Intermediate [wealth] technology
Once upon a time, I had the great privilege of spending a couple of months in central/Eastern Europe as a tourist. I learned many interesting things along the way, the biggest of which was just how completely World War 2, the Molotov-Ribentrop Pact and the Cold War had shaped the destiny of many millions of people, but right now I feel like talking about one of smaller ones: the true role of laundromats or launderettes.
Prior to this trip, I had lived in some of the wealthier areas of London, a wide range of areas of Brighton, and a poor but beginning to gentrify district of Bristol. In this whole range of places, I had observed that the poorer ones and the university campus (Sussex, just outside Brighton) all had laundromats, while the wealthier ones (whether in London or the most central part of Brighton I'd lived in) didn't. I thought this was the way the world was, because I was naïve.
As a tourist, I assumed I'd be able to find facilities to wash clothes routinely. Many youth hostels have a washing machine, but when I stayed in one (or a spare room in a house, as is-or at least then was-the norm in the former Yugoslavia) that didn't I soon learned that laundromats were also hard to find. Rather idiotically, I was perplexed by this until a conversation with an Australian fellow tourist (who was named after a character in The Tempest, but that's another story) in Vilnius. He pointed out that laundromats were not really an artefact of poor districts in any global sense, but of the relatively poor districts of British towns, which are at worst middlingly well off in a meaningful global sense. The rich don't need laundromats because they have their own washing machines. The poor can't afford laundromats so they wash everything by hand. It's only the people in between who can afford to timeshare a machine to do this work for them, but can't raise the capital to buy one for themselves.
This was perhaps a bigger revelation than it should have been to me at the time, but it also made me realise that this kind of intermediate technology appears in many realms. It's on my mind right now because of a few examples I've encountered recently:
Prior to this trip, I had lived in some of the wealthier areas of London, a wide range of areas of Brighton, and a poor but beginning to gentrify district of Bristol. In this whole range of places, I had observed that the poorer ones and the university campus (Sussex, just outside Brighton) all had laundromats, while the wealthier ones (whether in London or the most central part of Brighton I'd lived in) didn't. I thought this was the way the world was, because I was naïve.
As a tourist, I assumed I'd be able to find facilities to wash clothes routinely. Many youth hostels have a washing machine, but when I stayed in one (or a spare room in a house, as is-or at least then was-the norm in the former Yugoslavia) that didn't I soon learned that laundromats were also hard to find. Rather idiotically, I was perplexed by this until a conversation with an Australian fellow tourist (who was named after a character in The Tempest, but that's another story) in Vilnius. He pointed out that laundromats were not really an artefact of poor districts in any global sense, but of the relatively poor districts of British towns, which are at worst middlingly well off in a meaningful global sense. The rich don't need laundromats because they have their own washing machines. The poor can't afford laundromats so they wash everything by hand. It's only the people in between who can afford to timeshare a machine to do this work for them, but can't raise the capital to buy one for themselves.
This was perhaps a bigger revelation than it should have been to me at the time, but it also made me realise that this kind of intermediate technology appears in many realms. It's on my mind right now because of a few examples I've encountered recently:
- Walking home from Capitol Hill I passed 2 or 3 internet cafes (there's Uncle Elizabeth's and Cyber Dog, but I vaguely recall a third) and they seem absurdly anachronistic here in Seattle, but the equivalent is probably how much of the world gets online.
- At work we're launching a corporate sustainability report writing service, and talking it over with the people who'll be doing most of the work I realised that this is only relevant to companies at a very particular stage in their work, because the really great ones won't be outsourcing this job and the uninterested ones won't be interested in having it done at all.
- Reading about the decline of carpools just after thinking about what an efficient way they are to move people around.