From shopping to work to education — what do we lose when digital takes over all aspects of our lives? Author David Sax joins host Brett Hendrie to talk about the myth of a digital utopia, how the pandemic helps us understand the limits of technology, and how we can all add a bit more analog back into our daily routines.
From shopping to work to education — what do we lose when digital takes over all aspects of our lives? Author David Sax joins host Brett Hendrie to talk about the myth of a digital utopia, how the pandemic helps us understand the limits of technology, and how we can all add a bit more analog back into our daily routines.
Brett Hendrie: Do you remember when Twitter burst onto the scene in 2006, helping to usher in a new era of communication? We could build communities with strangers halfway across the world, all through 140 characters or less. Pretty soon Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites fueled movements like the Tunisian revolution in the Arab Spring, helping oppressed populations rise up across the globe. Digital technology was helping mobilized populations for good with history changing results. It looked like technology was saving our future.
But flash forward to January 2021, a mob of angry insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol trying to overturn the presidential election. Social media was fueling this movement too except, this time, it was being powered by misinformation and algorithms that amplify conflict. So is technology really here to save our future? Or is it derailing it? What happens to our culture when we move everything online?
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that we never ever have to lose access to those virtual worlds. But should that be the case? What do we lose when digital permeates all aspects of our lives?
Welcome to Visiting Experts, a Rotman School podcast featuring backstage conversations on business and society with influential scholars, thinkers and leaders featured in our acclaimed Speaker Series.
I'm your host, Brett Hendrie, and I'm joined today by best selling author, celebrated speaker and journalist David Sax to talk about his new book, The Future is Analog: How to Create a More Human World. David's book explores the myth of a carefree, digital future, why the pandemic helped us to better understand both the promise and the limits of technology, and how we can all be more thoughtful about the path ahead. Welcome, David. Thank you for joining us today.
David Sax: It is great to be here, Brett. Thank you.
BH: Congratulations on the book. I wanted to begin by reflecting back on the pandemic. And during that time, it seemed we were doing everything digitally. We were working through Zoom, we were ordering groceries online. We were watching concerts via livestream. What did we learn about the role of technology in our lives during the pandemic?
DS: I think the first thing we learned is that it is essential. It is an essential service to use the parlance of those wonderful months and years.
And that the transition to using it almost for a complete existence — to do every activity that sort of necessary and meaningful in our lives, through screens, through digital technology, through the internet — is a fairly simple transition, technologically speaking. I mean, what's amazing is that there were no companies that just like, went bankrupt overnight, or like failed to make this transition. Everyone's like, "Oh, what did we do? Okay, well, we're gonna do this on Zoom," and we use the software and it's like, "Alright, everyone, make sure you invest in some sweat pants." And that was it.
Everything was kind of up and running, whether it was places like Rotman and universities or major corporations or small businesses or medium-sized businesses — unless you had to do a physical thing, like build a building or cook a hamburger or, you know, be an ER doctor.
Generally speaking, that transition was simple. And it worked for churches and synagogues, and it worked for performing arts and it worked for all these different institutions that were fairly analog in their core, right, fairly physical. And so I think that, ease of it had long been the promise of this digital future that Silicon Valley and others creating and selling and marketing this technology promise, right? This was an easy transition to do.
But I think the deeper thing we learned, the longer we went through the pandemic, and the longer we were doing these things remotely, was that they had their limitations. And their limitations weren't so readily apparent. But the more time you spent doing all these activities, working, learning, socializing, communicating, entertaining yourself, even praying online, the more you saw the value of the physical spaces, and face to face relationships that are the core of the human analog experience. And it became very apparent how central those values are, even to things like working in an office where it would seem that the productive aspects of work, the task doing, the things you get paid for, the widget making and widget selling and so on. Even those non quantifiable analog parts of it - the smell of the office and the birthday party with the little cake in the lunchroom, and all these other interactions - actually made a greater part of the whole, they made a company and its culture and our lives richer and interesting and actually added up to something that was incredibly valuable in the end at the bottom line.
BH: And it seems like the pandemic was really a moment of reflection for you and for your family, and was part of the inspiration for the book. So can you share with us a little bit about what your own experience was? And why that inspired you to write the book?
