More Lanier
You, you, you, have the affirmative responsibility to invent and demonstrate new ways to live without the crap that is destroying society. Quitting is the only way, for now, to learn what can replace our grand mistake.
I recently read Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier.
It’s a brilliant book and not your typical “abandon social media” tirade. It’s filled with unique insight from someone who really understands Silicon Valley and is in fact still a part of it.
I like how he has not abandoned the Internet entirely and instead urges the social media giants to reform their dark and creepy business plans, encouraging us to delete our accounts at least until it’s fixed.
Check it out if you want to. In the meantime, the quotations in this post are the ones I marked in my copy of the book. They make wider Escapological points beyond discussion of the Internet.
This:
What if listening to an inner voice or heeding a passion for ethics or beauty were to lead to more important work in the long term, even if it measured as less successful in the moment? What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing.
and this:
Your character is the most important thing about you. Don’t let it degrade.
and this:
You must solve problems on the basis of evidence you gather on your own, instead of by paying attention to group perception. You take on the qualities of a scientist or an artist. When you’re in a pack, social status and intrigues become more immediate than the larger reality. You become more like an operator, a politician, or a slave.
Without Work, Who Do We Become?
If work were no longer what it used to be, how we would cope? Who would we even be?
Mark Kingwell is a long-serving thinker in the fields of work and leisure. You’ve probably read some of his work already. Among other things, he wrote the introductory essays to Josh Glenn’s Idler’s and Wage Slave’s Glossaries. He’s also a UoT colleague of Joseph Heath whom we interviewed in New Escapologist Issue 9 (we also interviewed Josh in Issue 7).
This quick column of his is over six months old now because I sat on it for too long. Sorry about that. It contains many nice nuggets:
More than two millennia ago, Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, argued a fundamental point: The essence of human life is not work. Work lies in the realm of necessity, not philosophy. Leisure time, understood as the contemplation of the divine, is the true aim of life.
Another Escapee
Hello Robert,
I just wanted to say a huge thank you. I read your book and took the back catalogue of your magazine away on my Summer Holidays last year. Fast forward ten months and this week is my last in my [civil service] job. I handed my resignation in and have found part-time work with a friend in street food catering.
I am happier, more carefree and have a smile back on my face.And this wouldn’t have happened without your writing.
Thank you for the inspiration to make the great escape.
Kind Regards
C
An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 55. Operation Breadhead
I’ve been working harder than usual to make money. It’s a year-long project of uncharacteristic money-grubbing. I call it Operation Breadhead and we’re three months in.
I have a big pie-chart, which I look at every day to see how far I am from making the money I need. Cash earned so far displays in the pie as green (my favourite colour) and it advances against the red (my least favourite colour) in a genuine attempt at motivating myself (to replace red with green). Instead of red, I thought about using a picture of Theresa May’s office-manager face, which I could gradually cover with pleasant rain-forest green, but I couldn’t work out how to do that in Google Sheets.
This is all to do with the visa again, I’m afraid, and the associated minimum income requirement. We satisfied it last time through horrible, horrible employment [place werewolf howling sound effect here], but this time we have chosen to resist such catastrophic disruption to our lives and to do it through part-time employment (on my wife’s part) and self-employment (on mine). Tactical!
For my part, this has meant writing, writing, writing. And managing that writing enterprise in a way that I have never bothered about before. Honestly, I even have an accountant now. I’m dabbling with overseas editions and things like that too.
It’s actually been a lot of fun. Being creative and resourceful instead of submitting to a tedious day job is Escapology in a nutshell. And where the project is not “fun” per se, it has at least been instructive and interesting. I’ve had to stretch myself and increase my usual annual income by about 20% but, let’s face it, that’s something I should do anyway.
It’s also rather exciting to know that once it’s done, it’s done forever this time. At the end of this financial year, we’ll have everything we need for “indefinite leave” on the visa front, and my wife and I can be together with minimum threat of being separated or forced to leave my own country.
Anyway, we’re three months into Operation Breadhead and all goes well. In fact, I hit 50% of my target after the first two months, which was a considerable confidence boost and a welcome relief of pressure, but this large chunk relied on shaking some old piggy banks — calling in my book royalties and the likes — rather than creating new work.
