IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

42 Chapter 2
quitting work, or going from a full- to a part-time job. And these were
not only the old. Juliet Schor, who has pioneered research into downshifting,
finds that these downshifters tended to be more young than
old—indeed, they are disproportionably found in the eighteen- to fortyyear-old
range. 49
Business shows some signs of a return to slowness—thanks in large part
to a revalorization of time as an element of trust. During the dot-com years,
it was thought that ‘‘disintermediating’’ people from business processes
would improve efficiency and reduce costs. The theory of eco-nets, agoras,
aggregation, value chains, distributive networks, and so on was that as networked
communications dissolved inefficient ties to people and place,
companies would access different suppliers, procure new items, and so
drive down prices. But experience has shown that relationships based on
the development of mutual trust through time remain the vital essence
that makes markets work. Social ties and personal relationships that have
developed slowly through time have proved to be as valuable as brute
speed in many industries that experimented in disintermediation.
Journalist Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal chronicled the struggles of
one family-owned food distribution business in Oakland, California, that
matches buyers and sellers in the eighty-billion-dollar-a-year food produce
industry as it toyed with an e-commerce model. Gomes described a vivid
scene that featured ‘‘six salespeople in a small noisy office, buying and selling
produce using telephones, fax machines, and 20-year-old software on a
recent-model IBM minicomputer about the size of a small refrigerator.’’ The
dot-com proposition was simple: Use Web technology to build an automated
business-to-business exchange—and banish billions or even trillions
of dollars of inefficiencies. More speed seemed a prime target in a sector
whose prime rule is ‘‘Sell it or smell it.’’ It turned out that the main assumption
behind the Internet exchanges was wrong: The technological workhorses
already in use were efficient enough and had little to gain from the
Internet. ‘‘I could sell ten times more produce by just getting on the phone
and hustling than I ever could on a website,’’ said one trader Gomes interviewed.
As Gomes wrote at the time, ‘‘the abrupt leap from old-fashioned
personal relationships to the ruthlessly competitive world of electronic
exchanges was more than many could handle. The boosters failed to balance
the cost efficiencies of electronic transactions against these personal
relationships.’’ 50