DOUGALD HINE

Author: Dougald Hine

  • A Journey Begins

    A Journey Begins

    This October, as the leaves gather in the gutters of Stockholm, a gang of artists, writers, performers and theatre makers will set off on a journey in search of a cultural language capable of reframing the largest questions the world is facing.

    The search will take us deep underground, into the places inside ourselves that never see daylight, the kingdoms of loss and longing, the dark soil in which love begins again.

    Time works differently down here.

    Down here you are still a child.
    You are older than the mountains.
    You are bones that have shed their name.
    You are waiting to be born.
    All of this is happening always.

    A thin thread of story is the safety line between us and forever: the memory of an upper world where cars wait at traffic lights and carry in their tanks the remains of ancient sea creatures, where cafes serve drinks brewed from beans shipped halfway around the world, and all of this looks as though it could go on forever.

    It will not go on forever. We know this and we don’t know how to know this, how to make it real to ourselves, how to imagine what it is that will go on.

    At night, this knowing and unknowing comes to us and takes the place of sleep.

    This is what has brought us here, together, to this journey.

    Originally published on the blog for ‘the Dark Mountain Workshop’, a project I created during my time as leader of artistic development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre.

  • Labour Through the Looking Glass: 15 Early Morning Speculations on the Corbyn Surge

    Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

    “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

    1. If only Labour had a reason to exist…

    I keep thinking of Landon Kettlewell, the dot com entrepreneur from Cory Doctorow’s novel, Makers. At the start of the book, he has just bought up the exhausted shells of Kodak and Duracell. To an audience of puzzled Silicon Valley journalists, he explains that these companies have history, infrastructure, administrators, facilities, supplier relationships, distribution and logistics. All they lack is a reason to exist.

    To their own and everybody else’s surprise, the Labour establishment looks to be losing their party the same way they lost Scotland. That’s what set me thinking about Kettlewell. A month earlier, the Corbyn surge would have sounded impossible, a piece of wild political science fiction. Now, they were throwing every trick in the playbook at the Islingtonian candidate, to the opposite of the intended effect, and casting around for explanations as to what the hell is going on.

    So here’s one more explanation to try out: Labour is Kodak, Labour is Duracell, Labour is the shell of something that has lost its reason to exist. As it currently stands, it is useless, but it is also the heir to a whole stack of resources that could be very useful indeed, if only it had a purpose.

    Kettlewell has a solution for ‘Kodacell’: he is going to turn it inside out and put the companies’ resources at the disposal of a network, a grassroots network of tens of thousands of hackers and makers. Between them, they will make it useful again.

    And so the absurd thought came to me: what if this is what Jeremy Corbyn’s election ends up doing to the Labour party?

    2. What does this look like, if it works?

    Bear with me, this will take some time, but there may be pieces here that start to fit together.

    I’m thinking about what it looks like, if this works. No need to ask now whether Corbyn can win — that was last week’s question — but winning is the easy part and there are plenty of scenarios circulating for how things then go wrong. Could we construct a scenario for how things go right? Is there a plausible account of the next few years, in which a Corbyn victory turns out to be the best thing that had happened to the Labour party in a long while? And how would current events look, from that looking-glass future?

    I’m not a member of the Labour party, I don’t have a vote in this leadership election — and I’ve hesitated to join the ranks of the registered supporters who will get one. But in the raw hours of May 8th, I wrote something that resonated with a lot of people who would have preferred some kind of Labour-led government to five more years of rule by the rich, for the rich.

    Here’s a taste of that post:

    What we have seen is a failure of politics, a failure of democracy at a cultural level, part of a larger story playing out across the struggling countries of the post-industrial west…

    Labour is about to endure a tug of war between those who believe it needs to go leftwards and those who believe it needs to go rightwards. The truth is, neither of these directions will be much help. Right now, the only way is down.

    That came from a place of loss; I’m writing this now from the vanishing point where scepticism and hope converge. My first reaction to the Corbyn surge was that this is wishful thinking, a shortcut, an attempt to bypass the journey down the hole into which we had fallen. But it’s worth at least trying out the alternative, the possibility that this might be one route into the upside-down world we need to learn to navigate.

    A caveat, before I try to trace that route. My post-election post was about larger social and political currents. This one is about the Labour party, an organisation I only know from the outside. So it’s probably best to take what follows as one more piece of wild political science fiction. (Especially the part where I start writing Corbyn’s victory speech.)

    It is after three in the morning, the sky is getting paler, and this is a story a man is telling himself to see if it sounds believable.

    3. On the appropriate response to losing an election

    Labour, as it currently existed, was useless. If the election campaign had left any doubts, these were buried by Harriet Harman’s attempt to explain why the party would not be opposing the welfare bill.

    ‘We can’t simply say to the public, you were wrong,’ explained the acting leader of the opposition. (Except, that was, the 75% of the public who hadn’t voted for the Conservatives, or hadn’t voted at all.)

    This wasn’t an aberration, it was an unusually clear expression of a mind-set that suffused the Labour establishment. According to this mind-set, the appropriate response to losing an election is not to do a better job of making your party’s arguments, nor to do a better job of coming up with convincing alternatives that embody what your party stands for, but to do a better job of imitating the party that just beat you.

    Those who thought of this as ‘realism’ thought of themselves as the heirs to New Labour, but this did New Labour a disservice. Whatever you felt about it, once upon a time, New Labour had worked. Some combination of Blair’s talent for summoning up conviction on demand, Brown’s brute cunning and the times in which they found themselves made it a formidable operation, until the men at the heart of it spun off into various flavours of self-delusion. But if Blair and Brown had been the Gallagher brothers of Brit Pop politics, the current Labour frontbench was a dodgy Oasis tribute act. The tunes might be the same, only if you thought they were going to wow an audience, you hadn’t really grasped how this works.

    Harsh? Sure, but this matters, because it was the backdrop against which Corbyn’s leadership campaign started to make sense to far more people than even he could have expected.

    4. An unexpected legacy

    Let’s just say the Corbyn thing worked out. We’ll come to how this happened, but one consequence was to recast the Miliband legacy.

    He became the leader whose reform of the way that Labour chooses its leaders paved the way for one of the great transformations in the party’s history. And there was a certain poetic justice to this, because inside the conflicted soul of Ed Miliband, there was a politician who wanted to be in the place where Corbyn now found himself, riding a wave of networked radicalism.

    But in truth, it was a piece of luck. A reform designed to solve one problem accidentally solved another: the great conundrum of British politics, south of the Tweed, as of 2015. Like most other western democracies, a strange insurgent political energy was bubbling up from below the surface of politics as we had known it. But how could this energy ever break through in a parliamentary system locked up by first-past-the-post?

    The solution was to take over one of the existing big parties — and Miliband’s legacy was to create the conditions under which this could happen.

    5. The Return of (Groucho) Marxism

    If it took Miliband’s reforms to make it possible, it took a candidate like Corbyn to realise that possibility. The day that nominations closed, he told an interviewer he was standing because ‘It was my turn.’ As Diane Abbott and John McDonnell had carried the standard of the Labour left in previous contests, he had been persuaded to do so this time around.

    His lack of ambition was palpable — and this turned out to be his attraction. Here was the rarest thing, a politician with no hunger for power. The sincerity of this was unfakeable, backed up by the evidence of thirty years’ unfashionable dedication to his principles. (Another kind of left-winger — the roguish kind, a Livingstone or a Galloway — would not have had this effect.)

    Well beyond the natural constituency of a politician with his views, there was an appetite for this, a kind of electoral version of the Marxist theory of clubs: ‘I don’t care to vote for any candidate who is after my vote.’

    Meanwhile, as they tacked leftwards in response to Corbyn’s unexpected appeal, the other candidates seemed to embody that other Marxist dictum: ‘These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.’

    6. Occupy the Party

    As the newspaper columnists woke up to what was happening, they reached for easy historical parallels. Among the most popular was the Militant tendency, the Trotskyite group whose entryist tactics saw them expelled from the Labour party in the 1980s.

    The comparison reflects a failure to understand how the world had changed in the intervening decades. A takeover might be under way, but it was of an entirely different kind.

    Militant was a party-within-a-party, a Marxist sect with an ideological leader, hierarchical, disciplined in its tactics, wedded to its own ‘correct analysis’. It belonged to another era, an era in which you met someone who told you a totally different story of how the world worked to anything you’d ever heard, gave you a newspaper and invited you to a meeting. An era in which almost the only way to develop and sustain a critique of the society in which you had grown up was to adhere to an alternative orthodoxy, a support group of people who schooled you in a different way of making sense of the world.

    This mode of politicisation belonged to an era in which Google and Wikipedia were unimaginable. You had no way of checking or filtering the information and analysis on offer from your new friends, little chance of exploring and developing it. The experience resembled joining an evangelical sect.

    The survivors of these sects may have got excited by the Corbyn surge, but the character of the surge was quite different: it resembled the waves of networked disruption that first broke into view in the events of 2011. This was not a stealthy entryist takeover, years in the planning, it was a spontaneous movement to Occupy the Labour party, a suggestion taken up with an energy that took everyone by surprise. Such networks are like a mood in action, a rolling conversation that gathers momentum and brings the boundaries of possibility into question.

    One of the characteristics of such a network is that it learns, experiments, adapts. In Greece, Spain and Scotland, the energy of the network had already evolved from the horizontalist purity of 2011 into a series of experiments in interfacing with the top-down forms of institutional politics. On each occasion, this had happened rapidly and unexpectedly. Now, it seemed to be happening again.

    7. After all the wild words

    So much for the events leading up to Corbyn’s election and how they came to look in hindsight. Now the hard part: what had to happen after September 12th, for this not to turn out to be the disaster so widely forecast?

    The new leader had to reach out to three different groups: a parliamentary party that would never have chosen him in a million years, the movement of members and supporters that he had enthused, and the wider electorate.

    After all the wild words that had been thrown at his campaign, he had to claim the ground of common sense and pragmatism. Opposition to austerity was not some revolutionary project: it was a position backed by some of the world’s best-known economists, Nobel laureates among them. A government’s finances don’t work like the finances of a household — and yes, this is harder to explain than the ‘maxed-out credit card’ story that the Conservatives had been offering for the past five years, but so far Labour had not even tried to counter this.

    ‘From now,’ he told them, ‘our job is to challenge austerity, to help people learn about how finances actually work and how the decisions that shape their lives are taken.’

    To do this, we need to work with everyone who shares our desire for a fairer, more just and more liveable society. If Labour could join forces with the Tories and the Lib Dems to campaign for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom, then we should be willing to work with other parties, social movements and groups within society to campaign for an alternative to austerity. That doesn’t mean we stop being the Labour party, or that we form electoral pacts that take away people’s chance of voting for a Labour MP, but we need to take up our responsibility as the largest and one of the oldest forces within a wider movement for social justice.

    8. The MPs

    The talk of an instant coup came to nothing: even the hardest Blairites could see it was suicide, and no one was really enthused by the prospect of importing another Miliband. But the parliamentary party was biding its time. Corbyn wasn’t their second choice of leader, he was their last choice, the leader no one had expected.

    Meanwhile, another unexpected effect of his victory was the split between the Blairite true believers and the bulk of the party. While it prospered, New Labour had justified itself on the grounds of pragmatism: your heart might lie to the left, but your head accepted the need to move rightwards. When Blair said he wouldn’t want the party to win with Corbyn in charge, he revealed the unspeakable truth: that he would prefer a Tory government to what most still thought of as a ‘real’ Labour government. This surprised no one, yet now that it was spoken, the internal coalition on which New Labour had been built began to unravel.

    As it became clear that, against everyone’s predictions, Corbyn was holding his own at Prime Minister’s Questions and establishing himself in the leadership, a couple of the true Blairites left parliament to spend more time with their careers. In the resulting byelections, with candidates drawn from the grassroots movement, rather than the party machine, Labour saw its majorities increase, and this steadied the party a little. Perhaps the new direction was not electoral suicide, after all.

    A surprising number of MPs began to rediscover the reasons they had come into politics in the first place. The renewal of the parliamentary party would not be complete, though, until the arrival of the 2020 cohort. For the first time in a generation, it felt like Labour was represented in parliament by people who were recognisable to their voters, who had worked in ordinary jobs, been self-employed, knew what it was like to live on the minimum wage or to queue at the job centre.

    9. The movement

    Over the past weeks, tens of thousands of people have found a faith in politics, a faith they never had, or thought they had lost long ago. It is not a blind faith nor an unquestioning one, it is not dogmatic. At its root, it is a faith in each other, as human beings, that we are something more than just self-serving consumers.

    The future of the Labour party under Corbyn’s leadership would depend on what happened next with the movement which had grown up around his candidacy. ‘The job of this movement is not over,’ he told them. ‘There are four and a half years until the next election. We can’t wait that long to start rebuilding society, we need to start today, in the places where we live.’

    There were three things that needed doing, now, he went on.

