Factory life: an introduction

(Above: You can just make out the red strap holding up P's platform/bedroom. Photo thanks to Harry Kenard)

A few months ago, following my unscheduled return to the UK at the request of the Department of Homeland Security, I moved into an abandoned factory-cum-squat in East London. It was a moment of madness that I haven’t yet regretted.

Once a thriving sweet factory the building is now a dilapidated brick monolith with a dusty courtyard more often than not scattered with past and future components of the building itself. Each of the floors are partitioned by rotting plywood into dozens of small padlocked studios which, over the years, have been scribbled on, painted, postered, wallpapered and repainted again. Inside, depending on the time of day you can find a bar, a live music venue, a café, a dance studio, a child development centre, a mosque and a bi-annual transvestite sex club. The rooms are rented out at extraordinary low rates strictly for commercial or business purposes, leaving the 100 or so of us that live in these studios prone to sudden eviction by the council.

I share a vast high-ceilinged room on the top floor with two other people, P a lovely 28 year old artist/professional man of leisure, whose ironic wit and almost pathological serenity was a strong inducement to move into the space, and Mel, a loquacious northerner. Usually P will come home at about 11 in the morning, in the throes of an ashen-faced comedown, often with a single vegetable in a shopping bag which he will then forget to cook. Usually M and myself will already be awake and engaged in a fiery political row, sparked by my idiotic frustration at her inability to tolerate the local Bangladeshi community or our differing views on short term deficit reduction. M’s “room” is a small loft-like enclave in the ceiling accessed by a rocky splintered ladder, while P lives on a platform above the couch, built by himself and held up by a climbing rope. His plans to “turn it into a spaceship” are perennially interrupted by cycles of drinking and coming down. I live in a small windowless plywood cubicle at ground level which is just big enough for a double bed and a desk.

The many benefits of living in the factory are occasionally offset by the lack of showers, hot water or cooking equipment beyond a small camping hob perilously attached to a sinister looking gas canister. The toilets are a good few minutes walk through the plywood maze, a walk which more often or not involves passive crack smoking from the drug den five doors down. While showers have recently been installed they are operated by tokens, which are purchased for a pound from a toothless Polish janitor. Usually he can only spare three or four a fortnight. Last month I read the famous Young Foundation study of poverty in the East End in the 1950s – ‘Race Kinship and Class.’ There was something disheartening about realizing that deprived war-time working class communities in Tower Hamlets enjoyed access to far more conveniences than I do. What would Michael Young make, I wonder, of the factory?

Its certainly the case that my own factory lifestyle is part of a broader trend across London. Indeed, many of the relics of England’s industrial decline, the warehouses and factories that have been stripped bare by a generation of offshoring and de-skilling, have been colonized by transient communities of artists and hipsters, all looking for new ways to invest their surplus social capital. Hackney Wick, tucked away in the awkward no-fly-zone between the Blackwall Tunnel and the Olympic stadium is the is the current home of the majority of these strange new proletarians. Wander through Hackney Wick at 7pm and you’ll notice the familiar pattern of early evening residential activity: lost looking pizza delivery men, bored pedestrians with Tesco bags and the distant throb of Radio 1, all within a horizon of dilapidated barrack-like warehouses, bisected by ten-foot tall chain link fences with no discernable entrance.

Living in the factory raises a lot of questions. Specifically the following, which I want to tentatively answer during the remaining two or three months that I’ll be living here:

IS Is there any link between the radical Marxist East London squatting movement of the 1970s (more on this) and what’s going on in the factory? Or is this another form of apolitical stylized consumption?

2) What does it mean to be an artist living somewhere like the factory? Is this artist (or dare I use the North American term ‘hipster’) identity something new and radical which can be isolated and engaged with, or is it another expression of middle-class whiteness?

3) What's the future for the factory? Will it survive the recovery-driven wave of new property development in Poplar and what will it look like?

Learning economics

(Above: taken in a newsagent in Beijing Ariport in October 2008)

In a youth hostel in Moscow, sometime in September 2008, I used a few minutes of my carefully rationed internet access to log onto the BBC news website. In the kind of headline size normally reserved for terrorist atrocities or general elections was announced the collapse of two banks that I had never before heard of, Lehman Brothers and Meryl Lynch.

