The Second Hygiene Boom
In the winter of 1935, a group of journalists shuffled nervously towards a room on the 20th floor of the Hotel Governor Clinton in New York City. They were there to interview a man whose name would later become synonymous with innovation: Nikola Tesla.
Having migrated to the US from Serbia in 1884, Tesla had been instrumental in the commercialising of electricity. Unfortunately, his engineering brilliance was blunted by a lack of ruthless business acumen compared to his rival Thomas Edison. By this time in his life, he had lost his wealth and was spending much of his time feeding pigeons in the local park.
Despite these circumstances, Tesla was still publically recognised as a genius. It was this reputation that had brought the journalists to the hotel he now was now calling home. They wanted insights from the man who could allegedly see into the future of technology. While there are many predictions to choose from the interviews, in light of our present circumstances, one quote stands out:
“The Secretary of Hygiene and or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States in 2035 than the Secretary of War”.
I have a confession. Like many, I have been guilty of aggrandising technology’s role in economic life.
I would kneel at the altar of Apple product launches. I would idolise innovation and on occasion scapegoat the buffers of progress. This was short-sighted. 2020 and the advent of Covid-19 have exposed the inherent fragility of an inter-connected world. This has led to a recognition of my own bias in the realm of tech prediction. Among the isolated masses, I am forced to ask the question: ‘Has a century of tech-centrism blinded us to the other influences that determine economic progress’?
Naive Empiricism: The 20th Century Was Not the Norm in Technology Adoption
Ah, the technology adoption growth curve. Since Tesla’s own involvement in the advent of electricity, investors and entrepreneurs have sought to build a business around their rise. The 20th Century saw the Radio, the Car, The Airplane, Television, the PC, Software and the Internet. All inventions birthed companies that have become staples of our daily existence. Until recently, it was easy to point towards the previous century’s innovations and believe that and the next big thing was around the corner.
It would also arrive faster. It took Radio around 20 years to reach 50% of Americans, the Internet 10 years and the Smartphone, a mere 5 years. Harbingers of a new growth curve have thus sparked many a venture capital led frenzy. Billions of dollars are speculated annually in the hope of being early to the next paradigm’s party and riding the exponential growth phase to an IPO El Dorado.
This topic has been a focal point of tech discussion in recent years, where things on the consumer side began to feel, well, a little slow. Compare 2019 to the wave of post-iPhone activity where there seemed to be a new app every month. Or how about the wild west of the Web 1.0. A service such as Napster could have 87 million users at its peak before the recorded music industry had time to respond. New pretenders to the throne were often tripped up by two problems:
1. The technology had a use case they could not yet serve (voice control in 2020 is good but still prone to mistakes, much like search did in the mid-90s).
2. The technology needed its killer app or mainstream use case (cryptocurrency’s popularity is among enthusiasts but not the wider public).
From San Francisco to Shenzhen, the tech world anticipated the next opportunity. AI or not, it would again confirm a century-long pattern of innovation.
Then…well you know what has happened. Covid-19 has disrupted the notion of economic growth curves being the sole remit of technology. And yet, a larger sample size of history should have yielded warning signs.
Instead of viewing our predicament as unusual, it is the past century’s detour away from microbes as a front-rank issue which is the anomaly.
To better understand this, consider the four defining influences in human affairs as defined by the framework of megapolitics. They are as follows:
1. Topology
2. Climate
3. Microbes
4. Technology
The first two are distinct in that they cannot be influenced directly in the short-term by humans. Topology, in the context of megapolitics, is the layout of the land. Governments and private enterprise cannot influence move New York City to Asia or take the mountains out of California. Additionally, discussions on climate change rest more on the extent of human activity on the planet over an extended period. A government, however, cannot spontaneously decide to make it warm in London in December. The two malleable variables in human affairs are thus Technology and Microbes.
Microbes influence on economic practices were far more obvious in previous centuries. The book, Guns, Germs and Steel, contends that a civilisation’s success was not a matter of superior technology (gunpowder etc). Nor was it the cultural superiority argument favoured by the darker corners of Reddit forums and Twitter. Instead, Colonial rule was as much a result of the novel diseases brought by Europeans to the new world. Despite their adaptation to local diseases, both smallpox and measles were deadly to native populations. In short, microbes have been the equal of technology in making the modern world.
The century-long absence of a major global pandemic has led to microbes lagging in the collective imagination. As we attempt to form a framework for a COVID-19 influenced future, the next big growth curve should not be exclusively through technology (big data, sharing economy etc). Instead, it is one with an anchor in history: a hygiene boom.
The 19th Century Approach to Innovation
It was another pandemic that spurred the popularity of modern hygiene in Europe. Before the bubonic plague (or Black Death) in the 14th century, good hygiene had taken on connotations of vanity. This perception was a hangover from the perceptions of decadent late-stage Roman culture. Signalling of good hygiene had thus become taboo in the Christian societies of 14th century Europe.
In the aftermath of the Black Death, this began to change. The advent of the industrial revolution that we saw what in hindsight can be viewed as a hygiene boom. For context, let us revisit innovation in the 20th century:
The Car, Radio, Television, Nuclear Power, Personal Computers, The Internet, The Airplane, Anti-Biotics
While the 19th century did give us the telephone and early photography, much of the innovation was based around hygiene:
Regular Handwashing: Regular handwashing was not popularised until around 1847. A physician named Ignaz Semmelweis was the first to notice a link between medical student’s handwashing practices and childbed fever. After much reluctance from the part of the students, the practice was adopted and deaths were said to have dropped by 20 fold within 3 months.
Clean Drinking Water: During a cholera epidemic in 1854 in London, a physician named John Snow was the first to establish a link between the outbreak and a tap located in London’s Soho district. Making this connection led o the advent of modern drinking water in the city, a practice which was spread throughout the British Empire.
The Modern Sewage System: The summer of 1858 saw the “Great Stink” engulf London. A heatwave exposed the pollution of the Thames and disease swept through the population. To combat the problem, Parliament commissioned the Victorian engineer Joseph Bazelgette to design London’s modern sewage system.
Other innovations related to hygiene included the modern toilet, pasteurisation and home refrigeration.
Inventions of the 19th century demonstrably owe much to bringing microbes under control. These developments facilitated both population growth and increased trade. Proto-Venture Capitalists would have done well to pay attention to this development. Companies built included Procter and Gamble, Unilever and Coca-Cola. Many still dominate their respective industries to this day.
What Now?
The second hygiene boom following Covid-19 will be a combination of two things:
Hygiene awareness will meld with our recent innovations in data analytics and tracking: There will be an increased demand for voice control devices and haptic senses for public services. There may be an expedited adoption for AR lenses if they can demonstrate a use case in revealing cleanliness.
Social signalling
Technologies will plug the gap from a scientific perspective. What will be interesting to see is how Covid-19 impacts how people signal their hygiene to others. We have already done this through regular bathing, haircuts and brushing teeth, but how will humans signal hygiene post-corona? Even once a level of normality is restored, this experience will live long in the collective memory. Products deemed commoditised such as hand sanitiser may become like sunglasses. Sunglasses were deeply unfashionable until the 1950s when they were rebranded as ‘eyewear’. They were then marketed through the ascendant film industry.
The Hygiene Boom 2.0 has begun, and like consumerism, it may be the prism through which much of new commerce flows. A period of transition is inevitable. Given the renewed interest in his ideas, I will leave the last word with the economist John Maynard Keynes:
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”