DS: Yeah, I mean, my own experience was very identifiable to a lot of people who are living in the same circumstance. I had two young kids, I was working to promote a book that I had just come out. And so everything I was doing all of a sudden, was online and on Zoom. And my wife was working on her career coaching business, and everything moved online for her and our kids were online for school. And we were doing all these activities online. And we would call our friends all over the world, and they were doing the same crap. And it was just like talking to my friend in Uruguay about how awful it was that his kids were in school online in Uruguay. And talking to my friend in London about what it was like to work from London. And so my experience was like everyone else's was, I was able to continue life. I was able to stay safe, because there were no vaccines then and so I was limiting my movement out in the world and exposure to other human beings.
But every day that went by felt diminished. And each day, there grew a yearning for something more. And I think the thing that I identified as that yearning for something more was what I refer to as analog, which is, the places and the relationships that occur as a human in the physical world that there was no substitute for that. The digital version of that through Zoom or, I don't know, Cisco WebEx that like sad third child, it sort of got part of it there. But it never went the full way. There was there was that thing that was missing. And the longer it went on, the more I yearned for that real thing.
BH: And so hence, the title of your book, The Future is Analog, which sounds a little bit like a manifesto that we need to exorcise digital out of our lives. But you didn't write the book on a typewriter — I assume you used a word processor, and you're not using rotary phones. Where's the balance? And what's the optimal role for technology in our lives to balance the human side with everything that digital gives us?
DS: Balance is the key word because the promise of the digital future, which has been the sort of core technological challenge — and core marketing strategy of software companies, hardware companies, other companies, like consulting companies that are selling these products and services — is that the future is digital. That the growth of digital technology, whether it's hardware, software, AI, whatever the flavor of the week is, is this inevitable hockey stick (to use the terms of venture capital) upward growth. It’s the concept of Moore's Law, exponential growth every 18 months, the doubling of processing speed, the halving of cost of a processor applied to the world writ large. And anywhere where you're going to apply that technology, you're gonna get that exponential growth in profits, in sales, in innovation, and expansion, and ideas and so forth. And ultimately, that leads to this sort of flourishing of humans. We're going to change the world. How many people got on with their pitch like this is going to change the world. We're gonna make the world a better place, Kumbaya, my lord Kumbaya. So that promise has been this kind of accepted thing, and no one has questioned that. Oh, the future of education is digital. And people like yes, of course, of course, of course.
And I've been questioning this for a number of years because I've been writing on this. And so what did we see, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was getting contacted to do interviews people say well, “we know the future is digital now, but there's no going back. This is the new normal,"
Everything that we're seeing is now going to increase. And the predictions were that the offices were closing, they would never reopen, no one would ever go back to an office downtown. This was the future. Virtual learning was sort of the way that this was happening. That we were seeing this exponential increase in E-commerce that it went from, I don't know, 10 per cent of people shopping online to like 15 [per cent], in the span of weeks, and like, next year would be 20, 25, 30. And on and on, until we wouldn't need any more stores. Everyone would just buy everything through E-commerce.
And so what I was doing is questioning it, because what we forgot — and all those predictions forget is like — everyone says the future is digital. But we're still humans, are still flesh and blood creatures sitting here in the basement of a university.
And we have human needs. But as long as we continue to be human beings — flesh and blood creatures, animals on this planet — we have real needs, our bodies have needs, our minds have needs, and I guess I would say, our hearts and our souls have needs. And those needs can only be addressed through technology in a very limited way. There is only so much technology can give us. We need more. Our bodies need to engage with physical things in this world. So that might be learning in a physical way through a school, and sitting in a classroom and interacting. Or shopping. What have you seen in the past year is that E-commerce sales have gone down tremendously. Amazon's laying off 10s of 1,000s of people at its warehouse, because its sales are down. Shopify stock is way down, because they all predicted it would grow exponentially. And it's actually shrunk exponentially, right? Because people like to go to stores, you go to a grocery store, go to a mall, they're full in the middle of a recession.
And so there's those real needs that we have that is the thing that we really came to realize. And so when I say the future is analog, I'm not saying we have no use for technology, it's that the core of our human experience is analog. And any future that doesn't acknowledge that and address that, especially when implementing technology, is not one that's going to come to fruition.
