Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to Failed Architecture Breeze blogs, where our editors share their thoughts on works in progress, urgent matters, and current happenings in architecture and spatial politics. My name is Charlie Clemos, an editor on Failed Architecture's Netherlands team. And in this episode, we continue the conversation I had with Callum Kant about his book Riding For Deliveroo, which, as the name suggests, documents his experience riding For Deliveroo in a bid to understand the new form of algorithmic management that this UK based food delivery startup represents. In the first conversation, we started by having Callum talking in detail about what it's actually like to ride for delivery. We then went on to discuss the workers'inquiry methodology and class composition analysis that inspired his research. In this episode, we move on to discussing what lasting impact gig companies have had on the urban fabric and explore the dissonance that has developed between the tech vision of seamless disembodied convenience and the exploitative labor process embodied in the experiences of gig workers themselves.
But first we start by discussing the concept of invisible organization as it relates to the two strike waves that Callum documents.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: In the book. There's two spikes in strike activity that you mainly focus on, which seem to take Hughes somewhat by surprise, or at least they came from somewhere that you didn't expect.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: And in relation to that, I thought.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: It would be good to bring up this concept of invisible organization that you discuss.
Could you just introduce the term and then also explain what was going on kind of under the surface during your early days riding for Deliveroo?
[00:01:38] Speaker C: Okay, so invisible organization I think the really important thing to understand about invisible organization is not necessarily a strategy per se, right? The term is kind of given to us by an Italian workerist called Romano al Qatti, who was observing workers in the Fiat plants and observing how they were organizing to kind of improve their situation there and how they were fighting back against the dictates of capital in their workplace. And he essentially noticed that there was a very strong tendency amongst workers for them to organize, not via the formal trade union channels, but just to organize with one another, kind of one to one basis. And when you looked from the outside, observers could say, oh, the unions at Fiat, the workers at Fiat are very weak at the moment. But then suddenly, out of nowhere, these wildcat strikes would emerge, which would be incredibly powerful, which would shut down a plant with 100,000 workers in it. And no one could really explain this process of emergence, right, because it wasn't being done by particularly visible channels. So there's a sense if you weren't on the shop floor, you couldn't really see how anything was happening. And I remember reading that shortly before I started at Delivery and being like, oh, that's really interesting. I wonder how that works in practice. And then I go and start the job and suddenly you realize that actually what appears from the outside, like a workplace which is disorganized, which is spread out across the city, which doesn't really have any common points of convergence. Actually there were a number of points of convergence, both like communicative, there were these mass self communication networks which operated to allow people to talk to one another in really powerful and effective ways and were basically the networks which would call strike action. So you're talking about Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups basically. And these were set up over periods of time through in person connections and gradually grew and grew and grew and provided a really febrile environment for talking about why are wages so low, how should we organize, how should we respond? They had organic functions as like, does anyone want to play five or five football with my team this afternoon? But then they were also like, this is how we're going to organize. So there were those kind of like communicative points of convergence and there are also physical points of convergence, right? Like the zone center, restaurant kitchens. Some restaurants would call you early for every delivery because they wanted to try and get the food out as soon as it was ready, right? They didn't want to have any waiting around time. Now that for you was really negative because you're paid per delivery. If you spend 15 minutes waiting outside their kitchen, you're not going to be getting paid for that time. You're going to be getting slowed down. Your hourly rate is going to be negatively affected. But also the same restaurants call all of their drivers early so you would end up with five or six of you stood outside a kitchen because they've just been calling everyone really, really early and you're spending time together. And there's also the whole system of delivery works on basically having a big surplus of labor available to work around a number of surges, basically mealtime surges.
And that means that at 06:00 on a Friday evening you probably don't need that many people. But at 07:00 on a Friday evening you need loads of people, right? Like you suddenly need way more delivery workers. So what happens is they basically built into the app this idea of the zone center, this spare labor accumulation point where it's like go here when you don't have any deliveries to do. And you know how restaurants are laid out in a city. They'll often be clustered in certain locations. So you'd all wait in the zone center just next to all these clusters of restaurants and then when demand spikes, suddenly you'd all be in the right place to do the orders and there wouldn't be any delay. Now that means that they've created an informal meeting place with no surveillance over it. The app can't do the human manager thing of stop talking about union, go back to work or whatever.
