The End of the Workplace Necktie
From Dickon Edwards’ diary from 2005:
Wednesday 22nd June – a historic date for some. The head of the UK Civil Service announces the wearing of ties as no longer mandatory for male employees. As long as they’re still smart, office boys and men alike can now wear their shirts open-necked as they oil the cogs of government. Must be a relief for those suffering under the current heatwave in offices built before the invention of air conditioning.
It may just be the Civil Service, but I suspect the trickle-down effect for the world of work will be ineluctable. When a similar guideline was made with bowler hats in the past, the trademark headwear of the English businessman soon disappeared from the streets and onto the naughty head of Ms Minnelli in Cabaret.
Fascinating! That was just a few months before my first escape from office work.
When I went back to office work in 2017, I didn’t like the “open collar” lack of formality (so it did indeed trickle down as Dickon expected, though at the time I saw it as Silicon Valley trend-setting). It was as if The Company had sidled up to me, straddled a chair backwards, and said “hi buddy, let’s rap.”
We’re not friends, The Company, and we never will be. Our neckties were there to put distance between us. Well, that’s how I felt until they were taken away.
So I continued to wear a beautiful tie to work most days, despite all of the justified ridicule. It worked too. It said “I am here formally.” It was a Big Fuck Off to the lot of it.
Dickon continues:
I personally welcome this news. Soon, when a man is seen in public wearing a tie, he will no longer be accused of having come straight from work. Tie-wearers will at last be deliberate tie-wearers. All ties will be nice ties, not ugly arrows of drudgery.
Nice.
And a final detail:
This apparently follows an industrial tribunal where a man claimed the forcing of ties upon male workers but not their female colleagues was tantamount to sexual discrimination. He won. The times are indeed a-slightly-changing.
It occurs to me there might be more pinpointable moments like this in the history of work: the day they invented modular office furniture, for example, or the very first building to have air conditioning and flourescent lighting instead of windows. I’ll try not to get carried away.
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Cubed
At the newspaper I worked for in the early 2000s, I remember a moment of great excitement when we moved into new premises. It was the dawning of a new age. Instead of the usual dreary desk arrangement, with time wasted in long conferences and senior executives sequestered in status-enhancing glass boxes, a revolutionary new newsroom would channel the dynamic work-flows of the 24-hour digital future. There was excited talk of “vertical silos” and a lot of nodding.
This is from a 2014 book review of the aforementioned Cubed: A Secret History of the Office by Nikil Saval.
Saval notes, “in news stories the word ‘cubicle’ rarely appeared in dignified solitude; instead it was prefaced with some inevitable epithet: ‘windowless’ or ‘dreary’, ‘cubicle warrens’, ‘bull pens’ or ‘infernos’. People laboured in ‘cube farms’ and were stuck next to each other in six-by‑six standard sets known as six-packs. Douglas Coupland’s epoch-defining book, Generation X, coined the phrase ‘veal-fattening pen’.”
and
Saval persuasively argues that, from the rise of the clerking classes in the 19th century and early 20th century onwards, a key ideological feature of white-collar work has been that the worker is individualistic and self-directed; believing he (the exception for she, unfortunately, needs little rehearsal) might be a clerk now, but with patience and application there’s nothing to stop him one day sitting where the boss sits. That idea, much more often than not, has turned out to be pure vapour: you fall asleep dreaming the American Dream and you wake up as Dilbert.
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Issue 17 has sold out! But never fear, it’s still available in digital formats singly or bundled. There’s also a few copies of Issue 16 — perhaps our best work to date — still gettable in print.
The Suck-Suck Man
I’ve enjoyed Mr. Biffo’s comedy for years. Sometimes it takes the form of unhinged Tim and Eric-style sketches. Other times, it’s grounded in video game reviews and a teletext aesthetic. He’s funny!
Lately, he’s turned his attention to social issues, reporting on them with good humour but relatively straight. This video explains UBI in a very funny and accessible way.
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What Do We Want? More Time for Golf! When Do We Want it? After My 12:30 With Steve!
This is from Maclean’s:
The big question is: what will we do with all that extra time? Some will use it on family-oriented activities, like caring for elderly relatives or spending more quality time with their kids (not to mention saving on childcare costs). Others might return to a lapsed hobby or develop a skill they never thought they’d get a chance to learn. For example, foreseeing a huge increase in leisure time, Steven Cohen, an American venture capitalist and the owner of the New York Mets, has reportedly invested heavily in golf. The ultimate goal is working to live—not the other way around.
