Seeking Signal in the Noise

Climate Change, Ranga Myneni, Foetus, Colonialism, “Fees Must Fall”, Gramsci, Fanon – what is the link between  these issues and names?  I admit - I have an agenda.  Throwing these “randoms” at you is an attempt to buy your engagement. I am trying to engage you in a “meaning-making” exercise as an exercise in agency and  citizenship of this fantastic country.

The common link is an intended emotional  fruit that is, in my opinon, diabolical. This is a strong word but I am happy to use it. For, if you stay with the programme over this series, you will connect the dots and understand what we believe are the  pathways to undermine your identity, and by extension your agency.

There is an intentional assault on a way of comprehending life. The goal is to  destroy. This is done by trashing history and criminalising those who are the carriers of the defined disease - labelled “colonialism”.   The next step is to demoralise and suck people dry of hope creating visionless men and women. This  leads to a kind of death where,  in  the land of your birth, you have no “agency”  and the irony is not lost on us.  This is precisely the accusation levelled against “the colonial” who are the creators of the initial dispossession. The way of redress is what is being navigated right now. It is anything from retribution to restoration. But Gramsci, who we will introduce you to next time round,  does not allow restoration. It is good  you know why.

The Oliver Tambo vision of  South Africa is anathema to a new Nike-wearing marxist generation. They harbour a visceral intolerance, even hatred, for any  approach that leverages ALL our past, using ALL our social, technical, psychological  and spiritual complexities that comprise our  common heritage. This is their narrative: Mandela, Tambo and the 1994 leader cohort are deeply compromised.  They were bought out by colonial capitalists.

The activists  feed, even rely on, the  toxic bacteria of grinding poverty, injustice, resentment, entitlement, disappointment, covetousness and a generationally fuelled impatience with the pace of change.  Corruption doesn’t help either.

A sense of “denied justice” is a  powerful motivator that  legitimises anger. The target of this hatred are the perceived originators and now the current “owners” of this misery - the “colonials” - which is code for, in generic terms, the individualised world view asociated with northern hemisphere, western thinking and practice. Its embodiment just happens to reside in people with pale skins.

But in our first blog, as a scene set weʼll look at some key actors and their “virtue signalling” with comments. It is important to note and understand the branding. Nothing is insignificant. All actions are intentionally choreographed and grounded in deep ideological and psychological thinking.

Julius Malemaʼs “red beret” garb  looks to be borrowed from the failed Equadorian President,  Hugo Chavez. Chavez probably has minimal resonance here other than reducing his nation to squalor.  Fanon provides the intellectual component to the EFF uniform. The intention is really to offend - what can be more offensive to the more stoical mindset than watching the dignity of Parliament disregarded by worker clothing? The EFF are smart operators and superb virtue signallers. Their “parliamentary uniform” - the “Easyjet” orange jumpsuit is an effective visual hook, ideal for the TV camera. JuJu is a conditional democrat -  he lauds the Constitutional Court because it sides with him against President Zuma. This is further “virtue signalling” - at the SONA address as the Cheif Justice and his Bench parade in to Parliament the EFF cohort signal their respect with silence.   He is a consummate political operator where all influencing options are open. The end justifies the means.

Consider Mcebo Dlamini, the 32 year old Wits LLM student activist/apparent leader. He frequently sports the   PLO Arafat-famous, Keffiyeh Scarf at all major public events. This is intentional virtue signalling which,  interestingly, links him to the progressive student “rent a mob” currently rampaging the streets of major US cities protesting  Trump’s election.   Violence is always an option. The end justifies the means. The angry students he incites are really just useful potential cannon fodder - where the choreography requires   a few to go and collect a bullet at the hands of the police - and create an outpouring of national mayhem that will bring down Zuma’s government.

Chumani Maxwele, the UCT  management student who tipped excrement over UCTʼs Rhodes Statue is a colleague of Chumani. They drink the same koolaid.  The intention  is to offend colonialists by  attacking symbols of colonial aggression - burning paintings of Hall Founders at UCT, tipping excrement on Rhodes’ Statue and so on. The goal is to both enrage and demoralise. He succeeded in evoking the psychological response that Fanon urges. He is driven by racial hatred generated out of, and no more compelling than  the same psychological/spiritual swamp that drove PW Botha, HF Verwoerd, Eugene Terreblanche and their ilk - notwithstanding the irony. But, it feels as if , “progressives” and radicals are a humourless bunch.

