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! :)
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.
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:)
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?
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! :)
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.
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:)
Bro, you’re on fire. Beautifully written
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?
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...