    First, to start conversations that went deeper than doorstep canvassing, those five million checkbox encounters that had amounted to so little in the general election campaign. Labour needed to listen to people, not just when they fed back the soundbite opinions circulating in the daily papers, but in spaces where they had room to reflect on their own experiences, and to start making sense of the forces shaping their lives. The task of creating those spaces started in people’s kitchens, in rooms above pubs, in empty units in shopping centres, with house parties, meet-ups or pizza nights. Members of the leader’s team would show up to these events, sometimes the leader himself, and party organisers helped find guests and speakers, people to get the conversations started and to carry ideas from one town to the next.

    The second task was for members of this movement to get active in the places where they lived, offering practical help and support to those hit hardest by austerity. ‘There’s a word for this,’ Corbyn told them, ‘an old fashioned word: it’s called solidarity.’ This was a movement for a society where no one would need a food bank, but while food banks existed, its members were going to be there, alongside the people running them and the people dependent on them, because these were the people with whom society would be rebuilt.

    The final task would be a voter registration campaign on a scale that Britain had never seen.

    10. The voters

    The panic and despair of the Labour establishment at Corbyn’s victory was based, more than anything, on their certainty that he could never deliver electoral success. (That the same people had been certain, two months earlier, that he could never succeed in the leadership election did not cause them to question this.)

    What were the factors that proved them wrong? The effectiveness of the voter registration campaign — not only in getting people onto the electoral roll, but in generating a wider sense that, this time, voting would matter — was clearly part of the story.

    But another part of it was the gap between the way the political establishment thought about voters and the messier reality of the voters themselves. Most people don’t have a political opinion or identity in the way that people who dedicate their lives to politics tend to think of these things. The left-right spectrum is irrelevant to them, not because they subscribe to any of the analyses used to argue that this frame is obsolete, but because the words just don’t mean much. What they do have is a gut-level feeling about the direction in which society is travelling and a trust in their own intuitive judgement about whether someone trying to persuade them of something believes the words coming out of his or her own mouth.

    Mainstream politicians had tried to respond to UKIP by borrowing as much of their rhetoric of xenophobia as they could get away with. Just like Gordon Brown with Gillian Duffy, the assumption was that UKIP voters were bigots, it’s just that bigots had now been identified as a target demographic. Yet this was too simple an interpretation of UKIP’s support, which was rooted in a deeper, vaguer sense that things were headed in the wrong direction, had been headed that way for a long time, and that nothing these voters heard from the mainstream politicians seemed to acknowledge this or reflect the experience of their lives.

    11. The obstacles

    Among the reasons people wrote off the chances of Corbyn’s Labour was the hostility of the press. Yet so much ink had been thrown at Red Ed and his Britain-hating dad, there was no stronger vocabulary left with which to damn his successor, so the message that Labour was lurching dangerously leftwards just sounded like more of the same. Except that what viewers identified when watching Miliband was his awkwardness, the constant sense that he was trying to work out who you wanted him to be, whereas you could see that Corbyn knew who he was and was happy with it.

    Meanwhile, somewhere in the shadows of the defence and intelligence communities, contingency plans must have been drawn up for the possibility of a prime minister committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from NATO. But whatever its calculations, there were no outward signs of the deep state moving against the Labour leader.

    The other predictable source of hostility, big business and the City, was preoccupied with the fall-out of the second wave of the global financial crisis, which broke in the autumn of 2016. It was that October that Labour first took a clear lead in the polls. The party also benefited from the damage done to the Conservatives by the deepening paedophile scandal.

    12. Back to the allotment

    Of course, in the end, the people who said Jeremy Corbyn would never become prime minister turned out to be right.

    In September 2018, in his conference speech, he announced his intention to step down as leader. The leadership campaign that followed could hardly live up to the drama of 2015, but it was historic for another reason, as it led to the election of Labour’s first woman leader. Three years earlier, when she was among the backbenchers elected to Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet, few would have identified her as on the left of the party, but the platform on which she stood combined the anti-austerity commitments of her predecessor with a pledge to reform the electoral system.

    As for Corbyn himself, he was only too happy to leave the despatch box and get back to his allotment.

    13. Beyond a nostalgia for social democracy

    It is August 2015, it’s getting close to six in the morning, and this is a story a man has been telling himself to see if it sounds believable.

    Does it even come close? I’m not sure.

    I can convince myself that there is a movement happening that could go far beyond the leadership contest, that the reach of the kind of politics Corbyn represents could go a lot wider than those who identify as on the left, and that a Labour party that confidently made alternative arguments would have a decent chance of reshaping political debate, despite the hostility of the media. (A hostility that hardly goes away if the party tries to play it safe, instead.) The hardest part is imagining the parliamentary party coming together around a Corbyn leadership, or at least giving it a chance.

    At the level of political ideas, despite a lot of what’s being written, Corbyn’s platform hardly comes across as ‘hard left’. (For comparison, try watching this televised debate with Militant from 1982, where Peter Taaffe declares that Labour should nationalise 80–85% of the economy and ‘introduce a socialist plan of production’.)

    What I do get from his campaign is a distinct flavour of ‘the Scooby-Doo theory of neoliberalism’: the idea that, if it hadn’t been for those meddling neoliberals (Friedman, Thatcher, Reagan, Blair), we could have got away with a social democratic end of history. That way of thinking always feels like it gives its enemies too much credit, makes them masters of events, rather than the opportunists that they were. Neoliberalism today is hollower than it appears, but that doesn’t mean we know what an equivalent of social democracy looks like for a world of international capital and networked individuals — or what an equivalent of social democracy looks like that knows how to include the people crossing the Mediterranean in leaky boats and climbing fences at Calais.

    These are hard questions, but the space in which we can articulate them and think carefully about them seems to be opening up. Whatever else comes of the Corbyn surge, it should help to enlarge that space.

    The most encouraging thing I’ve noticed in his campaign is the crowdsourcing of policy ideas: 1,200 people contributed to theNorthern Future document. This has to be better than a policy-making process concentrated among the London-based thinktanks and inner circles populated by PPE graduates who have never worked anywhere beyond Westminster. It seems like the best chance for developing the principles of those supporting Corbyn into a policy platform that is not simply nostalgic for the golden age of social democracy. And it’s how Landon Kettlewell would make policy, if he took over Labour.

    14. The reality-based community

    There’s one other line that’s been ringing in my head as I read the churn of comment pieces, the phrase that Karl Rove used to Ron Suskind. ‘Guys like you,’ he said, ‘are in what we call the reality-based community.’ For many, it summed up the delusions of the Bush regime, and belonging to the reality-based community became a badge of pride. But I always thought that Rove had half a point, when he made that distinction between those who study reality and those who create it.

    The alarmed voices of the Labour establishment surely think of themselves as the reality-based community. The panic grows as they find those enthused by Corbyn are seemingly immune to reasoned arguments. But reality is complex, it isn’t just composed of facts, those facts are always entangled with perceptions, and with stories that shape those perceptions. A lot of the reality to which Labour’s realists are currently appealing is made up almost entirely of perception, since its facts consist of the results of opinion surveys and focus groups. It’s worth asking whether these methods borrowed from the market research industry really plumb the depths of the electorate, or even its shallows. Not to mention, at what point perceptions that have become dislocated from the facts get to overrule them, whether in relation to the effectiveness of austerity or the impact of immigration.

    Another chunk of the reality to which the realists are appealing consists of stories. For a story to work, it needs to show a certain respect to the facts involved, but there will often be more than one story that fits the facts. When Polly Toynbee writes that her heart lies to the left of Corbyn, but the 1983 election result tells her this would be futile, she is invoking what has been the definitive story of Labour’s wilderness years and its return to power under Blair, the story of ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Other stories are available, though, including one which might mention that, when the Tories took the seat of Lewisham East from Labour at the 1983 election by a margin of 1,909, they were helped by the 9,351 votes polled by the breakaway SDP, whose candidate was Polly Toynbee.

    15. You get one chance

    It’s nearly time for breakfast. I’ve been practicing like this, the last few mornings, because I want to believe that there is a constructive insurgency going on, a wave of networked disruption that will renew the Labour party, remind it why it exists and open up the politics of the country where I did my growing up. I want to believe that the party can take this and not just tear itself apart.

    Give me a few more days, maybe I’ll have got enough practice.

    Meanwhile, here’s one thing I am sure of: if Corbyn doesn’t win, there will never be another chance for a grassroots surge of this kind within the Labour party. The system for electing a leader will be reformed all over again, the gap that Miliband opened will be sealed and the control of the parliamentary party reasserted. And perhaps the result will be that the pendulum of politics continues to swing jerkily from blue to red and back again, as if by some ahistorical force of nature, but my hunch is that the gap between the reality talked about by politicians and the realities of people’s lives will continue to grow, the pressure will continue to build, and sooner or later it will find a way to break through the cracks of the existing system. Since I’m writing this from Sweden, which many of you still think of as the spiritual home of social democracy, let me remind you how ugly that can look.

    First published on my old blog, the week that Jeremy Corbyn took the lead in polls for the 2015 Labour party leadership election.

  • The Friendly Society: On Cooperation, Utopia, Friendship & the Commons

    We are looking at a photograph from Amsterdam, 1868, thirty or so men in black and white. Even in the flesh, they would be black and white: black overcoats with blacker collars, faces pale as November and framed by various symmetries of facial hair, top hats like a row of chimneys. Despite what the hats might suggest, these men are workers, craftsmen, dressed in their Sunday clothes, outside a cafe called The Swan. They stand formally, the members of an association shortly to constitute itself as the Construction Society for the Acquisition of One’s Home. On its first night, hundreds more will join. By spring, the membership will have passed two thousand.

    Their gaze presents us with a question, and the way I remember it, our conversation in Gothenburg was an attempt to put this question into words. Ana and Marc framed it for us first, with images of abandoned, half-built housing blocks in a Spain where someone is evicted every fifteen minutes. They traced a line along which the cooperative associations of the early socialist movement had been absorbed into the great public housing programmes of the mid-20th century, only for their achievements to be liquidated in the neoliberal decades that followed, leading to the current crisis. Why is it, they asked, that we struggle to find the confidence to remake reality that we see in the actions of these men?

    Running through this discussion was a yearning for and an unease with utopias. The shadows of futures past—made concrete in the geometries of Biljemeer, Tensta, Novi Beograd or Park Hill—lean over us. The drawings of La Città Nuova look so familiar, it is hard to imagine the promise they once held. After the failure of the planned utopia, can there be a utopia from below—something improvised, emergent? Are our improvisational, networked ways of working really capable of building anything strong and lasting?

    Into this conversation, Kim brought another current of history: the stories of the commons of preindustrial England and their enclosure. Unfamiliar words evoke the strangeness of these ways of living with each other and with the land. If the workers’ movements of the later 19th century mark the beginning of one story, they also belong to the ending of another. As I have written elsewhere:

    The history of the industrial revolution is a history of massive resistance on the part of ordinary people. This resistance fell into two phases: in the first, it was an attempt to defend a way of living; in the second, which began when this way of living had largely been destroyed, it became an attempt to negotiate better conditions within the new world made by the destroyers. What had been lost was a way of living in which most production took place on a domestic scale, interwoven with the lives of families and communities. Work was hard, but it varied with the seasons and required skill and judgement. Many of the basic needs of a household could be met by its own members or their immediate neighbours, not least through access to common land, so that people were not entirely exposed to the mercilessness of the market.

    It is not necessary to romanticise the realities of pre-industrial society: the intensity and duration of the struggle which accompanied its passing are evidence enough. (In 1812, at one of the high-water-marks of this struggle, the British government deployed 12,000 troops against the Luddites in four counties of England, more than Wellington had under his command that year in the ongoing war against Napoleon.) The relationship between this first phase of resistance and the labour movement that would arise out of its defeat has most often been presented as a progressive development: the dawning of a new political consciousness, and with it new forms of organisation and effective action. Yet it was also an accommodation to what had previously been fought against: the new division of the world between the space of work, dedicated to the sole purpose of maximising production, and the domestic space, now dedicated to reproduction and consumption. The sentimental idealisation of the home as a woman’s sphere originates in this division, as established in Victorian England. Behind this advertising hoarding lay the real transformation of the home from a living centre of activity to a dormitory, a garage in which the worker is parked when not in use.⁠

    The swelling of the cities was driven by the loss of earlier possibilities for living with the land. (In England, the process of enclosing common land was generally referred to as ‘Improvement’ by those who organised and profited from it.) In the seminar, Kim talked about the persistence and reemergence of customary practices among the displaced, even in the new context of the city.⁠ New laws were required to proscribe activities which, because they took place outside the monetised economy, were illegible to both state and market.

    As the conversation went on, Kim brought us back around to those men in Amsterdam. How could they trust each other enough to realise a thing like the Construction Society together, to rely on each other for something as fundamental as meeting the need for shelter and living space? ‘Perhaps what we are really asking is, how can two thousand people become friends with each other?’ (In English-speaking countries, the mutual associations of this time were often known as ‘Friendly Societies’.)

