Notices by Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop), page 3

@pts I am building up to a longer rant about this, and in fact something that may well become a longer piece of writing and/or otherwise definitive of this next part of my life, but competence and capacity and clarity and diligence and strength (*clearly*, I hope, for some specified and carefully defined values of “strength”) are all things it is beyond foolish to cede to the people who hate us and love hate. Will say (probably too) much more shortly.

@edsu @luis_in_brief Washing dishes at the moment, but can’t wait to see where this conversation goes! 👊

@edsu @luis_in_brief Washing dishes at the moment, but can’t wait to see where this conversation goes! 👊

@sarajw I am sorry, I didn’t want to be one of those insufferable “everything’s better in the States” people. If it makes you feel any better, we’ve thrown in our lot here. We’re on Shite Island for good!

@gardenpeach things like the Sewol ferry disaster or the collapse of the Sampoong department store, where the systems and processes that a higher-diligence society would insist on being observed have just been blithely circumvented, at awful cost.

@gardenpeach But maybe I actually prefer the Korean way? Like you can get a pair of prescription glasses made, same day, and even when the prescription’s complicated, for something like fifty bucks. They might not be Zeiss quality, but honestly, if they’re not, I can’t tell the difference (and while I’m not an expert, I’m the kind of person who would). There’s a kind of cheap-and-cheerful, LFG-ness to a lot of everyday process. The *flipside* is terrible, though -

@pts Yes! Good catch, that’s precisely how I intended it, and yes these qualities are braided ‘round one another.

@gardenpeach Finland is higher diligence, but stoic about defaults and shortfalls in a way that approaches the British. When people fuck up (and Finns generally assume they will, because people and life are disappointing), you’re just supposed to tough it out with lots of sisu and perkele. For all its many faults, and barring only its addiction to litigiousness, American culture actually balances these qualities reasonably well.

@gardenpeach Japan is the most diligent, but the least flexible: you cannot put raisins or shaved coconut in curry rice, because “curry rice does not have raisins or coconut in it.” Korea is a relatively low-diligence society – everything is ppali-ppali, “hurry hurry” – but it’s buffered by a high degree of flexibility, adaptability and the expectation that you and a service provider will negotiate a modus vivendi.

Sure, some of this can be accounted for by the deskilling, outsourcing, shoddy lowest-bidder automation and responsibilization that are part and parcel of neoliberal governance/management/governmentality. But much of it feels deep to the culture, in a way that absconds from awareness or visibility. And I don’t, actually, want to bellyache about this state of affairs: I would like to find some ways for us to *do* something about it together. But it’s daunting, “vaster than empires and more slow.”

rather slapdash comedy of errors, the result is not improved accuracy or streamlined process flow. It’s a new and supervening set of faulty readings, with its own particular kind of plausibility and authority, that people must somehow summon the energy to challenge and counter. Occasionally, this has literally lethal effects - if you do not live in the UK, prepare to be shocked speechless by the Post Office/Fujitsu scandal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

I only observe it. People you rely on for important things lose critical documents. A task that you’d expect to be done right the first time needs to be redone and then redone again. The wrong kind of emulsion is specified, or the financial support is deposited in someone else’s account, or the wrong form is filed, or the referral is lost in the mail. (These are all real examples from the past year of my life.) And when you layer brittle, overspecified and inflexible digital processes over this

Here’s what I mean by “low-diligence”: Of the five cultures I’ve lived in as an adult, the American, Japanese, Korean and Finnish in addition to that of the British Isles, the UK is on the lower end of the scale in terms of the care and attention to detail people bring to bear on everyday tasks. As we’ve discussed before, this is true across classes, backgrounds and occupational sectors here. It’s true in the NHS, in the academy, in the trades and above all in business. I can’t explain it –

In a low-diligence culture like the UK – a term I’ll explain shortly – overlaying digital systems (like these smart meters) over the processes of everyday life results not in efficiency or productivity gains, but in just the opposite: compounded failures that take extra time, effort and resource to correct. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/26/smart-meter-rollout-number-faulty-machines-leaps-great-britain

@migurski ❤️

@dana 🎶 This is how we do it. 🎶

No promises, of course. But I’ll do what I can to help, or tell you plainly if I’m not in a position to. : . )

In practice, that will very often mean inviting someone from outside the project team to review your promotional and explanatory materials, with an eye toward ensuring they’re all written in an appropriate register of language, explain the context and the motivation behind some proposed intervention, and so on. *If you run a project like this, and you’d like help with making it more invitational, feel free to reach out to me.* I may be able to offer some useful advice.

@james 👊

This goes for projects in cooperative economics, for guerrilla healthcare initiatives like Cassie Thornton’s Greek-inspired “hologram,” and most especially for anything technical. If such projects are to succeed in achieving liberatory ends, the challenge gradient confronting the newcomer needs to be as shallow and gradual as is practically achievable. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13qfwcg