I know Frank Marchand because he has been my plumber and neighbor for many years. He has always had a soft spot for going the extra distance. Now after eight continuous years of working and fighting stage four colon cancer full-time, he’s bringing his community into that same extra distance. Frank conceived, wrote, directed, and starred in Now I Can Die Happy, an original performance that Frank summoned to life at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls MA on August 30th. Too close to home to be theatrical. Too elevated a theme to be slice-of-life. Now I Can Die Happy is lived out on the most personal terms in the most revealing of ways.
Frank doesn’t say. But I imagine he was first visited by the idea of a one man autobiographical show in a long, contemplative moment. Perhaps during chemo?
Many chemo trips removed from the original diagnosis, Frank has outlived many of the crew in the same Cooley Dickinson treatment program. This includes former teachers, customers, and local folks that had been receiving their infusions alongside Frank.
This prompts Frank’s insertion of the “why me” directed to a higher power. You don’t need religion or infusions to appreciate the pay grade above where this question lands.
Frank answers back his why me voice without anger, guilt, defiance, or passive acceptance. His response is an ardent and clarion call to action. He has given himself over to the world of need. A world that defines tangible need as the privileging of one’s own concerns.
Big Digs in Own Backyards
Here’s the Frank I knew in B.C. (“before cancer”) times: A guy who took his professional calling seriously. Himself? Not so much. His work ethic was insatiable. Big jobs, small jobs. His answering machine played the same steadfast loop for decades: “I pick up my messages every hour.” He promised to return every new request by the end of each work day. Didn’t matter how overbooked he might be.
On the job, he was a swirl of activity and patter. The channeler of once troubled waters into the basin of stability. A chatterbox of wisdom. Behind every valve and fitting – a story and sometimes… a lesson.
The dedication, the range of problem-solving, and the self-effacing humor all conspired to build trust that Frank would unscramble whatever our steeply-pitched 150 year-old Victorian home could spray his way. It was a down payment. Not for curb appeal but infrastructure. Now our rickety Victorian would see an engine room facelift. Preventative medicine. Newly assembled sets of permeating radiators and plumbing bones. Nothing much had stirred under its floorboards until Frank descended into the foundation. Now our matronly manor was going to see another fifty years.
He emerged weeks later, a six foot mole caked in the abrasions of his craft. Our own bonafide big dig under Chestnut Plain Road, adjacent to the recently relocated Whately Milk Bottle edifice and neighbor Frank’s home. It was a pathway adjoining the 19th to the 21st centuries over the protestations of the accumulated neglect of past owners. Of course I wrote that check to Frank. Of course it’s the biggest check I ever wrote to another individual before or since. I took his word on every itemized entry in that invoice. And why wouldn’t I? I trusted the iron works and the PVC in the architectural details to the master cobbler of heating systems. My friend and neighbor, Frank.
Divorced Dads Night Out
Fast forward to 2000. Frank and I are sharing some bowls of All You Can Eat popcorn in South Deerfield before the waitress at Wolfie’s appears with our orders. We both find ourselves in the league of divorced dads with visitation weekends. It’s not exactly in our respective road maps of where our lives were once headed in the sleepy hamlet of Whately Center. Frank tells me of another neighboring family that’s split since: “Must have been in the water,” he reckons.
It was that hazardous backstretch around the turn to forty. So, so many marriages never make it past those bends. We see the stranger across the table from us and what have we got besides our vows, debts, and a shared history? The empty miles that distance us from the future we once called family.
Years later Frank tells Karen Brown that it was his ability to correct misbehaving water flows at the age of 12 which drew him into plumbing. Ms. Brown is both a Frank customer and an NEPM reporter whose radio portrait of his survival saga goes viral on national NPR. However, this form of troubled water was nothing Frank could fix. I clinked his beer glass to reaffirm my own limitations in this area. We go back for popcorn refills. Our unwritten chapters are no longer blank slates.
Full-time Schedule
I’ve been remarried, twice actually, since our last dinner date. My fourth marriage in 2015 coincided with Frank’s cancer diagnosis. He delivered this news the following year when I rang him in to prep a bathroom for the pending sale of my wife’s home. I can’t say it surprised me at all that Frank was dug in for the fight of a lifetime. What threw me off at first was the realization he was fighting what sounded like a war on two fronts.
At first I didn’t understand how his trade was actually an ally in this battle. Rather than attempting to protect his marshaling forces, he refused to draw any distinction between Frank the plumber and Frank the cancer patient. Others may have retreated into the shadows, of rejection and denial, or an even wholesale withdrawal from the business of living. Frank doubled down on it. His greatest nemesis wasn’t the disease or the prognosis. It’s the number cancer does on an idle mind preoccupied with the harm-seeking disruptions that lie ahead.
Rather than catastrophize, Frank chose to inhabit the solution-seeking sanctum of his problem-solving nature. He opted as Paul Simon described in song, “to dominate the impossible in his life.” That chemo treatment was another slot to fill in an already answered-for calendar of running toilets, clogged pipes, and vanity installations.
But the jammed calendar was never just to remain in motion. In “I Can Die Happy Now,” Frank implores us to step back from our own autopilots. He wants us to absorb the bigger picture so we can take in what’s truly life affirming in our daily practice. There’s nothing stoic or guarded or kept in reserve for later going on here. But the pep talk isn’t coming from fevered piety of sweeping judgments. That’s what we’re used to: Painted on thick with the broadest of brushes.
Smiling Statues
On a summer evening, my wife and I went to see Frank’s show at the Shea Theater. It stars its director, writer, and stage manager Frank. It co-stars Frank’s secret friend. There is no show program. But if there was, it might have been a single urgent message: Spend down our emotional debts.
As my Uncle Stephen Pollan wrote in Die Broke: A Radical Four Part Financial Plan, the last check you write should be to the undertaker. And it should bounce. From very different angles, Frank and my Uncle are imploring us to empty our pockets of regrets. But emotional debts, come again? These are the I.O.U’s that carry us through our daily graces. We come to know this as the kindness of strangers. Paying it forward. But Frank turns the tables. What if we’re the strangers and the kindness must come from us?
Frank isn’t evangelizing from his throne. He’s locked in battle. We’re the ones fleeing the scene and he’s the one calling unsolicited attention to this. Our strength as a community comes from engaging, from the providing and receiving of kindness and empathy. Not the protective shell we often grow to seal us in from the suffering all around us. Not the veneer of privacy that insists on scheduled interventions only.
Frank’s not having that. He pushes on the margins of emotional availability. On its fringes labors the panhandler who carries the shame of pity over the unfilled isolations that hold the awkward dread between the haves and the what-have-you-gots: I admit it, Frank. I haven’t any more to give.
And yet. And yet!
Knowing the pulse of gratitude that brims over Frank, we sense a towering waterfall of connection. A reservoir of feeling waiting to be shared. “Waiting for what exactly?” the man at stage four for the last eight years is asking us. As if we’re asking for our souls back from the places we’ve been hiding them. We can’t hide from Frank at center stage.
The Curtain Comes Down
The crowd is one part sorry-it-had-to-be-you, Frank, and another part frozen smiling statues. That’s when Frank goes one step further. He introduces back to his secret friend, a.k.a. alter ego that’s arrived to comfort and cajole him through the trials of his life. The secret friend has seen Frank through the perils of his solo missions. In the first act, the friend provided a comic foil when young Frank couldn’t get out of his own self-imposed obstacle course.
The friend is also cast as the keeper of Frank’s own bargaining with his maker. It’s an existence of light and energy that can only be shaped into action and outcomes in the fleeting expanse that this natural force inhabits a human body. The desire to bend events in our favor requires the gripping of hands, the stepping of legs, and the flexing of muscles commanded through our vast neurological circuits. Where our heart stops is not a curtain call. It’s not a thunderous ovation. It’s musical chairs where the music cuts out. That’s the theme song of Frank’s requiem.
Frank is not engaging us around the protective custody of angels and bugle corps. He’s bargaining with us where we live. At ground level. That’s where we leave no sincere praises on the table. We spend lavishly and don’t wait for Frank’s funeral. Or our own.
Think about it. The eulogy is off-limits to unkind words. There’s safety in the protection of legacy. It’s as timeless as the keeping of the flame. But what would happen, I hear Frank saying, if we let these praises escape through the mundane discourse of an ordinary day? Then we wouldn’t wonder if the dead could hear because they would bear actual witness to the appreciations they inspire. They would actually come to know the meaning of the lives they’ve touched in these overlapping lifetimes.
That is a world we can share. This is the do-it-yourself instructions for saving your own soul. No waiting is required. You can go right in. And thank you, Frank Marchand, for helping me to see and live that.
A Three Part Series on Reimagining Social Media as a Force for Employee Engagement and Organizational Cohesion
The Reckoning
The closing section addresses the transition of the corporate workplace from a security to a social model. Will the discretionary controls of a need-to-know policy be replaced by a more transparent one? Open access is required in the sharing and distribution of enterprise social networks. Do business and pleasure need further introductions? Can they shake hands on open networks within their own enterprises?
(c) blog.experientia.com
6. Left to Our Own Devices, Literally
There are many wrinkles in the emerging social formulas. It’s true that some of that lies in the gray zone between first-hand experience and the conformist pressures of affiliation. Some of it is flat-out trolling. All of it is distracting from the work priorities that support the operational and business success of the enterprise host.
What happens when the engagement becomes so pervasive, so ongoing, that it removes the employer as the cornerstone of employee experience? That doesn’t mean people confuse posting on the network with their real jobs. It means they expect the crowd sourcing to produce the resolutions they seek whenever novelties are introduced into their problem-solving.
Will they complain about the answers they’re getting only to condemn the system that offers them? That’s not as farfetched as it sounds. How many of our new hires are sold through the onboarding screen a set of expectations for how to handle all the social tools, information sources, and data resources they’ve been provided? In most enterprises, that’s not an HR-brokered conversation.
In a prepandemic world we were told to show-up. Whether our appearances added value or sparked discussion was not the trigger here. The focus was reserved for our absences not escaping the notice of supervisors. The doghouse as limelight. In a social-mediated workplace we now have the news menus of staff meetings with the option of using this same medium to engage with our peers.
Implicit in this dialog is the intimacy and trust required for active listening and inclusive participation. We’re seeing these trust factors play out in groups that can’t be easily defined as communities of interest or practice. They are both. They’re professional in their approach to problem-solving and information sourcing. They also pride themselves in personable contributions of their welcoming and approachable members.
Ultimately there is a golden rule of social media that doesn’t just bear repeating. It embodies any communication or failure to communicate across a screen conferred by mutual acceptance of network membership. If you are personally offended or upset by a post to your feed, respond to the flawed process, the underlying conditions … the issue at-hand. NOT to the character of the person sending it.
