what is 'enshittification'?!

A recent piece in the New Yorker on The Age of Enshittification looked at an interesting word: “Enshittification” was named the word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2023 and by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary in 2024. The embrace of the term reflected a sense of collective frustration.

And a recent piece on this blog also looked at the term: 6-7 or parasocial or enshittification - what makes a good word of the year?: “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

Back to the very beginning and end of the New Yorker piece:

Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment. “Enshittification,” coined by the prolific technology critic and author Cory Doctorow, is one of these. Doctorow came up with the phrase, in 2022, to describe how all the digital services that increasingly dominated our daily lives seemed to be getting worse at the same time. Google Search had become enshittified, showing ads and product links instead of relevant website results. TikTok had become enshittified, artificially “heating” specific videos so that some would go viral, inspiring copycats and goosing engagement while frustrating creators whose output didn’t get the same treatment. Twitter would soon become royally enshittified in its reincarnation as X, losing its status as a global town square, as it tipped into Muskian extremism and rewarded grifters and meme accounts over legitimate news sources. Spotify, iPhones, Adobe software, e-mail inboxes—it was hard to think of a platform or device that wasn’t seeing a decay in user experience. Wasn’t technology supposed to endlessly improve in the long run? ...

The book stops short of fully extrapolating enshittification to national politics, but the term is certainly also relevant in that realm. If the playbook Doctorow describes involves promising benefits to people only to erratically renege on, and degrade, existing services, then Donald Trump is the enshittifier-in-chief. Under his second Administration, scientific research, diplomacy, corporate watchdogging, and social services have all gotten worse. The beneficiary, of course, is largely Trump himself. Perhaps the worst outcome of enshittification is that it drives us to expect things to be bad, and to assume that they will only get worse.

Which is where the piece by the inventor of the word comes in, in a piece which Cory Doctorow wrote for the Guardian this week: Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again - or: The US president is weaponising tech, but his tariffs and Brexit provide a surprising opportunity to gain back digital control of our lives:

We adopted laws – at the insistence of the US trade rep – that prohibit programmers from helping you alter the devices you own, in legal ways, if the manufacturer objects. This is one thing that leads to what I refer to as the enshittification of technology. There is only one reason the world isn’t bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US’s defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an “anti-circumvention” law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer). But the Trump tariffs change all that. The old bargain – put your own tech sector in chains, expose your people to our plunder of their data and cash, and in return, the US won’t tariff your exports – is dead.

With lots more here:

Enshittification - Wikipedia

'Enshittification' is coming for absolutely everything | FT [February 2024]

What Is Enshittification? Definition, Effects, Mental Health Risk [November 2025]

What Does 'Enshittification' Mean And When Does It Happen? | HuffPost UK Life [November 2025]

Finally, for a look at this from two years ago when the term first came out, see this piece: Jay Doubleyou: controlling ai - part two: how chatgpt is ruining the internet:

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leopold kohr: opposing the cult of 'bigness' - and understanding that 'small is beautiful'

The idea that Small Is Beautiful was first popularised by the German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher over fifty years ago.

But his challenge to 'bigness' came from his mentor Leopold Kohr. And indeed, another of Kohr's pupils gave the lecture The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics - this being the educationalist and philosopher Ivan Illich who has featured several times on this blog:

During his life-time, this teasing leprechaun was recognized by very few as a man ahead of his time. Even today, few have caught up with him; there is still no school of thought that carries on his social morphology... Throughout his life, Kohr labored to lay the foundations for an alternative to economics; he worked to subvert conventional economic wisdom, no matter how advanced.

With more on Leopold Kohr from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics:

Believing in the effectiveness of returning to the local level to solve the problems affecting humankind, he saw small self-governing communities as best able to solve their problems with their own resources.

He was against 'bigness':

Leopold Kohr was highly critical of the claim that the world is split into too many states and opposed pan-nationalist, continental and global unions. He argued that the success of Swiss Confederation did not lie in a union between the French, German and Italian-speaking peoples, as that would lead to the domination of Swiss Germans and to the gradual decline of other groups. The reason that Switzerland remained diverse was that instead of having three nationalities, it was federated into 22 cantons, representing the actual cultural divisions of Switzerland. Kohr argued that number of autonomous cantons "eliminates all possible imperialist ambitions on the part of any one canton, because it would always be outnumbered by even a very small combination of other".[15]

According to Kohr, a European Federation of unequally large states would lead to a domination of a single nation and thus an erosion of dialects and smaller languages "with just the same inevitability as the German federation, in which 24 small states were linked to the one 40-million Power of Prussia ended up in Prussian hegemony". For him, a successful European unification can be based only on the Swiss model, which would entail splitting the existing nation-states into smaller ones on the basis of cultural and historical regions. He defends the concept of Kleinstaaterei by arguing that while in the Middle Ages, wars were common, they were brief and caused little to no devastation. However, after the consolidation of Europe into a few large states, every war that erupted between caused huge destruction and loss life.[15]...

Kohr also discusses the problem of cultural heritage and cultural assimilation. According to him, culture is a product of individuals, and since individual cannot prosper under a large power, neither can culture. He describes democracy as a "system of divisions, factions, and small-group balances", which slowly wither away under internal consolidation of a large state and with it the ability for cultural and intellectual flourishment.[27]

Following the banking crisis of 2009, the author Paul Kingsnorth wrote in the Guardian that this economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness':

One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr. Kohr has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that you have never heard of...

Drawing from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it. The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get its hands on. The solution to the world's problems was not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of any one unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative. On a whistlestop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does a brilliant job of persuading the reader that many of the glories of western culture, from cathedrals to great art to scientific innovations, were the product of small states.

To understand the sparky, prophetic power of Kohr's vision, you need to read The Breakdown of Nations. Some if it will create shivers of recognition. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for "whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions". Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.

Here are some very helpful reviews and summaries of The Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr on Goodreads

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what is 'merit'?

