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Editor Note: This was first published on May 31, 2010.

Some time ago I tweeted on the observation that Information Technologies tend to be destructive to jobs overall, and was rather surprised at the number of responses I received to that comment. As I've found that trying to argue a thesis that broad over Twitter can be an exercise in Haiku minimalism, the post came into being to explain a bit more my thinking here, and to suggest that IT's influences are THE primary engine driving the nature of work in the 21st century.

When I first started working, I spent a couple of years working for a Midwest advertising agency as their computer consultant back in the mid-1980s. This was a "full service" agency. We had a couple of staff photographers, a typesetter, creative director, three art directors, four or five on staff graphic artists, a prepress specialist, a couple of layout artists and me.

The typesetter was in the most vulnerable position - she worked on a Linotronics electronic typesetter that used a combination of optics and computer processing to create the text layout. It produced beautiful type, but as bit-mapped fonts shaded over into vector graphic fonts, the superior graphical quality couldn't make up for the fact that the linotronic fonts were expensive, laying them out was expensive, the thermal layout paper was expensive, and the cost of acquiring new fonts was expensive, limiting what fonts could be displayed. Eventually she ended up switching over to doing Aldus Pagemaker and Quark, bumping another junior graphic design purpose out of the company and rendering the older technology obsolete before it had been fully paid for. The prepress guy and the waxed-paper layout artists went shortly thereafter, both because what they were doing was replicated by where the graphic artists were going and because our clients were all pulling their expensive processing back in house.

Pretty soon we lost one, then another of our account reps, because they couldn't bring in enough work. I left to take another gig at this point because my computer skills were in greater demand, but I checked up later, and both photographers had been let go as had one of the two art directors, the other spending more time doing layout directly. A year after that, the company was calling itself a service bureau, operating with about a third of the previously existing staff.

Now, many of those same people were able to adapt - and a couple of them went on to found software companies in their own right later that decade. Creatives typically tend to be pretty resilient job wise.

IT Favors the Entrepreneurial

A few years later, I was working as a software consultant for Nordstroms. The programs that I was working on (in the Nordstrom Accounts Receivable dept.) ended up later turning a two hundred person AR into a fifteen person AR. Many of those who lost their jobs were not creatives - they were mid-level managers, accountants, secretaries, and other artifacts of an earlier business age, and far fewer of them really recovered, even as the tech revolution was booming. A lot of them turned to the newly liberalized stock markets, and while quite a few did make money there, many more lost that money during the tech bust.

IT advances typically start out favoring the generalist over the specialist. The secretarial pool of yore existed not so much because of chauvinism, though that was a factor, but because using a typewriter was a specialized skill, was highly repetitious, and generally was not worth the cost of paying a manager to perform. It was a form of factory work, but because the work involved dealt with information management, it was also work that tended to be closest to the managerial class.

The advent of the PC (and later of networking) changed that equation dramatically. It eliminated a lot of the repetitious aspect of typing (making a mistake didn't require that the typist start over from scratch), it eliminated the need to store all documents in triplicate (which acted as a mechanism to insure that letters and forms didn't get lost) and it made it easier to work from boilerplate templates. The secretarial pool shrunk dramatically, but it also meant that those junior level managers who usually had to wait on the services of a secretary could essentially type their own letters in a far smaller period of time. The enterprising secretaries became office managers[i] or [i]executive assistants, both of which tended to become fast tracks (especially for women) into the ranks of management.

However, what of those that weren't as enterprising. Many became redundant, released from the work force at a time when other companies were releasing all of their secretaries. It can be argued that IT here served to create higher paid and it did: office managers and executive assistants generally made considerably more than secretaries. However, in the aggregate it eliminated far more moderate wage jobs in the process.

In the 1970s, the idea of outsourcing jobs across time zones would have been considered ludicrously expensive in all but the most basic of jobs - there were too many barriers that emerged due to language, time differentials, cultural expectations and most importantly, information management. By the 1990s, the information management barriers had dropped to a point where the other factors could be mitigated, and outsourcing use exploded. Certain factors later would mitigate that somewhat, but even in the worst recession in eighty years, outsourcing of jobs is still increasing, and is having the consequence of reducing wages in the US and elsewhere for all but the most critical jobs.