The reduction of working hours is a classic demand of labour movements, so it’s good (as with UBI sometimes) to see the four-day week being discussed favourably by the conservative press. It shows that the Overton window is shifting in favour of less work and more leisure.
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A Swiss Picnic
This is an interview I gave to a Swiss newspaper when Das Gute Leben (the German-language version of The Good Life for Wage Slaves) came out in 2020. They wanted to talk about what the Swiss call “home office” (i.e. working from home) in the then-pressing context of the pandemic. I don’t know how much of this made it into the newspaper, but I recently chanced upon the full transcript.
Many studies and surveys (before Corona) come to the conclusion, that working from home is not as great as people think. Why do you think that is?
The most cited disadvantage to home office is that there are too many distractions at home and not enough motivation to work. But when you stop to think about it, there are far more distractions at the office. At home, you need some self-control to switch the TV off and you need to resist the temptation to play PlayStation, but the fact remains that you can turn those things off. At the office, you can’t turn off other people’s noisy gadgets or the antics of an office joker or an overbearing manager.
It’s just a question of learning to deploy self-control for your own benefit instead of someone else’s. If you’ve got the self-control to set an alarm clock for 6am and to trudge to the train station and reach the office on time, you clearly have enough power within yourself to to work independently. And even if you occasionally do give in to the temptation to watch Netflix when you should be working, at least you’re slacking off in a fun way! Research shows that people spend vast swathes of time in the office pretending to work anyway. It’s called “presenteeism” and it’s a far darker and more depressing situation than trying to resist a 2pm nap, which actually might improve your life and your productivity anyway.
I understand it’s tricky for people with children to work at home under lockdown, but under normal circumstances, the children will be at school or in day care. The lockdown home office situation is a bit more tense than regular home office.
Read the rest of this entry »
Choice and Control
From a decent article about Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the Observer today:
The only basic income pilot currently running in the UK is a Welsh government scheme for 600 young care leavers. Each is receiving £1,600 a month (£1,280 after tax), for 18 months, so that researchers can evaluate the scheme’s benefits. An interim report suggests recipients feel “a greater sense of choice and control over the future”.
Well yeah.
Having to scrounge and toil for the essentials of life is neither necessary or right. If society were better organised, none of the suffering inherent to the jobs system would exist. Instead, we’d have, as the article suggests, “choice and control.”
Choice and control! Natural gifts snatched from us by an unjust and increasingly rampant capitalism.
Give us the basics, oh leaders of the world, so we can once again have our choice and control. You are powerful and you are capable of granting us this meagre request. Give us the basics we require to live with dignity — by which I mean the ability to spend our days how we like — and we’ll never speak ill of your ugly orange asses again.
Or to put it more eloquently, Dr. Neil Howard at University of Bath says:
I think we need to be calling for basic income on the basis of a sense of shared morality, because economic insecurity is grim. It’s empirically damaging and it’s based on historical injustices that are translated into present inequalities. So there’s a very strong case for redistributive basic income right now, irrespective of whether or not the machines are coming.
Currently, we do not work because we love it; we work because we have to. This would change under UBI. Unwanted, unfair, badly-paid jobs would practically vanish overnight.
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On Fences and Scarecrows
I was thinking about low-tech automation this morning.
My walk to the Post Office sometimes takes me past a school. There’s a big fence around the playground but I can hear the kids running around like hellions inside.
I had a reflexive curmudgeonly thought that it’s a shame we can’t see the kids playing because there are baddies in the world who spoil it for everyone but of course the kids need to be protected, etc.
When I was that age (in the 1980s) we didn’t have tall fences around the playground and we’d regularly talk and be cheeky to passersby. There were playground supervisors to make sure we weren’t too cheeky and that we weren’t kidnapped.
The fence, it strikes me today, is a form of low-tech automation. A fence around a school playground removes the need for (or at least reduces the workload of) so many supervisors.
We generally think of digital technology when we talk about automation, about how so-called AI is dispensing with the need for copywriters or how robotic appendages reduce the need for assembly line laborers. But a fence is a sort of automation too.
