A shout out to rail/coach/ferry travel. I quit flying for environmental reasons a long time back, but these glimpses of budget air travel remind me how good I have it.
I don't know how much your Easyjet flights cost you, but I did London-Berlin for £50 on Flixbus the other week, turned up ten mins before the bus left, had pleasant informal times with the cheerful staff/drivers, saw dolphins while chilling in the comfortable ferry bar and really enjoyed the journey!
I'm not sure where we non-flyers sit in the hierarchy of capitalism but, for whatever reason, thus far they seem to have overlooked to bring in all the surveillance and enshittification for us.
On this occasion, it even sounds as though I got there faster too, though you did get to sleep in a bed! :)
Ha ha, well put. I should return to bus life, and I do adore ferries. Train life is the best, but I just wish they could make that less expensive
At a systemic level, routine air travel is another example of the acceleration tendencies in our system - many people do indeed prefer slower forms of travel, but feel increasingly compelled to default to air travel, to cram more into what seems like a shorter amount of time
Yeah, it's funny isn't it. I could swear there are 24 hours in my day regardless of whether I travel by air or bus! The question, surely, is whether we enjoy those hours.
I get so much done while pootling around on slow travel and savour the journey, rather than surrendering a few hours to being shunted around in miserable air/Bufferland travel.
Well I think the issue is that perception of time changes over time - things that were previously experienced as a normal pace - such as handwriting a letter, or reading a book - are increasingly experienced as unbearably slow, due to the fact that the economic pressure on people is to cram more into the same finite attention span. People realise this when they manage to break out of that cycle, but - at a systemic level - there is no support for that process
I used to work at a passenger rail company. At one meeting a newish senior exec told us that we should be designing for a passenger journey sequence more like that of an airline if we were to get people to shift from air travel to rail. Fortunately the looks on our faces stopped him in his tracks and we ended up with a fruitful conversation about passenger experience.
Having said all this, the bufferland is still there. It is much less of a problem at the publicly funded transport organisations than the privately owned ones though, in my experience. I think that's partly due to the scrutiny and governance ("public" literally means not able to keep it private), partly due to public service ethos, which I didn't believe in when I was younger but have seen so many times since that I now understand it is the human norm.
Thanks for sharing Simon. In well designed/funded public systems there is a certainly a kind of spaciousness that is squeezed out of private systems. The private ones, especially in low-margin industries, will force frontline employees to bear the brunt of the cost-cutting/revenue boosting impulses of the managers and shareholders
I do enjoy your writing Brett. I like your term Bufferland. Many buffers contribute to the pain of both employees and consumers. It is the shareholder-stakeholder disconnect—the distance between shareholder incentives and customer experience. There is the strip and flip or private equity buyout, where the firm keeps the owner to run it in the short term, squeezes out quick profits through cuts and price hikes, and then sells it off. Maybe we need consumer unions or public campaigns to highlight and boycott the products. What about a conscious consumer private equity fund? Hey, one can dream:)
Thanks for the comment Tammy, and glad you like the piece. I actually advocated for customer unions and activist private equity funds in my first book The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance in 2013, and apparently that did help inspire one customer union to form - the Cooperative Bank Customer Union :)
Bufferland is one reason among a few others why flying has become such an unpleasant experience. I had similar issues with Vueling and AirFrance; weirdly, not yet with easyJet, although I travel with them more frequently. Great article, Brett.
On rare occasions, those on the other end of the stick do confront the elite, like when an Uber driver told CEO Travis Kalanick that he was bankrupt because of him. Kalanick's reply: “Bullshit...Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit.” He later apologized and a little while later was kicked out of Uber for not taking responsibility for his own shit.
At least you should get the 250 euros flight delay compensation, plus accomodation, plus food covered under EC Regulation 261/2004 . They are looking to water that down so that in the vast majority of cases it wont be applicable.
P.s. entertaining article Brett :) keep up the good work.
How to resolve this anoniminizing/unresponsablelizing mediation of money? Even in a limited hoardings economy it would be like this? Or it is just the unlimited size of capital and companies that makes it so monstrous?
I think the scale is a crucial factor. If you punch someone in the face, there is a very visceral experience of that at a small scale, but corporate executives (and, for that matter, any executives in any large-scale bureaucratic structure) can, metaphorically, punch hundreds of thousands of people in the face without directly experiencing it because the act is split into a chain of separate parts
Seems to me that those are exactly the right questions. Let's start brainstorming them:
A first step is transparency laws. A problem with the private sector is the privacy. And when privacy takes hold in the public sector it becomes a problem there too.
After that a tax system which favours the real risk takers, the people who start with nothing and start up a high street bakery, for example.
Next is to grow empathy at all levels. Why do some people lack empathy with those who lack capital ? It's because they grew up with capital. The beginning of this is to severely limit inheritances, but also compulsory civic service for young people and other blender type initiatives have a part.
Then we need democratisation of industry. Employee ownership and participation needs to be made the norm, with companies paying fees (or fines if you prefer that terminology) if they want to be exempt. Employee benefit trusts should be the standard form of private company organisation.
Finally, from me at least, let's all try to be nice. Niceness is civilisation's greatest achievement.
A shout out to rail/coach/ferry travel. I quit flying for environmental reasons a long time back, but these glimpses of budget air travel remind me how good I have it.
