The Age of No Hassle

Re-post fra LinkedIn for at have den her på mit eget domæne

No Hassle

We live in the Age of No Hassle.

That’s not to say that we don’t experience any hassle. We have plenty of hassle all the time.

For instance, it’s easy for me to get a refund for an audiobook I don’t like at Audible.com. But it does involve actually phoning them up. This is a hassle.

For instance, I can hear almost any piece of music ever produced and recorded. But it has to be on the streaming service I subscribe to, and I have to remember my password. This is a hassle.

For instance, I can transfer money from my bank directly to a supermarket without actually holding money in my hand. But I do have to have my phone or credit card out.

The point isn’t that the world we live in is hassle-free, but that we increasingly expect it to be.

Audible automatically refunds the first couple of audiobooks you want refunded right on their webpage without any call. Streaming services usually integrate with other music on your phone and as a matter of course remembers your log in details. That new-fangled Amazon Go store that people are telling me exists now lets me give them money without even trying! I wonder how their refunds work.

So, the Age of No Hassle is not a question of there not being any hassle at all in our lives. It’s a question of designing everything to absolutely reduce the amount of hassle as much as possible. No hassle is the ideal all our designs strive for.

How many buttons do you need to press to buy an app in an app store, a book in a digital book store or a plane ticket in a modern ticket-finding web service? Ideally just one, and when you  do need to fill in more stuff, you sigh.

“Oh Lord,” your brain moans, “do I really have to tell these people my password/user id/first pet’s name? Don’t they know who I am?” And thankfully, they do, since Chrome or Safari will just fill out the fields for you and remember your passwords. No hassle.

In fact, you can also just log in with Facebook, since you’re logged in there in your other tab, anyway, right? It’s not really that important that Facebook knows what you buy and where. In the choice between no privacy and no hassle, most of us are seemingly not in doubt. No hassle.

Since we are getting used to it and comfortable with it as consumers – I mean, these are not new examples for you, right? – we should keep them at the forefront of our design and business modelling as well.

After all, in the Age of No Hassle, if your competition makes it easier to pay them for a product like yours than you do, the users will just shift over to your competitors.

No hassle.

No Purchase 

This means that we do not particularly want to buy things

Don’t get me wrong – we like things. We like the feel of things, the smell of them, the clicks and swishes as our fingers touch the keyboard, the crunching of a particularly choice piece of food between our teeth, the weirdly perfect feeling of our gaze as it travels around a well-shaped chair, table or appliance.

But we don’t particularly want to buy them.

They say that there are different ways to purchase something. That we can buy something because we’re used to that brand, like we do with a particular whisky or detergent. We can buy something because we’re tired of the same old brand, so we choose something new – like when we feel adventurous in our consumption of whisky or detergent. We can buy something because we have carefully weighed the pros and cons, researched the market and figured out exactly what we want – like when we read books about whisky or reports about different detergents and base our purchase on this expert knowledge. 

All of these are hassles.

There’s a fourth way to buy something, they say. We buy something because we don’t want to be thinking about what we want to buy and whether or not we should. It's called dissonance reduction.

This has always been a purchase of desperation, and it is a deadly proposition to a lot of thinking. The basic idea of a market as a functional and positive social mechanism works only if you also believe that people are mostly interested in making a good purchase decision. In the same fashion, marketing theory and the efforts of many, many highly paid professionals to work systematically with positioning products just right makes little sense, if we just buy stuff because of…well, because of nothing in particular.

But of course it is something particular. It’s just not something related to buying the thing, but related to what the things can do for us. When we live in the part of the world where abundance is the norm, everything becomes a tool. Computers are tools that let us do a host of things, movies are tools that lets us examine things and be entertained, food is a tool to let us decrease our idle hunger.

We don’t want to buy things. We want to use them.

This is the basic insight behind the subscription economy. We don’t particularly want to think about what movie to watch, so we have a Netflix account that effectively presents a host of opportunities for us. We don’t really want to think about upgrading computers and devices all the time, so we lease them. We don’t really want to think about food, so we’re subscribing to it instead. Start-ups in scores are focusing on this under the heading “The Uber of X”.

Because we don’t actually want to call a cab - we want to use a cab to get from one place to another.

I travelled from northern Denmark to Southern Sweden today. A short distance of around 400 kilometres. To make it, I purchased four train tickets, two plane tickets and one cab ride. A total of five companies were involved. Each purchase was made after doing a selection process of the cheapest and timeliest way to make the journey. 

Why can’t I just travel?

We don’t want to think about a purchase, we just want access to the use of a thing, so we can cut out all thought of actually using money. It makes it easier to seamlessly use money that way, which is something you should think about in your business design. Make it easy for customers to provide you with a steady revenue stream – because this is what they actually want:

No hassle.

No Possession

We live in the Age of No Hassle, where we crave No Purchase.

This means that we will brook no possession.

Already, many industries refer to their customers not as customers who achieve possession of their products through purchase, but as users who must be lured back to the product again and again and again through various means of retention. But what does this mean?

