Lee Suckling: We love doing old things new ways

Using technology for daily tasks has caused concern in a number of industries. Photo / 123RF

In case you haven't noticed, taxi-killing car service Uber is all the rage. There are usually a good dozen private cars buzzing around Auckland's CBD and fringe suburbs, offering cost-effective, GPS-trackable and reliable private transportation and the touch of an app.

Taxi drivers and their respective unions have been up in arms in recent months as Uber proliferates. Uber cuts their lunch, as it were, by allowing newcomers into the market with a superior product at a cheaper price. The Uber backlash has been a worldwide phenomenon this year - cab drivers across Europe and the US have literally caused traffic gridlocks in protest, claiming they will go out of work, and consumers will subject themselves to unsafe and un-vetted drivers.

The modern generation, however, doesn't empathise. In fact, we love market disruption: it's what makes things better, more affordable, and forces inferiority out. We have an "adapt or die" mentality, one might say, and the super-expensive New Zealand taxi industry is one we're certainly keen to see ruffled up.

This certainly isn't the first time we've seen this kind of innovation and subsequent backlash. For more than 15 years physical retailers have lamented the presence of online shopping, believing it to be "the beginning of the end" for their industries and livelihoods. Amazon was the main disruptor in the beginning, and now we're privy to local online establishments like OnceIt and NZSale, both of which exist to undercut traditional retailers by selling off stock at prices difficult to sustain if you're managing the overheads of a physical shop.

AirB&B and Netflix have innovated similarly to offer us the things we love in a better, more convenient package. The hotel industry is fretting and DVD stores are shutting up shop, largely because our generation of internet-loving consumers has no sentimentality for traditional ways of doing things.

In fact, we actually love that there are businesses out there beating people at their own game. Not-so-secretly, we fantasise about creating these kinds of businesses ourselves, or at least landing jobs with them. Why? Because we love to see the dominant fall.

Until the end of the 1990s, and even for much of the early 2000s, market domination was the M.O. for big business everywhere in the world. We had a commercial culture that didn't want to innovate, evolve, or raise standards - instead, it existed to quash competition and disallow choice.

We were surrounded by companies and conglomerates that were completely self-interested and ultimately capitalist. They desired monopolies and a gravy train that would keep them in power - just look at Nike's dominance in the sneaker market or Microsoft's control over all things computer-based. You could get a Coke anywhere, but didn't stand a chance of finding anything else.

But as a taste for start-up businesses emerged, the gravy train ended. Today, we're a generation that is intolerant of economic ascendance because we favour a "sharing economy"; one that allows innovators to get a slice of the action and make a bit of money for themselves.

Generation-wide, we love newness. We love out-of-the-box thinking. Most importantly, we love the pressure to be better. Individual responsibility is top priority, and the basic assumption that we respect old ways went out the door when the world economy crashed six years ago. We don't like to see anyone get too comfortable, because economic instability has meant we've never had the luxury of being comfortable ourselves. Instead, we'd rather advance and evolve. Tech is one industry that gets this about us: just look at how frequently Apple updates its devices and operating systems.

And of course, we want options. We're a generation addicted to choices: be they in our news, films, blogs, or political points of view, and we want to see those same choices mirrored in our commercial realities. That's why we love cut-price airline competition, gluten-free alternatives, and apps that mean we don't have to book cookie-cutter hotels or submit to unreliable, casually racist taxi drivers. We love options, and we love batting for the little guys that give them to us (perhaps because we've thus far spent our careers being little guys ourselves).

This doesn't mean to say we want to see traditional services die. We don't. We do, however, want to see them up their game. We want to see them utilise technology and respond to market pressures to offer us what we haven't seen before. We want to see them move forward into the future, not keep us in the past. We want to see them keep our options open; not squeeze out the competing options.

We're a generation that can't be ignored as a consumer group: for the next 10-20 years, it's us who will be the big spenders. Evolution of consumerism is not new, and it shouldn't come as such a shock to everybody that refuses to adapt. After all, when was the last time you saw someone wearing a powdered wig in daily life?