It Revolution: How Evolution Will Turn into Revolution

By Michael Higgs

Technology is so ubiquitous and such an integral part of our lives and our culture that we take it for granted. Indeed, technological advancement is bringing wonderful enhancements to our lives in the form of productivity, ease, comfort, convenience, and fun. But technology is always changing.

So where will we be in ten years? Will technology result in a utopian society, or will the picture be much bleaker and darker?

Here is the ugly truth: this rapid, exponential growth of IT will soon bring massive, even cataclysmic, social disruption and upheaval. In many fields of employment, IT is taking humans out of the equation and making us obsolete. Entire job classifications and industries will soon disappear. Will yours be one of them? To make matters worse, many “fall back jobs” that people currently rely on to help them get through the tough times caused by layoffs will soon be gone.

Think about this impending future development: What will millions of people do when they cannot find a job of any kind, at any amount of pay? Where will they turn? How will they respond? And what will be the effect on society overall?

The vast majority of people are unaware of what will soon happen. According to IT Revolution, we, as a society, are like the passengers on the Titanic, coasting along comfortably and complacently, blissfully ignorant of the disaster that looms before us. We are taking a “head in the sand” approach to the future, believing that disasters will happen to “somebody else” or that “the government will take care of me”.

But disaster will soon happen to many of us, maybe even all of us, and the government won’t be able to help us. So we must prepare to be able to respond to the future, and we must start preparing now.

This is a book that will trouble you. It will antagonize you. It will scare you. But it will also give you hope.

As you read IT Revolution, you will discover

• How and why the $15 per-hour minimum wage movement will backfire on those demanding that it be implemented
• The serious downside of modern-day white collar life
• Why technology is rapidly morphing from our Servant to our Master
• That technology is not just affecting the white collar world; many blue collar and service jobs are at risk of disappearing
• How “Supervisoritis” is harming quality of life for millions of people in the industrialized world and costing western economies billions of dollars annually
• How “higher education” is leaving many graduates woefully unprepared for the “real world”
• How a major failure of the education system is leading to the removal of millions of people from the workforce and the rapid takeover of industries by IT
• A question company leaders need to answer in order to start moving down the road to progress and financial success
• What specific steps you can start taking now to shield yourself and your family form the coming disaster


Tough times lie ahead for all of us. But it’s not too late for you to take action. It’s not too late to prepare. But we as individuals, family members, leaders of companies, and society as a whole, must act now. Why not let this riveting, fascinating book serve as a practical roadmap?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728330853

Michael Higgs

Michael C. Higgs is a 27-year IT Industry veteran. He has held roles in Management, Engineering, Project Management, Business Development, Training, Consulting, and of course, Technical Support. He graduated college with a Political Science & Government degree, however while in DC, he found his way into computing. Michael’s diverse career experience has helped him gain a broad spectrum of knowledge. From developing location sites for clients such as the American Federation Of Teachers and The Leadership Institute in DC, to designing and building a data center for the Air Force Space Command, to helping companies like BAE SYSTEMS and Carnival Cruise Lines automate their operations, he has helped many people find their paths in life. And he has received countless awards at each place of employment. His relentless focus on the 3 C’s of Communication, Collaboration, and Cooperation has helped to bring disparate global teams together to achieve their business goals. During his career, Michael has gained wisdom he now wishes to share with people seeking to improve their lives and prepare for more positive futures. His vision for the future involves a provocative, proactive approach, one in which he attempts to help stop problems before they occur. While his current focus is on business, he maintains an automobile blog, DrivingIsLife.Com, for his fun hobby.

Book preview

WHAT IS THE PAST?

When we were kids, growing up and running around in the yard and playing, what were we thinking of for the future? When we grew up, we wanted to be a policeman. Or, maybe a fireman? Maybe a race car driver? Over time, as we grew older, this had to move into reality. We started thinking of more realistic choices…… like race car driver (well, ok, that was mine). The reality was, we all were told to climb the corporate ladder.

