Our Future: Trading Reliability for Power

I've often heard people 40+ grumble in the following way about modern communication technology: "Yeah email and text and voicemail and all that are great. But in 1982, you called a number, and either the person answered, or they didn't. There was no 'Oh your text got buried,' 'It must've gone into my spam folder,' et cetera." (All the more annoying because they're all plausible excuses.) Having all these technologies makes our reach much greater, but ironically, much less reliable.

If you're not sure this is such a great trade, it's worth thinking about, because something similar is increasingly happening with public services. Startups are replacing a lot of the services that local government typically provides in the U.S. - e.g., information reporting for state governments (traffic light is out at Third and Grant), DMV appointments, metro bus routes, trash collection, etc. Yes, sometimes those services are already spotty. The concern is that with, say, trash collection, barring gross dereliction of duty, I know the majority of days they'll get my trash, I know who to call if they miss it, and I know next week and next month and next year it'll be my city that's doing it. In a truly efficient market, there's no guarantee that if Startup A is doing it this week that they'll be doing it next year - yes, Startup B might replace them because it's doing a better job, but with that marginal improvement comes a whole lot of friction - a new schedule, new rules to learn, etc. This is a cost which, in making this trade, I don't think is adequately appreciated. It's already enough of a pain that you have certain friends eat up your bandwidth remembering which media platform is the one the check regularly. Expand this to other domains in life, and pretty soon all you're doing is keeping lists, which change constantly.

The analogy: you have to choose between being Clark Kent who can bench a respectable 400 lbs any day of the week, vs Superman. The catch is that 20% of the time Superman is sick in bed with kryptonite flu and you never know when that will be, and the medicine for kryptonite flu is constantly sold at different pharmacies and his health insurance changes unpredictably.