Information technologies are implicated in a worldwide and
world-historic crisis: falling employment. As the wealth of nations
increases, those who have lost jobs or had to accept menial ones over
the past three years are left with only a wealth of culprits to blame:
financial scandals, wars, tax cuts, stagnation, etc. But there is
little doubt that a large contributor to rising unemployment is rising
productivity, which in turn can be laid to advances in computerization
and communications. I can no longer avert my eyes from the
consequences of the field I have chosen, and no one else who programs,
administers, or promotes the use of computers can morally avert their
eyes either.

The gigantic combine of capitalism has always obsessively pursued
efficiency, and computers make the pursuit almost child play.
Capitalism has succeeded in sowing a cornucopia of innovation up and
down society. But capitalism is atrocious at distributing the fruits
of innovation. Each labor-saving device means the idling of thousands
of people, wasting their years of experience, rigorous training, and
practical insights.

People who work with computers remain fixated on efficiency. Every
week I hear the debates over whether businesses should use Linux or
Windows, the commentators always wrangling over which systems will
save the most money. I find this battle increasingly tiresome. I’m
more interested in finding the systems that will put more people to
work.

I have a sinking feeling that we can’t wait for the next upturn in the
employment cycle, as optimists would have us do. I sense that this
upturn may never come, unless people in a position to influence
innovation make a conscious effort to involve the worker. Anyone who
writes programs or plans system deployment should start thinking,
“What can I do to bring average people back into the process of wealth
creation?”

It is not my goal to place restrictions on investment or innovation;
it is only to present a new way of thinking that some people may find
stimulating. I am simply stretching a new canvas on which others may
spread their oils; I am not providing a frame for the canvas. Just to
illustrate what’s possible, though, I offer a few tentative
suggestions.

Write free software for individual industries

A lot of programmers are pounding their treadmills in the free
software movement in order to create pleasant desktop experiences and
improve general-purpose applications. These help everybody and are
worthwhile in themselves, but think how society might benefit if a few
hundred of these programmers took a trip down to small, local,
cutting-edge businesses and asked the proprietors, “What would you
like on your computers to make you more productive?” And think of what
would happen if the programmers went on to write industry-specific
software that solved immediate, felt problems and distributed it for
free.

Businesses can afford to pay for software. But small businesses cannot
pay as much as one would think, and specialized packages can be
incredibly expensive. Proprietary packages also suffer from
limitations, bugs, and lack of guarantees that they will meet user
needs. Free software opens more possibilities, and perhaps can drive
the expansion of job-creating businesses.

Make devices more responsive and easy to customize

Personal devices and cellular phones are growing in power and
complexity, particularly as Java applications become available, but
they still don’t provide the flexibility to augment the ordinary user
at work (as visionary Douglas Englebart first suggested in the
1960s). I would like a computer to plan ahead for me, track things
that are too much trouble for me to remember, and combine inputs to
suggest efficient courses of action. My desktop computer has software
to do some of that, but my cell phone does not. And soon I’ll be able
to have a dozen devices in my office with the hardware capability to
augment my intelligence–I’d like to have the software capability as
well.

In the previous item I suggested very specialized software. But very
generalized software on cheap, available devices can also be
liberating. I am reminded of the power that desktop publishing
brought to ordinary writers in the 1980s, a power that made a social
force out of the same Apple Computer that is currently doing
innovative things to make a mass movement out of another medium with
even more relevance and social impact–video. It’s nearly impossible
to overestimate the advances that users can make when they are
presented with flexible, open-ended technologies. Maybe it can make
more of them into productive members of society.

A key part of the solution is easy scripting languages. Current
languages always seem to develop tangled syntax; they look easy enough
for “Hello, world” applications, but as soon as you start to work with
real data and serious tasks into which you can sink your teeth, they
slap on braces and other indigestible characters. I want a scripting
language that is really simple enough for a kid to learn and powerful
enough to run a small business with.

Create a truly public key infrastructure

People have been trying to get corporate communications and
negotiations online for years, and probably the biggest beneficiaries
of such a move would be small businesses and individual contractors.
After all, who finds it hardest to pay travel costs and conference
room fees for expensive legal help?

The move online has been held up by deep and serious problems in the
processes for validating users and dealing with such issues as
certificate revocation and non-repudiation–social aspects of
security, or what I call the social infrastructure for
technology. But perhaps we’re asking too much. Perhaps the average
user could be happy with a less universal and less ambitious system.

When you want to contract with some professional or service, it might
be enough for you to verify that he or she is a dues-paying member in
good standing in some association. Individual associations could
provide authentication services for this. Perhaps a contract could be
sealed by the combination of recorded voice messages and a digital
signature on a computer file. We have to be flexible and creative.

Those ideas are here just to get people thinking. We don’t have all
the time in the world. Already, educated professionals are griping
about jobs moving to other countries, a form of heightened national
and racial tension that not only bring their own horrific consequences
but dampen the spirit of exploration that can raise everyone’s
opportunities. And meanwhile governments, businesses, venture
capitalists (what are you doing with all that money your pets in
Congress and the White House brought you, tails all awagging?),
universities, and NGOs seem paralyzed in the face of this economic
disaster.

There are precedents for this type of thinking. In the 1970s, a
movement called participatory design started in Scandinavia to develop
technologies that enhanced and strengthened workers’ skilled
contributions, instead of eviscerating them. I have written about
other elements of the program suggested here in earlier articles:

But a few good examples will promote change more than all the talk in
the world.

What can you do?