So is a scarecrow. AI’s just another name for a turnip on top of an old duffel coat really. It keeps the crows off so you don’t have to.
I’m not entirely sure what to do with this thought. Seen one way it says “don’t sweat, automation has been going on for years” but you could also use it to say “AI is just the latest threat in an ongoing war against wages.”
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Personally, I’m still in favour of using automation to get rid of the sort of mindless jobs that corrode the soul, but I recognise the problem of how we can all pay for our lives when there’s no more entry-level work. The longterm solutions seem to be either UBI (in which we’re paid for leisure) or bullshit jobs (in which we’re paid to waste our life). The latter destroys life and gives birth to Escapology. The effects of the former remain to be seen, but subsidising the basics sounds like a badge of civilisation to me.
Another option nobody’s talking about is that we just set up a whole new economy separate to the old one. Start again basically. When people talk about books being “written by” AI, I sometimes think “great, how about making some bots that will read the shitty things as well.” While AI’s talking to AI and while buying and selling just happens between AI systems, maybe we can all just get on with real things. Like writing and reading and talking to each other and feeling the sun our faces.
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Bullshit Jobs Cheat Sheet
I like this website. It’s an angry single-page summary of the Bullshit Jobs economic scenario in which our global society is ensnared. Or, as its author puts it, “a crude attempt of helping people to understand humanity’s #1 issue.”
And the Number One issue it surely is. Yet so few people describe it as such or talk about it so directly. Our economy should work to push money around to the places it’s needed, but instead we’re hollowing out the Earth and enslaving billions of people (often literally) to generate vast batteries of pointless wealth for tiny coterie of bastards.
We are 30+ years past said peak labor efficiency but continue to maintain the obsolete work-for-income paradigm. With fatal implications and consequences.
Instead of finally decoupling income from labor and distributing the wealth generated by our actual economy, we maintained this narrative of “never-enough-jobs”. [This has led to] to billions of purely systemic and/or redundant, non-contributing bullshit jobs.
The site quotes Thomas Jefferson, our forever boyfriend David Graeber, Margrit Kennedy, and Alan Watts. (I’ve never read Alan Watts. I think I prefer E. F. Schumacher when it comes to hippie economics but Watts’ name comes up a lot and he’s a goodie for all I know. The cheat sheet describes him as an early advocate of socially-responsible automation and UBI).
Most powerfully of all, the site reminds us that all of this pointless toil, as well as ruining lives and promoting staggering injustice, is destroying the planet. “To save the world,” it quotes Graeber as saying, “we’re going to have to stop working.” Graeber was right.
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An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 74. Existenzminimum
I just got back from a happy few days in Paris. I met Friend Landis who was over from Chicago for a book tour, swanned around at the AsiaNow art fair, listened to live jazz (and got hit on) at Harry’s Bar, and visited the Louvre for the first time.
What I mean to talk about today however is the hostel. I stayed in a proper hostel dorm for the first time in perhaps 20 years. I loved it and I’m going to do it again in Holland and Luxembourg next month.
Seemingly, Paris hostels have privacy curtains on their bunks, which really changes everything. The bad thing about hostels as everyone either knows or can imagine is the feeling of overexposure; that strangers might be looming over you as you sleep. But the simple addition of a curtain makes a hostel every bit as good as a Japanese capsule hotel. You can still hear people moving around in the room at night, but I found it oddly comforting; you can tell from their soft movements, careful not to cause a fuss, that they’re just sleepy travellers the same as you.
For about £30 (instead of the £100+ you’d need for a hotel room in a city like Paris) you get the privacy of your bunk (in which there’s a reading lamp, a socket for charging your phone, and some little shelves for anything else you like to have nearby in the night), a locker in which you can stash your bag for the duration of your stay (actually a cube-shaped chest with a padded lid, good for sitting on to remove or put on your shoes), and access to the communal kitchens and toilet/showers.
Sorry to rattle on excitedly, but I am excited. I really enjoyed all this.
The toilet/shower rooms are much like the ones you’d find at a modern gym: by which I mean private shower cubicles, not the horror of shared showers like the ones in which footballers practice their heterosexuality. The kitchens, I was surprised to see, were spotlessly clean but well used: as well as being a casual social space for strangers to chat, I saw travellers preparing decent meals in there like fresh soup and spaghetti. (I just used it to fill my water bottle before vanishing off into Paris for pastries and cocktails).