I don't know how much your Easyjet flights cost you, but I did London-Berlin for £50 on Flixbus the other week, turned up ten mins before the bus left, had pleasant informal times with the cheerful staff/drivers, saw dolphins while chilling in the comfortable ferry bar and really enjoyed the journey!
I'm not sure where we non-flyers sit in the hierarchy of capitalism but, for whatever reason, thus far they seem to have overlooked to bring in all the surveillance and enshittification for us.
On this occasion, it even sounds as though I got there faster too, though you did get to sleep in a bed! :)
Ha ha, well put. I should return to bus life, and I do adore ferries. Train life is the best, but I just wish they could make that less expensive
At a systemic level, routine air travel is another example of the acceleration tendencies in our system - many people do indeed prefer slower forms of travel, but feel increasingly compelled to default to air travel, to cram more into what seems like a shorter amount of time
Yeah, it's funny isn't it. I could swear there are 24 hours in my day regardless of whether I travel by air or bus! The question, surely, is whether we enjoy those hours.
I get so much done while pootling around on slow travel and savour the journey, rather than surrendering a few hours to being shunted around in miserable air/Bufferland travel.
Well I think the issue is that perception of time changes over time - things that were previously experienced as a normal pace - such as handwriting a letter, or reading a book - are increasingly experienced as unbearably slow, due to the fact that the economic pressure on people is to cram more into the same finite attention span. People realise this when they manage to break out of that cycle, but - at a systemic level - there is no support for that process
I used to work at a passenger rail company. At one meeting a newish senior exec told us that we should be designing for a passenger journey sequence more like that of an airline if we were to get people to shift from air travel to rail. Fortunately the looks on our faces stopped him in his tracks and we ended up with a fruitful conversation about passenger experience.
Having said all this, the bufferland is still there. It is much less of a problem at the publicly funded transport organisations than the privately owned ones though, in my experience. I think that's partly due to the scrutiny and governance ("public" literally means not able to keep it private), partly due to public service ethos, which I didn't believe in when I was younger but have seen so many times since that I now understand it is the human norm.
Thanks for sharing Simon. In well designed/funded public systems there is a certainly a kind of spaciousness that is squeezed out of private systems. The private ones, especially in low-margin industries, will force frontline employees to bear the brunt of the cost-cutting/revenue boosting impulses of the managers and shareholders
I do enjoy your writing Brett. I like your term Bufferland. Many buffers contribute to the pain of both employees and consumers. It is the shareholder-stakeholder disconnect—the distance between shareholder incentives and customer experience. There is the strip and flip or private equity buyout, where the firm keeps the owner to run it in the short term, squeezes out quick profits through cuts and price hikes, and then sells it off. Maybe we need consumer unions or public campaigns to highlight and boycott the products. What about a conscious consumer private equity fund? Hey, one can dream:)
Thanks for the comment Tammy, and glad you like the piece. I actually advocated for customer unions and activist private equity funds in my first book The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance in 2013, and apparently that did help inspire one customer union to form - the Cooperative Bank Customer Union :)
Bufferland is one reason among a few others why flying has become such an unpleasant experience. I had similar issues with Vueling and AirFrance; weirdly, not yet with easyJet, although I travel with them more frequently. Great article, Brett.
On rare occasions, those on the other end of the stick do confront the elite, like when an Uber driver told CEO Travis Kalanick that he was bankrupt because of him. Kalanick's reply: “Bullshit...Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit.” He later apologized and a little while later was kicked out of Uber for not taking responsibility for his own shit.
Glad you like it Marcello. Thanks for reminding me of the Uber example - I might put it into a new piece actually...
At least you should get the 250 euros flight delay compensation, plus accomodation, plus food covered under EC Regulation 261/2004 . They are looking to water that down so that in the vast majority of cases it wont be applicable.
P.s. entertaining article Brett :) keep up the good work.
I'll bear that in mind! Thanks for the support
Bro, you’re on fire. Beautifully written
Thanks for the support Ryan - glad you like it
How to resolve this anoniminizing/unresponsablelizing mediation of money? Even in a limited hoardings economy it would be like this? Or it is just the unlimited size of capital and companies that makes it so monstrous?
I think the scale is a crucial factor. If you punch someone in the face, there is a very visceral experience of that at a small scale, but corporate executives (and, for that matter, any executives in any large-scale bureaucratic structure) can, metaphorically, punch hundreds of thousands of people in the face without directly experiencing it because the act is split into a chain of separate parts
Seems to me that those are exactly the right questions. Let's start brainstorming them:
A first step is transparency laws. A problem with the private sector is the privacy. And when privacy takes hold in the public sector it becomes a problem there too.
After that a tax system which favours the real risk takers, the people who start with nothing and start up a high street bakery, for example.
Next is to grow empathy at all levels. Why do some people lack empathy with those who lack capital ? It's because they grew up with capital. The beginning of this is to severely limit inheritances, but also compulsory civic service for young people and other blender type initiatives have a part.
Then we need democratisation of industry. Employee ownership and participation needs to be made the norm, with companies paying fees (or fines if you prefer that terminology) if they want to be exempt. Employee benefit trusts should be the standard form of private company organisation.
Finally, from me at least, let's all try to be nice. Niceness is civilisation's greatest achievement.
Anyone else have ideas?
UBI...