Gregory's ServerSure, 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.”
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27 comments
 @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. @Loukas And that, in turn, reminds me of a passage from “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/507105-he-meditated-resentfully-on-the-physical-texture-of-life-had @adamgreenfield the classic explanation for pubs was they were a place for working class men to escape from the unhappiness of married life. So much so that women used to, and sometimes still do, face violence if they go to a pub, because jer like you say, it's a designated male grumble zone 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 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.