A while back over on LinkedIn James Caig wrote a post talking about modern digital services and how ‘technology and automation has led to more customers of those products and services doing more of the work involved in delivering them’. James linked to an article by John Lanchester on Marx’s theory of surplus value, which might be defined as the gap between how much the labourer sells their labour for and the price that the employer gets for the commodity. A gap which accumulates value to the employer and is, according to Marx, the basis of all capitalism.
One of the issues with Marx’s theory that all value in capitalism is the surplus value that is created by labour could be that so many of our products and services in the modern world are now digital. And yet, as Lanchester says, the idea of the value of things coming from the labour that is inherent within them works surprisingly well in the digital world. This is particularly true when you think about the surplus value that is created by customers of digital services. Lanchester gives the example of online check-in and bag drop at airports:
‘Online check-in is a process which should genuinely increase the efficiency of the airport experience, thereby costing you less time: time you can spend doing other things, some of them economically useful to you. But what the airlines do is employ so few people to supervise the bag drop-off that there’s no time-saving at all for the customer. When you look, you see that because airlines have to employ more people to supervise the non-online-checked-in customers – otherwise the planes wouldn’t leave on time – the non-checked-in queues move far more quickly.
They’re transferring their inefficiency to the customer, but what they’re also doing is transferring the labour to you and accumulating the surplus value themselves. It happens over and over again. Every time you deal with a phone menu or interactive voicemail service, you’re donating your surplus value to the people you’re dealing with. Marx’s model is constantly asking us to see the labour encoded in the things and transactions all around us.’
This idea of businesses transferring inefficiencies on to customers and then benefitting from the surplus labour of those customers is all around us. James makes the point that the surplus value is not just the effort that the customer needs to put in but the emotional investment too:
‘Our Sainsbury’s local has no signage, no place to queue, staff you have to call, often away from other jobs, a silent dance with other customers to signal you’re waiting for the staffed till because you’re buying alcohol. Every check-out takes cognitive effort, social interaction, a kind of mental negotiation with the world, just to buy a bottle of wine.’
This shift, says James, is often sold as being more convenient for customers when the reality for many may be an accumulation of additional responsibility, a lack of control, and more stress.
I was thinking about the idea of surplus value as I read Jamie Bartlett’s piece on the ubiquitous ‘techno-admin’ of the modern world. Jamie defines techno-admin as: ‘…a pervasive phenomenon, whereby we customers are forced into infuriating, confusing, absurdly time-consuming and bleakly unrewarding tasks by a machine’.
He uses the example of an elderly relative struggling to deal with an erroneous auto-generated energy bill for £1,000, but there are endless other examples of customers having to invest extra time to sort issues generated by poorly applied automation, or online fraud, or companies that want to make it difficult for you to cancel a subscription, or frequent software upgrades for every piece of hardware in the home, or inter-operability issues, or even simple error traps and mystifying customer journeys (I love – or should I say hate – his example of ‘Schrödinger’s account’, where you try and log in to something using your email address, are told there is no such account, but when you try and create a new account with the same email address you get told that one already exists with those details). Jamie quotes Bill Gates:
‘Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency…automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.’
We’re in the midst of a huge AI-driven evolution of services, and it’s going to be so important that we think carefully about not increasing the ‘techno-admin’ burden that is in danger of overwhelming so many people. The risk is that, as Jamie says, as increasingly sophisticated AI is applied within services, fewer and fewer people understand how it actually works or have access to the skills required to sort issues out. Or, as James notes, that this uneven accessibility and knowledge generates unnecessary inequities.
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