Homeworking and the impending zombie apocolypse.

We've all seen the movies ... people roaming the streets, staring without seeing what's around them, disengaged from their environments, unreachable, following an internal mission without concern for you ...

Zombies.

OK, so home working might not lead to flesh-devouring monsters (unless you are single in your forties and on Tinder) but the other bits check out.

Here's how it happens.

1 - your employer for reasons of releasing real estate or global pandemic gives you the option to do your job without going to a physical office.

2 - all your work now lives inside your laptop.

3 - this is great! I'm not going to sit a home in my office space, I'm going to work whereever I like! [downloads phone app]

4 - people walking through parks, filling cafes, on public transport, outside shops waiting for their partner to buy shoes, visiting their grandma (or children) all focused on their devices trying to complete a 35-hour working week while also doing other things.

5 - shit gets normalised. No offices exist anymore.

6 - zombie nation.

I tried it. For years I had a really future-thinking job, working online only with an office-less organisation. I went surfing, I travelled in my van, I raised my kids - all while functioning as a senior consultant for online designs with companies across the world.

But, whatever my instagram might say, here is the reality.

1 - Wifi doesn't work and data is unreliable, especially when you are moving. 

    working online usually means being constantly connected - for cloud-based saving of documents, for communications with your team, for billing and time trackings. It's all online. Sat at home in your suburban office you might have a good boosted wifi to rely on, but in transit, in public spaces, in cafes and on beaches in the carribean, you might not get good service.

2 - Working remotely is working alone. Being alone is lonely and crushes your creativity and productivity.

I hated my commute when I did it. I was socially uncomfortably in teams and with colleagues. Leaving all that behind seemed like nirvana. But actually I was craving contact and that sense of having something in common. Sitting at an antenatal class, that comment about how design practices are being disrupted by pattern-languages is ... honestly just don't. And when the new timesheets were a pain, the cat didn't really seem to relate to my stress. There's a monotony about home working, and additional pressure from trying to self-stimulate (no, not like that!) to ensure you get breaks from tasks, think non-linearly and just have a life outside of your work tasks.

3 - Task-based working happens. You are no longer an employee but a completion monkey.

There is something about knowing they will have to look you in the eye and you know where they keep their milk that makes bosses at least pretend to care about their employees as people. I was pregnant at work. People could see that. They tended not to be too critical when I took more frequent breaks to go to the loo. Once you are removed from your colleagues (and bosses) you are just a machine that completes tasks. Complete them on time, great. Don't, trouble. It's really hard for managers to empathise with employees they can't see or hear. Work stops being a community and starts being task-based only. 

4 - Ultimately you need to put the people back in your life... that's expensive.

So, you never leave your home and family, you don't have any colleagues to relate to and co-create with, you are left without support of managers. Just find the wifi, do the tasks, log the time... Eventually you need to have people back again. Only now you don't have an employer-funded workspace. So you seek out company elsewhere. Eventually I hired a co-working space, which is fine as a freelancer (which I was) because I can write off the cost, but as a salaried employee - well you just end up paying for something you used to get for free. I imagine most people won't, so ... 

5 - Everywhere becomes a place of work. That's rude.

People are necessary, your employer doesn't supply them, co-working is expensive, so what do you do? To save going mad in corner of your own living room for the rest of your life, you'll probably go outside and find somewhere else to work. Most likely this is a cafe. Most likely it has a wifi (for free) connection that is trying to support other customers and the staff and business (#1), most likely those other customers didn't come to the cafe to feel like they were in an office (with stacks of paper, whirring laptops, one sided-business conversations rattling across the air), most likely the cafe owners have carefully created an environment that is calming, or fun - and they have budget for people to sit for no more than 1.5 hours and typically eat food. Only you are sat there, because the wifi is free, with 2 coffees, for 6 hours trying to get a days' work done. Or at least that's what I did. Service stations, train carriages, cafes, pubs, playgrounds. Everywhere there were tables (or benches) and wifi (yay! plugs!) I have made my workspace. And brought my office to where everyone else was trying to be not at work.