I’ve also been running around, writing bits and bobs for magazines, though this has been for comparably small amounts of money and involves an inordinate amount of chasing people up to actually get paid. I don’t know why they’re like this: I doubt they’re so evasive about paying, say, their electric bill, so why give the writers a hard time when they’re arguably an even more important ingredient in conjuring up a magazine? Has there ever been a strike? Surely, we’re essential?
It has proven less difficult to extract money from less-creative writing projects. Copywriting and the likes. This is because the money for such work seems to come from marketing budgets, which are generally taken more seriously. You know, because marketing.
In particular, I’ve been doing some copywriting for English universities whose marketing budgets are clearly through the roof. This is fairly dull, though the people are nice. One fellow for whom I’m writing is a kindly Canadian who grew up two streets over from where my in-laws now live in Montreal. He’s a lovely fellow with a passion for his academic subject, though he rarely seems to remember who I am when I call. This sort of thing always bewilders me: even if you can’t remember my name, why isn’t this pre-arranged phone call in your diary? Why are you expecting the call? Still, at least this sort of scatterbrain nature doesn’t seem to be in service of “forgetting” to pay me.
As a consistent side project that will take far longer than the Breadhead period to complete, I’ve been editing and transcribing sections of a friend’s life-long travel journal. He is kind to pay me for this as I used to read his writing purely for pleasure. The total work is (genuinely) three times longer than War and Peace and its not finished yet. He’s going to be the Samuel Pepys of end-of-the-century travel writing one day. He has, quite simply, been everywhere. Literally everywhere you can think of.
Elsewhere for this omni-caper, I directed a one-person comedy show, helped to design a library (not sure if that qualifies as literary work but it was at least pleasant and studious and was no struggle to get paid), and edited part of a book about ’80s indie music.
Aaaaanyway. I just wanted to let you know what’s happening at the moment in this life on the lam. I’m treating the visa situation as just another escape: escape from a pesky situation using tactics and a little bit of elbow-grease, this time (largely) on my own terms.
I know this all looks rather busy and manic but the fact remains that I really do only put in about four hours a day before kicking back with a book (I’m currently reading the diaries of David Sedaris and a funny old book about “microbes”) or hitting the pub or the cinema.
Don’t worry, gang. The next Escapology-focused book is in the works too. It is written and is in the hands of my agent. More on this when I have it.
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The point of this here long-running Escapologist’s Diary series, by the way, is to chronicle the life of an Escapologist, to help answer the question of “what would I do if I didn’t have a job?” in almost sarcastic detail. You can now do this in even more granular detail (what joy!) over here. Leave a comment to help me feel less like I’m spaffing away into the abyss.
Ye Olde Internette. Or How to Escape Web 2.0.
[dropcap]I’m[/dropcap] turning back the clock on the Web. I want to experience the Web as I did some twenty years ago, and I invite you, madam, to join me.
Usually, turning the clock back on the way we live is only ever intended to be a partial operation. Think of Medievalism: those who advocate living according to the ways of Merry Olde England clearly believe in the virtues of localism and “husbandry,” but they don’t usually mean we should forgo adequate dentistry.
Such backtracking projects at least offer an ideal to hold in the mind. So while there is doubtless some dentistry-like improvement I will continue to use, my rolling back of the Web really does aim to be as close to total as possible. I want to go back to Web 1.0. I want to go home.
The most obvious first step in this time-travelling campaign is to ditch social media. I’ve salted the earth on 75% of my social media, and I invite you to do the same.
You can do it straight away.
It’s easy.
Before even needing to get into Jaron Lanier’s advanced arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now” (each of which is perfectly illuminating), I’m simply bored by social media. Aren’t you? I’ve lost interest in “liking” and being “liked.” Moreover, the idea held by many (most?) that social media is a somehow necessary evil, that “I don’t like it but you have to be connected these days,” isn’t really true. Does it not ring a little hollow to you? Do you have to be on social media? Really?
I crave proper engagement again: the lengthy blogs, chats, threads and emails we’d exchange circa 2000 were far more interesting and creative than anything mediated by Twitter or Facebook.
The Internet of yore provided a sense of connection–genuine connection to other minds–which is what social media claims to do but doesn’t. Back then, ideas and insight prevailed and the sense of defying borders (geographical, psychological, social) was palpable.
