Night shift
Month: January 2023
More Klingon than Starfleet
A Musk spaceship will be a Musk workplace
UPDATE 13 July 2024. I wrote this in January 2023 but actually it all still seems fresh and up-to-date. And the bit about Silicon Valley tightening up and closing the free crêches and sashimi bars actually seems to have happened.
I suppose if you went to Mars on one of Musk’s starships – at least on one of the early missions – you’d probably be an employee of a government agency so the prevailing human resources model would be the faux-nurturing bureaucratic norm of the major Western corporation – mental-health check-ins, work-life balance, standing desks and so on. But I guess, ultimately, someone’s going to wind up on a 100% Musk-owned mission – to Mars or beyond (maybe it’ll be you. It won’t be me).
And what we know about Musk as an employer and as a manager suggests the experience would be a bit more hardcore. Certainly more Darwinian than working for NASA. He’s been very publicly stripping his most recent acquisition, Twitter, of every trace of the cosy superstructure of the advanced late-capitalist corporation. The massages, the vegan food, the unconscious bias training…
We read that he’s turned the place into a kind of bootcamp for eager disciples – what sociologists call a patronage network. A court where a loyal hierarchy competes for preference, like the Soviet Union after Lenin or Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet before they all turned on her. He even brought trusted loyalists from one of his other courts to enforce the tough new culture. Fear and ambition coexist, absolute loyalty is rewarded. And this could be much bigger than Twitter. Some think Musk’s purge might mark the beginning of the end for the liberal-tech utopia of Silicon Valley and its immitators and that hardcore Twitter could become a model for the whole industry. Lay-offs are happening everywhere. The social experiment of cheap-money hyper-meritocratic platform capitalism may be over.
So, once you’re in space on a Musk mission, what’ll it be like? The evidence suggests it’ll be pretty hard yakka – a minimum of 21-months of long shifts, arbitrary policy changes, weird reversions, unexpected side-missions and over-night code rewrites. The crew will dread waking up to a new pronouncement from the boss, non-compliant colleagues will be monstered – on Twitter, natch. In space, loyalty will not be optional, of course: contracts will be unforgiving (a dismissal would likely involve a long spacewalk with no tether, a disciplinary might mean a longer stay on Mars than planned). It’ll definitely be more Klingon than Starfleet.
- It was Olga Ravn’s The Employees (see previous post) that got me thinking about Musk as space boss.
- Musk’s interactions with the other organisations in the new space economy – the old-school bureaucracies like Boeing and NASA but also the frat-boy start-ups like Blue Origin and all the unicorns behind them is instructive. The collegiate, exploratory, cooperative phase of humanity’s journey into space is so over.
Bureacracy in deep space
If you want to understand the state of the art in space-age capitalism you must visit the HR department
Everyone knows that it’s in Human Resources that you’ll find the perfect expression of the polished lie of the benign 21st Century workplace. The grim neoliberal orthodoxy of human potential in service of capital lives here: it’s HQ for lean-in corporate orthodoxy. The smiling, dead-eyed culture of compliance-disguised-as-fulfilment that anyone who works for a big firm will recognise. A disciplinary function that thinks it’s a wellbeing project.
There’s a space-faring future HR department at the centre of Olga Ravn’s ‘The Employees’, a 2020 novel subtitled ‘a workplace novel of the 22nd century’. It’s literary science fiction, from hip publisher of translated works Lolli Editions, written during the pandemic (published in November 2020). The bleak, suffocating setting is sketched rather than described – it’s a spaceship, very far from earth, in orbit around a colonised planet that’s been named ‘New Discovery’, and it conjures up the lockdown as vividly as it does all those other spaceships of the collective memory.
The book’s thesis is neat: a spaceship – no matter how advanced its technology, no matter how far into the future or distant from earth it is, no matter how difficult and unsettling its mission – is still a place of work, right? And, when things go wrong, when a discovery on the planet’s surface causes a kind of collective nervous breakdown in the crew and the hierarchy of human and humanoid on board collapses and things start to get nasty, there’ll still need to be some kind of formal investigation, right? Management will need to get involved, send a team, kick off some kind of process?