6 - You aren't really free. 

People used to go on holiday between days when they worked. And, unless you were the CEO of HSBC or the President of the UN, leave work and relax and play. You got paid when you were 'at work' and you didn't when you weren't, so you didn't work. But the 'freedom' to work when you want means that we are task-based employees, not time-based employees. It's on us to manage our time and workloads (although we can't manage our workloads). Work tasks keep coming, and without 5pm to create a cut off, the work isn't really ever done. So, we do it all the time. We take it with us wherever we go. We blur the lines. We take a leap and say 'I can go wherever I chose and my work will come with me'. We land in tropical countries and take up space in hotel lounges, still calling and emailing and shuffling our files. We stress about wifi, occupy tables near plugs, believing we are lucky to be here on this beach when other suckers are sat under striplights at desks. Only we don't ever look at the sea, because the work isn't finished and the signal fell down and the time-zone means early mornings and late nights. We no longer take breaks where we are free from our work to enjoy our lives, our work invades everything.

7 - Zombie apocalypse.

We are all burnt out from looking constantly at our screens, monitoring them to see what we need to do next, if we finished that thing yet, communicating through them with the only people who understand - people who aren't here around us. We are busy, so busy, but not in this space. We don't have time to look away, we are dependent on being present inside the digital world in our hands, our minds always partially attentive - even when we are with our children, our friends, our neighbours, our families, our lovers, our communities. Our work is not longer bounded by a building that we can leave - we have spread it out and smeared it everywhere, polluted even the most tranquil places with the busyness of business.

I no longer work online. I changed path. But that has happened at a time when so many are now moving into the lifestyle I once had. I wanted to share this so that it could expose some of the truths about our future society, open conversations about what can be done to avoid the zombie apocolypse.

Some of my thoughts are ...

1 - employer funded local coworking spaces.

As a part of your salary, in much the same way as employers contribute toward a pension, employers that require their workers to work from home must pay an amount to that employee toward the cost of a local coworking space. Local 'bubbles' present much less risk of infection and environmental degredation than huge centralised offices with people congregating from many areas.

2 - government investment in digital infrastructure.

Some of the behaviour is easily fixed by free, fast broadband for all. Call me a socialist (I'm not, don't be reductive), but I believe the economic benefits of providing every home and public space in the UK with a fast, centrally owned, serviced broadband connection are enormous, and far outweigh the set up and maintenence costs. Large companies could also be encouraged to sponsor this work.

3 - legislation

Guidance is fine, but there are currently no laws that govern the welfare of employees using digital services. Health and safety legislation could apply, but it isn't used. Serious understanding of how digital interation (and service design) contributes to public health is overdue. If employers risked being sued for negligence in providing digital work environments and management like they do for physical spaces, a lot would change fast.

4 - Grass-roots change

A lot of this is related to employees working in office jobs for large corporate business (or smaller ones). But honestly I believe that once people begin to experience the effects of homeworking for themselves, we are going to see a lot of change coming from the bottom up. People will make choices, just like I did, that affect what is valued in society, what is sustainable. My children are already learning that they can work at home because of the pandemic. They are already questioning the value of structured heirarchical institutions and understanding that they are supported, not by the structure or the institution, but by specific individuals working in that system. Digital life gives us direct access - to knowledge, to people. It crumbles the walls that have prevented people from interacting on their own terms. So I think most of what needs to happen is to facilitate that change, that growth, that is coming from the bottom and allow our systems and societies to evolve.

fight your own battles to see lasting change

I am trying my hardest to stay quiet about Extinction Rebellion.

I am trying not to upset people I care dearly about who are engaging with the movement.

I am trying not to upset myself by thinking about all the underlying issues the movement (and it's success) represent.

I am trying not to be a negative factor that gives fuel to those who would argue against action on climate and environmental protection.

