Virtuous efficiency. For whom?
At my usual coffee shop the other day, two of the workers stood by the point-of-sale terminal, discussing how to best put in an order. “Do we put it in as a bacon & egg roll, and then remove the bacon and add cheese and avocado, or is it better to just put in a whole new item?” This went on for a few minutes. Standing behind them (it’s a tiny kitchen) was the chef, who joked to me that he was about to get a very confusing order.
There was something about this situation that troubled me. Why didn’t they just tell the chef what they wanted? It wasn’t like it was super busy. What ever happened to pen and paper? In the time they spent discussing which was the “most efficient method”, they couldn’t completed both of them! Their goal of efficiency prevented them from being efficient.
Of course, we need to put the data into the point-of-sale terminal so we can charge the customer the right amount, so we can keep tabs on stock levels, so we can appropriately manage their profit-loss, and so we can pay the correct amount of tax when the time comes. It was not only the terminal which is part of this wider system, but the people themselves (don’t worry, I’m not going to go into a whole Marxist rant here, so you’re safe - this time!).
It appears to me that the very presence of this device, the point-of-sale terminal, has influenced the workers to a point where they value efficiency as the main virtue, even if it means they spend more time working out how to be efficient. Technology asks us to do this all the time, it’s not new. And yes, designers can certainly look at how to make their interfaces more adaptable to edge cases, but that isn’t what interests me here. It is the presence of this device that demands that we act in a certain way, enter the information in specific fields, at particular times, so that the rest of the system can function as designed.
In The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul, a French philosopher and sociologist, argued that:
“true technique will know how to maintain the illusion of liberty, choice, and individuality; but these will have been carefully calculated so that they will be integrated into the mathematical reality merely as appearances.”
- Jacques Ellul, 1954, The Technological Society (Translated by John Wilkinson in 1964), p. 139
This is exactly the short scene that I witnessed. Technique, for Ellul, might also be called “technicist society” or “technological society”. A society where its people are co-constituted with technology. In this way, the presence of the point-of-sale terminal, and all its associated connections, enframes the individuals into seeing their world in a particular way. Specifically, one where efficiency for the machine is more highly valued - it’s important to put the information into the device in the most efficient way possible, even if it takes us longer to figure out what the most efficient way actually is.
