Remembering Vinny Mosco

Thanks to Catherine McKercher for permission to use this image which seems to me to capture quintessentially Vinny’s extraordinarily well-balanced mixture of human warmth, sharp intelligence, self-deprecating humour and ease with his identity as a renowned scholar with proud working class origins

How the ranks are thinning! On Saturday, I was shocked to hear of the sudden death of another towering figure from the intellectual generation I suppose I am part of: Vincent (‘Vinny’) Mosco. Perhaps best known for his foundational importance in the study of the political economy of communication, his influence is so ubiquitous it is difficult to pinpoint the moment I first became aware of it, though it was most probably in the 1990s. 

My earliest strong recollections are of a conference called Citizens at the Crossroads: Whose Information Society? held at the University of Western Ontario in 1999, which brought together a strange mix of government policy-makers, academics and people we were learning to refer to as representatives of ‘civil society’ from across Canada and elsewhere, memorable for me if no other reason than it was where I first got to know Leslie Regan Shade. As with so many conferences I can remember almost nothing of the formal speeches (except for the nice way that Quebecois presenters who spoke in French presented their powerpoint slides in English, and vice versa). But I do remember deep and interesting conversations with people from a wide range of different backgrounds. One thread that seemed to hold them all together, whether they were interested in feminism, in Marxist theory, in trade union strategy or in government telecommunications policy (and however much they might disagree with each other) was a universal affection and admiration for Vinny Mosco, whose name seemed to surface one way or another in just about every conversation.

Over the next few years it became clear that, almost single-handedly, he had helped birth , either directly, as their PhD supervisor, or indirectly, through his lecturing and writing, a generation of academic researchers who combine serious, often pathbreaking, scholarship with an equally serious commitment to workers and their interests, including, to name but a few, Enda Brophy, Ellen Balka, Andrew Clement, Tanner Mirlees, Nicole Cohen and of course, Leslie Regan Shade. And that’s just in Canada. He has fans across the world, from California to Beijing, where he held a visiting professorship. What is the explanation for this universal respect and gratitude?

Perhaps his understanding of labour, and the ways in which it both shapes and is shaped by technology, can be traced back to his childhood. Vinny was raised in a class-conscious household in a tenement in New York’s Little Italy where (to his enormous pride) a street is now named after his father. Supported by his family, he won entry by competitive examination to one of New York’s top public high schools and from there progressed via Georgetown University in Washington to Harvard, where he had completed his PhD in Sociology by the age of 27. It is clear that he never forgot his roots, while excelling academically and, unusually, managed to integrate these two aspects of his identity in a comfortable way that was highly productive in enabling him always to hold in view the labour that underlies any form of communication, however apparently abstract, and to integrate it into theory. This also, I suspect, gave him a kind of empathy with students, regardless of background, that might explain his huge personal and intellectual generosity to them and, in turn, their loyalty to him.

Vinny was so proud that this street in New York’s Little Italy was named after his father (who was a local community leader and trade unionist) that he used it as his Facebook profile picture.

He was also highly unusual among the leading intellectuals of his generation in being supportive of women scholars and open to integrating a feminist perspective into his political economic theory. Here, perhaps, the influence of his wife, the brilliant journalist and scholar Catherine McKercher (whom he always referred to as ‘the love of my life’) might have played an important part. They were collaborators in work as well as life, co-editing to my knowledge at least two books and many articles in a rare form of mutual enrichment.

When I founded the journal Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation in 2006, Vinny was one of my strongest supporters. Right from the first issue, he contributed articles (sometimes co-authored with Cathy or with a PhD student) and made helpful recommendations. Along with Cathy, he also co-edited a special issue on communications workers and global value chains, which attracted a range of contributions from around the world that was in itself a testimony to the breadth of their influence. And right up to the end of his life he was one the most reliable reviewers, arriving at perspicacious verdicts with lightning speed when others couldn’t agree.

I have another vivid memory of a conference, this time organised by myself, in 2014 where (there being little else in the way of attraction for foreign visitors in Hatfield, where my then employer was based) we had a grand dinner in the banqueting hall of Hatfield House, where Queen Elizabeth 1st was brought up. Having given a rip-roaring keynote speech to open the event, it was Vinny who leapt to his feet to propose an impromptu toast at the end of the meal (it felt like a gust of clear air, as if the New York working class was taking on the Tudor ghosts).

He adored his family – two daughters, a granddaughter and grandson – whose grief, along with Cathy’s, must right now be hard to deal with such is the scale of what they have lost. I hope it will be some consolation to them to know that his legacy will live on. And here I do not just mean his considerable intellectual legacy as the grandfather of the ‘political economy of communication’ and his insistence on recognising the central role of workers in the development and implementation of new technologies but also his kindness and principled personal values which provided a model for future generations of teachers. He will be hugely missed.