That Maxwele inhabits the same behavioural excess as the “colonials”  is nevertheless good news. Evil, we suggest,  is not racial but universal, available, by choice, to all.   Because he is “on the right side of history” though, his racialism is acceptable or tolerated.

In our next blog we will introduce you to Gramsci and if there is space, Fanon (who got a passing mention this time round).

Simon Middleton

Partner at Noted Thinking

www.noted.co.za

The Olympics: Does it still have a ring to it?

Will the Olympics die? After Rio, there are strong forces working against this longstanding, iconic event.

Rio TV audiences were down between 17 and 20% depending on which figures are quoted. Alarmingly the opening event attracted 30% fewer viewers than that recorded for the epochal 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics which were seen by 4.7 billion people (minimum 1 minute watched).

Media industry heavyweights bravely explained the decimation of TV viewers as a technical shift: “Audiences have migrated to streaming” they said, pointing out that live viewing on computer and mobile screens had in fact climbed substantially. However the new online adopters accounted for 5-10% extra daily viewers. They did not compensate for the steep decline in traditional TV viewers*.

NBCSN: NBC Sports Network - a cable and satellite channel

Furthermore, there is no advertising revenue from much of this new type of viewing including ‘time-shifted’ viewing (the watching of pre-recorded footage). The current paradigm relies on traditional TV audiences because big TV audiences justify high advertising rates which translate into broadcast rights fees paid to the Olympics organisation (IOC). This remains their chief revenue source. No audience - no Olympics.

Source: www.olympic.org

Paying big fees to the IOC is what NBC has done. In a fit of optimistic joie de vivre NBC paid $4.4bn to secure the global TV rights for the Olympics up to the year 2020, and then went back for more, forking out a further $8bn for rights until 2032. That fewer people watched the Rio Olympics is now an open secret. This drove NBC managers to offer clients additional free prime-time advertising slots to make up for the unrealised Rio audiences.

Source: Nielsen

However, a simple decline in monetisable audiences may not tell the whole story. There is an easily overlooked generational development. The steepest audience declines were in the key youth segment where up to 30%**of those aged 18-34 simply evaporated. The “future” vanished. Analysts were again quick to point out that younger viewers did engage with the Olympics via non TV media but we know that much of the claimed youth interest had little to do with traditional athletic prowess. For instance younger profiled Buzzfeed suggestions included “How many athletes ‘hook-up’ in the Olympic village” eliciting shock and dismay amongst IOC officials. TV risks becoming irrelevant in the younger, connected world. A post-Olympics media news headline pertinently read: TV has seen the future of TV.

Re-inforcing the youthful migration away from TV are their strong peer group bonds that seem to be impervious to top-down messaging and branded role models offered through traditional media. While the youth may be interested to know that androgynous Caster Semenya won a medal and big-footed Phelps many more, they are not on the verge of a new wave of idolatry such as that which followed Mark Spitz’s victories a few decades ago. The world has changed.

Young people have a greater level of self-confidence under-pinning a stronger sense of identity than recent generations. Modern youth identity is diverging from external figures, labels and commercial abstractions. (See  http://noted.co.za/work-and-advertising-did-marx-foresee-this/ )   

With the Olympics producing a repetitive inter-nation big-media athletic circus it risks becoming tomorrow’s anachronism as youth interests and communication preferences diverge.

There are other forces acting against the Olympics – well known to us. The exorbitant costs and losses that befall host cities, the drug and performance enhancing scandals, the politicisation of the event including boycotts and national grandstanding, even the branding police. These coalesce to diminish the compelling spectacle it once was.

Finally there’s the Seneca Cliff. Yes, Lucius  Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher that amongst many things described how complex systems decay faster than they develop. Put differently, things that take a long time to develop will often collapse rapidly. (This has been subsequently demonstrated mathematically):

At a basic existential level, survival of the Olympics will be threatened by its size and “complexity”. The combination of forces listed above suggest the IOC needs to embrace the attitudinal and value shift occurring in the emerging future audience. Yes, the Olympics can die, yet more so without rapid innovation and readiness to adapt.

