TREES ARE RARELY ASSESSED as significant cultural heritage in Australia; the bar is too high. When a project manager gets on the blower and asks ‘now listen, but is it heritage?’, a professional applies the standard frameworks of his or her calling, and decides—with a standardised process—either a yes/no significance answer, or a level of significance (from ‘little’ to ‘exceptional’). Human involvement in the thing or place is the most important: places where historical events happened, buildings made by specific people, artefacts of a known history. The reason trees rarely meet the ‘but is it heritage?’ test is because they’re ephemeral by nature, growing and reproducing themselves and dying by themselves, without people needing to be involved. ‘Cultural landscapes’, the fashion of the 2000s, remedy part of the question of individual trees by seeing the forests, but there’s generally no such thing as a ‘heritage tree’. You see the problem already.

The test is a European one, and doesn’t account for Indigenous relationships with specific trees and specific places associated with them. And when the chainsaw teams come in to fell the tree, the Courts are asked to deal with the question of heritage, on significance terms, and on the basis of specific forms which the defendants either did or didn’t correctly fill out, or in the argument of the corporation, ‘previous assessments of the tree …“did not reveal characteristics consistent with cultural modification”’, that is, the involvement of a person in the business of the tree. It’s a racist system, but it’s more than that too: ours is a degraded and barbarous culture of forms, as I wrote the last time the Philistines detonated a culturally significant place:

the only thing that matters is is the letter of the law, because that’s how the application forms will be drawn up, and forms are where power is exercised.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Australian heritage industry came into being with an odd-couple political deal between architecture-fanciers and Communist building workers, both protesting barbarism in their own way. What was obvious then, was that without a protective law, the status of ‘heritage’ was fundamentally decided by power: real people risking the sack or arrest to protect places, and on the other side, real thugs, real fist-fights. When the architecture-fanciers betrayed the unionists and formalised the process, making Heritage Acts, it was deliberately to eliminate that element of plain power of ordinary people, and to deny the concept that ‘Heritage’ was whatever anyone cared enough to protect.

But is it ‘heritage’? If people are willing to be sacked or arrested for it, you already know the answer.

THE FOUR DAY WEEK is both an attractive demand and a realistic utopia, an acheivable measure any of us could feasibly gain, and with it, improve our lives. But wait! Our society’s totalising culture of shouting-productivity and management will strike back with demands of its own:

“Managers need to be comfortable that these hours are being used for that particular purpose (of passion) and not to do chores, or to work on your own little start-up [or] business when not explicitly stated,” she says.

Absolutely no. We can all imagine the kind of management where the tradeoff for a four-day week—or any other arrangement of increasing leisure—is increasing intrusion of management onto recreation time. We’ve all heard of the (in theory) rather nice arrangements where software developers in major firms are given company time to work on open-source projects; we all know about lawyers and professionals working pro bono. This isn’t that, this is colonisation of private time. One person’s ‘romance day’ of fulfilling tasks and self-actualisation can so easily turn to HR measuring those things against firm profitability. Clocking off should be exactly, and completely, that.

I AM READING DANIEL Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap, which is very good, compelling, and is crystallising thoughts on human merit I’ve been recently having. It’s a fairly compelling argument that the reproduction of the ruling class, today, happens at the level of transferring skills and educational training, and through elites exploiting their own labour, of specific kinds which create value in the context of our times (financial services, law, business, technology, and so on). It’s slightly less compelling in the Australian context, where the older forms—your parents buying you a house in Sydney—still work fine. Yes, I’ve been saying to myself as I turn the virtual pages of my e-reader, yes, that observation relates to the way I see the world. Yes, that is the way the ideology works. The book happens, as I happen to be, caustically enduringly angry.

And then the challenge:

Tweet by Yuan Yi Zhu: ‘I’ll go further and say that the reason for the sudden popularity of the anti-meritocracy case has more to do with traditional elites’ realisation that they are being out-competed than with concern for those left behind by meritocratic competition.’

