4 Comments
Aug 26Liked by Olivier Roland

The problem here is that there have to be a significant number of level 0 businesses and people working in them because otherwise all of the infrastructure that the level 2 & 3 people need to be able to work would not exist.

If doctors would film themselves performing operations and then publish it for others to follow, we'd have a lot of dead people...

If everybody would turn to digitized work, there would be no hotels, bars and restaurants, means of transport etc.

I know we are very far from that, but advocating a change of paradigm in this direction has to take into account the chance that your advice could be followed by many.

Plus - education is better with at least some direct contact. Home educated children also have groups they join to practice some of the skills they learn independently or they take part in businesses as apprentices to learn the tasks and solutions. Children benefit from growing up in a fairly consistent environment as they learn relationships - disrupt that and there will be a lot of clients for your psychologist friend to deal with later in their life.

You are talking about a type of existence which will ever only apply to a very small minority of people - and which is essentially about tax evasion when you are not one of the ultra rich who can do it with money.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I'm a sociologist and I know that one way to test social solutions (including public policies) is to assume they will fully work and to see what the possible consequences might be in that case.

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Thanks for your comment Sandra.

"If everybody would turn to digitized work, there would be no hotels, bars and restaurants, means of transport etc."

I answered this criticism in my book The Way of The Intelligent Rebel, which urges people to start their own businesses.

Here's the excerpt:

"Sometimes, when I share some of the ideas I have been sharing with you, people say: ‘Fine, but if everyone acted like that, society would no longer exist. There would be no food, no one to look after children and the pets, and civilization would collapse.’

This always makes me laugh. It’s as if a firefighter were giving a motivational presentation to recruit firefighters and people said: ‘Hang on a bit, Sir, what would happen if everyone became a firefighter? There would be no farmers, and we would all die of hunger. Nor would there be any television producers or reality television shows, and that would be the end of civilization as we know it.’

How ridiculous!

As the startup incubator The Family put it: ‘Anyone can become an entrepreneur, but not everyone can be.’ What they mean is that not everyone can become an entrepreneur, but that an entrepreneur can come from any location, any social setting, any background.

Of the people who read this book, many will admit that I am right but won’t necessarily act on what I say because most people are not proactive."

"You are talking about a type of existence which will ever only apply to a very small minority of people"

I don't agree.

Remote working was greatly democratized during COVID, and is now affecting a growing proportion of the population, including middle-class employees.

See https://disruptive-horizons.com/p/digital-nomadism-disrupting-nation-states for the data and sources.

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Not everyone will want to be a firefighter after a passionate presentation about their work and life, but if the list includes a few hundred professions alongside firefighter, you're talking about a completely perspective. That's the thing I've referred to when mentioning sociology: individual examples don't explain societal changes.

If you can't thing of large categories of people from various backgrounds being involved and of social consequences broadly speaking when you are attempting to describe social realities, you're not conceptualising your topic correctly.

Technology has definitely and always been a significant factor in processes of change in the fabric of society, but the fact that (young) people spend more time on electronic devices and this affects their mental and physical health may be arguably more relevant than the fact that 6% of the population in SOME developed countries chooses to develop digital businesses and travel the world in the process.

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Every type of work that results in making or modifying material things cannot go digital. It's mostly office type jobs (based on pen and paper in the past) that have been turned into ones that can be done electronically and remotely. There are more of these now because of the ever higher levels of specialization, but at the same time the proliferation of AI has diminished the need for some of these skills and a certain shrinkage of these role is taking place.

Also, whilst there seemed to be a large embrace of all jobs digital during and immediately after COVID, there is a significant pushback against digital nomads in some countries due to their encroaching on the local strained housing market (especially in Europe).

Any job that is associated with material objects and their processes, from plumbing to oil rig maintenance, to making clothes, mining, agriculture, cleaning, medicine, in-situ environmental management etc. are hands on and cannot go digital.

The way to figure out what is the proportion of people who can become digital entrepreneurs if they wanted to if to look at statistics in various countries (all of them, ideally) who perform object centred jobs versus let's say concept centred jobs (ex-pen-and-paper in one way or another, from design to accounting, to software engineering, coding, marketing etc.).

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