The Nobility

Before we get into this I'd like to draw people's attention to the fact that:

1) The Black Lives Matter protests are still ongoing and will continue to do so until real results have been achieved that aren't simple corporate and governmental virtue signalling, and

2) Unmarked federal agents in military kit are literally snatching people off the streets in various places in the US with no justification and no guarantee of freedom or fair treatment.

Stay involved, stay informed.

Now, to business.

I'm going to open with this screenshot of Rishi Sunak, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, espousing some of his virtue.

Specifically I am going to point out this particular sentence.

And where's the harm in that, one might think? The nobility of work. Everyone loves a bit of hard work, right? It's noble to go in and put in your however many hours. You go in, you do your time, you shed your sweat, you get your pay, you go home, and you feel proud over nobly doing your duty.

Nobility. An interesting choice of words.

I've talked about work ethic before, and it relates to this - that there is a universally accepted ethically good attitude towards work, and how I am a bit of a hypocrite for having a work ethic but also having the thoughts we're going to discuss.

See, there's this... thing about work. As in both the concept of employment, and also the notion of undertaking physical labour. There's a thing about it being above reproach, about the notion of working being total and universal, and about how hard work is the be-all and end-all of human existence. It's a uniquely Conservative worldview.

Who here remembers this song from Dumbo?

Still not sold on how deeply this notion is embedded in our culture? How many stories do we get told by our older family members about how hard they used to have it, and how that was better for whatever reason? It's like the suffering brought about by worse conditions has a virtue applied to it. Imagine the attitudes of your older friends or relatives when they talk about people on benefits or receiving governmental help or charity, who haven't worked for it, who are expecting "something for nothing".

Ah but I get ahead of myself. First, let me delve back in time. WAY back.

Ever since we've had social groups and individuals in those social groups capable of performing different tasks, division of labour has existed. It's a very basic concept - someone has to go and stab the mammoth, someone has to stay home and watch the kids. The alternative is just not worth any numerical advantage it might offer, as any parent that has had to take their kids shopping when they're in a bad mood can tell you.

As social groups grew, as our tools got better, as we started to shift away from hunter-gatherer existence to arable and pastoral existence some 11,000 years ago, it became clear that less time needed to be spent stabbing the aforementioned mammoth. It took less effort to nurture the crops, guard them and prepare them for eating, than it did to go and bring the food home. So there was time to do other things. There was time for leisure, to have more children, to raise and teach them, to make things that weren't strictly needed for survival, such as art and music. We had, by dint of our growing brain pans and our tool use, earned free time.

We had also earned mercy. Margaret Mead - cultural anthropologist of renown - pointed out that, in her eyes, the beginning of actual civilization was a 15,000 year old human femur that had broken and healed. That broken femur was a concrete example of humans helping someone else without immediate reward, someone that couldn't care for themselves. This would have been even easier once crops became widespread. If one isn't constantly chasing one's next meal, one has time to recover from an injury that could easily prevent them from catching that meal and starving to death.

In truth, we owe as much of who we are as a species to the fact that we had time to NOT work for our survival than the things that we did TO survive.

And then along comes...

That's it, hierarchy. Or, specifically illustrated here, The Divine Right Of Kings.

The moment that we start having people in charge, people who lead and have others that follow - we see resource start to trickle upwards. The leader gets the biggest hut, in the most basic example - does he go out and get the mud and sticks himself? Probably not. Does he take from a mutually gathered pool of mud and sticks? Probably. Does that mean he gains more from the labours of others than they do? Definitely. (Is he definitely a he? You didn't even notice I was doing that, did you? Question everything, my friends!)

Humans have a base minimum resource need to exist. If you have eight humans, and one of them doesn't want to put in the work to meet that resource need, that human needs to convince the other seven that they need to do more than THEY need to as a minimum - so that the one can benefit from the excess. And if that human also wants a big hut, well, then you have to convince them to do even more work. Just hope that nobody notices that they work that much harder each day and have less to show for it.

Thus, we come across the origin of selling work as a noble virtue. Peep a couple of these bible quotes.

So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him? (Ecclesiastes 3:22)

Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense. (Proverbs 12:11) 

And remain in the same house, eating and drinking what they provide, for the laborer deserves his wages. Do not go from house to house. (Luke 10:7)

And I believe we have all heard variations on the phrase, the devil makes work for idle hands, which is believed to have originated in a letter sent in the 4th century by the theologian Jerome: Do something, so that the Devil may always find you busy.

Having actual slaves, actual indentured people who are literally forced to perform labour for a leader (or collective of leaders), was a practice so common that I barely need to touch on it. It's a practice that continues today, even right now as we speak, though it is dressed up as prison labour. That said, one can't have an entire population that are literally enslaved - one needs a significant percentage of their people to not believe they need to be freed, so it is good for them to see that the key to a good life is to put in work, all day, every day, under the circumstances provided.

Oh hi, Feudalism. A big old pyramid scheme, with the king at the top, the nobility in the middle, and the peasant class at the bottom. There's your nobility of work.