Over the next few weeks, as myself and two other friends traveled across Russia and China we saw the economic Armageddon unfolding in peeps and snatches. Stock market boards showing rows of LED minus arrows or glimpsed newsreel footage of guilty looking men in suits carrying small boxes of their possessions through skyscraper lobbies. Every day the BBC’s font got bigger and bigger, as Iceland’s became a failed state and banks were nationalized by the dozen. None of it seemed real. Unlike the hard news, the roadside bombs and hurricanes that had set the agenda over the previous decade, this was everywhere, invisible and extremely confusing.

What’s more, despite being well-educated people who, for our brief adult lives, had followed the news almost every day and who held assiduously formed opinions about how society should be structured, none of us had a clue what was going on. An entire alternative universe of finance and credit, of insurance and mortgages that had previously escaped our notice was burning to the ground, dragging the next ten years of political discourse into hitherto unknown territory and bringing us all back to square one. All of the issues we had traded opinions on, be it Iraq, ID cards, climate change or constitutional reform now had as much capital as your average Lehman Brothers CDO. We had a lot to learn.

And who can blame us? Since the publication of the Black-Scholes paper in 1973, which worked out a formula for trading derivatives, economics had undergone a shift towards abstraction and self-referentiality equivalent to the birth of modernism in literature. In fact John Lanchester has argued that the invention of credit default swaps in 1994 saw high finance take a turn for the post-modern, writing, “for anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism.” In other words the financial markets in recent years have only really been created and understood by Maths PhD graduates leaving everyone else, from protestors to politicians, feeling confused and alienated from the entire process.

Cut to 2010 and the new politics of deficit reduction and public spending cuts has energized the left in a way that the social issues of the past failed to do. Even the rough social edges of the coalition, the Victorian marriage incentives, Cameron’s inflammatory speech on immigration or the government’s staunch silence on climate change are rarely discussed. The student protests last December concentrated on the raw issue of funding rather than the culture shift towards ‘marketization’ in higher education. Its been a steep learning curve and I worry that, dizzy with our new-found rhetorical toys, we are forgetting difficult issues such as multiculturalism and gender politics. A senior Climate Camp organizer recently told me that the climate movement is “dying on its arse.”

Unfortunately many of us still can’t really describe with certainly what’s going on. We are still not comfortable enough about economics to make informed judges between the left and right wing economists who put forward radically different arguments for the scale and speed of short term deficit reduction. We are inclined towards the former because the Tories have been on the wrong side of every clear-cut social issue that we ever remember being on the table (with the possible exception of detention without trial). We don’t trust that a party which has been consistently calling for an ever-smaller state won’t pick an economic policy that is a means to that end. Furthermore, the academic economists who have spent the last ten years calling for globalized unregulated growth, intimidating into silence almost everyone on the left who lacked a degree in economics, are discredited by the crash, and can no longer monopolize the high-ground of common sense.

Perhaps the lesson of the last eight months is that the solidarity of the balance sheet always trumps the solidarity of identity politics. Our dizzying, turbulent and traumatizing process of fiscal politicization over the last six months affirms William Cobbett’s old adage that it is impossible to agitate a man with a full stomach.

Election Day Part 2: Midterms in America

Above: The Guardian’s Mid-Term election coverage.

Last week, in case you hadn’t noticed, there were elections in America. But of course you noticed. David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg could have co-hosted a mud-wrestling and Koran burning sex party on the floor of the Commons and the story would have been buried under the latest exit polls from Wisconsin.

There is something sad about how slavishly obsessed we have become with American politics. On the night of the election The Guardian website replaced its front page with an enormous blue white and grey map of America that automatically updated every few seconds, broken down by state and congressional district. The Times, the BBC and The Independent were all equally obsessed. Guardian Columnist Gary Younge has spent the last month driving from Denver to Los Vegas interviewing gun toting pensioners and Obama-hating hipsters. Meanwhile Ed Pilkington snuck on board on the tea-party express bus to interview a disabled Iraq war veteran who, for some god-only-knows reason, had decided to spend his life campaigning against moderate healthcare reform and someone at the BBC blogged at length about the effect of a viral campaign video in North Carolina’s second district. The nadir came a few weeks ago when a Guardian blogger, watching a local news channel, posted a breathless minute-by-minute live blog covering the debate between the two senate candidates from Delaware. For about an hour this was the leading article on The Guardian’s website. Just imagine for a moment what this would look like if the situation were reversed. It would be the equivalent of a senior New York Times staff writer sitting in a dank half-empty hall in Stapleford watching Nick Palmer, the obscure Labour backbencher from Broxtowe, debate with his Tory opponent about the punctuality of Nottinghamshire council’s waste and recycling collection.

