Decolonising time
Our perception of time is perhaps the most directly colonised aspect of our existence. We largely march to someone else’s drum, so much so that we feel odd and disconnected when that drumbeat pauses. I write from lockdown, so privileged with acres of space and a profusion of wildflowers. The days of the week make virtually no difference. My watch battery ran down and I don’t know how to get it replaced. The rhythm of the days revolves around the naptimes of the grandchildren and preparing feasts of local food.
I am, however, subject to the tyranny of those that use time as a weapon. Think of the oil industry and their campaign to be allowed to profit from burning their reserves long past the time when it was clear that their activities were going to be fatal to mankind. The type of campaign is called predatory delay. It uses delay as a way of stealing assets. It maintains public narratives known to be lies simply in order to prolong profitability. It is extremely caustic to public discourse, to politics, to environmental policy. It is quite literally death stalking the world, and its weapon is time.
Think also of the very recent history in the US and UK of government incompetence around the pandemic. Incompetence will always be there to haunt us, but in this case there was extreme urgency to act. The best of the heads of government around the world, many of them female, just got on with doing what needed to be done. The worst of the populist leaders, including Trump and Johnson, just prevaricated and blustered in the way they always do but it was fatal to tens of thousands of people. They got caught up in political calculations that there was literally no time for. They flew kites from “a senior government source” instead of doing their jobs. Time was used to steal peoples’ lives.
Colonisation is most immediate in our lives as wage slaves. We work to the clock, we treat out employer’s time as more valuable than our own, we allow work to spill into our private lives in so many ways. David Graeber understands that most of what we do at work is bullshit, that it makes no difference to anyone. But not many of us can sustain that decolonised experience directly.
I am pointing to these cases because they are clearly not susceptible to due process and legal challenge and the eventual establishment of truth, even if that were possible. No future remedy can bring back the people whose lives were stolen. The operation of time is truly imposed by an authority that is far from legitimate, in a way we can do very little about. We have been colonised: we think like our colonisers right at the heart of our experience.
My lockdown existence gives me a vantage point for decolonisation. If I set myself a schedule of tasks, I simply miss what I needed to notice elsewhere. The country rhythm is dominated by the weather, by plants and animals, by all those eco-systemic processes we have been so determined to ignore. Imposed time is very much a mechanism for distracting us from what we most need to pay attention to. Of course, that “most” is the whole colonial point: you will do what the colonial power thinks you should, not what you and your family need you to. You miss the world by trying to pay attention to the idiot elite.[1]
Efficiency
Our colonial selves worship efficiency. It is one of our highest values. But, as Margaret Heffernan has been pointing out, efficiency is what you need in the steady state, in business as usual, in lean supply chains. In times of crisis and disruption it is the last thing you need: you need resources to cover the unexpected. When conditions are precisely what was not foreseen, efficient normality is the shape of the problem.
There is a cult of Edwards Deming known as Lean and its more Japanese extensions. The cult is precisely about stripping waste out of processes so that they run more accurately and with less resource. The public sector especially has been subjected to this form of “improvement” for many years and I can tell its success stories with the best of them. The Achilles Heel of this work is its focus on purpose, with the result that purpose becomes too narrowly focussed. Part of colonialism is to assert narrow purpose that is there for control more than anything else. Purpose becomes a way of saying that what you are doing is not necessary or is off-message.
When conditions lurch, purpose needs to change. All that PPE was an annoying and unproductive overhead until it was needed in quantities that could not be sourced. The model says how much stock to carry and then the model is wildly wrong in its assumptions.[2] If we manage by models, the chances are that we will defend the model rather than acknowledge that purpose needs to change. If we worship efficiency, we might argue that in times of sudden demand we need to be even more efficient.
A window on the world
We are being given a chance to see the world differently. We can see suddenly that neoliberal economics leads to the destruction of everything that we value, indeed quite possibly to our destruction as a species. All those arguments about efficiency lead somehow to the obliteration of ever doing anything worth doing. That is quite a lot to take on board, and most people actually believe that the fit will pass, like it did with the last crash and bailing out the banks.
When the government is largely wrong in most of what it does, we can see the degree to which the news is managed. Who gets a platform on the BBC and who does not? What is on the front pages of the papers especially when they are mysteriously aligned?[3] Who are the establishment nutters who get rolled out even though they lost credibility years ago? Above all what counts as balance and science when it is no such thing?[4] We absolutely must pay attention to the distortion and narrative management. It is there all the time but most of the time we don’t notice it. We must pay attention because we are all colonised in our minds. If we don’t make time for this work then the trap is sprung and our worlds are closed on someone else’s terms.[5]
The basic comparison is this: we don’t have time to organise track and trace for pandemic cases but we do have time to train form fillers for the customs checks necessary for Brexit. Whose time, what values are expressed?