    By now, a set of words had started to form a constellation on my notepad: friendship, utopia, commons, public, cooperative. In the relationship between them was a provisional answer to the question we had been circling around. What follows is a first attempt at spelling out that provisional answer, though perhaps it is best read as a rough sketch for a more ambitious project.

    The connection between friendship and the commons had been put into my mind by the Mexican intellectual and activist Gustavo Esteva. During a conversation we filmed in December 2012, he returned twice to the suggestion that friendship was the key to the possibility of new commons. ‘If you want to abandon that feeling of precarity, then it’s to rediscover that the only way to have a kind of security is at the grassroots. With your friends. With the kinds of new commons emerging everywhere.’⁠ Particularly in Europe, particularly in the urban context, he emphasised, if we want to talk about commons we should start with friendship. Since this is not where people usually start, and since friendship hardly sounds solid enough to be a starting point that will be taken seriously, these comments stuck with me.

    At the Commoning the City conference in Stockholm in April 2013, I spoke about this, and suggested that one reason for starting with friendship is that it gets us beyond the idea of a commons as a pool of resources. Anthony McCann has observed that ‘resource-management models’ of the commons mirror the arguments made historically by the defenders of enclosure: these discourses, he argues, ‘tend to work more in the spirit of a Trojan horse than an analytic tool.’⁠ In contrast to the discourses of resource-management, Ivan Illich made the distinction between ‘commons within which people’s subsistence activities are embedded, and resources that serve for the economic production of those commodities on which modern survival depends.’⁠ To see the world as made up of resources is already to have enclosed it in one’s mind, to reduce it to a stockpile of raw materials to be exploited for the production of commodities. Illich adds that the English language ‘during the last 100 years has lost the ability to make this distinction’. Certainly, there is little left that is not considered capable of being treated as a resource: the ecological crisis is to be solved through total ecological accounting, while we rarely think twice about the presence of ‘Human Resources’ departments within companies and organisations. In this context, friendship is an exception, one area of human experience where we still have a shared language to express the sense that not everything can or should be viewed as a resource: when someone we thought of as a friend treats us this way, we say, ‘I feel used.’

    There is another sense in which friendship illuminates the nature of commons, as we come to the distinction between ‘commons’ and ‘public’, two terms frequently used as if their meanings overlap. Instead of treating them as interchangeable, it might be more helpful to think of them as characterised by two rather different logics, founded on differing presuppositions and leading to differing atmospheres.

    A typical definition of something ‘public’—public space, the public sphere—will emphasise that ‘access is guaranteed to all’, in contrast to the private, which is by its nature ‘closed or exclusive’.⁠ The twin concepts of public and private are often seen as corresponding to the collective and the individual. This is most obvious when the terms are transposed to the political-economic structure of public and private sectors—and so to a model of politics in which the left is associated with the public and the right with the private. In a deeper sense, however, both concepts rest on an idea of the individual as possessed of certain rights that exist prior to and override the social context in which she happens to find herself.

    This kind of individualism was hardly thinkable much before the 18th century, when the concepts of public and private took shape. The high version of this story—the version that animates Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man, for example—treats the emergence of the public sphere in this period as among the great achievements of the Enlightenment and, indeed, of human history.⁠ There is a lower version to be told, however; one which sits less awkwardly with the recollection that this was also the century in which the enclosure of common lands reached its greatest intensity. In this version, we might recognise—among other things—that public space is, often literally, the subdued remnant of an older commons. A striking late example of this is the enclosure of Kennington Common, the site of the largest and last of the Chartist mass meetings in 1848; within four years, legislation had been passed to create Kennington Park, fenced and patrolled by guards under the command of the Royal Commissioners. (The artist and Kennington resident Stefan Szczelkun makes the fascinating suggestion that the curiously anonymous monuments, lacking plaques or dedications, erected during its emparkment seem to have been ‘placed strategically… just far enough from the sites of public executions and mass rallies to misdirect attention and focus from those emotive and resonant sites.’⁠ There is an analogy lurking here to the anonymity and seemingly random deployment of public art in today’s cities.)

    There seems to be a paradox by which the concept of the public, with its guarantee of access to all, is realised through the creation of boundaries of a new hardness. In the case of Kennington Park, we have a modern public space created through legislative and physical enclosure. A more general example is the establishment of public services provided on a basis of universal access, which has entailed the hardening of the boundaries of citizenship which form the practical limit to the ideal of universality. In contrast, if the historical commons were unfenced, this never implied that they were simply open to all. There were rights of use in the commons, but these were not universal: rather, they were deeply specific, a fabric of interwoven agreements, subject to an ongoing process of negotiation. This is the customary law that Illich describes: ‘It was unwritten law not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs.’⁠

    The absence of any commitment to universality in the logic of the commons sounds alarming, since—within the logic of the public—the alternative would seem to be exclusion. It is here that the example of friendship may help us discern the difference between these logics. If I claim that I have a right to be your friend, this makes no sense. The dance of sociability by which the possibility of friendship is explored takes a multitude of forms, but it can neither be rushed nor predicted.

    The logic of the commons resembles the logic of friendship, in that it is based neither on an a priori openness, nor a set of a priori criteria which determine exclusion. The journey by which a newcomer may be drawn into the web of relations which form a commons—that ‘reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs’—is determined through what happens between the people present, rather than by the application of prescribed principles. The ideal of a universal guarantee of access makes no sense here, yet nor is there anything that resembles the erection of a hard boundary of exclusion.

    The logic of the public appeals to something higher and more constant than the vulnerable threads of human relationships; but in normalising such an appeal, it has a tendency to cut through the fabric which those threads make up. The individual possessed of a set of rights begins as a fiction, contemporary and in other ways parallel to the figure of Robinson Crusoe which has held such an enduring appeal for economists.⁠

    But such fictions have a way of coming to life: the attempt to realise a society based on such rights has often framed our highest aspirations for social justice, even if the reality has fallen short, but it has also been accompanied by the creation of societies characterised by an unprecedented individualism and atomisation. We pursue the circumstances of loneliness, even as those who study public health have started to describe it as ‘an epidemic’.⁠

     The logic of the commons, according to which rights are negotiated within human relationships, rests on another understanding of the individual, one which is closer to that of Raimon Pannikar: ‘I understand a person as “a knot in a net” of relationships.’⁠

    If it makes sense to distinguish the logics of public and commons in the way that I have done so far, it is worth touching on a further aspect of this distinction, in relation to ‘space’ and ‘place’. The space of the public is Cartesian: an abstract, homogeneous, measurable void which preexists its actual contents, just as the individual (within this logic) is treated as preexisting the actual context of social relations in which she finds herself. In contrast, the commons is always somewhere, a specific place, just as its rights and laws are specific.⁠

    In this sense, among others, the logic of the public is utopian—literally, ‘placeless’—and this can be seen in one of the fullest attempts to realise its ambitions, the commune movement of the 1960s counterculture. In many ways, of course, this movement was an attempt to create a refuge from the kind of modern society which we might more often think of as embodying the logic of the public, but the refugees took with them certain core assumptions—and these played a critical role in how their dreams went wrong. Lou Gottlieb founded the commune at Morning Star Ranch in 1966, declaring it to be ‘Land access to which is denied no one’. After Time magazine turned its spotlight on the hippie phenomenon in July 1967, the numbers of newcomers arriving at the ranch grew beyond its ability to cope: the site became overwhelmed, struggling with open sewers and the hostility of the Sonoma County authorities. In 1972, at the end of a series of court cases, all but one of the buildings were bulldozed.⁠ Iain Boal adds a speculative twist to this story, pointing out that Garrett Hardin was writing his ill-founded yet hugely influential paper, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in California in 1968 as the story of the Morning Star court hearings was on the front page of his morning newspaper.⁠ Hardin’s account of why commons are doomed to fail bears no relation to the actual history of the commons, but it does resemble what Boal calls ‘the tragedy of the communes’.⁠ The essence of that tragedy—as seen through the lens I have been grinding away at here—is the attempt to realise, in its full utopian form, the promise of universal access which is alien to the historical phenomenon of the commons but intrinsic to the logic of the public.

    One further example from the movements that came out of the 1960s counterculture illustrates the converse of the connection between friendship and the commons, the suspicion of friendship within the logic of the public. ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ is a key text from the women’s liberation movement, drawing attention to the ways in which abuse of power takes place within informal, supposedly non-hierarchical groups. Running through it, however, is a striking suspicion of friendship:

    Elites are nothing more and nothing less than a group of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any groups and makes them so difficult to break.⁠

    Written in 1970, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ was an attempt to learn from the failures of the innocence which had guided the experiments of the period to which Morning Star Ranch belongs. It contains a great deal of painfully-won insight. Yet there is a connection to be traced between the way that friendship is problematised here and a more general tendency to treat specific human relationships as interfering with the equality of individuals, as envisioned by the logic of the public: to avoid such interference, friendship should be confined (or at least seen to be confined) to the private sphere.⁠

    The politics of informal groups to which ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ draws attention is real enough and—as Kim reminded us during the seminar—an essential element of the historical commons was ‘a democratic assembly space’ within which to resolve the difficulties and disagreements that arise.⁠ We might question, though, whether friendship need really be so inimical to the social fabric—and whether a logic according to which the key to avoiding the abuse of power is to ‘break’ the connections of friendship is really headed in a direction which we would wish to take.

    How do we find our way back around to the question in the gaze of those workers in Amsterdam, a century and a continent away from the examples we have been considering? The thought that occurred to me during the seminar, and that prompted the scribbled constellation of terms on which I have tried to elaborate here, was about the peculiar position of the cooperative movement in relation to these differing logics of commons and public.

    There is always more than one story to be told about the origins of a movement, but the story most often told about the origins of cooperativism goes back to the experiments of Robert Owen at New Lanark. The waterfalls that powered the imagination of the Romantic poets also drove the first phase of the Industrial Revolution which their more practical contemporaries engineered. A short walk from the Falls of Clyde, which drew visitors such as Coleridge and the Wordsworths, Owen’s mill town straddles the mechanical and the visionary. Its founder belonged to the period described by Karl Polanyi in which practical enterprises were entered into in a spirit of intellectual enquiry, seeking to discover ‘new applications of the universal principles of mutuality, trust, risks, and other elements of human enterprise.’ (By contrast, Polanyi suggests, after the 1830s ‘businessmen imagined they knew what forms their activities should take; they rarely inquired into the nature of money before founding a bank.’⁠)

    If the communards of the 1960s thought that they were walking away from the top-down institutions of modernity, yet took with them the essential logic of the public, Owen’s projects represent a more wholehearted attempt to realise utopia on an institutional scale. When his original investors at New Lanark tired of his philanthropic experiments, he arranged for them to be bought out by a group which included Jeremy Bentham. The plans for a model community at New Harmony, Indiana drawn up for Owen by the architect Thomas Stedman Whitwell belong to the genre of the panopticon, even if the reality of the settlement—which failed within two years—was closer to the experience of Morning Star Ranch.⁠ His earlier proposal to put the poor into ‘Villages of Cooperation’ met with resistance from popular Radicals and trade unions for whom, in E.P. Thompson’s words:

    The Plan smelled of Malthus and of those rigorous experiments of magistrates … who were already working out the Chadwickian plan of economical workhouse relief. Even if Owen was himself … deeply in earnest and dismayed by the distress of the people, his plan, if taken up by Government, would certainly be orientated in this way.⁠

    Owen was ahead of his time in many ways, yet the suspicion with which his plans were viewed also anticipates the shadow side of the real achievements of public provision as accomplished in subsequent generations: the suspicion that what has been achieved is not a liberation, but the rendering sustainable of an exploitation to which we become naturalised.

    To point out that Owen’s own experiments were, by and large, failures is not to deny the significance of his legacy, but it could prompt the question as to why certain ideas with which he had been associated subsequently took on a life of their own. Thompson makes the observation that:

    Owenism from the late Twenties onwards, was a very different thing from the writings and proclamations of Robert Owen … The very imprecision of his theories … made them adaptable to different groups of working people.⁠

    It was this passage that came to mind, as we sat in Gothenburg trying to piece together the histories of the commons and the public, and that led me to add the word ‘cooperative’ to the middle of my scribbled constellation, somewhere between the clusters ‘public, universal, space, utopia’ and ‘commons, specific, place’. This is no more than a speculation, and clearly there were a variety of factors and innovations by which Owen’s ideas about cooperation as well as other experiments, some of them predating New Lanark, fused into the cooperative movement that took shape in the following decades. However, if we are trying to answer the question put to us by the gaze of those workers in Amsterdam—to understand the kind of trust which holds together a Construction Society for the Acquisition of One’s Home, or a Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, the equivalent of which we struggle to find in our own experience—perhaps it is significant that these associations were formed at a time when the practices of commoning were still within living memory among the newly urbanised?⁠ Were these self-organised institutions—organised in response to the torn fabric of rapidly industrialising societies, and which we can see as anticipating the vastly larger systems of the following century—made possible because of the living memory of older customary practices? If so, we could think of the cooperative movement as a meeting point, straddling the boundary: conceived (at least by Owen) within the logic of the public, but brought to life by something that could well be called a heritage of commons.