This is something most of us think is a good thing - but what is 'merit' exactly?

the quality of being good and deserving praise:

MERIT | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary

And what do we mean by 'deserving' what you get?

to have earned or to be given something because of the way you have behaved or the qualities you have:

DESERVE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary

Most of us believe that 'merit' deserves recognition and should be rewarded:

In a meritocracy, the people are chosen who are thought to be the best.

Meritocracy - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But do we really 'merit' or 'deserve' what we get?

Do you feel lucky? The answer, well known to psychologists, is that you probably don’t. You probably think you got where you are today through willpower and elbow grease. We chronically underestimate luck’s role, and this seems to get worse the richer we get; surveys show that the wealthiest are least likely to attribute their fortunes to, well, good fortune. They also seem to be meaner: one ingenious study found drivers of luxury cars were more likely to cut others off than those in cheaper vehicles.

It’s hardly surprising many such people oppose taxation and government spending: why should others get a handout if they didn’t need one? The ironic result is that they vote against the very policies that helped them get lucky to begin with. In a recent Atlantic essay, Robert Frank, an economist who has studied attitudes to chance, quoted EB White: “Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”

Yet to see this purely as a problem of the super-rich lets the rest of us off too easily. Anyone living in a highly developed economy in 2016 is already the beneficiary of stupendous luck – for example, not being born during the plague, or living in the modern-day Central African Republic (average life expectancy:about 50). Ponder that, and it’s easier to see why Buddhists speak of the incomparable luck of being born human at all. You might have been a battery hen, or a mayfly with a one-day lifespan.

Don’t think you’re lucky? Think again | Health & wellbeing | The Guardian

Jay Doubleyou: don’t think you’re lucky? think again

In other words:

Do Those on Top Deserve Their Success?

Many people who find themselves on the wrong side of growing inequality feel the system is stacked against them.
But who deserves to succeed?
Should we reward talent and hard work?
If so, what do we do about those left behind?
Do they deserve their fate, too?
And is talent, in fact, little more than luck?
Using a pioneering digital facility at Harvard Business School, Professor Michael Sandel is joined by 60 people from nearly 40 different countries.
Together they look for answers to these tough questions; questions which lie behind some of the biggest political stories of the moment.

The Global Philosopher - Do Those on Top Deserve Their Success? - BBC Sounds

Jay Doubleyou: meritocracy

Even the Financial Times is questioning this:

Architects of Meritocracy

Michael Sandel has written a book about this:

The Tyranny of Merit

And he makes a provocative statement:

Michael Sandel: 'The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit' | Michael Sandel | The Guardian

Here he is talking about this:

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Michael Sandel: The tyranny of merit | TED Talk

Jay Doubleyou: the tyranny of merit: we are not self-made or self-sufficient

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There are two new books out on this:

Inheritocracy | Biteback Publishing

The Art of Uncertainty by David Spiegelhalter review – a search for sense in probability and chance | Books | The Guardian

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On the radio:

Start the Week - Chance and fortune - BBC Sounds

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team-building with lego

We can have fun doing things with Lego

Jay Doubleyou: things to do with lego in the esl/efl classroom

... while learning leadership, cooperation and group dynamics:

Jay Doubleyou: how to work together well in teams

BUILDING A MODEL:

here's an excellent example of just that [with thanks to comments from Mike Harrison to a good overview of what can be done with Lego by Emma Herrod]:

What I did was similar to Barbara’s foolproof lesson (ref. this is an idea in the OUP Resource Book for Teachers: Conversation by Rob Nolasco and Lois Arthur).

>Make a model out of Lego – the more complicated the better!

>Place the model somewhere not all the students in the class can see. Screens or office dividers can be good for this.

>Divide the class into two teams. They then have 15/20/30 minutes to attempt to reconstruct the model!

All good for practising spatial language like you mention above, Emma, and that Barbara mentioned in her earlier post. I also used it as a way to develop teamwork skills (like the building the bridge activity for business English students).

More Than Five Things to do with LEGO® in the EFL Classroom Part 2

With the original available here: 

Conversation : Nolasco, Rob : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

BUILDING TEAMS:

There are lots of great suggestions of  activities to see how people work together: 

Here are ideas from some of our most popular team building challenges and activities for businesses and organisations of any size. Not sure team building with LEGO bricks is for you? Read why LEGO bricks are great for team building activities here.

5 ideas for team building with LEGO® bricks - Bricks McGee

Who’d have thought that playing with Lego could teach communication, collaboration, and teamwork?

The Lego Challenge team building activity & alternatives | MTa Learning | Experiential learning

In this edition of "What I Wish I Knew..." I go over some helpful tips for running the Lego Challenge smoothly in your classroom or corporate event. This is a FANTASTIC team building challenge that really tests the participants communication skills! I hope you enjoy!

Lego Challenge STEM Team Building - What I Wish I Knew.... - YouTube

David explores the concept of working versus playing and how to be more productive in meetings using LEGO bricks.

What the DUCK? How playing with LEGO bricks can change how you inter(act) | David Kubacki | TEDxCWRU - YouTube

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decolonizing britain... israel... russia... canada... australia... india...

What do we mean by 'decolonizing'?

to free (a people or area) from colonial status : to relinquish control of (a subjugated people or area)

Decolonize Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

Decolonization, process by which colonies become independent of the colonizing country. Decolonization was gradual and peaceful for some British colonies largely settled by expatriates but violent for others, where native rebellions were energized by nationalism.

Decolonization | Definition, Examples, & Facts | Britannica

The first definition is very wide, the second very specific.

And starting with the second, we can look at all sorts of examples:

In the two hundred years following the American Revolutionary War in 1783, 165 colonies have gained independence from Western imperial powers.[25]

Decolonization - Wikipedia

It has got much more complicated lately - especially when we consider the general definition - to relinquish control of (a subjugated people or area)

Britain:

There have been academic studies:

Decolonizing Britain: An Exchange | Modern British History | Oxford Academic

On the right, it's about freeing the UK from American control:

How to decolonise Britain - UnHerd

On the left it's about statues:

Jay Doubleyou: all statues are political

And it's everywhere:

Britain has always been an imperial state, not a national one.