(c) Marc Solomon, 2022
7. Permission Statements
Nothing tests the boundaries of a distributed workforce more transparently than enterprise social networking, a.k.a. Corporate Facebook. Turns out the protection of an employer-based firewall is not just a safe zone for selfies but a sanctuary for discourse. Turns out that working for the same outfit remotely transcends the traditional barriers posed by office politics, territorial skirmishes, and most importantly, network security — that Achilles heel of all organizational networks.
Permissions management is the key chain of network security. It is the access controls behind every server, application, and file folder, (land and cloud). However, in their zeal to protect, the network security folks took their eyes off one basic consideration. It’s one thing to tackle internet-launched security threats. It’s another thing to keep them so guarded that they’re not put to actual use.
For instance, in the case of enterprise networking, it turns out that the opportunity for personal branding exceeds the risk of identity theft. Oh wait. That’s not on me. That’s our firewall which handles malicious attacks. How is it then that a sometime knowledge worker has evolved into a full-time knowledge in-mate? Today’s intranet contains a virtual prison yard of electronic directories, lists, and libraries in perpetual lock-down. These are the underlying conditions that contribute to large-scale organizational IT stumbles such as…
Knowledge Gaps: Not knowing what we know,
Information Silos: Losing track of who would know,
And back by popular demand,
Flustered Users: Wondering of it’s just me (or did a decade of IT changes land on my screen before arrival of the next Covid variant)?
8. Promises Kept
Outside of work, our consumer selves were never given the chance to opt-out of one-way social networks that surveil every step in our digital lives. The culprit turns out to be network security protocols; specifically, the notion that the employee relationship to corporate information exists on a need-to-know basis. If it’s not essential to the job, it’s not available to the user.
This policy runs counter to most of employees in pursuit of most information. We’ll call this the like-to-find-out policy. Those are the conditions knowledge workers find themselves. This is true in making informed decisions and on finding authoritative answers. It’s evident in the service of our most soaring aspirations and most routine of tasks.
We’ve all heard the familiar denunciations:
Hide: That’s hoarding!
Go seek: That’s one crap load of search results!
Still seeking: That person’s no longer here to let me in!
This time lost chasing access-resistant corporate assets pales in relation to the larger loss of trust that happens when you don’t see what I see. How can you and I be on the same page when clearly we’re not accessing the same app, function, image, or file on our screens.
There simply is no justification for need-to-know access in a post-pandemic world espousing transparency, equity, and the full participation of co-located, remote, and hybrid teams. Enterprise social networking platforms like Yammer, Slack, and Zimbra channel news feeds on an intended want-to-find-out basis. When governed and managed effectively, they enable self-organizing groups to collaborate across the familiar silos of departments, lines of business, and regions.
More importantly, their openness and vibrancy parade an undeniable affirmation that this is a welcoming workplace. Not with its basis in one big unified corporate family but an unforced reflection of a workplace containing the voices of its workers, managers, and executives. This is a new chapter with an established roadmap: A return to the pre-firewall promise of social media.
Corporate enterprises are served well to put as much thought into building their communities as they spend dollars on buttressing their fortresses. It’s that kind of thinking which will retain and attract the best talent in the post pandemic culture to come.
A Three Part Series on Reimagining Social Media as a Force for Employee Engagement and Organizational Cohesion
PART II: Employee Engagement Finds its Voice
Part two of our three part series on workplace-based social media addresses the use cases and tangible benefits of its adoption. Key to that success are the underlying trust factors. It’s this sense of belonging that enable participants to contribute in both their work roles and as members within these communities. Employee retention tops all success factors.
A camera on the meeting screen is now a seat at the table. (c) yektafurniture-com
3. Scaling the Firewalls
Before the pandemic, the choice was simply toe the line or leave. There was no shared social history that lived outside the data fortress of the corporate firewall. Anyone attempting to step outside it was greeted with the same studied ferocity as those greeting the hacker-invaders attempting to break-in. This false equivalency criminalized the notion that a corporation be held externally accountable for its own internal actions.
There still is no safe public harbor for the trading of these untold white collar war stories. A half-century of employment laws and workforce reductions are not to reverse course in deference to the opening of our local chapter of corporate Facebook. In fact, management’s legal stranglehold on corporate labor is one of the galvanizing forces for instilling civility and cooperation in ways completely alien and largely absent from advertiser-driven social media.
In fact enterprise social networking is a valuable opportunity to reimagine the social media conversation. Shedding the conflict-seeking grandstanding of the agitator is both good for bonding and the bottom-line. Realizing the limitations of social media for resolving disputes is another part of that rethinking. Locking horns on screen is another reason to close potentially explosive and incendiary posts so that cooler heads intervene, arriving at an “offline” resolution.
Finally, the toxic mingling of obsessive behavior and competitive bargaining is another regrettable piece of recent social media experience. Its removal is supported by the need for greater cross-enterprise cooperation. No vanity-induced campaigns for the most winks or fewest unsubscribes.
Promoting a healthy participation rate includes generous helpings of member counts and feed interactions specific to the full potential of each group. No need to pit them against one another or in side-by-side comparisons. Remember, social metrics that support cooperation are not those sports league betting formulas used to measure external success.
4. Where Is the Conversation Headed?
What happens when the voice of the employee gets a seat at the table?
Whether limited to encryption keys or scripted for applause lines in town halls, all of these stories are siloed at the discretion of top management and their container-keepers. What you say here stays here. What you see here never happened if it didn’t go down as planned. What you hear later is a stilted reconstruction of rationales used to justify the impact of events no one saw coming.
So why rock the boat now? Who was ever naive enough to suggest that corporate playbooks are open secrets? That their appetites for growth and the conflicts of interest posed by this solitary purpose should be scrutinized and confronted? We call for investigations and expect our public institutions to weigh transparency against a fair return on shareholder capital. Why not the workers who generate those same results behind the muffled seclusion of the firewall?
So, who is our expert witness here? Who can speak to both power and the need for open discussion? If you want extra helpings of candor and credibility, don’t ask a current employee about the employer you’re considering. Ask a former employee. Someone with no skin in a game they once played to win under the same rules you’ll soon be learning.
They’re under no obligation to side-step the problem personalities, undue hardships, or plain dumb stuff that passes for standard protocol when: (1) the blame gets assigned, while (2) the underlying problems go unaddressed when your firsthand witness decides to jump ship.
Maybe in a pre-jaundiced view of social media, there would be a pooling of internal webs. This is a rally cry for collective action to scale the firewalls not high enough to hold us in.
Here are three such expressions of this initiative:
a) War Stories:
Develop success cases told around a communal fire through open discourse and courageous debate.
b) Knowledge Metrics:
Use enterprise social networking analytics to quantify the involvement of network communities in opportunity gains and cost containment, i.e. employee self service.
c) Process Guidance:
Provide support to energized and often less-seasoned colleagues who wish to leverage guidelines and sequential learning in the practicing and mastery of new skills.
(c) blog.hubspot.com
5. We’re Waiting for the Desks to Settle
The long sidelined promise of social media is when it’s conducted within the decorum of what used to pass as polite society: Keep your politics, religion, and money separate from your daily discourse with others. From a First Amendment perspective, we’re treading into ulcer-inducing territory. It’s a form of personal discretion best left to AI-guided robots.
The argument goes like this.
In an age where visceral anger meets instant gratification, the noise of the mind has replaced the din of the public square. Therefore we humans are too authentic to suck it in a reserve of uncomplaining stoicism. In fact, emotional repression has never fallen out of favor inside the corporate realm. What’s more, a shared belief in a reliable pay check inspires the self-regulation missing from the toxic undersides of Facebook and Twitter. This politeness factor breeds big trust under a big tent, consisting of tens of thousands of employees. All with access to their colleagues’ posts, likes, and follows.
Perhaps the ultimate business value of a trusting social network is that the benefit of the doubt is extended to people we’re meeting on social media for the first time. These are no longer complete strangers. They’re former teammates of a current colleague. They’re newly hired to plug a hole we’re tired of fixing. They overheard that we’re onto something and it sounds a lot like the missing piece in their pursuit of what comes after the problem we’re resolving:
Degree of separation meets self-organizing teams.
(c) ideas.ted.com
This was always the promise of a network effects. Now it’s landing squarely in the post-pandemic wheelhouse of the distributed workforce. It’s a workforce that could just as easily move to some other enterprise should they not feel included in this one.
A Three Part Series on Reimagining Social Media as a Force for Employee Engagement and Organizational Cohesion
Introduction
(c) Philip J. Britann
The notion of polite society has been pilloried in all directions. Since time immemorial, it summons an elegance and privilege shielded from the commoners and working classes. These refined rules of etiquette faded with our regard for elites and institutions. They fell in a heap, ringing down the privacy curtain that separates first-class passengers from coach.
Now, add social media to the mix. The language of the street became the vernacular of the screen. We gain gratification and followers. We sacrifice the temperance, discretion, and decorum of pen to paper, and spoken word as the primary expression of interpersonal communication.
Skip ahead a generation. Within the sanctuary of corporate networks, employees are now told that their companies reflect the virtues of a benevolent gatekeeper. Business success is no longer measured by profit alone but by private sector contributions to the greater society.
Re-enter social media. This time it’s not a destination app but a two-way communications channel:
The assignment? Pry open a dialog. Keep it civil in tone. Who’s involved? Everyone who wants to be.
What’s at stake? Shared perspectives across office, remote, and hybrid workplaces.
What’s being shared? Best practices, common interests, event launches, shout-outs, and no shortage of selfies.
How do we know they work? Look at cooperation levels between office, departments, and business lines.
Is this the workplace you remember vacating in March 2020? The shifting answer suggests that we have an opening for you well ahead of your return.
PART I: The Case for Enterprise Social Media
The opening argument in Part I addresses the crossing paths of social media with the virtual workplace and the unprecedented return to office of a largely homebound workforce. The social media factor turns on this key question. Can the same medium that bred widespread misinformation and distrust be used to build community and cohesion in post pandemic work environments?
(c) The Atlantic, 2021
1. The Socializing of the Remote Worker
I’ve met an unexpected and rewarding twist in my career as an adapter/survivor to the ways of keeping both feet in the gainful camp of the salaried corporate middle manager. The twisting is not the endless contortions made to remain employed in professions with insatiable appetites for awards, honors, certifications, and credentialing I’ve never possessed.
This world has been tone deaf to the many skills accrued in the weathering of the hire/fire rhythms that shadow its more famous boom/bust cycles. What does it mean to attain the title of Certified Cloud Practitioner? For some, it’s the beginning a rewarding corporate IT career inside an Amazon-centric ecosystem. For others, it’s the cost of staying employed. The exam answers are as perishable as last year’s jargon will be to your next passing score.
It’s a curious thing. Before the pandemic we listened in our commutes to podcasts about business, politics, public policy, culture, entertainment. What did we learn from our drive-time audio excursions? That once you go beyond the news, sports, and weather, you get a contest of wills. Not just who wins but who gets to define what victory even means. In any fathomable category of human endeavor there’s a shared and disputed history of how we got where we are. With one notable exception.