BH: You mentioned the future of work and the future of the office and the predictions that we would all be virtually working from home indefinitely. But of course, now we're in the in between moment where some people are working from home and some people are at the office-
DS: The great “what’s going on?” as I like to call it.
BH: Exactly. And so you interviewed a lot of experts and professionals and executives who are trying to navigate this space right now on what is the future of work? What are the questions that they're wrestling with? And what were your perspectives on those?
DS: Well, I think there's two sets of questions, the shallow questions and the deep questions. The shallow questions are the sort of obvious, immediate ones that are really driven by budgetary needs, Okay, well, how much office space do we need? And how many square feet will be devoted to this team and this team? And what days, and what hours will these people come in? And how do we coordinate this ballet of humans so that we can achieve maximum output and productivity with the minimum investment in real estate? And what kind of furniture do we need? And what could the Herman Miller Company sell us?
And those are just the sort of knee jerk reactions to trying to figure it out through physical assets.
The deeper questions, which I think the pandemic has done a service, in unearthing is this bigger issue of what it means to be a productive worker or build a productive workplace that allows for ideas and creativity, in an economy that's dominated by information where all non-physical jobs, jobs that are done on computer, can be done anywhere. Like you go into an office with a bunch of people sitting around and on computers, and those people can all be working regardless where they are because of the nature of the technology. And yet we're still applying — and this is to paraphrase my friend Cal Newport, whose written about this — we're still applying this notion of productivity that's a 19th century Taylorism factory notion, which is this many bums, shall sit in this many chairs, and we reward these bums for sitting in these chairs with this much money per hour that they're sitting in the chair.
And now we're applying that to remote work. You know, there's, there's keystroke monitoring technology and like, weird AI camera crap, which is an entirely ineffective, inefficient and outdated mode of measuring how people should work and being productive. And we see this productivity paradox that they call the past half century, which is for all the leaps in information technology, and what it's allowed us to do, productivity in the Western world has stayed flat or declined. And like how is that? I don't understand — we have email. But it just, the technology doesn't solve that because the main model of what we have to think about for the future work, we haven't even begun to tackle. And I think now you're seeing these experiments with it. And this is what the next decade or more is going to be, is different groups, different organizations, different individuals, trying out different ways of working to see what's going to work. And it's not going to happen overnight. And it's not going to be a simple solution that the right software or the right platform and the right device, is going to solve. It's trench warfare and hand-to-hand combat that ultimately, I hope, will lead to more productive work, but also work that allows people to be more meaningful and free.
But that's the reality, right, is keep an open mind, treat it as an experiment and be honest. What are the things that are valuable to your organization for your team?
And what is the way that you found through already the experiments of the past three years that actually elevates that and makes that work, rather than saying as some companies have, we’re remote first from the day one and then have to kind of live with the consequences of that decision. It is a time to be flexible, it is a time to be honest. And it will still be a time to make difficult choices. Because there's no one perfect solution. You don't get to keep all the office space, but only use it half the time. There's hard costs to these things.
BH: I want to focus in on the impact of technology on retail and small business and local communities. And we certainly saw during the pandemic, the huge growth of major companies like Amazon and DoorDash, and the huge growth in E-commerce, and you're very thoughtful in your book, providing some perspective on how we can help local businesses and small businesses actually compete with these larger platforms. How can technology support those smaller companies?
DS: This goes back to the promise that you talked about at the beginning of the internet and the promise of digital technology, which is that it was going to be this great leveler. The world is flat, in the words of the great mustachioed sage, Thomas Friedman. And, as Thomas Friedman talked about in that book, and all those columns, the internet would allow Brett and David's consulting company to compete with Ernst and Young, because we could set up a website and that website would get our word out there. And in a way, that's true. But when you look at the market for E-commerce, for the sale of sort of consumer goods, and the sale of services, like food delivery, which became this essential thing, if you want to eat something other than your bad sourdough, during the height of the pandemic, it's this increasingly non diversified monopolistic thing, right. Amazon owns, I don't know, 30 per cent or more of online commerce and the U.S. Walmart owns almost a similar amount.
And when it comes to restaurant and food delivery, again, you're talking about a very small number of platforms, all of which have massive capital market funding, or venture capital market funding.
