It’s been a while.
Apologies for the distinct dearth of recent Little Teapot thoughts!.
Somewhat my topic for today.
Throughout this little writing project, I’ve maintained a ‘real job’ but, like many others in the past few years, I found myself shouldering an increasing load of ‘supplementary real jobs’ to do as well, due to (what those unaffected by it euphemistically describe as) “cost savings”.
What’s really going on is “more work for the same money”. In certain circles, it has been important to present this as just a consequence of our varied cost of living/financial/globalisation crises; despite there remaining conspicuously chunky piles of (untaxed) left-over-economy-stimulation money still lumbering about, in the form of overpriced houses and shares, NVIDIA AI processing units, and healthy term-deposit balances. I don’t know… money just seems ‘naturally’ drawn into the pocketbooks of people with access to private jets and children with Instagram posts that feature #luxlife hastags I guess?
We used to call this kind of addressing-our-apparently-insurmountable-monetary-limits stuff names like “austerity”. But that’s a bit of a dirty word now. Still, it’s concerning increasing numbers of people with the mental capacity and self-awareness to be watching corporations and politicians easing us out of the unprecedented and lingering disruptive generosity of, especially, Covid-19 and back into our “modern economies”.
It might surprise you to learn austerity was once actually considered a very patriotic approach to economic challenges. That was at a time when we shared collectivist ideas, like individual “belt-tightening” being healthy and resilient, because we broadly still understood the tangible value of individual participation in shared sacrifice. And it was real sacrifice back then, because things being cut or sold were intentionally frontline—public sector engineers, housing, healthcare, teachers, energy or water infrastructure—stuff that was directly connected to citizen’s daily lives.
That, of course, was also before we believed in endearing myths about trickly economics working like gravity. Back when words like “job creator” described an actual human focused on putting actual humans behind actual machines to produce actual things; rather than some country-sized monopoly or disconnected narcissist with acronyms like “VC”, “PE”, or “SPV” in their TwiXer bio. And before government largely started aping the structures of modern corporations to outsource actual work; replacing functional public employees with consultant-aspirants whose job has become largely to just repurpose private-industry memos into implementable policy.
So, we’ve lost both the collective sense of sacrifice, but also the sense that public sector workers actually put on gumboots and do things. And that means we can now recognise a term like austerity for the grim reality it hides, hence our aversion to use it. Except maybe on leftie YouTube channels.
Which means, instead of that sacrificial austerity, which governments with limited actual direct participation in the community actually couldn’t now do (even if they were evil enough to want to), we solve our cost of living crises by “trimming fat”, “maximising productivity”, or “clearing back-office bloat”. Everyone still wants nurses and teachers and firefighters; but we can surely do without all those IT-consultants and paper-shufflers, right?
Let’s get back to me.
I work for a big, global company, in a one-of-a-kind niche role that basically combines strategic communications and technical translation.
I’m good at the job I’m paid to do. However, if you work in any industry that involves marketing or communications now, you’ll know a lot of ‘frontline’ work gets done by external agencies. The outcome of that is there is a corporate version of ‘austerity’ which look almost like the reverse of its infamous old public-sector version.
And, if you’re following along, you’ll realise that means it’s going to look almost exactly like the way the corporate-sycophants that construct modern governments do modern State austerity.
Specifically, while a job like mine—involving the vapidity of ‘communications strategy’—would near-universally be understood by the average person on the street as ‘back office’, it’s actually the product planners and other intermediaries who operate in the space between us “big-picture strategic thinkers” and the (external agency) front office who are the ones now considered excess-to-requirements. So, cost savings in a corporate ‘back office’ simply open a giant crevice between senior people with good connections, and the frontline (who, of course, can’t be gotten rid of because they don’t work for us anymore). And that—it should go without saying—makes it near impossible for whoever is on the frontline to do a decent job.
Long story short, I’ve therefore been spending hours picking up pieces and fixing shoddy frontline work. Not because these agencies aren’t capable or the strategic approach isn’t sound, but simply because there’s no-one left doing the ‘back office’ work between 60,000 feet and the ground.
I guess I could just let the frontline self-immolate. They don’t work for us, and are replaceable with another external agency. But I’m unfortunately cursed with the burden of actually caring about things and appreciating short-term choices and long-term consequences.
And, regardless, even short-term bad outcomes clearly don’t solve the problem for anyone… Bar giving me more time to write Little Teapot newsletters.
So, essentially what seems like an entirely rational pursuit of money savings forces people across the spectrum to either forgo themselves, or forgo their humanity.
And this is the basic problem with all the modern just-don’t-call-it-austerity fat-trimming. It might be presented as precocious ‘productivity managerialism’, but it’s really just the same old power-play in a better-fitting suit.
Money might be saved, but that’s not really the point.
