Futurismic

Sometimes I think I should have more faith in my own mad ideas. While the UK postal strikes were in full effect earlier in the year, I was kicking around an plan for replacing the increasingly beleaguered Royal Mail with a sort of peer-to-peer localised mail delivery system, which everyone I mentioned it to told me was completely impractical. [image by piermario]

I dare say they were probably right, but it’s still somehow gratifying to see that it’s not so crazy an idea that I’m the only person to have had it – via Global Guerrillas comes a post by a fellow called Chase Saunders in which he describes a similar idea: UsExpress.

I have mental picture of millions of people driving back and forth to work (and other places) over and over again.  It’s almost like Brownian motion.  Even if people rarely took long trips, there would be plenty of this routine, back and forth motion to ship all the packages we could possibly want, if only there were a service that gave a percentage of these drivers the right incentives, information, and infrastructure to hand off the packages at the proper moment. USExpress could be that service.

[...]

If my father took 10 packages, 4 days a week, fifty weeks a year, that would be 120 x 10 x 200 = 240,000 package miles.  How much do you think it costs to pay for a UPS driver to carry and deliver 240,000 package-miles?  Even if we assume an average of 300 packages on board at all times, that’s probably at least a week’s salary, not to mention overhead and benefits.  The difference is, the UPS guy is not going to drive that route unless we pay him (and train him, and buy him a truck, etc.)  But my father is going to drive to work anyway. If the pickup and dropoff locations are close enough to his work and home, why not generate a few hundred — or a few thousand — extra dollars a year?

Sure, there are some flaws to the idea, but Saunders addresses some of the big ones. The major stumbling block would be getting past the largely unfounded institutional trust we have in national mail systems – the trust that parcels won’t be lost, and that they will get to where they’re supposed to go, on neither of which Royal Mail has a flawless record. But such a system might just fill the gap as energy costs soar toward the day that physical delivery becomes obsolete…

Those of you in the States may not be aware (or even care) that the staff of Royal Mail were recently engaged in wildcat strikes as a protest against the machinations of their management. Much as a lot of us have sympathies with their plight, it’s hard not to see them supplying the nails for the business’s coffin lid in the process; for example, in my guise as a music reviewer, the last two months have seen a sudden massed move by music PR outfits from mailing CDs to using file transfer services. It’s a sad story, really, the sort of thing I dare say someone will make a movie out of; by using the only method available to him to protect his job, the humble British postman is unwittingly hastening his own demise*.

But don’t feel too comfy over there, Statesiders, because Fed-Ex won’t last much longer in the grand scale of things. Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon points out that as old-school letters are trumped by email, Fed-Ex’s business shrinks down to authenticated documents and object transfers. The former won’t last much longer:

For whatever reason, the business/legal world insists that it needs a copy of a sheet of paper with ink from a pen that I actually touched.

So it gets sent by FedEx and the guy shows up at your door with the package and to prove it was received, you sign for it. On a touch pad. Electronically. I don’t think that the signed documents portion of FedEx’s business is long for this world.

That’ll leave Fed-Ex with what you might call “molecule moving” as its last major specialisation. And while the internet can’t dissolve that as quickly as data and authenticity, the writing is already on the wall, albeit faintly:

At some point, rapid prototyping and 3d printing becomes a mature technology. It leaves the design studios and then the factories and ends up, if not people’s houses, then at least as commonly distributed as print shops or 24 photo developers (which are themselves getting to be less and less common). Just-in-time fabbing.

So many of the things that we ship are mass-produced and interchangeable. Take a look around you and consider all the stuff you might move, were you planning to move. How much of it is stuff where an exact copy would be fine? How much of it is stuff where a factory-new copy would better than fine? How much crap do you ship because it’s easier/cheaper to just ship it than to get a new or better one?

Given that I’m moving house in about three weeks, I have a close and direct sympathy with what Maly is saying there – I’m not looking forward to disassembling my furniture and having it driven 270 miles in a van just so I can reassemble it at the other end. Molecular-level fabrication may seem that little bit too science fictional to believe right now, of course, but that’s what we thought about ubiquitous consumer-grade computing back in the early eighties… [image by Dano]

And by the way, if you like the cut of Mr Maly’s jib, keep your eyes peeled – there’ll be some interesting news in the next week or so here at Futurismic.

[ * Please note that I have no wish to see postmen put out of work, and I'm not the sort of person who believes that unions or striking should be illegal. However, striking in this age of social media is observably self-defeating, and as much as corruption and mismanagement have exacerbated the problem, the business model that the Royal Mail has been operating under for so long is withering away as a result of circumstance and technological change as much as malice. Or to put it another way, playing King Canute is only going to get you wet feet. It's a sad thing, but it's also inevitable. ]