    First published in Heritage as Common(s): Common(s) as Heritage,University of Gothenburg Press, 2015. This essay responds to the papers given by Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen (STEALTH.unlimited) and Kim Trogall (University of Sheffield) at a seminar at the Gothenburg School of Design & Crafts.

  • The Only Way Is Down: 18 Thoughts on the UK Election

    The Only Way Is Down: 18 Thoughts on the UK Election

    So, good morning. I’m afraid it’s true: that nightmare you had, it wasn’t a dream. Let yourself feel the shock, the rawness of disappointment sharpened by sleep deprivation. If you ached for an end to five years of government by the rich, for the rich, then what you are feeling today is a blow to the soul. Stay with that for a while, before the pundits and the candidates in the coming leadership elections start to rationalise what just happened. There are other levels on which we need to make sense of this cruel result.

    Labour is about to endure a tug of war between those who believe it needs to go leftwards and those who believe it needs to go rightwards. The truth is, neither of these directions will be much help. Right now, the only way is down.

    What we have seen is a failure of politics, a failure of democracy at a cultural level, part of a larger story playing out across the struggling countries of the post-industrial west. For now, it may look like the Tories have won, but it is a fragile victory. If you want an image for the state of English politics today — Scotland is another story — then think of three cartoon characters who have run off a cliff. Two of them have just plummeted and flattened themselves into the ground, while the third is still hanging there, feet spinning in the air, oblivious to its situation.

    The one cold comfort that Labour — and perhaps even the Lib Dems — could take from last night’s results is that events have forced them into a confrontation with reality, while the Tories will continue to govern on the basis of delusions, with ugly results, for a while longer, before gravity catches up with them. This could give the defeated parties a head start, but only if they are prepared to enter into a kind of soul-searching deeper than anything we have seen in British politics in a very long time.

    For that to have a chance of happening, it will have to start somewhere else, somewhere beyond the party machines and the earnest, highly-educated, decent people at the centre of them, who are almost entirely unequipped for the journey to the political underworld which is now called for.

    What follows are a set of notes that might help us get our bearings for this journey, some of which may turn out to be wildly off the mark. But I hope they are some use, this morning. Take care of each other. Give someone a hug today. Look out for the moment where you catch a stranger’s eyes and recognise the loss you have in common, a loss that goes deeper than the tally of seats. Grieve for the inadequacy of the ways in which we have tried to stand up to greed and fear and exploitation. But hold your disillusionment gently, don’t let it harden into damning conclusions about human nature. Get ready for a dark ride ahead. We are going to have to rethink politics on a level this election didn’t touch.

    Everything is broken

    1. Three tribes go their separate ways. About the only piece of commentary from the election campaign that felt truly prescient last night was Paul Mason’s analysis of the fragmentation of the UK into three distinct political geographies: a Scotland dreaming of a future as the warm south of Scandinavia, a south-east held up by asset wealth, and a post-industrial remainder of the union. There is no party that is now a major contender in all three parts of the country and their divergence means that there is no unified pattern of swing at a national level.

    2. Labour talked to five million people, but it didn’t know how to listen.The sincere bewilderment of Labour figures as the exit poll turned out to be accurate says something about the failure of the “ground campaign” in which activists had five million doorstep conversations over the past four months. How do you talk to that many people and come away having misread the mood of the country this badly? Two easy answers will be given to this: Labour talked to the wrong people and/or people didn’t tell them the truth. There’s probably truth in both of these, but there’s a third reason that goes to the deeper levels of what just happened: the conversations they had on the doorsteps weren’t real conversations. We badly need new ways of having political conversations — and if we’re to start regrowing a democratic culture from below, it will start with finding ways to bring such conversations together.

    3. The Lib Dems totally misunderstood their own voters. One of the most striking features of the night was the splintering of their vote in every direction: in some constituencies, it appeared to be dividing equally between Labour, Tory, UKIP and Green candidates. Some collective delusion convinced the Lib Dems that their MPs had earned the loyalty of local voters. It seems truer to see the party as having been a depository for vague dissatisfaction of a variety of flavours, whose raison d’etre disintegrated when they became an adjunct to the Tories.

    4. People who are into politics just don’t get how puzzling and alienating it looks to the rest of the population. This is a broader version of the problem the Lib Dems had. Over the past week, I’ve worked with the #dontjustvote tour, a tiny playful art project making its way across the south of England on its way to Westminster, starting conversations about the election in all the places they stopped along the way. The stories they gathered along the way, snatches of which you can find on their Facebook and YouTube pages, brought home to me the sheer confusion, mistrust and disconnect with everyday reality which is most people’s experience of politics.

    5. Social media is not delivering on its promises to change politics.There are lots of reasons for this, including that many of the promises were hype. But here’s one element in the mix. If you’re old enough to remember when Google was new, then think back to the first time you saw the Google search page: how long did it take before you got why it was good? Not much longer than a few keystrokes and a click. Then think back to the first time you saw Twitter: how long did it take you before you got why it was good? Probably months. Or maybe you’re still not convinced. The social technologies that have grown up over the past decade layer a depth of social and cultural subtlety on top of the technical platform in a way that wasn’t true for the information technologies of the internet in its earlier phases. This creates an under-recognised gap between the people who have invested the time to get initiated in the kind of active, engaged use of a tool like Twitter and people who don’t get it and aren’t likely to get it any time soon. So it’s not just the self-selecting echo chambers we create that make social media problematic, it’s also the unrepresentative section of the population who are actively present there and the detachment this fosters from the rest of the population.

    6. Is it time to ditch the expensive American advisors? Hell yes!When I was a broke student, I spent my summers selling educational books door-to-door for a US company, first in the UK and then in California. Nothing prepared me for the difference in psychology between how Brits like to make “buying decisions” and how Americans do. Just because we share a common language, doesn’t mean American experts are well-placed to help British politicians.

    A 200-year moment?

    7. The unmaking of the English working class. The long trend underlying all of this is the unravelling of the social settlement that slowly emerged from the Industrial Revolution, from the destruction of pre-industrial ways of living to the emergence of the labour movement to the social democratic consensus of the mid-20th century. We have inherited political parties that belonged to a kind of society we no longer live in. As I rushed out the door yesterday morning, I found myself grabbing E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, a pre-history of the labour movement that covers the period between 1790 and 1830. The period we’re in has many resemblances to that. (If I were a cartoonist, I’d be tempted to draw Cameron as the Prince Regent…) None of the forms of left-wing politics that we’ve inherited are adapted to the times in which we find ourselves — and the process of regrowing a democratic culture is, I suspect, going to require a search for new and unexpected political forms that resembles the history that Thompson tells. The roots of the popular political movements that grew up in the 19th century were deeply entangled with grassroots self-education movements — and something equivalent to this is going to be needed in the years ahead.

    8. The British media make a joke of democracy. A handful of tax-avoiding billionaires control the agenda of almost all the national papers which then indirectly controls the agenda of the broadcasters. The grip of a cynical and decadent establishment is another feature that’s reminiscent of the period Thompson describes — and the creation of new grassroots media was part of the process that led to the emergence of the labour movement.

    9. Love him or hate him, Russell Brand might just be our William Cobbett… It’s neither a precise analogy nor an unambiguously positive one, but Cobbett found a voice that captured the popular imagination, speaking in dramatic language about the monstrousness of the times. He was also a fantastic egoist. “Cobbett’s favourite subject, indeed, was William Cobbett,” writes Thompson. “But… his egotism transcended itself to the point where the reader… is asked to look not at Cobbett, but with him.” (I don’t know whether Cobbett also swigged from over-sized bottles, but if he did they probably weren’t full of water.)

    10. Brand provides a clue to the only kind of revolution that is still even conceivable. The week he went on Newsnight and predicted a revolution, I’d been in England, giving a lecture about “the failure of the future”, in which I suggested that one of the symptoms of this was the impossibility of taking seriously the idea of political revolution in the way that had still seemed possible in the 1960s. As the video went viral, I wondered if I was wrong. And then I remembered something Martin Shaw says, one of his mythic metaphors for making sense of the kinds of times in which we’re living: “This isn’t a hero time, this isn’t a goddess time, it’s a trickster time.” When people like John Berger (one of my heroes) were young, it was a real thing to believe in the heroic revolution that Marx had seemed to promise. Today, the only kind of revolution that is plausible is a foolish one, one where we accidentally stumble into another way of being human together, making a living and making life work. (And whatever that might look like, it doesn’t look like utopia.)

    A journey to the underworld

    11. This is not just a battle of ideas, it is a battle for the soul.Another thing that Brand is onto, in his inimitable way, is what he would call the “spiritual” nature of the revolution. Margaret Thatcher was explicit about how deep the project of neoliberalism went. Two years into her first term, she told the Sunday Times:“Economics is the method: the object is to change the soul.” The left has never taken this seriously, we have never even tried to contest neoliberalism on the territory of the soul. The people at the top of today’s Labour party, a few of whom I’ve crossed paths with over the years, are in no way equipped to operate in the territory of the soul — so it’s probably going to take the help of some of us who’ve been a long way outside the pale of politics-as-we-know-it, if we’re going to work out how to do this. But one of the wrong notes that Miliband hit in the past few weeks, for all his decency and awkward charm, was his repetition that this election was “a clash of ideas”. The political battle in which we are engaged is deeper than that, it’s a battle for the soul, and until the left feels that, I don’t think it will find its way to the kind of new politics we are going to need.

    12. We need to be willing to go to some dark places. I had a public conversation last summer with Steve Wheeler in which he sketched out a set of thoughts about the need for a politics of “depth”. I must edit the recording and get it online, but the thrust of it was that the left has associated depth and the darker, less rational side of ourselves with the worst kind of politics. His argument — which parallels the one Zizek makes about Nazism in his Perverts’ Guide to Ideology — is that it’s a terrible mistake to cede the territory of the intuitive, the emotional, the unconscious, the irrational to the far right. It’s only by people of good will engaging with these sides of ourselves, at a cultural as well as an individual level, that we can prevent a political “return of the repressed”. We need to go there vigilantly, but we need to go there.

    13. We need to understand the amount of fear in the equation.Miliband used to talk about the “squeezed middle”, but it turns out the Tories can still count on the worried middle. As I’ve said before, there aren’t enough people doing well in Britain to deliver a Tory majority, but there are enough people who are worried, who hope the brittle prosperity of the housing bubble will sustain their way of living a little longer, who hope that what happened to the poor, the young and the disabled over the last five years won’t happen to them. The puzzlement I see in the despairing posts of friends on Facebook over the past twelve hours comes, I think, from the difficulty we have in understanding this. Somehow, we need a space for conversations where people can speak honestly about their fears, their disillusionment, their lack of belief in the possibility of change for the better — without trying too hard, too quickly to convince them they are wrong. Presenting big ideas or retail policies is no substitute for this.

    Regrowing a democratic culture from below

    14. Democracy doesn’t end at the ballot box. The aftermath of the Scottish referendum proved this, wrong-footing the entire UK establishment. Below the surface, barely capable of being translated into election results (except in Scotland), there is an extraordinary welling of anger, disillusionment, disgust with the lot of them. I wouldn’t like to predict the circumstances in which this will take louder, more visible shape, but it was one of the running themes that emerged from the #dontjustvote tour. The Scottish precedent needs to be the inspiration for an ongoing grassroots process of democratic renewal.

    15. This needs to start outside of politics as we know it. Politics today is broken in ways that go deeper than our political institutions or the people who inhabit them are able to reach. While the kind of regrowth of a democratic culture that I’m talking about is not non-partisan in some detached, objective way, it can’t be on behalf of any one party, either.

    16. Build a movement that starts by being present in the place where you are and supporting the most vulnerable. Look at the role that the grassroots movements around Syriza have played in helping people to endure the hardships of austerity in Greece. That needs to be one of the models for whatever happens in Britain, as five more years of austerity are piled on the weakest. And for heaven’s sake, work with the churches (and the mosques, synagogues, gudwaras and temples) — whatever the rational differences many on the left may have with people of faith, the everyday engagement of religious communities puts most of us to shame. And the churches have shown more courage in criticising austerity than most of the Labour frontbench.

    17. Another party is possible. The FPTP system may be a steep obstacle, but we live in strange times. Look at the polls in Spain. Look at the polls in Iceland, one of the few countries hit harder than the UK by the banking crisis — they are now in the third (or fourth?) act of some kind of political revolution, where a left outsider coalition gave way to a centre right government, but that government is now losing support as the Pirate Party lead the opinion polls. Strange times, really.