Brexit, Empire, and Decolonization | History Workshop

Yes, everywhere in the UK:

Jay Doubleyou: teaching empire in british schools

Israel:

This is perhaps the most controversial use of the term:

The path to peace in Israel-Palestine is through decolonisation | Opinions | Al Jazeera

Why Israel is Not a Settler Colonial State | AJC

The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False - The Atlantic

What the left gets wrong about Gaza and “decolonisation” - New Statesman

Russia:

It's not just Russia's imperial goals, but the fact that the country we call 'Russia' is in fact an empire:

Is Russia Europe's last empire? Is its invasion of Ukraine a 'colonial war'? Calls to 'decolonise' Russia are growing - but what would that mean?

BBC Radio 4 - Decolonising Russia

Russia’s history is one of almost ceaseless expansion and colonization, and Russia is the last European empire that has resisted even basic decolonization efforts, such as granting subject populations autonomy and a meaningful voice in choosing the country’s leaders.

Decolonize Russia - The Atlantic

As the successor to the Soviet Union, which cloaked its colonial agenda in anti-imperial and anti-capitalist nomenclature, Russia has yet to attract appropriate scrutiny for its consistent and oftentimes brutal imperial tendencies.

Decolonizing Russia: a Moral and Strategic Imperative – CSCE

Both those who believe a Russian collapse is imminent and those who warn against it agree on one thing: The Russian Federation has never truly been, well, a federation. Decentralization is the key, Khodorkovsky said. Whenever the time comes for the West to lift sanctions, it must negotiate with a government that has received legitimacy from the regions.

Is the West’s Talk of Russian Decolonization Wise?

What used to be the main theme of anti-Western Soviet propaganda back in the 20th century is now a favorite toy of hawkish Atlanticists, pro-Ukraine activists and East European ethnonationalists. Talking about the decolonization of Russia (and Russia alone – one hardly hears about returning Tennessee to the Cherokees) has become the surest way of attracting the attention of institutions that fund scientific research and political activism.

The Controversy of the Decolonization Discourse

With a couple of academics looking at the issues:

Dr Kevork Oskanian | Politics | University of Exeter

The fraught complexities of ‘Decolonising Russia’ – Riddle Russia

Nationalist Myth-Making and Western Notions: Studying Eurasia in the 21st Century | ISPI

And:

M.K. Bhadrakumar — Valdai Club

Russia_Disinformation

No respite for France as a 'New Africa' rises

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a new economic world order?

Are we seeing a new global currency emerging?

Russia and China are out to undermine the US dollar, and if they succeed it will change the world for ever

Maybe not:

Why Russia and China’s move to shift world away from the US dollar is doomed to fail | South China Morning Post

China economy: Central bank tries to slow weakening yuan vs US dollar

Renminbi on course for steepest monthly fall as China’s economy slows | Financial Times

And are we seeing new global payment systems?

China, Russia Develop Alternatives to the SWIFT Payment System

Financial Weapons Helped the West Respond to Russia. China Wants to Weaken Them. | Barron's

Maybe not:

Paul Mason writes in the New European about the future of the global economy:

Ukraine has smashed the global economy… and there’s no going back

This is not only another cold war, it's a profound fragmentation of the global economy with little chance of a return to normal

When people on the left use the term “capitalist system”, it’s often to portray a generalised way of doing things between companies, workers and banks. But there’s a much more specific way in which the global, market-based economy is a “system”. Ever since it emerged in the 19th century, it has required both formal and informal structures between states to keep things going.

The Gold Standard, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement that replaced it, and the World Trade Organisation are formal arrangements. Informally, though it is nowhere written down on paper, stability has always relied on one major economic power providing leadership – its currency becoming the global reserve, its bonds being the safest investments on earth.

What we’re living through – with the Ukraine war, the division of the world into sanctions and anti-sanctions blocs, and the declaration by Russia and China that the post-1945 order is over – is essentially a crisis of leadership. American power is in decline and China cannot assume leadership. As we watch the votes of smaller countries at the UN swing backwards and forwards between the pro-Russian and pro-Ukraine camps, those blinking lights – red, green and amber – are a kind of dashboard of systemic power.

We’ve been here before, of course. After the first world war, the essential question was: who will lead and regulate the system? The answer was America… probably.

And in that space of uncertainty during the inter-war period, we saw the Great Depression, fascism and eventually another war. Because until 1941 neither the US public, nor large parts of its political class, wanted to assume global leadership.

But today’s crisis is of a different magnitude. Charles Kindleberger, a historian whose life’s work was to study the inter-war economy, listed five things a leading country has to do: buy other countries’ goods at knockdown prices; lend to countries in distress; stabilise exchange rates; co-ordinate economic policies across the system; and be the lender of last resort. It was America’s unwillingness to do so, and Britain’s inability, he argued, that triggered the Depression of the 1930s. There has, in short, to be a big country resilient enough to take the economic strain. After 1945 that country was the US. Today, however, there is a crisis deep within capitalism itself. At the micro level, something is badly wrong. Since 2008, the only way to keep the engine turning has been to pump newly created money into the system, via quantitative easing; and to run up debt. When Lehman Brothers went bust, the combined debts of global households, firms and states were $147tn.

Today they total $256tn (£196tn) – and rising.

Yet, until February 24 2022, the essential architecture of the system held. The dollar was the global currency of last resort. The US remained the informal co-ordinator of macroeconomic policy. American debt was the safest form of investment.

The Ukraine war has thrown all these certainties into doubt. While the seizure of Russian yachts has made the headlines, the most spectacular sanction applied was America’s decision to freeze half of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, which are held in dollars in western banks. It tanked the value of the rouble.