Oh hi, Victorian workhouses.

Springing up in the 17th century as a means of providing something for poor people without upsetting the pockets of not-poor people, the workhouse was where you went if you didn't have any money. Because it is a sin to offer a hand of help to people that aren't making themselves useful.

Herein we find where this ethic becomes useful: because if you lionise the worker, and you enshrine as holy the notion that one has to work for their supper (even while those higher in society don't do so), then you can very easily adjust your thinking into believing that those that do not - or cannot - work, don't deserve any help. It allows one to demonise the concept of "something for nothing". Describing monetary or fiscal assistance to those of the lower classes as "handouts", while describing such a thing to businesses as "stimulus".

It is a weapon that can be aimed at any number of individuals that certain more conservative states might decide need to be the enemy of the day. Refugees, for example. Immigrants. Local disenfranchised populations. Teenagers. Protesters. The homeless. So on. Also, it is used to dismiss individuals who are opposed to being charged for things they feel they should not be charged for, for whatever reason. Tuition fees in the United States are a good example; most arguments that they should be forgiven or eased are met with some derivative of "you can't have something for nothing", often accompanied by a "back in my day". The word Scrounger gets used a lot, too, as a pejorative. This specific point of view can get shored up very easily by television programmes that demonise and villainise those who rely on benefits or external support - just one wing of the Right Wing Propaganda Block of programming that goes out daily on British TV.

What we can also do, at this point, is we can imply that it is only through hard work that one can gain wealth - and thus by the simple facts already established, we arrive at wealth being a virtue in and of itself, which makes it even easier to demonise those that don't have any. You're seen as a better person if you have plenty of cash, because it is implied that you worked for it, which is an inherently good thing to do. If you don't have cash, you are seen as a worse person, because you obviously haven't worked.

Let alone the hundreds, nay, thousands of reasons why effort put in doesn't equal reward gained - or the hundreds, nay, thousands of reasons why one can work hard and put in their virtuous noble labour and still end up bankrupt and homeless. If one is poor, if one is having difficulties, they can just work their way out of it - even if they can't. To the purveyors of this particular mindset, every problem that a person has should be overcome by them "just working harder".

That is the narrative. Right there. We justify our existence through our work, so those who do not or cannot can be dismissed, and so we do not have to provide assistance for anyone. We reject and deny and condemn those who want or expect "something for nothing", because everyone has to work, everyone has to contribute, and pay no attention to those carving off massive shares of what profits we make to keep themselves comfortable.

Except that phrase I keep using. Something For Nothing.

That concept is treated as a closed system, totally independent of any other factor. That this individual, regardless of their personal circumstances, wants - and perhaps expects - to receive some kind of benefit, for no effort or repayment. That's how it is phrased, and most people who will use the term in the context of wanting to deny others any kind of help or support will mean it that way.

This of course ignores how these benefits or fiscal forgivenesses are funded, and that is through tax - billions and billions of pounds worth of tax every year. This tax is used on a wide, wide variety of things - but it includes such things as benefits. Your tax money isn't ring-fenced; road tax on vehicles isn't solely used for maintenance of highways, National Insurance contributions aren't solely used for the NHS. It all goes into one single large fund, which is used to pay for everything that society needs - or so the plan goes.

So if you have had a job for a long time, and lived in a local council, and have bought things in local shops, and have a car that you drive, then you have paid a lot of tax; and if you are unable to work for a period of time, that means that, if you ask for some fiscal support to not - you know - starve, then you have already contributed to the fund that would actually support you.

What about someone who comes to this country from somewhere else? A refugee for example? They haven't done any work. Thus, if they expect any help, they are asking for Something For Nothing! They can't have it, because they haven't worked, and work is good, and work is noble, and not working isn't noble! (Or at least, so we would be led to believe.)

Well here's the thing; the third highest contributing tax to the national income is Value Added Tax, which is applied to the sales of damn near everything.

I have probably discussed this before, but just living in this country, even if you are having your housing provided by the state, means you still contribute to the economy - multiple times over. You walk into a shop and buy a £2 bottle of fruit juice - 40p of that goes straight to the treasury, and the profit the shop has made on the fruit juice is added to their total profits, which also get taxed as corporation tax. The people that made the juice? Yep, they pay taxes on their profits too, as do the people that made the bottles, the labels, and everyone else. Turns out that just about everyone pays tax, if they don't subsist on lichen and sunlight.

Even if they were given that £2 by the government - the government gets so much of it back so quickly that the actual cost to the government is so much less than the actual sum of money handed over. Anything that doesn't end up back in the tax coffers either goes into bank savings - which thanks to the eighties can be gambled on the stock market, for good or ill - or cycled through an endless churn of businesses that ends up stoking the economy as a whole.

But none of that matters, of course; because work as a virtue - and thus wealth as a virtue - is an ideology, projected into the world by those that have the money, and picked up by those that want the money and to not feel guilty about it. Be good, be obedient. Do your work. Make the money for the owners. That makes you a good person. This educational film will show you why.