    18. Come to Sweden (but lose your illusions). I’m writing these notes in Gothenburg Central station, about to rush off to the Congress of the “popular movement” that owns the national touring theatre for which I currently work. Since the exit polls came out last night, I’ve had a stream of people, with varying degrees of seriousness, asking me if they should move to Sweden. I wish I could help you fulfil your wishes, but there are far more similarities between the reality of politics today here and the British situation than you would like to believe. The work that needs to be done here is much the same as the work that needs to be done there — though, for now, the harshening grip of neoliberalism is better hidden here, and we have been spared the kind of austerity the UK has seen. But precisely because the work that needs doing is similar, maybe there are possibilities to host conversations here that bring together people from both countries who want to engage in this work. I’m certainly interested in helping to make that happen.

    Alright, enough words. Be kind to each other. And be wary of the tendency to allow a situation to be defined by the oppositions present within it. This is going to be a time for redrawing the maps, a time when things we overlooked or undervalued may end up making all the difference.

    First published on my old blog, the morning after the UK general election of 2015.

  • The Limits to Measurement: A Conversation With Christopher Brewster

    The Limits to Measurement: A Conversation With Christopher Brewster

    These days, people talk a lot about ‘the art of hosting’, but that is only one half of the dance of hospitality: there is an art of guesting, too. I can say this with conviction, because I have been a lousy guest, in my time, and lately I’ve had the luck to live with someone who teaches me to notice the things that make a person easy to have around: the moments at which an artful guest steps forward with a gentle insistence, the moments of well-timed withdrawal. Perhaps because he is one of life’s wanderers, Christopher Brewster has mastered this art. If I picture him now, it is standing in our kitchen, chopping vegetables at speed and maintaining an unbroken conversation while preparing a lunch that will show the influence of the years he lived in Greece.

    He could be a classicist or a philosopher—either of those things seems more probable, from his manner, than that he should be a computer scientist working in a business school. In fact, as he touches on near the start of this conversation, his route into computer science came through the philosophy of language, and it was his feel for the ways of thinking embedded in digital technology that suggested the theme around which we wandered together.

    It was the spring of 2014, my first year in Västerås, a middle-sized city by a lake in central Sweden. A string of friends had invited themselves to visit, so that I had taken to telling people, ‘We’re running a residency programme in our spare room.’ It occurred to me that a residency programme should really include a public events series, so one afternoon, I wandered into the local branch of the Workers’ Learning Association and a week later sixteen of us were gathered in their foyer for the first of what became eight weeks of Västerås Conversations. Our first guest was Anthony McCann, talking about tradition, the commons and the politics of gentleness. From week to week, certain themes would loop back: hospitality; friendship; the challenge of speaking up for things that are hard to measure or adequately define.

    What follows is an unfaithful transcript of the fourth of those conversations. We have taken the opportunity to straighten out our more crooked sentences and to fill in details where memory failed us at the time. Still, what emerges from this process should be read as a sample from a larger conversation: both the relay of stories and ideas that ran over those eight weeks in Västerås and the ongoing conversation that is my friendship with Christopher. 

    It is a friendship that began at one of the handful of conferences I have been to where people seemed to be there to listen to each other; a conference whose theme was ‘the university in transition’ and the possibility of new, radical spaces of learning growing at the edges of a dysfunctional system. It seems appropriate, then, that our friendship should have become a strand in a web of convivial conversations that form a kind of ‘invisible college’ in which many of us have found nourishment over the years since. This text and the other Västerås Conversations are among the visible manifestations of that web.

    DH: If we’re going to talk about the measurable and the unmeasurable, perhaps we could start with this observation: to a computer, the world is made up of numbers, while to a human being, that is not the case. Yet the more inseparable they become from our lives, the more likely we are to fall into ways of thinking which do treat the world as made of numbers, even though this is not our experience. 

    Now, do you agree with that as a starting point?

    CB: As a starting point, yes, but the story is more complex. When I first set out on my PhD, I remember meeting a man who said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could make human language behave like a programming language—if we could reach that level of precision?’ And my response is that this would be a complete loss, because it’s exactly the ‘failures’ of human language that are its virtue. So the fact that human language is ambiguous and vague is a feature, rather than a bug.

    Computers are precise. It’s the digital nature of computers that gives the particular effect that we observe. They require everything to fit into either-or categories. This goes back into the intellectual heritage of computer science, which originates partly in logic and partly in mathematics. And because of this logical heritage which is physically embodied in the transistors and the physical hardware, it has been natural for computer scientists to wish to analyse the world in logical terms. They have been deeply influenced by thinkers like Frege and Carnap who believed that one could represent the world completely in logic. That remains to this day a fundamental, if very often tacit, assumption about all activity in computer science, whether at the theoretical end or in the development of business systems where you believe that you can have an enterprise resource management system that can put people into different categories and then describe the world in a perfect manner.

    DH: So what you’re saying is that the way that computers represent the world has a heritage in particular areas of philosophy—particular ways of thinking about the world that are by no means the only ones available. Yet since these machines are now everywhere and intertwined with our lives to such an extraordinary extent, they carry these ways of thinking into our lives, they shape the way we see the world and the way that we reshape the world?

    CB: Yes. Each computer, each system we use, each piece of software embodies a particular model, a particular perspective on the world—and we tend, in the end, in using these systems to believe the model rather than the world. Whether it’s an accounting system or a personal fitness management system, what happens is that you create a set of categories, a model, and then either things fit or, if they don’t, they tend to be ignored.

    DH: And when you’re interacting with these machines, you either agree to act as if the world is like that, or the interaction with the machine quickly becomes difficult. So, to the extent that we spend a lot of our time dealing with these machines, we have to spend that time agreeing to pretend that the world is more logical and more capable of being reduced to things that can be measured than the full range of our background experience might suggest. And for as long as our focus is held by the machine, that way of seeing the world is being affirmed.

    CB: Part of the problem here is the plasticity of the human mind: our own native ability, agility, flexibility to deal with things. 

    Several years ago I was a reviewer on a research project that concerned the analysis and production of emotions by computers. The idea was that you would construct computer systems that could detect emotions in the voice or gesture of people and that would then produce something that would represent an emotion. They had an example, a system which would have an artificial tree on a screen, and if you spoke to it nicely it would grow and if you spoke to it harshly it would slowly shrink. And they were terribly pleased with this because they said, ‘Look, we have managed to capture human emotion and analyse it in a way so that the tree grows when people are nice and happy and positive…’

    DH: And it will shrink if people are being nasty?

    CB: The trouble is, they didn’t really think about the likelihood that human beings would observe the tree and, within seconds, respond appropriately and figure out how to control the tree. So it had nothing to do with your real state of emotions, but technically it was a brilliant success!

    DH: So, to go back to that conversation from when you were starting out on your PhD, there is this utopian ambition—which people who are enamoured of the ways of thinking embedded in these machines tend towards—which is a belief that the world would be better if we could get rid of the vagueness and achieve the same kind of precision that these machines are capable of?

    CB: Well, this tendency has deep intellectual roots. You can trace it back to Descartes and the Enlightenment, or all the way back to Aristotle’s attempt to enumerate all the possible kinds of things within a fixed set of categories. There has been a repeated attempt throughout western intellectual history to develop a total system of categories that will cover all of human experience. My favourite example is in England, in the mid-17thcentury, when you have people like Francis Lodwick with his project for A Perfect Language. There was a whole movement of ‘philosophical languages’ and at the centre of it was John Wilkins, one of the founders of the Royal Society, who produced this extraordinary taxonomy of every known scientific concept. He founded the Royal Society to ensure the longevity of his project and when he had produced his taxonomy, he told everybody, right, now you have to keep it up to date! And, of course, everybody ignored it. But the tendency continues—and the next step, in the 18thcentury, is Linnaeus from Sweden who produced a taxonomy of all animals and plants, the foundation of the modern biological naming system. So you have a growing sense that, yes, we can describe the world completely.

    DH: We can know the world by having a box for everything!

    CB: In the late 20thcentury, there are innumerable failures. There’s a wonderful project which began in the mid-80s called Cyc which has put hundreds of man-years of work into constructing a logical system to represent the whole of the world. Now, there are some fantastic examples of people trying to use the system and failing completely, yet it carries on—it’s a recurring human ambition. 

    And of course, if you pin a computer scientist to the wall, they will say ‘Well, no, of course we don’t mean to describe the whole world.’ But you see it creeping out in all kinds of ways, even if it’s just a small corner of the world, even if there’s an acknowledgement that we won’t describe the wholeworld in our set of categories—there is still an assumption that those categories will represent reality perfectly.

    The other thing to say is that there is a lot of money riding on this assumption. If you want to find the current version, it goes under the name of ‘smart cities’ or the ‘Internet of Things’, a vision of a world in which everything we interact with is connected to the network. But it has consequences, socially, that people have not yet fully worked out, because what it means is that we are trying to construct systems that will model every aspect of reality. And you need to tell your story of trying to use the electronic toilet…

    DH: Yes, this is about what that interconnected vision looks like in practice. It was six weeks ago. I was at the railway station in Borlänge—a small city in Dalarna, which is Sweden’s answer to Yorkshire—and I needed to use the toilet. There was a toilet there, it was vacant, and there was a keypad on the door. To open the door, you had to put in a code and a notice on the wall explained that, to get a code, you needed to pay 10kr by sending a text message to the number provided. So I sent a text message to pay my 10kr. After a couple of minutes, I got two replies. The first was from the toilet company, telling me my payment had failed. The second was from my Swedish mobile provider, explaining that, in order to make the mobile payment, I needed to download an app. So now I had to get online, find the app, download and install it, then give it my bank card details and approve the safety request from my bank, allowing me to transfer 10kr from my current account into the ‘virtual wallet’ that now existed on my phone and, presumably, somewhere out there in a data-centre. At which point, I could send the text message again, pay my 10kr and get texted back with a code that would open the door—and finally, after twenty minutes, I had access to the toilet. In among all this technological wizardry, the real miracle is that I had managed to perform all these tasks whilst keeping my legs crossed.

    CB: So, this is a perfect example of smart cities! And one consequence is, now the mobile phone company and the app company and possibly the company operating the toilet door all know who has gone to the toilet and when!

    DH: I guess so—or maybe there is some way in which the controlling of access to the toilets is saving the local council money? But I wonder if it’s really that rational, or if it’s just that the idea of the Internet of Things sounds so shiny and new, and whoever was responsible for deciding that the bathroom of Borlänge railway station should be part of it couldn’t envisage the reality of how it would turn out, the reality of the Internet of Toilets?

    I guess what I’m asking is, did anyone ever know what the problem was that this was meant to solve? And maybe we could extend this to the whole project that you’ve been describing, this recurring project to come up with a complete set of categories for describing the world—is it a problem that we don’t have a complete set of categories like that?

    CB: I think it’s very important that we don’t have that set of categories! I’d argue that it’s actually a positive thing. 

    But I think what we’re getting to now is this concept of ‘legibility’, which comes from James C. Scott’s book, Seeing Like A State. And this construction of categories is part of the need that organisations in authority have to describe their territory, to describe their universe. That’s where the ‘problem’ comes from.

    DH: Yes, Scott’s concept of legibility, that the modern state has a great desire and demand for the ability to see and read activity of all kinds from above. He’s talking about the kind of centralised political systems that came about in the past two or three centuries in Europe and were gradually extended across the world. To meet this demand, you need to standardise things, to reduce the complexity to a manageable model. And the classic example that Scott uses is forestry in Germany.

    CB: So in the 18thcentury, in Prussia and Saxony, forests were a major source of income to the princely states. They developed ‘scientific forestry’ as an attempt to rationalise the revenue: new measurements were developed, trees were categorised into different size categories and their rates of growth were charted, so that the output of the forest could be projected into the future. But everything else that made up an actual living forest had vanished from these projections, all the other species, all the other activities—as Scott says, they literally couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Then, in the next phase, they began planting ‘production forests’, monocultures with trees all the same age, lined up in rows. And of course, with our ecological perspective, we know where this is heading: as the soil built up by the old growth forest becomes exhausted, the trees in the new rationalised forests no longer grow at the rates projected, the forest managers get caught up in needing fertilisers and pesticides and fungicides, trying to reintroduce species that had been driven out, struggling to reproduce something like the living forest that their way of seeing had destroyed.

    DH: And at the root of this, there’s a ‘problem’ that was only there from the perspective of the office at the centre of a huge area of territory that wants to be able to ‘know’ what is going on everywhere and then improve the numbers in the model that has come to stand for the forest. There was no ‘problem’ from the point of view of the old-growth forest, or the people who were actually living and working there.

    CB: Scott uses the concept of legibility to explain a number of seemingly disparate phenomena. Things like surnames, which only arrived in some parts of Europe as late as the Napoleonic period—they give the state a way of knowing who is who, how many people there are in a population, so that they can be taxed or conscripted effectively. Standardised weights and measures—the metric system was invented in France at the end of the 18thcentury and then gradually imposed upon the whole of Europe, replacing measures that varied from one market town to the next. The introduction of passports is another example. And you see this desire for legibility, too, within companies. The whole concept of Taylorisation and time-and-motion studies is another form of increasing the ability to read activity from above. 

