Wilderness of mirrors

Simon Reynolds reviews an Indonesian rock anthology:

another example of the trend of reissue labels moving into the pasts of foreign countries and finding there a kind of narcissistic mirror image of Western pop and rock, a mirror-image that’s slightly askew. but only very slightly. so Those Shocking, Shaking Days is really hot, fiercely played early 70s hard ‘n’ heavy rock with a bluesy groove funk energy (the kind of stuff Woebot might dice into chunklets for recycling) but betrays zero traces of gamelan or much else Indonesian… so it’s like we’re going abroad but all we’re discovering is another facet of ourselves, our own cultural hegemony…

Which is sorta-kinda another example of what I was getting at yesterday. This isn’t quite cultural appropriation because nothing of the other culture is taken; it’s just feedback from our own cultural imperialism. Importing this feedback just reinforces our own cultural narcissism without engaging with the people behind the product we’re consuming or the cultural context in which they operated. It’s still all about us.

What postal liberalisation has done to us

Three key paragraphs out of James Meek’s excellent LRBarticle on post office privetisation in the Netherlands and the UK:

Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman is in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life have left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail have built up in the hallway that it’s getting hard to move around. Twice a week one of the private mail companies she works for, Selektmail, drops off three or four crates of letters, magazines and catalogues. She sorts and delivers the fresh crates but the winter backlog is tough to clear. She thinks her employers are getting suspicious. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hall when I visited recently. There was a narrow passageway between the wall of crates and her personal pile of stuff: banana boxes, a disused bead curtain, a mop bucket. One of the crates has crept into the study, where the postwoman’s computer rears up out of her own archival heaps of newspapers and magazines. Should these two streams of paper merge they would not be easily separated. The postwoman hasn’t given up. She had a similar problem with the other private mail company she works for, Sandd, a few years back. ‘When I began at Sandd in 2006 I delivered about 14 boxes of mail every time,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t cope and at Christmas 2006 I had about 90 of these boxes in the house. By New Year’s Day we had 97. There were even boxes in the toilet.’ The postwoman is paid a pittance to deliver corporate mail. She hasn’t done her job well, yet so few people have complained about missed deliveries that she hasn’t been found out.

[…]

Every week Dutch households and businesses are visited by postmen and postwomen from four different companies. There are the ‘orange’ postmen of the privatised Dutch mail company, trading as TNT Post but about to change their name to PostNL; the ‘blue’ postmen of Sandd, a private Dutch firm; the ‘yellow’ postmen of Selekt, owned by Deutsche Post/DHL; and the ‘half-orange’ postmen of Netwerk VSP, set up by TNT to compete cannibalistically against itself by using casual labour that is cheaper than its own (unionised) workforce. TNT delivers six days a week, Sandd and Selekt two, and VSP one. From the point of view of an ardent free-marketeer, this sounds like healthy competition. Curiously, however, none of the competitors is prospering. TNT is being forced by the hedge funds and other transnational shareholders who control its destiny to split up, even as it tries to beautify its bottom line by replacing reasonably paid jobs with badly paid ones. Deutsche Post is pulling out of the Netherlands and selling Selekt to Sandd – a company that has never made a profit.

[…]

Van Hulten, who is 81, is still an activist, an idealist. The privatisation of the mail depresses him; the latest privatisation, of Holland’s local transport networks, makes him angry: the three bus companies supposedly competing in Lelystad, he said, are all owned by the same French firm. ‘Today’s Wednesday, yeah?’ he said. ‘On Wednesday, we have at least six people coming to the door, all bringing some mail. First was the local paper. Then the other local paper. Then the postman comes. Three more will come later. I think that’s the basic defect of post office privatisation. What used to be done by one man is now done by six. They’re all underpaid, and the delivery hasn’t improved. It used to come in the morning, and now I’m still waiting.’

Privatisation and competition in the mail market has literally had no positive effect whatsoever in the Netherlands. For the workers it has meant increasing casualisation, the increasing shedding of good jobs and the replacement by piecemail work that does not pay a living wage. For customers, both sending and recieving, it has meant a much less reliable postal service with post arriving later than we’re used to and less often than we were used to. For the companies themselves, it hasn’t even meant profits, almost as if companies like Sandd or Selectmail were founded just to force through this process of casualisation. Only the Dutch Post/KPN/TNT/TNT Post has been able to profit, making more money with less workers than using these profits to buy out other companies rather than do anything useful with it, in an orgy of supposed creative destruction. That sort of thing keeps the board of directors and their consultants in ready money, sometimes even the shareholders, but it kills everybody else. To add insult to injury TNT last year threatened its workers with mass redundancies unless they agreed to an (iirc) 15 percent pay cut. They lost that fight, but the trend is clear.

