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.

IRONY IS A HARD form of humour to appreciate. Senator Ralph Babet (of the Clive Palmer franchise team United Australia Party) went on twitter to post a bunch of slurs. At one level, that's just twitter these days; and his content is no different to the garden variety of hate that everyone still on there stews in, but on the other hand, it is a notable thing for an Australian Senator to do. And what's ironic about it is that it shows a gigantic and secular shift in the way we culture war about values.

It’s a cliché that modern political Right parties appeal to ‘traditional values’, yet have members who fail to display those actual values in behaviour. That's just hypocrisy; the sexual mores campaigner who has affairs, the drinking, smoking, anti-drugs activist, and so on. But actually displayed disinhibition like Babet's is at a different order of behaviour: the irony is people like Babet behave the way they do precisely because of a lack of shame—the result of valuelessness.

It was always the political Right's critique of the sexual revolution of the 1960s onward, and of feminism, and of modern life generally, that it led to disinhibition and a breakdown of traditional structures and hierarchies---and anti-social behaviour. What Senator Babet lacks, because there is so obviously nobody in his life that he respects to say, hey mate, how about just shutting the fuck up, is in fact the traditional male role models who display ‘traditional virtues’, of inhibition and dignity, and his puerile, obscene, hatefulness is a symptom. It's anomie! It's precisely what the moral majority who swept the 1980s were fixated on!

If it were me, I’d consider it a shameful thing in its own right to have nobody in my life to who I could look up to model my behaviour or police it, and call out my social breaches. I've often used the example of the Beastie Boys, who made perhaps the 20th century's most cartoonishly sexist rap record, were indeed called out by their peers, and who did indeed clean up their act, of the power of social norms to improve people. But hey that’s just me, out here on the political Left, with my odd ideas about social norms!

The irony to appreciate is that we've had a secular shift in our culture war. It's the political Left which is the defender of institutions, of the inheritances of the past, of strict mores of behaviour (especially those to do with sex), of the value and importance of family, and of marriage, while it's the political Right that has embraced chaos and impulsivity. Or as Fintan O'Toole observes:

“Disinhibition” is a word that has recently migrated from the lexicon of psychology into that of American politics. It refers to a condition in which people become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges, and this year it very obviously applied to Trump’s increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. But it now must also apply to the institutions of American government: with allies on the Supreme Court and with control over the Senate and (most probably at the time of writing) the House of Representatives, Trump will have no one to regulate his urges.

And perhaps it applies to American society too; this is a disinhibited electorate. It is no longer, on the whole, frightened of its own worst impulses.

David Sessions, ‘Against Bernie Would Have Won’, The Point, 7 November 2024

Undergirding that logic was the classic left-wing belief that the working class is always right, always wants socialism deep in its heart no matter what it does on the surface. The strategic and ideological arguments fused together in a conviction that being ideologically correct—being pure—was the secret to winning. Voters wanted principle, they wanted ideas, they wanted Medicare for All. That was how to win.

Zadie Smith, ‘The Dream of the Raised Arm, 5 December 2024

For the past fifteen years we have—all of us—been subjected to a truly monumental network of psychological influence that our governments have failed to regulate in any real way whatsoever. Just as it was in the Thirties, our version of the propaganda megaphone is “subject to no legal or moral restraints.” Maybe it’s time that it is?

James Meek, ‘What are you willing to do’, London Review of Books, 26 May 2022

But the real danger might be that Trump and Republicans loyal to him cheat and lie their way to a victory that is accepted by Congress, federal power passes to an autocrat, and, after a period of mass protest, most liberals just put up with it, judging it not worth the blood and damage to fight for democracy. If it is a real danger that civil war may threaten democracy, it is also a real danger that democracy may die because its defenders refuse to start one.

AMERICA IS A WEIRD society, in the full sense of the notion of weirdness. It is large, diverse, dynamic, but those are just cliches that everyone from Tocqueville on has observed. What it truly is is weird, in that its society doesn’t necessarily obey sensible or regular laws. Compare: anyone who has ever gone doorknocking for a political campaign in Australia will know that the spectrum of things that people believe is extraordinary, and well, well beyond the boundaries of what’s sensible or supportable by evidence, sometimes even what’s tolerable, but mostly there’s a lot of weird shit. If you start talking to people in unstructured conversations, you’re going to get very strange ideas bubbling up. People in Australian electorates are weirder than we think, maybe weirder than we can think. As odd as Australia can be, America is magnitudes stranger.

There’s a well-recognised and very old overlap between esotericism and the extreme Right, which, since the American extreme right is now simply the Right, is also now common. Donald Trump launched his official 2024 campaign in Waco, Texas, the city that was the site of the 1993 Branch Davidian siege, a cause celebre of the 1990s paranoid right. For anyone with memory of the time that’s a brutally unsubtle statement, and an implied endorsement not only of the violent affect, but also of the conspiratoria that grew up around it (and that of Ruby Ridge), which, not coincidentally, came to fixate on the Clinton family. The American political Right has gone all-in in its approach to media of, in Steve Bannon’s words, ‘flooding the zone with shit’; meaning of course information that’s untrue or unfalsifiable, racist, misogynist, and hateful, but mostly tending toward some kind of occult or weird conspiracy. Since we now have so few common sources of media and so many unreliable social ones, it’s easy spread for the strange and the eerie. RFK believes in raw milk. Tucker Carlson believes in demons. Well, why not?