Yes, but I think also no. Yes, the notion that anti-meritocracy is fear of competition rings absolutely true thinking of the Fairfax stable of papers’ long-term fixation on selective schools, Asian children, and exam coaching: a fear that comes exactly from the insecurity of an Australian white ruling class. No, because if there’s a ‘sudden’ anti-meritocracy case it’s at least four years old, when Helen Andrews in a 2016 Hedgehog Review was making the same meritocracy-critical arguments in reverse, arguing that these things (the concentration of power, the increasing inequality between winners and losers of the race, the stamping of failure on the second-rans), were good, actually:

For all its flaws, this elite does have many virtues. Its moral seriousness contrasts favorably with the frivolousness of certain earlier generations, and its sense of pragmatism, which can sometimes be reductive, can also be admirably brisk and hard-nosed. What is needed is someone who can summon a picture of the meritocratic elite’s best selves and call others to meet the example. But this process can begin only when this new ruling class finally owns up to the only name for what it already undeniably is.

One alternative is aristocratic self-denial, in the Russian 19thC manner, such as e.g. Francesco Pacifico, Workplace Hacks:,

Our class is a scam.
There is no merit in success. Until we destroy the impression of merit in people’s success, every discussion will be muffled by fascination—by the apparently objective, natural, collective fascination with success and successful people. This already happened with aristocrats. At some point in the 20th century they lost the bulk of their ability to impress. It should happen to us, too. We must lose our allure.

The ‘We’ is the key to all of this I think. It’s meritocracy’s great appeal that it individualises; on its face it is every candidate competing against the test, every career a separate arc of talent. Making or breaking has meaning. Hard work is rewarded, virtue recognised. Friends don’t help each other, nobody does favours, and each deserved outcome is the best of all possible worlds. Because merit must be imagined as an individual capacity (or else commit the error of bell-curvy prejudice) here is no, can never be any, meritocratic ‘we’ of belonging, or ‘one of us’. As the result, the fact of ruling class political and economic power, increasingly obvious to insiders and outsiders, threatens the whole ideology.

So a ruling class ‘we’ is up in the air, even if there’s definitely an identification of a ‘them’, from everyone who’s been pushed aside. A meritocratic ruling class by definition can’t be class-conscious: the moment it accepts the name, and responsibilities of collective rule, it also must accept the consequences of increasing wealth inequality and abuse of power, and must fold back to individualism, or else admit that it’s failing at its core aim of fairness for all. (As the saying goes, faber est suae quisquae fortunae, fuck you, Jack, I’m alright).

We start by recognising things that exist. A class that transfers benefits to itself, reproducing its power, using the tools of merit, is an existing fact. Just because it tells lies to itself about its own deserts, doesn’t mean we need to believe them. Markovits said as much to the Yankee Puritans at Jacobin:

The meritocratic suggestion that hierarchy is compatible with democratic equality because elites deserve their earned advantages is circular. Notions of meritocratic desert cannot justify inequality because they depend on inequality. And merit is not a natural virtue but rather an ideological conceit, built to launder an otherwise offensive distribution of advantage. Merit — in this precise sense — is a sham.

WE VIEW CORRUPTION IN public office as, generally, a bad thing. When a politician or official takes [what looks like] a bribe, we expect them to be punished. On its face, corruption of public processes breaks our norms against fairness, because we expect the State to evaluate things—policies, projects, people—on the basis of equality, and natural justice, not whose brown paper bag was heaviest. But I want to praise corruption, not bury it.

There are two points of view in this recent article in the ABC on labour hire staffing of the commonwealth public service. The first is institutional:

A former senior Defence Department executive, Paddy Gourley, has warned against this trend for years, saying it allows corruption to flourish. "The basic point is it opens up scope for nepotism and corruption in public service staffing," he said.

The second is more prosaic, from a self-identifying APS prole:

Mr Wilson, 25, said the outsourcing of government work had another effect: it had left young people like himself with far less hope of ever becoming a public servant. "It's kind of disappointing to realise that there really is no way in, aside from a tiny number of spots in the graduate program," he said.

These two evaluations of how the APS runs its affairs are completely correct. The staffing cap requires managers to buy labour on the sly if they want to carry out the functions demanded of them, and everyone knows the public service career route is basically closed to outsiders. But this state of affairs is also perfectly acceptable to a meritocratic view of the world, which, as I've become more and more convinced, is opposed to any sense of egalitarianism and human dignity.

