How we get things
I was thinking on the bus yesterday morning that how we pay for things could be changed. For most of human history payment has been on the basis of trust (through credit and debt) or through dessert (through wages for prior work). Probably much of this has as much to do with ideological concerns and the retention of structures of indebtedness as social power, but there is also likely to be some technological component as well.
One of the familiar refrains from liberal non-Marxists when talking about the idea of communism or socialism is that while “from each according to his ability, from each according to his need” is a nice idea in theory, in practice it is unworkable or unfeasible. It is difficult to know exactly how much we need certain things, how much we are really able to do certain useful work.
Technology has been getting us progressively closer to answering those questions in real-time over the last century but this progress is distributed across tens of thousands of individual companies and hundreds of governments, few of whom like each other very much.
So perhaps for now we should reformulate the statement to something more technically feasible for the purposes of a more equitable distribution of stuff, and probably it should be based on how humans actually behave in the systems under which we now live.
There’s a phrase in service design that is increasingly popular — I first saw it at the Government Digital Service but it’s likely taken from somewhere else. It is this:
Good services are verbs, bad services are nouns
It’s about changing how people that create and manage services for the general public go about designing them. In Government many services are known by their name — to declare that your car is no longer fit for the road you have to fill in a Statutory Off Road Vehicle Notification, or SORN. As such the service is, colloquially, known as ‘SORNing’.
The whole process introduces a layer of bureaucratic obfuscation that isn’t entirely necessary. It is like going to the hospital and only being able to be seen by a doctor when you know their full name.
Plenty of this kind of thinking occurs outside of government, and even more of it outside of ‘designed’ services.
The noun-service I’m going to talk about today is ‘shopping’.
Shopping has kind of become a verb in the last few decades, but ultimately it’s still more along the lines of ‘SORNing’ than anything else. Shopping is the act of using a shop to get something else; few of us will go to shops simply to see what exists (although sometimes my girlfriend and I go to Heal’s furniture shop on Tottenham Court Road to gawp at what rich people are actually spending money on), in the same way we don’t go to a hospital to see what they could do for a broken leg (“Well, just in case…”) or to gov.uk to look at what services the government can do for us (“I might need a duck-hunting license one day…”).
A shop is a kind of intermediary for the need of a given good, like a hairdryer. Or a box of cereal. Or some shoes. It’s also an intermediary for wider “needs” (quote marks owing to the less literal interpretation of the word) — weird socio-psychological things like a need to be accepted in a wider community, or a need to differentiate oneself from one’s peers. Shopping in a particular place can be a signal for these things.
Shops have downsides as intermediaries, though.
The most important one is in how we pay for things.
If I need something, but can’t afford it either by using credit (based on expected future earnings) or by using money I already have (through reward for work, or unearned income), I’m basically out of luck. I can’t have the thing I need, regardless of the impact it would make on my life or the generalised necessity of the thing.
You could borrow something from a friend, but that’s not particularly effective in the long-run, or if you need lots of things, or if you need something particularly personal. There’s also social stigmas there that we feed we need to be careful of; not being seen to be ‘needy’ or ‘greedy’, etc. There are libraries and food banks, but these are limited by funding and supply.
Beyond the problems of availability there are a host of issues in how we do and think about shopping. There’s how we know what we need, which is easily and deliberately manipulated by peers, media, advertising and politics. There’s the general opacity of things like supply chains and externalities, which stops us knowing the true effects of our purchase. There’s how bad we are at maths and understanding value, which suckers us into things like price traps. There’s the importance we place on differential consumption relating to purchasing power — that is, somebody with a lot of money will pick something more expensive or elite simply on the basis that it is different from what others will purchase (cf. Capital as Power by Nitzan & Bichler, which is freely available), which leads to production focusing on a litany of inefficient differential goods over the fulfilment of broader general need.
We’re also terrible after we buy something. One of the most powerful forces in consumption is post-purchase rationalisation; defending your purchase after the fact as a vital and necessary thing even if it goes unused or is unsuitable for the purpose you bought it for. This filters into our assumptions about broader social requirements, too — our justification for buying an expensive, useless trinket is also applicable to other people as well.
So what does a service that fulfils the need for basic goods without allowing (or indeed requiring) people to fall into cognitive traps?
I think it looks a bit like Argos.
(More next week.)