But I think what we saw was the full extent of the harm that that did to businesses, this third party restaurant delivery, which is UberEATS and DoorDash and all that constellation of an app that tells a young immigrant man on an E-bike to go pick up some Pad Thai at a restaurant and bring into your house. The middleman software services the predatory nature of that in order to sort of deliver this expected return became really apparent. And you heard stories of restaurants, which had to switch to delivery because they couldn't have dine in, losing money on every order, they're sending out the door. And the delivery companies just turning the screws to increase their fees, to cannibalize their businesses with ghost kitchens. So it's like, hey, we see Brett's Hot Dogs are doing really, really good. On our app, we have data, we know that people who order from it. So why don't we just open up David's Hot Dogs and we’ll charge $1 less a hot dog, and we'll will own all the profit margin on that. And that's what these ghost kitchens are, which is an insanely horrible thing to do. And you would see restaurants closing and this was because of it.
And so what you actually saw during the pandemic is restaurants, and other small businesses being so desperate for an alternative to this sort of monopolistic platform, like Amazon, or these delivery companies, they started creating their own. And so there's a wonderful platform called Ambassador, which is one that started here in Toronto, there's another one called LoCo Co Op, which is cooperatively owned in the United States. And they have individual chapters. And it's like, hey, same software, but it's owned by the restaurant or it's just a software as a service model. We're not taking increasing cuts of different things in the back end, and this can help it. And in the same way that Shopify, allows any individual store — the bookstore, the shoe store, the hardware store — to set up their own E-commerce platform, they'll pay them a monthly fee, but they're not like Amazon - Shopify is not going to be like, Oh, I see Brett’s shoes is doing really well. Now we're going to copy Brett's shoe and sell it for 13 per cent less, and make it a rank higher on our platform, which is what Amazon does. So digital still has the potential to really elevate these analog businesses. But it requires that mindset that this is a service to be provided to strengthen the analog physical world analog physical businesses, restaurants, brick-and-mortar stores, manufacturing, design businesses and all these other things, rather than their goal being to usurp them, to disrupt them out of existence.
BH: And I think everybody has seen the power and the dominance of these platforms and their desire to really own the marketplace, as you said, and become the seller and everything else through the value chain. And, and hopefully, people are beginning to understand that relationship.
DS: We don't allow that in other businesses — except in Canada. But we've broken up monopolies in the past, because we realize that, especially in a capitalist society, this is a truly unhealthy thing. Nobody wants just one place to go to buy their groceries or one place to go to get their hotdogs. The beauty of a society that encourages entrepreneurship and business is that it allows for a multiplicity of products, ideas, price points, visions the can serve all sorts of different communities.
And I think digital does scale really well. But it can also do individualization well, and I think we have to remember that if we can focus on that, and then that's what I'm talking about by keeping the analog at the core by saying, hey, ecommerce doesn't mean that you have to put every store out of business. In fact, ecommerce can be the thing that helps the stores, diversify, and stay in business as it did during the pandemic, but only if you're building it in a way that allows that, like a company like Shopify does, rather than everyone else is the enemy but me, like Amazon does.
BH: Let's turn to education. And you have a quote that really was very powerful in your book, where you noted that education is a relationship. And it's that relationship between the student and the teacher that turns information into knowledge. And I wanted you to reflect on what we learned about the importance of in-person education during the pandemic, and what we should take from that moving forward.
DS: Sure, yeah, that quote is, is from the mouth and mind of the brilliant Larry Cuban, professor of education, history and technology at Stanford. And Larry is someone that studied ed and tech, for many years was actually a booster of it in the ‘80s and grew increasingly skeptical as he saw its attempted implementation.
The promise of ed-tech was always — and this is going back to pre digital, even to Edison's time with film and, and recorded sound — is that schools, places like Rotman, places like the elementary school, my kids go to not too far away, they're outdated. A bunch of people trekking to some building that you have to pay to heat and service and clean and whatever, and that these people are sitting for a period of time, on their butts, listening to someone drone on and on about a topic. Why couldn't this information be available anytime, to anyone, that way people's time is freed. And not only that, but geographically, Rotman doesn't have to be in Toronto, Rotman can be anywhere in the world, anyone has connection.
