IRL vs. URL
Lately, something has been bothering me (IRL). I’m losing sleep. I don’t understand how life can be IRL and URL. To me, life is only IRL – there is no such thing as URL. Technology is merely a construct that we created, presumably to make IRL better. What began slowly, now rapidly causes big shifts in how we experience life, IRL. Not all change is good. The modern office is among the high value social constructs which technology seeks to upend. The office IRL is fast becoming the office URL. Is this a good thing?
The idea of separating life into IRL and URL is fundamentally harmful to society. Twitter is an excellent example. There, people interact with others very differently than they would if such interaction was in person. We have 5 senses; sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing. We’re designed to use all 5 to engage our environment. Yet in the digital realm (URL), we can’t engage all our senses. In addition, we don’t share a common experience, anchored in place. I’m not suggesting that taste, touch and smell are particularly useful in most business meetings (at least not the ones I’ve attended). But I do believe there is something uniquely important about having all senses activated in the same context, about how this translates to a shared human experience. Maybe this is among the reasons Zoom calls suck, because we can’t fully appreciate the environment in which the communication occurs. A number of our senses are disabled and/or we’re having an individual sensory experience which is disconnected from that of the other participants (e.g., I’m hearing my infant child cry in the background, or I’m hungry and my partner is cooking in the kitchen).
I think people are being sold a bill of goods when it comes to the office URL. For example, they see the immediate ways in which abandoning the office feels good, how it provides more work/life balance, eliminates their commute and possibly allows them to relocate from an expensive region. But they’re failing to fully consider where this is heading. More URL, less human connectivity. The big winners will be those who build the infrastructure to support URL. A massive market. This is why Meta has already spent $100 billion dollars and will spend many billions more to create the metaverse. Yet just as 1985 you (assuming you were born then) likely lacked the foresight to predict that 2020 you would buy everything from groceries to a new car from the comfort of your couch; it’s hard for us to wrap our minds around a future in which we visit the office in the metaverse, or we shop at the mall in the metaverse. But at the current pace and nature of technological advancements, this is the future.
One day your company will announce a remote-first approach to the workplace. Next you’ll notice that geographic proximity to an office is no longer important, maybe not even possible. The only role geography will play in the labor markets is in terms of how it limits the employee, not the employer. The employer gains profit by lowering its cost of labor through talent acquisition on a global scale. Those who live in expensive geographies will find it harder to compete for work because their cost of living is not supported by their compensation. Cities like San Francisco and other highly desirable geographic regions will increasingly become socio-economically homogenous (already started). Labor costs will be steadily pulled downward by the availability of qualified talent living in the least costly regions of the world. We’re in one of those moments where the employee is “winning the battle but losing the war”. So strap on the virtual reality headset, call the movers and get agile. Oh, we should also talk about your new colleague, AI. Some of your colleagues will be bots (maybe already are). Of course, it will be difficult to compete with a super computer, the contributions from which are informed by the scraping of zettabytes of data. And AI doesn’t ask for a raise, it doesn’t take vacation and it’s rarely sick.
I hope we can take a moment to think more holistically about the promise of the office URL. Technology is real; but increasingly, the experiences it facilitates are not (or are less so). Before we fully destroy the modern office and the cities in which it was built, it’s worth spending a moment to consider that while the modern office has its limitations, it remains human-centric. It fosters human connections and engagement IRL. Maybe that matters.