Dear BTN

(Note: The following letter was sent in 1998 to the technology editor of the Business Travel News, which was promoting the online systems that eventually decimated the business-travel industry. The letter was sent along with the report I wrote on what was happening to the travel industry. Predictably, I received no reply.)

8 April 1998

Dear [X],

I'd like to address you on a serious matter. It may not be a pleasant one for you to read, but I write you in all honesty and without ill intent. It's just a matter of gravity and there is no changing that about it.

Has you ever considered that every office, every business, and every industry has trapped itself in a paradigm of cost-cutting which sees them treat people as simply a commodity to be bought and sold like desks and chairs? Whenever an opportunity to cut costs (read: people) arises, men and women are pared from the payroll with no thought at all given to the impact on their lives.

The cost-cutting and downsizing we see in every area of the travel industry only goes on because we do not recognize that there are laws of the universe that apply to this human arena. But there are laws. When people say, "What goes around comes around," they are expressing one such law in commonsensical language. It is more formally called the law of karma in the East. People who treat other people like objects are bringing upon themselves the same suffering that they are dealing out to others in the first place. I know you are a sophisticated enough writer for me to point this out to you without you simply sloughing it off. Only because we do not recognize this law in North America do we go on behaving in the manner I have described.

I've been studying your industry, [X], as well as forestry, warehousing, medical labs, banking, and numerous others to see how automation is universally and increasingly capturing work. This snowballing elimination of people from the workplace in favor of technology is some day soon going to cause widespread global misery when countless people wake up and realize that work has died for them.

On the way home yesterday I listened to a radio program in which university students lamented that they could not find jobs. Yes, work is shrinking. I can understand their plight. Neither can lab techs, sawyers, loggers, warehousemen, and autoworkers, to name a few.

Given the fact that automation is shrinking the rolls of employees, don't you think you, as Technology Editor, could afford to be a little philosophical and humanistic and consider what automating the travel agents out of the picture means to them as human beings? What about when travel managers are identified as middlemen and automated out of the picture as well? Could it ever happen to you? Even if it doesn't, how will you feel about your role in it, cheerleading the effort as you are?

All of us will have to answer to our own selves and history for what we did during the years when work died for so many. What will your answer be some years from now?

Sincerely,

XXX