It’s where many of us listeners spend the majority of our waking hours when we’re not tethered to our headphones. It’s the history off-limits to anyone outside our employers, and even beyond the reach of many of our peers. When we sign our employment contracts at-will, we are never more than one bad work day away from termination.
In a tightened labor market those same management controls that breed conformity and reticence are keeping a lower profile. Open debate with superiors? Whoa! No one said the open floor plan extends to a hybrid workforce of mostly full-time remote middle managers and operations staff. Speaking truth to power? Yep, still the same career-limiting move we never left.
2. On the Clock and Off the Cuff
(c) karencortellreisman.com
But the rise of the social media feed is a new form of employee expression that diverges from the top-down command-control of corporate communications. No, this isn’t an infomercial or even scripted. Neither, as the social marketers would pitch you, is it an all cast production number. True, it is a dialog across departments, regions, and subject domains.
But it’s not yet anything as tangible as a territory, or a job family, or a set of performance review and promotion-worthy metrics and achievements. It is however a warm medium that permeates cold dollar calculations. It also holds the balance between a simple cost benefit analysis of remaining with one employee or taking the promotion in pay from the higher bidder next door.
Simply put, corporate newsfeeds, a.k.a. enterprise social networking, is the glue that holds those intangibles together. It’s not just about puppies, kittens, and paranormal geeks. Channeling our personal side into teams and projects is not about bloviating. Quite the opposite. It’s involving the moving inter-dependencies of groups unified by common interests.
The result isn’t self-promotion. It’s a shared outcome of working together, regardless of rank, location, or reporting structure. With increased engagement comes a stronger sense of community. This is cohesion that gives recognition, bonding, and personality to the often faceless calculus of complying with guidelines, engineering solutions, billing, purchasing, packaging, and keeping our heads down doing these things.
It’s interesting. I serve on a panel that approves, declines, or redirects requests for new communities. At the outset, we expected two things: (1) lots of pent-up demand for groups, and (2) lots of on-the-fly learning about what constitutes a new group and what doesn’t.
Six months later both assertions are both correct and misguided. (1) The demand has yet to recede. (2) We’re still learning. In fact, it’s gotten harder to negotiate when a proposed community is unique and universal, or, when it’s too focused on a group or issue best addressed as a topic or theme.
50th anniversary scenes and takeaways of Hampshire’s return from the brink.
The College Turns 50 and Learns What It’s Grown Up to Be
Mounting the comeback without staples.
Last weekend my wife Patty (F78) and I attended Hampshire College’s 50th Anniversary celebration. We live one town out from where we first laid eyes on the future, long before we realized our marriage is what that future needed to be fully lived in. We went expecting some chance encounters with a few peripheral acquaintances and a newly untangled neck lanyard. What we left with was the renewal of hope that the future not only required but could insist on the continuation of Hampshire College. The grandiosity was unexpected. But there is much to celebrate.
We arrived with guarded, pensive questions:
Is the existential crisis of prepandemic times only visible in the rear view? Is Hampshire back for good?
At age 50, is Camp Hamp ready to declare itself the institutional grown-up in a crowded room of fat elites, insulated by their liberalism?
Does such emancipation lend authority to the traditional school fight song? The one calling out the injustices that now masquerade as the business of the usual?
Davis Bates F73 retells the story of the Div Free Bell: “You go out into the world and Division 4, 5, and 6 will find you.”
Paraphrasing President Ed Wingenbach here, few colleges can fall back on its social justice legacies without resting on its quixotic laurels. The Hamp he inherited didn’t have that financial luxury. What it did have was a devoted alumni community that considered Hampshire their academic soulmate. Not some option on a roulette wheel of school rankings but the only choice for them. An improbable mix of trust fund spoils, interdisciplinary modalities, and the pioneering spirit of the self-initiated.
By the Skin of Our Whims
Where else could you build a degree based on the skin of your whims? Where else could you demonstrate the value of your education was not clocked to your classroom hours but to the more expansive view of independent study. Not learning for its own sake, but for putting it to work — the fruits of your Hampshire labors.
The culmination of this remains the Division III — a thesis-like concentration anchored by academically-chaired committees and assembled by …
the Hampshire student as both messenger and focus of their purgatorial scrutiny.
Hampsters in contemporary habitats.
The committee assessed the merit of the proposed Div III contract against the abstracts of the thesis. Often within the experience of delivering their realization through scientific, literary, musical, cinematic, and theatrical expression.
It’s fortunate for the college and our community that these yardsticks for graduating Hampshire remain in place 51 years later. It’s this blending of freedom, support, and guided trial that binds the real-world fortunes of alumns to their original and enduring premise for attending Hampshire. It’s true that the process still carries this dogmatic insistence:
1 Div III completion = one liberal arts degree
Perhaps that’s the price for being left in our post graduate bassinets at the entry ramp of the professional freeway? But at least the generosity inspired by these rites of passage allows us to host these spirited disagreements for another day.
Hit the Ground Solving
There were the four schools that bracketed Hampshire’s academic offerings across the liberal arts spectrum of its founding: Cognitive Communications, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. The portfolio was reshuffled with the great re-imagining of Hampshire’s relevance and differentiation from other endowment-challenged small liberal arts colleges.
This urgency pares the precarious state of four evolving social problems with Hampshire’s own comeback from the abyss of the dim ‘Mim days of F18-S19. In practical terms this means that the first arrivals no longer dabble in Div I level flirtations. They jump into the furies of the current spasming century with both skidding feet, be it…
Confronting climate change,
Escorting white supremacy out the door, or
Defining truth in a post truth world.
Average White Male Band
The supremacy part of hitting-the-ground was especially apparent in reliving the grainy splendor of Hampshire Video. The only hue starker than the black and white test patterns was the white maleness of the crew and cast. At the time I think most of the Infinity crew considered themselves more as outcasts — even by Hampshire freak-flagging standards. But fast forward to today and it’s undeniable. That’s not a reason to pay an apology forward. What would today’s Hampshire students want or do with such a misdirected misgiving?
A more sincere gesture would be to mentor these new voices and encourage their own shaping and discovery. That we were afforded the same pathways is the institutional memory that bears preservation — not the memories themselves. I thought of that when I heard Lisa Napoli’s virtual presence of her eighties curation segment. Lisa was lamenting the loss of her Hampshire video legacy. I almost interrupted her virtual voice by challenging her familiar lament with actual evidence.
Recently I excavated a sketch where I cast Lisa in her future real-life role of reporter on the antics of Wind Shields. The interview concerns celebrity journalism and the fortunes of Brooke’s fictitious younger sister. In retrospect, the script is sophomoric. Like so many Infinity sketches, it deserves an obscure death. But at least I was trying to venture out of my hermetic maleness. And never had such inside baseball risen this close to the surface of my personal Infinity history.
Roger Mellen (S72) introduces John Bruner (F94) who guides us through a virtual tour of today’s Studio G.
Once and Future Infinity
My favorite 50th Anniversary ceremony was the Infinity & Beyond viewing and discussion of Hampshire Video. Full disclosure: I had no hand in the assembling of the program or curating of the artifacts. Yet I got scooped into the eighties reels like so many unwashed sweaters with their drying cycles set to a mod kitchen microwave:
Former spouses,
Long dried-up mod spills, and
Distant combustions of drug-induced creative angst.
All living in one throbbing continuum of a continuous metallic oxide salvage mission. What could be more legacy than that? A big pile of donations, that’s what!
Failing big windfalls of liquidity, John Bruner is the proud and capable keeper of the Infinity flame. The torch he carries was passed to him by the legend known as Gunther.* We learned from Bruner that it was John Gunther (F84) who executed the monk-like preservation of Studio G as a streaming channel on YouTube. **
* Also, thanks to John Gunther for looking the other way when those of us on security detail let interrupted the slumber of the editing suites in the early morning off-hours. As my Div III collaborator Andy Morris-Friedman (F80) attests: "Maybe you could crank out a 3 minute rock video within your 3 hour allotment. But not a feature-length documentary."
** As a second footnote, Bruner provided some homework to the time-rich and cash-strapped Infinity partisans. It's assigning times, places, collaborators, titles, etc. to the smoldering collection of orphan videos now stored in this YouTube-hosted vault. Please contact John for the QR scan you'll need to access.
Many alumns I remain pals with harbor a lost treasure buried in the metallic shadows of this vast, untamed archive. I look forward to providing the door, secret handshake, and instructions for crowdsourcing this reconnaissance mission.
Tom Giovan (78F) shared the insight that Infinity itself was always about the framing, the queuing, and the segues. He figured the folks who wanted their mugs to appear on Intran would emerge from the shadows as the weekly “programming” destination. It was the “glue” between segments that the Infidiots that anchored whatever submissions had gathered in the backlog. I can confirm from the era immediately proceeding Tom’s that the glue formed its own standalone destination, whether it was introducing the news, entertainment, or bastard of both.
Unwritten Histories
The existential flash point of Miriam Nelson’s ten interminable months as the school’s president may have been the shock to the system that we never got from prior leaders. Maybe her predecessor would sooner fall on his sword than his board to balance capital improvements with lagging enrollments and budget realities. In either narrative, “Mim” held the carving cleaver in the role of the grim reaper. In the overtures to her would-be suitors, she saw in Hampshire’s buildings, property, and infrastructure something that no graduate could envision or tolerate: the seeds of an extractive business.
Februry 2019 | Cole Science Center: The winter of our discontent and the seeds of our revival.
The collective rejection of this was on full display at this weekend’s celebrations. $10 million in federal rescue funds have yet to be touched. Plan B is in place and may not be needed. Is this Hampshire’s books we’re talking about? We’ve got the vision thing and the business side playing on the same team? Amazing!
Curiously, there were teary-eyed farewells to former President Jonathan Lash curated in the 2010s reel. Yet there were no postcards from the predatory aggression or student-led brush-back against the administration in the dim, grim Mim times. John Bruner explained this as so much footage trapped in so many phones that never found its way to an arching meta treatment of this epic and ultimately heroic battle.
Any alumn Netflix producers out there?
A vulture capitalism carve-out script awaits only your filming rights. Either way, the diffuse nature of digital artifact collecting is a major challenge to a technology that remembers singular images contained in a visual lock-box in the casing of a SONY videocassette.
Next Chapters
We all left campus with a pocketful of sounds, pictures, a crumpled enrollment packet, and the exuberance that comes with believing the is a vital force for social change in a world gone to shit on our watch.
Can Hampshire cure climate change?
No and sorry but wrong question.
Can we nudge it back to health?
Better question.
Patty and I will soon depart our unglamorous work lives as salaried people. We will exchange commutes and Tupperware with a surplus of time and experience and shower them on a Hampshire community that supports the future as a nurturing place. One supporting its inhabitants on the earnings of their humanity alone. A market at the service of its citizens. It starts with a generosity still scarce in these times of perceived loss and imposed transition. Tomorrow’s Hampshire is the nesting place.