There was also a cafe-bar in this particular hostel. I assumed it would be a basic affair for weary travellers so I dropped in on my first night with a plan to read my book over a quiet pint. But there was a jumping party going on! Glamorous drag queens were spinning records while the well-dressed Parisian youth gyrated and laughed and mingled. The place felt like the colonial bar in Lawrence of Arabia where he demands lemonade after crossing the desert; it was decorated with strings of muted lights and lazy palm fronds.
I was wearing my smelly Montreal Bagel t-shirt and some old jeans, so I was hardly presentable for it. I thirsted for that beer though, so I courageously ensconced myself at the bar and chatted with a bar worker who wasn’t bothered about my grotesque appearance and texted with my partner at home who assured me I was beautiful. I felt too self-conscious to read though, so I quaffed my refreshing blanche and made a dash for my bunk.
Sleeping with that curtain closed was a bit like being on an overnight ferry or a sleeper train without, obviously, the sensation of motion. For three nights in my coffin-like quarters, I slept like a brute.
The hostel struck me as quite the model for living. It was my socialist motto of “private sufficiency, public luxury” taken to the extreme and placed under one roof. I was happy to be far from material responsibilities and domestic maintenance. I think I could have worked on my books there if I’d wanted to.
If my partner ever throws me out, I’ll look into a long-stay hostel arrangement. The existenzminimum of a bunk, a locker, and access to those shared cooking and showering facilities was extremely liberating. And when you’re not sleeping or padding around in the communal spaces, you’re out there in your new town, living.
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A Treat for Future You
I used to listen to a comedy podcast called The Parapod. It was about the paranormal and presented by two comedians: one a believer in any old rubbish and the other a rational sceptic. The believer, Barry Dodds, was generally ridiculed as a gullible thicko even aside from his belief in El Chupacabra.
It was always very funny and Barry was a good sport. But, baseless belief in vampires aside, I was often left thinking “but, Barry’s got a point there. It was just a bit strangely articulated.”
On one memorable occasion, he described making tea before bedtime and putting it in a Thermos for the morning. He described it as “a treat for future me.”
This was good ammunition for his opponent who ridiculed him for thinking in those terms. Most people would, for example, fold their laundry without thinking of it as “a treat for future me.”
But getting things done sort of.. is a treat for future you. Isn’t it?
Getting things done today improves your life (or the lives of others) tomorrow.
Celebrated wise man and New Escapologist columnist David Cain picks up the subject at his blog today. He does not use the phrase “a treat for future me” because he’s more articulate than poor Barry. Instead, he writes:
Imagine you’re having a hard day, and you get home to find that someone has left dinner for you. It’s exactly what you wanted. Lasagne! Or maybe green curry, or tacos. […] Of course, this thoughtful benefactor could be you, just earlier.
He goes on to give more significant examples than lasagne or a Thermos of tea. Perhaps you past self wrote a book or got a degree or invested some money. They did something difficult for you. If you’ll pardon my weak pun, it’s a present for the future.
Anyway, David also says:
This sort of inheritance represents real wealth — consisting of personal freedom, money, resources, skills, relationships, and overall well-being — and you can pass it on to yourself.
The whole post is interesting and worth reading. He explains the “catch” of having to do things now in order to benefit from them later. And how to actually do the difficult thing of doing. But what interests me as an Escapologist is his definition of freedom.
He’s right. It’s real freedom. The only reason my days aren’t a living Hell today is that I put in the legwork yesterday and the day before and ten years ago. Rarely does a day at Escape Towers see an act of manic brinkmanship: I take everything in my stride and, largely, do what I want went I want to do it. I am the inheritor of many, many treats for future me.
Compare and contrast this idea of freedom with what Joan Didion once observed about the American idea of freedom (in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968) via their then-idolisation of multimillionaire Howard Hughes:
That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves […] that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
I think it’s possible in 2023 to get those wires crossed. I think people today idolise the Kardashians (who whoever it is now) because, on some level, they’re hungry for Didion’s “absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy” but getting caught up on the material wealth they see on the screen or how their bodies look compared to theirs. I could be wrong. But it’s what I suspect.
So be like David Cain and Barry Dodds: send presents to the future — treats to future you — in order to maximise your freedom, not the material things or the power that money can buy. Those are dubious treats for future you.
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