Get a college degree, start off in the mailroom, work up to a desk job, make some big deal happen in the company, get promoted to manager, to director, to VICE PRESIDENT with the corner office. Ah, living the dream. Fast forward to the future. Now, we have Office Space. Ok, for those of you who are just getting ready to leave college and hit the real world, you have no idea what I am talking about. Office Space is one of the greatest movies of all time. It will go down in the annuls of history as the harbinger of the Corporate World’s apathy. As I write this book, it is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

Office Space is the movie based on the predication of the initial boom of information technology and how the jobs were coming up. Three guys work as software developers for a growing tech company, and their job is to take banking software, and change the date format from a two-digit year to a four-digit year. There are plenty of other characters who act and interact with them, such as the mealy-mouthed nerd Milton who liked to look out the windows at squirrels that were married.

However, the underlying theme of all this is the cold-hearted drudgery of corporate life. You went to high school, you went to college, you found yourself a job, you have a home to pay for, a car to pay for, bills to pay for, and it is done by you parsing through mounds of software code looking for two digit years and changing to four digits. This is the sum of your life so far. Then throw in painfully annoying coworkers and of course a plan to outsource your job and leave you with nothing. Sounds awful, right? Nope, pure truth never was so funny.

This is the basis of what we have known in our lives. We work our way through school to eventually get a white collar job and work our way up the proverbial Corporate Ladder from worker to supervisor to manager to director to vice president to President, and then one day we retire with a gold watch and a pension that covers the 6-7 years of life remaining before our death. Charming thoughts.

Now, if you didn’t apply yourself in school, if you were one of those greasers back in the 1950’s hanging out, smoking cigarettes, and dancing with Betty Sue each night instead of studying, you ended up in a Blue Collar job. These were the menial jobs, the ones that parents used to say "If you don’t study hard and fly right, you will end up being a ditch digger!" Needless to say, parents back then didn’t know that their grandchildren would be ditchdiggers and paid 400% more than their white-collar job pay back then, as highway infrastructure upgrade project unionized workers make right now. It’s sort of a kick in the parental groin of logic.

So, what are these levels of work? Let’s take a swipe at this.

WHITE COLLAR JOB

Ah, you made it! You put on your graduation robe for the third time in your life, just past the Kindergarten graduation (yes, these exist, crazy!) and then repeat again for High School graduation. Then, you repeat again by now graduating college. You have just completed $200,000+ in education, hopefully some covered with student loans, hopefully all covered by mommy and daddy. Most likely, you still have plenty of debt on your back. However, it’s so worth it in your eyes. You now have a Bachelor’s Degree. You are ready to hit the ground running. So what jobs are there for you?

Business, that’s a common goal. Plenty of business jobs out there. Sales, accounting, finance, banking, all those various areas for the pursuit of employment. You put on your suit & tie or your nice dress/business outfit, your nice dress shoes, and off you go. Commute in your car through rush hour traffic, inching slowly down the road, till you hopefully get a parking space at work that is not 500 yards from the building, forcing you to walk through rain or snow. OR, maybe you live in a true urban city, so you take the bus or train. Walk from your house, make sure you have your monthly pass to ride, hop on, hope you get a seat that also doesn’t have gum stuck to it, and then ride into the city. Past that, now you walk through the Jung hordes of people all marching to their building of employment. You get to your desk, maybe even a cubicle, you have your computer screen pumping your eyes full of blue light so you will be blind when you are older. You work for eight hours a day (usually much more), having a boss give you tons of painful tasks, while you drink hideous coffee, listen to the corporate gossip, using not-so-sanitary bathrooms, and try to make meetings on time. At the end of the day, you reverse your commute, so you can get home, scratch the head of your pet, have a little dinner, and go to bed.

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Comedy Central has a show called Corporate, and it satirizes this life brilliantly. I am addicted to the show. This is the world of the white-collar job.