Programmers enjoyed a brief respite from this trend because they possessed specialized skills that could not readily be translated into code themselves, but that respite was comparatively short lived. Programmers were employed from job to job, and while a few were again able to ramp up to the next level of abstraction, the cost needed to stay current was being in a constant state of re-education. In the last decade, web services, open source software (essentially a growing library of legacyware) and cloud computing have also had an effect - as the cost and complexity of integration has dropped (due at least in part to the rise of XML and related standards) the cost and complexity of customization has also dropped.

There are far fewer programmers working on foundational code anymore. Instead more and more of these programmers are integrationists building mashups from data-feeds. Again, you need more creative programmers to recognize how to build the best bundle of mashups for a given market, but those outside of integrationist roles or advisory/architectural ones (such as security services) are finding it ever harder to find decent paying work.

The Myth of IT Job Creation

I've heard arguments that have said that this phenomenon of technology generally has led to more creative jobs being opened up than non-creative ones being destroyed, and that this has been true of technological innovation since the earliest days. I would contend, however, that we've never been in a regime like we are now - never in the history of humankind. Disruptive technologies have certainly emerged many, many times, but typically such innovations disseminated so slowly that society could readily adapt, sometimes over generations. Yet in the space of one century, disruptive innovation has occurred so frequently that today a technology that is considered cutting edge one year may be obsolete the year thereafter, and society cannot adapt to that pace for long.

Consider the following thought experiment. If a person from 1810 London were to arrive in London in 1910, there would be some radical changes, certainly, but the world of 1910 would have been deducable from that of 1810 - steam engines were beginning to be experimented with, so the idea of a horseless carriage would have made sense. Advances in machining techniques were beginning to occur in 1810, so many of the innovations that occurred from that, from far more efficient farming tractors, trains, piping for gas, even the fundamentals of electrical systems, could have been foreseen at the beginning of the nineteenth century by an astute observer.

The world of 2010 is profoundly different from 1910. The Internet doesn't necessarily follow from the telegraph. The global distribution system, the rise of the use of petroleum by-products (and all of its dreadful side effects), the all pervasive networks providing global point-to-point communication through all media, metropolitan regions stretching across continental coastlines, the awesome destructiveness of war technologies, the fact that we are now creating our own life forms - none of these things were conceivable in 1910 beyond being seen as the deranged ramblings of a lunatic.

The effect of this is intriguing. Even in the worst jobs climate in a lifetime, there are high paying IT jobs that are still going unfilled - they require too specialized a set of skills. Meanwhile, millions of displaced workers, in fields that were thought safe even a few years ago, are now playing the electronic casinos (either the "official ones" put out by gambling companies or states, or the "unofficial ones" - the various equity markets), are either creating entertainment for others or are consuming that entertainment, or are just biding their time until the recover commences and they can get their jobs back.

Yet these jobs aren't going to come back. The physical retail sector is shrinking, even as the electronic sector is growing, but the brick and mortar stores absorbed a lot more of the low-end specialist job market than the electronic retail sector does. Alt-energy and alt-transportation sectors are beginning to absorb young workers, mostly college educated and architecturally or engineering motivated, but this is still a small percentage of the number of workers let go by the Big Three autoworkers, as the deconstruction of Detroit eerily demonstrates. Enviromental reclamation is absorbing workers, and will likely be one of the big growth industries of the twenty-first century, but because profits on such reclamation usually only arise after the work has been accomplished, it does not lend itself well to the traditional corporate model. The fiscal woes of states and the Federal government mean that even public-sector work is no longer safe, and will become less and less so over time. Similarly, biotech needs highly educated workers, more than are being produced, but not that many more.