The constant march of work-worship has its costs, of course. The arts suffer constantly, due to their not being seen as worthwhile unless one can make a profit from them. Even actual documented evidence that shows that working a four-day week improves productivity by 40% - more than accounting for the extra day workers don't spend at their desks - gets roundly rubbished and ignored.

So when Rishi Sunak says he believes he believes in the nobility of work, he is echoing something that his fellow Conservative politician Iain Duncan-Smith said, which is: Work makes you free.

Right.

Even if it can be proved that an objectively kinder, objectively more merciful system and methodology is actually better for the economy and the individual alike - while people that believe in the "nobility of work" are in charge, it is not something we shall ever see.

Remember: Rishi Sunak and Iain Duncan Smith alike both voted to end free school meals for children, despite their own meals being paid for by the taxpayer.

Just something to think about.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Butts In Seats

I know I tread this ground quite a lot, but - I'm ill. I have various conditions that make doing things difficult or impossible. I feel like I talk about it often, but like, it's literally my life, so - my apologies. If me talking about my chronic illness is liable to upset you, feel free to check this out - it's a blog I did on Secret of Mana and video games in general.

It means that some days, my mobility is terrible, and getting out of the house is nigh on impossible. Can't usually predict which one of those days I am going to have, either; though sometimes I will wake up and the lack of mobility is obvious. Like, if you told me that there was a fifty pound note on the other side of my bedroom - there's days (and more of them than I'd like, like several a month) wherein I would probably have to just leave it there.

One of the downsides of this is that, well, doing stuff that isn't work becomes difficult. If I can't get out of the house, doing EVERYTHING becomes difficult; and even on a good day I have to be aware of energy levels, of how much what I am about to do will hurt after an hour, two hours, half a day.

This sucks, because I like doing things. Especially watching movies in the cinema.

I mean, you know I like them movies. I talk about them often enough. I do wish I could catch every release - there's so many movies in the past five years that I just haven't been able to see when they came out, so I've had to wait until they get a home or streaming release.

Or something.

It isn't even just those days wherein I can barely make it to the bathroom. At the end of a work day, I just don't have the energy to do much aside from get home again. It sucks. That's a big chunk of hours that are basically not usable for anything specific. After a decent week's work the weekend is kind of a waste; I spend most of it willing my joints to operate properly again, and that's all before the actual physical work of getting to the movies and being able to sit in a cinema seat for three hours without the subsequent pain and discomfort fucking the movie up.

So yeah. I missed a bunch.

More than a few of those movies, I wasn't too hard-bitten about. Like. Midway? I already know how that ends. Turned out to be a great film when I finally got to watch it, but there's nothing to ruin there, nothing to give away.

Sure, I know people are annoyed about spoiler culture and anti spoiler culture, but this is one of the big ones.

I really enjoy the new Star Wars movies; and thus, I was hyped to watch Rise Of Skywalker when it came out.

Except I didn't get to.

I spent Christmas basically crippled. I couldn't get out of the house; my knee literally wouldn't support my weight, and I had a chest infection that felt like I was dying slowly. It was pretty killer. Not much fun to be had. No opportunities came up to catch it. The few days I made it into work or was fit enough to walk around and do things while it was out, I got the things done I had to, and that was it. I was wiped out for the day. Sometimes barely even that - at one point I almost didn't make it home.

So I never saw it. It slipped out of movie theatres. I was still ill. Then I start pulling myself back together again, and then along comes pandemic season and everything is fucked again.

Not to mention the arthritis having another shot at me as the stay-at-home orders were signed, but that's another story.

The point is that there were certain large plot points in the movie that, after a certain point, just got talked about in public or hinted at strongly enough that anyone could piece them together. I don't want to crucify people that give out spoilers, but at the same time - I'm really hoping that the movie can tell me the story, rather than someone obliquely referring to a bit of it and outing that chunk so that when it comes along when I DO watch it, I just go "oh yeah that's what happens now".

I'm pretty sure that the crew that made the movie are a better storyteller than "angry man in front of greenscreen on youtube".

But that's just the way it is, right? You can't catch the movie when it comes out, then - well, get fucked, right? "It's been [arbitrary amount of time], you should have seen it already if you care so much about it," is often a defence for spoiler-friendly folks. Which. You know. Whatever. Perhaps there's a reason that a person hasn't seen a movie yet. Like, you know.

Imagine me gesturing at my body in general.

Just the way it is, though - but does it have to be?

Well, Universal didn't think so.

Yeah, see I'm not a fan of the franchise, BUT...

So one thing that is coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic is many wings of society are accidentally revealing that they can actually be more accessible than they currently are. The sheer amount of businesses that have made the shock discovery that many of their employees can actually work from home is astounding. Businesses providing contact-free or kerbside delivery. Sure, it's all being done in a very bootstrappy fashion and because there's no other option, but - for some of their consumers and employees, there already was no other option.