But this is my sandbox, my personal echo-chamber. So I am about to shout.

1 - The movement is a sign of white middle class privilege in full effect
2 - actually everything else is basically a consequence of #1.

Time to devote to protest

OK. Let's imagine you are going to glue yourself to a bridge for a month. What does that say about your income level and community support network. Who will pay your rent? Keep your job open?

Treatment by the police

The behaviour of the police toward lovely, innocent, well meaning members of the community coming together to voice a collective opinion about a valid political or social injustice is very different if you are a large mass of white people than if you are a large mass of ethnic minorities. The consequence of having a previous conviction for your employment or in the case of any future offense is also not the same.

Your biggest threat being the climate

We have many issues which threaten our safety and security as a community. Poverty and racial inequality among them. When Grenfell burned we tweeted a bit and discussed it at dinner parties and the school gates. If the biggest threat to you daily wellbeing is climate change, well... 

Status to fight on behalf of others

And yet there are those who are dying daily because of climate change. Protesters are demanding 'someone over there' acts differently to protect 'someone else over there'. What is their motivation? What do they want to change in their own daily life? What threat do climate issues present to them? Fighting on behalf of others is a demonstration of privilege, or your own position of power. And it precludes personal responsibility. Every one else needs to change.

This one needs two paragraphs. Why fight climate change? Because Bangladeshi children are drowning (for example). What are we fighting for? Large corporations to stop producing oil (for example). But now it is halloween and I will continue to buy plastic wrapped sweets and toys for my kids and drink almond milk from a tetrapak.

Maybe three. If you are expecting radical change, you need to be willing to radically change. The act of just saying "yes that is a good idea" is just alignment, not change. Fight for what you want - A total ban on plastic packaging in the UK so you have an alternative purchasing option, A local glass recycling scheme and nut milk dairy so you can drink almond milk without TetraPak. If these types of immediate local changes are not in your demands, then you aren't really personally affected by the issue, you are to protected by your privilege and wealth.

A need for a common enemy

So why is it happening at all? Why are large numbers of people across the world rallying to the rather vague cry of 'make it better' and 'stop making it worse' all of a sudden? People need community, they need to align and have purpose. In at risk communities this is often easy to do - there is a common enemy that we need to fight against, we are at risk and need to work together to protect ourselves.

But today white middle class privilege has become so extreme that there is no tangible risk in daily life. We are well fed. Few of us will go without food for more than a day except through choice and if we were to find our cupboards empty we could go to another person and they would have plenty of surplus. I know this because I have done it.

We are well protected. Individuals may cause us harm but we have well financed police forces that can respond to and deter most threats to our personal safety so in truth the threat to the individual is not a significant daily issue. We may not feel safe, but mostly we are and can walk most streets alone and come back in one piece.

We have work, we have social structures, we have leisure, we have health. We basically have everything. Except a reason to cooperate and work alongside each other for a cause.

Why is this a problem?

Why do I care? ER has successfully pushed environmentalism into the public agenda and it's nice that people get to come together and feel part of something? So why not just welcome it with open arms. Us white middle class people are people too, right, why shouldn't we have something to rally around?

Because I am afraid.

When I look at the coverage all I see is a large mob of wealthy, entitled, resourced white people. All I see is people with no clear feasible agenda with the ability to steer public policy on a whim and to shut down governments and services until they get themselves satisfied.

I see ambulances blocked, I see poorer people preventing from attending their jobs, I see government work and public services stalled and underfunded by diverted agendas to please the ER movement.

But more than that I see resentment. That's the big fear. If I'm angry about this discourse and it's dominance of the public agenda, about it's ability to divert funding and attention away from the important things that support people who need it in their daily lives, and I am a middle class white person, and I have the privilege, then I fear the sentiment it is rousing in those who don't.

What do ER want? What do they expect to happen? And do they really understand what they are asking for?