Andrew Barnes

Partner at NOTED Thinking

September 2016

*Audience measurement is not directly comparable across traditional TV where audiences are measured in people versus streaming where the measurement is “minutes” viewed or available, with no comparable estimate of people actually watching. Audience estimates are for the USA.

** Some estimates claim a higher figure. 

Effective Leadership in Your Domain of Influence - The Antidote to Civil Passivity

A sure way for Business School’s to make money is to tap into the thirst for insight and knowledge around the topic of leadership. The subject has spawned a consultancy industry worth billions. Airport bookstores are crammed with titles that offer, sometimes, enlightening  stories behind the apparent success. Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Margaret Thatcher, Mandela, the Amazon man, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, the South African born enfant terrible of Tesla, Desmond Tutu, Willem de Klerk, Richard Branson...all have something written about them. They are the subject of genuine fascination, the sources of inspiration, emulation and even denigration. Two descriptors, often interchangeable seem to apply to them. They are influencers and by extension, leaders.

The association with “big names” communicates an exclusivity.  Leadership is often regarded as the domain of the few - a specialism practiced in big picture circumstances buttressed by the media and in the public gaze.  Leadership is understood to be “out there”, somewhat esoteric and associated with mass recognition. The single citizen only has value and influence when in aggregation - a viewpoint that leads to passivity and disengagement.

There is however another narrative. It starts with a readiness to  exercise influence over that which we can rightly call our domain of authority - no matter how apparently insignificant. Leadership is personal, immediate and active. This domain can be territorial (such as my local street and the self-appointed car guards) and certainly my home, relational (those who I manage at work), my area of expertise and more.

Often times one’s context defines the authority. Recently I witnessed an example of sexual harassment between two staff members in our local up-market food store. I could have ignored it - but it happened directly in my physical space - where I had temporary authority as a paying customer - and so I engaged. This action was highly localized and generated, I hope, a realm of safety into the working environment of this store. I pick up the litter as I walk my neighbourhood streets in the morning and support the local Resident’s Association which removes graffiti immediately.

A US commentator, Bill Johnson has defined the purpose of leadership as twofold: “The purpose of leaders is to create a realm of safety and a realm of prosperity”.

Effective leadership creates a realm of emotional well being which translates into engagement, a measurable commodity defined by the amount of discretionary effort given by a person in the completion of any task. “Engagement” is the polar opposite to passivity. Here are 8 leadership features that will guarantee engagement.

1. The first “sound” of leadership is silence. You have two ears and one mouth. Actively listen for context, emotion and assumptions. Open your mouth only to elicit more insight.

2. Leaders “ call out” the invisible into experience - using pictures, symbols and words. Work to have a compelling vision or idea of what is desired. Be relentless in reducing your abstract ideas into visually appealing formats that culturally align with those who you lead.

3. Leaders go first into the unseen without a roadmap. You cannot expect others to go with you until you have been there first. Courage and a readiness to path find with all the attendant risks is non-negotiable.

4. Leaders transform as they transact. As you engage with others or a given situation, look for ways to bring value that releases the “other” into a different, deeper and greater sense of significance. Find out the other’s story. Break any system rule that is futile and senseless. Renew old ways, abolish that which traps and frustrates.

5. Leaders create emotional pathways so people can embrace a new reality with respect and pride. There are few rational decisions ever - even when dressed up as such. Assume that most decisions are rooted in emotion. The language of emotion is acknowledgement. Get comfortable with your own emotion and ensure that the emotional content of a situation is adequately managed. 

        

6. Leaders create a “commonwealth” - which is value shared. Prosperity is more than money - it is a state of “being” where all is well - the environment is good,   there is presence of predictability and accountability.  It creates an environment that attracts people.  

7. Leaders work to call out the identity of “the other” and, in so doing ignite extraordinary engagement. Personal security is required before one can recognize others and their value. Profound leaders know  how to see the potential in others, celebrate it and ensure that it is experienced. The flow through into the use of discretionary effort is well documented.

8. Leaders know when to let go. Obvious really - but it requires self-knowledge and genuine humility to remove yourself when you can  no longer add value.