Second order effects
Of course, it is not as simple as doing what other people want us to do. None of us simply comply. The McCulloch cybernetics says that we try to keep things stable. If you listen to what people actually say, especially techies, they talk about all the other things they are expected to do: any request for action turns into a defensive response, either verbally at the time or in practice in the selection of which tasks to perform. This doesn’t have to be a work issue as in an employer’s instructions, it often works with domestic chores as well.
To give a brief case study, I did a small project with some district council planning teams. The regulations then were that to get central government support they had to process planning applications in 56 days. When we looked at the statistics, most planning applications took 55 days. We asked the teams to use lean tools (yes really) to take waste out of the system and they were easily able to take a week out of the median time.
Is that the end of the story? No, of course not. As soon as we left them the time went back to 55 days. It went back for a good reason. If they finished an application with time to spare, senior management would give them extra tasks or suggest changes to their responses. The time taken was against the limit not because that is how long it took but because that was the effective way to avoid interference. We are all like that.
This behaviour is in no-one’s interest in the bigger picture. The management instructions that result in bullshit jobs spawn not meaningful responses but more bullshit that neutralises the management intention. This is of course the colonial experience: it is the colonisation itself that produces endless baroque inefficiencies and Kafkaesque nonsense. That is the price we are all paying for having been colonised, especially in our sense of time.
And if you want to prove all this to yourself you will find that the concept that it is all a game of soldiers draws a much fiercer and more angry management response than simply disobeying instructions. The thought that all the conflict and angst were simply part of the nonsense is too much for most people to bear.
I was taught this lesson early too. I worked on a seismic crew on the delta in Nigeria. The job involved heavy manual work drilling holes in the ground with heavy steel pipe. My colleague, an ex-pat, was charged by senior management in the UK to get the crews to drill two holes a day rather than one; but the drilling process could not be interrupted, so the crews were anxious not to start a new hole they might not be able to finish. The crews downed tools and milled around the office for three days in threatening mood: a hundred huge strong men in the heat. They were persuaded in the end, at which point in country senior management over-ruled my colleague and we went back to the status quo ante.
Decolonisation
As world history shows only too clearly, kicking out the colonial power does not result in decolonisation. The grip of colonial ways goes much deeper than that and we are unaware of most of them. And of course, the other lesson of history is that the colonial powers themselves are somehow more subject to the damage and destruction they hand out that the people they oppress. Trump’s USA is both ridiculously oppressive and Teflon-coated when the crows come home to roost.
If we want decolonisation, we need to look to rebuild civic institutions that can protect us. The Canadian government issued advice about the pandemic telling people that they were not working from home but trying to get some work done while at home. Institutions need to negotiate for people to reassert their own needs and values. The colonisers need to be sent packing not once but over and over again until we learn as deeply that time is our own as we learnt that it belonged to people directing our lives.
If most jobs are bullshit and most of the function of all jobs is bullshit, then the way our time has been colonised cannot be valid. The function of colonising our time is control, not any legitimate aim. The history of colonisation shows only the erosion of potential. Of course, there are greedy colonisers (FANG I guess now) but the notion that the world somehow benefits has no evidence, just loads of narrative control that would have us think otherwise.
We are exploring under some duress why our employers need us to go to work. How much can we get done without all those meetings and how many jobs and functions simply evaporate? There are good reasons for working socially but they are not the reasons why employers like us to gather. There are some big questions that are begging to be asked and they will for the most part be ducked. Not enough people are aware either of their shackles or of their potential if they throw them off. For all the mantras, real productivity is too threatening to those that control us.
[1] Can’t mention the idiot elite without tipping one’s hat to Nassim Taleb and his phrase, “intellectual yet idiot”
[2] A minor unrelated example. I used to buy a particular product from my local midsize grocer in batches of six, sometimes clearing the shelf. In response, the ordering system made sure that they had increasing quantities of the item, such that if I didn’t go to the shop for a while, the shelf would be groaning. So they’d stop ordering, and soon there’d be a stock outage, and so on.
[3] The mysterious alignment of the press is a reminder that in the UK there is not as free a press as exists in some other countries, between the shenanigans, the suppression, and the libel laws
[4] We’ve written before about false notions of balance, the sort that keep fringe groups like the KKK and the Farages front and centre, regardless of whether there’s any useful balance to be sought from exposing people to their views. And we’ve written before about the misapplication of the scientific method to increasingly irrelevant things, overweighting on physics, leaving ethics and semantics in the dust.
[5] Nora Bateson talks about the tyranny of language, describing how she, despite having grown up as her father’s daughter, continually struggles to escape the language of things and parts and to communicate using only the languages of symmathesy and warm data
