Her coffee had gone cold.
She noticed she had received a company communication.
There was no time now.
The shift had started.
…
Ruthlessly protect your scheduled time.
…
Her shift carried on without any issues.
She preferred the days when there were no interruptions.
The work was not difficult but there was a lot to manage and administrate.
The traffic was slower today and extended long past its pre-scheduled duration.
Technically, it did not count as overtime.
The shift is the shift.
It doesn’t matter how long it takes.
Evening traffic must be catered for at all times, as per requirements.
…
Finally the traffic tapered off.
She reheated her coffee and her uneaten meal.
She browsed aimlessly through the communications and bulletins from the day.
It was getting late.
She finished the end of her meal, and cleaned away the dish.
Clutter is distracting for the mind.
If your physical space is chaotic it might be a sign that your inner space is out of balance too.
Balance and order were everything.
…
She went back to her station.
There were only two communications left unread: her performance review, and her overtime quota for the evening.
She hesitated.
The communication earlier had made her anxious.
She hovered over the performance review.
Instead, she opened her overtime quota.
…
Two additional shifts.
Her evening excursion suspended for the night, she opened her review.
No simulcast.
A long list of graphs and stats.
Her eyes glazed over.
She stood up, opened the window to let in the cool air from outside.
From her initial glance, she knew it wasn’t good news.
At least it was not bad news either.
She hadn’t been reassigned.
She walked back towards her station and read the review.
She scrolled to the end to absorb the feedback.
We must continually experiment and sample to develop and cultivate our Content.
It can be tempting and certainly easier to ‘turn the crank’ on problems that we know how to solve, but ultimately this will result in Content that becomes stale and boring.
Creativity is key in these uncertain times.
Try to dig a bit deeper and understand the value that your traffic cares for.
Surely with these improvements and the deployment of new protocols we can overcome these inadequacies?
…
She would have to re-evaluate her approach.
The new protocols they had devised were outlined at the end of the report. With these at least she could revise her approach.
The Content needed something more.
She continued to read the recommendations.
…
The night set in.
The notification sounded for her overtime.
She stared at her station for a moment.
She went back to her work.
9
Fatberg and the Sinkholes: A Report on the Findings of a Journey into the United Regions of England by PostRational
Dan Gavshon Brady and James Pockson
CONTENTS
Foreword
Objectives and Methodology
Prototypical Hypothesis
Absorbism
The Infrastructural
The Architectural
The Personal
Return from the URE
Fatberg
(NOUN)
A congealed lump of fat, sanitary items, wet wipes, and similar items found in sewer systems, which do not break down like toilet paper. Such deposits are officially referred to using this term by authorities at Thames Water in London, UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatberg
Sinkhole
(NOUN)
A depression or hole in the ground caused by some form of collapse of the surface layer. Most are caused by karst processes – for example, the chemical dissolution of carbonate rocks or suffosion processes. Sinkholes vary in size from 1 to 600 metres (3.3 to 2,000 feet) both in diameter and depth, and vary in form from soil-lined bowls to bedrock-edged chasms. Sinkholes may form gradually or suddenly, and are found worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinkhole
Figure 9.1 Nodal schematic of the United Regions of England (illustration: Mike Lim)
FOREWORD
To the United Regions of England
Things are going well in London. Productivity and the economy are booming. Disrupt, capitalise, optimise, repeat. The decimal of time is moving left and the decimal of profit is headed right.
Could things be any better in the great city? Yes. In the city we are always improving, cutting the fat, but no one would have expected the fat to cut itself! When the English regions voted London out, the ground shook, but what we thought was the end actually fomented a new beginning. Indeed, we have thrived on city state status, with the rest of the country lagging out our bandwidth no more. Now, it’s London and it’s the United Regions of England (URE).
For London, Labour, Imports, Commerce, Finance and Politics had been a largely extra-GB phenomenon for nearly two centuries. From our perspective the metropolis was so large and globally oriented that it was effectively self-sufficient in national terms. Where did that leave the rest of us?
Dave, 31, political editor, North Eastern Herald. Has always believed in another way. Northumberland is his paradise. Where he feels truly at peace.
-PR-
There was always a disparity between London’s absolute economic dominance and its relative lack of political influence.
Set adrift, we were politically and economically unencumbered.
In London we were happy with the split: there was very little we had to do with the rest of the country beyond the quaint or the nostalgic.
Our predictions and analysis for the new United Regions of England became increasingly inaccurate, however. What was going on there?
Certainly, stagnation was obvious.