Though the rouble has been artificially pushed back towards its pre-crisis level, the cost to Russia is enormous: most of its trade with the West – except for oil and gas – is grinding to a halt. Major brands, banks and corporations have pulled out. Russia is heading for a devastating recession. Trade in everything from semiconductors to wheat to smartphones is shutting down between the rival powers.

Some believe the US dollar’s role as the global reserve currency is doomed. Zoltan Pozsar, an economist at Credit Suisse, has predicted the rise of a rival global trading system backed by the Chinese renminbi. Russia – unable to trade in dollars or euros, he argues – will form a symbiotic trading bloc with China, and smaller countries will begin to abandon the dollar.

Others scorn the idea. They point out that Britain and America, in their heydays, were economies with deep, resilient markets and subject to the rule of law. They had to single-handedly crisis-manage the world economy. They had to be prepared to see their bonds and currency circulate around the world.

China, says US economist Joseph Politano, is neither willing nor able to do these things. It’s not possible for foreigners to move capital in and out of China; nor does Beijing operate a legal system where you stand a fair chance of getting your money back if things go wrong. So becoming world leader is not just about size. It took two decades, says Politano, for the dollar to become the reserve currency.

For now, I side with the sceptics. What we’re seeing is a new kind of crisis – where American power is weaker, but in which it is impossible for China to emerge as the leading capitalist power. If it wanted to do so, it would have to liberalise its financial markets, democratise its politics and separate the powers of the executive, judiciary and parliament.

Much more likely is that China becomes the leader of the unfree world, and puts pressure on countries that want to be in it to think and act according to totalitarian diktat. So this is not just another cold war. It is a profound fragmentation of the global economy, with little chance of a return to normal.

What that means was best summed up by the banker Sir Ernest Harvey, just after the 1929 Wall Street crash: “It’s better that a car is driven by one bad driver than by two excellent drivers fighting over the steering wheel.

Ukraine has smashed the global economy... and there’s no going back - The New European

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can we have our immigrants back, please?

One of the main reasons people voted for Brexit was 'immigration':

Jay Doubleyou: identity today in the uk

The only problem being that we need the immigrants to do all those low-paid, low-status jobs:

Jay Doubleyou: migrants

Because nobody else wants to do them:

Jay Doubleyou: neets - again

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Now, one of the leading figures pushing for Brexit wants access to cheap EU labour - for his chain of cheap pubs:

Brexiteer Wetherspoons boss says UK needs more EU workers to tackle staff shortage

Tim Martin, who has previously called for the UK to leave the single market, said he now backs a "reasonably liberal" immigration system, blaming a "low birth rate" for a shortage of staff in the hospitality sector

Former Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood posted on Twitter : “I remember disagreeing with Tim Martin on @bbcquestiontime about this, back in 2016. He was arguing the opposite position to this then. Too late mate.”

Clive Watson, executive chairman of the City Pub Group, told The Telegraph that there are "just not the bodies out there to perform roles in the hospitality industry". As a result, he said, some places are now not opening at lunchtime.

Brexiteer Wetherspoons boss says UK needs more EU workers to tackle staff shortage - Mirror Online

Here are more perspectives from today's news:

According to trade group UK Hospitality, Brexit has added to the problem, as more EU workers return to their home countries.

James Reed, chief executive of the Reed employment agency, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the firm was advertising 275,000 new jobs in the sector in May. When we added them up we had more jobs in May than in any month since February 2008." 

Hotel chain Best Western said it could not open some of its venues at full capacity due to staffing shortages.

Wetherspoons boss denies facing shortage of EU workers - BBC News

With more comment here:

“There are severe staffing shortages,” said Michael Kill, chief executive of the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA). “A lot of workers are from Europe, so Brexit has had an impact, and there is the ‘furlough hangover’ where a lot of people have now got other jobs to keep themselves going and are not coming back.”

Severe staff shortages hit UK hospitality venues amid huge rise in bookings | Hospitality industry | The Guardian

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The solution? Either allow people in - or make the industry more attractive:

The UK Home Office is being urged to create a ‘coronavirus recovery visa’ for Britain’s hospitality sector, according to a report published by iNews. However, the Home Office is calling on employers to focus on training the domestic workforce. The call from leaders in the hospitality sector comes amid major staffing shortfalls across pubs and restaurants.

Home Office urged to create ‘coronavirus recovery visa’ | Workpermit.com

Hospitality calls for ‘coronavirus recovery visa’ to bring foreign workers back amid staffing shortage

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Things have changed over the last year - with workers not prepared to tolerate the low-pay, low-status:

Employers Need To Take Long View Of The Current Skills Shortages

One aspect — which many employers may have failed to anticipate — is that the coronavirus has caused people to reappraise their lives. As Kelly puts it, “employees want more opportunity, more security. They are making demands.” She sees the current situation as an opportunity for a complete overhaul of how companies hire and develop staff. “It’s not good enough to have ad hoc training and development,” she says. “We need professional standards. Skills have got to be recognised and valued.” Better employers will realize that and will treat workers with greater consideration and enjoy the rewards, she says. But others, less enlightened, may not do so well. There is a generation of employees — perhaps emboldened by Uber drivers gaining greater rights — kicking back against what many see as the exploitation of zero-hours contracts and other aspects of the “gig economy.”

The pendulum could be swinging. And only the most short-sighted employers should think that paying their workers a little bit more or giving them the odd perk will halt its progress.

Employers Need To Take Long View Of The Current Skills Shortages

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In the short-term, there's a price war out there:

Hospitality in 'wage war' over staff shortages

But in the long term, there will have to be a rethink:

The double whammy of Covid and Brexit has stripped the industry of some of its best workers, some through redundancy, some through finding a better deal elsewhere after a long furlough. Rosalind Mullen looks at the staffing crisis and discovers how some businesses are working to fill their vacancies.

