Now what?

Fake work: the fuel that powers the Internet

Paul Graham recently shared a post called How to Lose Time and Money and he explained the dangers of losing time and money via “Fake Work”, which is something that feels like work because it isn’t fun, but it isn’t real work in a sense that it’s not necessarily taking you towards any meaningful destinations:

If I spent a whole day watching TV I’d feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.

Graham himself sees the irony, in that he’s a creator of and investor in sites that encourage fake work. And others have pointed out that, in a sense, Silicon Valley’s in a fierce battle to create the next great timewaster.

For those of us in the industry, how should we feel and what can we do about this trend of encouraging and enabling more fake work? As Aaron Swartz notes, “technology never solves things by itself. At bottom, it requires people to sit down and build tools that solve them.” So, who’s building the tools we need?