It seems that the movie market has caught on, too, because Universal decided that Trolls World Tour should be released on rental on-demand at the same time as its US cinematic release, seeing as the world was trying to stay indoors as much as possible. It isn't just Trolls either - several of their other releases saw a similar plan. It isn't a new idea, either; the Chinese cinema industry took several similar measures two months prior, allowing a bunch of movies to be released day-and-date at the same time in both theatres and at home. It also isn't the first time Universal has done this - it did the same thing with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

They aren't the only business cashing in on the pandemic, either deliberately or accident of timing. Disney+ and Netflix have both had significant gains, and Disney+ has engaged directly in pandemic advertising; and lets face it, Animal Crossing came out at exactly the right time to get half the gaming world hooked just when they can't go to work.

Well - the Trolls thing seemed to work. It took $40 million in its opening weekend, in the onset of a pandemic. Sure, that doesn't cover the cost of production, but that is an opening weekend when people literally aren't allowed to go outside and cinemas are literally closed.

Like, that isn't shabby.

And nothing quite shows that you have succeeded at doing something that vaguely disrupts the status quo than...

The full article is here.

Of course there will be kickback. The model has worked this way for a long, LONG time, and people don't want to have to adjust to a different model - or a deviation from the current model. Just keep pouring the money in our pockets! Why do you have to make us think about things!? Just pay us and shut up!

The relevant section:

“This policy is not aimed solely at Universal out of pique or to be punitive in any way, it also extends to any movie maker who unilaterally abandons current windowing practices absent good faith negotiations between us, so that they as distributor and we as exhibitor both benefit and neither are hurt from such changes,” AMC chairman Adam Aron write in the letter. “Currently, with the press comment today, Universal is the only studio contemplating a wholesale change to the status quo. Hence, this immediate communication in response.”

Now... here's the thing.

When I was sat at home the entire time my knee was busted, I wasn't putting any money in the pockets of either my local cinema (which isn't a chain, it's mostly indie) OR Lucasfilm/Disney. It just wasn't happening, because I couldn't go to the movies, and I couldn't make the choice to pay on demand.

You know how free-market plebs often say that the market responds to demand? Well, it seems that Universal did that, without asking nicely; which is kind of a dick move, but at the same time, it showed that it can be done - and showed that it can rake in funds.

If the cinema chains are clever, and careful, then they can get a slice of the pie that companies like Universal are going to bake. If people act in good faith then this could be good for all of us, because I know that there is demand for such a service. From people like me, for one.

And there's so much cross-marketing that could be going on via the medium of a website. You want to watch a movie on release day? You click through to your local cinema, and from there, to their on-demand one-viewing rental website. You pay for a midnight viewing, which becomes available immediately after midnight. There could be reviews available, professional and user-based. A magazine section, to check out upcoming releases and read articles about the industry. Adverts for local food delivery places, that offer a slight discount on a click-through, as a partnership promotion. Synchronised viewing links so you can watch a movie at the same time as someone else, or "Viewing Rooms" like Twitch.

People have more and more complicated media setups at home; huge TVs, PCs and laptops with incredible screen resolutions and headsets with vast fidelity. I know it isn't the same as a big screen, but you know how it's better? You don't have to view it from the bottom corner, and you don't have to deal with that mob of teenagers throwing popcorn and being obnoxious, and the only person you need to move for is you. And even if they don't - Jesus Christ, I just want to see the movie. Don't give me shit because I can't afford a 4K TV. We've managed to watch films on VHS before the heady days of DVD and BluRay, I daresay I can enjoy one on a cheap laptop.

Imagine how good that could be. Imagine how good it would be, right now, to be able to have that, in this time when we have to stay inside; now imagine that all the time, for the people that find going to the movies difficult or impossible for whatever reason. Imagine having that available to you, and knowing that the money you pay for the viewing is going back to the industry, paying those that made the film you are watching. Knowing that if you stream Movie A, that it will be counted as the take for Movie A for the opening weekend, to prove that it performed better than Movie B.

Of course there's a million and one reasons it won't happen; and there's even more reasons why, if it happens, it will fuck someone over. We can't ever have a thing just work out. At a guess, if it does become an industry practice, then the cinema chains are going to suffer a lot for it and will start having to tighten their belts, which will lead to talk of the death of cinema - and who knows, from there?

And that's the sad, shit thing. With every potential innovation, with every method of making life easier or better, comes the innevitable question:

How will Capitalism make it awful?

People ask me why I'm a cynic.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

NaNoWriMo Thoughts - I'm The Bad Guy, Duh

Villains!

Now I bet we have some villain fans in here, right? I know we do. The kind of people that want a plush Scar, or who argue that the Empire did nothing wrong (which I used to do a lot), or who just really, really like Loki.

Now I have talked about villains before, in this blog post over here. In which I talk about my seven favourite villains, actually. Today though, I'm going to talk about the kind that actually features in my NaNoWriMo novel - and some other kinds.

We all want to make the villain memorable, right?

Like who could forget this guy? Who... is ultimately only in this movie like THIS for five minutes and then becomes a big glowing orange eye on top of a tower?