Environmental degradation is the consequence of individualistic approaches in modern life - of a failure of modern society to work for a common good over personal comfort. I don't see ER as anything but an extension of that behaviour. The people involved in the movement have demonstrated exactly how much energy and activity they are capable of putting in to something they care about. And in doing so they have shown that they never cared about the troubles less well-off neighbours in their own communities enough to fight this hard.They prioritise the rainforest over racism, the ice caps over immigration and green house gases over homelessness. There have been many chances to rally around a cause. The fact that the only cause that hits the heart of the ER demographic is ephemeral is an illustration of how disconnected from the truth of many people's challenges that group has become.

When we don't see the suffering of those around us as our own suffering, when we consider others to be separate from ourselves, we aren't motivated to fight for those causes. We sympathise but we don't empathise. If those in the ER movement felt themselves to be part o the same group as those suffering other issues - such as those contributing to the Grenfell tragedy - those issues would be primary. No one who feels the threat of homelessness, of prejudice, of a lack of opportunity for employment, of safety would demand a reduction in greenhouse gases before a right to, say, a place to sleep.

But they don't. They don't fear, or feel aligned with the fear, or the things people in today's world, in their own towns and cities, do. Poverty, prejudice, violence, hunger, enslavement etc. are not threats to them.

Why I won't vote

I didn't vote. I haven't voted for some years now. And I won't vote any time soon.

Obviously this draws a lot of rage from my politically-minded liberal middle class friends. And others.

But here's why I don't.

If someone asked me to choose from the following options:

• Get kicked in the face
• Get punched in the stomach
• Have my foot stamped on

I wouldn't say 'yes please' to any of them. I wouldn't answer the question with an affirmative at all. I most probably would just walk away.

There is no way we would think it was acceptable for a person to be forced into choosing to be knowingly harmed, and we would all agree that it was unreasonable to try to force them to.

The villain would not be the person who refused to select an option, but the one who was forcing them to choose which harmful act.

So it is with parliamentary elections.

I cannot with a clear conscience choose any of the three proposed options - three parliamentary parties - that are available. Any one of those choices will do me, my family, my community and my society great harm. Any one of them will be subject to the same supra-national forces of greed and exploitation that mean that our country remains the at the mercy of global corporate interests that prohibit any of the things I want to see represented at a national government level.

I can't vote for something - I can't agree to something, say 'yes' to something, MANDATE something - that I know will cause harm.

And that is what happens in a general election. Our views as individual voters are not transferred to the halls of Westminster via the ballot box, our opinions are not represented, our ethics are not upheld.

What happens is that our vote provides a mandate for the leadership of a particular party to do whatever they want to do.

Brexit is the perfect example.

'Do you want to leave the EU?'

If no then we stay in the EU regardless of what the EU does in the future (and there is a lot of economic protectionism and right wing sentiment in the European states at this time).

If yes then we leave the EU in any circumstances, however recklessly harmful the terms might be for us as citizens.

Just tune in to the media. All you will hear as a bottom line argument from the leave leaderships is "We have a mandate!"

As if a mandate were unconditional. As if a vote on a simplistic question were representative of the will of the people over a detailed answer. As if being the unelected leader of a minority party in the House of Commons (only half of our parliament) gave one the divine right of Kings.

So I don't vote. Because at least I know no one can say to me "This is what you wanted".

If you want someone to impress you - give them space

my son just topped the goal scorers table for his league despite only playing half a season.

WHY AM I PROUD?

Because he had to get to this level himself. Because I made him a deal when he was very young that when he was old enough to organise himself to football training etc, if he really wanted to I would support him.

So he never spent (we never spent - I was a single parent with a tough workload and another child I didn't want to get lost under the world of kids soccer) every Friday standing in the cold and rain at the edge of the pitch watching a bunch of knee-high boys get shouted at. He never had his parents sacrifice their sacred weekend time to shuttle him across the county, wash his socks etc. He had to learn himself - he had to get good in the park (we did do that together!) and then get accepted into a team at the age where he was old enough to make his own choices about how he spends his time.