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Bangs, whimpers and clashing background noise

‘This is the way the world ends.’, said T.S. Eliot, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’. Watching the news these days it is hard not to think that we are witnessing if not the end of the world at least the end of a particular phase of history, an era of neoliberal globalisation dominated by the United States of America. There is banging and whimpering aplenty but, switching compulsively from The BBC to CNN to Aljazeera to Euronews trying to make sense of what is going on, I hear other noises too. 

There are times when I need some respite from the news channels with their relentless documentation of new waves of awfulness, rising hysteria and competing explanations and rationalisations (jarringly interspersed with ads for trivia) and just about everybody I speak to these days seems to feel the same. In January, in that curious still time when the holidays are over but it feels premature to start chasing people up for answers to questions that were put on hold before Christmas, I could not find anything else I wanted to watch in those down times when TV watching is the least exhausting thing to do, so I revisited a list of programmes I never got round to watching at the time they were first aired and settled, for who knows what unconscious reason, on the West Wing.

First broadcast in September 1999, this must have been produced just at the time of Clinton’s impeachment (at the beginning of that year) and was perhaps intended to sanitise his image and shore up public faith in US democracy. It certainly didn’t prevent Bush being elected in 2000 (albeit by a contentious whisker) but could perhaps have played some role in Obama’s 2008 victory (the series ran until May, 2006, though I must confess I haven’t got much beyond Series 2). 

I was expecting it to be a cynical satire, along the same lines as the BBC’s The Thick of It, first broadcast in 2005, and, so I understood, strongly influenced by it. So I was surprised by the extent to which, notwithstanding its apparently detached up-close observations of the machinations of press officers and political advisers at the centre of government, it is romantic, not to say schmaltzy, in its view of democracy, veneration of the office of the presidency and conviction that America is a force for good in the world. Indeed, much of it could have come straight from the mid 20th century cold war playbook. Take, for example, the tear-jerking episode in which the apparently hard-boiled deputy chief of staff in the White House discovers that a dead homeless person was wearing a purple heart won in the Korean War and breaks the rules to organise a full state funeral with military honours for him, for the benefit of his brother, also a hobo.

I could go on, but I won’t. Three weeks of toggling between the manipulated news from the real White House in 2024 and its fictional representation a quarter of a century ago, have brought to the surface a series of questions that might not otherwise have occurred to me and provided a new lens through which to view the evolving news.

Some of these concern the ideological underpinnings of neoliberalism. There is one episode, for example, in which an exasperated Democrat (who has been asked to debate with a group of protestors – presented as a baying mob – outside the World Trade Centre) expostulates, as if it’s so bleeding obvious you shouldn’t even need to say it, ‘Don’t they understand that it’s free trade that stops wars?’, an episode I happened to watch last week just after the USA and UK announced they were bombing Houthis for attacking container ships in the Red Sea. Hmm.

It is not just the relationship between war and global trade that is problematised. There is also the tricky question of the relationship between politics and the rule of law. The West Wing presents politicians, including the President, as terrified of being legally prosecuted and indicted by grand juries and going to tortuous lengths to establish legal justifications for any decisions that are made, right down to issues such as the withholding of information about their health. (This is still very much a live issue, as was evidenced last week by the outcry caused by the Pentagon’s failure to disclose to the White House that US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin had been given hospital treatment for prostate cancer.) However it is also the case that the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court is an explicitly political choice made by the President. So the President sits simultaneously both under and over the law in a contradiction that might go some way towards explaining some current developments in US politics

Yesterday, CNN reported at length on Donald Trump’s defiant reaction to being fined the extraordinarily large sum of $83.3 Million for defaming E. Jean Carroll in a New York court. He (and his press spokesperson) insisted that this was yet another example of the law being used unconstitutionally to hound an innocent man and that, furthermore, that’s what you would expect in New York because it is a Democrat state. The tone CNN adopted in reporting this followed the standard Democratic Party line, which is also that of the majority of public opinion in Europe and much of the rest of the world (to judge by Euronews and Aljazeera) which is that this represents a failure to respect the rule of law, rendering Trump a dangerous person unfit for public office. 

While broadly in agreement with this view, it does seem to me important to note that Trump may have come by his opinion quite rationally, based on his own experience. As President he appointed no less than three of the nine Supreme Court judges in the USA, so he has first-hand knowledge of their likelihood of being swayed by their personal political opinions in arriving at their decisions. That very lack of objectivity was why he appointed them! Furthermore, he inhabits a world in which, just as electoral victory goes to those with the largest campaign funds, so legal victory goes to those who can afford the most, and most expensive, lawyers. This too is illustrated in the West Wing in an extended plotline about the size of the legal budget of the tobacco lobby. This contradiction is not new, and neither is the public playing out of victim/aggressor dynamics in the portrayal of political leaders, but it is quite possible that the 2024 general election might be the moment that it becomes important enough to tilt US history onto a new path.