Public service cultures in Australia have always been tinged with crookedness, and some—like local Councils—veer between moderate integrity and hopeless, endemic corruption. The City of Sydney Council (as Hilary Golder's book shows) has been constantly, repeatedly, sacked for its cultures of graft, starting in the mid-19thC, long before democracy. It's worth asking why cultures of corruption endure, when meritocratic ones are so fleeting, and I don't think the fatalism of 'there's always corruption it's human nature' is sufficient. If corruption is natural, why is it so bad?

A meritocratic system rewards the ability to pass tests. The virtues it selects for are aptitude, skill, confidence, education, and experience of systems, as well as hard work. These things aren't to be sneezed at. They're not quite enough, either. In the context of growing inequality—when there aren't enough 'winning' spots—a meritocratic system creates more and more losers, and raises the stakes. The result of accelerating qualificationism is people being told they aren't worthy, and with more and more tests, they're told that more and more often. It links the dignity of having a job and career with winning it against a field of other people.

Relationships of patronage and support, which are other names for corruption and nepotism, reward other virtues and talents than the ones our society values. Older, crookeder systems reward qualities like loyalty, attention to the needs of the institution, a strong sense of collective identity and goals, staunch support within groups and teams, talent-spotting and career development by superiors and bosses, protecting one's mates, and task orientation (just 'getting things done') as opposed to process orientation (making sure things are accountable). Those things aren't to be sneezed at either. Indeed, there's a long anarchist tradition that describes exactly those attitudes and practices as 'mutual aid'.

It's true that such systems benefited a narrow elite, consolidated power in the hands of people who did not value the public interest, and protected bullies, abusers, plain criminals, and worse. They elevated people who were incompetent, and locked out genuinely talented people. But look at the results of 'meritocratic' systems. Look at the mates-games that are key to Australian political economy. Are they very different?

One of the aspects of the City of Sydney Council's older culture of rorting was that it was partly about redistribution: it was a corrupt early 20thC Labor Party's way of giving jobs to the boys, and shoring up the support of inner city working class communities in suburbs like Paddington, Surry Hills, Redfern, and Glebe. Corruption was a client relationship, where bosses who didn't provide for their communities were replaced with others, who could. More jobs were provided than were really needed. Obviously, those communities no longer exist, nor do the prosaic ordinary jobs that were their basis of support. Joe Flood's 'The Fires', about a similar period in New York City, when corrupt municipal cultures were being rooted out and replaced with 'fair', algorithmic, testing practices for running things, noted that the loss of these older ethnic Tammany Hall systems also mean the loss of real expertise for making things happen, with tragic results. A corrupt boss is still a boss, and still has to perform tasks.

Corrupt systems make no pretence of being arbitrary. They're unfair, but don't pretend to be anything but what they are. When young people correctly identify that they're being locked out of systems that claim to be 'fair', though, and identify the choke point—'merit selection'—is it any wonder they take the next logical step, and realise that 'merit' is just another ideology of protecting privilege?

Ryan Boyd, LARB, This Long Whine:

Since the 1960s, he emphasizes, medical document-keeping has changed. In privatized health-care markets, where cost and risk are transferred to individuals, therapists write less openly and less interestingly, and contra the rich narration and character descriptions that distinguish his earlier records, now a patient’s archive is about “handing you expeditiously on to the next provider, the notes a sort of bill of lading.” There are plenty of kind, skilled, well-meaning individual doctors and therapists, but the system in which they practice turns patients into sources of revenue trailed by miscellaneous records...

A Very Public Sociologist, A Cultural Sociology of Mass Stupidity:

The neoliberal self comes packaged with other consequences: on how the individual sees themselves in the world. While this mode of governance is prescriptive about individuality, choice, and responsibility, excludes collectivism... and reinforces one's powerlessness in the face of the world, it compensates by endowing the neoliberal self with ontological and epistemological sovereignty. Put plainly, I'm all that matters and I know best. If then the cultural accent is on self-responsibility and effort, there is no higher power dictating what is and isn't true apart from your own opinions.