When the latest lockdown measures were loosened, those who have survived the past year could realistically expect to see a rush of business from cooped-up Brits. But when operators sent out the call for staff to return from furlough this spring, they may have had a bitter shock.

What's the solution to hospitality's staffing... - The Caterer

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However, everywhere else seems to be having the same problem:

NYC's pandemic-hit hospitality industry faces labor shortage a year on

US job growth crashes below expectations amid labour shortages - CityAM : CityAM

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As for the 'solution', the idea of paying people more is not the top one:

7 chief economists on how to solve the pandemic’s labour market paradox – The European Sting - Critical News & Insights on European Politics, Economy, Foreign Affairs, Business & Technology - europeansting.com

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this gig-work market wouldn’t be run for profit but to facilitate local economic exchange

The 'gig' economy is now everywhere:

Pre-pandemic, 35% of adults were reliant on uncertain employment. In 2021 that could be 50%...

Employment is fragmenting. Odd hours of work through platforms like Uber are just the tip of an iceberg. Tens of millions of corporate W2 employees don’t know next week’s hours or pay. Ad-hoc work in the informal economy is bigger than “gigging” through platforms.

Beyond Jobs

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Last month in the UK, a Supreme Court ruling declaring that Uber drivers are workers who are entitled to benefits "sent shockwaves across the gig economy":

Is this the moment of reckoning for the gig economy? | Evening Standard

And in California, similar moves have happened:

Gig workers are independent contractors, online platform workers,[1] contract firm workers, on-call workers[2] and temporary workers.[3] Gig workers enter into formal agreements with on-demand companies to provide services to the company's clients.[4]

In many countries, the legal classification of gig workers is still being debated, with companies classifying their workers as "independent contractors" while labor advocates have been lobbying for them to be classified as "employees", which would legally require companies to provide the full suite of employee benefits (time-and-a-half for overtime, paid sick time, employer-provided health care, bargaining rights, and unemployment insurance - among others). In 2020, the voters in California approved Proposition 22, which created a third worker classification whereby gig-worker-drivers are classified as contractors, but get some benefits (minimum wage, mileage reimbursement, and others.)

Gig worker - Wikipedia

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This is how a piece in the latest New Yorker starts:

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Should Gig Work Be Government-Run?

The labor reformer Wingham Rowan wants to reimagine labor markets for the digital age.

By Nick Romeo

March 23, 2021

Last October, the East Bay Economic Development Alliance, a nonprofit in Oakland, California, hosted a virtual event called “Beyond the Gig Economy.” The Presidential election was a week away, and a new law on the ballot, Proposition 22, promised to affect the fate of many of California’s gig workers. In 2019, the state’s legislature had reclassified some part-time and gig workers—including drivers for services such as Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash—as employees, rather than contractors. This would entitle them to paid sick leave, a guaranteed minimum wage, and other benefits. But Prop. 22, which had been crafted by the gig-work platforms, made app-based companies exempt from the new rule. Work part time as a nurse in a doctor’s office, and you’d get benefits; drive part time for Uber, and you wouldn’t.

Throughout the fall, Prop. 22 had been a subject of intense debate. The gig-work companies argued that, if it didn’t pass, prices would go up; they threatened to take away workers’ flexible schedules. Gig workers, labor unions, and Democratic politicians, meanwhile, contended that the platforms were impoverishing their workers, dismissed as a false choice the trade-off between flexibility and benefits, and cautioned against setting a legal precedent for other states. It was the costliest ballot measure fight in California history, with the gig platforms pouring more than two hundred million dollars into the campaign for Prop. 22—outspending their opponents ten to one. The mood in California’s progressive circles was grim.

The invited speaker at that morning’s event, a British policy entrepreneur named Wingham Rowan, maintained that the real battle lay elsewhere. Sixty years old, with dark hair, a lean face, and glasses, Rowan has a youthful affect and a quick wit honed through a career as a TV host. He called Proposition 22 a “tempest in a teapot”—“a sideshow”—and told the audience not to think of it as “some sort of endgame in the fight for precarious workers’ rights.” During a data-dense presentation, he outlined eight major challenges faced by gig workers: misclassification, lack of benefits, no progression, high worker overhead, misleading promises from employers, sudden market closures, pay cuts, and having an algorithm as a boss. He said that defeating Prop. 22 would solve only the first issue, part of the second, and maybe the fourth, then offered an ambitious plan that he thought could address all eight.

Rowan’s idea is to create markets for gig work that are run as public utilities, by non-profits and governments. Instead of getting work through a private company, such as Uber, a job seeker in Rowan’s system could use a Web site or app overseen by the government and regulated to promote the public interest. Many kinds of work could be offered through such public platforms, not just driving. The platforms could be run on open-source software, such as the system that has been built by his nonprofit, Modern Markets for All; private companies might bid to operate them, following the concession model currently used in national lotteries and parks. Such an approach wouldn’t use regulation to hobble the gig-work Goliaths. It would compete with them, combining many gig-work options into a broader labor market designed to benefit workers and the public.

“What does a really healthy hourly labor market look like in the twenty-first century?” Rowan asked the Zoom’s participants, from his book-lined office in London. As he enumerated such a market’s optimal features—the power to draw economic activity out of the informal economy; minimal transaction fees; responsiveness not just to labor laws but to workers’ ultimate goals, which might include education and training—it became clear what he was not imagining. “Everything I just described does not add up to a sizzling Silicon Valley investment opportunity,” he said. “It’s a public utility.”

Rowan offered an example of the sort of transaction that might be conducted on publicly run gig-work software. Suppose that you were Oakland’s city government, and you were in search of window-washers. “If you wanted to know how many people did window-cleaning bookings on a Tuesday morning, within three miles of Oakland City Hall, where the worker was under twenty-six and had previously been in the services, it will tell you,” he said, of the software. “If you want to compare their earnings to classroom assistants, working part time, on the eastern side of town, it will do that for you. You gain huge pools of actionable data that can be used to plot interventions, find the strugglers who need help.” Citizens could use the same software to book child care, yard work, tutoring, or bike repair, and to buy or rent appliances, vehicles, and living space. As on Uber, buyers and sellers would accumulate reliability records; unlike on Uber, features such as health-care contributions and retirement benefits could be built in. This gig-work market wouldn’t be run for profit but to facilitate local economic exchange. “You can have it for the East Bay tomorrow,” Rowan said, of the core software.