So the book is a sequence of reports, memos from crew members, gathered by a team sent from earth. And they start kind of bland, empty of tension, cleverly suggesting the complicated economic and social context the crew occupies without describing it (this is not a Kim Stanley Robinson novel). The memos hint at the drama to come and – without spoilers – the tension does build and things do get bad.
The book’s full of subtly-delivered ideas, it has an unexpected emotional charge that builds and there’s real beauty and strangeness in the places we visit, especially in the tantalising glimpse of the surface of New Discovery that we’re offered and in the ‘objects’ encountered there. The language is authentically that of a workplace in crisis and the bloodless, rules-bound culture of human resources and people management described is chilling.
The story is told only by the workers, by the actors in the workplace drama. It’s a one-sided interrogation. We don’t hear the voices of the HR team sent to investigate, the managers who decide how to resolve things (there are evidently no union reps present). The language of the staff interviewed betrays the strangled effort to comply with rules you only vaguely comprehend. And the outcome, the resolution to the problems on-board, is chilling, authentically bureaucratic, brutal – and there’s no right of appeal.
- I review the books I read on Goodreads – mainly so I don’t forget I’ve read them.
Smart technologies for disciplining the poor
There are millions of energy prepayment meters in Britain. They’re supposed to liberate customers from financial worry. They do the exact opposite.
(I updated this post on 5 January 2024 and again on 8 January when it was announced that some energy suppliers have been given permission to start ‘force-installing’ prepayment meters again. We’re back where we were last Winter, energy prices have just gone up again and more people than ever are being cut off).
There are around four million households with energy prepayment meters in Britain. Over three million of them were cut off at least once in 2022. 18% were cut off for two days or more. Meanwhile, the number of people being forced to switch to prepayment because they’ve run up arrears has surged—660,000 households in 2022. Parts of the media have bought into the energy industry’s story that prepayment meters are in some way benign, that they protect poor customers from getting into trouble. A BBC journalist says:
The introduction of prepayment meters was meant to ensure that vulnerable people could not have their gas or electricty cut off. Paying in advance would mean, it was said, they couldn’t get themselves into financial difficulties.
Today, BBC Radio 4, 12 January 2023
It’s a bizarre assertion, essentially the industry line, that journalists obviously feel obliged to reproduce. Of course, prepayment meters don’t protect customers at all. They protect suppliers and discipline customers.
Questioning an MP on the BBC’s Newsnight, the presenter asks:
What is a better way to make sure that people don’t try to buck the system?”
Newsnight, BBC Two, 2 February 2023
Equally bizarre: poor customers, in the midst of a doubling and tripling of energy costs, are ‘bucking the system’ by not paying bills or paying them late. Prepayment meters are, at the same time, a device to help customers stay out of debt and to prevent them from ripping off their suppliers.
Once it’s become clear to your energy company that you’re struggling or you’ve missed a payment, it becomes urgent to get you onto a prepayment meter sharpish, to stop you from ‘bucking the system’. For a supplier, switching the customer to prepayment ‘de-risks’ the relationship, removing the possibility of default and the need to chase you for payment, appoint debt collectors etc. Moving a customer who’s in financial difficulty to a prepayment meter switches them from potential liability to cast-iron, zero-risk asset.
Free money for shareholders
Also, to state the obvious, a customer with a prepayment meter pays in advance. There are around four million energy prepayment meters in the UK and without even knowing what the average credit held on an account is, it’s easy to calculate that, with interest rates for cash held over night currently (January 2024) at well over 5%, the energy firms are making tens of millions annually, in bank interest alone, from these deposits. Free money! And from the poorest customers with the least choice.
