
Against the synchronous society - mildbyte
https://kimonote.com/@mildbyte/against-the-synchronous-society-3146/
======
apatters
This is classic antisocial engineer thinking. The principal benefits of
synchronicity are all social: it enables human contact, live conversations and
shared context.

No one cares that a million toilets have to flush at the same time. We invent
bigger and better sewage pipes, some people get paid to build them, and
everything's fine. Lots of people like to watch the new Game of Thrones
episode at the same time and then talk about it with their coworkers at the
office the next day.

It really is a minority of people who think otherwise. I run a heavily
asynchronous, remote company, with fully remote customers, and mostly remote
employees. I bias toward hiring locally just so I have someone to talk to.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _This is classic antisocial engineer thinking. The principal benefits of
> synchronicity are all social: it enables human contact, live conversations
> and shared context._

That's post hoc reasoning. Individuals don't globally optimize to synchronize
everything. In fact, most individuals have good reasons for things to be
desynced socially - so that they e.g. don't have to take a day off to visit a
doctor or submit paperwork to a bank.

I suspect though that there is a process through which society tends to keep
itself in sync. Not sure what it was, though.

> _Lots of people like to watch the new Game of Thrones episode at the same
> time and then talk about it with their coworkers at the office the next
> day._

Does this still happen, given the rise of the torrents, on-demand streaming,
and the way TV shows distribution tend to be spread out over time? (Maybe it
does, I'm an antisocial engineer, so I might have missed it.)

~~~
emodendroket
If there were no set hours how would you be able to depend on the weekday
being when you could go to the bank or the doctor? What you're talking about
is being the beneficiary of the very thing you're decrying.

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jessaustin
One suspects you've never lived in a place where all the grocery stores have
bankers' hours. This arrangement makes it difficult for a working single
person to obtain groceries.

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ajmurmann
I never understood that. It drove me especially nuts when I lived in Germany
where opening house were much more limited.

I'd love to see what happens if certain stores radically change their hours.
Opening hours from 6am-9am & 5am-11am always seemed much more sensible to me.
Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?

If I had enough money to an experiment like this not endangering my future,
I'd own a store just to see what would happen.

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Fnoord
When I was in Berlin I was surprised grocery stores were open so short on
Sunday. However, regardless of religion, it has a side effect that horeca
workers (which -I kid you not- _is_ tough labour) can have a guaranteed half
day off on that one day. That's a disadvantage of the 24/7 economy: workers
who do certain tough labour jobs who are replaceable (a relatively non-unique
skillset) have less rights.

> Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?

What happens at say grocery stores is they have less workers at the non-peak
times, and workers do different tasks at different times of the day. Instead
of being clerk, they for example replenish from the warehouse or throw away
items which are past their due date. You'd have only 1 or even 0 clerks, but
there's also hardly any customers. Meantime, all these workers can still be
productive elsewhere.

In your specific example I can imagine a clerk doing inventory or online
orders during downtime. Though it depends also on the size of the store.

As for who buys that, grandpa & grandma, the guy who took a day off to buy a
new TV (tho nowadays one can buy TVs online just as well, and why not [1]), or
the mom who's a housewife or has a part-time job (latter being very common for
females here in The Netherlands).

[1] I'm getting on a tangent here geez but if I'd buy the TV online here in
the Netherlands I'd also have 2 weeks to send it back for _whatever_ reason
other than warranty. I _don 't_ have that right if I buy it in brick & mortar
store other than warranty. A good reason to shop online indeed!

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starchild_3001
Intriguing blog post, but the analysis appears overly simplistic.

I'm going to go with the assumption with that individuals and private
companies are rational. Therefore, they do what's best for them. Then the
question becomes why a majority of individuals and private companies pick the
synchronized schedule?

I believe that should be the angle of investigation, rather than creating
theories about the grand mistakes the society makes. Everybody has more or
less a brain you know :) And they can choose what's best for them. The
question is why does the majority of people and firms choose the synchronized
schedule?

There can be many reasons. I don't claim to know the answers. We can posit
some theories, then test them through reasoning.

Number one reason might be: society needs a clock so that families can sync
up. Drive kids to work. Help them with their homeworks. Cook. Eat family
dinner. Both mom and dad go to work at the same time, so that they can be at
home at the same time. You cannot delegate your interactions with your spouse
or the kids :)

Single people and childless people do have more freedom. I remember the days
where I used to go to work between 10-12am. Then leave around 7pm. Many of my
single and childless friends are on a similar, shifted schedule.

So there you go. You can posit many other theories: E.g. market prices may not
be dynamic enough for efficient allocation. That too might have a good reason
(dynamic prices incur communication costs & may create confusion). So lack of
incentives, too, must be a playing a role.

Weekday-weekday synchronicity too must have good reasons. Work gets done a lot
better when your colleagues are around, you know :) Remote working hasn't
caught up with the quality of face to face interaction.

Etc etc. The article misses many obvious things, imo.