Austerity has a definition; but it also has both a subjective purpose and an objective reality.
By definition, austerity is the process of reducing public spending in challenging economic times. It is—for an entity that is responsible for the wellbeing of its citizens and can literally print money—arguably the wrong thing to do in challenging economic times. But, regardless, it remains an acceptable “economic inevitability” among the kind of people that believe government finances are just a bigger version of household finances.
Still, let’s ignore the strict definition of austerity for a moment, because one person’s challenging economic times are often another’s boom times. And that means the objective reality of austerity is really more important, because that reality almost always involves sacrificing something of the lives of those without political power in order to maintain the comfort of those with political power.
And, when you consider that reality, you start to understand austerity as having a subjective purpose, which is to be a kind of wedge, designed to be slipped into the background hum of society in order to anchor certain power structures, and unsettle anything that might otherwise grow to fill a need: That is, unions, activists, community groups—typically the sorts of groups that draw attention to our collectivist reality and our individualist mirage.
The actual process by which this happens is designed to be deliberately muddy. Of course, we are more suspicious now around proposed belt-tightening because of all the time those designing it (along with their friends and donors) haven’t suffered like their ‘inferiors’ do. But, while it might have this very deliberate effect on the least privileged in a society, for a large block of actual voters1 it remains simple theatrics to maintain the pretence of “responsible governing”.
The hope then is that those, relatively-comfortable, voters might—patriotically—tighten their own belts a little “for the good of the economy”…
I might, in my corporate role, work a little harder to pick up the slack.
…But austerity is not designed to make those people actually suffer; it’s just to remind them that suffering happens. It is that little twinge of awareness that keeps them from getting too uppity about things. It essentially retards their cerebral cortex, and keeps them from noticing the bigger picture, because of their own laser-focus on avoiding any wrong step that might put them into a pit of poverty and despair themselves.
I point all this out because people—politicians especially—might not like to use the “a-word” anymore, because of all the baggage around its definition. But, spoken out loud or not, the dual subjective purpose and objective reality are still very much in play.
There’s always been a range of ways to expand your power in a group: You can innovate, or grind, or con your way into ‘earned’ status; or you can simply inherit it. Any ‘power’ you gain in that process might variously be measured as wealth or confidence or ability or access depending on how society chooses to acknowledge it.
But, if you don’t have talent or inclination, or rich parents (or, perhaps, a European-male birth certificate), you can still achieve results simply by reducing the relative power of those around you. You might prevent them from accessing certain resources, or burden them with such a mental, spiritual, or temporal load that they have no means to challenge your status on an equal platform.
This is broadly how things like cults and dictatorships work. But it’s also what crushing unions, privitising public services, NIMBYism (and also much “abundance” YIMBYism), reducing “back-office” staff, and so on, is actually doing.
After decades of ‘elites’ experimenting with this kind of thing have revealed that, with every additional unsafe water tap, potholed road, lonely suicide, or child poverty statistic—not to mention every unaccountable monopoly or billionaire boondoggle—more-and-more people will get more-and-more antsy.
Some of those antsy people turn to political activism, or write newsletters on Substack. But many more, without the time or access or cognitive margin to understand the full scope of the game, are simply willing to accept there must be someone else to blame: Trans people, immigrants, college professors...
In that, you’ll notice that, while the idea of austerity is formulated around money, many of the topics around which it swirls are objectively-unprofitable public goods or non-financial social constructions. This is because, at some point, you reach a level where extracting an extra dollar is hard, and provides little benefit to you, but cultural power is a limitless pool. That’s why, for example, we’ve landed on two main political sides: One which broadly believes in super-empowering individuals through the incentive of disproportionate reward; and the other which believes in shared success through shared resources. Of course, the roughly equal split of people who buy into each of those ideologies makes it seem like they both have a case, but it’s really just an illusion based on the more fundamental truth that almost everyone just wants a fair opportunity to succeed on their own merits without being artificially ‘propped up’ or ‘suppressed’ by either welfare or inequity: Success is—we tend to forget—a thing we can desire and attain without money needing to be involved.
However, for people like me who like to mull over this stuff, it’s hard to ignore that the side who concentrate on independent opportunity have a relatively-easier communications strategy to follow, because they can just sell the best way to measure success as via the proxy of individual financial wealth. That’s far from the only way to measure human success, but it’s an easy idea to sell. Plus, it’s exacerbated by the modern truth that money buys access and decision-making, in ways that other successes like happiness, life-expectancy, or equity don’t. So, money-havers get the connections, and get to choose austerity and other power plays: Choices that, ironically, shift society away from the very freedom of individual empowerment that they claim to believe in.