There are many other common threads, including the obsessive attention paid to the precise wording of the US Constitution, conferring an almost divine prescience and infallibility onto the Founding Fathers, replacing rational discussion with the kinds of abstruse interpretation more usually found in theology. This is not new either, but might we be entering a new phase where such hair-splitting arguments suddenly start not only to seem ridiculous to the rest of the world but for it to become permissible to express that sense of ridiculousness?

When America was the undisputed leading economic power in the world, it behoved the rest of us to respect its values, or at least pay lip service to them, and to follow its progress and judge its behaviour just as carefully as servants anticipate the changing moods of their masters. Is that hegemony now being shaken? And, if so, how will we even know? The management of the mainstream media by politicians gives us a filtered view but even this filtered view is increasingly contradictory. Meanwhile the cacophony of information (real and manufactured) from other sources is deafening.

Advance or retreat?

I recently discovered that the convent boarding school I attended in Llandudno from 1959 to 1963, run by Irish nuns, has been turned into the ‘Loreto Spirituality Centre‘ offering ‘retreats, conferences and quiet time’. 

A postcard from around 1960, when it was a boarding school, featuring: dining room, library, netball and domestic science facilities. I’m not in any of the pictures but at least one of my contemporaries is.

On their programme for 2024 is a 3-day event entitled The Sea Within – Wellbeing and Sandplay for a Changing Era offering ‘a relaxing and refreshing space to get in touch with your own inner resources and gifts through sandplay, poetry, quiet meditation and stillness, and incorporating Wellbeing practices such as Tai Chi, self-acupressure, and Circle Dance’ 

I am still in touch with several former classmates, bonded by common memories in which the petty cruelties of some of the more sadistic nuns, the disgustingness of the food and the suppression of any expressions of individuality feature large. Although widely scattered geographically, we have been having instant-messenger-enabled fun imagining what the nuns we knew back then would make of all this. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ we imagine Mother Anthony expostulating. She was one of several who repeatedly told us off for ‘daydreaming’ (a term that you might think encompasses just about every activity this retreat is designed to encourage). ’Daydreaming’ was defined broadly, even including redirecting your gaze from the textbook (in which you had already finished all the homework that had been set) to a window to follow the flight of a seagull or wearing an expression that provoked the response ‘And you can take that look off your face’. On one occasion, when I had obviously failed to manage my body language appropriately, she followed this up with ‘God help the man who gets you, Ursula Huws!’

Or Mother Rita, not the sharpest knife in the box, who was assigned roles teaching topics for which she had little aptitude, including art, and often let cats out of bags. I recall a typical interaction which went something like this:

Mother Rita writes a statement on the blackboard with an error in it.

Pupil (rashly) puts up hand.

Mother Rita: ‘Well, Noticebox, what is it now?’

Pupil starts to point out said error. Observing the look of fury dawning on Mother Rita’s face she backs down, ‘Well I just thought….’ and tails off.

Mother Rita: ‘You thought, you thought? You’re not hear to think young lady, You’re here to learn obedience and be a good Catholic wife and mother’.

As for playing in the sand and dancing in circles, Well, whatever next! It is true that the convent was right next to the sea and we were all required to do a brisk walk every morning ‘around the lake’ (the ‘lake’ being a shallow paddling pool on the West Shore Promenade) but there was certainly no play: we had to stay in tight formation, walking in pairs in a crocodile topped and tailed by a nun. No breaking of ranks and certainly no relaxing! Idleness was as dangerous a crime as daydreaming or thinking.

Even Mother Mary of the Rosary, the runaway favourite in most of our shared memories, discouraged too much independent contemplation. When I confided that I’d like to study philosophy at university she advised strongly against it on the grounds that it would lead me to ‘lose the faith’.

(Here it is only fair to note that many of these nuns had probably been pushed into joining the order in their teens under who knows what pressures and may merely have been echoing familial views they had grown up with. I learned the backstory of one novice, through a family connection. Her parents, converts from Judaism, were determined to ‘give a child to God’ and the lot fell on her after her older brothers, one by one, had all dropped out of seminaries)

So does this conversion to a retreat represent a complete turnaround? On the face of it, yes. But, as one of my fellow-survivors shrewdly pointed out, you could equally well look at it as the continuation of the same old strategy of making money by giving the paying public what they want, leveraging the order’s religious values for whatever they are worth. Back in the mid-20th century, convents were able to exploit middle class parents’ desire to outsource the difficult parts of childcare by persuading them that the children would be instilled with good Christian values, including obedience to authority and the ability to focus on deferred gratification, and moulded to the prevailing societal political and social norms. 

What the nuns promised these mostly conservative parents was a balance that was well-nigh impossible even then and was shortly to become completely so. On the one hand, their daughters would be equipped with the manners and attributes that would enable them to ensnare a husband while, on the other, they would be able to preserve their purity – a major challenge given the oft-emphasised assertion of how impossible it was for men to resist their urges if they were overly provoked. Girls thus had a double responsibility – to charm, but not tempt! (and, by implication, they were also to blame if either strategy failed – whether they were dumped for being insufficiently seductive or raped for being overly so).