It’s no longer the personal story of the hero but the political reality of the all-powerful where the fantasy life of today’s escapism is scripted, cast, and streamed. Movie fantasy? Meet video game.
What Happens When The Escapists Are Greeted As Liberators?
Inside the House chamber, lawmakers, staff aides and journalists were told that tear gas had been deployed and to grab an emergency hood from under his or her chair. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
Prolog
Much has been said about America’s mud wrestling with media disinformation and political dysfunction. Much has been debated about the competing versions of what America stands for and what she stands against. This clash of narratives is nothing new. It comes straight from central casting and sucks your news feed dry.
What is new is a switcheroo between two competing versions of how Americans view themselves through the social histories that form of our American identity.
One is the ideal of the American dream. The other we’ll call the American hallucination. The willful removal of context from the telling of dark, American stories. Those are tales where backwards thinking slips out the back door. Casting retroactive judgments on moving pieces of the human chessboard is not just some parlor game. It’s what’s on the news menu. It’s the future of entertainment.
Retrofitting a movie ending around changing attitudes is one way to explain the wholesale rejection of the moral codes at work guiding their time-appropriate behaviors. Another is to say this is what happens to a culture that witnessed the death of the American dream. On our watch die she did. We grew up in the promise of an American dream that was within potential reach. Of which reachers? That would be the upwardly mobile as-in … anyone with modest means and slightly immodest ambitions. We all knew the dream was both imagined, and as real as our devotion to it.
Yes, it was a marketing ploy. Not everyone would rise accordingly. And yet, shouldering those hopes would nurture our stamina. We will endure this recession. We will break out of this bust cycle. We’ll reach the point where it’s our money that’s being borrowed. The ultimate payback! Such were the trailers for the American dream that fired our young, professional imaginations. A generation later, that hope has dimmed if not extinguished for millennials gaping at mountains of student loan debt. Didn’t we get ourselves through school? Wrong question to be asking, Buddy.
They don’t root for the little guy because they know first-hand their chances of taking on Goliath or selling him their start-up is nil. Instead they’ve escaped to a world where the entire power structure is questioned. The elites and the brokers and the deciders are all accountable for the corruptions wrought by their abuse of this power.
It’s a power they neither earned nor amassed but simply inherited, thus bypassing any of the accountability associated with traditional channels of leadership and trust through public dialog. It’s no longer the personal story of the hero but the political reality of the all-powerful where the fantasy life of today’s escapism is scripted, cast, and streamed. Movie fantasy. Meet video game.
Smell Testing Standards
Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill on her morning commute.
Like you, my wife and I watch our share of streaming escapism. Like you, sometimes we’re Googling while we watch to determine empirical fact from artistic license. Recently we traveled back to our formative professional adult times and streamed the movie Working Girl (1988) starring Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, and Sigourney Weaver.
If your post boomer curiosity is unaroused, I guarantee there’s no spoilers worthy of your alerting. The implausible resolution of a lurching plot twist rests on a wobbly bed of screwball comedy formulas. These wacky, zany, turns of narrative have long since thinned out on the expired belief they could pass the smell test. There were three bands of smell test results:
Sweet success (first and foremost): that an audience could invest its betting money in a series of improbable events coming true.
Scent of a popular B movie (next and likeliest): that the guy gets the girl (or in this case) the girl gets the gig and that conviction could lift the emotional prospects of its audiences.
Cheap cologne grade (last and least): that the silver screen could suspend enough disbelief to make them forget their off-screen troubles. Sometimes for longer than the film. Imagine! Are your movie muscles still limber? Can you still go the distance?
The final elevator scene has more sleights of hand than a fire-eating juggler of vanishing card tricks. And yet the world surrounding that bank of corporate elevators is grounded in the same plausible backdrop that would greet any movie-goer on their commutes the following work day. The change that director Mike Nichols is foisting on us lives between the hearts and minds of a repentant but worthy protagonist. Melanie Griffith’s hometown character is in a double destiny reversal with her antagonist boss. A worldlier and coddled arch-rival played by Sigourney Weaver. Who do we root for? Nichols makes the decision for us.
Crowd Scenes of Today
Is It Safe to Go to the Movies? Tara Santora, Fatherly, September 14, 2020
In 2021’s collective mental landscape, snootiness is not only in. It’s the cost of even entering the one remaining form of advancement. Self-promotion is the last resort of scoundrels and ambitious claims on climbing today’s corporate, political, and cultural ladder. Our seething anger can’t be directed at the privileged few cutting the line of our promotion. We were never up for one in the first place. And we still have jobs. Even if it’s a full time job just figuring out how to hold the one we have. Besides, no one is especially interested in our inability to rise in station or settle a personal workplace score.
However, aiming our invective at the tribe who cut the line? Sublimating my shame with healthy dollops of contempt for the success I’ll never be? Now you’re talking. Permission to uncork, sir? It is the contagion that knows no flu season. Our addiction to indignation is transmitted via smart phone notifications. No surgical strike implied when the car drives over the curb. Nothing pedestrian about these protesters.
Wait! How did we get from the crowd scene shot in a lower Manhattan office lobby a generation ago to the white supremacist march on Charlottesville in 2017? What do our current political upheavals have to do with screwball comedies, cultural smell tests, or the aerosols dancing off our phone sceens?
Everything, if you’re streaming wholesale retakes of historic tragedies like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Plenty, if you’re rewinding to episode one of anything Ryan Murphy revisits on his $300 million tab from Netflix, or what Midge Maisel doles out to the knuckle-dragging GI Joe Schmoes in the smokey take-my-wife clubs .
A whole new backdrop to the Cold War once the viewer inserts heroine Beth Harmon into the cardboard cut-outs of gobsmacked prodigy bros and inscrutable Russians.
Bridge Construction Ahead
Tools of obliteration.
The point is to guide the viewer’s lust for justice to the obliteration of the bullies who tormented us through the 20th Century. The bridge leading back there is a fabrication that bypasses victims, heroes, and all history books that stand-in for the psychopathic reality hosts that set civilization on its heels.
Is a bridge back to the Twentieth Century the way to throw the cold water of reality on a Dorothy who mistakenly thought herself in Kansas … but that Kansas prohibited free and fair reproductive rights services?
Is it a bridge back to the Minutemen when San Francisco schools throw Paul Revere on the tinder of so many Confederate flags because of his mistreatment of Indians?
Is it a bridge back to the time when a white man’s country was his shining castle and everyone else new their respective roles and places? Who needs cancel culture when you can delete entire decades of coalition-building and consensus-making?
Does the retelling require the wholesale re-staging of our revisionism? A post racial past where open hearts and independent minds upstage inheritance, tribal rites, and skin tones?
Is that how social justice wins over individual liberty?
Is that how merit transcends birthright?
Are we sure we’ve persuaded our libertarian friends this is the way, past our open intolerance for one another?
And can 71 million Trump voters be fully culpable for their own alternative realities?
These are weighty deliberations for the most reasoned of actors and the most sensible of cultures. For the winner-take-all USA, it is a bridge too far for anyone expecting to meet solid ground upon its crossing.
2020 as Hindsight
In the screwball past, the audience could indulge in the implausible outcome, so long as the good guy was believable. Maybe a little more faith would enable us to fight the good fight long enough to prevail in our own reality series. But at least we had to power to change for the better.
That was the known quantity after the credits had rolled. Our current indulgence for these flights of historic fancy is the outcome of losing that faith. That expectation of a future we can have a hand in shaping, not just a present we’re preoccupied with enduring.
In the narrative, this was once centered on the change and growth of the protagonist. These days you don’t need to identify with the star. In fact if you stage an anti-hero your plot can beat up on the larger society without needing to identify with the star, as-in…
I don’t condone Walter White’s crimes in defense of providing for his meth empire family
I don’t sanction the use of waste removal consulting services for packing Tony Soprano’s adversaries in garbage bags
I don’t approve of Cersai Lannister’s power grab as much as I respect her dealing of bargaining chips. Would I despise a man any less?
But I do indulge with imposing my 2020 hindsight on the 1970s world — the same painted cloth of unyielding circumstance that hung behind the characters of my coming of age. The idea of switching out the social norms was no more conceivable than redirecting the crowd scenes in Working Girl off lower Manhattan. And into the East River.
Reality departures don’t mean that the reality keepers own the landing rights of reality’s return. It means that we must change and grow past where our own despair pacifies our anger and appeals to the notion of running out so many clocks. That would be the ultimate fiction and the breaking in the arc of histories yet to be written.
Talk is cheap. But shouting is even cheaper. Especially when it drowns out the opposition — the expense of listening.
And the cultural war prop room never closes for business.
What Happens Here Will Only Stay Here If We Comply
Employees walked out at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., last November to protest how it handled sexual harassment complaints. Credit: Jim Wilson, The New York Times
It’s a curious thing. You listen to podcasts about business, politics, public policy, culture, entertainment. In any fathomable category of human endeavor there’s a shared and disputed history of how we got where we are. With one notable exception. It’s where many of us listeners spend the majority of our waking hours when we’re not tethered to our headphones. It’s the history off-limits to anyone outside our employers, and even beyond the reach of many of our peers. When we sign our employment contracts at-will, we are never more than one bad work day away from termination.
As we’ve seen in our polarized country, the behavior of our political classes breeds conformity, cowardice, and a reflective dismissal of open debate with superiors — be they elected by a board of directors or a pitchfork-waving crowd of primary voters. Under the employment laws of most states, speaking truth to power is a career-limiting move. It reduces potential counter-moves too when the fallout moves beyond the boundaries of whistle-blowers and legal protections against workplace retaliation.
There is no shared social history that lives outside the data fortress of the corporate firewall. Any one attempting to step outside it is greeted with the same studied ferocity as those greeting the hacker-invaders attempting to break-in. This false equivalency criminalizes the notion that a corporation be held externally accountable for its own internal affairs, specifically the actions taken against the collective good of its employees.
A Monopoly on Knowledge Labor
Instead we have white collar war stories told between the combatants in the knowledge worker ranks. There are the legal skirmishes around employment law that are traded between corporate legal departments and the council they retain. There are the use cases to prove out the frameworks, scoring systems, and mid-course corrections of insistent strategy consultants who bless management team acquisitions, workforce reductions, and all manner of impact on earnings reports, (i.e. many if not most knowledge worker employers).
Even annual rites of we’re-all-in-this-togetherness like employee surveys are ultimately re-calibrations for how high management can turn the screws without courting a groundswell insurgency or a grassroots rejection of newly imposed terms and conditions. Employees have much skin in the game and no place at the table. While the survey is marketed as an instrument for feedback, the ultimate goal is to isolate the first inkling of departmental simmerings and cool them down. The operative goal here is isolation before untended resentments can leap across the well-enforced boundaries of business units and organizational functions.
