FRAN KELLY IS TO return to the airwaves at Radio National after having, three years ago, retired. She will replace Sarah Macdonald. Edit: she will present a new 6pm program. This is our media labour economy in a nutshell; absolutely dominated by three or four major institutions (the ABC, Nine-Fairfax, and the Murdoch papers) which combine to form what is effectively a cartel for media, and within that, explicitly hostile to young people and new entrants.

There's no question Kelly is a good journalist. She's even likely to be the best journalist for this role and for this audience. She would meet any set of criteria for meritocratic appointment. But a broader pattern of older, more qualified, more experienced, people, being appointed and reappointed to positions in institutions, is not a positive overall. Think of Richard Kingsmill, the former Triple J presenter, programmer, and manager, who remained at the 'youth' radio station well into his late middle age: it's no fault of his that he got old, but it said a great deal about the station--and our media culture--that his being there, for decades, effectively closed a promotion ladder to generations of younger presenters, and with them, their ideas. It's not just Triple J. This broader pattern, which we might call Kingsmillism, where meritocratic appointment without a countervailing system of moving those appointees up-and-out, closes institutions to new people, new systems, newness generally.

It's a classic example of preference for the best, over the good enough. This is fundamental, though, to meritocracy; that because it seeks to ideologically justify, having made, the appointment of people, it's also a logic of exclusion, exactly working against the notion of a fair-go. That meritocratic processes tend also to be ones that act against social mobility, creating classes of meritorious people and keeping them in place, is a paradox that a lot of fair-minded people won't honestly admit. So much more when the meritocratic choice is selecting authority figures, whether political or cultural.

William Davies, Owning Towards Death, Finance and Society

These brief allusions suggest that if work (or labour or production) were to lose its pivotal position in the justification and organisation of capitalism, the result would be profoundly disorientating. Firstly, it would risk a legitimation crisis for capitalism, should work appear to become disconnected to reward, property or ‘social mobility’. Whether or not capitalism has delivered these outcomes to workers, its moral crisis potentially stems from a breakdown in the public normative conventions which justify hard work and industry, and thereby allow individuals to achieve moral status, recognition, or security through their labour. Secondly, it would risk a kind of existential crisis for individuals, bringing them face to face with the arbitrariness and potential pointlessness of their lives, once notions of ‘career’, ‘earnings’, and ‘merit’ lose their grip on individual life courses and personal development. Instead, individuals may be forced to confront economic activity as nothing other than a flow of time.

James Meek, Nobody Wants To Hear This, London Review of Books, v46 n22, 21 November 2024

Something like this is happening in the Kharkiv of 2024. Vladimir Putin is still the enemy, and shows no sign of losing; but more and more, the war itself, the instrument that was supposed to deliver Ukraine from Putin’s cruelty, is the enemy too. There is still reverence for the Ukrainian army, for its brave soldiers, as a noble ideal, but the perception has grown that the army is shackled to the selfishness and stagnation of Ukraine’s regressive side, the corruption, bureaucratic inhumanity and small-town cronyism that fermented in the 1990s with the combination of late Soviet decay and foreign biznes. That was the first obstacle to progress in post-independence Ukraine, long before Putin came along; it turns out still to be a force, a dead weight.

Tim Judah, Ukraine Divided, New York Review of Books, 5 December 2024

In the past, and especially after Ukraine triumphantly drove back the Russians from Kyiv, Kherson, and the Kharkiv region in 2022, most Ukrainians, taking their cue from Zelensky, were very clear: the war would end with victory, and victory meant the expulsion of the Russians from every square inch of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. According to opinion polls, that is still the case, although there is growing support for a freezing of the front lines. In my experience, Ukrainians overwhelmingly believe that an armistice along the current lines would not end the war, only pause it.

WE ARE ALL THATCHERITES in 2024. Neoliberalism may be on its way out in favour of a new mercantilist order, but the fundamental concept-order behind how we structure political economies remains. Ministers are the custodians of legislation, and of budgets, and of the administrative/regulatory state, and those three levers are all they have. Outside the State lies the impartial market, the working of which determines prices and conditions. Simple dichotomy: on one side the rule of human laws, on the other side the rule of economic laws; a divide that makes sense, so long as you shut your eyes and don't know what economics or politics is.