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Should Gig Work Be Government-Run? | The New Yorker

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Here is more from the Guardian in 2015:

One man’s quest to meld Adam Smith and Marx – by creating an Uber for jobs | Work & careers | The Guardian

And here he is doing a TED Talk:

Wingham Rowan: A new kind of job market | TED Talk

Here's his website:

3-minute read « Beyond Jobs

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conflict resolution

The idea is to listen - without interruption. 

Then to reflect - both in the sense of thinking about what you just heard - and to act as a mirror on what you just heard.

So, finally, to repeat back to the person what you have heard and what you understand - without interpretation.

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This is the basics of conflict resolution:

Conflict resolution - Wikipedia

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And this is how to do it:

Training for Conflict Resolution | Main Section | Community Tool Box

Conflict Resolution: Definition, Process, Skills, Examples

Conflict Resolution Skills - HelpGuide.org

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BBC Radio 4 gives us an example:

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Does impartiality impede good journalism?

Across the Red Line
Series 5

Anne McElvoy presents the debate programme which invites two public figures who disagree on an issue of principle to listen closely to each other's arguments - and then to find out what drives them. In this edition, 

Anne is joined by James O'Brien, LBC presenter and author of 'How Not to Be Wrong', and Roger Mosey, former Head of BBC Television News, to debate whether impartiality impedes good journalism. 

And Anne works with conflict resolution specialist Louisa Weinstein to foster a more exploratory conversation, to encourage both speakers to probe the values and experiences that underpin each other's beliefs.

Across the Red Line - Series 5 - Does impartiality impede good journalism? - BBC Sounds

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They are specialist skills:

Louisa Weinstein | Conflict Resolution Centre

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Here are some videos from more specialists:

Conflict to Resolution in 4 Steps - YouTube

Three Ways to Build Trust For Effective Conflict Resolution | The Conflict Expert

3 steps to having difficult — but necessary — conversations |

3 ways to resolve a conflict | Dorothy Walker | TED Institute - YouTube

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the tyranny of merit: we are not self-made or self-sufficient

Do you believe that 'passion and perseverance' - focus and dedication - will get you where you want to be?

Jay Doubleyou: grit

Do you 'merit' - or deserve - what you get if you use your talents and work hard?

Jay Doubleyou: meritocracy

But there are several weaknesses in the argument:

Jay Doubleyou: don’t think you’re lucky? think again

Jay Doubleyou: 'I have met many people who earn way more than £30,000 and have literally no discernible skills, not even one.'

Prof Michael Sandel of Harvard University has just written a book on the subject:

The Tyranny of Merit | Michael J. Sandel | Macmillan

As he says in the Observer:

'The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit'

“The solution to problems of globalisation and inequality – and we heard this on both sides of the Atlantic – was that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their effort and talents will take them. This is what I call in the book the ‘rhetoric of rising’. It became an article of faith, a seemingly uncontroversial trope. We will make a truly level playing field, it was said by the centre-left, so that everyone has an equal chance. And if we do, and so far as we do, then those who rise by dint of effort, talent, hard work will deserve their place, will have earned it.”

Even a perfect meritocracy, he says, would be a bad thing. “The book tries to show that there is a dark side, a demoralising side to that,” he says. “The implication is that those who do not rise will have no one to blame but themselves.” 

“Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively. They hadn’t got a university degree and so on.”

Blue-collar workers were in effect given a double-edged invitation to “better” themselves or carry the burden of their own failure. Many took their votes elsewhere, nursing a sense of betrayal. “The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.” 

The Covid-19 pandemic, and in particular the new appreciation of the value of supposedly unskilled, low-paid work, offers a starting point for renewal. “This is a moment to begin a debate about the dignity of work; about the rewards of work both in terms of pay but also in terms of esteem. We now realise how deeply dependent we are, not just on doctors and nurses, but delivery workers, grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, lorry drivers, home healthcare providers and childcare workers, many of them in the gig economy. We call them key workers and yet these are oftentimes not the best paid or the most honoured workers.”

To those who, like many of his Harvard students, believe that they are simply the deserving recipients of their own success, Sandel offers the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding… but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

The Tyranny of Merit is the latest salvo in Sandel’s lifelong intellectual struggle against a creeping individualism that, since the Reagan and Thatcher era, has become pervasive in western democracies. “To regard oneself as self-made and self-sufficient. This picture of the self exerts a powerful attraction because it seems on the face of it to be empowering – we can make it on our own, we can make it if we try. It’s a certain picture of freedom but it’s flawed. It leads to a competitive market meritocracy that deepens divides and corrodes solidarity.”

Fair competition does not constitute a just vision of society. Even if Trump is defeated in November’s presidential election, this is a truth, Sandel says, that Joe Biden, and his counterparts in Europe, must take on board. For inspiration, he says, they could do worse than turn to one of his intellectual heroes, the English Christian socialist RH Tawney.

“Tawney argued that equality of opportunity was at best a partial ideal. His alternative was not an oppressive equality of results. It was a broad, democratic ‘equality of condition’ that enables citizens of all walks of life to hold their heads up high and to consider themselves participants in a common venture. My book comes out of that tradition.”

Michael Sandel: 'The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit' | Michael Sandel | The Guardian

Here he is giving a TED talk back in May:

Michael Sandel: The tyranny of merit | TED Talk

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Michael Sandel: The tyranny of merit | TED Talk

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human resources as social engineering

How can you 'engineer' people?

