Welcome to Britain, 2003: the land of the 27minute lunch hour.
Nine out of ten of us say we are working too hard to spend enough time with the kids. One in three men and one in six women are too busy at work to take a summer holiday. Four out of five couples claim work is putting their relationship under strain.
No wonder that 12 million people across Europe, two and a half million of them in Britain, have 'downshifted', swapping the highpay, highstress life for something with less financial reward but with fewer working hours and more satisfactions.
That 27minute lunch is a result of 'flexible labour markets' and other late twentieth century political nostrums. It goes with overwork, rationalisation of jobs and insecurity. But those who have decided not to put up with it any longer also often mention another factor: the additional pressures heaped on them by new technologies. Specifically, people say they feel burdened by information.
And they have a point. Who, after all, needs the daily 100 emails screaming for an instant answer? Why jump to every electronic trill of the mobile phone? You're merely giving the boss a level of control undreamed of by those Victorian factory masters who fantasised about the constant surveillance of the work force. Or the 3,083,324,625 internet pages constantly demanding to be searched?
Our gurus once told us that the entire history of humanity has been nothing but the story of how we substituted mechanical for human parts. Instead of the machine that built the pyramids (slaves), they promised that we would have machines that would labour and think for us. In the technological wonderland of the year 2000, said the gurus, only the very brainiest will have to do anything like work and, for them, such work will be nothing but a pleasure. The biggest problem, we were told, will be what to do with the mass of humanity when the curse of Adam is finally lifted.
It hasn't worked out that way. Instead, we are all working harder and in more stressful circumstances than ever. Technology hasn't helped because, in essence, there is no such thing as a laboursaving device. Tasks expand to fill any time and effort saved. In certain circumstances, such as our current employment environment, they will continue to expand beyond that, making life more onerous than it was before the new technology was deployed.
Technology loses its radical potential which is why after more than two centuries of constant technological upheaval here in the West, at least, things are, however buffeted, more or less what they used to be. In Britain, for example, we still have an established church, a monarchy, parliament. There's still a glass ceiling in the labour market and woman remain the primary child carers.
With the exception of medicine, where the pressure for progress is grounded in the alleviation of suffering and therefore unstoppable, the history of most technology reveals an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary pattern. Technology offers huge potential for change but human society is capable of inexhaustible resistance to it. Indeed, the repeated neutralising of the effects of technological advance has evolved into a syndrome the law of the suppression of radical potential. And it is this law which the downshifters are obeying. In part they are simply rejecting the new ways of doing things.
The Net is at the centre of this process. Technophiles burble about its revolutionary power even as its impact is being blunted all around them. Take the email blight. Despite its enormous presence in the offices of the land, and its availability on home computers, the vast majority of us never use email. And among those who do, only one in 20 of us send more than 50 a week. In effect, we are collectively just saying 'no'.
Emailing turns out to be not particularly efficient. It's not just the irritating flow of 'spam' or the broadcasting of salacious personal secrets. It is also the unwanted pages of jokes; the forwarded communications from the porn firm. It's the 'all staff' message that somebody in a remote building's car park has left the lights on. It's the 12 attached documents now being separately runoff of on 12 different computer printers by 12 high cost workers when, yesterday, one worker would produce 12 copies on one photocopier.
So email has to be doomed certainly in its present form. Our leaders will have nothing to do with it. The Prime Minister won't use it. CEOs are getting their PAs to screen it. Estelle Morris enhanced her Mrs Average status when she revealed she never used it either. It's the same with the internet. Those three billion pages are far more often a burden than a support just a haystack in which the needles of information are impossible to find. So rapidly is it grinding to a halt, there's already talk of the need for a more rational, more controlled alternative.
Industrial interests are as capable of suppression as individual naysayers. Television, for example, as an idea dates from 1884 and the first image was sent to a cathode ray tube in 1911. Nevertheless, it took another 50 years to reach the majority of living rooms, not so much because of the slowness of advances in science and technology but because it was being developed by the radio industry which had a compelling interest in not bringing it to market in competition with its primary business.
The very idea of a digital 'revolution' is a misnomer since the first digital device was built in 1938 and was based on maths which had been developed more than a decade earlier. The 'revolution' has taken 75 years so far. It's the same with solid state electronics: The first radio device to use silicon was built in 1914. Or take the desktop computer: The first real computer to work, in Manchester University in 1948, was a 'baby'; but everybody knew that its primary purpose would be the calculation of thermonuclear problems, so enormous machines were the order of the day for the next quarter of a century. Devices to make them smaller transistors, say were used instead to increase their capacity. IBM waited so long before giving up valves that, when they finally nerved themselves to make the move, the single transistor had become a large scale integrated circuit. Big Blue never made a wholly transistorised computer.
During these delays and slowed advances, industry, and we as a society, learn to absorb the new machines. They make a difference, certainly; but, in the West, the law of the suppression of radical potential ensures it is never a transformative one.
The 27minute lunch hour is not technology's fault; it is ours.