He put in the effort- this is his achievement. There is no part of his story that can place any credit for this at anyone else's feet.

So we reward that with our effort now. We drive him, wash the kits, spend our time etc. Because HE deserves our admiration and our support.

MORE PARENT BRAGGING

 

And here I cross a line. I go too far. I hurt people who have done their best for their kids - I insult them (and their children).

But I want to for all the parents to come - because if there is one thing parenting needs to be it is less competitive, less idealistic, less personal. Our children are not a reflection of our abilities. Putting them under pressure to be better than others or to excel in certain things (football, spanish, maths, piano etc.) especially from a young age - well I think it is a problem And I think that when we do it we do it because we are fearful of criticism that we didn't do enough.

We did enough. We gave birth to them and we love them. We continue to try to create a world in which they can thrive as best we can. We try to create ourselves as role models and resources they can rely on. To provide access to people and places and ideas that they can grow into.

But do we need them to be A* students? To have 6-figure salaries? To master complex Chopin? Do they need to?

I am proud (SO PROUD _ DID I SAY THAT?!!?) of Roo because he did this, and he did it because he enjoys it. He loves it. He worked hard and became good at something he loves doing and has overcome some pretty significant obstacles to keep doing it.

I hope that is something he always feels able to do.

X

#shitmum

The new ethical tech movement and me.

“It isn’t evolving in a random direction … There is a very specific goal in the development of technology and that is to compete for your attention … it become this race to the bottom of the brain stem.”

https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention#t-773574

Tristan Harris, former ethics designer at Google, speaks courageously and frankly about social media design practises that affect us all.  He is essentially a whistle-blower in the spirit of Edward Snowden and talks of putting technology back in the place of being a tool, not as a master of what we think.

Should we kill the machines?

Technology has enormous potential to connect people and ideas, to, quite frankly, get shit done.

My favourite example of this was the women’s march against trump that saw people right around the globe get up, walk outside, shout NO, and then go quietly go home again. No central planning, no drama, and an unprecedented amount of people. Awesome.

So getting rid of technology isn’t the issue.

But making some ethical boundaries are vital. Right now the only people who are winning are advertisers and the platform owners, and they are winning at the expense of our daily lives and our minds.

“I learned when I was young, that the only true life I have is the life of my brain. And as the only true life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day, for their particular use, on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition.”
‘Frying Pan Jack’, quoted here by Utah Phillips in the prelude to his recitation of the poem Bum on the Rod was referencing labour conditions, but it seems to precede Harris' sentiment.

What I cannot unsee?

In the past decade I have worked in the heart of the world’s largest companies as they brought their internal activities online. As a usability designer, researcher and consultant, I have watched the behaviour of employees across the world and at all levels as their daily work activities became increasingly digitised, from file sharing to HR reporting. Very few workers on the planet now have a job that involves no digital interaction.

During this time i and my colleagues at Digital Workplace Welfare have been able to track and evaluate the positive and negative consequences of the technologies in place and their design, and some of the ways in which employees are personally affected by the need to interact digitally to get the job done. Often employee digital services are sub-par compared to the out-of-work experience and have the potential to create considerable stress in the workplace.

Working toward welfare

Innovation and development is happening in public-facing technology, and the employee services sector often seems to lag behind, borrowing or copying non-workplace experiences for internal employee use. We see this in recent developments to integrate social media platforms and apps into the employee experience.

As more and more evidence emerges to support the concerns that Harris and others have about the consequences of handing our attention to social media and app developers for increasing parts of our daily life, we see the scramble among the world’s employers of people to integrate the same technologies and scenarios into the workplace.

The digital workplace has been embryonic for a few decades and now has reached maturity. As this social development embeds itself we will be watching carefully to understand the research around how social media engagement, interface design and hardware are impacting, not just our thoughts but our physical bodies, and help companies and employees to ensure that their digital and physical workplaces remain healthy and effective places to work.

In a world run by robots, humans must conform.