    Now, one of the origins of computing is in the construction of machines to do some of this work. It took seven years to process all the data that had been collected in the 1880 census in the United States. Between 1880 and 1890, the population was growing so fast that, not only was the data from the last census out of date, it was reckoned that it would take 13 years to process the data from the next census. But right on time, you get the Hollerith machine, a punchcard database system that allows all the data to be processed within six weeks.

    That was a huge improvement from the point of view of the state’s ability to understand what’s going on—and it fits right into the story that we’ve been talking about of the intellectual origins of computers in the desire to measure, observe, count and categorise. 

    But we mustn’t only view this as negative, it has produced wonders.

    DH: I think this is why I wanted to frame this conversation in terms of ‘the limits to measurement’, rather than ‘the problem with measurement’. Because you’re right, however anarchistic our instincts might be, I don’t know many people who would honestly choose to forego all of what the state provides for them. I remember Vinay Gupta saying, ‘I’ve stopped worrying about the power of the state, I’ve started worrying that the state is going to collapse before we’ve built something to replace it.’

    And I remember the first time I tried to speak about this question of the measurable and the unmeasurable, realising that there were people who heard what I was saying as an argument against measurement. Actually, what I would like to bring into conversation is this: under what circumstances is measurement helpful and appropriate? Under what circumstances does measurement become problematic? And how do we develop a language for talking about these things more subtly?

    And perhaps one way of approaching that subtlety is to bring in an idea from Ivan Illich. In his early books, in the 1970s, he talked a lot about counterproductivity and ‘the threshold of counterproductivity’: the point beyond which increasing the intensity or the amount of a given thing begins to produce the opposite of the effect that it has been producing so far. Beyond a certain point, he argued, our schooling systems end up making us stupider as societies, our health systems end up making us sick, our prison systems end up creating more criminality. Illich brought together a lot of detail to make those arguments, but I think the general principle of the threshold of counterproductivity can be a good tool for thinking with, because it gets us free of thinking in either-or terms, without replacing that with slacker relativism. Instead of debating whether X is a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bad thing’, or claiming that it’s all just a matter of opinion, you can say that, up to a certain point, X tends to be helpful—and beyond that point, it becomes actively unhelpful.

    This doesn’t have to be particularly esoteric. Think about food: we can pretty much all agree that food is a good thing, but once you’ve eaten a certain amount, it’s not just that you get diminishing returns, it’s that you’re going to make yourself ill.

    CB: I think this is an excellent concept. I think there’s a complete lack, though, of applying anything like this to technology and asking at what point one reaches the level of counterproductivity. I’m thinking of the kind of software that is imposed to track accounting in an organisation: where you used to just get a piece of paper and hand in your receipts and somebody would sort it out, you now have to fill in all kinds of forms online, collecting far more information than used to be the case. Now, as far as the accountants are concerned, this is wonderful: they can analyse exactly what’s going on in the system. The trouble is, you’re getting a huge counterproductivity effect because it becomes so complicated to do something. Now, where in the system can one actually make that decision to say, actually, we don’t want to have that type of accounting system, because the effect on the core activity of the organisation is going to be negative? That’s missing.

    DH: Even the possibility of that being a legitimate conversation is missing. But I wonder whether we can look at small, grassroots organisations as spaces within which you don’t have the requirement for the level of measurement and legibility—and, in its absence, certain kinds of human flourishing tend to be more likely to happen than they are in most institutional spaces. Equally, within institutions, you often find pockets within which people seem to be coming alive. If I think of the examples that I’ve experienced, those living corners within larger institutions, what is going on is usually that you have one or two individuals who are smart in a particular way—and they are effectively holding up an umbrella over this human-scale space.

    CB: Hiding it!

    DH: Yes. They are producing the necessary information to feed upwards and outwards into the systems, to keep the systems off people’s backs…

    CB: Strangely, in the business world—where I have half a foot—there’s a whole vast literature about the wonderful energy and passion and creativity that occurs in startups. There’s a slightly smaller literature on what are called ‘skunkworks’, these hidden projects that occur in large organisations that sometimes then emerge as being very important. There are some classic inventions that were invented by somebody working in a big organisation, a little part-time project that they were pursuing out of curiosity, and eventually it becomes their best-seller. Post-It notes is the example that always gets used.

    DH: So what you’re saying is, within the business school world, there’s at least a partial recognition of the need for spaces in which the rules are off people’s backs…?

    CB: But there’s a cognitive dissonance, because then there’s a whole other literature which develops all these systems for tracking and tracing, Taylorizing and managerialising things.

    DH: So, the thing that we’re talking about, when we talk about the kinds of spaces in which people come alive—spaces in which there is room for human flourishing—we’re asserting that one of the characteristics of such a space is that there is less pressure for reality to be reduced to things which can be measured. Things which can’t be measured are allowed to be taken seriously—and, somehow, some individual or group has built an interface to the systems that require measurement, that keeps those systems satisfied, without reducing the activity within the space to activity to satisfy those systems. 

    So, the thing that goes on within those spaces, I think, is very closely related to what Anthony McCann is getting at when he talks about ‘the heart of the commons’. His starting point is Irish traditional music, the field where he started his studies, and he’s talking about what it is that matters to people within the traditional culture and that goes missing from the version of that culture that you find in the archives of the folk song collectors. Those archives are the legible version of the culture, but you won’t find any people there, and you won’t find the thing that matters most, what it feels like to be there. And when Anthony was here a few weeks ago, he was talking about the need to develop language for this thing that matters. And I guess that means developing a sufficient degree of legibility, so that this is not completely invisible, in order to defend it. In order for it not to be crushed. 

    And this is where it gets uneasy, especially when we’re talking about business schools trying to put their finger on this. How do you describe ‘the thing that matters’, how do you word it, is it even possible to do so…

    CB: Without destroying it?

    DH: Yes, exactly. That’s the paradox, isn’t it? What’s the answer?

    CB: Well, if you look at many spiritual traditions, they would say that you can’t word it. And you get this in philosophy, Wittgenstein’s ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ 

    So what could function in the formal world? Again, I’m thinking back to the business literature, where there’s a contrast in this fascination with top managers. There’s this obsession: what gift do top managers have that makes an organisation really work? And they really talk about it as some kind of magical property. ‘We don’t really know what it is, but if we can find somebody who’s got it then we’re going to pay him a lot of money!’ All kinds of people try and describe it, one way and another, but there is a language there about—whoa, this is something that we can’t really measure, but we know it exists.

    DH: Maybe it would be interesting to start looking for the different examples from different places where we do seem to have some common vocabulary left for talking about things that can’t be reduced to that which is measurable. I say that, because I listen to you and I realise that this is what you’re doing, with your half a foot in the business world—you’re spotting the places within the literature of a rather unlikely field where there is language for talking about this. And I’ve come across a completely other example in the ideas that I’ve been working with around commons and resources. 

    To summarise the problem, first: a resource is something that can be measured, something that is seen in the way that those German princes were looking at a forest. There is a very dominant idea, when people talk about commons—whether they’re talking about the ‘information commons’, the environmental commons, or whatever—that what we’re talking about is a pool of common resources. Again, this is something that Anthony McCann has directed attention towards. We are so used to thinking of things in terms of resources—our organisations have Human Resource departments—but a resource is something to be exploited. And there are very few areas of modern existence where we have a good vocabulary for talking about the idea that some things just shouldn’t be exploited. But one place where we have it is friendship. Because when somebody who you thought of as a friend treats you as a resource, you say, ‘I feel used.’ And everyone knows what you mean. It’s an everyday expression, you don’t have to get into a long explanation of why everything shouldn’t be treated as a resource. We still have that as common knowledge.

    So I’m getting this idea that there might be a project to document, to gather together, the unlikely mixture of pockets where there is still shared vocabulary for talking about the importance of the part that can’t be measured.

    CB: I think that good organisations are aware of this. They are aware of the community that is built within the organisation and the dependence of the organisation on non-contractual relationships, on collaboration, on the ability of people to do favours for each other at a friendship level, even though it’s in a workplace.

    DH: This is what David Graeber calls the ‘everyday communism’ which subsidises the world. The whole world system that we’re in, which might look like this globalised, capitalist, neoliberal system, would grind to a halt without the everyday communism of people doing things for each other without asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’

    CB: So good organisations recognise this. The thing is, because it’s not measured, because it’s not worded, it’s often difficult to defend. It can be very simple things, like cancelling Christmas parties. Good managers know that the best way to get their team to work is to take them out, get them all drunk and next time they meet have the problems will be solved! 

    DH: That sounds like a rather culturally-specific approach to management…

    CB: There are certainly variations on the theme! But the basic concept applies. And that’s really creating a space for illegible activity, illegible conversations, which then can break down barriers, can break down categories and solve problems. But that needs to be defended, because it’s very easy for the Christmas party or the social space to be the first luxury that gets cut.

    Where these things work, it’s very often, as you say, those particular people who create an umbrella, who create a protected space. So perhaps there is an opportunity there to try and teach people who are in positions of leadership that there is a particular aspect which has to do with creating these special spaces. Developing a language for that can make them work much better as organisations.

    DH: There is a difficulty here—and I suppose one way into talking about it might be through a lovely story that I came across. I met a guy who had been the managing director of a company with about 200 people working for him. The company was taken over and the nature of the takeover was such that this company was going to be wound down, none of these people were going to work for the new company, but everyone continues to be employed for the next year until the process is complete, with relatively little to do. And he thought, what are we going to do, for the next year? And, in particular, so that these people are in the best position possible to go off and find new work or do whatever it is they do next. And he decided that they would just get out on the table everything that people were interested in, the things that they did, the things that they had never told anybody at work about, that were really important to them in their lives—and just get everyone’s skills and talents and ideas out there, and see what would happen as they started matching things up together. And he said it was the most amazing year of his career—and I could see it, in the way he talked about it.

    So, here’s the problem: things can become amazing when we can bring more of ourselves into the workplace, the school, whatever space it is that we spend most of our waking hours. But… the shadow side of this is that, you’ve talked about Taylorist management and we think of Henry Ford and the production line, that whole model of 20thcentury capitalism, but there is this whole other thing of the post-Fordist, post-industrial economy, where we are absolutely expected to bring more of ourselves to work, because it’s not just our bodies but our emotions that our employers want to use as resources.

    Once upon a time, I used to work as a corporate spy. Well, really I was a struggling freelance radio journalist, taking bits and pieces of other work to pay the bills, and every few weeks I used to get paid to go and sit in Starbucks, drink a coffee, make various observations, then buy a takeout coffee and run round the corner to weigh it and take its temperature, and fill out a twelve-page form that went back to Starbucks headquarters to tell them how their staff in this local branch were doing. The bit that sticks in my mind was that, not only did I have to stand in the Starbucks queue with a stopwatch in my pocket, timing the process and remembering whether the staff were following the different stages of the script—I also had to report whether, over and above the script, I had observed staff recognising and acknowledging regular customers and initiating spontaneous conversations. So Starbucks was essentially trying to write the computer program for how you simulate, systematically, the friendly local cafe, only with precariously employed staff who have no real connection to the place they are working and are at the mercy of this mystery shopper who is sent once a month to check up on them.

    At the same time, I was living around the corner from an independent cafe run by a couple of old hippies who were seriously grumpy. You went in there for the first time and you’d get a good cup of coffee, but they would be surly with you. If you kept coming back, though, they would begin to acknowledge your existence and you would begin to notice that they had their regulars who got to sit at the table at the back and play chess with them and decide what music went on the stereo and smoke a joint together when it was quiet in the afternoon. 

    And I realised that the one thing that Starbucks couldn’t attempt to simulate was customer unfriendliness—and that there was something about this customer unfriendliness that felt right. If we think in terms of thresholds, again, maybe it’s kind of OK to use money to pay for a good cup of coffee, but if I’m paying for someone to act like they’re my friend, we’ve crossed one of those lines?

    But this is the thing: we want to create spaces in which we can bring more of ourselves to what we do, in which we can be more than just getting through the day, trying to avoid drawing any unwanted attention and trying to satisfy the requirements of the system that we’re plugged into—yes, we want to be doing something more meaningful with our lives, bringing more of ourselves into the situation. But if we try to make legible ‘the stuff that matters’, the stuff that would bring more of ourselves into the situation, how do we do it without it becoming another resource to be harnessed, allowing the extension of exploitation even further?

    CB: I don’t know. I think that’s a real danger and I think, equally, in creating the vocabulary that we might develop, we are in danger of formalising it. And even if our terms are very vague and abstract, somebody will say, ‘Ah, here I have a collection of categories and I will construct a form or an application that will then be used to describe that.’ Just like your Starbucks example: is the barrista behaving like he is happy?

