tenure by decades, but they’re judged quarterly. This shifts business strategy to heavily favor short term profits. Also, CEO pay is usually tied to stock prices. Couple this with shareholder pressure to always increase quarterly profits and the fact that business consultants are paid according to their ability to demonstrate immediate measurable increases in profit and you get massive pressure from many actors to adopt strategies that favor short term profit increases over long term viability (to say nothing of customer experience). Who cares if a business fails when you are no longer there?
Basically, you end up with business strategies designed to optimize extraction: how can we squeeze every penny out of this person before they leave the property? Because profit must increase every quarter, leadership and business consultants have to come up with yet another way to squeeze even more money out of people: It’s always going to be one of two things: Give people less (reduce costs) or charge people more/for things that were previously free (increase revenue).
This explains a lot of all the nickel and diming, obfuscation of additional fees, removal of coffee machines, accosting guests with timeshare pitches, parking fees, and basically everything that made the experience so awful that I never want to stay on the strip again. But the extraction model requires something else to work at scale: the ability to measure, optimize, and standardize every interaction. Which brings us to…
But wait! It gets worse!
Technology, Quantification, and Standardization
That’s the capitalism part of the story, but for my purposes, I’m interested in the technological drivers of these trends.
Technology, and especially digital technology, is intimately tied to what I call “the tyranny of quantification.” In lay terms, quantification is the ability to measure and put a number on something. Recall what Ellul says: the more efficiently an activity can be performed, the greater the expectation/pressure for that activity to be performed.
We now have a ton of fancy technologies that can, in real time, efficiently (cheaply) measure all kinds of things and perform sophisticated analyses. Hence, there will be among business managers and consultants an expectation–a tendency–to measure lots of stuff. This is old news.
What really matters here is a displacement effect. Things like stock price, costs, revenue, profit are all really easy to measure and so business analysis will focus on these metrics. The same goes for customer satisfaction surveys: It’s really easy to ask people to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 their satisfaction with the food, wait times, service agents, cleanliness of a room, etc…
However, the meaning and meaningfulness of an experience is not easily quantifiable because these involve narrative and description. These sorts of questions are qualitative: What was it like for you? Explain your experience. Hence, in the quantification-obsessed business culture, these sorts of questions will rarely be asked of customers/patrons and therefore rarely taken into account in developing business plans.
Ignoring qualitative information can leads to business plans like the new Vegas. In the old Vegas plan, room and food prices were subsidized by gambling revenue. So, even if a customer in 2001 (or earlier) ultimately gave the casino the same amount of money (in inflation adjusted dollars) by the end of their trip as someone in 2020, the experience feels very different. In the first case, I feel like I got a good deal. My room was cheap or comped, my food and drinks were cheap or free. No one was nickel and diming me, there was no price obfuscation. It was my choice to gamble. I got free stuff! What a great deal! I’ll be back next year.
In the new business model, a customer might pay the same amount by the time they leave. But the experience is awful. The pettiness of removing coffee machines from the room then having to wait 20min in line for coffee is hard to overlook. And while I’m on vacation, I can’t even walk through the hotel lobby without someone trying to rope me into sales pitch? And you’re going to charge me a daily parking fee on top of my room and resort fee? Naw. Fuck this place.
Notice that this pattern is present anywhere private equity is involved: Healthcare, the movie theatre, the airline industry, etc… One of the most recent intrusions of private equity is into veterinary care. If you’ve noticed the cost of caring for your animals has skyrocketed, private equity has been buying up independent veterinary clinics and hospitals and jacking up the prices.
But wait! It gets worse!
There’s something else that the tyranny of quantification combined with private equity ownership/capital concentration does to our daily experience in public life. It removes a sense of place and authenticity from any commercial experience and renders it purely transactional.
Let me explain.
Part 3: The Blueberry Hill I’m Prepared to Die On
When I lived in Vegas, my (now) wife and I used to regularly get late night meals at a local diner called Blueberry Hill. The food was OK and it was clean enough. Solid 3.5 stars across the board. Is this why we frequently ate there? Not really.
We knew our waitress by name and she knew ours. We knew a little about each other’s lives. We’d chat. She knew our regular orders and the little modifications we liked. Occasionally, she’d bring us little extras at no charge. We even knew some of the kitchen staff. The restaurant had a unique feel. It was a holdover from early Vegas and not much had been done in terms of updates.
In a word, going to Blueberry Hill wasn’t interchangeable with going to another diner because of the particular people who worked there and the particular place that it was.
The purpose of quantification in corporate-run business is standardization. They want to make sure that no matter what location of Diner Corp you go to, your experience will be the same. Same food, same level of service, same aesthetic, same clean bathrooms for you to shit in. Regardless of what waiter you get, the experience should be the same fake corporate cheerful efficiency.