Simon Middleton

Partner at Noted Thinking

www.noted.co.za

Mall of Africa - A new Sense of "Placelessness" for All?

If you do not live close to Gauteng you might not have heard the brouhaha surrounding the opening of the new Mall of Africa. South Africa’s biggest shopping mall the media proclaimed … or is it the biggest in Africa? In a fit of Mall Envy, a Cape Town centre as well as Eastgate claimed it was actually the largest. Who cares? This new mall encloses 130 000sqm of new shopping centre space filled with yet more Woolworths, Truworths, Dis-Chem and McDonalds outlets. Luckily there are a few new marketable international stores too. The cherry on the top … we now have two Starbucks outlets in South Africa. One template begets another - from concrete mall, to shop layout to coffee. Yippee.

The Mall of Africa represents the evolution of 100 years of Modernism in urban design thinking. This paradigm leads to a template view of mankind and communities where structure, style and layout is transferable from one culture to another regardless of context. The operating mantra is that of urban efficiency wrapped up in massive concrete scale and ribboned with tar. 

The prevailing modernist metaphor is that of the machine. Predictable, impersonal, functional, without personality. Yes, early Modernist thinking viewed society as a machine and they sought to maximise its efficiency. Modernism as a theory emerged at the end of the 19th century and was influenced by the industrialisation wave that swept Europe at that period. Early proponents of Modernism saw roads as the major functional arterial passages that propagated economic activity. Modernists set about driving nuisance value pedestrians off ever widening roads, adorned on either side by new templated featureless buildings. This is consistent with the spirit of pure function over nuanced form and characterful texture. The result is urban sprawl and the destruction of habitat - both natural and communal.

But something is amiss. 

While we measure the value of investment funds in the Mall of Africa in terms of pension fund growth, we ignore the real costs. These real costs include the real people prevented from participating at the meagre peripheral of the economic landscape. A shopping centre is an extension of a “gated community” both in practice and insinuation. While I know you will cry out “but we have a high crime rate and shopping centres are safe”, to what extent can we follow exclusionary land use principles that may well contribute to the problem of inclusion, participation and powerlessness? Does exclusive land use ameliorate or exacerbate what we seek to avoid? 

A community comprises many people. Many you might not even see. Where I live there are people that pick through the rubbish to extract anything of value. They live by agreement behind a petrol station. Sometimes I talk to them. They have families and are paid 85c for each kilogram of scrap metal that they can recover. There are others that sell items at intersections, and still others that claim to clean up these places. Yet more try to sell goods door to door. These people, largely unseen, are participants at close quarters. They try, best as they can, to engage in the economic fabric of our communities. But shopping centres, as we know them, simply smother this vibrant component of real people and with it the problems we hope to avoid are magnified elsewhere. 

New Urbanism is a response to, and a critique of Modernism. Human complexity and nuance informs its approach where urban design facilitates walkable, sustainable, mixed use community environments. New Urbanism is an approach that builds inclusion and participation around the community. In so doing it creates natural buffers against crime and squalor. 

There are many places in South Africa that reflect the spirit of New Urbanism. Many of these places are indeed quite old but the spirit is present. Can we build on this? Newer places such as Melrose Arch in Johannesburg have tried to capture the essence of New Urban thinking but have also failed to authentically reflect the local community. 

And so we have the Mall of Africa and probably many more to come - milestones in our national pursuit of at least 1 square metre of shopping centre floor space for every citizen and an epoch in “placelessness”. Is this really the best we can do? 

Andrew Barnes 
Partner at Noted Thinking
May 2016 

Sensationalising Racism in the News - Does it Help?

Again there’s another headline in the news – “Racist Tweet” or similar. Again there’s a lot of noise and hyper reaction. Do we face our societal reflection and deeply interrogate our innermost flaws? Or do we implicitly revisit old racial stereotypes, …. stereotypes we explicitly know are damaging?

Is the motivation behind the “news report” of any use? Does it move us forward or does it re-inforce the status quo and hold us back?

