OK. You’ll be working right here for the next 40 years…
Last week, on the heels of reading The Most Powerful Idea in the World by William Rosen, I paid a visit to Richard Arkwright’s first factory in Derbyshire, England.
It was not just Arkwright’s first factory, it was, in fact, the first factory in the world and the place that set off the Industrial Revolution that changed the world.
Arkwright invented the water loom, a way to harness water power to drive both the spinning and the weaving of cotton. This was, until Arkwright, a handicraft that had taken place in the home, one loom at a time, one pair of stockings at a time. It was long, arduous, and complex work. It required skill.
Arkwright built rudimentary machines, first powered by water and then by steam – thanks to James Watt, that could increase the ability to manufacture cotton goods by a thousand fold (at least). This had several impacts which are significant to us today:
First, it cut the cost of making woven goods, which in turn, destroyed the value of what the weavers and spinners at home did. Where once it took a skilled person a few days to weave a pair of socks, now a dumb machine could do it in minutes. The cost of a pair of socks fell to next to nothing (by comparison), but so did the income of the former weavers.
Now think journalism.
The ‘craft’ of reporting, writing or videotaping a story and then printing it in a newspaper or transmitting it on TV tower has now been replaced by an internet and millions of ‘citizen journalists’. For the average person it’s great – cuts the cost of news and information down to, well, virtually nothing. For the former ‘crafter’ of news and content, a disaster, much as Arkwright’s mills were for the weavers of Nottingham.
Technology is a bitch. Always. Some win, some lose.
In the case of Arkwright, the weavers did not take it lying down, at least not a first. They began to burn down Arkwright’s mills; they arose in the Luddite movement to destroy the mills and machines that were destroying their lives. (I don’t see armies of unemployed journalists smashing the Internet… at least not yet, but the journos are only the first of many to go.. stand by…).
Ultimately, the weavers as highly paid craftsmen were crushed by the technology, and thus broken, headed to the mills. These would be the same Dark Satanic Mills of William Blake. (The same poem that brought us ‘Chariots of Fire’). Perhaps some modern day rapper will chance upon the Dark Satanic Google… unlikely… but you never know…).
In any event, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Industrial Revolution was the idea, today commonplace, then, rather radical, that all workers should be assembled in one common place – the factory – to do their work. It was, after all, where both the power source (water or steam engine) was, and where the machines were that spun and wove the cotton.
That factory mentality so powerfully permeated our culture that almost everything thereafter took on the look and the feel of a factory, from public schools, which also use bells and performance goals to prepare generations of future factory workers, to offices filled with cubicles, to newsrooms that look more like information factories than anything else.
But like the machines of Arkwright’s day, the Internet is a basic industrial change that will result in entirely new ways of working.
And one of those will be where we work.
With the web, there is no longer any need for the factory – for the workers to gather together in one place.
Indeed, it is in fact counter productive to force people to commute for miles or hours to get to a ‘work place’, to get on a computer to go online to then be connected to the same network they were on at home. Pointless.
And many people have vastly superior equipment at home than they do at the ‘factory’. Pat Younge, Chief Creative Officer at The BBC, greeting a group of TV producers we were training in Bristol said, ‘You work here but then you go home to much better equipment’. It’s almost universally true.
We produce daily content for Verizon’s FiOS1 Channels in New Jersey, DC and Long Island. All of our VJs work from home and upload their finished stories to an FTP server.
By the year 2020, 75% of people will work from home. This will happen because it turns out to be far more cost-effective than gathering them together in factories, even word factories, which are really a remnant and a memory of the 19th Century. There is no reason for them. In fact they are extremely ineffective and terribly expensive. Take the money you spend on lighting them, heat and air conditioning, carpeting and desks, security, insurance and the rent and pay the workers who are producing the product instead.
A walk through Arkwright’s mills in Derbyshire is a fascinating experience. We gaze and and photograph the empty long rows of spinning machines and cotton processing machines that now stand as memories of how the world once was. In the not too distant future, tour groups will be taken through buildings like 30 Rockefeller Center and stare and gaze at row after row of steelcase cubicles and take pictures and ask, ‘did people really spend their lives in places like this’?