So they've just created the perfect environment and especially when you're there in that zone, you're not doing a delivery, so you're not getting paid. So the worse your wage is, the fewer deliveries you're doing per hour, the more annoyed you are, the more time you spend in the collective meeting place where you discuss with other workers how annoyed you are. Right? So through this, they created kind of the structure of invisible organization that if you come into it like I did, expecting disorganized workers, that wasn't what you found. What you found was increasingly workers who had self organized these networks and were being given more opportunities all the time to talk to one another. And that's where the strikes emerged. I mean, I had some experience working alongside trade unions, as know, UCU had been on strike whilst I was a student. I was like, oh, I know what a picket line is. I know how a union kind of works. I've got some vague understanding of this. We want to try and form a union. Fine, let's start organizing that. We had a meeting, we had about 20 cyclists come together. There's probably about 400 people working in the city. So not bad, but not hugely significant. And it was the start of something. And we're like, all right, over the next six months, we're going to build and build and build. We're going to gain more support in the workplace, we're going to gradually escalate. In fact, that's not what happened at all, because a group of Brazilian migrant workers heard that we had, in fact set up union and they were like, okay, all right, so what do unions do? They go on strike. We're going on strike next week.
I think it was actually two weeks notice they gave us. So they informed us through the WhatsApp chats, oh, we're going on strike. And we were like, I guess the union's cool with that. Yeah, fine, why not? And it emerged from there. They had a chat called the Brazilia Ruse, right? Like, it was their chat that sparked the whole thing off and that kind of made it explode. And then the union supported it, facilitated it, carried on a series of protests after the strike, continuing the drive for the demands on the campaign, and we had some moderate success.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: You mentioned the zone centres which Deliveroo created at Jubilee Square in Brighton, where you worked. And then there's Uber Eats as well, which has this different but pretty similar dynamic, whereby they're doing away with supervisors, saves lots of money, but then leaving that managerial function to an algorithm actually creates this new problem. And there's this irony, isn't there, that the strike wave occurs and it's to do with a moment when they're trying to hire more people, so more people come on board, and then that in itself creates its own contradiction. I got that feeling reading the book, that at the same time that there's this sense of despair, there's also this sudden moment of hope, basically, that the apps are seemingly unable to avoid shooting themselves in the foot.
[00:07:30] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, this is the thing with technological development, right? Like it's never just purely negative for workers. It's never just taking our power away. There is no way of just changing technology to purely disempower people because it will create opportunities. Like it may not be even it may not create as many opportunities as it does disadvantages, it may shift the balance of forces against our favor, but all the same, no process of development is completely negative. It will offer chances. And one of the major advantages of works inquiry as a method is that when you've got these new developments, it can be so simple to assume from the outside what the implications of those developments are until you actually see from the inside. Then suddenly you can get a very different picture of like so, for instance, with Deliveroo, it's like you've got rid of the employment relation. We don't have holiday pay, we don't have sick pay, we don't have any of that. Like the regulation of the relationship has totally changed. But then at the same time that means that trade union law has gone out the window, right? So like, the one fundamental bit of law that prevents workers from exerting power as and when they want through their own self organized democratic means, that's gone. So you can organize wildcat strikes, you're not breaking the law. The unions can support wildcat strikes and you can call a strike on no notice. You don't have to inform the company ahead of time, it can just happen and then destroy their ability to deliver food in an evening.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: Right?