The Left also has a forgotten tradition of this weirdness. It’s not just in the occult features of anarchism, but also in the quasi-scientific scientific-socialisms of the twentieth century, that all seemed to develop into personality cults, in the mischief-centric Situationist movement of very serious bullshit, and the slapstick gags of the Yippies, Reichian sexual liberationism, New Religious Movements, funny-money fixations like MMT, and, I am sorry to say, variants of the same tedious anti-semitism that crop up whenever someone thinks too hard about capitalism without proper adult supervision. In the later twentieth century the centre-left moved away from all of this towards a sensible, official, liberalism of order, of Fukuyaman institutionalism, of—-and I spit at the words—-‘evidence based policy’. If the American election in 2024 is anything, it’s a popular vote against order and for chaos. For weirdness.

Things are going to be extraordinarily bad, for our American friends and for the world. They’re going to be violent and nasty. But they’re also going to be very, very weird.

BUILDING DESIGN SHARES A lot of similarity to the spread of memes on the internet. A successful configuration that resonates with people’s experience of the world, or to the experiences of some group of them, will reproduce itself in self-similar ways. Designs that become popular are that way because they respond to specific needs and desires, and carry symbolic meaning, not because they are intrinsically good. Surviving designs, like memes, don’t last because people like them, they survive because they’ve outlasted other worse ones.

In Australian inner cities there is a specific memetic house design that became popular in the 19th century and has stayed that way: terrace blocks of houses, each one with a short verandah, a front door to a side corridor, a front window to a room, with a flight of something less than a dozen stairs up to the entrance, and the kitchen set at the very back. They’re of one, two, and more rarely three storeys. Depending on topography and budget, style and taste and age, that’s a design meme that’s stamped out suburb across suburb, in variations so small, when you get to them, they just don’t matter.

That short flight of stairs does a few things really well. First of all, it keeps water from coming in when it rains, and blown debris from piling up around the door when it’s windy. Second, that height is an allowance for space underneath the house, to insulate: if you’ve ever lived in a house where the floor joists lie straight on the dirt, you know how cold and mouldy it is. Lastly, and most importantly, it’s height that gives privacy and light, so that someone in the front room can see easily onto the street, but someone on the street can’t easily see someone in bed in the front room, and that front gets more sunlight than the street does. It’s a very old, traditional form that has been desirable and meaningful for a long time; and the principle of raising a living-area floor to a higher level is ancient. They work.

Here’s the problem though: the terrace design-meme, while very humane and recognisable, is horribly inaccessible. In the picture above, the residents have added their own ramps for what’s most likely access for a stroller or pram, another memetic design solution you see people add everywhere, in every variation of designed ramps, planks, boards, every kind of improvised solution.

It’s extraordinarily hard to reconcile the design requirements to be private, to be dense, and to allow street-grade access, without changing some fundamental things about what makes the terrace design terrace-y. You could add a much larger front garden, or add a wall at the front. You could reconfigure the house simply not to have a front window, or have a front door extremely set back to a side, or front the street with a roller door garage. You could design the main access from a rear lane. All these things in fact have been done and are done, against huge resistance from neighbours and Council, since all of them alter the terrace form from what it is to something else. Eventually, in fact, what you do is invent the car-centric suburbs, and lose, in gaining functional accessibility, the communal benefits of terraces.

No wonder people just shove ramps in.

DEAR EDITORS,
“WHY IS Everything So Ugly?” (Issue 44) was a pleasingly dyspeptic essay about something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately: the unremitting ugliness of life in early 2020s America. But since the editors were more preoccupied with describing the ugliness than explaining it (a few references to supply chains and global capital aside), I thought I’d try to actually answer their rhetorical question by looking at the economic transformations of the post–New Deal era that led us here. I see us as the victims of four interlocking phenomena, tackled below in no particular order.

Letters to the Editor: The Cheapo Stuff Wins (Nplusone)

THE WIRE TAPS THAT captured conversations between Daryl Maguire and Gladys Berejiklian were extraordinary. At various points, Maguire complained about the Icac’s powers, warned Berejiklian they could be listening in on their conversations, and said the watchdog was “marginalising the art of politics”.

This is actually right.

Despite the long twentieth century, all the Australian States inherit the basic makeup of colonial governments, and their continuing tension between the interests of the city and the interests of the country. In some ways our society is modern, cosmopolitan, urban, in other ways it hasn’t changed a great deal since the Goldrushes. Long before there were contemporary Parties, before democracy even, the point, the ‘art’ of politics was diverting the resources of the Colonial state towards specific geographic areas and interest groups. The modern Party system still reflects that colonial mindset: the Labor Party aim to the interests of the cities where the people are and the economy is, the Greens towards a sense of futurity, the Liberal Party aim to the interests of firms and landowners, and the National Party quite explicitly offers a promise: we will divert funding away from cities towards the regions, because that redistribution-out only happens with the art of politics.

(The Commonwealth has this makeup to a lesser extent. This isn’t because the Commonwealth level is less prone to corruption, or because Federal MPs are better people, only that the Commonwealth is less political, in the sense that it isn’t where the basic questions about who wins and loses, and how people live, are resolved. Local Councils, by far the most important level of government in Australia, are well known as the most corrupt, and the scene of the most bitterly contested politics, and also arena of the most contested democracy).

Corruption in the contemporary sense is an offence against the public. It’s a transaction between two people for benefit, at the expense of the people as a whole, and well understood by anyone who can see it. ‘Perceived’ corruption in the remit of the ICAC counts just as well as actual substantive corruption. But the ‘art’ of politics in the States, as Maguire rightly points out, is precisely the defining of benefits for some at the expense of others! This isn’t something that some training in ethics for MPs is likely to stamp out, it’s a basic quality of our history and geography.