It strikes me that this story highlights precisely What’s Wrong With Modern Britain (And Possibly The World In General). Centralise for greater efficiency, where “efficiency” equals profit. Reorganise for the inward-looking benefit of the industry concerned, rather than the service it provides to the community. Remove the local element, because what did the bumpkins know anyway? Eliminate redundancy (i.e. resilience) by designing for optimum conditions rather than the, ahem, gritty reality of the days when nothing runs smoothly. All in the name of consumer benefit. The over-riding concern is that we must have everything as cheaply as possible. You remember them asking us that, right?
It’s not just the milk of human kindness that falls prey to this appallingly dehumanised view of “service”. Your local bank branch, rationalised back to a central call centre that was then moved 6,000 miles offshore. Your local butcher, baker, candlestick maker, all of whom failed to hold back the rising tide of the supermarkets with their centrally negotiated puchasing arrangements. Capitalism – the cult of money and profit above all other modes of being – pushes for ever greater “efficiencies”. It also tends to prefer monocultural solutions… standards, embodied in systems. Individual autonomy is time-consuming. Conformity is predictable: it can be organised, scheduled, managed. Controlled
It’s ‘clipboard culture’ gone mad, a tick-box style of management that forgot that those boxes were being ticked for a reason. Everything has become proceduralised, standardised, part of a larger system that reduces the “mistakes”. Yet the system can’t cope with complexity, with scenarios and situations that exist outside its neat and wholly self-defined flowcharts. So let’s pretend they don’t exist. Individuals with differing requirements? Hmm… messy… design them out. They’ll learn to fit in, eventually. Either that, or they’ll end up surfing an ever-rising tide of anxiety, building to a tsunami. A “natural” disaster that only breeds further self-defeating systems.
You want an image of the future? A rubber stamp, booted into the face of mankind forever, declaring compliance. A check-box tattooed onto our hearts, awaiting validation by the pen deadlier than the sword.
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Yeah, innit. And 1984, from which I stole cheekily and without shame in the closing paragraph. And Brave New World. And The Matrix, Terminator and other modern, filmic dystopias. Not to mention other more nebulous influences, such as Crass’ Systematic Death and Escape To The Country (“It ticks all the boxes…”, as though the choice of a home can be reduced to a balanced scorecard decision – though maybe I’m too precious about these things and for some it can).
I can’t claim originality, only the semi-original expression of my own interpretation.
People get the market they deserve. If consumers based their decisions primarily on resilience rather than price, that’s what they’d get.
Hmm. Not sure I’d agree. But then, if I read someone else writing what I’d written, as a natural contrarian I’d probably say the same thing too
I wonder whether consumers make decisions primarily based on price because that’s the prevailing ethos of the (capitalist) market? Strikes me that it all comes down to the ubiquitous “shareholder value” concept, which is ultimately driven by the hunger for profit. If the dominant business model was the co-operative rather than the corporation, would things be different?
Let’s say the dominant business model was currently the co-operative and things *were* different – things are run with more slack and so on, so the prices are higher.
If I started a rival organisation that offered lower prices (by taking out the slack), I think I would get a lot of customers. The co-operatives would have to change or die.
In other words, it’s not the dominant business model by accident!
You could rip up capitalism and enforce something different, but the dangers of that are serious and obvious enough that they don’t need repeating.
But, on the other hand, to stay with the 1984 imagery – if there’s hope, it lies in information. One of the biggest reasons the market delivers the wrong thing is poor information about the choices available and their consequences.
I don’t mean public service advertising and colour-coded labels – it would take something unimaginably radical. It would almost certainly need to involve genuine artificial intelligence, just to start with.
And even then you’d still have to find some way to “fix” situations like tragedy of the commons.
Yeah, you put your finger precisely on the issue. As I wrote my comment above, I was thinking that capitalism wasn’t exactly imposed on us, it emerged on the basis of fundamental human needs and personality traits.
I’m not into “enforcing” something different. I question the mindset that wants everything cheap, but is happy to moan when the service isn’t up to scratch. I’m occasionally guilty of this myself, so don’t want to sound holier-than-thou. But I watched it in action at my local train station this evening. A guy tutting and bitching about a train being five minutes late. I felt bold, so pointed out to him that the railways are clearly starved of cash at the moment. “It needs to be cheaper, not more expensive,” he said, “so more people will travel.” Yeah, but… “cheaper” means low margin, which means less likelihood of capital investment. Chicken and egg.
I don’t agree that a form of business based on collective self-interest has to “run with more slack” and thus be inefficient. Efficiency isn’t a totally financial measure. A higher-cost service that still manages to deliver milk when the odd snowflake falls is “efficient” in my eyes. I do acknowledge that state-owned public services didn’t always use their resources wisely, but that’s not the only way of doing things. Local co-operatives, owned regionally by the people who have a stake in the services provided, can still be run as an efficient business. But a business where profit/efficiency is balanced with service. I agree totally that “enforcing” anything is a mistake. But capitalism seems to be completely enforced at the moment, through lack of any viable alternatives.
I’m an idealist, I know.
I’m intrigued by your closing comments, but they’re just a bit too compressed for me to grasp them. What do you mean by “tragedy of the commons”?
‘A higher-cost service that still manages to deliver milk when the odd snowflake falls is “efficient” in my eyes’ – yes, but can you accurately express how much a certain value of resilience is worth to you? Can you reliably tell which suppliers are expensive and resilient, and which are just expensive?
It’s being able to answer those questions well which my magical information revolution might give you.
The problem isn’t with any particular system being “enforced” in itself, it’s the centralisation of power that goes hand-in-hand with it.
“We have to tell them what to do for now because they’re blinded by the old capitalist ways, but once our brave new world is established we’ll let go of the reins and everybody will work together in a happy collective”
I was really using Tragedy of the Commons as a kind of lazy shorthand for “problems where rational self-interest doesn’t lead to the outcome you want”.
That is, people will still be pushed into making decisions that ultimately lead to an undesirable result, because they can’t trust other people.
It all boils down to this – people are largely going to pursue their own interests as they see them, with the information they have and the capabilities to determine how to go about it.
If you can change some or all of those things, you can change the world. You can’t do it by saying “this is how it should be”.
I’ve thought of a much better way to say what I was groping towards at the end of my previous comment
I think this is a good test for any suggestion of “this is the way the world should be”:
Suppose you were given the chance to be the benevolent dictator of the UK for five years. You can rearrange things however you chose, but once your term is up you will have no further influence.
So you might establish lots of socially-minded cooperatives in place of the profit-making corporations. But after your term, would the same factors still be in place so the corporations would come back?
Or you might decide you don’t like political parties and abolish them, but the benefits of grouping with like-minded people would still be there, so they’d come back.
Aha, thanks for the “tragedy of the commons” link. It’s not something I’ve come across before, other than intuitively. Fascinating territory and clearly something I need to think through in more detail.
Maybe there is no solution. Maybe there’s nothing more I can do than state “this is how it should be”. At least that feels like action of a sort. A Sisyphean assertion, even if the rock will always roll down again.