PAUL KEDROSKY
Investor; contributing editor, Bloomberg & Partner, SK Ventures
How many calls to a typical U.S. fire department are actually about fires? Less than 20 percent. If fire departments aren’t getting calls about fires, what are they mostly getting calls about? They are getting calls about medical emergencies, traffic accidents, and, yes, cats in trees, but they are rarely being called about fires. They are, in other words, organizations that despite their name deal mostly with everything but fires.
Why, then, are they called fire departments? Because of history. Cities used to be built out of pre-combustion materials—wood straight from the forest, for example—but they are now mostly built of post-combustion materials—steel, concrete, and other materials that have passed through flame. Fire departments were created when fighting fires was a more urgent urban need, and now their name lives on, a reminder of their host cities’ combustible past.
Everywhere you look, you see fire departments: not literally fire departments, but organizations, technologies, institutions, and countries that, like fire departments, are beyond their “past due” date or weirdly vestigial yet remain widespread and worryingly important.
One of my favorite examples comes from the siting of cities. Many U.S. river cities are where they are because of portages—the carrying of boats and cargo around impassable rapids. This meant, many times, overnight stays, which led to hotels, entertainment, and, eventually, local industry, at first devoted to shipping but then broader. Now, however, those portage cities are prisoners of history, sitting along rivers that no longer matter for their economy, meanwhile struggling with seasonal floods and complex geographies antithetical to development—all because a few early travelers, using transportation technologies that no longer matter, had to portage around a few rapids. To put it plainly, if we rebooted right now, most of these cities would be situated almost anywhere else first.
This isn’t just about cities or fire departments. This is about history, paths, luck, and “installed base” effects. Think of incandescent bulbs. Or universities (or tenure). Paper money. The post office. These are all examples of organizations or technologies that persist largely for historical reasons, not because they remain the best solution to the problem for which they were created. They are often obstacles to much better solutions.
Obviously this list will get longer in the near future. Perhaps multilane freeways join the list, right behind the internal combustion engine. Or increasingly costly and dysfunctional public markets. Malls as online commerce casualties. Or even venture capitalists in the age of AngelList and Kickstarter. How about geography-based citizenship? All of these seem vaguely ossified, like they’re in the way—even if most people aren’t noticing, yet.
But this is not a list-making game. This is not some Up with Technology exercise where we congratulate ourselves at how fast things are changing. This is the reverse. History increasingly traps us, creating paths—and endowments and costs, both in time and money—that must be traveled before we can change directions, however desirable those new directions might seem. History—the path by which we got here, and the endowments and effluvia it has left us—is an increasingly large weight on our progress. Our built environment is an installed base, like an ancient computer operating system that holds back progress because compatibility gives such an immense advantage.
The writer William Gibson once famously said, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I worry more that the past is here—it’s just so evenly distributed that we can’t get to the future.