This is the promise behind, Nicholas Negroponte “one laptop per child” vision in the early 2000s, which was, “we're going to give these low-powered laptops that connect to the internet to anyone in Africa and all over the developing world, and they'll open them up and get the best lessons. And this'll really pave the way for equal access to education in the developing world.”
And it was the same thing behind the MOOC movement of Sebastian Thrun and others at Google and Stanford who said massive open online courses, the best lectures should be available on the internet for a low fee. And anyone can sign up to take a course at U of T, Harvard, MIT, Sorbonne and Oxford, like, we can move beyond the walls of these institutions and open them up to the world and people will get much more education.
And what Larry Cuban says is, those initiatives failed. And they failed tremendously. I mean, one laptop per child barely even got off the ground. You know, when people finally got the laptops, it didn't really work. Anytime anyone's given out kind of iPads and things as the means to sort of, supercharged learning the scores are always lower, the academic performance is lower, and there's all sorts of other problems associated with it.
And the MOOC movement. When it was put into practice 10 per cent of people completed the course. Only 10 per cent of people watched the lectures and did all the work. If a professor at U of T at the Rotman School had a 10 per cent completion rate, they would be fired. Doesn't matter if they have tenure. And that faculty would be investigated and likely shut down.
And yet, year after year, we were accepting this promise. So the future of education is digital. And so what happened when it was tried with every student in every school in every country in the world, right for the period of months, if not years? The same thing, terrible results, unhappy teachers, unhappy students, unhappy families, bad, bad, bad across the board. Why was that?
Larry Cuban said, what ed-tech got wrong and has always gotten wrong, is thinking of education as the delivery of information to individual minds.
What is an MBA at the Rotman School? Well, it's learning how to do cost accounting, and it's learning how to do sales and learning how to do marketing. And it's learning these specific facts and theories about how to do these things. That's part of it, that's the substance of it, let's say. But the core of it is a relationship, a relationship between a student and a teacher, whether that's in kindergarten, or a university professor, a relationship of students to one another, and a relationship of that school community to the greater community it's in, whether that's a neighborhood or city like Toronto, with the alumni network of somewhere like Rotman. Anyone knows this, when you think back to school, you remember the teachers, you remember your friends, you remember the feeling of the school, and what it was like to go to school in Toronto or Harvard, wherever… You remember all these things.
Do you remember the specific lesson you learned? Do you remember the facts? You remember some of them, but you remember the ones that you cared about remembering and cared about learning because those relationships allowed it.
There's another wonderful professor I interviewed for the book, her name is Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, she's at the University of California, maybe Southern California. She's a neuroscientist, and she studies the way emotions in the brain lead to learning. She said that learning is not a logical act. It's a fundamentally emotional act. And that emotions are what drive the retention of knowledge and the transference of that knowledge into something greater. But if you don't care about learning, you're not going to learn anything. Which is why when people turn on those video lectures, as they did in the pandemic, they stopped caring, they tuned out. Because there was no one there to make them care. There wasn't that relationship. They weren't sitting there with their friend like “shh, pay attention. This is good.” There was no none of that energy in the room. That just gets flattened online.
So this is what we learned. And I hope it's something that we will keep learning from because they're two industries, if you want to call them education, and technology, which purport and promise that they are based upon the scientific method and learning from objective facts. Well, the objective facts are, this didn't work. It hasn't worked before. It hasn't worked anytime someone's tried it. And it sure as hell didn't work when it was tried all over the world.
BH: Well, I'm sure the parents of any school aged children who had to help-
DS: Let's not even talk about that. They're all have collective post traumatic stress. Yeah, for sure. That's education.
BH: Your book is grouped into broad categories such as that, but also work culture, society at large, commerce. If you had to choose one area where we need to most urgently be more thoughtful about how we use technology, what would that be?
DS: Hmm, It's interesting. I think the one that that to me kind of gets back to the core of it and when you what you alluded to at the beginning in your intro is conversation. I'm here, we are sitting in a room in the basement of the Rotman school.
BH: A very nice studio.
DS: Lovely. Thank you, gentlemen for bestowing it. We're having a real conversation, even though there's microphones in front of us and headphones on. And two other people here producing, drinking water very quietly.