This US best-seller may have been the model for the book (right) which might be the one we were each given at school. But a quick google search threw up many alternatives.

‘Charm’ was a very popular concept in 1962. Also published that year, inter alia, were ‘A secretary’s guide to beauty, charm and poise’ and ‘The co-ed book of charm and beauty’

In pursuit of these contradictory goals, we were each presented in 1962 with a copy of a ‘book of charm’ (see picture) but were also forbidden to wear patent leather shoes in case lustful boys might be aroused by seeing a reflection of our knickers in them. And told that it was a mortal sin to use menstrual tampons. Meanwhile we were warned regularly from the pulpit of the dangers of communism (the convent had its own chapel and resident chaplain).

Now in the 21st century, you might think that all of these values have been overturned. But there seems to be one constant. Those wily nuns are still generating an income from pandering to the dominant values of conservative middle-class consumers – still monetising their holiness. After several decades of public exposure of a range of horrors (including the Magdalene nurseries in Ireland, snatching of babies from single mothers, separation of indigenous children from their parents, forced child migration, sexual abuse) it is no longer possible to present the catholic church as occupying any kind of moral high ground, but ‘spirituality’ has found a new social role. Along with ‘mindfulness’, ‘meditation’, ‘positivity’ and ”personal growth’ it has become an essential tool in the battle for ‘wellbeing’ in the crisis of ‘mental health’ which is currently regarded as one of the greatest ill of our times.

Unhappiness, these days, it seems, is no longer understood as the consequence of personal misfortune (such as a debilitating illness or a bereavement or social ills (such as poverty or homelessness) or, heaven forbid, the result of an unpleasant working environment (with long working hours, monotonous processes, impossible-to-meet targets or precariousness). It is not, in other words, something whose causes we should be trying to address. No, it is seen as something which it is essentially our own responsibility to cope with – and our own fault if we fail to do so. If we cannot manage to handle these contradictions on our own (just as parents in the 1950s could not handle the contradictions of bringing up teenagers in an increasingly consumerist society) then solutions must be provided in the market.

If you are poor, this might be via an app on your phone or a standardised course of therapy supplied by your employer, the NHS or a project designed to get you back to work (increasingly likely to be provided via an online platform in which you are matched by AI with a precariously-employed therapist, in a process described by Elizabeth Cotton as ‘the uberisation of therapy’ or ‘therapeutic Tinder‘). If you are better off, then you can afford to combine it with something like a weekend retreat – a holiday break with creature comforts in pleasant surroundings in which you can be reassured that no rebellious thoughts are likely to interrupt the process of massaging your soul back into alignment with contemporary capitalism. 

It is therefore perhaps not surprising – though nevertheless depressing – that this new accommodation of suffering individuals to the status quo should be taking place within those same walls in Llandudno that saw so much human misery when I was young. But you have to hand it to those nuns – despite their discouragement of our youthful inventiveness, they are nothing if not entrepreneurial when it comes to their own commercial future.

Saying goodbye to 2023

It feels almost obscene to wish you a Merry Christmas this year. The biblical references to what was going on in Palestine two millennia ago and their parallels with what is happening now are beyond irony: pregnant women desperately seeking shelter, massacres of innocents, flights into Egypt….I guess the best we can wish for is peace. And some respite. And new starts for new generations. And a reminder of the symbolic importance of light, and candles, in the theologies and seasonal festivals of all the world’s major religions – signifying not only divine truth, wisdom and understanding and the victory of good over evil, but also hope.

So the best I can offer you this year by way of a greetings card is this image, taken in the grey early light this morning, of a begonia in my garden obstinately refusing to succumb to frost and continuing to flower in London in December as if it’s still summer.

Being, as some of you may know, (somewhat irrationally), a believer in José Ortega y Gasset’s theory of generational change, I started this year convinced that it would be one of major upheaval, drawing on the insights of this Spanish philosopher who, back in the 1920s, and with what now seems to have been extraordinary prescience, gave precise historical form to this change which, he argued, followed a 15-year cycle. Let me give you a summary, starting from the beginning of the 20th century, of the turning points he identified and some of the things they ushered in:

1903 (Edwardian ‘gilded age’ , suffragettes, births of my parents…)

1918 (end of World War I and Ottoman Empire…)

1933 (Hitler, Franco, Japanese invasion of China…)

1948 (post-war welfare states, Keynesianism, Cold War, my own generation’s birth…)

1963 (‘permissive society’, civil rights movements…)

1978 (Thatcher, Reagan, neoliberalism, my daughter’s birth…)

1993  (globalisation, the Internet…)

2008 (financial crisis, austerity, platform economy…)

As the next in this series, 2023 seemed bound to be eventful. According to the theory, each of these turning points leads to fundamental changes in fashion, art and culture as well as the economy and represents the moment when a new generation takes charge, usually in conflict with the immediately preceding generation but often in an uneasy alliance with the one before. Its characteristic feature is unexpectedness. 

