A decade of digital change got compressed into about six months this year. I want to write down what that looked like from the inside, while it is still fresh, because I do not think we will remember it clearly once it is behind us.
The version we will tell later is that everyone adapted beautifully. What I saw up close was closer to adapting out of fear, which is a different thing, and I suspect the difference will keep showing up for years.
What actually happened is that a lot of businesses shipped, in a couple of weeks, the thing they had been putting off for a decade. Online ordering. Remote booking. Digital payment. Not because they had come around to the value of it, but because the other option was closing the doors.
And it mostly worked, which has quietly taught the wrong lesson. It is easy now to believe this stuff is quick and simple, because the emergency version was quick and simple. But what got built was scaffolding. Scaffolding is the right answer to a fire. It is not something you want to leave standing for ten years.
The bill for that comes later. It shows up as a checkout that loses one in five customers and nobody can say why. As a booking system no one can maintain, because the person who bolted it together in a hurry has moved on. Speed under pressure borrows from a future that has to pay it back.
So my honest read is that the acceleration was real, and mostly good, and that we also took on a lot of quiet debt without quite noticing. A good part of the next few years, for people who do what I do, will be going back through and building properly what got built in a rush. I do not say that as a complaint. It is just the part that comes next.