At its best, thanks to nuanced personal essays on blogs and email groups, the old Web often felt like prophylactically journeying into another universe, or like Spock going into V’Ger.
I remember astonishing an American in a chatroom simply by being British. He couldn’t believe it. “A Brit,” he typed, “I. Am. Talking. To. A. Brit.” It was beautiful.
Web 2.0–that is, the Web now dominated by social media–is by contrast deeply ugly. Aesthetically as well as culturally. The old Web could be ugly too, but there was an instructive, home-made beauty to that ugliness rather than the totalitarian, corporate ugliness of Facebook today.
We know who benefits from our being on social media and they’re bastards. They sell our data to dark and creepy clients to get rich, siphoning off our power to maximise theirs. It’s vampiric. As a Web designer friend puts it, “how evil would Facebook need to be for people to stop using it?”
It’s already pretty darn evil! We already know that “advertising” is a euphemism for behaviour modification now. We know that it plays a part in swinging the global balance of power in favour of evil.
So let’s stop using it, eh? Let’s withdraw our support individually and together, switching off the lights one by one until it all goes dark and we can see the stars again.
The means by which we access the Web can be turned back too. I’d like to use a smartphone less and return to the days of sitting down to “go on the Internet.” This is hopelessly old-hat, I know, but that’s the point. I’m going cyber-Amish.
By sitting to “go on the Internet,” I might still be wasting my eyesight by gawping into the often-moronic universe of the Internet but at least it becomes a conscious act when approached this way, instead of absent-minded or automatic or, usually, while struggling to concentrate on something else. Something like a book.
David Cain’s recent experiment to “make [his] iPhone a tool instead of a toy” inspired me to follow suit. His description of phone use is uncanny. I’ve only had a phone for two years (as opposed to most people’s ten) and I can already feel the spiritual draw to damn thing and the urge to thumb away at nothing in particular.
That has got to stop! So I joined David in his experiment. I immediately removed the “fun” (Twitter and Instagram) from my iPhone to made it appropriately boring. It now feels far more like the “Swiss army knife of modern life” it’s often hailed as now that I’ve put paid to the creep of social media apps.
But what will we do with the Internet once we’ve absented ourselves from social media and turned back the clock on which gizmo we use to access the Web? How can we rediscover the transcendence of connecting with others online and, y’know, skive off from doing any work?
The answer is to go back.
The world of Web 1.0. is still there, like your childhood toys, a little dusty perhaps but waiting in hope for your return.
The Internet is not the problem. It’s just an infrastructure like the sewers or the pavement. It just happens to have fallen into the hands of dickheads, psychos and bullies. (Imagine if those other examples of infrastructure fell into their hands: sewers would be free to use so long as you agreed via a checkbox to having your stool analysed and the results sold off to advertising agencies or political campaigns; pavements would likewise we free to use but would be lined by garish billboards in favour of White Supremacy.)
So let’s go back to the idea that the Web is a place to play and create and build and communicate–on our own platforms, draped with the standards and liveries that make up our own hand-crafted contexts–as it was before the trolls took over and made billions of dollars from our clicks and our conversations and our negative behaviour.
So far as I’m concerned, websites, mailing lists, forums, and blogs are the new old thing. Web 1.0 deserves a vinyl-style comeback.
Operating on this new/old programme, I read other independent websites and blogs (using an RSS reader!) more now, and I post at a forum and subscribe to great mailing lists. An Australian journalist called McKinley Valentine has a newsletter, the Whippet, which is a lovely example and is filled with interesting science stories and her “unsolicited advice” agony column.
Taking cue from McKinley, I hope to make my own mailing list a more fun thing in which to participate, with a newsletter going out every couple of months with some book chat and whatnot. Join this!
The energy I used to put into social media has been re-channeled into my independently-designed and hosted blog. I focus at the moment on shorter, more frequent posts while I overcome the need to tweet.
Stop by if you want to, have a read, leave a note for me.
Nobody, so far as I know, will gobble up your data or monitor your eye movements at sites like mine. I’ve even started building a new “skin” for my site in the true fashion of HTML sites of yesteryear. It may or may not sing.
And no, of course, life isn’t all online. Ideally, very little of it would be online. We can still read actual books. We can read them outdoors even. We can “connect” with people face-to-face and in the pink.
