We Need to Protect the ‘Touchless Economy’

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/opinion/coronavirus-economy-delivery.html

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The economy is currently on life support — yet as that metaphor suggests, it could actually be worse. Imagine if, next week, we find that coronavirus infection has spread so far through major supply lines as to sicken large numbers of the workers who deliver goods and also begins to threaten their recipients. Or imagine what the economy would look like if broadband internet service were to go down for significant parts of the population.

I raise this point because the current debate about the economy is focused largely on matters of the past and the future: how to help afflicted businesses bridge the crisis, whether industries like the airlines’ or cruise lines’ ought to be bailed out. Yet as important as that debate may be, we may be neglecting a very urgent question: How do we protect the “touchless economy” — the part of the economy that is still working.

To put it differently, we need to realize that the touchless economy (also known as the “distance economy”) may be what stands between us and a full-on economic depression. The touchless economy comprises the economic activities that remain possible without close physical interaction between people: the online meeting, the live-streamed yoga session, the virtual conference, the drop-off delivery of groceries and other physical goods. As it stands, this is pretty much all the economy we’ve got.

Among the touchless economy’s key vulnerabilities are its delivery lines. We usually think about “supply lines” as the connections between producers and retailers — like the delivery of produce from farms to supermarkets. But the coronavirus shutdown has brought into special focus the role played by the warehouse workers at Amazon, the drivers for UPS, FedEx and the United States Post Office and the many delivery workers for local restaurants and grocery stores. These are the people who translate clicks into economic consequence.

Most of those jobs aren’t high paying, and they now have elevated risks of infection. Protests by Amazon warehouse workers in France and Italy may portend our future; there are reports of postal employees working in close quarters and of infected delivery workers pressured to remain on the job to meet demand. There’s a danger of infection spreading to entire companies and some (albeit relatively low) risk of infecting package recipients.

Some larger businesses may have sufficient incentives to protect against infection, and Congress has passed a new sick-leave law, though fully protecting the gig economy is another story. Private companies and the Postal Service need to ensure social distancing when possible, provide protective gear and, above all, let sick workers quarantine themselves.

Then there’s broadband. It was easier to mock the idea that internet access should be a “right” when broadband was not, as it is now, the essential infrastructure for most economic and even social transactions. The Federal Communications Commission has convinced the telecommunications industry, for the time being, to waive late fees and not disconnect customers unable to pay their bills. That’s a commendable start, but if this crisis drags on, it will not be enough. The government may need to find ways to guarantee broadband access to the public at speeds sufficient for economic activity.

The problem here is the stubborn “digital divide.” Far too many people in the United States lack access to broadband, especially in poor and rural areas as well as among older and less educated Americans. Some 25 million people don’t have access to broadband at all. In 2019, Microsoft conducted a study of broadband usage and found that more than 162.8 million Americans didn’t use the internet at broadband speeds. Many people who don’t have fast internet service at home rely on public libraries or fast-food restaurants for broadband, which is not possible during a pandemic.

Apart from what the government might do to help, it is also a time for American inventors and entrepreneurs to ask what might be done to enhance the quality of the online interactions that are replacing in-person experiences. The streaming of in-theater movies is a simple example. And while Zoom and Skype are default platforms for online meetings, if there was ever a time for niche technologies like virtual reality and alternative means of socialization to reach broader swathes of society, this is it. You attend a conference not just to hear talks but also to meet people — how might those encounters be replicated online? Teachers might even think about using video game technology to create entire online worlds for their students.

For now at least, the touchless economy is holding firm. But now is the right time to be thinking about its weak spots. Because if it falters, we could end up thinking of our current chaos as the good old days.

Tim Wu (@superwuster) is a law professor at Columbia, a contributing opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.”

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