Whether limited to encryption keys or scripted for applause lines in town halls, all of these stories are siloed at the discretion of top management and their container-keepers. What you say here stays here. What you see here never happened if it didn’t go down as planned.
So why rock the boat now? Who was ever naive enough to suggest that corporate playbooks are open secrets? That their appetites for growth and the conflicts of interest posed by this solitary purpose should be scrutinized and confronted? We call for investigations and expect our public institutions to way transparency against the rights of shareholders to receive a fair return on their capital. Why not the workers who generate those same results behind the muffled seclusion of the firewall?
Aborted Mission Statements
Actually, many 21st Century-based tech giants have branded themselves under the banner of corporate responsibility, environmental sustainability, and ethical business practices. Are these publicly-facing aspirations reflected in the way big tech engages its knowledge workers or are they high-minded platitudes that confer no wider social benefits beyond their corporate PR value? Many of the millennial and Gen Z knowledge workers attracted to their employer’s social mission are pushing back.
Earlier this fall Google employees protested the trafficking of hate speech, the use of AI surveillance for infringing on citizen identities and digital rights, and management countermoves, including the suspension of activist employees. The protests were soon followed by calls for the workforce to try something quite alien to the U.S. economy, corporate labor practices, and employee relations — the right of knowledge workers to negotiate with management through collective bargaining.
So, who is our expert witness? Who can speak to both power and the need for open discussion? If you want extra helpings of candor and credibility, don’t ask a current employee about the employer you’re considering. Ask a former employee. Someone with no skin in a game they once played to win under the same rules you’ll soon be learning. They’re under no obligation to side-step the problem personalities, undue hardships, or plain dumb stuff that passes for standard protocol when: (1) the blame gets assigned, while (2) the underlying problems went unaddressed when your firsthand witness decided to jump ship.
My proposal is that knowledge-worker user groups foster research and communications to scale the firewalls. The tools of the trade are every bit as familiar as the barriers for its facilitation: discussion boards, virtual workshops, and collaborative platforms that veer clear of social media platforms and their own un-scalable firewalls of prying eyes and the intrusions of surveillance capitalism.
Draft Agenda
That said, here are three such expressions for elevating the concerns, goals, and ultimate demands of the U.S.-based corporate knowledge workforce:
1) War Stories Told Around a Communal Fire:
Develop success cases where channels between KMers and leaders showcase exemplary partnerships through open discourse and courageous debate.
Be those expert witnesses to the use cases we develop where collaborative know-how and process experience are undermined or compromised by leadership that fails to include the knowledge organization in its decision-making.
2) Open Knowledge Metrics for Scaling the Firewall:
Distill lessons from use cases into survey tool for benchmarking knowledge-based organizations by degree of management support, i.e. communities of practice, voice of employee, intelligent search, etc.
3) Process Guidance for the Unjaundiced:
Provide support to energized and often less seasoned colleagues who wish to leverage our guidelines in pursuit of more open knowledge communities and corporate rights for knowledge workers
* * *
This proposition should sound familiar to anyone who’s tracked their own sense of the post COVID world to come with my 2020 Foresight musings. I remain a wary bystander of the status quo. I do harbor an active animosity towards its unquestioning return. While corporate boards and elites are ripe for channeling this, that’s not either accurate, realistic, or in keeping with any future worthy of envisioning. That place accesses a healthy capacity for dialog, an appetite for cooperation, and a bias towards a stabilizing economy for the many, not for the prosperity of a few.
Playing by the same set of rules is a sound set of rules because the same ones apply to you and me. Other agreements are on the table. But this is the only one we’ll need to understand across that table our mutual commitment to social contract number one.
In our last install we considered what could happen if all the bread and circus distractions died down long enough for common people to share in their economic insecurity?
“Emptiness is not something to fear but to explore as a spiritual reality that leads to detachment from self-interest and greater compassion for the world.
Fr. Steven Paulikas, The New York Times, April 11, 2020
That cleansing embrace of that blank canvas sounds nearly as courageous as it does naive for anyone teleporting within the vicinity of “now.” In fact, if I had…
(1) Read up on the future in the maternity ward where I was born, and
(2) Been magically transported to 2020, I would have …
(3) Done a 360 degree crawl back into mom’s womb.
Future shock set in when what do you want to be when you grow up becomes the answer to a test score. And those answers are limited to a shrinking number of professions that are drawing from a declining range of cognitive strengths, artistic skills, and uniquely human traits.
What if the same career ambition could be expressed as social stability, and not mere social status? This promising societal aspiration starts with a wholesale rewrite of the social contract number one. That’s where Father Paulikas’s brave, defiant act of detachment begins. That’s from where we assess our relationship to our communities, peers, and juries without prejudice.
Playing by the same set of rules is a sound set of rules because the same ones apply to you and me. Other agreements are on the table. But this is the only one we’ll need to understand across that table our mutual commitment to social contract number one.
Only problem is that the contract is voided, no one’s in charge, and our responsibility to each other is decided by someone with no skin in the game. And when the contract is voided there are no winners and losers. Just suckers who never had a chance of winning. Also, your handshake is channeling my inner germaphobia. Perhaps we can lock our gazes in with an iris scan? What are the terms and conditions for lying through our irises?
Technopolists: Can we look at clouds from both sides now?
Given this loss of mutuality, personal responsibility is being tested in ways not previously relied upon to form agreements, let alone social cohesion.
Coordination used to be how humans in groups navigated their way through anticipated changes. But it’s also how we coped with the unknowable, as-in… if I take a bullet from the enemy, my loved ones will accept my death as a noble sacrifice in the defense of family honor. In these pandemic times there have been many great and minor sacrifices. But not in the public spirit and inner solace offered by a shared understanding of a common good. These virtues are not available to us in 2020.
In the past the enemy was foreign. The threat concerned more than enlistment or rationing or conforming to a defensive crouch while the storms of hostility roared overhead. It was the threat of what could be taken from us:
from our freedom to assemble,
to the abundance in our supermarkets, and
the shape-forming potential of our futures.
These fascist/commie/[blank] fundamentalists were all gunning for our way of life.
The Simpsons” predicted a Donald Trump presidency in the 2000 episode “Bart to the Future.”
Now that the threat has advanced to a largely domestic one, the cupboard of American treasure is largely a rite of privilege, not a under the lock and key of such former givens as…
An entrepreneurial spirit,
Expanding middle class,
High quality public education,
Widespread home ownership, and
The fruits of a well-earned retirement — the grand prize afforded to anyone with a lifelong appetite for hard work.
Food fight!
Our wounds are self-inflicted these days. The petty slights of self-involved indignation are now serviceable as both: (1) social media business model, and (2) the national conversation. We’re lashing out impulsively for optimal reaction. Somewhat like how a virus tempts an immunity system to over-correct in its compromised state. And we’re not defending our honor when we’re returning incoming fire with table scraps.
More importantly, we’re not defending an American Way of Life. Those defenses are way down in a time of declining life expectancy, climbing obesity rates, downward economic mobility, overpriced housing markets, the highest rates of chronic disease among our peers, a safety net in the shredder, and one uninsured medical condition away from an incurable credit report.
But before we figure out with what’s worthy of defending and from whom, let’s ease up on the gas? Perhaps a slice of humble pie served ahead of the bacon cheeseburgers and the chest-thumping? Maybe even a little gratitude for the small graces that have endured, or even strengthened under the strain of our COVID exile?
Here are a few collective blessings we’d all be well-advised to consider ahead of the next flash point for intolerance:
COVID is worse than the flu, less contagious than the measles, moves stealthily through populations dense and scattered, and about as lethal as a dirty bomb dropped in any single population center on earth today.
Your internet has gone down several times since the virus hit. But not for months at a time. (Can you imagine?)
The Pacific Coastal fires and the Gulf hurricanes have lived up to their “Hell AND High Water” billing in the coming attractions of climate changes to come. And most of us still possess the time, resources, and intelligence to rebuild … elsewhere.
Are We Done Here? (What Sounds Like a Plan and Sounds off Like a Platoon)
My wife calls it the 5-5-5 rule. That $5 dollar garment will ship for an additional five dollars. Upon arrival, it will be worn five times before it enters the pile-on of pre-washed un-wearables. Planned obsolescence is what happens when we flush our last trip to the printer cartridge store down the pipe of shredded fashion statements. Unplanned unemployment is what happens when the middle person is removed from the transaction. That job is not coming back. The newly disintermediated are not the cartridge repair guys of the future. There is no return policy for faster and cheaper when there is no “better.”
So what would better look like if we surrounded it with stable/merit and compensation? Would we publicly fund more of those “good paying jobs” the party bosses used to crow about at the ribbon-cutting? Didn’t think so. Do we elect a government that takes a healthy whack out of the trickle-free revenues that accrue to the great dis-intermediators? Now there’s a lifetime income funding source. Trickle-up the fruits of federal revenues and the cash gets spent before the capital can be hoarded.
That sounds convincing, to a point:
Only, what happens when the takers so far exceed the givers that the U.S. Treasury becomes a credit risk?
Will yesterday’s corporate tax cuts turn into tomorrow’s reparations, and loan forgiveness, and free day care for essential service workers?
Will emerging coalitions crumble under rapidly shifting centers of power? More acrimony and tribalism … is that even possible?
Here are seven ways that can play out as a shopping list for problem-solving. It’s all on the table. Even the table scraps. The only non-negotiable in this future is score-settling.
Loosen the margins: The pandemic economy let’s those of us with the luxury of work-at-home status to ponder its leading mismatch: The irony of essential workers drawing marginal wages. What would happen if we expanded both? The ranks of the essential and the rewards for the privilege of being pivotal to a functional society? What could be less marketing-driven or disposable than a living wage to keep the rest of us fed and looked after? That might not boost the fortunes of capital. But it might dignify our mutual understanding of the need for community, expanding windows of public service, and survival of our better natures.
Bridge the generations: In the sixties it was the gulf between the insurgent baby-boomers and the war handed them by the greatest generation. Nowadays those same boomers are standard-bearers of a graying nation. The new gap is based on a long delayed transfer of power and property from the ownership boomers to the resulting generations, with no sure lock on their own self-financing destinies. For starters, we boomers need to admit that we’re old, cranky, and medicated. Perhaps it’s not just golfing, cruises, and keypad access to a fiefdom of gated estates? Maybe retirement is for giving something back. Maybe that transfer is a wealth of experience to share beyond the next of kin?
And while we’re on a lifetime of self-service, let us not forget the the rise of individualism and institutional distrust was birthed, nurtured, and ultimately flourishing under the Boomer Nation of today. Cradle to grave. The working class. The privileged. The stars and stripes of all political persuasions. It’s all about me.
Abrasive post to newsfeed, generated without author’s consent.