[00:08:41] Speaker C: So these developments are always double sided, I guess is the thing to really stress that it's never just positive or never just negative. And I think they really understood this because the zone centers now delivery doesn't have them anymore, right? They're not a part of the app anymore. It doesn't say go and wait in this location because in many ways it did create such a huge problem for them. Now people still wait informally in certain locations. So for instance, the requirement to be around the restaurants during the dinner rush is no different. So people will hover around the place. But in general, that creation of a specific location has changed. But it's really hard for them because their vision for the future involves centralizing stuff. You have these dark kitchens on the industrial margins of cities where people still, again, delivery workers cluster because you might have ten or so restaurant kitchens all operating out the same industrial park and then people will end up there. And that's increasingly where they will talk and meet each other and put each other on WhatsApp groups. So even if you get rid of the zone center, you can't get rid of the fact that you're moving a load of your food production into industrial spaces. And then in these industrial spaces you'll often have that the industrial place just behind my flat. You have get ear have a thing there, right? So they have a little warehouse and a grocery delivery thing there. Then you also have all the delivery riders going to the dark kitchens and you've got your wagamuma's thing and you've got everything else. And together you see this incredible workforce know, we think about workplaces in London. It being quite rare to have like a semi industrial workplace with large numbers of people apart from in like Park Royal or East London. But even in leafy southeast, you've got 30, 40 workers regularly assembling in large groups out the back there. So this dream of completely Siloized individual consumers and workers who all just interface seamlessly across a network, it doesn't happen like that. There are clumps, there are points of convergence. There are ways in which people end up coming together because hands are very social animal, right? That's what Marx says in Capital, that we do just cooperate with one another and we do end up sharing thick social ties that aren't just dissolvable into the network of platform capitalism. There are ways that we come together and there are always alliances potentially along this stuff as well. So there's a really interesting example. The fast food shutdown in the book, which was the first ever national strike by food delivery workers. You also had it was done on the same day, like deliberately, as the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union had a strike of McDonald's workers. Now Uber eats workers do the vast majority of their deliveries from McDonald's. So you literally have this industrial alliance between the people working in McDonald's making the food and the people delivering the food from McDonald's. At the same time, they're kind of coordinating strike action to maximize its leverage so that both of them can rebound off one another. And that, I think, is really, really exciting and a potentially very good example of how this stuff, how the attempts to disaggregate people and to split us up don't really work, right? And in the final instance, there will always be points of convergence around which people assemble. Now, those might not be the same, right? Like anyone looking at the nature of the urban workplace over the last five years would never say that they will always be the same. Huge changes in patterns of usage and stuff occur all the time, but it does still reoccur no matter how much you change it. Fundamentally, if you've got a workplace where people have to cooperate and work for one another, they're going to end up sharing spaces and also online networks where they can keep communicating even when they're not in physical proximity.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: I think it'd be nice to talk about the Rebel Rue, this newspaper bulletin that was created during the strikes and I guess how it obviously goes against the grain of this very tech oriented platform model. And I'm interested in what function it played in organizing and sharing information across urban boundaries and maybe towards more national and even international boundaries. Maybe you could also talk a little bit more about this second strike wave that occurred in 2018, also in the context of the big elephant in the room throughout the text, in that it got published maybe, what, a few months before the pandemic?
[00:12:42] Speaker C: Even more so it got published whilst I was working at Momentum on the 2019 general election. So, yeah, it's like just before the two most depressing events.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. You have this little bit in it where you're talking about the 2017 election and the excitement of that and it was quite sad, I suppose.
[00:12:59] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, there's no shortage of.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: Reminders of that euphoric moment and the other depressing side of the coin in 2019. But sorry, this is really a convoluted question. Maybe just talk about the way that it went through this more direct experience of yours to something that looked like it could coordinate across national and international boundaries and yeah, the difficulties in actually making that happen.