    DH: Yes, they create the model and then they try to run the model in a way that is as convincing a simulation as possible, whilst extracting as much…

    CB: The aspect of this creation of models that we haven’t really addressed, but is intimately related here, is that we create the models and then we believe the models and don’t believe reality. We see this everywhere around us. The classic phrase is ‘All models are wrong, but some models are useful.’ Models don’t represent reality perfectly: a perfect representation of reality would be a cloned copy. Necessarily, they are abstraction and simplification, in order to be useful. The trouble is, we create a model, typically today on a computer screen, and then what we see in front of us on the screen becomes ‘reality’. 

    My favourite example is a parcel I sent in Britain by Special Delivery, guaranteed to arrive the next day. It didn’t arrive. I rang the Post Office the following day and said, ‘My parcel didn’t arrive.’ The Post Office employee said, ‘Yes it did, it says so on my computer.’ And at that moment, the friend to whom I had sent it rang me on my mobile and said, ‘The postman is just coming and giving me your parcel now!’ I told this to the Post Office employee on the other line and she said, ‘No, that’s not possible, it was delivered yesterday.’

    DH: So that’s the most absurd version of believing the model, rather than the evidence of our experience. But your point is that this is a pattern.

    CB: It’s systematic and it’s very dangerous, because you get a completely warped view of reality, very often. Reality changes, human beings change, and if your model doesn’t change appropriately, you fall into all kinds of pits. Governments collect the wrong data, or miss some major social change that is completely outside their perception at every level. Equally, in organisations, you have this problem. So, as part of the development of this language that we’re talking about, we also need to develop a language for making people aware of the limitations of the model. Making people aware that the model is useful within these limits, but there may be more, and to have a look outside the window occasionally to see what else there is.

    DH: So, this brings us back to the idea of treating the vagueness and imprecision of language as a feature rather than a bug. As not a problem that we need to try and get rid of, but actually as something helpful.

    You mentioned Wittgenstein’s line about remaining silent—and the way that different religious traditions have treated the thing that matters most as incapable of being put into words. But religions haven’t exactly remained silent! One thing that does go on within religious language is the deliberate multiplication of language to keep in mind its inadequacy. So you have the hundred names of God, because one way of speaking about the unspeakable is by never forgetting that none of the language that you use is adequate to it. And, in some ways, we need a hundred names for everything! This, again, recalls something that Anthony talks about—lifting up the words and looking underneath—and I think that part of the way that you avoid forgetting to do that is by using a multiple vocabulary. Rather than using one word all of the time, at which point that word quickly comes to be treated as if it’s a perfect match. 

    So perhaps that’s one principle that we could try to use?

    CB: It sounds like a very good starting point. The challenge is making that acceptable, socially. There is a long history in the religious traditions that you’re talking about of the difficulty of language and the difficulty of spiritual concepts—and that this is OK. You know, if you look at the Talmudic traditions of interpretation, it is OK to struggle with concepts, that is a valid task. Whereas the modern tendency is to want to simplify, to take away effort, to take away difficulty all the time. 

    Nearly every Computer Science paper will start off by saying ‘We wish to reduce the effort involved in doing X and here is the method…’ That’s the basic principle by which you do research. We actually need to write new Computer Science papers which start ‘We are now increasing the effort to do X because this will have beneficial effects.’ I have suggested this in the past, under the heading of ‘slow computing’. 

    Based on our discussion during the Västerås Conversations, this text was first published in Dark Mountain: Issue 7.

  • Let’s Get This Party Started!

    I spoke to Claire on Skype last night. She’d just done an interview with Jon Snow on Channel 4 News. It’s strange to be in touch again: until last month, I hadn’t heard from her in 20 years, not since we were kids knocking about in small-town County Durham, back when Major was prime minister and my idea of political engagement was marker-penning the anarchy symbol on the back of my German army jacket. She still has the accent that I mislaid somewhere along the way.

    ‘I just keep asking myself, what if nobody actually turns up? I’m going to look like a right…’

    ‘Don’t be daft! It’s been trending on Twitter every day for a fortnight. You’ve started a bigger fuss than when Billy went on The Voice in his orange tights.’

    That made her laugh, at least, but I couldn’t blame her for feeling nervous. It’s that moment when you’ve organised a party and there’s nothing left to do but wait for the first guest to arrive.

    I check Twitter on my phone as I’m waiting at the bus stop. It’s still early, half six here is half five in the UK, so my feed is mostly Californians, but as I scroll through I see a few early risers. A knowledge management consultant in Surrey just Instagrammed two vacuum flasks and a tartan picnic blanket—hashtag #streetparty—and an artist I used to share a house with in Sheffield has what looks like a stack of old-school deckchairs on a bicycle trailer. Lots of people are RTing a late night blog from Paul Mason: ‘20 reasons why the #streetparty could win tomorrow’. I don’t think Claire needs to worry.

    I said it was 20 years, but that can’t be right. Sometime around 2007 we must have reconnected on Facebook. Still, I don’t remember the last time I’d seen her name in my feed, until the morning after the second debate, when some faceless algorithm decided I would want to read her original #streetparty post. The algorithm got it right, and I wasn’t the only one: by the next morning, more than 300 of us had reposted it. 

    I hadn’t seen the debate, but when I found it on YouTube, I understood why people were reacting. It wasn’t like five years ago, when Clegg had his fifteen minutes of popularity. This was just grim. No one shone under the spotlight, Cameron’s face reddened and Miliband fluffed his lines, and everyone shouted over everyone else. It was a bad-tempered mess.

    ‘I watched them all just now and I thought, my kids are better behaved than this,’ Claire wrote. ‘If it’s down to this lot to run the country, then we’re screwed. I’m not saying we don’t come out to vote, because for those of us who aren’t millionaires like Russell Brand, it makes a difference which of them wins. What I’m saying is, we don’t go home again thinking that’s the job done.

    ‘I see us all having our rants on Facebook about the library closing, people getting their benefits stopped, rich twats who think paying tax is voluntary. But sometimes I think we enjoy getting angry more than we actually want to figure out what’s going on and why, and how things could be different. So I’m saying, let’s vote for whichever of them seems the least worst, but then let’s have our own party—a street party, on election day, outside every polling station.’

    She was running a cafe, two doors down from the record shop where we used to hang out on Saturday afternoons. On May 7th, she was going to shut it for the day. They’d take chairs and tables up to the playground of the junior school that was the local polling station. Free teas and coffees all day. Everyone was invited to sit down and join in a conversation about what we were going to do about the state of the country.

    When I wrote a blog about it, two days after the debate, I still saw Claire’s street party as a cute idea that was happening outside one polling station in the town where I grew up. But I thought it had echoes of other things that had happened since the last time Britain had a general election: the Indignados and the Occupy camps, the beginnings of the Arab Spring, the final summer of the Scottish independence campaign. 

    It was in Scotland that it started to spread, as people set up their own #streetparty events outside their local polling stations. The SNP picked it up and so did the Greens, encouraging their supporters to take part. Miliband was asked about it on a visit to a hospital and his reply was non-committal; then an unnamed backbencher was quoted saying his leader would probably be more comfortable at a #streetparty than leading the Labour party. As more events popped up around England, Cameron did his staying aloof thing, but Theresa May was reported to have asked police chiefs to look into public order concerns and whether these events constituted an attempt to intimidate voters. The next day, Boris Johnson told a crowd of reporters on Uxbridge High Street that he thought a street party sounded like a splendidly British expression of the democratic spirit, although his invitation seemed to have been misdirected in the post.

    I didn’t do much to help—a blog post, a couple of introductions to journalists who would have been contacting her anyway, the rate that it was spreading. I don’t even have a vote these days, since I left the country. But I feel involved and here I am, all day, watching the streams of images coming in, trying to figure out what this thing is that my old friend has started. Does it make a difference to how people will vote? Does it make a difference to what will happen tomorrow, when everyone sees just how weak the connection has become between how many votes a party gets and how many seats it has? And will this mean anything, five years from now, or will we see it as one of those occasional waves of popular madness that pass through a country?

    My phone buzzes, a DM. ‘Have you SEEN how many ppl came to our party???’

    As I’m starting to reply, I suddenly remember another party, one summer more than twenty years ago when my parents left me home alone for a week.

    ‘Hope plenty of them come back tmrw to help you clean up! Watch out for breadsticks under the carpet… :-p’

    This short story appeared in 28 Days, a one-off newspaper published during the 2015 general election campaign.

  • The Shield of Perseus

    ‘Julian and Theo met among a million protesters in a rally by chance.’ The camera glances across a collage of news clippings on the wall of the house in the woods. Among them, an ageing photograph of a sea of placards, the slogan familiar: Not In My Name.

    When Alfonso Cuarón adapted P. D. James’ novel The Children of Men for the screen, he laced the film with these threads of detail that link its grim imagined 2027 back to the world in which it was made. In another scene, Theo is chauffeured through Admiralty Arch into an enclave where a nostalgic England of Horseguards and brass bands is preserved against the chaos. Behind him, Trafalgar Square is filled with people holding placards that read simply, Repent!

    We are halfway between those two demonstrations. So far, human fertility has not collapsed, but in other respects things are not looking great. The warnings from the scientists who study our changing climate get starker every year, yet the only year in which global carbon emissions have fallen since the signing of the Kyoto treaty was 2009, when financial crisis shrank the world economy. It would not be possible to get the countries involved in climate negotiations to sign again today the agreements that they signed in the 1990s: I heard that said, last month, by someone who has been in the negotiating rooms. It is one measure of the depth of the mess in which we find ourselves.

    Those of us who work with words get asked to help and usually what is meant by this is that we should write things that help get the message across. Write a poem, or a play, or a short story that will wake people up to the depth of this mess, that will stir people to action or bring about ‘behaviour change’. The work that results is mostly bad art, because this is not how art works. As the playwright Anders Duus put it to me, ‘Our job is to complicate things.’ Not to be difficult for the sake of it, but to do justice to the strangeness and the messiness of life in a world like this, and to create the kind of space in which stories come alive. This is not helpful, if what you are looking for is a communications tool to get across the message that the world is on fire.

    Meanwhile, how much of the art being made while the world burns will look irrelevant or offensive, a generation from now, given what we already knew about the mess we were in? I remember voicing that question on the evening, seven years ago, when Paul Kingsnorth and I sat down to have the first of the conversations that would lead to us writing the Dark Mountain manifesto. A passage in a novel I had just read seemed to exemplify what I was getting at. The novel was Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Another set of fictional characters are sent among the million protesters who filled London that winter’s day in 2003 to protest the coming war on Iraq. At the centre of the story is Henry Perowne, narrator, neurosurgeon, non-protester. As he drives through the clogged city, psyching himself up for a squash match, his thoughts are on the future:

    If the present dispensation is wiped out now, the future will look back on us as gods… lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias, torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended life-spans, wondrous machines.

    It seemed that neither Perowne nor McEwan himself was attuned to the likelihood that generations to come would look back on us quite differently.

    These are two kinds of failure for writers to try to avoid: on the one hand, scribbling while the world burns, producing work that seems oblivious to the seriousness of our situation, and on the other, writing words that die on the page because a sense of the duty to ‘do something’ is forcing the hand that writes them.

    If our job is to complicate things, we might start instead with whatever seems to be getting taken for granted. Take this urge to get the message across. Is it really the case that the information about climate change hasn’t reached people? Or is it that we struggle to make sense of what this information means, to fit it into the frames we use to make sense of our lives? I sometimes suspect that the climate deniers have a better grasp than many of us of what is at stake: their willingness to twist evidence and turn reason inside out betrays an awareness of what it would cost to admit the alternative, an awareness that seems lacking among those who talk optimistically of the prospects for making the current way of living of the western countries sustainable.

    Art is not an information technology, a tool for delivering messages, but it does have a knack of drawing our attention to the frames by which we have been making sense of our lives, disturbing these frames, bringing them into question, suggesting the possibility of other framings. This kind of activity is not immediately useful, in the way that the work of a communications department is useful, and it does not deliver anything that could be described as a solution. At most, it offers clues, it opens our eyes to paths that might turn out to lead somewhere or might turn out to be dead ends.

    Over five years as an editor for the collections of new writing that Dark Mountain publishes, I read a lot of fiction that tried to tackle climate change as a subject. Love stories set against the background of international negotiations, science fiction futures set among the ruins of civilisation. Almost none of it worked. Instead, the stories that we found ourselves publishing approached this predicament obliquely. I think of the sense of loss that echoes through Nick Hunt’s unsettling tales of encounters with strange creatures. I think of Charlotte Du Cann’s ‘The Seven Coats’, a personal account of a journey through a myth.