Prepayment is nothing new, of course. Poor people have been required to pay up-front for gas and electricity since the distribution grids were built. Middle class customers with salaries and bank accounts have always paid monthly for goods and services – grocers and tailors and dairies posted a bill and waited politely for a cheque (those ‘no credit’ signs were just for the hoi poloi).
Two tiers
Working class customers – typically hourly-paid or on piece rates – have had, for the whole modern period, to maintain a patchwork of pay-in-advance and pay-as-you go services. Before the NHS, medical treatment was paid for on the spot, insurance and funeral cover was paid weekly on the doorstep. Radios and TVs were rented, ‘Christmas clubs‘ made saving for presents possible in the absence of a bank account. Gas and electricity was paid for in advance via coin meters. The acquiring and hoarding of shilling coins or later of 50p pieces became a source of perpetual anxiety and aggravation in working class homes.
A whole predatory ecology arose to service the pay-in-advance and pay-on-the-spot economy of working class Britain – tick, tallymen, pawnbrokers, money lenders – the infrastructure of informal, high-interest lending for the ‘unbanked’. For a hundred years the ‘man from the Pru‘ was a feature of working class neighbourhoods, collecting life insurance premiums door-to-door. This economy emerged to serve those excluded from the pay-on-account economy. And this system, as it does to the present day, extracted a higher rate of return from the least able to pay. Pay-day lenders, sub-prime credit cards, unsecured loans and ruinously expensive overdrafts – a secondary economy that cannot function without precarity and desparation. Prepayment meters are part of this world.
Soaking the working class
More recently, working people have been permitted access to the pay-on-account ecology—via modern devices like Direct Debit, an innovation that represents an improvement in convenience and security for working people and provides useful consumer protections but was really designed to expand the reach of pay-on-account services into the growing pool of workers with secure jobs and monthly salaries in the 1960s. Direct Debit is a survival of the post-war boom, of full employment and collective bargaining. In the era of the precariat its protections for consumers look anachronistic, almost quaint—and are increasingly inaccessible for the growing number of unbanked, working poor and near-destitute households.
Poorer customers are characterised as ‘higher-risk’ but the prepayment and pay-as-you go devices they’re required to use turn them into zero-risk sources of annuity income. Rates for prepayment are also typically higher and less flexible than for pay-on-account or Direct Debit bills. Suppliers say this has to be so because operating the prepayment infrastructure adds cost but as prepayment and smart meters converge this difference has essentially disappeared.
And the meters themselves lift the crude business of taking the money up-front to a new level. They’re exploitation machines, surveillance robots installed directly in customers’ homes. Each meter embeds a contractual relationship and a set of terms and conditions and, once all meters are ‘smart’, switching a customer from the pay-on-account elite to the prepayment underclass is trivially easy (and could even be automatic – missed a payment? Welcome to the underclass!).
It’s a one-way street. If you’re struggling you’ll find it almost impossible to get back to pay-on-account. Once you’re in prepayment mode, the machine acquires the discretion to enforce the contract by cutting supply. Spent your money on food? Couldn’t get down the shop? You’re out of luck. The meter has decided. And if you built up arrears while paying monthly (about 10% of prepayment customers are paying down debt, according to the Scottish Power executive quoted in this article), your meter will be set up to take it back from you, week by week, and while you’re repaying what you owe you won’t be able to switch to another supplier—the annual ritual of shopping around enjoyed by the savvy middle-class householder – the liberty of the informed consumer in a free market – is not available to you. You’re stuck. Incidentally, you’re almost certainly on the supplier’s highest available rate with the fewest options (in 2023 the UK Government announced that higher rates for prepayment customers would be abolished and that the government would fund the change until April 2024. I haven’t been able to find out if this has actually happened).
There’s an additional risk that if you’ve fallen substantially behind with your payments your utility account will be labelled as ‘delinquent’ and your credit rating will be affected for as long as it takes you to get back on terms, even though you’re now paying for your energy in advance, so you can forget about borrowing money to reduce the cost of your debts or remortgaging.