Headlines and news reports such as this are sensationalist. They unashamedly seek to provoke public interest. Via cavalier scrounging of social media verbiage “reporters” seek literally anyone that provides suitably controversial outbursts that fit the current agenda. In this case the news, more so than racism itself, is a “less than 140 character” Tweet outburst or something slightly longer on Facebook by an estate agent. Sure, this has curiously morbid value on social media, but in paid-for, curated and considered media, treatment of such news should offer society far more than scandalous “copy and paste” reporting. Note that “sensational” news is often conveyed at the expense of accuracy.

Is the sensationalised racist report seriously offered in the guise of helping us as a society move forward? And if so, does it succeed?

To understand fully we need to turn to Social Identity theory and how it relates to racism. Racism is a form of “extreme” prejudice rooted in stereotypes and arising from our need to boost our social identity. We do this by adopting favourable perceptions of our own group (the in-group) and often unfavourable views of out-groups. This dynamic changes as we implicitly and explicitly view out-groups, either as superior or inferior to our own group. We do this, it is said, to boost self-esteem.

Here’s an extract from an essay on the recent killings of black individuals by USA police: “Implicit bias - an unintentional action rooted in prejudicial cognitive bias - causes more trouble than it should. It's the root part of your brain that assesses everything you absorb from the world around you - smells, tastes, people, feelings - and categorizes them into experiences - good, bad, scary, happy - for easy recall. For example, if you smell something yummy, see a chocolate chip cookie, eat the cookie, taste it, realize it's delicious, your brain shortcuts remembering all of those stimuli by saving the whole experience as "cookie = yummy." That ingrained memory becomes a preference helping you make future decisions much more quickly. Implicit bias is your brains autopilot for decision making”.* 

Stereotypes and implicit biases work hand-in hand and are the same in some instances. These aggregations of accumulated experience help us simplify complexity and promote the emergence of a “mindset”. A mindset is a psychological screen filtering external data that bombards us. The most important characteristic of the mindset is that it only admits data which agrees with our current view of the world. Put another way, it self-selects data that re-affirms our stereotypes. Ultimately our mindset defines who we are. We cannot wish it away – it is fundamental and integral to our identity.

The interesting point arising from this, and there are many, is that implicit biases and stereotypes are re-inforced in the media, which in turn we generally select on the basis that it affirms our own in-group perceptions. You may choose to disagree, but the media choices we make (what we want to see and hear) already reflect our biases and stereotyping of others. Here’s the rub - we engage with media that favours our in-group because our mindset drives us to do this.

When our chosen media reports on “racism” it does so using stereotypical narratives that validate our in-group bias. In essence the “news report” itself assumes a racist mantle under the guise of seeking magnanimous ubuntu. It does this through the replay of stereotypes impacting us primarily at an implicit (subconscious) but also at an explicit level.

In other words, at a deeply subconscious level the sensationalised news report reiterating an un-curated social media outburst, serves merely to confirm the very unfortunate racial profiling we seek to correct. This happens because it confirms our most recessive racial stereotypes even in the face of our conscious repudiation.

The racist “news” report does not directly challenge social constructs such as language, behaviour, culture, ethics and morality which is needed to move society forward. It fails to offer guidance. It is thus unhelpful, even damaging, as it endorses the status quo using tired racial stereotypes and idiosyncratic isolated events as major news happenings.

The only way that a prevailing mindset can be changed is through authentic encounter and real life experience that is strong enough to offer a compelling alternative to the mindset predisposed towards prejudice. Of course this is possible - but not through the prevailing “140 character” Tweet mechanism. The media, especially “long story” journalism, can present an alternative narrative, but it must move beyond under-curated social media “cut and paste” ersatz journalism. 

Take your own Racial Implicit Association Test here and find out your score (this is built for USA society but will provide some use in other environments): Implicit Association Test Race. I tried it and in all honesty it is remarkably difficult, tiresome and frustrating!

Andrew Barnes 

Partner at NOTED Thinking 
www.noted.co.za

Sources:

• Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory by Peter J. Burke Jan E. Stets Washington State University.
• Social Identity Theory by Sabine Trepte Universitat Hamburg.
• A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo by John T. Jost Department of Psychology, New York University and Mahzarin R. Banaji Department of Psychology and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University and Brian A. Nosek Department of Psychology, University of Virginia

       * The Science Behind Why Cops Kill Black Men - And How to Fix it by LAURIE VAZQUEZ 

Work and Advertising - Did Marx foresee this?