As late as the 1980s liberal democratic States were deeply involved in the setting of prices for things, for commodities like beer and cigarettes, but also of the price of rents, the cost of imports and exports, the levels of wages and wages growth, and they answered for them election-to-election. As Thatcherites, the democracies shrugged off the direct responsibility for price-setting, really leaving only the price of money in the hands of the Government, until Paul Keating could dream of a leadership of heating up and cooling down the economy with a single rates lever, like an old-time engine driver getting the perfect fire in the locomotive. It's a way of doing things that has a level of abstraction; so long as you have a reliable fiscal policy, prices will go where they 'ought' to be, and everyone gets rich, and everyone gets a share.

It worked until it isn't working any more. Funnily enough, the democratic electorate still finds States responsible for prices and material conditions, and blames Governments thoroughly for rises in them, despite their actual effective lack of control. Consider housing, where the Productivity Commission is struggling to work out how to commission productivity:

The Albanese government has struggled to get its ambitious five-year target of 1.2 million new homes on track, weighed down by parliamentary and procedural hurdles and by the lack of policy levers at the federal level.

Conscious of that limitation, it has opted for a "carrot" approach of offering grants to states, territories and others in exchange for policy actions.

In fact it's not clear to me that parliamentary or procedural hurdles, or regulation, or policy levers, really have anything to do with the state of the housing market at all. Prefabrication has been a part of construction for decades (in prefab trusses, structural elements, and items like doors and windows, which are all standardised). The States and Councils who approve and regulate planning are much less the barrier than the lowish number of applications being submitted. It's very difficult to automate construction work in the way it's possible to do it for other sectors, or introduce much more productivity in the form of attacking labour conditions ('work harder!').

Australian housing is incredibly productive, world-beatingly productive, in the one sense that matters, which is storing wealth for owners in the context of our specific retirement system. The great barrier to making more and cheaper housing in Australia is the cost of land. It's really really expensive. There's no productivity cure for one class of people who own things, not wanting to give up their hold over the price of the thing that makes them rich. There's only the political need to get it back.

BLUESKY HAS BECOME THE happening place if what you want is to talk about Bluesky, as the well-trod joke goes. There's an ongoing exodus of people leaving twitter, as the result of the US Presidential election making stark, finally, what it is, to other microblog services (Bluesky, but also the fediverse), or to nothing. The experience of being part of a social network is always about the message you're receiving, by dint of membership, and sometimes, as is happening now, lots of people decide it's not very good. In 2022 I wrote that the then experience of twitter shared a lot with the 20th century experience of talkback radio, especially in the power of the choices producers made, to shape the message people heard out of the random chat:

The great imaginative leap was that talkback listeners took the broadcast for representation; that these people are saying what other people are thinking! The callers are the same as me, and people like me (for better or worse)! It was the classic genre for broadcasting in a society of masses... Alan Jones and John Laws in Sydney exercised gross influence over party and media by right of their pretense to ‘speak’ for their large audiences, to set media agendas, and to set the media cycle. Similar figures existed throughout the world. Donald Trump tweeting late at night through his Presidency may be the last true talkback mass broadcaster simulating (‘many are saying this’!) his own audience.

A single 'place' with a claim to be where important (meaning: culturally elite) public discussion happens, was, for a while, what twitter was; let's say between 2014 or so and the middle of the Trump presidency. Journalists used it as a proxy public, the proxy public returned the compliment to journalists, academics and public servants and celebrities and brands followed as though by a law of gravity, but as with all gravitational processes, there's an impact when you get to the bottom. As a Sun King-sized celebrity, Donald Trump has the extraordinary ability to make everything about him, and twitter for a time suited him perfectly, for the easily-indigestible bites of nastiness or surreality he'd punch into his phone late at night after cheeseburger dinners. Like the man himself, the network, lacking the will to moderate him, became superficial, shitty, mean, and fundamentally spectacular. Under Elon Musk it has followed its new owner's tendencies into white nationalism, corporate/crypto grifting, misogyny, conspiratorial lies, drugs, and esoteric occult Nazism, but in either guise, and this is the unpleasant bit, we're still living in the shadow of the radio talkback host. All of that---all of it---was very present in the days of the shock jock.

So I am in favour of a fracturing of social media into as many places as there are people. There's no reason to accept the fundamental immoderation of the simulated audience, it's unpleasant, it demeans us, especially when it so clearly is not ours, but a tool of power. We can do better by doing more diversity.