The easy half of the work

Opening a shop online used to take months. Now a young woman in her bedroom can have a storefront, a payment page and a courier booked by the end of an afternoon. That is real progress, and it is worth being glad about.

It is also worth noticing why it came first. The tools went where the work was easiest. Joining a seller to a buyer and a card machine was a problem with a known shape, money waiting for it, and a dozen companies racing to solve it. If one had not built it, the next would have.

The harder problems are still sitting there. The buyer who paid for a dress and received a photograph of one. The small maker whose designs are copied within a week by an account with no address. The courier paid by the drop, riding through August afternoons.

When those come up, the answers from the people who built the tools tend to sound alike. Checking every seller would cost too much. The market will correct it. Buyers should be more careful.

Each answer treats technology as weather, something that happens to us and that we can only profit from or shelter from.

It does not have to be weather. Someone decided what the storefront would make easy and what it would leave hard. Someone could decide differently, and accept duties as large as the reach they now hold.

The interesting question about any tool is not what it can do. It is what it is for. The people with the most leverage are the best placed to answer that, and the most tempted to leave it to someone else.