The idea for this series arose from a colleague during the editorial meeting almost angrily sharing a film clip of Great Yarmouth in the 1950s. We watched it joyously. The joy was spontaneous, but deeply felt. Joy at watching a grainy black and white film of the 1950s. All those little shops, all those people gossiping. The anger was equally spontaneous and deeply felt. And it came, we realised, from a sense of what we have lost.
We are all suffering from psychological impotence. Throughout mankind’s existence we have been social animals, dependent on each other for our very survival. For food, for security, for emotional wellbeing. But gradually, we are being denied that. The cause is computers, of course. Their arrival was never intended to change life in this way. But neither in the rush to modernity was it given much thought. We were all caught up in a vague sort of ‘Tomorrow’s World’ idea of greater leisure, involving clever gadgets, to carry out we had no idea what fascinating new tasks.
The division between provider and customer was established
But the people developing the technology have never primarily been philanthropists. Without evil intent, they naturally saw their role as being to add value to their clientele: to make unspecified things easier, to make them in an as yet unspecified way cheaper – or at least, cheaper to produce. But it was perhaps at this point that the division between providers and their customers was first established.
Compared to what could be done by stringing together a few electrodes to produce such extraordinary economies of scale, people had become costly. It was easy to pretend, because nobody actually thought about it much, that the new advantages enjoyed by increasingly large corporations would naturally work their way down to their customers too. A different version of the delusion of trickle-down economics. And there was no profit in finding out if that actually happened.
A customer’s purpose has become simply to provide money
The change to an IT-driven economy began to turn successful companies into huge corporations. That in turn widened the gulf between them and those in theory they exist to serve. Computers had separated them from their customers, not brought them together.
Ther realised that they could extend the idea of streamlining, slimming down their processes, to their customers as well. The trouble with customers is they are a mixed bag. On the plus side, they give you money. On the negative side, they have expectations of you. Not only do they want products and services, but they involve a lot of faffing about in providing them. So what about, some bright spark thought, if we could slim them down – just like our other component parts – to just the bits we wanted: the money. Think how much easier it would be if we didn’t have to interrupt the smooth flow of our systems to accommodate the by-product of having to deal with people. Complaints about late deliveries, breakdowns, failure of supply. All those people with all their individual problems and idiosyncrasies began to be not the purpose of a company’s activities, but a hindrance to them. Our very social traits which make us human beings became the problem.
Human contact is to be avoided: just give us the money
In a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – was it ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’? – one character, a businessman, is obsessed with dealing with all the problems arising through his complaints department. The advice he is given is to close his complaints department. His complaints cease.
This same idea now dominates much of our lives – not our problem, but the problem of those large organisations with whom we have to deal. We are now the problem. So gradually, organisations of every kind – not least local government – began to look for ways to restrict or even eliminate any contact they have with actual people. We, the consumers, find our only permitted role is to cough up and pay our bills. Any problem, any complaint, any contact whatever, must be avoided.
We never really did have that much control over our lives, but at least decisions affecting us seemed to be taken on a scale we could comprehend. Not any more. Probably not a single one of us goes through the day without some new frustration created by a system which looks for every way possible to simplify the way it has to deal with us.
What have we lost and how do we recover it?
As I write this, my wife comes in to complain that there is no way online – of course – that we can report our electricity usage, since we have both daytime and night-time meters, but one box in which to enter a single figure. Is this short cut intended for our convenience? Have they simply discontinued the cheaper rate without telling us? There is no way to find out, of course, because there is nobody to ask.
What have we lost? And is there any way of recovering it? In our series ‘Our Place in Europe…?’ we set out to learn as we go. We have learned a lot, and we hope our readers have too. So we hope our new occasional series, ‘What have we lost?’ will provide similar enlightenment, help to dissipate or empathise with some of the frustrations, or at least point our virtuous anger in a direction in which it might do some good.