    The mythographer Martin Shaw offers an image which has helped me make sense of the difference between these two kinds of story and why the first of them fails. There are horrors, he suggests, that cannot be looked at directly, that will turn us to stone if we try. Such things can be approached only by following the dark reflection in the mirrored shield that Perseus uses to approach Medusa. This is an attitude that fell from intellectual respectability sometime around the 17th century, when such indirect ways of knowing were put away as childish things. The shadows were chased out, first by Enlightenment and then by electrification. We no longer inhabit a world of terrifying forces that exceed our understanding, or so we like to tell ourselves. Surely climate change is a problem that can be fixed with the right combination of technological, financial and policy innovations? As this framing of our situation loses its plausibility, we find ourselves clambering through the attic to dig out those half-forgotten things we put away in the corners of children’s literature or the more unfashionable genres.

    The alternative is a dead language, words that turn to ashes on the tongue. Slogans we repeat because we feel we ought to, because we have to do something, even if parts of us no longer believe what we are saying. Activism can go on in this way, it often does, but this is where art has to revolt. ‘To be a good artist you have to be the person who walks into a space with integrity and tells the truth,’ says the playwright Mark Ravenhill. ‘That’s what marks you out from the audience… you are the most truthful person in that room.’

    This relationship to truth does not allow for tactical calculation. If the Dark Mountain manifesto could be read as a defection from the environmental movement as we knew it, this was because that movement was coming to feel like a church whose priests had lost their faith. At rallies, you heard the same rousing speeches you had heard five years ago, but if you caught the speaker later, in a private moment, they would confess to a pessimism verging on despair. As writers, the duty to truth – not some cold, omniscient, placeless truth, but the messy, paradoxical truth that you meet in medias res – would no longer allow us to be part of this.

    Who needs poetry or plays or manifestoes, when the world is on fire? I have said that art is not useful, in the way that many who are rightly alarmed at the flames would like it to be, and all of this talk about truth is liable to sound foolish. I don’t want to make any strong claims for the role that art can play, but here are a few weak, tentative, questionable ones.

    The insistence on not using any language that rings false – the lifeline on which any writer who is not dead yet depends – may lead us to other ways of talking about the mess in which we find ourselves. I can’t bring myself to write about tackling climate change, or to use a word like ‘sustainability’ in the way I hear it used. What I can say is that there remain actions worth taking, actions that might set things on a less bad course than it looks like they are on. And when I need reminding of this, I can go back and reread John Berger’s essay on Leopardi and arrive again at that final paragraph, where he writes: ‘Something is always in the balance. Reality is always in need. Even of us, damned and marginal as we may be.’

    The insistent probing of language may be inconvenient. It opens up holes which the agreed vocabulary had papered over. It may force us to ask whether climate change is actually the problem, an unfortunate and unforeseeable consequence of human activity which might otherwise roll onwards on its current course, or only the most obviously alarming symptom of something larger, something that needs to be defined in other terms. How far down those holes go is anybody’s guess.

    Art may lead us to other framings of what is at stake. Again, I think of Martin Shaw and his way of talking about this mess that we are in:

    I haven’t a clue whether we humans will live for another 100 or 10,000 years. We can’t be sure. What matters to me is the fact we have fallen out of a very ancient love affair – a kind of dream tangle, with the Earth itself.

    Could you get any further from the grown-up language in which serious discussions of our predicament are meant to take place? And yet, there is something here that demands admittance, a voice that will be heard. Before all this is over, we will have to find a way of talking together about loss and longing and love, again, and it will take the voice of a Martin Shaw, a Jay Griffiths or a Jeanette Winterson to call the deep words out of the private places within us.

    Finally, it may even be that the foolishness of art has a role to play. Meeting activists who are preparing to travel to Paris this November, what strikes me is the contrast to the mood ahead of the Copenhagen meeting, six years ago. Then, everyone seemed to be straining to believe that one more push could do it, so that when the summit ended in disappointment, people were devastated, broken by the result. This year, at least among those I have met, the disappointment seems to be assumed from the start and this gives a different atmosphere to the mobilisation. If there is no longer a rational story about the chain of cause and effect by which our presence will help lead to an agreement, we are participating in something stranger. The risk is that it comes to resemble that flash of the crowd as the limousine passes Trafalgar Square, the placards calling on the world to repent, the classic form of political protest hollowed out into the ritual of a puritanical sect. But this is not the only possibility. Art knows something about the power of seemingly useless acts, of giving voice to desperation, and the strange kind of hope that sometimes arrives when you have given up everything. Such experiences make you no promises.

    The world is on fire. None of us knows for sure where this will end. I would bet on humanity making it through the hard years that are coming, but who can say what shapes human culture will take along the way? Much that we cannot imagine living without has been with us for a handful of generations, often less – the supermarket cornucopias, the wondrous machines – but there are certain elements within our experience that seem to be as old as being human. Making images and telling stories are among them. If things turn out less badly than it often looks as though they are going to turn out, in the time ahead, I suspect that these old parts of ourselves will play some role within that turning.

    Commissioned by the Free Word Centre, London.

  • When Promises of Progress Fail Us

    When I hear the word ‘postmodernism’ outside of a seminar room, it is usually spoken with distaste. It has come to signify a deliberately impenetrable intellectual jargon, cliquish, fashion-conscious, its fashions suspected of coming straight from the Emperor’s New Wardrobe. For many, its chief characteristic is a radical relativism that leaves no ground for the kind of value judgments that make it possible to act for change.

    Whether or not this is fair to the thinkers most closely associated with the term, it is certainly unfortunate for Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash’s recently reissued book Grassroots Postmodernism, first published in the late 1990s. For this is a book that will bemuse those expecting a contribution to the esoteric discourses of the seminar room, yet one that may prove more satisfying to those whom the title might put off.

    The idea that we are living ‘after modernity’ reflects a sense that the future has failed. The origins of academic postmodernism lie in the retreat into the university of activists and thinkers whose hopes for revolution had been disappointed in the events of 1968. Since then, a more general disillusionment has spread through the Western world, beginning in the crises of the 1970s, muddied by the neoliberal boom years, then given new clarity by the systemic crisis that broke out in the autumn of 2008. Opinion polls confirm that the basic assumption of economic progress – that each generation will grow up more prosperous and with greater opportunities than their parents – no longer rings true for most of us. The failure of the promises of modernity is no longer a theoretical matter, but part of the everyday experience of people in Western societies.

    Despite its radical roots, the postmodernism of the seminar room has little to offer to people trying to make sense of their lives in the absence of progress. But another set of voices may be more helpful: the voices of those of the same generation who retreated not to the universities, but to the mountains, the villages and the slums, where their thinking was challenged and deepened by encounters with the stubborn refusal of peasants and Indigenous people to be confined to history. This is the source of the other postmodernism, which Esteva and Prakash seek to articulate, whose echoes can also be caught in the words of John Berger, Subcomandante Marcos, or Vandana Shiva – who has written the introduction to this new edition.

    In both Grassroots Postmodernism and The Future of Development – Esteva’s most recent collaboration – the failure of modernity is exemplified by the failure of the promise of international development, as experienced in countries such as Mexico and India. The unravelling of this promise leads to the questioning of a number of concepts previously held to be beyond criticism. These include the fantasy of ‘thinking globally’, which always in practice means attempting to extend a way of seeing the world with roots in a particular time and place into a framework into which other cultures are required to contort themselves. In the case of international development, the most problematic aspect of this framework is the idea of the atomised individual, possessed of a set of rights. The question of how we can challenge injustice within our own and each other’s cultures without appealing to this kind of individualism is one of the major discussions in Grassroots Postmodernism, while The Future of Development offers advice for those who want to know how to put their idealism into practice.

    Both of these books belong to a larger set of conversations particularly associated with the friends and collaborators of Ivan Illich, and they represent an ongoing improvisation around themes that are recognisable from Illich’s own work. Of particular value is the contribution of Salvatore Babones to The Future of Development, drawing on his background in quantitative social policy to provide a forensic analysis of development statistics.

    The greatest strength of both books is that they avoid the academic trap of treating critique as an end in itself. Rather, they are the work of people engaged at the grassroots, for whom thought and action are inseparable. They deserve to be read widely within the international development sector, but they also contain important clues to finding our own ways beyond the dead ends of modernity in the troubled societies of the post-industrial West.

    Published in Resurgence: Issue 289.

  • The Moment When the White Rabbit Goes Past

    This letter comes to you from a hotel room in Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle. The hotel is called the Arctic Eden. From the window, I can see the mine buildings that crown what’s left of Gironvarri, the mountain the city came here to devour.

    The way I was told it, the Swedes knew there was a mountain full of iron ore, somewhere in this landscape, but the mountain was sacred to the Sami and they had no intention of letting the Swedes find it and tear it apart. Until eventually some prospectors got an old Sami man so drunk that he let out the secret.

    The history section of the website of the company that owns the mine that tore apart the mountain is headlined: ‘Faith in the Future since 1890’.

    In the foyer of the Folkets Hus is a scale model of the city. A red line loops across from the mine, taking in the whole downtown and chunks of the surrounding neighbourhoods. On the underside of the model, a reef of ore slants downwards more than two kilometres into the ground. As they keep following it, digging it out, the city itself will be undermined. The red line marks the zone in danger of subsidence. The answer is to take down the city and rebuild it three kilometres to the east.

    You can take a bus from the current city centre that drives straight into the side of the mountain, the road spiralling down into the mine to a depth of five hundred metres, but that will have to wait for next time, because this time I came here to see a play.

    Jag Kommer Härifrån is a story about what it means to come from a small place, to grow up with the idea that everything exciting in life is waiting for you somewhere else, somewhere bigger and brighter and more open-minded. Watching it, I was back in Darlington, twenty years ago, full of the desire to escape. There’s nothing wrong with that desire, it seems to me now, but there is a problem when it hardens into a claim about the objective superiority of life in the big city, held to be an obvious truth by people old enough to know better. This is the attitude I think of as ‘urban supremacism’ – what Anders Duus, who wrote Jag Kommer Härifrån, calls ‘metronormativity’.

    The train from Stockholm to Kiruna takes seventeen hours. That’s a lot of time for talking – and the other reason I am on this trip is for the luxury of that time together with Anders and my new boss, Måns Lagerlöf, the director of theatre for Riksteatern. I still struggle to get my mouth round words like ‘boss’ and ‘job’, but for the first time in a decade or so, I have both of these things. Since January, I have spent much of my time in an office in a tower block in the concrete surroundings of outer Stockholm, trying to work out what it means that I am now the Artistic and Audience Development Lead for Sweden’s national theatre. If this job had been advertised in the newspaper, it would never have occurred to me to apply, but it came to me by one of those chains of coincidence which I have learned to trust.

    I guess if you grew up in Sweden it probably seems normal to have a national theatre that is also a grassroots movement, a network of over two hundred volunteer-run local associations that own the national organisation and arrange performances in smaller and larger places, up and down the country. To me, this sounds like the start of some extraordinary story: the moment when the White Rabbit goes past, staring at his pocket-watch, muttering to himself, and you know that you have left behind reality as you knew it.

    So, when the laughter and the applause have died away, the staging for Jag Kommer Härifrån is packed and loaded onto the tour bus, ready to head on down the road to the next town on a forty-date tour that stretches the length of the country. And having seen one of our productions out on the road for the first time, the organisation I’m working with just got a little more real to me.

    I’ll be writing more about what I’m actually doing, as these newsletters get going again, and as I get further into the process of figuring it out. I should say that I’m working 70% (as we say in this part of the world) which means I still have 30% of my time available for writing, speaking and other freelance projects. Most importantly, I’ve wound up here because the things I’ve been thinking, writing and speaking about seem to resonate with what they want to do over the next few years, so this is a chance to put some of my ideas into action.

    Jag Kommer Härifrån has fun at the expense of the hipsters of Södermalm, buying their organic groceries at Urban Deli on Nytorget. That bit reminded me of Venkatesh Rao’s essay, ‘The American Cloud’, where he suggests that today’s America consists of a Jeffersonian simulation, an imagined version of small-town life, running on a Hamiltonian platform of mechanised processes the scale of which is uncomfortable to think about. He starts with the example of a Whole Foods store, its pre-distressed wooden fittings connoting authenticity, while behind them is the concrete and steel of which the building is actually made. Steel that came out of a mountain like the one outside my hotel window.

    The deposit of iron ore under Gironvarri is one of the largest and richest ever found. When mining began, there were 1.8bn tonnes of it down there. As part of the project of moving the city, the municipality held an architectural competition. The winning design was called ‘Kiruna 4-ever’. Today, less than half of the original ore remains to be mined. It seems that Kiruna has accepted the need to dismantle and re-mantle itself with little complaint. I imagine that only a city whose existence was this bound up with a single industry could be so accepting. The current rate of extraction of iron ore is over 25m tonnes a year. The new city hall will open next year and by 2021 the beautiful wooden church will have been rebuilt on its new site. The full project of moving the city will be complete sometime in the mid-2030s. By my reckoning, that is about when the ore will run out. I suppose that’s what they mean by faith in the future. Still, ‘4-ever’ seems an ambitious timescale.

    Sent as Issue 5 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter.

  • Who Cares About Democracy?