This mind-set is not necessarily irrational. For some, their jobs really do depend on such behavior. In 2013, for example, Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers. Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn’t sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for not spending more time checking e-mail (one of the primary reasons to log in to the servers). “If you’re not visibly busy,” she signaled, “I’ll assume you’re not productive.”
Viewed objectively, however, this concept is anachronistic. Knowledge work is not an assembly line, and extracting value from information is an activity that’s often at odds with busyness, not supported by it. Remember, for example, Adam Grant, the academic from our last chapter who became the youngest full professor at Wharton by repeatedly shutting himself off from the outside world to concentrate on writing. Such behavior is the opposite of being publicly busy. If Grant worked for Yahoo, Marissa Mayer might have fired him. But this deep strategy turned out to produce a massive amount of value.
We could, of course, eliminate this anachronistic commitment to busyness if we could easily demonstrate its negative impact on the bottom line, but the metric black hole enters the scene at this point and prevents such clarity. This potent mixture of job ambiguity and lack of metrics to measure the effectiveness of different strategies allows behavior that can seem ridiculous when viewed objectively to thrive in the increasingly bewildering psychic landscape of our daily work.
As we’ll see next, however, even those who have a clear understanding of what it means to succeed in their knowledge work job can still be lured away from depth. All it takes is an ideology seductive enough to convince you to discard common sense.
The Cult of the Internet
Consider Alissa Rubin. She’s the New York Times’ bureau chief in Paris. Before that she was the bureau chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she reported from the front lines on the postwar reconstruction. Around the time I was writing this chapter, she was publishing a series of hard-hitting articles that looked at the French government’s complicity in the Rwandan genocide. Rubin, in other words, is a serious journalist who is good at her craft. She also, at what I can only assume is the persistent urging of her employer, tweets.
Rubin’s Twitter profile reveals a steady and somewhat desultory string of missives, one every two to four days, as if Rubin receives a regular notice from the Times’ social media desk (a real thing) reminding her to appease her followers. With few exceptions, the tweets simply mention an article she recently read and liked.
Rubin is a reporter, not a media personality. Her value to her paper is her ability to cultivate important sources, pull together facts, and write articles that make a splash. It’s the Alissa Rubins of the world who provide the Times with its reputation, and it’s this reputation that provides the foundation for the paper’s commercial success in an age of ubiquitous and addictive click-bait. So why is Alissa Rubin urged to regularly interrupt this necessarily deep work to provide, for free, shallow content to a service run by an unrelated media company based out of Silicon Valley? And perhaps even more important, why does this behavior seem so normal to most people? If we can answer these questions, we’ll better understand the final trend I want to discuss relevant to the question of why deep work has become so paradoxically rare.
A foundation for our answer can be found in a warning provided by the late communication theorist and New York University professor Neil Postman. Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it’s high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it’s good. Case closed.
He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn’t mince words in warning against it. “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,” he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. “It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.”
Postman died in 2003, but if he were alive today he would likely express amazement about how quickly his fears from the 1990s came to fruition—a slide driven by the unforeseen and sudden rise of the Internet. Fortunately, Postman has an intellectual heir to continue this argument in the Internet Age: the hypercitational social critic Evgeny Morozov. In his 2013 book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov attempts to pull back the curtains on our technopolic obsession with “the Internet” (a term he purposefully places in scare quotes to emphasize its role as an ideology), saying: “It’s this propensity to view ‘the Internet’ as a source of wisdom and policy advice that transforms it from a fairly uninteresting set of cables and network routers into a seductive and exciting ideology—perhaps today’s uber-ideology.”
In Morozov’s critique, we’ve made “the Internet” synonymous with the revolutionary future of business and government. To make your company more like “the Internet” is to be with the times, and to ignore these trends is to be the proverbial buggy-whip maker in an automotive age. We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return, and run by twentysomethings who are often making things up as they go along. We’re instead quick to idolize these digital doodads as a signifier of progress and a harbinger of a (dare I say, brave) new world.
This Internet-centrism (to steal another Morozov term) is what technopoly looks like today. It’s important that we recognize this reality because it explains the question that opened this section. The New York Times maintains a social media desk and pressures its writers, like Alissa Rubin, toward distracting behavior, because in an Internet-centric technopoly such behavior is not up for discussion. The alternative, to not embrace all things Internet, is, as Postman would say, “invisible and therefore irrelevant.”
This invisibility explains the uproar, mentioned earlier, that arose when Jonathan Franzen dared suggest that novelists shouldn’t tweet. It riled people not because they’re well versed in book marketing and disagreed with Franzen’s conclusion, but because it surprised them that anyone serious would suggest the irrelevance of social media. In an Internet-centric technopoly such a statement is the equivalent of a flag burning—desecration, not debate.