But if we’re going to use the Web as it was originally intended, we can “go on the Internet” like we used to instead of idly thumbing through social media on our pocket infinity machines at great, great cost.
Yes, I am going back to Web 1.0: rejoining the world of blogs, forums and newsletters: longer-form, nuanced, hand-crafted writing instead of memes and likes and lols. You can too.
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The picture at the top of this post is cropped from the poster of Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, a 2016 documentary by Werner Herzog with a brilliant opening chapter about the earliest days of the Internet.
Green Escapology Anyone?
Worried about the planet dying? I bloody am.
Happily, Escapologists who vowed a long time ago to work less (if at all) are at least on the right side of things. We’ve intuitively known for a long time that work and consumption are responsible for global warming and plastic soup and all the rest of it. I mean it’s obvious really, isn’t it?
So let’s tell the others: work less, save the planet.
A good piece by Andre Spicer in today’s Guardian puts it thus:
By working less, we produce fewer goods and services that require precious resources to make. We also consume less in the process of getting our job done. Less work means less carbon-intensive commuting, less energy-sucking office space, and less time on power-hungry computer systems. In addition, working less would help to break down the work-spend cycle.
It’s encouraging that people are slowly starting to wake up to this and to take [in]action. There have been studies to investigate the correlation between work and carbon footprint, as reported in Spicer’s piece:
According to a cluster of recent studies, working less is good for the environment.
One analysis found that if we spent 10% less time working, our carbon footprint would be reduced by 14.6%. If we cut the hours we work by 25% – or a day and a quarter each week – our carbon footprint would decline by 36.6%.
Another study found that if people in the US (who work notoriously long hours) worked similar hours to Europeans (who work much less), then they would consume about 20% less energy.
A more recent analysis of US states found a strong positive relationship between the number of hours people worked and their carbon emissions. The more they worked, the more they polluted.
Working a four-day week, rather than, say, taking more holidays or working fewer hours each day, was a great way of reducing your environmental impact. The exact magnitude of that reduction is unclear, but the research seems to point in the same direction: lowering the number of hours we work would help to reduce our impact on the environment.
Actual studies exist now to provide a research basis for what we could call Green Escapology.
Then again, when you remember that “work expends energy” is pretty much the basis of Physics, one wonders how much more science is needed for the message to be taken seriously.
“My resignation was quickly written out but not so easily accepted.”
I’ve been reading a book called Oasis of the North (1958) about Dawn MacLeod who leaves her mundane public-sector job in London to help her aunt tend to her gardens in the remotest Highlands of Scotland. The gardens are Inverewe Garden, a quirky botanical garden with diverse plant life thanks to an unusual sub-Tropical climate supported by the Gulf Steam. It is now part of the National Trust.
I’m not recommending the book here (though it’s perfectly nice) or hankering to tell you about the gardens, but I wanted to share with you the opening lines of the book, which are about her escape from comfortable mediocrity.
She receives a letter from her aunt, apropos of nothing, calling her to adventure:
A little later in the book, she starts to think about practicalities — only after escaping! The desire to leave was stronger than figuring out the details.
She takes a little audit, realises that she’ll survive in a frugal sort of way, and then realises with “a jolt” that she had forgotten about her National Insurance (healthcare and pension) contributions, a process normally taken care of by an employer (or, today, the PAYE system). Familiar!
Nice eh?
Spoiler alert: she gets along just fine.
Letter to the Editor: a major flaw in your argument
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Dear Robert,
I like your writing. I came across your column about “the Hot New Thing” in the Idler which prompted me to get your books Escape Everything! and A Loose Egg, while also subscribing to your newsletter.
I’m only 10% in to your Escape book, which is hilarious and I literally laugh out loud when reading it on the tube (a good reason to have a long commute), however I have come across a major flaw in your argument, which if you forgive me I would like to relay to you.
If we all became idlers and escapees, who would do the absolutely essential jobs that no one wants to do, like street cleaning, rubbish collecting, sewage clearing, etc.?
Surely the economic system we live under has facilitated wage slavery for this very reason – someone has to do the dirty work. The only way to reserve some people for pawn-like functions while others enjoy their kingly status is to set up an unequal, hierarchical system that keeps the poor out of pocket so that their only choice is to collect your black bin liner once a week.