Living on a prepayment cliff edge
The experience of living with a prepayment meter is necessarily stressful. Even if you’ve got a steady income and can afford the elevated prices, you still have to worry about keeping the meter topped up and about the cliff-edge of being cut off if you forget or run short. For people who are struggling (many millions of UK households right now, of course) the additional stress of controlling expenditure and topping up before the supply stops is punishing and time-consuming – and makes everything else harder. Worse yet, when a prepayment meter goes wrong or a key fails or the battery dies, the meter – you won’t be suprised to learn – will always fail in the ‘off’ or ‘closed’ state, so if your top-up doesn’t work there’s a reasonable chance you’ll be cut off and waiting over night or over the whole weekend in the cold for an engineer or a call-back. Failing in the ‘on’ state would obviously risk supplying a low-value customer with some free energy and must thus be avoided at all cost.
Some customers give up and ‘self-disconnect’. Since about half of prepayment households have a smart meter it’s easy for suppliers to tell when customers have self-disconnected. Ofgem’s data says it was 269,351 households for electricity and 534,462 for gas in the first three months of 2023 (these numbers have gone up since this snapshot and they vary seasonally) At any one time hundreds of thousands of households in Britain are cold and dark.
Adding the stress of prepayment to the anxiety of poverty and precarity is, of course, a feature not a bug. Families with no slack, no buffer against destitution, have to find the bus fare to get to a distant news agent before it closes or someone to look after the kids while they scrabble for funds. And if you can find a fiver to top up you’ll need to do the same again tomorrow – and lie awake worrying about it tonight. Prepayment was designed this way. It’s deliberate, debilitating, immiserating. The routine humiliation of the poor is a centuries-old practice. It’s unchallenged common sense that life should be harder for the poor. Smart technologies and prepayment meters make it easier than ever to achieve this.
- This Citizen’s Advice report on prepayment meters is a pretty bleak read. Citizen’s Advice also has advice on stopping your supplier from switching you to prepayment. Ofgem has a list of the suppliers now allowed to switch you to prepayment without your permission.
- British Gas, one of the biggest suppliers, was once the publicly-owned utility (sold off in 1986). In February 2023 it was revealed that the company (and others) had been instructing bailiffs to break into people’s homes to install prepayment meters – it happened 94,000 times in 2022. They were told to stop and the regulator published new rules. On 8 January 2024 it was announced that some suppliers have been allowed to smash your front door in and switch you to prepayment again.
- I haven’t been able to find any detailed comparisons but it certainly looks like Britain is an outlier. According to this Independent article, Romania is the only European country with a comparable number of prepayment meters and “In most countries in Europe prepayment meters are not used at all.” In some regions they are actually illegal. This article in a smart meter trade publication says that most prepayment meters have been installed in the developing world and in middle-income countries in Africa and Asia. Ireland, Bulgaria and Romania are also mentioned.
- Did you know that taxing your car costs more if you pay monthly instead of annually? There’s a 5% surcharge. The same if you need to buy a prepayment certificate for your prescriptions (13%). Another penalty for the less well off, this time from the UK government (in Scotland prescriptions are free).
- Danny Dorling, geographer, regularly points out that much of this story—expanding poverty, the increasingly punitive financial and welfare context for the poor, disconnections and evictions—only applies in England and Wales and that simple measures taken by the Scottish government have essentially stopped it happening there.
- Today smartphones are often paid for via expensive two- or three-year credit agreements, at interest rates that can add a third or more to the cost of the handset. Somehow a huge proportion of us have been persuaded to enter into a Radio Rentals relationship with our mobile phone operators – spending hundreds of pounds more than retail to participate in the culture.
- The Rowntree Foundation’s most recent report on poverty in Britain has a lot of the current figures. Resolution Foundation’s Living Standards Outlook 2023 (PDF) has detailed forecasts for 2024/25.