Jay Doubleyou: social engineering

Jay Doubleyou: work, leisure and human resources

A lot of it is about manipulation, one way or another:

Jay Doubleyou: story-telling: the art of framing

Jay Doubleyou: behaviourism >>> krashen... pinker... skinner... chomsky

Jay Doubleyou: psychology at work

The education system helps:

Jay Doubleyou: education: dumbing us down

Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto - best teacher ever

Jay Doubleyou: paulo freire and the tabula rasa

After all, humans are considered to be 'resources':

Jay Doubleyou: taylorism >>> and education

Here's an excellent and provocative documentary from Metanoia Films directed by Scott Noble, which looks at the issues:

 

 
HUMAN RESOURCES Social Engineering In The 20th Century HQ FULL - YouTube

With more here:
Human Resources Documentary (2010) - Quotes - IMDb
Human Resources - Top Documentary Films
“Human Resources” by Scott Noble // Skilluminati Research
Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century (Documentary)

The director has done other films:
The Power Principle - An Interview with Filmmaker Scott Noble

Here are some notes:
2010 documentary, "Human Resources" - outline/partial transcript [1 of 3] : DarkFuturology
2010 documentary, "Human Resources" - outline/partial transcript [part two] : DarkFuturology

And here are some further notes of key points from the documentary:

"If there is a devil in history, it is the power principle." Mikhail Bakunin
Cultural Criminology: An Invitation - Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward, Jock Young - Google Books

John B Watson was the founder of Behaviourism:
Behaviorism | Simply Psychology
John B. Watson - Wikipedia

"The driving force in society is fear":
Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century

Rebecca Lemov wrote the "World as Laboratory" about the remodelling of society on scientific principles:

Deeply researched, World as Laboratory tells a secret history that’s not really a secret. The fruits of human engineering are all around us: advertising, polls, focus groups, the ubiquitous habit of “spin” practiced by marketers and politicians. What Rebecca Lemov cleverly traces for the first time is how the absurd, the practical, and the dangerous experiments of the human engineers of the first half of the twentieth century left their laboratories to become our day-to-day reality.

Amazon.com: World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (9780809098118): Lemov, Rebecca: Books

BF Skinner said behaviour is predictable - and was particularly interested in operant conditioning:
B.F. Skinner | Operant Conditioning | Simply Psychology

George Ritzer has written on "The McDonaldization of Society" and behaviour modification
The McDonaldization of Society: Into the Digital Age 9th Edition CTQL - EbookEV - Selling Ebook store
McDonaldization Theory of George Ritzer - YouTube
McDonaldization of Society - George Ritzer - YouTube

Morris Berman looked at this in his "The Re-enchantment of the World":
The Reenchantment of the World: Morris Berman: 9780801492259: Amazon.com: Books
Morris Berman - Wikipedia

The eugenics movement and enforced sterilisation was very powerful in the the 1930s: 

Tomorrow's Children - Wikipedia

Tomorrow's Children (1934) | The Embryo Project Encyclopedia

Tomorrow's Children (1934) DVDRip XviD - YouTube

Justin Chacon looked at another aspect in "No One is Illegal":
No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border: Justin Akers Chacon, Mike Davis: 9781931859356: Amazon.com: Books

"The Black Stork" (1917) was a seminal film:
The Black Stork - Wikipedia

The Black Stork Rises | Psychology Today

The Black Stork: A physician’s cinematic argument for eugenics | by Jack El-Hai | Medium

Rockefeller invested $$$$$ 1929...

Yale Institute of Human Relations

FW Taylor and Scientific Management is central:

Scientific management - Wikipedia

Taylorism and Scientific Management - from MindTools.com

On the decline and resurrection of Taylorism | Eight to Late

Scientific Management: The Pernicious Persistence Of Taylorism – The Human Energy Organisation

Adam Smith warned about the Division of Labour as deskilling + control of decisions over work:

Smith recognized the potential problems of this development. He pointed out that forcing individuals to perform mundane and repetitious tasks would lead to an ignorant, dissatisfied work force.

Adam Smith and the Division of Labor

On the Degradation of Skills on JSTOR

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century: Amazon.ca: Braverman, Harry: Books

More on job (dis-)satisfaction: Harold Sheppard and Neal Herrick: "Where have all the robots gone?":

ERIC - ED122067 - Where Have All the Robots Gone? Worker Dissatisfaction in the '70's., 1972

Michael Albert looks at "Parecon" as an alternative:

Parecon: Life After Capitalism: Michael Albert: 9781859846988: Amazon.com: Books

Michael Albert - On Participatory Economics (Parecon) [Oct 2011] - YouTube

Post-Capitalism - PARECON or a World Without Money? - YouTube

But Lenin preferred Tayorism to Factory Councils:

The Taylorization of Lenin: rhetoric or reality?

How America Helped Build The Soviet Machine | AMERICAN HERITAGE

CrimethInc. : 1919: When the Bolsheviks Turned on the Workers : Looking Back on the Putilov and Astrakhan Strikes, One Hundred Years Later

Factory committees in the Russian revolution - Rod Jones

But the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin did not:

An Anarchist FAQ (09/17) | The Anarchist Library (Mirror)

Taylorism – COSMONAUT

Workers Against Work

An alternative would be the Participatory Economy:

Participatory economics - Wikipedia

Participatory Economics | A model for a new economy

John Taylor Gatto in "Dumbing us Down" is not impressed by what the education system does to us: 

John Taylor Gatto on Dumbing Us Down - YouTube

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, 10th Anniversary Edition: John Taylor Gatto, Thomas Moore: 9780865714489: Amazon.com: Books

His middle name is 'Taylor' - as in F W Taylor:

The Industrial Classroom

The American Horace Mann brought the Prussian model to Massachusetts in 1852, as a model of how to scientifically engineer schools to produce human resources:

Forced Government Schooling - The Prussian model - The Prussian model

Learning for Its Own Sake: The German University as Nineteenth-Century Model on JSTOR

Toward the Destruction of Schooling | The Anarchist Library

The Gary Plan brought Scientific Management into education in 1900:

Gary Plan | education | Britannica.com

William Wirt (educator) - Wikipedia

John Dewey, William Wirt and the Gary Schools Plan: a centennial reappraisal: Journal of Educational Administration and History: Vol 49, No 2

Gary's early schools set standard for education | Northwest Indiana History | nwitimes.com

The educationalist Alfie Kohn challenges much of this:
Kohn's challenges to widely accepted theories and practices have made him a controversial figure, particularly with behaviorists, conservatives, and those who defend the practices he calls into question, such as the use of competition, incentive programs, conventional discipline, standardized testing, grades, homework, and traditional schooling.[2]

Alfie Kohn - Wikipedia

And so we get into the area of 'natural evolution'...