Now, you could be one of the kind of sort of lucky folks. You could work at a creative workplace. Places like ad agencies for example. Here, you trade your life for benefits. You work in a cute little table with a cute nametag by your desk. Everyone is encouraged to be friendly. You have free breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You get free laundry/dry-cleaning. You get constant free swag like clothing, Yeti mugs, etc. All your necessities in life are taken care of……but you can’t leave the building. The infamous music band The Eagles had a line in that historic song Hotel California of You can check out any time you like. But you can never leave! They meant it as a hotel. You know it as the office. You literally work 20 hours a day. Your apartment is untouched, your bed is never dirty because you barely sleep in it, and your pet is a cactus so you don’t have to worry if you forgot to water it. You live to work, you belong to the company. This…… is the good side of the current modern-day white-collar world.

BLUE COLLAR JOB

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The ditch digger, the blue-collar slob, the deadbeat profession. We have heard that for years, this is for the people that our parents told us "didn’t do their homework on time or study enough". You work with your hands, you work in the dirt, you work outdoors in the heat or in the cold. You have no chance of making big money, and you are just a slave. That has been the view on these jobs for years.

For those of you reading this who still listen to Rock and Roll, queue the song Working Man from the legendary band Rush. Hey, it’s a buck on any music service, just download and listen. Oh, wait, I just dated myself, I meant look it up on Spotify or Amazon Music and listen. Geesh, I need to now go to Cracker Barrel and have my oatmeal for dinner.

Yet, in the movie Office Space, after the lead developer has his sort of breakdown, that’s all he wants to do, be a construction worker, to get good exercise, fresh air, sun warming him and giving him a nice tan. Nowadays, if you are part of a Union, your pay and benefits can easily be more than a White Collar Job.

How about the other infamous job our parents would torture us with, the Garbage Man? Used in many movies, the garbage man was the lazy guy who was completely untalented, and couldn’t do anything but simply pick up a garbage can, dump it in the back of the garbage truck, and then hop on to ride to the next house.

How about working on a loading dock for a company? Or maybe baggage handler at the airport? Lots of blue-collar jobs.

Here are two big ones, plumber and electrician. Now, these are the high-end of the blue-collar world. Let me tell you something you already know. Try finding one that is affordable. Whether they are high on Angie’s List or not, their fees are sometimes astronomical. Back when I was in the last home I ever rented, a nice little townhouse up in New Hampshire, the owner was a guy who bought a house and then rented out his old townhouse. I went over to visit with him and chat. He was renovating both the house, and a small corporate office building he owned and was preparing to rent out to businesses. He looked at me and said "You know what? We are idiots, total idiots!" Of course, I looked at him all aghast, horrified. Whatever could he mean? We both were hard working people with careers, how were we idiots?

He said "We took the normal path our parents taught us. We went to school, we went to college, we got jobs and tried to climb the corporate ladder. This was stupid!. Now I really looked at him with a shocked/confused look. He continued, Michael, right now, I am paying my plumber $100/hour and my electrician $150/hour, with over time, day after day, and I am lucky to even get them since their schedules are constantly packed. These guys make more than me. They each dropped out from high school and have no education, and just went out and got drunk and partied. Then they picked up their skills, and now they are robbing me blind, and I have to pay their fees!" Let me tell you, his words have resonated in my head for YEARS. $150/hour back in the 1990’s, that was huge, and even today still is.

Of course, now it is over two decades later, and things are starting to change.

RETAIL HELL

In the true moldy/oldie days, retail was considered a semi-acceptable job. Ladies working at a jewelry store, or at a dress maker, those were regal jobs. Even men who would be the tailors to help a man fit perfectly into his suit. These were jobs that held a level of respect. You would hop in your Studebaker, drive to the town center, to a nice store. All-in-all, a very nice experience.

Then came (queue the lightning and thunder and other scary sounds) THE MALL!! This bastion of corporate hell on Earth appeared on the American scene. Big ugly buildings where multiple stores would cohabitate, set under painful fluorescent light and crappy plants by benches, with of course the fountain filled with pennies, because EVERY fountain is a wishing well. From the big box stores like Sears, JCPenney’s, and Macy’s, to the smaller places like J. Crew, Brookstone, Pottery Barn, Banana Republic, Polo, Calvin Klein and so on, the malls took over retail America.