Fuck that.
That’s not the world I want to live in.
I don’t want my waiters to be interchangeable. I like my quirky waiter. I like the relationship I have with her. I like that she knows me and my wife. I like that our conversations are not empty pleasantries without any history. I like that she tells me that she recently took a week off for the first time in years because she had a serious medical issue. Knowing this I can leave her a generous tip.
I want to live in a world in which I have personal relationships with people because this is the foundation of a world with care. Standardized experiences degrade the foundation of care because, by definition, they obliterate individuality and particularity. Standardization requires that people and places be interchangeable.
Standardized, supervised, quantified interactions leave little room for the spontaneity intrinsic to authentic human interactions and experience. In this world, our waitress needs to get managerial clearance before she can bring us that extra scoop of ice cream–if she thinks of it at all. When every interaction must be planned, measured, and optimized, it is drained of its humanity.
But this is where we are and it’s only getting worse.
Sense of place and personal relationships in our public/commercial life are being wiped out by standardization via efficient quantification.
You can’t easily measure the importance and meaning of my particular Blueberry Hill Diner location or of my waitress to me and my wife. You can only measure on a scale of 1 to 5 whether I was satisfied with the cleanliness. Or my waitress’ “friendliness”. But you cannot easily measure and quantify *why* I am happy with her friendliness. And even if you could, you certainly cannot standardize it because it’s a function of who she is as an individual and the particular relationship we have with her. She is a quantity of one.
Put another way, you could drop me into any IHOP in the world and I’d have no freakin’ idea where I was, except that I’m in an IHOP. Drop me off at Blueberry Hill, and I know there is only one place I could possibly be.
4. Choosing the World You Want to Live In
This is the feeling that’s been nagging at me. Our public life has been degraded by the combined forces of capital concentration and standardization through technologically-enabled easy and efficient quantification. I understand there’s a danger to romanticizing the past. Of course, not every aspect of the past was better than it is today. But it’s hard to deny that in this very important respect–the quality of public life–our world is worse.
Let me close by trying to tie everything together. Imagine if after every meal at Blueberry Hill (and there were at least 100), the waitress gave me a survey asking me the standard survey questions. How weird would that be? These kinds of concerns are secondary to the quality of the relationship built over time through authentic interactions.
In our current world, there’s a vicious feedback loop. Because standardization has so de-personalized public life, corporations now feel compelled to ask for feedback about every little thing. But they take that data and use it for further standardization–which increases depersonalization thereby undercutting the possibility of authentic spontaneous human interactions and relationships in public life.
There’s an irony here. These massive corporations work really hard pursuing the coveted prize of customer loyalty. But standardization/interchangeability of staff and resulting depersonalization shifts the nature of relationships to purely transactional from a rich multi-dimension relationship. All these corporate establishments are the same. Why choose one over another?
I’m not so naive to suggest that pre “quantification of everything” businesses had purely altruistic relationships with their customers. But they were qualitatively different and that difference was felt by the customer. This difference is partly explained by the fact that these business tended to be locally-owned employing longtime staff. The business model was based on long-term relationships, give and take, in short, mutual loyalty.
A major thesis running through Ellul’s writing is the idea of technological autonomy: Once you become a technological society (efficiency is the ruling value), the deployment of technology takes on its own logic independent of human intention. If a technology is developed to do something more efficiently, there’s no question about whether to deploy it. How do you argue against doing something more efficiently? All ethical analysis is post-hoc.
To see this, just reflect on the last decade of technologies that have intruded our lives. There was no pubic deliberation on increased presence of surveillance technology, whether and how to design social media platforms, or whether and how to deploy generative AI. All ethical analysis and public discussion happened after they were deployed.
Ellul does make an important qualification: Technological deployment can be curtailed if people collectively resist it. He just doesn’t think that’s likely because the forces propelling technology into our lives are so great. But there’s a glimmer of hope here if we recognize that the progressive intrusion of technology into our lives is the result of the aggregation of the decisions we make. Every time you and your family eat at Diner Corp instead of the local equivalent of Blueberry Hill, you are incrementally creating a world with more Diner Corps and without Blueberry Hills.
I don’t pretend to know the answers. Most days, I’m a pessimist about these sorts of things and the ability to resist the massive forces behind them. But if there is one small thing we can do to counter these trends it is to support small local businesses.
The people and place are not interchangeable. The owners have a stake in the welfare of the local community. So, next time you want to get a coffee, drive past the Starbucks and go to the local coffee shop and chat with the people working there…even if it is less efficient to do so.
After all, as much as efficient procurement of coffee matters (and it does!), authentic public interactions and community matter more.
Wrestling with Philosophy 