The Phoblographer, In the 1960s, High Resolution Color Photography Pained The CIA:

The US Government’s relationship with Kodak has always been fascinating. Labs and facilities in Rochester, NY, were developed just to deal with Classified photography and clandestine missions. Processes and films born there catered to Uncle Sam’s needs. But one can only imagine the dismay of the Chairman on September 11th, 1963: the date that Colonel Jack D Ledford filed a report saying that they started work on high-resolution Color Photography on behalf of the CIA. When they sent the negatives to Kodak, the company told the CIA that they needed some time. According to a Declassified document, Kodak wasn’t equipped to process the 9-inch materials and wouldn’t have them until the next month. Even by those standards, that’s a long time for anyone to wait to get their film back.

‘THE SEVEN BRIDGES OF Königsberg’, as well-educated readers of this blog will know, is a famously unsolveable problem in mathematics and the basis of graph theory. It’s not possible to design a walk over the seven bridges (as they were in the 18thC) in such a way as to cross each one only once. It’s lucky I’d never heard of the problem before I spent a wonderful Saturday making a round trip of the six vehicle ferries of Greater Sydney, challenging myself to see if I could cross them all without ever retracing my path. Four ferries cross the Hawkesbury River, one crosses Berowra Creek, and the other crosses the Parramatta River.

You have to go a surprisingly long way to catch them all. It was mostly a pretext to run any gremlins out of the motorbike I have spent hours repairing back into rideable condition, and to ride in some stunningly beautiful parts of Sydney, but it seems to me a pointlessly satisfying navigation exercise—you can work it out as a problem of nodes like Euler did, by trial and error with google maps like I did, or any other way. Cross every ferry once, no u-turns or retracing your path. There’s a large, but finite, number of ways you can do it.

The vehicle ferries, for the record, are:

• Berowra Waters
• Mortlake Ferry (AKA Putney Punt)
• Lower Portland
• Sackville
• Webbs Creek
• Wisemans Ferry

I did it in ~280km, taking a bit over 7.5 hours. Beware: some of the ferries run 24/7, while others have limited hours. There is some unpaved road north of the Hawkesbury River. None of the ferries have a toll; you do not need to pay the ferryman.

BOTH THE SCIENCES AND political conservatism tend towards interpreting the world in terms of iron law, and the principle that there is a way things naturally are that can be discovered through inquiry. That's in contrast to the alternative, more humanistic tradition, in which theoretical models have utility for explaining things, until they don't, at which point the honest thinker throws it away and makes a new model. Neither are intrinsically good or bad; the first tends towards stubborn stuffiness, the second towards fashion and cliques, but they're just approaches. Let me propose, in the first tradition, an Iron Natural Law of my own: given enough time, any previously radical left-of-centre writer, who prioritises 'merit', will tend inexorably towards reactionary, and hierarchical, ideas about how society should be ordered, and then, when presented with inequality, will use their skills to justify it. I am thinking in particular of Freddie de Boer, who is tracing his own intellectual Bell Curve towards elitism.

We should strive for a world in which all seeds grow in healthy, well-tendered soil, out of a fundamental commitment to the equal moral value of all. But just as no plant can grow in full from poor soil, no amount of tending to the soil can make some seeds taller than some others. Some seeds are meant to spawn taller plants. That is the way of things. All plants have their own beauty, and all human beings have something of value to contribute to society. But to act as though every human being has the same potential in academic life is no more sensible than expecting every sapling to grow to the same height.

This starts with the obvious point that some students do better at university than others—of course, or else why have gradated exams? What's implicit here is that these obvious differences in ability to study at university, to pass tests, to succeed in the sorting mechanism, are natural proxies for human 'merit'—and therefore, because Western societies are ostensibly meritocracies, to justifying the holding and the exercise of power. If what you prioritise is the kind of society where inequality is justified by ideas of 'merit', and you justify existing patterns of exam-passing (who is practiced in schools to get the best marks, who has the money to stay at uni, who has onerous caring responsibilities, who has the support of well-read parents and peers?) as politically natural, then you couch it in scientifically natural frameworks like the above.