Throw in the truly evil part of the Mall….. the Food Court!! An acre of small booth eateries offering what appears to be fun items, only to result in soggy nasty fat-filled drudgery. The king of all Food Court jobs, of course, we all know this well….. Cinnabon’s! Nothing like spending 8 hours a day making cinnamon buns with all that gooey (more like gluey) icing and serving it up.

Of course, let’s not forget the most omnipresent retail jobs….. FAST FOOD!! How many of us started off our work lives at the tender age of 14 or 15 working at a Burger King or McDonalds. The term "Ding, Fries Are Done! will live on for many years to come still, even if solely in our memories. All day, every day, ding fries are done, ding fries are done, ding fries are done. If you were lucky and worked your way out of Supersized Fry Hell, you made it up to Front Cashier. You were now respectable" in the teenage world.

In modern day retail, this is what Minimum Wage is all about. For those of us who have been allowed in schools to learn American History, we were told about the American Industrial Revolution. During that time, even children were fulltime employees. Textile factories had gigantic weaving looms that would make the various fabrics. Adults were too large to crawl around inside the looms, especially when the looms were operating. Children would crawl inside to fix the problems. Only issue is that the kids would trip or fall, and get caught up and shredded in the looms. All for pennies per hour, and working 12-hour days 7 days a week. So, the Federal Govt came up with a Minimum Wage as part of their Child Labor Laws, to help children be safe and not let greedy corporations abuse children.

THIS is what Minimum Wage is. It is absolutely and in no uncertain terms not a "Living Wage. It is meant for little kids, for teenagers. What 30-year-old or 40-year-old adult in their right mind would want to work a job that is meant for a 12-year-old? So, the $15/hour Minimum Wage Movement, this is the start of the end for adults working in these kid-specific jobs. It also shows how some adults just want to be lazy and not improve themselves.

Again, this is Exhibit A for how IT and new technology are going to irrevocably change the workplace.

WHERE COMPUTERS CAME FROM…. THE PC STORK

Do you want to see something really funny and a bit frustrating? Something that will make you feel so grateful for being born more recently? Then go to YouTube and search for Kids React to Old Computers. In this video, the kids sit down at a very old PC, and an offscreen narrator tells them to turn it on and do an email. NONE of them can do it. They can’t even find the power button, let alone figure out how to start off in DOS Operating System. I am struck by the pain in their eyes….. and in mine as I remember what I had to do back then with computers. Imagine not being able to go to Facebook to post your Yelp submission about that horrible restaurant you Tweeted about and posted the picture of the horrible food on Instagram. Oh, the pain, the humanity!

When I started out, the computer was a desktop model that weighed about 10,000 lbs. (ok, slight exaggeration, maybe a bit less) and a monitor that took up the entire table, belching out radiation from the old cathode ray tube (CRT) screen, burning our retinas to a crisp. I use this as my excuse for driving over the speed limit. I just tell the cop that I couldn’t see the sign because I used old computers. Never works though.

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The original computer was quite affordable, although you could get some lead poisoning from it. The first actual computer took up an entire room, and it performed one function….. calculator. Then cue the 1960’s, let’s go to the large spinning wheels of reels and reels and reels of very little info. Want to access info? Go load up twenty reels to get one report. What fun! Then it came around to the first big Brick computer, the expensive Desktop PC.

Next, evolutionary jumps to look at……

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This image is Mission Control during the famous Apollo 11 moon mission. This is just one of the two rooms for this. There was Mission Control in Cape Canaveral, and Mission Control in Houston. Then throw in all the computers onboard the actual Apollo spacecraft itself. The iPhone alone has more computing power than all of this. An entire moon mission could have been done from your phone. And you thought it was only good for calls and listening to music.

