Only Fools And Horses
“Cause where it all comes from is a mystery
It's like the changing of the seasons
And the tides of the sea
But here's the one that's driving me berserk:
Why do only fools and horses work?"
So goes the theme song from the classic comedy series “Only Fools And Horses”. It’s a tongue-in-cheek question, of course, but the answer is a combination of the Protestant work ethic and the needs of the consumer society.
John Maynard Keynes predicted that we’d all be working 15 hours a week as machines would take away the drudgery of labour, and he imagined the advent of "an age of leisure and abundance”. In fact, we are working longer hours than ever and have created an additional workload in our attempts at self-improvement, be that acquiring new skills, working out at the gym or running a ‘side hustle’.
So are we fools? Or horses?
Maybe we’re both.
Fools for chasing the acquisition of more and more stuff, the consumption of more and more things we didn’t know we needed or even wanted. Slaves to the empty thrill of consumerism, that requires us to earn increasing amounts of money to keep up with people who we don’t really like, to parade our status (and our worth?) before them through our conscious consumption.
Horses because we are in yoke to the economy, having to work harder and harder to secure the basics in the face of increasing costs or housing, health, food and energy and a shrinking share of the wealth available.
COVID allowed many people to reflect on what they were doing with their life and where they wanted work to figure in that. As a result, there are many ‘former fools’ who have jumped off of the consumer merry-go round and ordered their life in accordance with their re-defined priorities and values.
However, throwing off the yoke has proven rather harder, especially for those at the lower end of the income scale. In fact, it’s become tighter and heavier.
And what is the work that has to be done? Well, despite the plethora of personal productivity tools and new technologies to help us in our work, we are increasingly spending our time on bureaucracy and ‘busy work’ and less time on the actual work that needs to be done.
The technology has simply created a shedload of new tasks, mostly unending exercises in futility like maintaining a zero inbox or keeping up with the torrents of messages coming at us from every direction. The dead hand of managerialism has spawned new and previously unimagined forms of bureaucracy, supported by the capability to collect vast lakes of data to be analysed and processed to draw conclusions that used to be made by going and chatting to a few people in the know.
Work has assumed increasing importance in our lives, absorbing greater and greater amounts of our time and energy, whilst become less and less relevant or useful.
Del Boy was right. Work is futile.
I’m The Urban Spaceman
This missive is inspired by a piece by the late, great David Graeber entitled “Of flying cars and the declining rate of profit”. It’s been sitting in a tab on my browser for weeks and I finally got around to reading it, and that’s what set me off!
Like Graeber, I was brought up on visions of the future that included flying cars and many other amazing inventions. We should have all these amazing bits of kit by now, like transponders and teleports and, yes, flying cars (I mean, they’d be soooooo cool, right?). Instead, the leaps in technology have given us … er … the iPhone … online shopping … pizza vending machines … um …
It’s all rather underwhelming. Actually, no. It’s crushingly disappointing. We don’t even have robots that make our beds for us. I mean, it’s pathetic. How are we supposed to advance as a civilisation when we have to make our own beds!!!
Graeber, being a Marxist anthropologist (now there’s a job I wish I’d known about), puts it down to a weakness in capitalism. He posits that as automation increases, it reduces the rate of profit. Rather than invest in technological development, capitalists have sought to maintain profit margins by moving production to regions where labour costs are lower. Instead of automating production, they’ve reduced the cost of labour, both by off-shoring or by reducing real wage levels.
A disconnect has appeared between the narrative and the reality. Whilst we tell ourselves we are in an age of ever-accelerating change, the reality is that technological change is slowing down from a peak in the early and mid 20th century. We tell ourselves we are more productive than ever but in reality much of the ‘work’ we do has no value or utility (something Graeber later expands upon in “Bullshit Jobs”).
It’s all very paradoxical, isn’t it? Let’s hear the words of the great man himself:
“Americans do not like to think of themselves as a nation of bureaucrats—quite the opposite—but the moment we stop imagining bureaucracy as a phenomenon limited to government offices, it becomes obvious that this is precisely what we have become. The final victory over the Soviet Union did not lead to the domination of the market, but, in fact, cemented the dominance of conservative managerial elites, corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind. [remote working, anyone? Ed.]
If we do not notice that we live in a bureaucratic society, that is because bureaucratic norms and practices have become so all-pervasive that we cannot see them, or, worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.
Computers have played a crucial role in this narrowing of our social imaginations. Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the world’s population into full-time industrial workers, so has all the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities turned us into part- or full-time administrators.”