The thing is - you take one look at this dude and you know what he's about. He's just evil. He's a big old nasty bastard and he likes to stab people and hurt people and his goal is to rule everything and so on and so on. And in the books, that gets achieved by a lot of exposition, but you get the impression that he's just absolutely malevolent.

And wants to control everything, because, you know. That's the story Tolkien is telling you. When Aragorn is made king again (spoilers) that's fine, because he kind of didn't want to for most of the story, but now he is king, and everyone is just cool with him being king because he probably won't chop down millions of trees and hyper-industrialise his medieval fantasy realm.

He's fallible, too. Sauron screws up on many occasions. Like he literally gets his ass merked because he didn't think a couple steps ahead and was, basically, arrogant. Of course nothing can escape his sight - his direct-line sight - across a broken and buckled volcanic landscape filled with faults and rocks and basically god's gift to stealth-game mechanics.

Arrogance is key.

You know who else is arrogant as all hell?

That's right, King Grape over here.

He was an asshole but I loved seeing him on screen. Walking around and doing shit and just being fucking evil. I loved watching him fight. I liked hearing him talk. Because he was unequivocally wrong but wouldn't back down on that fact in any way. Even when he gets himself killed - both times - neither time is he sat there going, oh shit, I did the wrong thing. Nah. He just knows his work is over, and he hates it.

He has that fantastic monologue at the beginning of the movie where he talks about failure - where he talks about the moment wherein you know you aren't going to succeed - and then never addresses the possibility ever again. Because he can't conceive of failure. Which in the end proves to be his undoing, because he bum-rushes into a situation that he thinks he can totally dominate and at no point considers retreat, even while doubling down on his absolutely lunatic plan of blapping half the universe (by threatening to blap the entire universe).

Memorable, right? You know what he wants. He establishes himself early. He's relevant to now because there's actual people espousing genocidal views gently while saying that it is logically speaking the best thing to do. Just like how in Tolkien's day there were plenty of men swaggering about demanding total control over everything, regardless of who it might benefit.

Who is this?

You would be forgiven for not knowing. She is from Bright. Her name is Leilah. She wants... uh...

...yeah I can't remember. I think she does magic or something. But if you didn't know I could make up any number of stories about how she's from the Blade TV series, or that she's a character from True Blood, or something.

The thing is, she's also a part of the story that Bright was trying to tell. I hated it, but it had a story, and it kinda told it. And she was part of it - and she was (as I recall) part of the Elves Are Actually Evil sub-genre, which is one of my favourites.

My NaNo story, the one I am writing, is about three things primarily.

1. Working out who you really are is important, and sometimes requires changes in your life.
2. Sometimes people will try and control you. Don't let them.
3. Capitalism ruins everything cool and empowers monsters.

That requires another, quite specific kind of villain.

That's right. BURKE CARTER J BABY

Or at least... he is similar to my antagonist in several ways. Specifically, with the arrogance - knowing full well that he won't get caught, even up to the point that he does get caught. Even when he has a gun stuck in his face, and is being told that he's going to be executed, he's unapologetic - he's just spinning words to get people to not shoot him. Because he can still get away with this. He can still have traded all 157 of those colonists away for a huge, huge profit, and handing the biggest bioweapon ever over to Weyland-Yutani.

Because in a system wherein acquisition of power is directly connected to acquisition of wealth, and in a culture wherein possession of power is as much a part of ensuring that others don't have power over you as it is about having power over others - shit is encouraged.

If Burke had more influence, more power, then he would probably have gotten away with it. He'd have had more resources brought to bear, could move more subtly. Would have more pawns to sacrifice.

He's established from the very beginning, is present throughout. That's important, too. He becomes a presence. Even if he's only in the background, he's there, and he is inherently connected to events.

The antagonist in my book is a lot like Burke, in a few ways; but there's some ways in which he differs. The primary one is power. Another - Burke can come across as kind of likeable if you've never seen the movie before, but there's no way you like my antagonist. There's just... not much you can do about it, because he doesn't have to justify his actions to anyone. He just does what he wants and nobody can really tell him no.

That's where the arrogance comes from.

Nobody's ever told him he is wrong. What he says, goes - and he has a literal fortune and an entire market to back him up on it. So of course, his opinions are cast iron facts, and not opinions. Which can be kind of dangerous, when those opinions are things like:

"People don't change. They think they do. They want to believe they do. They do not. They remain who they are, be that for good or ill. That is who they are. That is who all of us are…"

And especially when your fortune comes from a company whose job it is to prevent poor people from living in a post-scarcity society.

Villains.

(Also if this guy had an actor I think it would be a great role for Jeff Bridges.)

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Gold Beneath The Ruins

I blogged, once upon a time, about how screwed up the infrastructure of my home town is, and why it doesn't necessarily get fixed. In doing so, I talked about how Beirut got rebuilt, and the fact that doing so was considered an investment by the company doing it.

A ruined city, torn apart by a civil war that nobody living in it really wanted, became an investment opportunity.