Since we as a species turned from hunting and gathering to tending and exploiting the soil and the beasts ten thousand years ago, accumulation of possessions and the right to private property has been the objective of all our collective and individual efforts. Possessions were our defence against uncertainty, our walls against starvation and our security against the cruel and careless world that took away what we toiled to achieve. 

We built granaries to ensure that we had food in winters to come, weapons to fight off the predators, fences to entrap the livestock, houses to shelter us from the raging skies, vehicles to move our material goods and money systems to liquefy our immediate possessions and enable us to ensure that we can possess again, when and where we need to.

Money was potential possession. A promise that we could own a thing. Now it is access, and with that transformation we have eliminated the biggest hassle there is: maintenance.

Have you too, dear reader in the developed world, bent your back under the oppressive yoke of doing the dishes? Of washing clothes? Of cleaning your house? Of having to sleep? Of having to eat? You possess dishes and clothes and a house and a mind and a body, but what you want is not to possess them but to use them, when it is convenient. No hassle. No purchase. No possession.

Possession means that we have to take care of things we use beyond the immediate uses we have for them. We have the responsibility to make sure that the things are ready to use when we or our loved ones need to use them. This is a hassle.

We will rent our cars, we will lease our appliances, we will drug and drink our minds away when they become more burden than benefit. Soon, science will find a way for us to use our bodies only when we need to.

We will truly be users.

Think of users of a software program. How do we react if our browser crashes or our word processor closes or – Heaven forbid – our WiFi is down? As if it is someone else’s fault and someone else’s responsibility to make it work again. We might try quick fixes, sure, but the vast majority of us will simply throw our hands up in disgust and get up in a huff to do something else. Likely nothing, while we wait for the problem to go away the same way it – for all we know – came.

“Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?” is the ultimate user support message, cleverly labelled by many companies as customer service to make the users feel empowered.

We are not. Moreover, we actually prefer not to be empowered in the direct sense. We would like to be able to just move on if we possibly can, from anything that doesn’t work. That is why the most horrifying thing we can imagine is a six month binding subscription plan. It reeks of possession, of having to try and make stuff work, when it doesn’t. We don’t want to do work, we want what we buy by to just work the way we need it to work exactly when we need it to work and that’s it. Put simply, we want:

No hassle.

No Normal

As such we are only trading processes.

Before modernity, processes were what was normalising and unifying. You could go almost everywhere and a lot of processes were exactly the same for all humans. We related to each other through different customs, sure, but the relations as such were the same. We endured the same social anxiety in all cultures and we were victims of the same basic entropy in all biological processes.

Now we are torn apart by vast differences in how we basically exist in the world. This is because existence is not an essential undertaking, but a process. I do not exist as long as some sort of thing – a Mikkel Lodahl – is in the world, but as long as I am I’ing. As long as I am existing. I am a series of processes. And these processes are now commodities.

Think about bullying, a basic social enterprise. Some people are excluded from social circles for no particular reason. Think of the children who desperately try to have the right clothes, hair, toys to fit in, to be normal, when it was never about the things – the possessions – but about a process. About socialising.

This is heart-rending to watch because our minds and thoughts believe problems like this to be keyed to things and essences, when they are not. There is no product you can buy and no character trait you can change which can solve the problem of a process gone awry. We lack the language to properly comfort against, challenge and resolve such problems, however admirably and somewhat usefully psychologists and theologians can attempt to alleviate this suffering.

Think about Trump. Notwithstanding his considerable amount of deplorable character traits, the danger he presents as president is not about them. It is about the way his activities carefully undermine processes that we consider normal in society and politics, in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Think about big data. Who gives a toss about the actual, essential data – what analysts are looking at is how the data drives processes, the existential process it signifies. How the many, many pieces of information tell us something about which activities drive the masses and how we can exploit this.

Back when we were focused as a society on amassing possessions, our processes were tied down in a different way. That everyone had similar, stable and stabilising desires – safe employment, a house to own, a family for life – made our processes hard to interchange. You have to have predictability in process to achieve predictability in possession. 

However, since processes are now what we desire to gain access to – since items and relationships are not desired, but only the use of them is vaunted – it is no longer necessary to have that stability. We can buy and sell the use of processes with no strings attached, whether this is amenities, entertainment or relationships.

This means that the only normal and unifying processes left – the only things that really tie us together as human beings in Western society – are purely physical ones. This is why so much humour is based on bodily functions.

In the Age of No Hassle, we keenly risk alienating ourselves through defining and customising our processes in the same way we did with our possessions. But we are succeeding mainly in making the very feeling of being a person unrecognisable in others, which left unchecked will be a societal and moral catastrophe. All this in the name of releasing ourselves from the shackles of hassle, purchase and possession.

We trade a solid prison for a fluid one, but none of us are free, and it is difficult to understand this, since we are caught in languages evolved for possessions, not processes.

The freedom of no purchase or possession is bought with the experience of no normal, and the society-toppling effects of eroding a common world of things at the expense of an exclusive world of private processes.

We must evolve our thinking and our language to be able to pre-suppose, analyse and plan in processes first and things second, if we are to survive this disruption as a society.

No hassle.