The concept of human 'merit' leads to ever-more abstruse ways to measure and assess aptitude, and stress on individual performance over group context. It's why football managers and recruiters, despite all the evidence that teams playing together for longer tend to perform better, go immediately to recruiting 'stars'. 'Merit' creates its own frameworks in increasing complexity, as any Australian public servant will be able to explain, in the STAR format for job application criteria response. Even Donald Trump, one of the most aggressively anti-intellectual people in American political history, justifies his success not on having lots of money (which would have been more than enough justification in another age), but on his own cleverness, his 'stable genius', and intrinsic merit.

But back to de Boer, who bells the cat:

It’s been argued that the value of college stems largely from its function as a screening mechanism. By instituting admissions criteria like standardized tests, grade requirements, and the ability to pay, the thinking goes, college acts as a sieve, allowing employers to pick through those who have the underlying academic talent and soft skills, like time management, needed to succeed at work. This is particularly useful because in many states, employers are barred from using certain criteria, like intelligence testing, to judge applicants. I certainly don’t think that college’s value is only screening. But I do think that making college less exclusive necessarily means making its signaling value to employers much less useful and thus undercuts the economic value of the degree.

As a companion piece, read instead My Eighty-Six Jobs, an autobiography of the way our society actually relates atomistic human 'merit' to economic and political success: not at all.

those simple rules of work hard, don’t be late, you earn what you deserve mean little today, if they ever meant anything at all. It turns out our dreams were filled with booby traps, ladders with busted rungs, and required money to achieve...

IN MY WORK AND in the life I enjoy outside of work, I am constantly and relentlessly confronted with strategies, plans, frameworks, units of competency, planning policies, control plans, standard instruments, codes, validation matrices, key indicator lists, and an infinite variety of other written documents by which people attempt to guarantee particular aspects of human activity. They have a particular language, such as that a document like the Australian Core Skills Framework, for use in vocational training, bears a lot of similarity to NSW strategic planning documents, setting out land use parameters. They're boring and they're annoying and they're all very much the same. It's not what they, on their faces, are for, the sameness is part of what they are: a technology of public and private government. They all share other characteristics: they're all exercises in categorisation ('Domains of Communication'! Zone Objectives!), they all exist as part of an interlocking and linked library of policies, referring to other policies endlessly, and they are all written with the objective of compliance—they try to achieve what ought to be, rather than what is. Neither are they the product of the dull libertarian imagination's concept of bureaucracy ('Red Tape!'), a dead hand of government spending, holding back vigorous Reaganite market activity; the mentality is just as pronounced in the private sector, and its happiest environment are, like adult education and training, and urban planning, the ambiguous sectors which are neither public nor private. On one hand, it serves me right for pursuing white-collar work in a regulatory industry, on the other, all of these are just part of Australia's rigid, rule-bound culture. None of us can expect anything else: this is not a planning policy pity party.

What strikes me is that what these documents—let's call them in general Frameworks—are reaching for, is a sense of fairness that we all know is denied in practice by institutions. We all know that actually, the skills of urban planners, adult trainers, teachers, and every other kind of worker, are developed over time through experience, and we can see that the world that these skills and practices exist in is unjust and unfair. We know that the most skilled workers spend most of their days applying rules-of-thumb, and following processes that constantly change, because they have to, arbitrarily. Enter the urge to build theoretical Frameworks for compliance, an understandable desire that people's work should come from some consistent and comprehensible system. How terrifying it is, to a society that makes a priority of perceived fairness over any actual equity or quality (which is to say: Australia), to acknowledge that in fact, what most people do to work is fit any available theory to the immediate demands of what-needs-doing. No wonder that the economists' joke at their own expense ('ah, it works in practice, but does it work in theory?') works so well as a general observation about how this society works!

IN A DECISION OF the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal, the senior member was asked to rule—amongst other things—on whether a particular kind of rifle, that the applicant wanted to import into Australia and own, was 'of a kind that is designed or adapted for military purposes'. Unless you're particularly interested in the arcane details of specific 20thC weapons, which I'm not,¹ it's an interesting judgement for the sheer taxonomic argument that must have gone on between the two parties, discussing what particularly about this object set it in either a prohibited or a permissible category.