For those of you whose grandparents talk about their technology from the 1980’s, think about this. There were dozens of completely separate devices, like a boombox stereo, camera, calculator, voice recorder, beeper, etc. This is the amount of technology people had to lug around just to match what is on your tiny little smartphone. This was your grandparent’s technology. Back then, people needed a shopping cart to move all these devices around at one time. Now, they fit in your pocket. Oh, and there was no Internet with any of that……Wow, I could hear the gasp you just emitted! Imagine, No Internet! Again, the horror, the pain, the agony!

THE CURRENT ROLES OF TECHNOLOGY

When we look at all those pictures from the past, we see a gentle climb in technology, one that we humans just cruised through and enjoyed, playing with all the new toys and increased convenience that they brought. However, as mentioned right from the start, Moore’s Law is exponentially changing what is happening. IT is going from servant to master, due to this growth. Instead of technology working for the sake of humans, now it is working to control and eliminate the need for humans.

In the white collar world, everyone from a doctor to a lawyer to an accountant has to use technology. IT is taking control of blue collar jobs as well. Even farmers now have to work their tractors that have satellite data feeds to help them know where to plant their seeds for better crop yields. Uber folks live off their phone apps. We just can’t work without some form of technology to help us do our jobs!

Fast food restaurants are bringing in automated machines, and they do require some technical knowledge. The cash registers are all Point of Sale (POS) systems; there are no manual registers anymore. Even your everyday person in the street can get a free Square Reader to plug into their phone and be their own cash register.

Now, when my wife goes to a Craft Fair and wants to buy some items, we don’t have to hit the ATM for cash. The Crafts Vendor person just pulls up their Square device and swipes the card. Even regular businesses are using the simple Square terminals. For example, a couple of our local breweries will bring out the Square POS tablet on a stand, and we can swipe our card, add tip, and complete the bill.

As we all now know, I.T. is ruling the roost. If you do not currently have the ability to use technology, you will not have a good job, and in the future, you will not have a job at all. Think of any job where you go into an office and work. You sit down at a computer, regardless of your role. Occupations ranging from doctor to administrative assistant use a computer. Nobody pulls out a paper ledger and starts to make notes and/or budgets.

Now, for the moment, it is still possible to get a job without being incredibly technically proficient, and you can learn on the job as you go. To illustrate this point, a REALLY great movie to watch is The Pursuit of Happyness. While it is a Feel-Good movie, it is also based on reality. An extremely poor, down-on-his-luck father, in and out of work, one day happens upon a stockbroker in the street.

He becomes enamored with the job, and does everything he can to become one. He literally has to take an unpaid internship, then take care of his kid each night fighting to get a bed in a homeless shelter, and even sleeping in nasty subway station men’s rooms, all to get that job. In the end, Chris Gardner won the job, and eventually created his own successful investment firm, then sold that and went on to found yet another one. He is now a very wealthy man. This is an opportunity that has been around for a while, a situation where anyone could squeak into some high-end job. The problem is that this is changing. Soon, any job opportunity such as this will require higher end computer skills. No skills, no job.

BRICK AND MORTAR

IT doesn’t discriminate. It will change humans, companies, everything. Let’s take a step in a different direction. I have been talking about people, and about technology. I want to take a stab at the companies themselves. I want to talk about how they are handling people and technology.

I can complain till I’m blue in the face, till the cows come home, till the day that four people can all agree on pizza toppings (nobody agrees), till my wife tells me what she wants for dinner. I can take all of that time and more to talk about the horrible commute so many of us face when going to work.

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Yet, as we suffer in traffic, do we consider the toils of the company itself? Think about the companies (ha ha)! Does anything think of their feelings? I didn’t think so. What I am referencing here is just how much the current Go To Work process is costing all of us. As regular workers, people know how much it costs to go to work. We see our gasoline bill, car insurance bill, and we see the time tick away on our watches as we sit in endless rush hour traffic. We have our dry-cleaning bill for our work clothes. We spend time making/bringing a lunch or we see how much money we spend going out and buying lunch. We know all the various ways that we spend, and basically lose, our money doing the daily work grind. I will explain this in more detail in the next chapter.

The problem here is that companies are