And this is the way that humans have evolved over the course of hundreds of 1,000s of years to communicate. It is our greatest skill, right? We're not the fastest animal, we're not the strongest and mobile. But we're really good at sharing information in this way.
And when you take that, and you say, “Well, this is the same, you're going to speak on this flat screen, and this camera is going to shoot at you, or you can type these words, or you can listen to this podcast and have a conversation on the phone with someone. It's the same thing.” It's actually not. And I think this is the missing ingredient that we have seen linking all these different areas that I wrote about. The reason why people felt so burned out at work, when they were doing Zoom calls all day long, the reason why education was dismal and a failure, the reason why socializing with friends and family was just horrible, to get back to that sort of essential human value. Conversation.
People are saying, oh, Twitter, now that Elon Musk has bought it, you know, what's going to happen to the conversation on Twitter? Twitter is not a conversation. It's a communications platform. It's a platform for shouting ideas out in the world. It's a million soapboxes in a town square, and each person's yelling louder and crazier than the other one. That's not a conversation.
This, this in some ways, it's a conversation, or even more importantly, the conversation we had before, when we were sitting outside the studio waiting for our turn to come in, that was a conversation. And that is the glue of everything in society. It's the glue of business, it's the glue of education, it's the glue of personal relationships, it's the glue of communities and cities in these bigger things. It's what allows us to be human and work our way through the world, for better or worse. It’s what gives us meaning it gives us connection.
And anytime we take those conversations, and move them online, we're turning down the signal. We're still getting the words, but we're missing a lot of the meaning.
BH: If you had one piece of advice for our audience who are looking to have deeper and more meaningful conversations and create a more human and less digital life for themselves, what would that advice be?
DS: I'm going to give you the advice that I got from a conversation I had last week on book tour in San Francisco. I got picked up in my Lyft from Eduardo Ramos, who was my driver. Eduardo asked me what I was doing in town, I told him about this book. He said, “Oh, I would really liked that book. Two years ago, in the middle of a pandemic, my wife and I were pretty much at the point where we're going to get a divorce. And I realized it because when I came home from the two jobs that I work, and she came home from the two jobs she worked, we would just be on our phones, and we wouldn't talk, and our kids would be on their phones, and they wouldn't talk. And so what we finally did was we put the phones in a box at the front hall on weekends. And for the hours that we decided that we were going to be together as a family, we will be together as a family, we would make meals, we would go out, we would go for walks, we would go to restaurants, we would go to parks.” And he said it transformed their life because it brought back something that they didn't even realize they had lost until it was almost too late.
But it's such a simple thing that it just seems so difficult for us. You don't need your phone when you're having a conversation with someone. If you're in a meeting with someone and it's an important meeting, turn your phone off, no one needs to reach you. In that moment, they can wait. If you're out on a date, if you're with a family member, if you're with your kids, put your phone away, turn it off, put it on airplane mode. You don't need it, you won't miss it. And we become so habituated to this idea that it's this powerful tool, and because it's with us, it gives us power. It makes us important and productive. But it doesn't. It just distracts us and diminishes us 99% of the time.
BH: It's great advice. And I know that schools are starting to introduce the pouches where students can put their phones away, and so they don't have access. And so we'll stay tuned for the David Sax branded hideaway cellphone box coming soon to your store. David, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation today. Where can people go to find out more about you?
DS: They can go to the book, where finer books are sold. Support your local independent bookstore, as what I always like to say because they're more than just places that sling paper, they are community and I think one of the most amazing things is how many of them have grown and expanded over the past decade as everybody predicted they'd be done in by Amazon and, and sort of large chains. I hate to say you can follow me on Twitter- You know, it's a Rotman audience — LinkedIn. Link me in. I accept every invitation that isn't a crypto bot.And those seem to have disappeared lately for some reason.
BH: That's great. Okay, we will look for you on LinkedIn, David.
This has been Rotman Visiting Experts, backstage discussions with world class thinkers and researchers from our acclaimed speaker series.
To find out about upcoming speakers and events visiting us here at Canada's leading business school, please visit rotman.u toronto.ca/events This episode was produced by Megan Haynes, recorded by Dan Mazzotta, edited by Damian Kearns. For more innovative thinking, head over to the Rotman Insights Hub, and subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts or Google podcasts. Thanks for tuning in.