Karl Marx’s theories are back in fashion. Many talk about the failure of capitalism and more recently the failure of markets. If you don’t see the problem inherent in the fact that 62 people have the same wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population you deserve the social turmoil that will surely result from this in time. But that is not my point. While seeking a new road ahead that guards against the weaknesses of capitalism - an increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people – the theories of Karl Marx have come back into fashion.

Marx was not right about everything, but he may have been right about some things. He was one of the first to study the nature of work writing at length about it. Importantly he argued that work creates meaning. Work provides links to family and community and these links add meaning to our existence. The modern idea that real meaning is found through pop psychology, laughter therapy, drugs, yoga, consumerism, or free sex is a fallacy. It’s a deception. These pursuits, as well as the modern fascination with trying to connect with one’s inner self and blossom as an artist, is indicative of the extent to which our work fails to provide meaning and “agency”.

Yes, that is the point made by Marx. He argued that capitalist industrialisation distances people from their productive output. Through this loss of “agency”, Marx claimed workers are alienated not only from themselves and their workplace but from their communities and society too. Work therefore provides the basis for relevance and meaning. It creates the context in which we relate to people and the world around us.

Later, Christopher Lasch took Marx’s thinking further exploring how a loss of worker agency impacts at a societal level. He saw two contrasting dynamics emerging amongst individuals: 1) a narcissistic personality crippled by a fragile sense of self seeking solace in consumerist identifiers (wearing the right brands, etc.) and 2) an alienated mind-set seeking therapeutic self-help and pop psychology.

The post WWII global industrial boom has driven a loss of worker agency and an alienation from means of production. Corporate growth, globalisation, financialisation and cosmopolitanism have spearheaded this trend of task granulation. And the growing nation-state interventionist bureaucracy only aggravates matters. You can’t do anything without explaining it, accounting for it, apologising for it, and paying for it, either to a corporation (often domiciled outside SA) or the government. It is against this back-drop that we have seen the burgeoning self-help industry. Alpha courses, motivational speakers, centering, confidence building, how to win friends, positive thinking, and a raft of other commoditised self-deifying diversions, are products of our time and reflect our alienation from work and self.

But nothing happens in a straight line. The computer revolution, starting in the eighties and really gaining traction after 2000 is changing the world for the better in ways we least expect. Notably, computers are enabling some of us to recover agency over our work. Computers and digital communications are fracturing the traditional workplace. Increasingly work is neither location nor work-hour dependent. Many people have greater control over their output and can produce far more, both at a task and volume level. In many instances computer technology allows a reclaim of labour pricing. Cost of production is falling and networks are adding exponential value. A knowledge economy is emerging and it lies outside of the walls of traditional business. At its heart is worker agency.

Marx neither predicted the technology revolution nor a networked economy, yet some of its benefits speak directly to his critique of capitalism.

In support of an emerging new “agency” over work a few interesting facts from Forbes are:

• ·         Millennials will force companies to be transparent. Transparency is one of the top four qualities that millennials look for in leaders. They don’t trust CEOs and politicians because they don’t feel like they are honest, especially how they are portrayed in the media.
• ·     Millennials will choose corporate culture and meaningful work above everything else.  30% of millennials say that meaningful work is important versus only 12% of managers. Furthermore, only 28% of millennials feel that high pay is important versus 50% of managers.
• ·         Millennials want to build a collaborative organization. Millennials like to work in teams, on projects to accomplish goals. They are used to using wiki’s, social networks and other technologies to share ideas and innovate.
• ·         Millennials will make working from home the norm. In the next 9 years, 41% of the workforce will be working from home and currently over 13.4 million people work from home in America alone.
• ·         Millennials will encourage generosity and community support. While millennials are often stereotyped as being selfish and narcissistic, the story that goes untold is their involved in supporting their communities. 60% of college students aren’t considering a career in business. They view corporations as being greedy, having no equality (especially at the CEO level where only 5% of CEOs are women), and at fault for causing the financial crisis. Deloitte found that 92% of millennials believe that business should be measured by more than just profit and should focus on a societal purpose and 83% of millennials gave to charities in 2012 (up from 75% in 2011).