One common thread that weaves ‘austerity’ cuts in the private sector through those in the public sector is they supress creation; because creation is how we progress forward and away from the status quo. It is the human condition to tip forward towards progress, so any preservation of hierarchies and structures that benefit existing wealth and power basically amount to adding resistance or wedges to prevent an entirely natural forward lean.
I found myself struggling less with the availability of actual time to sit and write, and more with the mental capacity. What started as choices made above my paygrade in my day job—to maintain shareholder value—ends up as procrastination and “writers’ block” here. The recission of my physical time, into a vacuum of other people’s work and worry, become secondary to what it did to my motivation.
Look, I don't mind working hard. Nor is my intent to compare the genuine struggles brought on by State austerity with a bit of extra work on my own privileged plate! I just want to make the point that you can literally repress collective growth and progress by simply breaking people; and this is an acceptable cost in order to maintain the status quo.
I have time and health and enough. I’ve got no real problems to complain about, which is what has made my inability to turn-up here doubly-frustrating when I litigate myself about it. I have kept an eye on news feeds and creators and appointment TV. But I also feel something of a shell of myself in many important ways. My days typically end with crashing on the couch in front of some video stream, or lying in bed with earbuds on, half-tuned into an ‘Agile’ stand-up meeting occurring on the other side of the world, rather than being electrified by progress and possibility and—hopefully—planting a spark for others.
Most people associate austerity with sharing the pain of reduced spending, in order to get the (public) books in order. But, if you look just a little beyond the dictionary definition of it, it becomes clear it’s really a way to stall the natural momentum and constant power rebalancing.
The beauty of this is it makes intuitive sense, because we’re so indoctrinated with the idea that saving money and resources is both virtuous and rational during challenging times. That is how conservatism got to be a dominant political movement, even though public money doesn’t operate anything like our private bank accounts do. It’s understandable that we keep falling for it, but increasingly frustrating in a generational era where we spend so much time patting ourselves on the back about our impressive progress and innovation.
Which is all to say, austerity is not like a dramatic military coup or a violent revolution. It feels relatively small and inclusive compared to those kinds of things. But small and inclusive is how wedges are designed to work.
It’s hard to recognise it in any single moment but, in retrospect, it’s clear that humanity has only ever been its most progressive when leaning slightly-uncontrollably forward—revolutions, enlightenments, exploration, activism, even war at time. Yet people do justifiably fear tipping; they fear tipping could lead to falling. So, a little conservative wedge to keep things upright and the ‘same’ sounds sensible.
Governments and thought leaders could choose to patiently explain how ‘a little bit of discomfort’ is how humanity moves forward. There have been great politicians and philosophers who have stepped up and done exactly that over the centuries—encouraging us, through support, assurance and, sometimes, violence—to pull out the wedge and let humanity lean into progress.
That is where things like civil and human rights, liberalism, and democracy come from.
But, equally, others, empowered by the status quo, point—horrified—at the tottering lean and convince followers that the tipping is not progress but rather a result of poor foundations.
That’s where things like racism, eugenics, and authoritarianism come from.
And, as we’re seeing now across the world, once you believe the problem is “poor foundations”, even a wedge won’t do. At that point, people start to conclude that a more rigid structure, like fascism, is the only answer.
This all gets pretty dark, pretty quickly; beyond the scope of this piece. But it’s worth just mulling over how closely these things are related to each other, and how self-fulfilling they are.
Still, I wrote this to convince myself there is cause for optimism. I am writing myself out of my hole. We will continue to battle austerity-engineered paralysis and procrastination, but the salve for those injuries is in us. We can look around and realise all the economic certainties and objective logic used to justifies the continued hammering in of wedges, or questioning of foundations, simply doesn’t stack up. We can see clearly how the enormous productivity and wealth gains of the last decades have gone unshared. It’s undeniable, once we starting looking, how corporate concentration and enshitification and political capture are deliberately being implemented to stall human progress in its present financialised-for-the-0.1% state.
What we need to talk about is how our overlords and elites are doing this out of fear. They might be wearing the nice suits and the gold watches, and flying in the private jets, but we are—by definition—the many and they remain the few. They know the only way to win a game like that is to keep rigging it. Our goal then is to reveal what is actually happening, stripping them of the power that widespread ignorance, perpetrated by austerity in all its forms, gives them.
Starting (again) now.
-T
That is, privileged enough to be inconvenienced by having to downgrade to no-name branded butter, but not actually go without altogether… let alone suffer
Good to read your work again, Tim. I wondered where you'd got to, except for cropping up in comments elsewhere. The simple feeling word you're looking for I think is, drained. Ben mentions 'epic'. Excellent as your writing is, I do skim read. I say this, only as my opinion, you understand: I'm interested in your view, but shorter would suit me better. I am similarly inclined and have forced myself to edit with brutal rigour!
Good to have you in my inbox again, T-Pot! Epic post... welcome back!