Stop addressing our adversaries by their social media accounts: Putting the needs of our base ahead of our adversaries is an entirely understandable impulse. Posturing to the converted? This drags down the chances for reconciliation with our opponents. We need to re-invent the smoke-filled backroom as a safe space. We need to go screenless. We need to face each other. Repeat back the concerns we hear. Share back how that squares with our understanding. Confirm where we’re closing the awareness gaps. Disagree on the best way forward. Agree that these views stem from honest differences, not from selling tickets to rage parades.
“Protesting is good and needed, press conferences are good and needed,” says Councilwoman Alondra Cano, in discussing community solutions to New York City policing policies. “That third space is needed where we are committed to each other, and not the camera.”
Trust won’t return before the arrival of a new social contract: Accountability is what happens when social contracts are honored. The better ones aren’t enforced by a huge pile-on of legal codes but by the honoring itself. The carrot is reputation. The stick is ostracism. It’s an arrangement where everybody wins with no specific winners. Social contracts don’t enforce victories. No one runs up their own trust scores.
And no one is taking from a limited trust pile. Under the cover of trust can can protect large, sweeping allegiances to social mores and ethical conduct: Civility, common decency, the benefit of the doubt, etc.
Accountability is the highest projection of what’s escaped through a crack in the tax, penal, and police codes. Add oaths of office to that list. No one likes to go to the back of the line.
Accountability serves at the pleasure of a cognitive-borne contagion called insecurity. Withholding rates recede and advance. Economic insecurity however is a one-lane highway with no passing lane. We’ve driven down that road for half a century. With no signs of abating. Problem-solving needs to be protected from Twitter, permanent campaigning, and corporately-funded political parties. We need government to facilitate solutions without pitting the solvers against the insurgents.
Branding problems aside, government needs to break free of its problem versus solution conundrum. That’s the first step in figuring out a new core strength unique to big trust governing: how to play matchmaker between problems and solutions. In any size or flavor, a big trust democracy asks the obvious: – A stampede of social problems angling for the top fixation slot. – What are the gaping holes that need the most expedient filling in our fraying safety net? – How do we fix that problem by strengthen the net?
Skin the the Game is Under the Control of My Personal Responsibility: Masking the significance of top-down decision-making is at the root of “the great abdication.” The disowning of the impact of those weighted decisions on the shoulders of those who carry their consequences. For too long, authority has been consigned to the faceless, omnipotent powers of “the market” or “the algorithms” or the neighbors we never see with the wrong yard signs.
While we have no direct recourse to address those above-my-pay-grade executive decisions, we can single handedly cast a ballot. And it will count exactly as much as the votes of the candidates whose authority we reject or favor. This is what holds us to our history and pegs us to a future where owning up to consequences becomes a collective responsibility again.
Tolerance is the cost of doing social contracts: In olden, settled times we had a system of checks and balances. It was the rock, paper, scissors form of mutually enforced deterrence from the tyrannies of one person, body, or party domination. These days, voters are given an all-or-nothing choice:
– Either your team clubs your opposition over the head, or – You blockade every move they make to step over you.
There is no tolerance built into this unaccountable system. Only the seeds of unflinching contempt and deal-breakers for negotiating on unresolvable terms. Add any hinting of compromise to the enemies list.
Is that because our domestic enemies are so menacing or because our tolerance muscles have grown flabby? Could it be as simple as a screen-based engagement that no longer requires our in-person presence to engage in respectful disagreement?
The digital natives are restless: Selling out used to be an accusation aimed at performers who profited outside their coterie of fans and fawning critics. Nowadays it means acknowledgement of opposing views and a striving to strike a balance. And why shouldn’t the base hold out for a better deal? They have no history of deal-making where two sides can look each other in the eye and face the mirror the following morning. Knowing that means needing to draw the new social contract… – Within the conflict-seeking urgency of the news media, and – Without the public trust in the institutions required to make that contract a binding one
Running with rock, paper, and scissors
Shopping List Item #1:
Have today’s Technopolies Underwrite Tomorrow’s Guaranteed Minimum Incomes
Okay. Now it’s the government’s turn to find suitors who can unleash their engineering teams to design the delivery system. But unlike an Amazon warehouse or an Apple factory or a Google data farm, the designer gig is a tax write-off, not a new profit center. Strictly pro bono, and sorry, no product placements.
And the job placements? Why that would include generous staffing counts from the ranks of those essential marginals. Yes, the folks otherwise be swapped out for robots once the solution train leaves the social problem station.
What if big tech doesn’t get on board the big trust wagon? That’s where Bezos, Zuckerberg, and associates can leave the generosity of their current brackets in place. Or this: The feds can pry open their transaction cows to fund income guarantees for those same essential marginals who could otherwise be working on the social solution railroads of tomorrow. What could be better leverage for the disenfranchised than payment for our digital identities? They may have been stolen legally. But that doesn’t indenture us to surveillance capitalists. That doesn’t bind us to the broken contract.
As noted at the outset, a past that’s always in flux is a delay on the future. Nostalgia for the settled scores of former glories is more than the gibberish of cultural dementia. It’s a full-throated cancellation notice on the construction of future times that eclipse the selective memories of the infirmed and the entrenched.
The aging baby boomer confronts a world they have leveraged for personal gain to a degree unfathomable to prior generations. The time afforded by accruing wealth gives retiree-age the resources they need to support the efforts of future generations to make and honor their own promises. These are the markers of promises to keep in a century that is neither new nor on the cusp of greatness.
It is a future where the boomer can sunset our claims and privileges, and open our unspent endowments up to the inheritable promise of an inhabitable future. That must be our true legacy. And we will share in the faith that we tried to leave this world better than we found it.
Funny thing about the authoring of our collective history books. It’s one thing when we acknowledge that the selecting, composing, and retelling of battles and conflicts is in the voice of the victors. That’s a core conflict in itself, replayed as both “settled” or “disputed” in referential loops. Now add the rose-colored glasses to this reading of history. That’s where our memories filter out to the sacrifices, traumas, and injustices we carried to prevail within our victorious narratives. Adding a selective memory to a collection of questionable outcomes forms one shaky foundation; specifically for…
(1) unifying efforts to build a future worth living in, and
(2) for human cooperation in general.
Which confederate statue is the reflection of local pride in regional sovereignty? Which is a hideous reminder of white supremacy?
You have your opinion. I have mine. Should they conflict, there’s little chance we’ll be persuaded otherwise. So let’s seek common ground on your rightful respect for my wrong-headed views.
Let’s agree that conversion is both tedious and self-defeating. Instead let’s focus on issues where we both win and share in that same victorious narrative. We can tackle the harder stuff once the base level trust level is restored.
When we were last together in our third installment of episode three: (“Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good — What Comes Next”) we tried some perspective-taking. We slipped on the Gucci loafers of Senate Republicans to understand their resistance to helping the unemployed through the fall and winter of our pandemic discontent. We looked through the lens of Senator Rick Scott of Florida who argued that the hardball negotiation by Senate Republicans was a feature, not a bug, of keeping American labor lean, hungry, and ready to resume where it left off.
Sen. Rick Scott: "The moment we go back to work, we cannot create an incentive for people to say, 'I don't need to go back to work because I can do better someplace else.'" pic.twitter.com/VVydjN9VfN
Senator Scott’s pumping on the economic relief brakes is understandable. The wealthy underwrite elections, the parties protect their donors and in Mr. Scott, we’ve got a two-for-one sale displayed proudly in the C-SPAN store window Remember that return on investment in GOP majorities a.k.a. The Tax Reform Act of 2017? Turning the clock forward to the pandemic zone shot us clear past the final solution:
1. Neutering and defanging the federal government.
2. Turning the clock back to a world of unrestrained capital
3. Fleecing, before fleeing the republic, for which it stands.
No Life Boats in Coach
Of course, once the plane crashes, fixing the auto pilot is a luxury for the survivors. Even those survivors in first class who can float their own way to safety. Even recovery of the flight recorder is a distraction to the stranded hoards in coach. Would the most unfit be voted off the island by the libertarians watching at home? What would women and children first look like to the crew piloting this rescue plane?
Wake up from the scripted nightmare and a cold splash of aspirational reality could revive us. According to former Treasury Richard Rubin, federal revenues were already running a full two points below normal when the pandemic hit. Compared to the glory days of the dot.com heyday and tax revenues are now 16.5% of GDP, compared to 20% in the late nineties.
My point? A narrow post-contested victory this November still brings the of wiggle room needed to reverse the 2017 tax holiday for those likeliest to make it a working vacation. That consequential first step has the public, and history on its side.
Confidence in paying for what exactly?
The freedom for taxable income to do the most good for the most salary-dependent people.
The priority shifting from American Color War to a national obsession with a shared precondition called economic insecurity.
That’s where capital in search of a home goes. Not its reflexive old normal routine: the highest return on the hoarded investments of insistent shareholders. That’s the bottom-line for the underwriters at the crash sites of broken auto pilots.
U.S. is Them
There are limits. Soaking the rich does nothing to broaden the commonweal. We all need skin in the game. Even the self-dealers and self-makers who think they can redirect highway funds to repair their imperial driveways. It can’t fall on the losers of a prior election. We need to move away from winner-take-all to a renewed spirit of shared sacrifice. Replacing one echo chamber with another extends the cycle. The concussive bluster of who gets to govern returns to the mutual respect of governing effectively. The new adversaries are not those in disagreement but dissolution: the enemies of compromise.
Here are the counter-arguments to Senator Scott’s tough winners-don’t-negotiate love from Rubin himself, a former Goldman Sachs-plated lion of Wall Street, and the furthest voice from the Bernie Bro Choir of any corporate-respecting Democrat:
Prediction #3 — The economy as a manageable problem to solve in a plausible way…
There will be ample room to increase revenues, on a highly progressive basis, for example, by increasing corporate taxes, restoring individual rates, repealing pass-through preferences and imposing a financial transactions tax. — Robert Rubin, Bringing the Economy Back to Life, 4.17.20, The New York Times
The calculation extends to health coverage:
We should also pursue universal health care coverage, preferably through a public option, while at the same time reducing our system’s overall costs, which far exceed other developed economies’. Ibid.
And that credit card balance!
Addressing our debt/G.D.P. ratio is in our longer-term economic interest and also benefits us in the nearer term, as greatly increased debt could impede the recovery. Ibid.
Some of these resentments began spilling into the public square over the summer. The backlash against systemic racism for starters. Remember that post racial society that Chief Justice Roberts used to justify the gutting of key provisions in the Voting Rights Act?
Perhaps those same rose-colored blinders are what justified the left’s lethargic turnout during off-year Obama era elections. Either way, that pendulum swing is in full counter-punch. Pendulum whiplash. Darkest midnight to highest noon.