[00:13:21] Speaker C: So, I mean, one of the things to think about here is the fact that these platforms, as they've spread, have basically, because of huge amounts of venture capital funding, they've planted the same model over and over and over again. It's like cookie cutter. Like, every single country had the same model, with some small variations on exactly how pay and hours were coordinated. But by and large, the labor process was the same everywhere and it had spread really rapidly. So if you think about it in terms of there's a good analogy from biology that I remember from I can't remember if it was my GCSEs or ever, but you know the idea of a monoculture, right? Like if you grow loads of the same plant that are all genetically very similar to one another, then one disease can come along and it wipes it all out. Right? Well, essentially what they've been doing is kind of the industrial equivalent of a monoculture. They've been putting the same labor process out in all these different places with extremely minor adaptations because they have this, like, move fast and break things approach where they aren't going to try and fit in with local regulation, they're just going to try and do what they want to do. So when we were looking at the situation in the UK, and then you talk to a worker in France, it would be fundamentally the same. You talk to a worker in Germany, it's fundamentally the same. Whereas if you have like an international supply chain, all the points along that chain, people may not understand how their labor fits together or what interests they have in common, or there's all sorts of these potential frictions, but for us, there weren't really like you work for deliveroo, you work for deliveroo, you work for deliveroo. You work for Uber Eats, we all work for these platforms. It's all the same platform. We all have broadly the same antagonisms across a whole range of different labor markets. Right? And now you see the same thing in, you know, we all work for Rapi or we all work for Glover or whatever. So by rapidly reproducing the same model over and over and over again, they put loads of people in the same position. And what's really interesting for me is you look back at the history of capitalism, right? Often capitalism has tended towards the creation of differentiations within a workforce, not for any particular practical reason in terms of production, but just to stop that workforce realizing they have something in common. So Kathleen Stone wrote in the 1970s a brilliant article in Radical America about the development of the American steel industry and basically how there were like two job roles. There was like semi skilled and there was skilled. Right. And these two job roles were like everyone in all the steel plants was fitted into basically one or the other, and how they realized over time that, oh my God, this makes it really easy for them to unionize. Right. So, in fact, what we need to do, these early unions like, I think the early American steel union was called the brothers of Vulcan, which may I mean, obviously, gender aside, may stand up as one of the best union names in the history of the movement. But so these are early union that they could basically organize everyone in these big camps. So they intentionally introduced job differentiations. If you now look at Car Plant in the UK, you can have up to a thousand different pay structures. And this is in a plant of 4000 workers. Right. So in your plant, you may share your pay structure with four other people on average.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:10] Speaker C: And everyone you're working with in your team may have entirely different wage differentials. May have. I've got a bonus if I do this. I have a bonus if I do that. So people get split up into these groups right. Deliberately by capital, but they failed to do that here. And that produced essentially a giant recomposition of lots of different workers around the place.
[00:16:26] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a little bit like I was just reminded of when you were saying that it kind of gets repeated over just again and again as a monoculture. It's a little bit like this concept of I think David Harvey talks about the elimination of space by right.
[00:16:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:41] Speaker D: In a sense, you've got this time space compression occurring where everything's sort of happening at the same sort of pace and there really isn't much differentiation between different places.
I've never really heard it talked about as something that could actually create the conditions for sort of the disintegration of, I guess, the system of control entailed within the labor process, I suppose. I don't know if I got that right.
[00:17:11] Speaker C: No, absolutely. I mean, it was really amazing in 2018, when we were doing the early versions of the rebel Wu. So you'd be talking to someone in France about what their strike tactics were, and you'd be taking the best bits and you'd be bringing it back here, and then you'd be doing it in the UK, right? And then you talk to somebody in Germany. And we were constantly in this communicative process where it was like like people finding each other for the first time and you could just see month on month, it'd be like, oh, there was a little bit in Bologna here, there was a little bit in London, there's a little bit in Brighton. Oh, now it's Berlin. Now it's Barcelona. Madrid. Now, there was one period I remember where it was like all the b's, so it was like Berlin, Barcelona, Bologna, Brussels. Everyone in the B 50s was on strike, right? And this kind of development was really remarkable because it had a lot of potential and I think it still does have a lot of potential. I'm not as involved in the organising side as I was, but workers from all these different contexts do have shared interests still. What's interesting now is the development of regulation. So, for instance, Spain now has its Riders law, right, that has started to break up this common, because now you have much more different conditions. And in some circumstances, like delivery just left Germany. They were just like, they are going to regulate us too much, we're just going to leave. So that was perhaps one of the affordances of a particular moment in time. But just on the rebel Roux projects in general, I thought it was fascinating because it was like, basically all it did was share ideas, right? It was just written in this way that was like a bit aggy, a bit funny, and just written right at the forward edge of what people were willing to accept. So be like it was like, fuck the bosses, basically. Fuck the bosses. And then details about what other people were doing, information about what other people were doing. Once you combined all that, I mean, people were writing stuff and it flew in and we distributed it and the distribution network grew ridiculously. I mean, it's just two sides of a four that you hand out that had like six or seven I can't remember exactly how many, translated introductions as to what the thing was on the right, and then some blocks of text. And all you had to do was put this email address up and people we had people distributing Glasgow and all the rest of it, even in cities where you had no contact with anyone else. There's someone in Canterbury who wants 300 copies and be like, okay, fine, sure, go for it. So it spread rapidly and it was a really, really interesting process. I think what it really demonstrated to me was this