From HyperCapitalism to Social Capitalism

The environmental remediation, however, points to something profound. There is work that needs to be done - we have spent a decade destroying our environment, living off of infrequent updates to our infrastructure, neglecting our children's education, building wasteful food distribution systems and so forth ... and all of this work needs to happen. The problem is that the work is not profitable under the current economic system to perform. We've built a system that rewards financial companies with the ability to profit off of millisecond differentials in trading (which produces no real value to the transaction, but essentially is just a high tech variation off of the technique of shaving slivers off of gold coins and then recasting new money from the shavings), but people are going hungry. We have an epidemic of obesity and diabetes not because we are actually eating all that much more food than we did even a generation ago but because we've let that food become toxic, filled with calories but no real nutritional value.

This process is actually underway even now. The impending death throes of the European Union will send shock waves throughout the global economy for the next several years, coupled as it is with global resource declines, and one of the impacts upon this will be that the industrial economic system, put in place in the last years of the Great Depression, will finally collapse under its own weight. Among the casualties will be the industrial notion of the 9-5 job and the notion of guaranteed salaries.

Ironically, IT workers are probably more adapted to what will come next then most people are. Work becomes a series of short to intermediate term contracts, coupled with royalties on the products so created. This is a consequence of the shift to an engineering/creative dominant century. In the twentieth century, the primary beneficiary in a corporate production was the one who brought the most financing to the table. In the twentieth century, these same entities were also usually the only ones who could track sales of goods, and naturally the contracts tended to be in favor of the financiers. Now, it is becoming increasingly feasible to track use of your own productions and to distribute payment accordingly.

Customization, similarly will likely come in three flavors - traditional contract customizations, speculative customizations, and longer term ownership of the associated revenue stream. I see the last in areas such as environmental reclamation - contractors would essentially bind together to form a corporation that would then be entitled to at least a portion of the reclaimed salvage, with the proceeds going back to the workers. For this to happen, however, the role of the initial investor will need to erode, a process that again is happening. Many startups are now actively shunning traditional VCs altogether because the longer term revenue stream costs are too high compared to the costs involved in just eating the initial costs up-front. You receive recompense based primarily on what you bring to the table in terms of skill and work ethic.

Similarly, speculative customizations will evolve into a free/commercial dichotomy - provide the foundational system for free, but specialized customizations involve either outright purchase or lease of goods (real or virtual) for a specific period of time.

What of the great dispossessed, however? I don't know the answer there - don't see any way that good is going to coming out of this ticking time bomb. Standards of living will fall until a new equilibrium is reached. As has happened through much of the century, those who are adaptable and willing to be constantly learning will prosper, a gray market will arise (has arisen on the Internet and elsewhere) that can effectively support that reduced standard of living, and existing governmental influence will decline, especially as the gray market will be absorbing more and more of the erstwhile tax revenue of the "white market". In time, the gray market will absorb the white market altogether (though likely not before a revolution takes place) and there will be pressure on the part of the gray market to effectively internally tax itself in order to provide the relevant services.

Ultimately, IT here creates an intricate dance. Long term financial security comes from securing multiple royalty producing revenue streams, making key investments in terms of both money and creative work, balancing the need to be a specialist with being a generalist, constantly self-educating, and ultimately providing value to your clients and prosumer audience. Marketing skills factor into this as well, but marketing by itself is not a strategy to wealth - if you are not able to produce what you promise, then you will fail, because that your clients are as connected as you are.

We are now entering into the second stage of the reputation economy, and it is just as brutal as the older pure monetarist economy but tends to reward not those who are wealthiest but those who in general are best able to solve problems, entertainment us, or provide services. In many respects its not necessarily a new paradigm - anyone who grew up in even a moderate-sized city in 1910 would have understand that concept implicitly - but it's never been asked to work on so broad a scale before.

One final note: the twentieth century was the era of mass production, where economies of scale (and the dominance of the corporation) held sway. The twenty-first century is the era of mass customization, where the core production is held in common, but the value comes from tailoring this core to individual customers. It will not produce vast incomes for a small number of people, but rather instead will produce a workable income for a much largest number of people. This isn't socialism, though it may be described more accurately as social capitalism. It's consistent with a model for sustainable economies, and may in fact be the ultimate irony - for more than a century IT has typically been used to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few. It's perhaps appropriate that in the end IT may end up causing that hypercapitalism to collapse in favor of people making a living wage for reasonable work.