Charles Darwin stated that natural selection does not demand competition:

Competition, the Division of Labor, and Darwin's Principle of Divergence on JSTOR

Laissez-Faire-Social-Darwinism.pdf

Herbert Spenser gave us social Darwism and the idea of the 'survival of the fittest'

social Darwinism | Definition & Facts | Britannica
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It's all about winning and losing in the United States:
Jay Doubleyou: winning or losing?

Although some are born lucky:
Jay Doubleyou: inventions
Jay Doubleyou: the fall and rise of social democracy?

And some are not:
Jay Doubleyou: don’t think you’re lucky? think again

Trump appeals to those who think they've lost out:

THE FINANCIAL PAGE

 JUNE 6 & 13, 2016 ISSUE

LOSERS!

The more Trump emphasizes loss, the more voters may take a risk on him to get it back.

 By James Surowiecki

When Donald Trump appeared at the N.R.A.’s recent national convention, he had a simple message: Hillary Clinton “wants to take away your guns.” This was familiar rhetorical ground: warning of dire losses has been the core of Trump’s campaign. Free trade means that “we’re losing our jobs, we’re losing our money.” China’s trade practices amount to “the greatest theft in the history of the world.” We need a wall to stop illegal immigration because “we’re losing so much.” In Trump’s world, things are much worse than they seem, and it’s because American prosperity has been stolen: “We’re losing everything.”
Trump is playing to one of the most powerful emotions in our economic life—what behavioral economists call loss aversion. The basic idea, which was pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is that people feel the pain of losses much more than they feel the pleasure of gains. Empirical studies suggest that, in general, losing is twice as painful as winning is enjoyable. So people will go to great lengths to avoid losses, and to recover what they’ve lost.

Trump’s emphasis on losing is unusual: even in bleak times, American Presidential candidates tend to offer optimistic messages. But it has worked for him, because it resonates with what many Republican voters already feel. A study by the Pew Research Center last fall found that seventy-nine per cent of those who lean Republican believe that their side is losing politically. A rand survey in January found that voters who believed that “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does” were 86.5 per cent more likely to prefer Trump. Trump supporters feel that they, and the country, are losing economically, too. In the rand survey, Trump did better with the people who were the most dissatisfied with their economic situation, and exit polls from the Republican primaries show that almost seventy per cent of those who voted for Trump said that they were “very worried” about the state of the economy—as against only forty-five per cent of all voters in Democratic primaries.

There are a couple of surprising things about all this. The first is that, in objective terms, plenty of Trump supporters haven’t lost that much. We’re familiar with Trump’s appeal among white working-class voters, many of whom truly have seen wages stagnate and jobs dry up. But the median Trump voter is actually better educated and richer than the average American, as Nate Silver recently pointed out. A key point of Kahneman and Tversky’s work, though, is that people don’t look at their status objectively; they measure it relative to a reference point, and for many Republicans that reference point is a past time when they had more status and more economic security. Even people who simply aren’t doing as well as they expected to be doing, Kahneman argues, feel a sense of loss. And people don’t adapt their expectations to new circumstances. A study of loss aversion by the political scientist Jack Levy concluded that, after losses, an individual will “continue to use the status quo ex ante as her reference point.” Trump’s promise is precisely that he’ll return America to that status quo ex ante. (“I love the old days,” he has said.) He tells his supporters that he will help recoup their losses and safeguard what they have.

The other surprising thing is that you might expect loss-averse voters to be leery of taking a risk on an unpredictable outsider like Trump, since loss aversion often makes people cautious: offered the choice between five hundred dollars and a fifty per cent chance at a thousand dollars or nothing, most people take the sure thing. However, loss aversion promotes caution only when people are considering gains; once people have sustained losses, impulses change dramatically. Offered the choice between losing five hundred dollars and a fifty per cent chance of losing a thousand dollars or nothing, most people prefer to gamble—the opposite of what they did when presented with the chance to win a thousand dollars. As one study puts it, “People are willing to run huge risks to avert or recover losses.” In the real world, this is why people hold falling stocks, hoping for a rebound rather than cutting their losses, and it’s why they double down after losing a bet. For Trump’s voters, the Obama years have felt like a disaster. Taking a flyer on Trump actually starts to feel sensible.

Historical parallels are always tendentious. But loss aversion has been instrumental in the success of authoritarian movements around the world. The political scientist Kurt Weyland has argued that it played a crucial role in the rise of such regimes in Latin America, where the fear of Communism drove putatively democratic societies toward the radical solution of strongman rule. Trump may not quite be an American Perón, but, to his supporters, his unpredictability is a selling point rather than a flaw. Hillary Clinton has recently been emphasizing what a risk Trump represents. That’s fine when rallying the Democratic base and appealing to genuine independents. But it will only make Trump more popular with those who already believe in him. When he says, “We’re losing our country,” it doesn’t sound overwrought to his supporters. It sounds like the truth. For them, Trump is the long shot who may come in and give them back all that they have lost. ♦


James Surowiecki is the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds” and writes about economics, business, and finance for the magazine.
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ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

The more Trump emphasizes loss, the more voters may take a risk on him to get it back. - The New Yorker
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