adjective thirst for information that workers had about the workplace. And this is something that we talked about the Johnson forest tendency earlier. The Johnson Forest tendency wrote about the way that workers in car plants used to get their mate to cover them for a bit and then they'd go off and walk around the car plants, try and understand how it worked and like how does my labor fit into the general social labor? And I think that drive is still really strong. People want to understand. And this is one of the challenges of algorithmic management is that it black boxes or it hides a lot of the process from workers themselves, right? It makes them information poor in ways that empower management. So like historically, Taylorism, which is one of the original schools of management, frederick Winslow Taylor, inaugural bastard of the whole thing, he came up with a way of studying work in order to get information on the labour process that would allow managers to cut out the empty spaces that workers were preserving to prevent work intensification. He was like, I can make them work harder if I understand the process just as well as they do. So I can see all the gaps that they've been slowing down in and I'll eliminate all the dead time. And that basically was like the process has always been for managers. I need to gain the understanding of work that my workers already have. I need to get that knowledge. But then with black boxing, it almost in some ways can reverse this. As in like the workers don't understand their own labor process and so they have to try and steal information back from the manager. So there is this question of like when new technology is introduced, especially stuff that hides things and that's deliberately obscure and unexplained, workers have to engage in this struggle to bring information back. And it's one of the elements of the Spanish Riders law we were just talking about is it allows trade unions to request explanations of how algorithmic management is implemented. So this battle over information is, I think, one of the really interesting elements as well here, where workers need to understand what's going on in order to be able to fight it effectively. So the workers inquiry in that regard isn't just about finding out what workers already know. It might also now consist of what can we find out that we can inform workers that can allow them to take further steps or what can workers find out themselves that allow them to take further steps? I mean, researcher would say this, but information is like one of the key weapons of war in this stuff.
[00:21:32] Speaker D: It really does feel like a bit of a mystery. The black box, the way that you describe it, that it is this kind of rules run amok in a sense and without any kind of rhyme or reason to it. Which I guess to someone experiencing it must be just so, I don't know, scintillating. It's just like, what is it all about? Why has this happened? It must be so enticing to want to know.
[00:21:59] Speaker C: And people came up with the craziest theories, man. People came up with the wildest conspiracy theories because it's just like and this is where some of the really negative mental health effects of algorithmic management and the implementation of AI in the workplace more generally become really obvious. You need to understand the logic of what you're doing. People do not want to do. I mean, a Victorian method of punishment was the treadmill where you did pointless work endlessly, right? Not understanding the end goal or the contribution that your labor is making to society makes it fundamentally impossible to understand what your role in the world is, right? Like, it massively reduces job quality. So if you are fundamentally depriving workers of information about how their work works, for want of a better phrase, you are essentially contributing to a process that is guaranteed to reduce things like their self worth, their understanding of what the importance of the labor is. And so I think when we're looking for this information, we're not just necessarily trying to find out the things that can help workers struggle better, but it's also trying to make sense of what did all these deliveries mean? How did they work? What was going on in my life in that period when I was doing all those things? And for people who still work there, that these are live questions. Why did I get this order and not my mate? It's not a minor question. It's like a really fundamental one. If people want to understand and have dignity in their labor, it's not like something that can just be brushed off as like, oh, this is intellectual property. It's like, no, you're controlling someone's life. You need to explain how that's happening. And, I mean, this is just part of the class structure of production, right, that workers have always been forced to do things that they don't quite understand, and there's always been attempts to obscure basic information from people. But there's a bit in the book that goes into what the potential social use of delivery might be, like, what a positive vision might be, and that's where the information stuff is so much clearer. You can understand why you're working for social good, and I can imagine in a different society the knowledge of what you're doing. And that drive to understand could have a much more productive outcome than just feeling frustrated and app for not telling you why you got the order.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: Yeah. You talk about the social reproductive function of deliveroo and that it provides a pretty important service in reproducing the white collar workforce that I suppose is maybe becoming increasingly, I don't know, maybe not proletarianized, but certainly some parts are.
[00:24:12] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't say it's. An even trend across the entire white collar workforce, but definitely some parts becoming.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: Pro terrorianized, just coming home totally exhausted and maybe also living in a flat share rather than in a nuclear family. So not really being able to rely on this homemaker to cook your food and take care of you and provide a comfy house to recuperate in. Instead you come back exhausted and have a little slice of comfort in front of your Netflix, as you quite vividly portray.
[00:24:39] Speaker C: Yeah, the number of people have been like, yeah, I didn't want to realize that's what I was doing.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: I was like, sorry, but I was.