Does that last line resonate with you? When I was in my first job, back at Prestel, I found out about a process called ‘dis-intermediation’. Technology would enable us to bypass the likes of travel agents and insurance brokers and other ‘gatekeepers’, avoiding the ‘rent’ they charged for access to services.
Actually, what transpired is that dis-intermediation has not removed the intermediaries so much as put us in their place.
I have to re-insure our two cars and I approach the task with feelings of dread. The last time we did it, my wife and I spent about 5 hours wrestling with the various comparison sites and entering the same details in response to similar but subtly different online forms and then trying to discern the difference between the apparently similar offers that were generated.
Fortunately, when it comes to my house insurance, I still have a broker who ‘intermediates’ and gives me a simple choice of the two best options. This saves me the time and spares me the psychological torture of dealing with the process myself. During a recent claim, their additional support has proved very valuable in dealing with the insurer. I would gladly pay the premium for this, but they actually get me a better price than I could get myself!
I’m sure, like me, you can see the same thing happening in the workplace. We are all typists, secretaries, designers and coders now, as well as doing our actual job. We have to struggle with byzantine internal systems to carry out basic tasks like filing expenses or making a holiday request. God forbid that you should actually try to spend some money to make something happen! It will take longer to get the approval than do whatever it was you wanted the expenditure for. Even HR, which is supposed be the people-facing part of the business, has a ‘self service’ approach these days.
Instead of technological advance removing the drudgery as Keynes predicted, it has enabled the bosses to replace expensive specialists with our amateurish but free endeavour. Technology has not given us 15 hour weeks but 50 hour ones. And we’re told this is progress.
Pick Up The Pieces
This calls to mind some recent newsletters by Ed Zitron in which he points out that the internet is now making things worse as efforts to monetise attention or reduce costs get in the way of meeting the initial objective of the platform or app (eg Facebook still connects us with friends but is now almost unusable due to the ads and that the algorithm hides some posts from friends).
And so the internet, which promised the democratisation of access to resources and information, has had the perverse effect of degrading our quality of life, unless you are wealthy enough to afford the intermediaries that used to be available to all of us. An easy life is only available to those who can afford it, whilst the masses are consigned to the kafka-esque world of digital self-service. Some democratisation.
The digitisation of everyday activities is being pushed on all of us, and in the process excluding the digitally disconnected, the elderly, the disabled, and the poor. We have no option but to use ‘the latest technology’ (it has been announced in the UK that all railway ticket offices are to close, forcing people to use automated machines or buy online) but it is not only exclusionary, it is unreliable.
The journalist Tom Peck recounted how he had been on holiday in Cornwall, where the car parks all require the use of parking apps. However, there is no mobile signal where the car parks are, putting people in a vehicular Catch 22.
We come across similar binds in the workplace. Technology, instead of freeing us to be creative and expressive, is imprisoning us in rigid, unforgiving processes and digitally-enabled blind alleys. Using the systems that are supposed to help us is the technological equivalent of breaking rocks, as your average corporate employee has to remember around 40 passwords and navigate a host of different user interfaces.
Futile, I tell you. Futile.
Gotta Serve Somebody
All this and I haven’t even talked about purpose!
Graeber refers to the ‘Space Race’ between the USA and the Soviet Union as a driver of innovation. There is the apocryphal story about when President Kennedy visited NASA and saw a janitor standing there holding a broom. Kennedy asked him what he was doing and he replied “I’m helping to put a man on the moon”. It’s a neat story, which is why it gets trotted out regularly by conference speakers. It might not be true, but we get what it means.
So what is most work for today? How many of us are trying to put a man on the moon? Or solve world hunger? Or stop global warming? A few, yes, but a depressingly small number.
Most of us are working to improve shareholder returns. Often, this is done to the detriment of others or the planet. If our organisation stopped doing what it is doing, then the world would probably be a better place. That’s the stark reality that many are finding it harder and harder to ignore.
This is why people are disengaged at work. This is why they seeking jobs that have purpose, whether that’s saving the planet or just serving and contributing to a community. This realisation is also a contributory factor to the growing mental health crisis.
It’s why work has to change. We can’t live our lives in futility any longer.
You’re All I Need To Get By
I’m working on a new project, a ‘corporate survival guide’, and I’d like to interview people who found themselves leaving corporate life in order to survive, as I did.
Perhaps you have mixed feelings about your corporate career (by which I mean working for any large organisation, including public and 3rd sector). You appreciate the opportunities it gave you and the lifestyle it enabled but you now reflect that the cost was perhaps too great. Whether you’ve gone into something new or you are still recovering, whatever your story, I’d like to hear it.
Drop me a DM or an email and we’ll set up a call. All conversations in strictest confidence, of course.
Thanks in advance for your help.