~~~
emodendroket
The work day is mostly set by companies, not workers, and often the people
owning the company aren't even showing up to the office, so why would they
care about congestion? The fact that many software engineers can waltz in at
10:00 is a sign of the relatively strong market for their work; many workers
do not enjoy flexible hours. This seems like a hole in your analysis (though
also in the article).

~~~
ajmurmann
Have you read "Micromotive and Macrobehavior"? The entire book is about this
phenomenon. It's a great read! Out national political debate could be hugely
elevated by everyone having read this.

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gumby
Depending on your job you can hack the holiday mechanism to your advantage.

We were immigrants and little reason to care about the US holidays
Thanksgiving and Independence Day. My mum, a physician _always_ offered to
cover those days and every other doctor in the (small) hospital took her up on
it. Which meant whenever she wanted someone to be on call for her, she always
had a huge number of people who owed her a favor.

This hack worked for Christmas too even though we did celebrate it (though
just pressies and a meal — no family on the continent): people don’t like to
get sick at Xmas so she never got called before the end of the day (and as a
bonus she left us with all the washing up)

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air
People want to maximize the time they spend together with their team mates,
spouses, friends and children. That requires synchronization.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That doesn't automatically imply entire society will keep itself in sync, and
yet for some reason it does.

~~~
ajmurmann
It might. I want to be at work as the same time as my team mates. My wife
wants to be at work as the same time as hers. We both want to be home at the
same time. Now my team mates have to be at work as the same time as my
wife's...

That's not even taking vendors or customers into account we might be doing
business with. Schooling for children currently primarily happening with all
children in the same room doing the same thing at the same time also furthers
this. Just these few examples already cover huge parts of society.

I have neither kids, nor did my wife actually have fixed working hours
somewhere and yet my job is best done if I work the same hours as all the
people who have those constraints. So any one of these can have a huge impact.

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cosmic_ape
There is an assumption that most work environments are not like factories
anymore. I wonder how true is that, even in "modern" fields such as corporate
software development or maybe accounting. It seems these are still
overwhelmingly often series of short 2-3 hour tasks that depend on immediate
input from others - for task definition, or details needed for implementation.

Also, as other comments mention, work is used for socializing. I know many
people for whom work today is one of the major forms of social interaction. As
a society, we just do not sit on benches in front of the houses, talking to
neighbors as they pass by, anymore. That maybe for better of for worse, but it
would be good to construct some alternatives, before we remove the synchronous
workplace.

~~~
emodendroket
The fastest growing sectors are service and healthcare, where I think it
actually does matter what time someone is in. The idea that "most" jobs are
white-collar office jobs signals to me some lack of awareness on the part of
the author here.

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kzrdude
I'd guess that more now than ever are jobs strictly time or shift scheduled.

~~~
emodendroket
Not only that: there is a growing trend of requiring workers in low-wage jobs
to show up and they'll only find out at the time they show up whether they're
needed or just need to go home. Certainly a pretty convenient setup for
employers.

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nileshtrivedi
Markets have better liquidity when all players are at the same time & place.
It's possible that asynchronicity will come at the cost of liquidity - raising
transaction costs.

~~~
madsbuch
That's a valid concern, but it is solely founded in a capitalistic point of
view. For some people there is no more to life than raising their personal net
worth, others have other aspects.

~~~
hardlianotion
I don't think the point is capitalistic - others (above) have made similar
points to this one. Many business and social activities are enriched when most
participants are present.

~~~
vorotato
Many businesses and social activities are also enriched by not having downtime

~~~
TeMPOraL
And many businesses and social activities are also heavily disturbed when most
participants are present.