Growth had ceased; and yet, the URE still functioned.
What in the name of Keynes is going on out there!? I want to know. NOW!
Morduch, 72, CEO, Cloudnet, (London). Hates losers. Has only ever lost once. Hated it.
Why should you care?
Proximity is critical. London may have separated from the URE but you can’t do much about geography.
What is going on next door could either be a threat or an opportunity. To ignore the URE could render us defunct – or, worse, irrelevant. That is why you should care.
-PR-
Enclosed in the pages of this report is the PostRational perspective on the developing divergent economic system for the United Regions of England.
Welcome to the URE
Welcome to Absorbism
Objectives and Methodology
Why?
Because it was stagnation like we’d never seen: capital accumulation flatlines but social mobility continues to rise.
It became clear to us at PostRational that an analysis of capital flow in the URE was not appropriate to understand the new Zeitgeist. We could not observe from a distance any more; we were compelled to journey into the world beyond M25.
What?
This report documents what we saw beyond the city limits.
This report is for you, the time-pressed reader, to discover the world that we saw too.
We do not pretend that it is exhaustive – nor do we proclaim to be right.
But we went on the journey, and Absorbism is what we saw.
When?
Last year, lasting five weeks
(two in-field, two in deep mental analysis, one writing)
Where?
The United Regions of England!
How?
We designed a bespoke approach to mirror the significance of what was going on:
A mixed-methodology plan of attack, combining the anecdotal, the observational, the metaneural and the analytical. In order to glean the sharpest responses we prioritised extreme users, experts and cultural clairvoyants to form the most forward-thinking and future-proofed assessment. We applied cutting-edge, cross-cultural technological techniques to find the spaces in between the stories.1 You might even wish to work with PostRational to discover more.
•12 x F2F expert interviews with regional leaders and cultural instigators (including travel)
•6 x cultural assimilation workshops with mixed demographic and psychographic make-up
•4 x urban safaris
•4 x suburban and rural safaris
•4 x ethnographic sit-ins and digital ethnographic sit-ins
•2 x immersive experiencing excursions
•A multifaceted environmental design audit
•Infrastructural forensics mapping
•Interactivity swabbing
We had to go to the orbitals’ other bank to see for ourselves. Places like Wookey Hole, places like Stoke, places like Yeovil and Chipping Ogden.
Jake, 24, PR researcher. Likes to see beyond the surface. Bachelor in microeconomics. Misses 35mm film.
Prototypical Hypothesis
The modern world has always prioritised growth, with extraordinary results.
First, the Industrial Revolution facilitated this, from mass production to global expansion. Then the twentieth-century marketing revolution saw mass consumption from mass desire and fierce competition through brands. More recently, the internet revolution of the early twenty-first century created growth via value-extractive platforms. New opportunities arose as more and more people could acquire new value from one another. Seamlessly. Unthinkingly.
Or at least we thought so. These periods are posited as great paradigm shifts, but, in fact, they weren’t revolutions at all. Simply put, each acted as an accelerant and megaphone for its predecessor.
Social revolution Growth typology Suburban impact
Industrial >>> Productivity >>> Exhaustion
Marketing >>> Competition >>> Inequality
Internet >>> Optimisation >>> Suffocation
What appeared different was actually just quicker, slicker and more single-minded. It created incredibly powerful networks, and fragile individuals. This is our hypothesis.
1. London’s insatiable capacity for growth pushed against the constraints of the system
Growth didn’t come from creating new value or higher standards, but from optimisation: becoming so efficient as to be invisible. ‘Seamless’ growth had implications for the physical, real world, where things still have to be made and exist. London was anything but invisible. It was consuming everything, exhausting supplies and pushing surplus to unseen places. Blockages grew in the system, creating ruptures, with the result that something had to give.
2. London was kicked out, and the URE was formed, as a reaction to its insatiability
London, the blocked fatberg, burst through. To put it more accurately, it was expelled as a separate entity, seen as the root of the problem – the blockage in the drain. No city in the newly formed URE stepped up to take up London’s hegemonic mantle. This wasn’t the consequence of regulation, as we first thought. Equity arose from mutual consideration and cooperation between regions – the new direction of the URE.
3. The URE has set out, driven by necessity and opportunity, to do things differently
This new path marks a move from the quantitative to the qualitative, the immaterial and imperceptible to the tangible and weighty. It has also retained a sense of the symbolic. The URE has taken the first steps to an alternative mindset for governance and exchange. This mindset is a new relational dynamic, predicated not on growth but on the ability to withstand shocks.