I first came across this idea in the depressing 1980s and spent the next decade optimistically looking forward to 1993. Alas, it did not bring a return to the swinging 60s but opened up a new post-Cold War era of globalisation, precarious employment and the spread of digitalisation, whose prosperity was brought to a crushing halt in the great financial crisis of 2007-8. In the aftermath of this crisis, the generation born after 1978 (now in or approaching menopause) who have been busy trying to oust the post-1963 generation from their entrenched positions of power (with the support of a few baby-boomer survivors from the post-1948 generation) are starting to be challenged by those born after 1993, now in their 20s and (to the extent that their fragile mental health permits) beginning to flex their muscles.

It is early to pronounce judgement on 2023, but so far the verdict looks pretty grim: wars, climate-change-related natural disasters and a surging flood of ill-informed hatred and bigotry. Yet we must cling to whatever crumbs of optimism the cliches can offer us: it is darkest before the dawn, every cloud has a silver lining, hope springs eternal. 

Happy nadir, folks, and best wishes for a hope-filled 2024!

Holy shit

The tragic death of Sinead O’Connor is a reminder of the continuing legacy of Catholicism in so many lives: a legacy that is highly contradictory. On the one hand there is the powerful attraction – necessity even – of spirituality, combined with an idealism that breeds an atruistic pursuit of personal perfection. On the other, the deep awareness of hypocrisy, based on concrete – though often unspoken – personal experiences of abuse and tyranny. It is difficult, in these knowing times, to use the word ‘innocence’ but these contradictions have often been played out inside a culture in which scientific knowledge of the real world is kept at bay.

When doubt is a sin, questioning the faith is not allowed and this is inextricably entangled with a prohibition on challenging authority. Yet (at least in the convent schools of my childhood) little girls are also fed stories of virgin martyrs, exhibiting enormous bravery in standing up for their sense of rightness. So some kinds of courage (including suicidal courage) are rewarded with everlasting glory while others are savagely punished. You want to be good and unselfish and caring, but are also denied autonomy and told to stay silent. And then there is the beauty (of the music, especially, but also often of the architecture) and the safety of belonging to a community that allows you to abandon independent thinking in the knowledge that there is a socially sanctioned right answer to any question. Not to mention the joy of singing together.

I had got thus far in writing this blog yesterday morning when I was interrupted by a visit from an engineer who had come to do some maintenance work on my house – someone I had met before and taken a liking to. By coincidence, someone of Irish origin from, now I come to think of it, more or less the same generation as Sinead O’Connor, though brought up in 1970s London rather than Dublin.

There had been a recent death in his family and we talked about grief, and mourning and wakes, and how differently these were handled in different cultures. And soon we were swapping tales of funerals and Catholic priests. And then we got onto the hypocrisy and the politics. In my case, how the Irish nuns at my convent school in the 1950s ranted against communism; in his, the way the Irish priests in the 1980s preached against the miners strike, and how his father (a member of the SWP, though still a practicing catholic) had stormed out of the church, slamming the door as loudly as he could, followed by quite a few other members of the congregation. And the betrayals of the confidentiality of the confession. And the racism.

And then we got onto tales about the sexual abuse of children, so common and so covered up, and people whose lives had been ruined by it. And then we talked about how long it took, despite this widespread knowledge, for people in Ireland to express it. Sinead O’Connor must be credited with being one of the first, brave voices, to do so, too soon to be able to garner much public support (although she undoubtedly inspired a generation of young feminists). As far as I can tell, it wasn’t till the mid-90s, that there seemed to be a sudden and generalised moment (which I think of as the ‘Father Ted moment’) when the majority of the population found itself able to burst out laughing at the emperor’s lack of clothes.

But however progressive modern Ireland now is, there must still be so many people bearing the wounds of that contradictory legacy. Sinead O’Connor left us not only a record of the pain but also the spiritual beauty that is so entangled with that tortured history. Listen, for example, to her singing the Kyrie Eleison, in the same spirit as a Hindu devotional chant (but with the real world and its conflict present in the background) or the aching simplicity of her Scarlet Ribbons.

May she rest in peace. I have never understood why so many people on the left refuse to use this phrase, preferring ‘rest in power’. I find the idea of power as a sought-after eternal state deeply disturbing. It is of course revolutionary to want to overturn the oppressive power of the regime that is holding us back and, indeed, to substitute for it some kind of peoples’ power. But surely power, implying as it does a social relationship between people who are not equal, is a dialectical thing, part of an ongoing struggle in this, the real world. When we depart this real world, I am sure I am not alone in thinking that what we want, more than anything, is an escape from this conflictual world into a true state of rest and harmony: peace. There is a lovely Welsh hymn (O Fryniau Caersalem), often sung at funerals, that speaks of reaching the hills of Salem at the end of life’s journey, from which we can gain an overview of the twists and turns of our lives, and (in my translation) ‘with our minds filled with sweetness, we can look calmly at the storms and the fears and the terrors of death and the grave. Safe now from their reach, to swim in love and peace’. So yes, may she swim in love and peace for all eternity.