A Petition to Replace Faster, Better, Cheaper
Why is it that economic inequality is not a bug of an unjust society? It’s a feature of a smoothly-running free market economy. For me, the answer is personal and simple. I feel lucky to have a job. And it’s not just any job so I double down on gratitude. I experience feverish gratitude that the job pays enough to sustain a family and a modest retirement savings. Head over heels on a slow day, really. My appreciation reflects the precipitous fall from office to service worker. Concepts like recognition, generosity, or even job performance do not factor into this equation. Income flow for most of us is a precarious thing. There is no actual bump in pay for superior effort. Maintaining income flow is reward in itself.
Performance reviews aside, a former colleague summed up his amazement at another widening gap. It’s the one between
… How stubbornly we defend our pocketbooks against scams, knock-offs, and mark-ups… versus …
How cheaply we discount our own value to a contracting labor market.
The connection here is more than personal. When every labor is justified as an exchange of assets, the cheaper the transaction, the more marginalized the laborer. We get this theoretically for buying cheap T-Shirts and jeans from Pakistan. Does that rationale find its way home when it’s our work product that finds its ways into the software code, legal contracts, marketing collateral, or even health care coverage consumed by our employers?
The corona-infested economy may well in fact settle for a continuation of faster, better, cheaper; especially if we don’t find a replacement for the race-to-the-lowest reduction-based logic. That’s a return to the humming along economy that dropped us like a stranded passenger that forfeited their free Two Day shipping flight home from planet Amazon.
It’s not enough to blame the status quo for this predicament. We need to intercept faster, better, cheaper at the factory gates before escorting it out of the board room. We need to knock innovation off its trajectory enough to factor the greater good into the disruptions to come. Only then can we justify a future that includes us in business-as-usual. Three next chapters have yet to be written. Blame their stripped-down open-endedness on the allure of alternative arrangements and these bloated time bubbles:
What’s an economy for? This is not the question that comes to mind in the reinsertion of the prior default settings of manufacturing and distribution. Plug and play makes sense to the owners of capital than the holders of debt, let alone the 50% who were a few off weeks from belly-up when the prior economy was purring along. How do we get from a trillion dollar cash injection to more of it actually circulating as we enter that tentative, post coma rehab phase?
What’s our collective sense of security? Is it to beat back the advancing hordes of the bad hombres? Perhaps it’s no longer about who’s: (1) labeling who the terrorists or, (2) determining the greater of two evils … global, or homegrown (you pick ’em!) Perhaps it’s about an America first that favors the nationalizing of the medical necessities we’ll need as more of us are victimized by changing climates, dissipating resources, and heavy hand of the unforeseen to come.
What’s the role of the individual in all this? Prioritizing what brings us together in shared sacrifice was a pipedream before this pandemic. It becomes almost graspable if we can re-establish the guiding clarity of the greater good. That’s no drug-induced high. That’s corona phoning in a sick-out from the Oval Office last evening. But that begs the biggest-picture question looming on the great post-pandemic horizon. How to see each other as individual contributors to that greater good, and not its dilution.
Will the pivot back to a road ahead be engineered outside the exclusionary interests of the muscular capital elites? Until offshore means: (1) a full-time residence in a private island tax haven, or (2) different planet to occupy, we have a shared outcome in a mutual controlling interest.
A Poverty of Professions
Part of that mutual interest is to occupy the time on earth of those whose needs suddenly outpace the capital formation of their labors. A paucity of wealth-providing trades and professions is a seldom mentioned scarcity in the recently completed run of the bull market. It’s also curious that our oligarchy-favoring leadership decides that throwing unregulated profits at corporations is the shortest distance between record-setting unemployment and mission accomplished.
What future economy will open the door of career choices for the able-minded people of an entering workforce?
Prediction #4 — Amazon needs workers until … they don’t
In 2020, they’re arriving into workplaces where their labor is both urgently needed and conspicuously treated as a problem to be eventually solved.” — John Herrman, Amazon’s Big Breakdown, The New York Times, 5.27.20
Easy access to short bursts of cash works out great for the connected and the corrupted. For the rest of us, writing the rules requires a new way to tie three laudable goals long buried under an unsustainable pile of Better, Faster Cheaper: compensation, merit, and stability. OK, merit cuts both ways and the current steadiness in direction is taking us to some pretty unstable territory. How about if stable keeps merit honest? That leaves an open slot for “better” to climb back in… so long as we unmoor it from the greasy downslide to the cheap farm that globalization wins no matter who’s racing.
You Don’t Have to Worship a Dollar (to Go to Work Everyday)
I’m a part-timer nanny who drives for a ride-sharing service when I’m not pinch-hitting for a local caterer.
How many gigs are you holding up? Are they even consistent enough to be counted the same from one pay period to the next?
What if the social contract wasn’t bleed-me-dry in exchange for a chance of a promotable event in some foreseeable future? What if there was an actual dependency between the personal fortunes of the big tech elites and my take home pay? What if the downstream impact of decisions were felt firsthand by the folks who make them? Would they make those same decisions if they had to live with those decisions?
Returning to Senator Scott’s cautionary “do better someplace else” tale on the Senate floor, when was the last time you personally were moved to refuse the terms of your employer? That’s the leverage needed for economic recovery. And it’s not a return to work or the ethic of hard work. It’s the dignity of work that provides for the workers and their managers. Not simply for owners and shareholders.
The dignity of work: Step one in our long national recovery to come.
And now we are not returning to our normally scheduled programming.
Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good
The Oasis of Normalcy
When we’re knocked for a loop, normalcy is the comfort food of the disoriented. It’s allure comes from the reordering of so many misplaced pieces. We won’t have to walk barefoot and blindfolded through this pool of shattered fragments known to many as Ground Hog Year, known to some as an unyielding series of cancellations, and known to all as the year the media told time according to a scoreboard of accumulated deaths and new Covid cases.
Flirting with the sudden, unannounced resumption of normal ends the uncertainty, clarifies our work schedule, sends our children back to class, and buys us a drink at the watering hole we used to call bumping into someone. The bipartisan prayer for a cure-all vaccine is an understandable as the natural inflating of expectations around a pay-off delayed. Even a promise so universal that it can’t be politicized.
But the funny thing about normal is this: As we begin our inevitable return to the creature comforts of indoor dining, commuter transit, karaoke nights, nail salons, movie theaters, and preassigned theatrical seating, we find that our audience antennas are tuned to once remote signals we hadn’t picked up before.
We begin to insist on safety platinum plus deluxe edition. There should be six sanitizing stations from the time the gel enters our fingers until the moment the card reader ca-chings. The sound piped into our ears is the breathy ventilation that infuses our lungs with a purified whiff of mountain spring breeze. Anything less and it’s the stale, recycled scent of someone waiting to exhale the memories of the now bankrupt perfume counters of department stores from the zombie malls of the 20-teens.
Funny how the normal we insist on has as little to do with those pre-pandemic aerosols from sample perfume spritzes at Macy*s or a whiff of cotton candy-scented mesh teddies at Victoria Secret. In the world to come, we are practically punch drunk from bombardments of judgment about the state of our containerized orifices. It’s not just a lack of will for taking on further changes. It’s the thinning air under that facial mask that limits our abilities to imagine a world we want to publicly engage in.
How do we overcome these instincts towards self-protection for rethinking what’s possible and not just what’s preventable? How do see this transition as a respite from carrying forward the former burdens we needn’t carry into a more enduring future? What comes next is the struggle to fill the void of today with a new balance of personal and collective responsibility. What does that look like?
When Taking Care of Business Means Business as Usual
Prediction #1 : “I think Jeff Bezos is going to offer the COVID-19 test as part of every Prime membership. I think that’s where we’re headed.” — Scott Galloway, New York Magazine, May, 2020
Destabilizing is bad. We get that. Even our most skydiver selves are clutching our parachute cords when confronted by the no tomorrow future of street violence spilling its way into living room, kitchen, and utility mud room mayhem. What’s not so easy to navigate is where an unquestioning return to flawed assumptions about how normalcy clears the destabilizing bar at any low, medium, or high bar setting.
Perhaps no evidence trail is more tread upon in the service of stability than social contract number one: Playing by the rules is good for me and for you. Like any prevalent notion, this agreement is presupposed. It is ingrained in both our better and second natures. This accommodation is primal. It is transcendent. It is central to how we conduct ourselves within a society held together by the same reciprocal understanding.
What pre-COVID assertion has risen up to challenge social contract number one? Is it that a vote for my opponent is a vote for chaos? Is it that I’m a chump for playing by the rules and the social contract was never followed in the first place? Is it that democracy is too unpredictable to be left in the hands of a public electorate? Nope. It’s about our uncompromising push for a return to normalcy. We’re talking finger-in-the-socket mental-distancing. It’s no longer getting back to the life we know. It’s more personal than that. It’s getting back to the life we miss. That’s one selective memory and it lingers long past any expired social contracts.
Put down your gun, your phone, your remote, your thumbs, and the jewels and metals around your ring finger. There is no negotiation. There is no commentary. There is no rehash of a status quo consensus. Just an insatiable appetite for the ending of this moment. And in its place? The comfort of the expected.
The Pursuit of Human Misery
One thing that no one expects in America is justice: The notion that social contract number one is back in force, and binding, regardless of our social strata. We can miss the ideal of working towards a more just society. We can strive again towards that more perfect union. But until our measurement systems are refactored to include such goals, our pursuit of human happiness will be limited to trading averages, credit risks, hedge funds, and score-keeping perfected through the relationship between our online behavior and purchase histories.
How else to explain a financial scoreboard of booming stock markets and depression level unemployment numbers? And those are just the job consumers, i.e. people in need of a pay check or two. What about the small business owner who just sank a ton of dough into an unessential business? What’s their sense of what comes next?
Three-point-five-percent (3.5%) unemployment it turns out was no better firewall against our shuttered economy and its after-effects than if it hadn’t come down at all these past record-breaking 112 consecutive months. There is no social distancing the loss of a paycheck from the arrival of a rent bill. All those jobs created over those 9 years? Gone within a matter of weeks. In early June unemployment plummets to 13.5%! So much winning? You’re probably bored with so much winning!
The next set of financial health tests needs to focus less on corporate earnings and more on personal assets. Forget about another tax break encouraging big ticket investments of putting capital to work in employment-generating enterprises. Save your breath. Wear your mask.
Instead we need to scorecard how well the massive outlays from our next government find their way into a dynamic and re-awoken economy. For instance, what if money was not a contest of who’s richest but a travel log for what happens after it leaves the treasury? It certainly doesn’t find it’s way back if we look through the tax records of Amazon, Starbucks, and Chevron. But it might if instead we were tracking more graspable indicators of personal financial health:
How much are these trends reversible, sustainable? Is there even a place at the policy-making table to seat for sustainability? Other than an incumbent’s need to stay in power?
That Deer in the Headlights is Yesterday’s Road Kill
If the capital outside of circulation is being sold as credit to poor people, the next election won’t be between two candidates from two parties. That’s no longer plausible when the business of America is politics. Elected leaders cease to govern or persuade in terms of electorates. They had been working the ballroom, not the big tent.
