virtualize your work

Are we going through an Engels’ pause in the global economy? Engels’ pause as a term refer to an era around the year 1800, when the industrial revolution kept people’s wages low, while GDP per capita was increased, and capital was centralised to the owners and finances of new industrial business. 

Many have drawn parallels between what is going on today with digitalisation to this 200-year-old period. And it’s no wonder, because we are seeing many of the same effects. The white-collars of today may make a decent income, but the capital growth is concentrating to the few.

The industrial revolution made way for the labour movement. A movement to protect workers’ rights from the depredation by capitalists. At scale, the movement has been a huge success, and its effects, like a limited-hour-day or worker-safety are now considered “normal” in the working world. How will working life change this time around?

a Natural drive towards monopolies, again

During industrialisation, the bigger your factory was, the larger the benefit. In digitalisation, the more users a service has, the larger the benefit due to gaining better data, and thus, in most network-based services, offering a better service. 

So both revolutions naturally drive towards monopolies. In the world, where all data is available to all people (we call it a virtualised world), it doesn’t make sense to have a million search engines, a million online trading platforms or a million social networks. Theoretically, the one who gains the greatest amount of data, builds the best service. 

The worker-movement of the virtual era

In the industrial revolution, workers movement was built around uniting workers to protect them. Workers were not empowered, but rather grouped and given one voice, that could, and still does effect change. 

In the virtualised world, will the white-collar-workers answer be empowerment? In my discussions with startup-leaders and investor as well as big platform leaders, a common surmise is that one person with extraordinary skills far outweighs a group of “normally skilled” workers.

Be the best at what you do

So who can be a person with extraordinary skills? Luckily for us, anyone. The world is so specialised, that we can all be the best at something in our own market. The hard part is to articulate our skills to ourselves and to others, and bring them to the market. 

For the market is there. There’s a continuous auction for skills in platforms like Upwork, LinkedIn and Etsy. Each one of them different, but perhaps a sneak peak at the future of work.

The life of white-collar-workers today is made hugely more difficult by the remains of industrialisation. As industrial workers united, they needed strictly built professions that best described their place on the factory floor. The “drill worker”, “the welder”, “the power loom worker”.  Well, listen to us now: the data analyst, backend developer, senior game programmer, test automation engineer. Is it this classification of skills, that create “extraordinary” and “normally skilled” workers. Are we really all extraordinary in our own way?

The value chain of creating a top-notch company in the virtual world is not about having an army of web developers (front- and back-end), it is a combination of many individual, highly specific skills, that deserve a unique description, and deserve to be empowered and heard. 

plan your side hustle

It starts with you. Instead of trying to fit the industrial-era description of your assumed position, create your own. Consider what you’re good at, and what your market needs. Then build your story around that, and join the market.

If you’re not ready to go yet, at least start thinking of how you will break loose from the habits of industrial era work, by considering what you could do as your side hustle. Many of us will have multiple employers anyway in the future (See, for example this publication from Demos Helsinki & Sitra), so why not start now?