I once wrote a film idea about a woman who quit her job working for corporate banking because she didn't agree with what they were doing.

The bank came after her and her family. One of their tactics was to block access to all her accounts, leaving her penniless in a society where cash was hard to use.

For the last two months I have - despite having a £0 balance and a £6,500 credit limit - had almost every transaction on my credit card declined. When I question this with the bank they tell me 'the transaction filled their criteria for a suspicious transaction'. They refuse to tell me what these criteria are.

The most recent transactions to be denies are for Amazon (twice), AirBnb (three times), and now a family restaurant in Eastbourne where I was taking my daughter out for her birthday meal. These policies have left me in serious danger at times (thank heaven for good people) and - last night - emotional distress.

It isn't OK. We have handed control of our lives over to automated processes and we are helpless when the machine says no. I have a complaint lodged with the financial ombudsman but that isn't likely to yield anything. And it won't help me to pay for paintballing today with my son.

Some of my younger, more political friends look forward to a future where the machines do all the work. That frightens me: To be marginalised; to be the victim of either a deliberate or accidental obstacle to access, in the absence of humans, is terrifying.

Supporters of an automated future often cite the error rates in humans as a justification of their goal. But we *are* human. We make mistakes. We get ourselves into difficulty. And, as humans, we can override the protocol and help each other out.

But now we can't. We can't live freely if we insist everything is prescribed and there is no room for error. If there is no way to get round the rules then we need 'GOD' to have written them - some intelligence so powerful, so all knowing, that it truly can predict and accommodate all of the chaotic truths that it's ruleset might encounter.

If we want to be living in an automated world, we are going to have to be homogenous, rule-based organisms. We are going to have to leave behind the beauty of nature, the chaos of truth, and fit ourselves into little boxes and patterns that exactly match the rules we decided to live by.

Please be careful what you wish for. 

[with gratitude but not permission from the prophetic and pioneering Radiohead. http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace]

Modern Romance

I've been travelling a lot and getting a bit wistful of late ... ;)

Some words about words and love, and my love for them

See, what I really want to do now (and often) is to write to my lover.

But I don’t know who my lover is, so I do not know what to say.

Of course I chase around so eagerly hoping it will be you? or you? maybe you? you’ll do. Someone to aim at, to keep in my heart while I am thinking. While I am dreaming. While I am away and alone.

What I want to do is write to you. I want to unload my thoughts, my hopes and dreams, my heart. Not so that you will feel the burden of replying, but so that i can speak - which is so much more than just thinking.

I want to tell you about the walk I took today around the whole of the island. How I found a swimming spot in time for sundown again. I want to tell you how I jumped when I drifted into the seaweed. The difference in the sand between here and there.

But you are not my lover. You were not listening before or even now. You cannot relate these tales to those others or hear those to come and relate them to these.

To be my lover you must have longevity, you must endure. You must welcome my messages, even if your don’t read them line for line for they are long and numerous, detailed beyond necessity:

• the endlessness of the european lovers on shore-sunk swings
• the pink of the nails and the fakeness of the eyelashes of the american-asian (mixed) girls on the boat, and the young Lucy-a-like enchanting all with her window-seat splashing
• pointless musings on the relative expense of western-oriented vs locals eating places, and whether I should be welcome in the latter
• imagine my relief when my Dad had the tax money all along - LOL.

These words are nothing to you. Or you. My sequences of sentences are lost, wasted, hurled into the abyss, for you are not my lover.

Nor can I sit here crafting tender interludes between the facts:

• admissions that I daydreamed I was holding your hand on the beach
• that I wished your face had sat across from me at the pool, and not the face of my book
• how I am smiling gently as I remember how I could still smell you in the room after you left that day
• that the thing you said still hurts but I never told you until now
• how I wished I had greeted you, with a smile, with my eyes, when you came. Or when I did.

These words have no place in my message. No target to aim at. No heart to receive them. Yet still they come?

If you are not my lover, I guess I must be my own.