Store-ies, Talking about talking

Back when I was taking business classes in preparation for opening Unplugged Games, I noticed a running theme of distrust of technology from my fellow classmates, the reading material, and the teachers. I never understood that, most of my classes were online only, and without IT it would have literally been impossible for us to have them, Yet they saw no irony in talking about how little they planned to use/allow to be used tech in the businesses they planned on opening.

In one notable conversation I posted that I would permit my employees the use of their cellphones at work, not letting them just make calls constantly mind you, just letting them have access to the tool so they can screen calls and texts and take a break if it is something that needs an urgent response. One fellow student told me that "I don't foresee your store succeeding with a policy like that". Now of course the store didn't succeed, but I am absolutely certain that Whitney and Ash using their phones once in a while didn't contribute even a little bit to my downfall.

One of my major errors, or at least something I failed to take advantage of, was not using technology more than I did and really integrating it into my store, I used a register that largely looks exactly like cash registers have looked for the last thirty years, and functioned similarly too, items got programmed in with prices, receipts were printed and a backup was printed as well, now transaction records were stored electronically too, on a removable memory card with like two meg of memory, but there was basically no functionality for inventory tracking and no online support at all.

These days I go into game stores and see the registers are mostly replaced with tablet style computers, they are connected to an online inventory which is updated in real time as sales happen, they make having customer accounts easy and allow you to be flexible when doing pricing. They are amazing and they were totally available back when I started out too, but I didn't even consider the idea. Now I have no idea how to set up that kind of system, I imagine a fair amount of work goes into getting it rolling and updated properly, but if I had truly been thinking I would have invested in that and either taken the courses to learn how to do it myself, or hired an IT person on a contract basis to do it for me.

Would it have saved the store? Probably not, as I have said the main reason I failed was I didn't have enough capital to support the store through the first couple of years of operation, but I suspect that even had I solved that problem, my failure to use tech might have screwed me pretty hard down the line, particularly with inventory management. It wasn't a major issue when I had little enough stuff on my shelves that I could almost hold the contents of the store in my head, but it would have been if I had gotten bigger, it would have been a huge issue, and once it became a problem it would have been really hard to fix, better to have started with the problem solved from the beginning.

But none of my classes talked about that, I am not blaming them really, just remembering, instead they talked a lot about how disruptive cell phones in the hands of millenials can be, or the dangers of being hacked.

Basically the classes I took, online ones at that, treated technology in the workplace, specifically information technology, IE the internet, as a dangerous toy at best rather than a tool that can literally make everything about running a business easier, oh the classes were perfectly fine about teaching me how to use excel, or describing how a file system works, but as soon as online was mentioned it may as well have been witchcraft for all the support they gave.

It might have been a moot point with me, the flaws in my business were in other places and somewhat deeper, but how many other people started something with proper funding and a market but got burned because they never learned how to use technology properly in the formation of their business? Either by advertising or controlling inventory or payroll or what have you?

And yes, Unplugged Games is talking about the virtues of being connected, I am aware, you aren't funny.

The point is, there is a tendency for the older generations to demean the use of technology, and there might be some real reason to that, with many of them having experience losing jobs to automation and the like, but there is a broader cultural... I guess context might be a good term for it as well.

I've spent a great deal of time writing about how I view our socio-political system as an organism, specifically a predatory one that is highly proactive when defending itself against threats. Demeaning information technology is one of the subtle controls the system uses to maintain itself. The reasoning goes sort of as follows: Young people are stupid(because they want to be paid properly, have rights, and not hate their work/life/government), young people use Twitter(to give one example) Twitter is a threat to the status quo(ask the Middle East). Therefore by the transitive property Twitter is stupid, and therefore should be ignored.
Repeat as needed replacing Twitter with cell phones, the internet, texting, or, fuck, I dunno, fidget spinners or something.

The goal is to push the idea of social media as a toy or a distraction, rather than a usable tool of communication, organization... or revolution. You minimize the importance of it so that when your push to limit things like net neutrality happens people don't think of it as something worth fighting about.

All the while those who matter are taking full advantage of the medium as a means of control, some intentionally, some accidentally, but the power remains in the hands of the establishment all the same.

I do not believe that there is a grand conspiracy, I think this shit happens organically in systems designed to perpetually hold power, as ours is, there are absolutely individuals who know and take advantage of it, but for the most part those who push the ideas don't even know they are doing it, or to what end. In addition to the ability to organize, IT helps businesses succeed without vast reserves of capital, or at least without as many reserves, so eliminating the idea of that tool from the workers mind helps prevent them from changing their station, financial mobility being another enemy of capitalism. It's a nest of interconnected predatory systems all benefiting from a network of subtle controls imposed not just by laws and regulations, but by ideas and social norms.