I get that your writing is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, silly, and quite often ridiculous, but unfortunately it doesn’t come across as economically viable. I hope one of your later chapters will rectify this though.
Have a good day and I look forward to reading more of your witty passages.
D., a fan
Hi D. Thanks so much for buying my books. I can just about live on the strength of my book sales but I’m still in a position where every book counts, so I hugely appreciate it. Thank you. I’m glad you like the Idler column too – more of those to come!
I think I come some way to answering your question later in the book (the epilogue is literally and directly about “what if everyone was an escapologist?” – I think that might even be the title), though I appreciate that I may not have handled it fully and that the shortcoming you have detected probably remains a valid criticism of the book. Hold tight though and finish the book to see what you think. In brief:
– The sort of jobs I really take aim at are “bullshit jobs,” i.e. white collar, boring jobs that either make no difference to world or actively harm it. Toilet cleaning and the likes can be said to be “shit jobs” but hardly useless, so they don’t really attract my ire. David Graeber makes this important distinction in his brand new Bullshit Jobs book, which actually serves as a nice (if belated) preface to Escape Everything! and the sort of thing Tom writes about in the Idler.
– The “who would sweep the streets and do other sorts of dirty work” question is, I’m afraid, very common. There are ideas about automating it in various ways (not necessarily in high-tech ways but in upstreaming the problem, etc.), but you’re right that the work has to be done for now. It should also be better paid than it is, which is something social activists are working on (here in Scotland they’re doing quite well too – the living wage campaign is quite a success and should continue this way). If my writing enterprise should fail, incidentally, my plan is to become a street sweeper. I’m serious! I refuse go back to shovelling bullshit in an office. My wife has already quit her own bullshit job to become a funeral arranger.
– The idea of things being “economically viable” (i.e. making sure the economy stays strong) is a problem. I hold that the economy is a tool to make life better and more effective for us humans. It serves us, we do not serve it. So it doesn’t matter if growth decelerates a little. It might even be a good thing when overwork and environmental problems are taken into account. Might even be the moment all those anticapitalists have been agitating for. I think I probably do a better job of handling this sort of discussion in my NEXT book. It’s tentatively titled The Good Life for Wage Slaves: How to live beautifully as a white-collar drudge.
Sincere thanks again for buying my nonsense and also for writing to me. Lovely, lovely. All the best.
Sitting, staring and thinking
Friend Drew sends some pages from his copy of The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson, a two-volume book I’ve occasionally drooled over but is quite expensive. He wanted to show me the Houdini cartoon (above) but also the work-related commentary that comes with it.
Larson unpacks a question often asked of him: how long does it take you to draw a cartoon?
It’s a bit like the usual “what do you do?” icebreaker but it probably happens during the struggle to accept the sublime answer of “I’m a cartoonist!” (Incidentally, I recommend you give this answer too, even if you happen to be something more in line with the times.)
Anyway, how long does it take you to draw a cartoon?
I’ve suspected an ulterior motive from some people who ask me this question. I think they want to check to see if I’m really working. In other words, is cartooning a real job? If that’s the hidden question, the answer is easy — no, it’s not a real job.
But I’m working on an additional theory: that this kind of question is an outgrowth of American culture. We just seem to want to quantify everything.
How long did it take for me to draw an average cartoon? I can’t compute that with any real certainty. First of all, I enjoyed what I did. And when you enjoy something, time is a disconnect.
There’s also a critical part of the equation which has nothing to do with the physical execution of the cartoon, and that’s the time invested in just sitting, staring and thinking. And it’s difficult to know if you’re not, in truth, just doing the first two.
There’s more to Larson’s point than these exportable nuggets but it’s too long to reproduce here.
I think Drew also sent me this commentary because it provides an insight into the brainwaves of a fellow obsessive-compulsive humorist:
If [Houdini’s skull is] too gruesome it doesn’t work. If it’s too corny it doesn’t work. [It] has to simultaneously capture silliness and scariness, horror and hilarity, sadness and stupidity. For me this meant draw, erase, draw, erase, draw, erase … for hours. I couldn’t get it, although I think in the end I got sort of close. (I now see that the head should have been tilted forward just a little, dammit.)
Ah, shit, I’ve got to buy this book haven’t I? Someone do me a favour and buy a couple of PDF bundles from the shop, quick!