[00:24:48] Speaker D: Going to say something else about this mysterious quality of the black box as well, since you already kind of were touching upon it.
[00:24:55] Speaker C: Well, I think there's something really interesting about the spatial side of this whole thing, which is like, what you're really talking about with a lot of platform stuff is last mile delivery services. And the way in which last mile delivery services are recomposing urban environments is really, really fascinating. So the way that you basically have local high streets and last mile delivery services and actually your retail park thing is being killed by ecommerce. And that restructuring is profoundly interesting because in some ways people are spending more time on local high streets, potentially, but then also they're evacuating previous shared spaces. So for me, when I'm working at home, there is absolutely no reason, fundamentally apart from seeing friends, for me to leave a mile of my flat because I can go to the local high street, I can get everything else delivered, there is no need. So I think that the way that last mile plays into this ongoing recomposition that's introduced by ecommerce, exaggerated by the Pandemic, is really interesting for me. It's a question of how far is this like a genuine siloisation? How far am I only seeing this from my working from home perspective? And how far is this like an actual major process that certain kinds of urban space, like your Surrey Keys shopping market, how far is that actually dying? I don't know. Like the Lewisham Shopping Centre in Lewisham town centre is empty now. Like properly empty. The only things that have people going into them are the food shops.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Yeah, no way.
[00:26:19] Speaker D: It's been a while since I've been.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: There, like five years.
[00:26:22] Speaker C: I lived in a little flat opposite the Clocktown during the Pandemic. And yeah, it's amazing.
A lot of these, you think of the shopping mall as like the emblematic or one of the spaces of Blairite Britain or something, right? Like the idea that when we were kids we would just go and hang out in the shopping center, but now those things are so dead and everything's recomposing around experiential service commodities, like nice coffee places or whatever, and maybe shops that's kind of nice to shop in person. So like slightly arty everything's like Lordship Lane, everything's like Lordship Lane or it's an aldi or it's getting delivered. That's basically my perception of yeah, yeah.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Which is like a very rapid thing, and it's happening right under our noses. I guess this wave of expansion of delivery services in its wake has reconstituted the city and has created new needs, or new wants, more likely.
[00:27:14] Speaker C: And also because need is social, right? What people need to consume always varies historically. It's like that Marx thing about social need now requires cigarettes and newspapers, whereas it didn't during the medieval period. Right. These things become needs once they've been offered.
[00:27:30] Speaker B: It reminds me of this article that Edward on Guiseo Jr. Wrote for Vice magazine earlier in 2022. It's called how one billionaire with a 300 year plan fueled the popping tech bubble. I don't know if you had a chance to read it. He talks towards the end about the full picture, the desperate attempts of Uber and other app based labor platforms like it to realize profitability and how that's had real consequences. And then he lists experiments over the years have locked out tens of thousands of drivers, left tens of thousands more to fend for themselves in persistently declining working conditions, unleashed racist algorithms that discriminate against drivers and riders, and restructured life in countless cities. It's quite a stirring conclusion the way that all this money that flooded into the industry has had these irreversible consequences for what we expect from an urban economy. And that reminds me, there was another article doing the rounds around the same time a Nation on Hold wants to speak with a manager. Written by Sarah Lyle for the New York Times. It was a very interesting report on the way that people have come to expect a seamless service and how that came up against the reality of things like the pandemic. And it brought up questions of, like, is this really a need? Do we really need to have something in five minutes flat? It's now created an impossible yardstick given what's coming in the future.
[00:28:52] Speaker C: The current book is quite a lot about climate change, and it's really interesting to think about what happens when we get forced to reverse a lot of these things. What happens to the long term reversal of just in time production because resilience and global shocks don't allow it. You're back to you can buy the car that's in the shop and no other car. The experience of the consumer is really going to change there. And I always think of the analogy to like, oh, the Travent and Soviet production and how unsatisfying the lack of washing machines was for the Soviet consumer. It's like, well, if you think that was unsatisfying, you wait until we go from the living standards of 2019 to the living standards of 2040 and you see what happens to the global north consumer in that process. Right. Because resilience and the creation of resilience in global supply chains basically means going back to that much more centrally coordinated push production rather than pull production. Right. Which will totally change the availability of consumer goods. Like consumer durables just won't operate in the way they do currently.