No, said the Commissioner of Police, you may not import it, it's obviously a military weapon, since it's a derivative of a design original to the Soviet Army. But wait, said the applicant, this one's a product for the commercial market, specifically the pre-1996 Australian market, stripped of its most gruesome military bits, and deliberately altered in appearance so that no military buyer would want it. No, said the Commissioner of Police's witness, that's not how it works; it's the function of the thing, its 'ability to discharge ammunition' that counts, and this is clearly able to kill a lot of people. But, continued the applicant, 'disturbing' the Senior Member of the Tribunal, the same is true of all centre-fire rifles, having been originally designed for military purposes—and that point was where the ontology kicked in. Platonists may kindly exit the room now, leave your essentialism on the table.

We are all of us surrounded by such objects, originally designed or brought into being for military purposes, commercialised. Some of them are incredibly useful, and our society wouldn't work without them: communications satellites, jet engines, encryption. Others, like synthetic textiles, are byproducts of war economies, with an original military purpose now completely illegible in the commodity—you wouldn't know that Nylon was so important to the Second World War just by wearing clothes. Wars tend to have been times when advances in medical science, including psychology, have taken place. Even games: every nerd lining up to role-play their warrior or sorcerer against monsters in a dungeon owes their rulebook to 19thC Prussian officers who wanted to engage bloodlessly in war-games, theorising the whole field of human conflict down to dice rolls and rules on maps. The distinction between things for 'military purposes' and for 'non-military purposes' is always arbitrary and, because it's in the nature of war itself to engage technologies adaptively, in a competitive cycle, it's always changing, bringing existing and new kinds of things into its category—the violent purpose makes the definition. As Manuel de Landa wrote, 'when synthetic intelligence does make its appearance on the planet, there will already be a predatory role awaiting it'.² But purpose is so slippery, and so socially constructed!

Computers and computer networks are the most obvious example. You are reading this on a device with an incredibly sophisticated processor, the information delivered to you electronically on a network spanning the globe. The first owes its lineage to machines meant to do to the calculus for bombs' and shells' trajectories, and later, to calculate theoretical atomic explosions. The second, the internet, is a technology original to the United States' military-industrial complex's desire to resiliently communicate during a nuclear war. Both have outgrown their original 'military purposes', you think, or have they? My own country is part of the Five Eyes alliance of intelligence sharing, a sovereignty-busting agreement for mutual spying, which adapts completely civilian functions—social networks, phone conversations—for security and surveillance ends. The technologies of networked computing seem to lend themselves to aggressive adaptation, used by bad-faith actors to recruit, disinform, confuse, incite. Nobody in 2020 can still maintain that technologies like Facebook and Twitter have entirely civilian, benign functions. At the time of writing, most bafflingly of all, the Tik Tok video app used by teenagers seems to be under a cloud of suspicion as a vector for Chinese spying.

As a citizen, I'm glad that Mr Bankowski wasn't allowed to import his KS-30; those kinds of so-obviously destructive machines have no place in any kind of society I'd want to live in. That's a political consensus in Australia, though, not a functional one, inherent to the device; it was confirmed in 1996. We mitigate the violent purpose, by restricting and regulating its potential machines, whatever they are. And if we can do that for the most grossly offensive and dangerous machines, like self-loading rifles, the possibility exists that we can do it to other machines, and other systems: the Americans right now are looking at their militarised, hypermacho Police forces in exactly this way. What other machines might we decide, as a community, to turn into ploughshares?

Alice Spawls, LRB, At The Type Archive:

Part of what makes the Type Archive unusual is that it has machines and tools from every stage of the process: those that were owned by Monotype and those owned by the printers who used its system. One room contains the original patterns (metal templates) for different typefaces, the giant machines used for pressing the punches and the pantographs that reduce the size of the template to the desired point or pica. (The floors were long ago reinforced for the animals the building once accommodated, so can bear these many-tonned iron beasts.)

Matt Castle, Damn Interesting, Chronicles of Charnia:

Like Mason, Tina realised the frond’s potential significance, and decided she should ask someone in authority. Her parents were supportive, but lacked geological expertise or convenient contacts at local proto-universities. So she mentioned the strange “fern” to her geography teacher at school the next day.

“There are no fossils in Precambrian rocks!” was the teacher’s reply. Tina said she was aware of this; indeed, that was why the find was so perplexing. “Then they are not Precambrian rocks,” her teacher shot back, closing down the discussion.