A run of the mill story of capitalist betrayal, but in TNT’s case it hurts me more because I used to work for the fsckers, back when being a postal worker still meant something, even if like me you only did it on Saturdays to get me through college, or rather fuel my comix habit. That was when even a parttime job with the post office paid well and people who came with nothing but a willingness to work hard and no adversion to starting early could get into a job that offered good pay and safety for years if not decades, without having to worry about having a proper career. I spent my Saturdays with men and women who had done their rounds for ten, twenty, thirty years and still liked the work, even though the first grumblings at the changes the socalled free market demanded had appeared. These days, who would want to be a postman if it means hard and increasingly harder, dumb, unappreciated work delivering unwanted junk mail slightly cheaper for big multinationals and be paid below minimum wage?

Market reform at the post office has destroyed or is destroying one of the proudest bastions of the working class, has destroyed a whole system of jobs open to anyone, not just to people with the right university papers and a business driven attitude. This is not a coincidence.

Fake charity

advert for Kika bracelets

At Unfogged they’re annoyed at the juvenile I Love Boobies anti-breast cancer campaign both for its inherent sexism and it’s misguided focus on outdated detection methods. Coincidently, yesterday I got annoyed at a similar sort of charitable campaign at the local hospital S. is staying in (until tomorrow). As you can see from the picture above, in the public canteen they’re now selling these anti-cancer bracelets to benefit Kika. Kika, which stands for “KInderen KAnkervrij” or “children cancer free” is a charity that sponsors research for combatting cancer in children and which supports the seven cancer centra that do this sort of research in the Netherlands. A worthwhile cause and there’s nothing wrong by supporting it by selling some token of compassion for it — unless it costs twelve euro fifty of which only one euro goes to the charity it supposedly supports!

Because that sounds remarkably like using this charity to get rid of the cheap tat you cannot sell on its own merits.

Fscking T-Mobile

Broke my phone because it slid put off my pocket to the floor and under the stupidly designed railing on the floor beneath it. Had to call T-Mobile to get it fixed, zillions of phone menus later got some phone drone to take my details, which she did, but could she make an appointment to send me an envelope to send the phone to them?

Of course not. That was a different department. So now I have to be called back to make an appointment to get the envelope to send the phone to get it fixed… Why oh why can’t companies have flat help desks that can handle every kind of routine question rather than have us submit to their internal bureaucracy?

Exhume to consume

The good people of Crooked Timber are debating the replacement of human labour with machines as if the great robotisation/computerisation debates of the late sixties up to the mid-eighties never happened, nor for that fact the original industrial revolution, as if this has never happened before. But never mind that, at least Henry Farrell managed to get science fiction into the debate which in turn reminded me of Frederik Pohl’s great 1957 novella, “The Midas Plague”:

Frederik Pohl’s Midas Plague Equilibrium under which robots produce consumer goods so cheaply that they flood society, and lead the government to introduce consumption quotas, under which the proles are obliged to consume extravagant amounts so as to use the goods up (the technocrats fear that any effort to tinker to the system will risk reverting to the old order of generalized scarcity). This is a world of conspicuous non-consumption in which the more elevated one’s social position the less possessions one is obliged to have. Crisis is averted when the hero realizes that robots can be adjusted so that they want to consume too, hence easing the burden.

Frederik Pohl is a writer whose heart has always been on the left, having been a card carrying communist before World War II and the Hitler-Stalin pact, remaining a socialist/leftist afterwards, something that has always remained visible in his writing, both his solo work and his collaborations with C. M. Kornbluth in the 1950ties. Their novels The Space Merchants and Gladiator-At-Law are sharp social satires of aspects of 1950ties capitalism projected towards extremes, still relevant and recognisable today. The same goes for “The Midas Plague”. The idea of a world no longer defined by material scarcity is an old one in science fiction, from Iain Banks and his Culture novels all the way back to –as Henry’s post alluded to — E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. Where “The Midas Plague” differs from most other examples is that it does not show an utopia, false or otherwise, but a still recognisable capitalist society.

McMansions

It just flips the parameters of our own capitalist society: rich people live simple lives unencumbered by materialist possessions and get to enjoy the challenges of meaningful work, poor people are burdened by mountains of disposable consumer goods, having to spent more time using them up than doing any real work, spurred on by government rationing rather than advertising. The absurdity of this situation, in which ghettos consist of sixtyroom houses in a riot of loud, extravagant styles and poor people are forced to use up seven cars a year and dozens of suits a month makes clear the absurdities of real existing capitalism. The end result, of robots making an endless stream of consumables for other robots to wear out to make more consumables is the perfect endgame of capitalism.

And Pohl’s imagination is actually closer to our own reality than we might care to contemplate. We have after all a middle class that has loaded itself with debt to be able to afford the American dream of the big mansion, two point one cars, HDTV in every room and vacations in Europe, that lives a life that could be mistaken for that of a rich person, but is completely depend on keeping one step ahead of the next credit card payment. Meanwhile there are people genuinely making the argument that because poor people can afford colour televisions and Ipods they are no longer poor, even if they’re living in one bedroom apartments in suburban slums three hours away by bus from their lower than minimum wage job and working three of those to feed their children.

“The Midas Plague” cuts to the heart of that by showing that just having more and more possessions to use up does not make one rich or ruling class if you don’t actually have the power to accompany your “wealth”.