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On Tech is taking a short hiatus. We’ll be back here again on Wednesday, Nov. 11.
It’s November, and I’m going to call it: 2020 was the year when technology proved both more essential in our lives than ever and largely irrelevant in the most important parts of it.
As the United States is nearing the conclusion to a tight presidential election, the nation’s spotlight is on the least technological scene imaginable: bureaucrats methodically checking and double-checking pen-and-paper ballots. Those ballots were in some cases delivered by the Postal Service, whose origins date back more than 200 years.
The American voting system is fragmented, overly complicated, underfunded and prone to incompetence or comical accidents. And in spite of that, it worked pretty well in an election that was profoundly altered by the pandemic.
Sometimes boring is better. But in America, because boring is boring, we tend to undervalue it.
But blockchain did not tally the votes. Artificial intelligence didn’t rejigger polling places for coronavirus safety measures. Robots didn’t wait in long lines to vote (I don’t think). That time 40 years ago — it was February — when the Iowa Democratic Party tried to improve the complicated caucus tallying system with an app … yeah, it didn’t go very well. Our voting system might be an anachronism, but technology is probably not the answer.
We know about the technology that mattered in 2020, too, to keep us working, schooling, communicating, playing and understanding the world at a time when none of that was normal. Even this election season, candidates campaigned through screens and people organized, donated and spread both good and bad information through screens.
But I also know that when we’re facing a challenge it’s tempting to believe that technology is the answer. That driverless cars would eliminate road accidents. That facial recognition software would protect children, and body cameras would fight bias in policing. That new forms of technology would help us achieve better health care, better education and a healthier planet. That social media would give voice to the voiceless. That tech would solve the problems caused by tech.
There is truth in all of this, of course. Technology can be an incredibly useful tool. But technology is not magic.
Most of the important stuff that happened this year pointed to the essential nature of boring stuff: Smart public policy or the lack of it. Good leadership making good decisions, or the lack of it. Medicine and science that iterates and learns. Human ingenuity and kindness to feed hungry people and look out for our family and neighbors. People making do. People planting their feet on the streets in rage and sadness at the mistreatment of their fellow Americans.
The things that mattered were the roughly 160 million Americans who squeezed in time after a late shift or ignored the shrieking of their kids at home to vote. And the people and institutions that delivered or tallied votes in the most boring way possible.
People dressed as Postal Service mailboxes shimmied at a protest in Philadelphia on Thursday. If you needed a symbol of our utterly un-tech mailbox election, there it was.
That is what I will remember from this year in technology. That technology didn’t matter so much for the most important stuff. Technology is not the answer. We are.
When David gets indigestion from Goliath
When upstarts that started online buy stodgy but famous old names, people like me get to wax poetic about how the upstarts are swallowing the old-timers.
Amazon’s takeover of Whole Foods was a moment for a new economy king to assert its dominance. An iconic department store chain, Lord & Taylor, sold itself last year to a clothing rental start-up called Le Tote. GoPuff, an app that drunk college students use to order Cheetos and other convenience store items and has expanded its reach, this week agreed to acquire a much-loved chain of liquor stores. (OK, a liquor store is not Lord & Taylor. But people do love BevMo.)
These milestones tend to lead to reflections on how time marches on. In with the new, out with the old. How the mighty have fallen. Etc.
Sometimes yes. But sometimes when David takes over a Goliath, it also proves the enduring value of the stodgy old guard. Or it’s a sign that the young upstart doesn’t know what it’s doing.
When Amazon bought Whole Foods three years ago, it showed Amazon’s confidence and boundless ambition. But it was also Amazon — a company that defined store-less shopping for a quarter-century — saying that stores still matter, and Amazon didn’t quite know how to do them on its own.
It didn’t take long for Le Tote to choke on Lord & Taylor, and both companies filed for bankruptcy protection this year. In hindsight, when the office rental start-up WeWork struck a deal to buy Lord & Taylor’s famous New York building in 2017, it was the peak of WeWork’s hubris. WeWork has since had a hubris crash and had to sell the building. To Amazon.
The fusion of online specialists and old-guard brands often makes sense in principle. But it’s always worth asking when the little guy hitches itself to a venerable old timer: What weakness is it trying to compensate for?
Before we go …
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Falsehoods travel at the speed of light: A Facebook group called “Stop the Steal” became one of the fastest-growing groups in the company’s history and a hub for people to falsely claim the ballot count was rigged against President Trump. Facebook executives shut it down for trying to incite violence, my colleague Sheera Frenkel reported.
Related: Mike Isaac writes that Facebook plans to take additional temporary steps to slow the spread of election-related misinformation, including adding extra steps before people can share posts and demoting material in the News Feed if it contains falsehoods.
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What if making Facebook worse actually makes it better? Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times, wonders if Facebook, Twitter and other internet companies that disabled key features like easy sharing to slow the spread of election-related misinformation can ever justify returning to the status quo.
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Counterprogramming (Day 2)! Brian X. Chen and Mike Isaac again played video games for work and concluded that they prefer the new PlayStation console to the latest Xbox.
Hugs to this
Watch this 123-year-old film clip of adults gleefully pelting one another with snowballs. The man in the bowler hat is my favorite. And read this appreciation of the snowball fight film in The New York Times Magazine.
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