Joy truncated

After their surgery – the poor pollarded plane trees shaking their mutilated fists helplessly at the spring sky

Yesterday I began a blog post and stopped almost immediately. One word, ‘disappointment’ suddenly felt like enough. Saying more risked being sucked, like water down a drain, into a spiral of self-pity.

I am usually, or so I like to think, fairly good at keeping depression at bay. I often find myself in conversations with people getting over difficult experiences in which clichés about this are exchanged. We speak of not taking things too personally, not letting things get to you, seeing the other person’s point of view, keeping a sense of proportion, recognising that holding grudges hurts only you, the gratification that can be gained from forgiveness, and the importance of living each day to the full (not to mention those outdated virtues from our childhood of taking it on the chin, keeping a stiff upper lip, soldiering on, remembering we’ll be rewarded in heaven or trusting in karma).

In the last week I have realised how much pleasure in my immediate environment has contributed to this daily renewal of positivity. The sofa on which I sit when taking a break from my desk has a view onto the back garden where, this spring, my bird feeder had a constant stream of visitors. The robin, with a new mate, two pairs of goldfinches, a wren and several great tits took it in turns to feed and my new placing of the feeder meant that the pigeons and squirrels, who were a bit of a nuisance last year, were discouraged from even trying, contenting themselves with what fell to the ground below. It was thrilling to have such a variety of bird life in such a central part of London. And, now in its second year, my gardening was starting to bear fruit. The second clematis montana rubens I had planted (the first having failed) had made it up the shady fence to find the sun and was covered in buds. I followed its progress every day, looking forward to the moment in late April when it would burst into a froth of pink flowers.

All this came to an abrupt end last tuesday when Camden Council sent round a team of tree surgeons to pollard the plane trees that surround my home. There was no warning, just the angry whine of electric saws and the grinding of shredding machines. Branches came hurtling down, including several into my back garden. Worrying for the clematis and thinking that the tree surgeon had moved on to the next tree, I went out to investigate, only to be hit on the head by another branch, coming from a different angle. The workman who had caused this was badly rattled. He expressed this not by any exhibition of concern for whether I was hurt but by absolute fury that I had been stupid enough to go out of doors. I suppose they worry about being sued.

Neither he nor the colleague who I eventually persuaded to come and clear away the branches could grasp that it was the plants I was worried about. With good reason. All the parts of the clematis with leaves and buds have now gone and I doubt if it will survive at all, and several other things have been damaged, including a pomegranate that lost its one and only fruit.

But, even more tragically, the bird feeder is now entirely unvisited. Not even the faithful robin has been seen since the great pollarding.

And of course this is not something about which it is possible or useful to complain. Many of my neighbours have been clamouring for the trees to be cut back for ages. The leaves clog up gutters in the autumn, causing leaks, and, in the summer, shed pollen and other detritus that means the windows need frequent cleaning. Balances have to be struck. And it is, after all, imperative to be reasonable.

But, nevertheless, a disappointment.

On having been made redundant

I guess you could call it a disappointment.

Dis-appointment. Geddit? Oh well, never mind.

Beep, beep. Don’t obstruct progress: co-produce it.

Not long ago I had a conversation with someone who had been in a coma for several months. He finally came to after hearing a discussion at his bedside about whether or not to switch off his life support, a conversation that penetrated his consciousness deeply enough to jolt him back to wakefulness. I asked him what he remembered of being in the coma. He said he had felt the presence of close friends, including a former lover who was dead, and was aware of other conversations. He had felt quite happy, believing himself to be in a beautiful garden, populated by singing birds. After returned to full consciousness he realised that the sounds his brain had interpreted as birdsong were in fact the beepings of the medical instruments that surrounded him. This left him none the wiser about whether or not there had been a ‘near death experience’. After all, it is common to dream about former friends and lovers, and for our dreams, porous as they are, to be invaded by external sounds, in my own case by stray items of news from BBC Radio 4 that weave themselves into the plotlines.

The ubiquity of beeps is now an essential feature of the 21st soundscape, not just in hospitals. In my kitchen, for example, it might be telling me that the fridge door has been left open, that something has finished cooking, that a droplet of water has strayed onto my neurasthenic electric hob, that the dishwasher has finished its cycle or that a new communication has been received on my phone. On the street it might indicate a reversing vehicle or a pedestrian light about to change or (if the window has been left open) that someone in a passing car has failed to fasten their seatbelt. Beeps provoke anxiety, sometimes leading to a condition of prolonged distress, especially if the cause can’t be identified or (as is often the case in hospitals) if one is helpless to address it. For some workers this stress must be chronic. Most of us do not have the luxury, if such it can be called, of sufficient passivity to allow our brains to transmute these sounds into something relaxing and beautiful. Beeps are designed to alert. They demand obedience.

