Technological Lag: A Personal Account \ stacker news ~tech

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3000 sats \ 10 comments \ @SimpleStacker 24 Jun tech

I don't usually handle the mail. My wife usually does that. But it turns out that she likes to keep old mail piling up, even if it's useless. She's out of town for a week so I decided to take a look at these piles of mail. 95% are useless, but only about 30% was uncontrollable spam. About 70% were notifications about our own accounts. Basically, mail that we "technically" requested, but we didn't need, because we just manage all our accounts online.

I decided enough is enough, it's time to go paperless! But then it hit me, why hadn't I gone paperless 10 years ago? It was certainly doable back then. It's not like the internet is new. I think it was just never a priority. My wife, who has a higher tolerance for clutter than I do, handled the mail, and it didn't bother her to let the paper mail pile up. Since the piles were neatly tucked into one place, it didn't bother me enough for it to register until I decided to sort through it today.

Going paperless is not hard, but it's not zero cost either. I have to go into each individual account and find the paperless option and select it. For all the accounts we have, it'll probably take at least 15 minutes, maybe even half an hour. And I'll probably miss some. But I think it's worth doing... sorting through and shredding all this paper is painful.

That got me thinking about technological lag. How long it takes new technologies to fully diffuse into society. Even a small but non-zero cost can delay a technology's penetration by decades, because of people's lack of attention.

I wonder what that means for Bitcoin. Setting up a bitcoin wallet is a similarly easy, but non-zero cost for most people, and it requires attention. It's one of those things that'll take 30 minutes, maybe even more, and things that take 30 minutes can on its own delay adoption by years if not decades. Interesting to think about.

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0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 24 Jun

Update to this story: Going paperless was harder than I expected. I couldn't find an option on someof the accounts. Some of them I needed to verify myself with my wife's identity, even though I know her logins I don't have her phone with me. Looks like I'm gonna have to wait a while to fulfill this task.

Yet more lag

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 14h

Great insight.

Here's an even more unsettling implication: imagine how basically everyone in the world doesn't want all this shit being mailed to them, and yet, for the reasons you say, we just live with it. So it's this insane idiot dance of them mailing you shit (which they would prefer not to do) and you getting the shit (which you would prefer not to get), and throwing it instantly away, and it accumulating in landfills (which we would all, collectively, prefer to not happen).

None of the participants are happy with the outcome, and yet we continue to produce eight zillion tons of garbage while we all soak in it. The human condition, ladies and gentlemen.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 12h

There are certain lobbies who probably want it to keep happening. The post office, for one.

63 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 24 Jun

In the case of paperless, I bet most of the adoption comes from businesses that want to save money by not printing and mailing. Sadly, I think you may be an exception in taking the time to go through your accounts and make them paperless. Most people probably just toss it in the bin.

So with Bitcoin. If it is something people have to opt in to (and permissionless money is voluntary money) then I don't expect the general population to ever take the time to adopt it.

So perhaps mass self custody adoption is unlikely unless we figure out some way to make it in the interest of businesses to promote self custody. Hmmm. That is a bit more pessimistic than I thought it would turn out when I started.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 24 Jun

It's definitely in the interest of the companies to help you go paperless, and you can tell because many of them have it in big bold letters on their envelope: "Go paperless at www.company.com/paperless!" And still, we don't do it.

It just gives you an idea of the amount of friction to get people to do things

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 24 Jun

That’s a good reason to expect bitcoin to be adopted after regular fiat apps integrate bitcoin wallets.

30 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 24 Jun

This reminds me of early on in this interview with Tyler Cowen. He argues bottlenecks will prevent even AGI/ASI from causing much of an explosion of economic growth. From what I recall: Yes, AGI will be amazing and powerful, but diffusing technology takes a long time. It will show up as a persistent increase in GDP but not all that much and not all at once.

He seems to have written about it here. (I haven't read it yet.)

30 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 24 Jun

lol the top comment on that post mentions going paperless:

I think people started talking about the paperless workplace in the late 90s. From my experience, it took about 20 years for most workplaces to actually go (mostly) paperless.

33 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 24 Jun

lol, i guess going paperless is a good example, since it's such a universal experience

30 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 24 Jun

And the extent to which people have gone paperless is VERY different in different countries.

For instance - between the US and Germany - Germany is far, far more paper oriented. You go to any bureaucracy in Germany, and most things are still in paper, with big file cabinets.