Gregory's ServerIn a low-diligence culture like the UK – a term I’ll explain shortly – overlaying digital systems (like these smart meters) over the processes of everyday life results not in efficiency or productivity gains, but in just the opposite: compounded failures that take extra time, effort and resource to correct. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/26/smart-meter-rollout-number-faulty-machines-leaps-great-britain
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I only observe it. People you rely on for important things lose critical documents. A task that you’d expect to be done right the first time needs to be redone and then redone again. The wrong kind of emulsion is specified, or the financial support is deposited in someone else’s account, or the wrong form is filed, or the referral is lost in the mail. (These are all real examples from the past year of my life.) And when you layer brittle, overspecified and inflexible digital processes over this rather slapdash comedy of errors, the result is not improved accuracy or streamlined process flow. It’s a new and supervening set of faulty readings, with its own particular kind of plausibility and authority, that people must somehow summon the energy to challenge and counter. Occasionally, this has literally lethal effects - if you do not live in the UK, prepare to be shocked speechless by the Post Office/Fujitsu scandal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal  @adamgreenfield (as soon as you made the first toot, I immediately thought of this. unconscionable.) @luis_in_brief @adamgreenfield Same. re the Post Office scandal. The thing went on because people were so easily gaslit to think they had made errors, all the time. I learned the word “slapdash” here… I never lived in the US as an adult so I can’t compare. I think diligence I have encountered in Latin contexts, including postcolonial, comes from bureaucratic zeal that simply doesn’t exist here. (And I have seen more of in the US come to think of it, I have been to the DMV, lol) @janet @adamgreenfield yeah, it's hard for me to to cross-cultural comparisons, but in the US's regulatory culture there is definitely a very related learned helplessness around technical regulation: "we'd like to be diligent, but that would require understanding tech and we can't possibly do that" Sure, some of this can be accounted for by the deskilling, outsourcing, shoddy lowest-bidder automation and responsibilization that are part and parcel of neoliberal governance/management/governmentality. But much of it feels deep to the culture, in a way that absconds from awareness or visibility. And I don’t, actually, want to bellyache about this state of affairs: I would like to find some ways for us to *do* something about it together. But it’s daunting, “vaster than empires and more slow.” @adamgreenfield Something about this tendency is self-reinforcing, too, it feels like—the assumption that other people are being slipshod elsewhere makes it easier to justify my own lack of diligence, for sure. "low-diligence society" is apt too in that it's adjacent but not identical to a low-trust society. @pts Yes! Good catch, that’s precisely how I intended it, and yes these qualities are braided ‘round one another. @adamgreenfield The concept of taking personal responsibility is a vexing one, given how frequently it's used by the enemies of solidarity, and yet! Being reliable and diligent is good, actually! @pts I am building up to a longer rant about this, and in fact something that may well become a longer piece of writing and/or otherwise definitive of this next part of my life, but competence and capacity and clarity and diligence and strength (*clearly*, I hope, for some specified and carefully defined values of “strength”) are all things it is beyond foolish to cede to the people who hate us and love hate. Will say (probably too) much more shortly. @adamgreenfield good memes are another virtue we cannot afford to cede, come to think of it @adamgreenfield @adamgreenfield @pts I still think the long tail of empire has to bear the blame for at least some of it. When you can fuck up repeatedly and there is a quarter of the world to make up and suffer your mistakes with essentially no consequences as long as the rich stay rich, you can go a long time running inefficient systems and getting away with it.  @adamgreenfield fundamentally people have to care about stuff. those who understand the consequences of their actions will, regardless, but that's always a minority... it is the job of a society to give people some reason to care about the society's well-being. We have this conversation a lot in the US about our culture's anti-intellectualism. It's poisonous and pervasive and makes so many other problems that much worse. And holy crap, the roots are deep and everywhere. @Emmadrime And! And! *It’s even worse in other places* (or differently bad, but at an at-least-equal intensity). @adamgreenfield I appreciate this focus on low diligence, for lols in a continuation of said diligence- Fujitsu are still touting their work there as a case study: https://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/SVC/fs/casestudies/uk-postoffice2.pdf @xenogon @adamgreenfield there is no single culture, NHS, Legal jurisdiction or education system in the U.K. and much of failings in England are totally irrelevant and inapplicable to NI, Wales and Scotland. The other 3 nations have their own challenged, but when will ignorant comments from those who equate England as U.K. stop? @Lassielmr @xenogon I’ve observed it in Scotland too, and I’ll thank you not to call me “ignorant.” Do you think that a focus on high efficiency (in terms of some effect over time) leads to a low diligence? In a sense I think this could be about quantity over quality for any given effect. @counterinduration An interesting thought, but no, it’s far too widespread for that. It crops up in too many contexts where the Taylorist grid was never imposed. Heya! I’m really grateful for your interest in the question of a diligence spectrum, but for those of you who have asked or suggested, I’m afraid there’s no real way one could quantify the appearance of this quality in a culture – other, I suppose, than doing the kind of thing that brash and overconfident management consultants do, i.e. collating a few proxy statistics, and calling it a finding. These are simply anecdotal and partial observations, drawn from my own experience.  @adamgreenfield I would link it to what i see as the thickness of social buffers in the different cultures. In the UK banter, irony and grumbling form social buffers where unhappiness with diligence can be attenuated. In Sweden there is zero buffer and people either communicate or cooperate with total precision or not at all, because the consequences are totally unbuffered. @Loukas I think that’s absolutely correct. It’s a stretch, but I wouldn’t be surprised either if some everyday solidaristic institutions here (and here I’m thinking primarily of pubs) derive some of their motive power from the fact that they offer a platform for commiseration and low-key mutual aid in the face of it. And the point of sharing that experience is not to cast blame or judgment. Given the *massive* amounts of waste and redundant effort that are involved in repairing or working around low diligence in the UK – like, in all seriousness, I would not be at all surprised if it approached something like 15% of GDP – my interest lay in wondering whether it might somehow offer a point of ecological intervention. But it’s not a low-hanging fruit, not at all. It may actually be intractable.  @adamgreenfield What you describe here is something I've observed in Germany, but only partially. Where this kind of low diligence is most evident is in jobcenters where the weakest of society have to beg for financial help and experience what you have have experienced: papers get lost, have to be resend, then get lost again, all the paperwork has to be filed again, until these people literally run out of money and lose all hope and stop opening their mail, as there is only bad news to expect. @adamgreenfield I can't thank you enough for your observations. I'm a yank in England, and can only compare the US and UK, but I get it. Prior to moving here, I was warned of the dearth of accountability in business. It's laughable! @adamgreenfield I'd be so interested to hear more about how these 5 cultures compare to one another. Which is the most high diligence?  @gardenpeach Japan is the most diligent, but the least flexible: you cannot put raisins or shaved coconut in curry rice, because “curry rice does not have raisins or coconut in it.” Korea is a relatively low-diligence society – everything is ppali-ppali, “hurry hurry” – but it’s buffered by a high degree of flexibility, adaptability and the expectation that you and a service provider will negotiate a modus vivendi. @gardenpeach Finland is higher diligence, but stoic about defaults and shortfalls in a way that approaches the British. When people fuck up (and Finns generally assume they will, because people and life are disappointing), you’re just supposed to tough it out with lots of sisu and perkele. For all its many faults, and barring only its addiction to litigiousness, American culture actually balances these qualities reasonably well. @gardenpeach But maybe I actually prefer the Korean way? Like you can get a pair of prescription glasses made, same day, and even when the prescription’s complicated, for something like fifty bucks. They might not be Zeiss quality, but honestly, if they’re not, I can’t tell the difference (and while I’m not an expert, I’m the kind of person who would). There’s a kind of cheap-and-cheerful, LFG-ness to a lot of everyday process. The *flipside* is terrible, though - @gardenpeach things like the Sewol ferry disaster or the collapse of the Sampoong department store, where the systems and processes that a higher-diligence society would insist on being observed have just been blithely circumvented, at awful cost. @adamgreenfield I am so with you on this. And it makes life for those of us whose literal job is to be high diligence (architects with actual ethics and a care for design and durability in my case) incredibly hard when we have to operate in a low diligence context. Sloppiness everywhere. @hanaloftus You, of course, have my sympathies. In your work, what measures do you put in place to mitigate or compensate for the failures of others to attend with due care? @adamgreenfield Labour intensive, loss-making levels of checking and rechecking and sadly never able to guarantee timescales with any certainty any more. It is worse than it used to be. Plenty of pressure to just get things over the line even if shoddy. Grenfell was not an exception. And in regard to the work I do in public engagement, clients being sold shit digital platforms and having no understanding of, or respect for, rigorous analytical methodologies. @adamgreenfield Something I see quite a bit in business is a mix of the British ability to innovate coupled with a feeling of being empowered to 'improve' things. This often results in people thinking they don't need to provide all the data on the task just completed, because it was not mandatory, using a different material because they hope it will be good enough (and avoids going back to the stores for the correct one) etc. It is not just about cutting costs!  @adamgreenfield that's because diligence and precision is for boffins, and no one here wants to be a boffin, and no one here wants to listen to them (I remember being really struck by that when radio 4 was interviewing my co founder - the interview started as a business one until they found out she studied maths at uni and then it weirdly switched to a boffin interview. It was so weird) @otfrom What would the difference be, in terms of kinds of questions asked or attitude taken by the interviewer?  @adamgreenfield ugh I've read the thread and my British side wants to rail against it - but I can't. @sarajw I am sorry, I didn’t want to be one of those insufferable “everything’s better in the States” people. If it makes you feel any better, we’ve thrown in our lot here. We’re on Shite Island for good! @adamgreenfield lol it's OK, I have a Swedish side and a naturalised German side too - I'm not really insulted - just gritting my teeth at the truth of it!  @adamgreenfield If you had to guess what might create a low diligence or high diligence culture? @franktaber Early childhood education, or more frankly conditioning, and what is praised, rewarded and encouraged (or conversely singled out for disapproval and punishment) in the highly neuroplastic years of early life. A certain amount of canny observation, as well, of the similar gradients obtaining in adult life. Even language norms, e.g. I had to move to the UK to learn the term “jobsworth.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobsworth |
Here’s what I mean by “low-diligence”: Of the five cultures I’ve lived in as an adult, the American, Japanese, Korean and Finnish in addition to that of the British Isles, the UK is on the lower end of the scale in terms of the care and attention to detail people bring to bear on everyday tasks. As we’ve discussed before, this is true across classes, backgrounds and occupational sectors here. It’s true in the NHS, in the academy, in the trades and above all in business. I can’t explain it –