For a more recent example - if you somehow missed the fact that Halliburton, a company that the US vice-president of the time (Dick Cheney) headed for five years, was given the keys (and the cash) to rebuild Iraq following the 2003 invasion... here is a reminder

It's not just actual warfare or mass destruction that results in profits, either. No, there's other ways. Shorting shares, for example. If you don't know how that works, there's a good description here, but let me give an example:

You know the price of milk is going to tank (harhar) so you go to your mate Billy the Milkman and ask if you can have ten bottles. You promise you will give them back tomorrow, and maybe give him some money on top of that. So he gives you ten bottles of milk.

You then go and sell the milk for its current market price - and overnight, the price of milk crashes. You sold the milk for £1 a bottle, and now it only costs 50p a bottle in the shops. (I don't know what would cause this, just roll with it.)

So - you take the £10 you made from selling the milk that wasn't yours, you buy 10 bottles for Billy the Milkman for £5, you give the bottles back to him, and give him £1 for his trouble. £4 profit for you, for essentially doing very little indeed, with things that aren't even yours.

It's only the rather unique way the stock and share markets work that allow this to happen, obviously. The thing is, though - it also allows people who can directly make money from shorting, to be in the sphere of influence or friendship with the kind of people who can influence share prices.

Let's say you are mates with Sheila the Shop Owner. Have been for years, went to school together, you used to work for the shop once upon a time. So you have a means to, for a period, influence the price of milk. So you go to Billy the Milkman, and instead of borrowing ten bottles, you borrow ten thousand.

You sell the ten thousand bottles of milk for £1 each. The next day, the town wakes up and the Shop is selling milk for - let's be conservative - 80p a bottle. So you take the £10,000 you just made, and you spend £8,000 to buy back the ten thousand bottles. You give them back to Billy. You give Billy £200 for his trouble, you give Sheila £800 for her time, and you pocket a cool £1,000.

These two examples are grossly simplified, but I think they give an accurate depiction of how this whole thing works.

Of course, shorting and share-dealing isn't available to literally everyone. It's a level of brokerage that you require expertise to get into, expertise and money of your own - getting that expertise also requires money - it's a literal class barrier.

What is missing from the example above, however, is what it means to everyday people like you and me - and how that would be represented is simple:

To cover the shortfall from a 20% reduction in milk prices, Sheila the Shop Owner cuts staff wages and increases prices everywhere else.

So we have two kinds of people, here; the majority, who would suffer if share prices suddenly dropped because the costs of such losses would be pushed down the line to the average consumer - and the minority, who would stand to not only avoid suffering under such circumstances, but could also make a significant profit from everyone else's misery.

That's pretty gross. It's amoral, obviously. It's also a built-in function of the system as it stands.

Why is this relevant?

Well - there have been several reasons why a referendum on our membership with the European Union has been suggested in the past ten years, one of the first being that our then-Prime Minister David Cameron wished to garner the support of the eurosceptics within his party. Throughout Ed Milliband's tenure in charge of the Labour party, he was strongly opposed to a referendum on leaving, which of course made Cameron's position much more concrete. More anti-immigration rhetoric started to creep into the justifications around 2014. It wasn't until the years following that the movement really started to pick up steam, though.

It was formalised in late 2015 - and the very beginning of 2016 began the formal introduction of an EU directive that had been years in the making, a package of anti tax-avoidance measures. Just a coincidence, I'm sure. Definitely just an absolute coincidence, that the Economic and Financial Affairs Council reached agreement on the directive literally two days before the referendum was due to take place. Just... plain lucky, I suppose.

But is that enough? The government has been utterly baffled by how much this little exercise is going to cost us individually and as a nation, or at least, has made little effort to be transparent to the public about such costs. Going so far as to quash the release of internal reports detailing suggested emergency measures, for when we start running out of insulin and all of the ports are in gridlock. It should still be patently obvious that the cost is going to be significant. We're already suffering for it.

Meet Jacob Rees-Mogg.

I'm going to do my best to not make any jokes about this man. What I will stick to is how he is relevant to what I am talking about.

1. Rees-Mogg is one of the hard-line Brexiteers within the Conservative party - he has gone on record as saying that the EU is a "threat to British democracy", which is a delicious irony given our current unelected PM just shut down Parliament because he wanted to.
2. Up until July 2019, Rees-Mogg was an advisor in finance company Somerset Capital Management. He "stepped down" from his role when he was made Leader of the House of Commons. He still owns 15% of the company, mind. It took the protective measure of opening a branch in Dublin to fend off some of the damage the finance sector will suffer during Brexit, another irony.
3. Rees-Mogg's father, William Rees-Mogg, was a Baron when he died in 2012. He'd worked for the Times, the BBC, and described Rupert Murdoch as a thoroughly nice chap. One of the books that Rees-Mogg Senior co-wrote with James Dale Davidson (ardent supporter of right-wing news company Newsmax TV) was all about how to make money in a crisis, and it was literally titled, Blood In The Streets. It was released in 1987. Here's the cover.

"The time to buy is when blood is running in the streets."

