William Essex
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Populism isn't asking to be defined, thank you.

31/10/2016

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Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Still some yachts out on moorings, but the dinghy park is filling up with above-my-head hulls laid up for Winter. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism.
     Defined by the first search result as "a belief in the power of regular people, and in their right to have control over their government rather than a small group of political insiders or a wealthy elite". Maybe. Or is it the assertion of that power rather than a belief in its existence? And maybe, given the endless wittering of news journalists and analysts, we should work "a talkative elite" into the mix. There's an all-too-frequently spoken assumption that a second referendum on the EU's membership of the EU would reverse the result of the first, which I doubt. And how does "best of two" work, anyway?
     Even now, there seems to be a not-quite-articulated assumption that "the gentleman [sic] in Whitehall really does know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves," as the politician Douglas Jay wrote in 1937 (before voting against EU entry in 1975). Thanks, Wikipedia. Except that I don't think that's quite the issue. The term "silent majority" can't mean much nowadays, given how many of us are online, but there does seem to be a divide between the talkative elite and the rest of us.
     The silent majority were once the dead, then Richard Nixon co-opted the phrase to convince himself that while a lot of people were rioting and demonstrating against him, a silent majority were staying at home and agreeing with his conduct of the Vietnam War. These days, maybe there's a meaningful distinction between some kind of a self-defined elite that takes for granted its own correctness - by now, all those Leave-voters must have realised they were wrong and we were right so let's hold a second referendum - and the rest of the "ordinary people" (as BBC reporters describe the crowds at national events) who vote the way they want to vote without reference - or access - to any kind of collectively generated "higher" wisdom.
     Life seems to educate some of us to believe that we can lead the "national conversation" (my turn to co-opt a phrase). We go into politics or the news media; we engage in some other way; we just keep ourselves informed, take an interest, whatever it might be. In doing so, I suspect, we run the risk that the conclusions we draw will turn into assumptions that we apply more widely than they merit. And it's very easy to forget that the status quo is even less of a guide than the past to what will seem normal in the future.
     Ronald Reagan for president? Come off it - he's an actor.
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So what do you think?

27/10/2016

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"Good customer service is really, really important to us," said the recorded woman's voice on the cold call I received just as I was walking back to the car with the parking ticket the other evening. We were going out to eat. Didn't catch the name of the company, although I let the call run for a bit, but I did appreciate the bone-headed irony of talking about customer service via a badly timed, recorded cold call.
     Yesterday night, the dry cleaner emailed to ask how I felt about the experience of dropping off my dry cleaning earlier, and today the company that does my car insurance wants to know what I think of it. Except that it doesn't - it actually wants me to spend ten minutes ticking boxes in a survey run by a third party. If only I was enough of a nerd to call up the company directly and offer my views.
     A phrase I haven't heard for a while is "work to rule". Back in the - seventies, maybe? - it was an industrial-relations thing: you work exactly to the letter of your employment contract. Short of a strike, but making a point by being deliberately inflexible. Perhaps the online-marketing equivalent would be taking everything absolutely literally - rushing into the nearest branch and sharing the excitement with the staff behind the counter, every time an offer arrives.
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Follow me?

19/10/2016

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Just had a notification through. Somebody's started following me on Quora. Don't know what Quora is, but I suppose I'm going to have to find out. Tumblr keeps sending me lists of blogs I'm going to like, and LinkedIn just can't stop offering me a free trial of its paid-for premium service.
     One characteristic of mine that has survived the time-machine jump from chronological 1984 to the current draft is a resistance - can't help it - to this kind of push selling. They're ever so slightly desperate, aren't they? But they live on a kind of conformity as well. Got a text yesterday from the utility company that does my mobile phone. "Hi William," it began, and went on to remind me not to miss a football match.
     If you can't see it, I'm not going to spell it out. Heard a very good talk recently by Douglas Rushkoff, author of 'Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus' and other titles, in which he raised the subject of growth. It is ridiculous, Rushkoff argued, to expect companies endlessly to grow. My example would be Twitter, which is useful to its relatively limited constituency but losing advertisers, backers, et cetera, because its numbers aren't constantly growing.
     Thinking about the talk afterwards, I wondered about a possible analogy. If the present business model of social-media companies is constant growth - thus, desperation to attract late adopters like me as well as to offer treats (football matches) to existing subscribers - then it's unsustainable. One version of history is that President Reagan ramped up defence spending, thus forcing the Soviet Union to follow suit, until the Soviet Union ran out of money and collapsed. If they don't keep on ramping up the numbers, social-media companies...
     Word beginning with C. Should have titled this post "I'll raise you."
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