It’s not only the youth that are impacted by the current techno revolution. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation says: Seniorpreneurship is a growing trend in many countries including the UK, Australia and the USA where nearly a quarter of new ventures in 2013 were started by those aged 55-64.

The facts above are all predicated on modern computer technology.

If one agrees that there has been a long term decline in worker agency post WWII then it’s not hard to see the link with rampant growth in modern narcissism and the elevation of “self” to the level of cultural keystone. These manifest in the obsessive seeking of instant gratification, the need to support a failing self-image, the absence of personal social relevance, and the need for material markers and debt-based lifestyle funding.

And a lot of advertising is contingent to this … all in the spirit of rampant capitalism and the seeking of a great fortune. The ad messages of old corroborate the spirit: the brand is the hero, be cool, seek joy and endless nirvana, reward extravagance, stop for nothing. Money is the enabler and consumption is the resolve.

Will this change? With a new youth culture emerging on the back of new technology maybe worker agency is strengthened prompting a renewed sense of authentic self-worth. Will ad messages and brand values change too? Will we talk about the world in terms of preservation, talk about self in terms of purpose, and talk about society in terms of cause and caring? Will we find hero’s outside of the ego and away from brands?

That, I think, is the challenge.

Andrew Barnes 
Partner at NOTED Thinking
April  2016

The Pikitup Strike: Can we afford to throw it away?

The Pikitup Strike: Can we afford to throw it away?

The Pikitup* strike that endured for 5 weeks annoyed me. It annoyed me due to the fact that a lot of people were simply refusing to do their work. It annoyed me because the world I lived in started looking like a trash can. Moreover it annoyed me because others tried to extract a quick profit through adhoc bin emptying (going rate R50+ per bin). And it also annoyed me because many of these nascent entrepreneurs dumped their loads in common spaces. Or so it seemed.

What was the strike about? A monthly salary of R10 000 was needed to replace a current salary of R6000 a month. That is what the workers demanded. The tax tables indicate that with taxes and rebates, a R6000 monthly salary might translate into a R5875 (excluding other deductions for medical, housing, etc). But the demand, unreasonable as it was, asked for R10 000 which after tax alone would net about R9100. So that’s it. R9100 (or less) to take my trash away.  A payment of R300 a day for a person working long hours, probably supporting more than him or herself. And so it dawned on me. The problem was neither the strikers nor their demands. The problem was affordability.

A quick glance at UK refuse collector pay scales showed that their salaries, in this hallowed hard currency empire, were around a Rand equivalent of R25000p/m or much more.  So our strikers were striking for less than half what their compatriots earned elsewhere. Yes, that’s about it.

In short, the answer is simple. If we cannot afford to pay those that remove our effluent from our doorstep at least R300 a day or a lot more, then we should do it ourselves. That to me is a no brainer. Put simply “Can we afford to throw it away?”

After looking at the issues my feeling was that the Pikitup strikers were justified. The problem lies not with culture, work ethic, and education. The problem is simply one of affordability. We need to pay more to discard what we do.

And this is where the argument gets really interesting because I have not touched on the social and environmental costs of what we discard. Think about a plastic bucket, as an example… a bucket that you may buy for R35. After a year it breaks and you throw it away. This bucket will continue to degrade and poison the earth through the release of phthalates, bisphenol A, and other poisons for about 500 or even 1000 years. It will wreak damage to the environment including soil cultures, water runoff and subterranean water reserves that we cannot undo, certainly not at an initial cost of R35.

The initial cost of the bucket soon pales into insignificance in the face of the on-going environmental costs that will be borne by other generations in time. Yet increasingly the future generation is the one you’re in. It’s happening now because of what your parents did and because of what you did not long ago.

The truth is we cannot afford the enduring environmental cost of discarding that bucket.  And we can’t even pay a living wage to those charged with removing it from our doorstep.

The problem, dear reader, lies not with Pikitup nor the demands of their employees. The problem lies with us, our excessive consumption, and our faux belief in our incontrovertible authority over the natural world we live in.

*Pikitup: the local refuse removal company.