In short, we think this
A new economy, the product of a network-diverse hyper-localism, is emerging in the URE. We have called it Absorbism.
Welcome to Absorbism
In a world of perpetual optimisation, the margins for value creation and extraction become increasingly, imperceptibly small, and the physical ceases to matter. In this space, we become more attuned to the projection of reality on the screen than reality itself. Big changes happen without being seen. Hardness and spikiness disappears from view: the literal corners from your iPhone are softened, controversial urban developments disappear into a background of average, uncontroversial design… A totality of smoothness, impossible to get a grip on. I had to get out.
Su, 45, sociable theorist. URE newcomer/London
Defector, (lives mostly in a van). Loves to rock-climb. Is terrified of an average existence. Hoping to scale every significant peak before she dies.
Absorbism
AN INTRODUCTION
The URE is not working in the service of London, is not bound by its philosophy and is averse to new super-city hegemony. The absence of London created fertile grounds for something different.
Serving London’s insatiable economic appetite for growth left the rest of the URE exhausted, unequal and suffocated. In such a weakened state, the URE was incredibly vulnerable, due to the decades-long impact of systematic industrial closure, of a low-cost globalised workforce and of London-centric infrastructural investment.
Without London, the URE has taken action to counter such historical vulnerability with a mindset that grew from an interest in resilience, not growth.
Absorbism (n)
A system of social organisation in which all members (at individual, community and regional level) are able to withstand shock through the quality of relationships they form with each other. This is facilitated through:
new communality that blurs boundaries between public and private space;
new regionalism that is founded on local identity, external curiosity and non-utilitarian exchange;
new openness that creates multiple formal and informal relationships between members in a spirit of non-competitive discovery and celebration;
new drivers of status that are less concerned with what you have, and more with how you do it.
Absorbism, Wrung Out…
Conventionally, the more people use a network, the stronger the network becomes.
Here, the more a member uses a network, the stronger the member becomes.
The strength of the network is immaterial. What matters is the formation of bonds that are free from hierarchy or the burden of financial return. The URE appears to operate on a system of exchanges between members, in which the point is not what-ness (the thing you are exchanging) but we-ness (the process of exchanging with each other). These could be about trading goods together, exchanging knowledge, sharing stories, or embarking on joint missions of discovery, salvage and reconnaissance. Members thrive on creating bonds and relationships with each other, almost for the sake of it.
What Exchanges Are All About
Not But
Efficiency Redundancies
Things People
Competition Transparency
To get a young person’s perspective on the networks in the community and beyond, we spoke to Rahul, an 18-year-old school leaver about to embark on a two-year research trip with his friends. He said that there wasn’t any great designed intent between communities and regions, but then described something that sounded an awful lot like that to us.
Yeah, I don’t know what you mean by networks. Like, a phone has a network, not people. We just click, whether you’re North, North-West, South – everyone’s got a story, everyone is capable of something cool.”
Rahul, 18, student, South Wales. Loves his mates. Loves his home town. Scared of swimming.
Components of exchange in the new regionalism
Redund
ancies of exchange
This has some of the qualities of an old alliance system in which members have abundant (even surplus?) places to turn to when seeking benefit (rather than having everything angled towards London).
Exchanges with people
People and places enjoy talking to each other, sharing ideas with each other and arguing with each other. Whereas London has extremely successfully designed lived experience to be an exercise in individual decisions and choices, the URE lived experience has shifted the centre of decision-making to multiple parties from multiple regions at the same time.
Exchanges of transparency
This has the hallmarks of genuine compatibility and collaboration between members, since there is no explicit goal of winning the exchange.
In other words: relationships through trade > trade through relationships
This new regionalism is mediated through the infrastructural ombudsmen, who exist solely to ensure that diverse relationships grow and decisions are made through them. They are, in effect, facilitators of high-quality exchange.
Absorbism is an emergent theory; capitalism is an angsty teenager, by comparison. To support the model we will describe what we saw on the ground. We will catapult you headlong through three chosen scales:
the infrastructural
the architectural
the personal
The Infrastructural
OPTIMISE, ATOMISE, BURN OUT
The United Kingdom, prior to the split, was the most centralised Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country in the world. Much research from both the left and the right argued that greater devolution and distribution amongst the regions could lead to a much more stable society.
As the focus on optimisation grew, however, driven by the rampant expansion and elevation of London-centred financial and technological institutions, little was actually done to effectively counter the ever-growing weight of the capital city.
Economic Science Fictions Page 16