And that is why Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson will happily prorogue Parliament to push this through. That is why he will do literally anything he can to maintain the majority of one that he currently enjoys. That is why he will sidestep and countermand any check or balance that would allow Parliament from stopping us from leaving the European Union by any means necessary.

Because people like him, and people like Jacob Rees-Mogg, are part of that minority that will be just fine when it all crashes down. Because people like them already know how they are going to profit from the collapse. Because people like them have probably already optioned shares in the companies that will be brought in to fix the nightmare that will follow.

They have prorogued parliament, they will see Brexit through, they will call an election in November, and then let the chips fall where they may. All the better if they aren't the ones in government when the costs really start being counted and people really start hurting - when people start dying - when the blood is running in the streets.

Then you can watch them slink off, one at a time, resigning or retiring or taking some family time. To go back to their investment portfolios and their overseas homes, to avoid the fallout of their work.

They'll still be able to profit from the gold beneath the ruins.

But yeah, sure, project fear, we'll be fine.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Where Monopolies End

Yep, it's that time of year again - I am doing National Novel Writing Month once more, and this time, we're going cyberpunk, baby.

This will form part of a series of blogs about my NaNo project and about writing in general, each looking at themes I am exploring or generally find neat or awful respectively.

Now, with cyberpunk, we find ourselves in the corporate future.

Take this shot from the set of the original Blade Runner:

See how well-lit everything is? And can you see any actual streetlights? It's all shining down from logos and neons.

This is a theme that gets heavily picked up in cyberpunk and scifi. Neal Stephenson, in 1992's Snow Crash, labels the effect Loglo. Here it is demonstrated in the TV series of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon:

Pretty but also a bit troubling, right?

For comparison, here is what I believe to be Tokyo, circa 90s:

I have gone on record before as saying that I believe the cyberpunk future to be the future we are heading into.

Picture this though. Picture the far future. Not the relative near, wherein we are still Earth-centric and our values are pretty similar to what they are today. Wherein the things that trouble us are also relevant to what they would be today.

Instead let us turn our eyes hundreds, if not thousands, of years into the future - a future based on the notion that, today, now, the corporations win. Massive business entities made out of hundreds of different individual corporations handling the exploration, colonisation and habitation of spheres beyond Earth. I hope that doesn't sound too out there, given that SpaceX exists. How big a jump is it, really, to go from SpaceX to something like...

So if one single company colonises a planetoid, builds all the homes there, makes it breathable, makes it habitable - is there still going to be a monopolies commission to make them let other corporate interests take root in the soil that they themselves made fertile?

Given how the world is going, I daresay that the law against monopolies will be left on Earth.

So this business ends up basically owning this entire planetoid, be it a moon, a large asteroid, an actual planet, whatever. And it can either let other businesses in, or it can just...do it its damn self.

Lets say that the company that ends up owning Titan is Nestle. I'm sure you have all seen this rather scary image.

Now this is just food and drink items, but it shows what a spread of products each of these individual large businesses has under their purview.

So lets say Titan needs places to live. Good news, one of the subdivided companies actually has a wing that deals entirely with housing. The people that live there need places to eat and shop, which is good, because another subdivision has both a chain of stores and a chain of bars and fast food restaurants.

These people need to work, though - and only so many of them are needed to actually "service" everyone else. Which is great, because Titan has plenty of natural resources to exploit, and there's plenty of business opportunities! ... for the processing and manufacture divisions of the company.

Who gets to tell them no? Who goes out into the solar system and rocks up to every single settled planetoid and demands that the company that literally built everything on it needs to let in competition?

The company gets to be the law, here. Gets to be the judge and jury. And one might assume that the way a business gets to be the one to settle, say, Titan is by a bidding system. That the colonisation rights would be put out to tender, and whoever can afford / make the best case for the rights, gets them.

So you, the normal person, some fifty generations after settling - you have grown up knowing nothing but the company. You've only ever lived, eaten, breathed, worked around company territory. You pay them rent out of the pay they give you for the work you put in. And whatever central government exists doesn't have to care about you, because you are the sole responsibility of the company that bought Titan.

Or Analog Incorporated, the company that bought the civic rights to Corpus VIII's second moon. Auroch, a moon with an atmosphere that is breathable and survivable but that has no magnetosphere and can't shield you from very rapid death from solar radiation. You can't go out by day - which is okay because a significant amount of time is spent in eclipse behind Corpus VIII, a gas giant.

The company doesn't have to pay for street lights. It has its own logos to light your way.

Welcome to the setting of my NaNo, 2018.

Capitalism, iPhones and Cooperation

As always, all of this is just opinion, fairly poorly researched and mostly just done as a thought experiment.

Anyone else seen the meme about capitalism building your iphone?

I mean, it's a good zinger, isn't it? It's a good gotcha. There's no possible way someone could see something wrong with a system while in possession of something that that system created, right?

Right?

Well...