It would be rational to presume that any irritation they cause is more than outweighed by their benefits in keeping us safe. But there is another way of looking at beeps: as part of the mutually shaping process by which people learn to adapt to technology, just as technology (through the use of machine learning) is taught to adapt to us.

As appliances become more complex there is an increasing need for them to be installed and managed (often via procedures that are so lengthy that many of us never bother to complete them, leaving the default settings intact and never using the vast array of different programmes that are in principle available to us on our smart tvs or fancy ovens). A beep may form a crucial part of the signalling system that tells you whether you have done so correctly. With the spread of speech recognition and touch-sensitive devices it is of course only one of many different kinds of interfaces, its role often little more than to say ‘mission accomplished’ or ‘watch out!’ while you grapple with some of the others.

These interfaces are often quite clumsy. In order to use them you have to learn how to enunciate words in such a way that they will be understood by Alexa or Siri or the bot your bank might use to route you to the right bit of the contact centre. You have to learn how hard to press the touch-screen and for how long before it allows you to buy your ticket or check out your groceries or access an app on your ipad, or how lightly to swipe to communicate with your potential lover or get rid of an unwanted ad. As with other new languages, two-year-olds can learn these things more easily than their grandparents (which becomes very scary when you think of what kinds of images can be inadvertently accessed from a smartphone or tablet).

We are in effect being trained to respond to machines, unable to access their use values until we have learned the correct way to interact with them, devoting our time and patience to this learning in a laborious process of trial and error. This is one side of a story, the other side of which concerns the ways that the machines are taught to respond to and anticipate human behaviour in ever-more sophisticated ways. To a considerable degree this converse process is also achieved by the investment of human effort. It might be through the labour of a dispersed global army of clickworkers, paid by the task. Or by our own unpaid labour, as we select which, from a grid of images, is the one containing a traffic light or a tree, to prove we are ‘not a robot’ in order to access some digital service. It might also be gleaned, without our knowledge, by harvesting and analysing the data captured from the tracking of our physical movements or online activities. In this mutual learning and adaptation, the boundary between our selves and the technology becomes ever more blurred. On the one hand, we seem to become technology’s servants, reducing our communications to those that it can accommodate and unthinkingly coerced into following its directions. On the other, it feels increasingly like a prosthetic extension of ourselves, enabling us to do things our childhood selves could hardly have dreamed of. Simultaneously constraining and holding out a promise of liberation.

I have just finished correcting the proofs of the latest issue of Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, which I edit. It is on a theme that provides interesting insights into this process of sociotechnical mutual adaptation. The guest editors (Manuel Nicklich and Sabine Pfieffer) are based in Germany and the key concept they use is that of Verselbständigung. Well-known to German-speaking readers from its use by Marx, Weber and Adorno, among other theorists, this concept is little known or understood by English language audiences, not least because it has been translated in multiple ways depending on its use in different contexts, and few non-German speaking authors seem to have grasped its importance. Using the term ‘self-perpetuation’ to convey its meaning in English, the contributors make a compelling case for its usefulness for grasping the ways in which (like other aspects of capitalism) artificial intelligence and algorithmic management take on a life of their own, setting in motion dynamics that exaggerate pre-existing trends and take them forward in ways that develop their own momentum (but also open up new contradictions). Like a runaway truck. Beep beep. Out of my way! Or else….

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The mass production of mess

In the early 2000s, just as the awareness of the health dangers of sugar, fat, refined flour and artificial food colouring became widespread, what was suddenly the most fashionable food to serve? the cupcake!

The history of popular taste is full of such contradictions. Perhaps a Jungian would regard this as a shadow surfacing from the unconscious like a dark bristle through peachy skin. Or it could be seen as a rebellion by entitled youth against parental values, although in this case this luminescent sugary protest was from a generation that also embraced veganism, yoga, mashed avocado on toast and eco-friendly cleaning products.

Of course, such trends are quickly picked up by capitalists. In the 1860s, reactions to the industrial development of mass-market commodities gave birth to the arts and crafts movement, but it didn’t take long for copycats to move in, inspiring a new wave of mass-production but this time of affordable objects that copied the look of their expensive hand-crafted models in what is retrospectively described as the Art Nouveau style.

I first became aware of the scale of the commercial reappropriation of the hipster aesthetic when I was booked into this room (in a four star hotel chain) in Brussels in 2016. I wondered how much extra my hosts had had to pay to give me a chance to graze my elbows on those recently-exposed bare bricks whose dust might even, so I speculated at the time, have contained genuine 19th century bacteria. Poor cleaners!
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Similar contradictions between the aesthetics of mass production and those of originality are being played out now. One of the places this is particularly visible is in hotel chains, struggling to compete in their bedrooms with Airbnbs and their dining areas with hipster restaurants. Rebranding themselves as ’boutique’ they seem to be aiming simultaneously both for predictable levels of luxury and comfort and for uniquely-crafted individuality, in the process failing spectacularly to hit either target.