Now it’s the breakout room on Zoom. That’s a frank and open exchange compared to the headspace between an itchy Twitter finger and the inaudible scream factory. That piercing incitement you don’t have to unmute. The dog whistling to the same wind that catches cryptic QAnon jabbering and late night punch line chortles alike. Loud and clear.
What about your own internal chatterbox? The voices that escape from the scream factory into your own fingers. You want convenience? You’ll find your instant cash-out at the ATM located near the slot machines.
Oh, you said voting machines? Sorry. Some hearing loss is inevitable at the scream factory.
You’ll hope there’s enough time between jobs to get cross-town for the privilege of waiting hours for a crack at expressing your power. Exiting stage left: Evacuations of the donor class to their own bunker islands, sheltered from the pitchforks of the disenfranchised, income-challenged, followers on Facebook, and former homeowners-turned-refugees.
And now we resume our regularly unsustainable programming
Do we want to continue feeding an economic engine that halts to a sputtering stop once the perpetual motion brakes get pumped? That’s no simple brake job with the plumes rising under the hood.
Here’s what a good corporate citizen would say about what comes next for the recirculated capital that lands on their own balance sheets:
Prediction #2: “With many businesses likely to be operating to some extent with public money, the scrutiny will be intense. There will be real effects on the relations between government and business, and between business and society. — McKinsey & Company, The Future is not what it used to be: Thoughts on the shape of the next normal, April 14, 2020
Remember, this ante-raising of untapped corporate responsibilities is a warning from the same preeminent consulting group that captains of industry retain to lessen their collective loads; to make social problems (and larger payrolls) disappear.
In fact it’s the separation anxiety of reliable labor pools from their steady pay checks that makes the American unemployment experience the towering shadow presence in the national psyche. Outfits like McKinsey rush to fill the void between the terminators and the terminated. It’s vital to organized lay-offs that a third-party luxury brand like McKinsey validate the decision. So vital, that paying McKinsey’s exorbitant fees is a relative bargain to the executive boards paying these fees from one ledger and justifying their workforce reductions from another.
None of the terminators want the social contract muscling in here. That’s the nuanced conversation between labor and management that once sought common ground and goes like this:
(1) No one gets everything they wanted.
(2) Nobody leaves empty-handed.
I’m not aware of such a meeting. Maybe McKinsey shouldn’t be faulted for keeping the guest list to clients only.
Here’s another meeting I wasn’t invited to that I can overhear going down in my kitchen. It’s a Zoom call between public school administrators and staff in the district my wife teaches in. She and her unionized colleagues are being duly informed that they’re simultaneously teaching virtual and classroom school. The choices here for public school teachers? Do what I tell you. Maybe you’ll keep your job. Maybe.
Nobody ever said the business of America is labor. Not even Bernie, right? What about restaurant owners, pet groomers, and local farmers? What about the local repair shop, the nail salon, and the micro brew? Let’s compare the difference between the smallness and the largesse that passes for American business.
The $25 billion the Senate scrounged up to address the zero balance of the small business rescue fund is also the same sum marketing the increase of Jeff Bezos’ net worth since the beginning of the pandemic. Percentage-wise that’s a second place finish for eye-popping according to Americans for Tax Fairness.
New York Post | April 30, 2020: Activists painted “Protect Amazon workers” in giant print on a street outside CEO Jeff Bezos’s Washington mansion to protest the online retail giant’s treatment of workers during the coronavirus crisis.
The winner is Mark Zuckerberg whose personal net worth has soared by nearly half of his pre-corona fortune. So has Zuckerberg’s capacity for recouping perceived losses at the hands of his labor force, like the popularity of working from home:
“If you live in a location where the cost of living is dramatically lower, or the cost of labor is lower, then salaries do tend to be somewhat lower in those places.“
These veiled suggestions of salary reductions for not shouldering the same real estate costs as one’s corporate keeper is astonishing both for its miserliness and rejection of one of few remaining cards a remote worker has left to play: The cost differential between where they settle and the more urbane locations of their office commutes.
In one career-span, we’ve seen “people” downgraded from their employer’s “most prized assets” to their costliest. What rounding error does management solve? The margins they can’t deliver to the board without those pink slips. The rewards are obvious: a bigger share price and sudden drop of interest in next year’s bonuses. Good thing too. A raise is no longer a justified investment in human capital. It’s an arrow on your back that follows you to the next downsizing.
Who’s essential in that equation? It’s cash horses like Zuckerberg. It’s the boss who identifies with putting their capital assets to work — not their workers, and certainly not themselves. That could create even costlier, unplanned liabilities as-in small tokens of empathic understanding: Let them work from worksites of their choosing? Sounds consistent for a tech giant that…
(1) Mines the emotional surveillance of its users regardless of location, and
(2) Outsources its editorial function to faceless, underpaid offshore contractors.
Stealing the Future from the Social Ordering Economy
For all this doomsday forecasting, why am I then more optimistic about making promises than pensive about holding onto the ones no longer worth keeping? Because, however you define 2020…
We’re in it together
We’re all fighting the same real enemy
Gated communities are not immune from it
Winning that fight is more important than pleasing shareholders
Many of the newly invented enemies are jokers in the deck of an overplayed hand. They are seen for the distractions that they are.
What happens when disruptions are visited on us by viruses instead of innovations?
Anger fuels the patience many voters will need to wait their turn long after the polling stations close on November 3rd. Less angry and the might have surrendered. More satisfied and they may have … Satisfaction? What does that even look like under the banner of the face mask?
1) Capital in search of its next home: Perhaps it means that money expands its role beyond the value of its investment potential for top-heavy holders of excess capital.
2) It’s the density, stupid: Maybe it’s that we stop knowing what’s best for people living in density settings that differ wildly from our own sense of place and community.
3) An under-cushion in lieu of safety net: And if economic insecurity ceases to be the isolated desperation of individuals, perhaps our societal concern can become the cohesion-forming kick we need to re-unify our country. Even if it means that the unemployed don’t have to choose between their next job or their next rent payment.
For all of us privileged with the gift of health, COVID-19 has some overlooked, silver linings. It’s provided us…
(4) Accelerated time tables for the demise of coal, and fossil fuels, and the,
(5) Boatloads of time we never had to reflect on the contrived clutter of our double-bookings and self-serve regular approach to hitting already congested highways.
But wait, you say. What advantages our idle minds to serve an economy in toxic shock? Is there no higher calling than reviving that social-ordering economy? And what of the spoiled appetites of our newly enfranchised non-workforce? Isn’t the disrepair of our unemployment systems enough incentive to settle for the entry floor of the big box stock room?
Here are three what comes next game-changers to keep those end-of-the-tunnel lights set to sustainable and away from our personal stash of unpaid bills. This is what the social contract to address economic insecurity looks like in three bold strokes:
1) Guaranteed minimum income (GMI): The GMI proposals floated by Andrew Yang in last fall’s primary season predated the generous unemployment package attached to the passage of last spring’s CARES Act. Both The unsqueezing of the already marginalized means giving workers the ability to better determine where they invest their labor. Perhaps one guy standing in the way said it best: “The moment we go back to work, we cannot create an incentive for people to say, ‘I don’t need to go back to work because I can do better someplace else.’” — Senator Rick Scott
Those of us less tormented by notions of sloth may not agree with Senator Scott that our work ethics are in the balance so much as the fighting shape of our beleaguered American middle-class. There is no better color, race, or red/blue state-blind bill than the economic security provisions it contains.
Without those? Remove the last vestiges of that frayed social fabric and you have more than skin in the game. You have exposed bone striking against raw nerve. Or, what we already had before the pandemic. That’s where the terminators lose their ability to float undesirable jobs for unsustainable wages. That’s where the gravity of the virus speeds into the passing lane; then swerves into the oncoming rattle of foreclosures, bankruptcies, and a prolonged loss of appetite for all but the essentials.
2) Education as Equalizer | The return to social mobility — Somewhere along the lines of self-interest, we lost sight of higher education as a win/win proposition for its graduates and a future depending on their success.
The end of the college campus as party central and the intimacies of classroom instruction means a refocus on learning and away from the emptiness of the overachieving: boilerplate recommendations, standardized test scores, an over-scheduled crush of extracurriculars, “and middling students who play arcane sports.”
Our future notions of leadership, community, and a responsible citizenry should not rest on a winner-take-all competition for acceptance to elite colleges and universities. A virtual education depends on access to technology, not the trappings of privileges that come with SAT coaching, bribing, or the boasting of what NYU Professor, Scott Galloway refers to as the luxury brands of higher education: The lower the admission rate, the more bullet-proof the Harvards, Princetons, and Stamfords of this stardom-ticketing enterprise.
A return to admissions based on the capacity of each students’ willingness to better themselves is not some vain hope or fabled stepping stone. It’s what used to pass for a college degree:
Its restoration will scale to social mobility for the graduate and the greater social good for the world they pass on.
What they will learn there is not to be traumatized by the debating of ideas. There they will learn to hold two opposable views in their heads while considering the respective merits of competing explanations.
That both of these aspirations are no longer even offered as electives these days is reason enough to ride roughshod over the glimmering towers of the ivory-coated fortresses. Yes, end the tax-exempt status of institutions that stockpile bloated endowments for the single purpose of inflating them further.
3) Gamify the IRS | From Tax Avoidance to Aspiration Spending — Looking for redress from that ransacked social contract? The one that says we’re all equal under the law? The one that says our treasury is funded by the size of our incomes, not our loopholes? Sorry, next party in power. But soaking the rich does nothing to broaden the commonweal. That’s skin in the game we need to move away from winner-take-all to a renewed spirit of shared sacrifice. Replacing one echo chamber with another extends the cycle. The empathy, perspective-taking, and context needed to govern effectively is replaced by the concussive bluster of who gets to govern.
We don’t have a demand-side system based on need. It’s a want-based system based on the incentive to opt-out. Where’s the justice in that? The only ones left holding the treasury afloat is a declining base of taxpayers; too affluent to avoid taxes, and too poor to stash their incomes under said loopholes.
One way to spend-down our debts and shortfalls is to give taxpayers the agency required to address policy issues of their own choosing: Immigration, defense, housing, Medicare, early childhood education… (as if the list ever shortens).
Given the monopoly-sized influence of the lobbies on tax policy, we taxpayers must insist that we file our returns with the added calculation for where to direct those funds. Need to gin-up the stakes? Market the choices like a Power Ball Lottery? Fine. Go gamify the thing. Give every thousandth return collected a free pass. The more skin, the better the game.
Now that you see what happens next, how can I bait your breath for more?
Stay tuned for more Foresight: Reckoning With the Virus as a Force for Good. Our next installment is Part 4’s What Needs to Come Sooner (if there is to be a later) and petitions the innovation orthodoxy of faster, better, cheaper with a supply chain that squares with accountable demand-side outcomes of compensation, merit, and stability.