To participate and survive in a capitalist society - one that we are in, like it or not - one must have an income, either some kind of state benefit (usually hard-won and easily-rescinded) or a job (also hard-won and easily-rescinded). In order to get either of those things, one must have a phone - which means that a phone isn't a reward for being in a capitalist society. It's a necessity.

To state the obvious - the actual building of the phone is primarily conducted by automated machinery and underpaid human beings, not an overarching belief in the free market. Those who benefit the most from capitalism don't get very involved in the creation of such objects, even if they take away a lot from their creation. (Here's another link to my blog about cakes and surplus value.)

So carefully sidestepping around the widening hole in the statement, which would now more accurately read "But capitalism forces you to own a phone that you build for next to nothing and have to buy back from the people whose symbol is on it at a huge markup" - it is correct that the prevailing philosophy of many places in which these phones are sold (and sometimes made) is capitalism.

...so what's the alternative?

Alright. So there's many different phone companies that produce many different phones, and every year put out a new set of phones. They're in competition with each other, which many claim is the best way to push innovation and lower prices. Sure, it also pushes down the wage they are willing to pay their workers in order to make sure they can keep prices low and also make high profits, but - sorry, I got distracted again. The fact is that the competition model is often hailed as the holy grail to producing the best product - which I am not really sure is strictly true.

I found it hard to track down the actual amount of money spent by each company - let's say for argument Samsung, Apple, Nokia, Huawei and LG - but let's assume it is quite a lot. Legal fees comprise of a not-insignificant slice of that pie, too. Nine-figure sums of money thrown back and forth between Samsung and Apple over minor design quibbles, because they are both trying so hard to be simultaneously distinct from each other and yet fit within the same market bubble that the public expect. (I talk about that over here, too. You ever noticed how most modern cars look exactly the same?)

What if these different phone companies weren't bound by the need to compete with each other? What if, instead, they were state-acquired and paid the same budget as they usually receive individually to co-operate with each other in order to produce a phone, not to sate the lusts of the free market, but to suit the needs of the citizen?

Of course, monopolies are bad, because companies with monopolies can't be trusted to act responsibly. However. Join me in a thought experiment, where we assume that there's laws that can actually make a corporate entity behave - say laws that lean more to the left hand side of the spectrum, rather than shoring up the holdings and powers of business and capital. Let's also assume in this thought experiment that we can trust our government. I know, I know. Just...bear with me here.

So you have five full-fledged phone divisions in each of these electronics companies. You put their development teams together. Some of them are guaranteed to be working on things that are either the same or very similar, so there's redundancy. So they instead work on something else. Something better, something new.

You have five marketing departments that are all doing the same job in order to fight against each other, which they no longer need to do. So you can afford to cut a significant part of the marketing budget, with little effect on demand for your product. In fact you can afford to reduce your production budget, too. Because you aren't making five ranges of phones, each of which has different technology. You're making one range of phones. Software development goes much the same way.

How would this affect the consumer? Well, a couple ways.

For one thing, no more proprietary competition between the phone brands means no more proprietary or exclusive software or access problems. Ever found out that the killer app you really want is an iPhone or Android exclusive? No more. Ever found that you can't import things easily from one software setup to the other? That's over too. My own personal favourite? There's no reason why your charge cables wouldn't be totally universal either. Just the very best one, suited for the needs of the product.

As previously discussed, phones are seen as an absolute necessity under capitalism. Despite poor people being treated like shit for having one that isn't the most visibly basic model one can buy, they are also told that if they want to achieve anything, they must have one. Most people are assumed to have a phone at least, often a smart phone, and at least have access to basic internet services.

So let's make that happen.

Where this phone program is government funded, the government introduces a minor tax to cover the cost of production, and provides their citizens a phone that they are entitled to - up to a specific standard. If you want a nicer model, and I do mean literally luxury, then you pay the additional cost yourself. Otherwise, you get a model that will do you right for the next three years.

What this would mean is a guaranteed income with savings across the board in its production, so you could actually afford to pay the people making your phones better - which is something that the state could mandate as an condition for receiving the universal phone contract in the first place.

Imagine how good a phone you could have if the best parts of literally every major new phone release of the past five years were coalesced into one universally-supported handset that has access to every app store. Phones that are made to exacting standards and made to last, because that's they aren't relying on repeat business to make their money. They have guaranteed repeat business, state funded.

Assuming the state can hold this conglomerate company to heel, and encourage it to produce the best it can - and assuming the state doesn't immediately turn this whole program into a means to profit from people's taxes - you could produce the best mobile phone on earth.

Something you couldn't do under capitalism.

Of course, all of this is just theoretical, because we know full well that those five companies would never let go of their own personal brands, that the current method of making those big bucks is serving them just fine and will continue to do so, and that our current crop of government would very happily abuse the notion of this system to make personal profits.

Because this vision of what could happen, of the thing that could happen for us in even one industry and one walk of life, is one that comes from beyond the all-encompassing grasp of greedy men in suits - which is one of the universal truths of this world.

So whenever I hear about how my phone was built by capitalism, I imagine how good my phone could be if it was built with a little more socialism.

Just a thought.