Just as the mass-produced functionality of mid-20th century architecture and design regains popularity as a ‘retro’ style, which is faked all over again by cheap furniture stores, its original artefacts are simultaneously reappropriated, in their more tasteful forms as ‘vintage’ and in their less tasteful ones as ‘kitsch’, with varying degrees of artful knowingness.

A couple of weeks ago I stayed in a (very expensive) hotel in Paris, illustrated below, that exhibited this contradiction in a particularly crass way.

It’ s so much cooler to hang your clothes on exposed pipework than in a wardrobe, isn’t it? However non-functional the pipes and however much trouble they are to dust for the African chambermaid (who has to leave her name daily in the room so she can be individually penalised in case of a bad customer review). And that slogan on the ceiling seems to be another version, for the transient, of those three-dimensional words that interior designers use to decorate show apartments, wishfully proclaiming ‘LOVE’ or ‘REST’ in the bedroom and ‘EAT’ in the kitchen, to avoid confusion about what these rooms might be used for.

Mass-produced kitsch in the shower. The 1950s-style image seemed carefully selected for its LGBT+ friendliness, ‘L’Amour’ being the main theme of the hotel’s self-presentation

The appropriation of what are seen as hipsters’ aesthetic values is accompanied by an equal appropriation of their perceived politics. This nod to feminism sits awkwardly alongside a less-than empowering attitude to the female cleaning workforce. The dining area (in which uncomfortable bar-height tables and chairs have replaced more traditional ones and most surfaces are littered with collections of would-be kitsch objects and randomly chosen pieces of defunct 20th century technology) seems designed, like so much else, to make cleaning as difficult as possible.

A couple of years ago, I had a not dissimilar experience in Toronto where I have, for several decades, stayed in the same hotel, a Holiday Inn on Bloor Street, originally chosen (by my academic hosts) because it was one of the few in the city that were unionised. Over the years I got to know the friendly staff well, and enjoyed its predictable late-20th century comforts: blandly decorated rooms; wide-lipped baths with efficient plumbing and the Ivory soap whose smell somehow conjured up childhood memories, despite the fact that my childhood was spent in a country where Pears and Imperial Leather were the two standard soap brands to be found in middle-class homes. I can only imagine that its North American equivalent, Ivory, must have arrived in some of the parcels that came from my aunt Jacky across the Atlantic in the days of post-war scarcity. When I returned in 2021, it was to discover that it had repackaged itself as a ’boutique hotel’. The staff were still the same, as was the rather awful restaurant which still doubled up as a sports bar open to non-residents, but everything had been restyled, with new fake 20th century armchairs replacing genuine ones. And of course the prices had gone up. In a different kind of (perhaps uniquely Canadian?) compromise, there did not seem to be anything that was genuinely old but, on the plus side, from the point of view of the staff, the pastiche furniture seemed to comply with modern health and safety standards and looked easy to clean.

Hotels are only one example, of course. As functionalism becomes a ‘style’ like any other, defunct machinery an amusing prop and just about anything more than ten years old a vehicle for ‘upcycling’, the struggle to stay ahead of the taste game becomes ever more stressful. Now that ‘distressed’ furniture and pre-frayed jeans are routinely mass-produced and available on Amazon, and every high street offers somewhere that serves cold drinks in jam jars and warm ones in mismatched tea cups, how can originality be expressed? I gave up back in 2009 when an estate agent described my house as ‘shabby chic’. The random collection of furniture, some inherited, some acquired from junk shops, some donated by friends and some bought as cheaply as possible from MFI or Ikea was, it seemed, a recognisable ‘style’. I had of course arranged it in a visually conscious way, as a painter might assemble objects for a still life painting, but this was something different. The act of labelling it robbed it of any innocence it might have had as a look and somehow dated it. Not to mention making it feel snobbish. Since then I have, perhaps naively, accepted visual standards that would formerly have made me shudder.. My new front door, for example, chosen by my builder in a fatal miscomprehension of what I thought had been a clearly stated brief, is pretty hideous (though similar, I am sure, to many thousands in recently renovated properties around the country) but I now contemplate it, smugly, with the thought that anybody who judges me by the aesthetics of my choice in front doors is too shallow to be worth much as a friend. No doubt my parents, with their 1930s bohemian tastes, would be spinning in their graves. But then they did not have to live through the latest, 21st century, wave of recommodification.

When life gives you lemons…

Wishing you all the lemonade you need in 2023.

Happy holidays!

This resilient lemon tree survived the move from Dalston and has been thriving in sub-zero temperatures in my new front garden in St Pancras.