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JoshTriplett
There are a few aspects in which society continues to expect synchronicity.
For instance, on average, more people wish to be awake when the sun is up, and
asleep in the middle of the night, than vice versa. People expect to be able
to reach services on the phone, or occasionally go to a shop in person. And,
some services can only be provided in-person with both the service provider
and customer present.

But yes, many things can and should be done in a far more staggered fashion.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Interestingly, and it's something I don't recall seeing a good explanation
for, most services tend to be offered precisely at the same time majority of
people are working - thus making them unavailable (or barely available) to the
working population. See e.g. barbers, banks, etc.

~~~
dasmoth
In a mostly-synchronous society, “standard” working hours become somewhat
desirable. Working 9-5ish typically maximises opportunities to see friends and
family, and for parents it means they get to take advantage of free
government-provided childcare (aka schools).

Plenty of places are open outside those hours, but they tend to be shops and
services provided by relatively low status workers. Higher-status service
workers (dentists, bankers, ...) generally seem to do better at resisting
“unsociable” hours.

It’s an annoying situation, but can’t see it drastically improving without a
widespread move away from synchrony.

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emodendroket
> In the case of the Underground network, there are times on some lines where
> trains arrive more frequently than every two minutes (pretty much as often
> as they can, given that the trains have to maintain a safe distance between
> each other and spend some time on the platform) and yet they still are
> packed between 8am and 9am. Any incident, however small, like someone
> holding up the doors, can result in a knock-on effect, delaying the whole
> line massively.

> Why are people doing this to themselves?

It is not as though they have any choice in the matter. However, if you've
ever worked a job with irregular weekends you'll know that one thing that
stinks about it is you can rarely coordinate stuff with friends and family on
your days off. Also hard to do stuff like attend church.

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robotresearcher
In case the author sees this thread: the time labels for the weekday graph are
wrong. The morning peak shows at about 0400, when it should be around 0800.

The weekend graph might have the same problem, since it ramps up before 0600,
which is unlikely.

~~~
mildbyte
There indeed was a 4-hour shift that I somehow completely ignored when
labelling my axis. I've fixed it now, thanks!

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skybrian
I would make a different argument about over-provisioning. Using
infrastructure at maximum capacity means there's less of a safety margin and
it's often unpleasant due to traffic or crowding. Reducing capacity in the
name of efficiency doesn't seem like a good thing.

Instead I'd argue that using infrastructure at maximum capacity isn't
something we necessarily need to do ten times a week. It needs to be tested,
but maybe not that often?

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jdblair
What if I want to play recreational soccer or attend church services in
fellowship with a few hundred fellow believers? This proposal completely
discounts a whole range of non-work mass activities.

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theoh
Hmmm, maybe file with art critic Mike Pepi's "Asynchronous! On the sublime
administration of the everyday"
[http://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59798/asynchronous-on-
the-s...](http://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59798/asynchronous-on-the-sublime-
administration-of-the-everyday/)

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michaelfeathers
I haven't read the full article but my immediate criticism is that systems
need the spikes and peaks that synchrony provides. If they didn't exist we'd
have to simulate them to keep systems from being overly fragile. Yes, there's
a power spike when everyone goes to the fridge during a commercial, but the
need to handle that variation makes systems more robust.

~~~
michaelfeathers
I'd like to hear a criticism of this.

~~~
Wildgoose
I agree - I thought you were making a valid point.

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xpto123
Yes i agree, synchronicity is environmentally unsustainable. Metro stations
and train stations are designed for peak capacity in rush hour.

Office workers spend the vast part of the day at their workstation and sending
emails.

Why not do that from home?

Most meetings are useless and we know it, why not do them in chat or video
conference?

Open spaces are the worst possible environment to get anything done and
everyone knows it.

But there is this mindset that in person presence is the only way to work and
interact, Which is true for some professions, but not all of them.

Most people dream would love working from home.

~~~
emodendroket
On the other hand, many commuter systems run at a much lower frequency outside
of peak hours. It seems like having them running at the same frequency day-
round would not necessarily be a win in the environmental impact department.
If that is your concern trains should be as close to capacity as possible at
all times.