We have arrived at a point where the British political classes are probably unable to name the leaders of Spain, China or Brazil, but are having heated debates about whether newly elected Florida governor Mark Rubio might run for president in 2016, or whether the proposition to legalize the personal growth of pot in California boosted democratic turnout in the state. The West Wing, Primary Colors, 24 and Obama have dramatized American politics and exported its tropes to the rest of the world. Politics in the US has become the paradigm for politics everywhere else. We now talk of “tough races”, “swing constituencies” and “negative campaigning.” The horse-race drama of photo-finish presidential races have become the greatest show on earth, and are now perhaps more likely than any UK election to compel British people of all ages to stay up watching News24 and eating popcorn.

This was brought horribly home by a recent article in Slate by Anne Applebaum comparing British and French political responses to recession public spending cuts. She pointed out that while the French were on strike, the British were showing a “characteristic… stiff upper lip”. “In an age of supposed globalization,” she wrote, “when we are all allegedly becoming more alike—listening to the same American music, buying the same Chinese products—it is astonishing how absolutely British the British remain.” This is a very odd statement indeed. Considering that In the 1970s so many British miners went on strike that electricity had to be rationed to three days a week. Considering that in the same decade, during the ‘winter of discontent’, even gravediggers were on strike. Considering that during the 1980s, the last period of Conservative public spending cuts, Britain was essentially plunged into Civil War - fighting a pitched battle with striking coal miners that lasted for years. Considering that in the 1990s there were riots against the introduction of a poll tax. Considering that in 2003 more than a million people marched against the Iraq War. Considering that a massive student demonstration against the cuts is set to take place next week and that BBC journalists are on strike. Many Western European countries, including Britain and France, have had issues with militant unionism and street protests that far outstrip anything seen in the United States since the end of the Civil Rights movement. But of course she hasn’t considered this. Her research could be based almost entirely on John Cleese’s character in the recet James Bond movies. Luckily for her few of her readers will know any better. While every time Obama sneezes the Guardian runs an editorial, most Americans have no idea who the Prime Minister of the UK is. Reading these articles I sometimes feel a pang of shame, as if I had commented in detail on a high school crush’s novelty key ring only to discover that she doesn’t even know my name.

On falling out

A month or so ago I wrote about my internship at Shoutcar.com. After leaving the company for two weeks to go traveling I was lured back on board by D, the ceo, with the promise of payment on my return (“350 dollars a week, in cash, paid every Friday. We are finally doing this!”). I thought my spell of unemployment had come to an end.

It only takes a quick glance inside D’s medicine cabinet to put the pieces together. He is on the brink of a manic depressive breakdown and despite moving from his own bedroom into a sweaty shoeboxy garage in Cambridge that, to my knowledge, is still lacking Internet (something of a handicap for an Internet start-up) Shoutcar is nose-diving at terminal velocity. The $25,000 of investments D claims to have raised has been bequeathed by his wealthy mother on the condition that he raise another $15,000 before he can touch it (“the thing about our investments so far… is that they are in this… well lets say very special account, where they won’t let me touch the money until I get to 40,000. How crazy is that?”).

Needless to say that on my first day back D immediately reneged on his promise to pay me. We argued, I stormed out, he unceremoniously “fired” me in a poorly spelt email and I haven’t been back since. Since then the marketing intern M who managed to escape today with a letter of reference from D has updated me regularly. The letter, indecently, is a window into D’s madness. One sentence reads: “[M] understood the scope and some of the emerging technologies in the IT sector, and am always interested in new products.”

D, however, is upbeat and impervious to his impending bankruptcy. Possessed by monomania he is riding the crest of an enormous wave of denial. In this sense he resembles many such Americans who, for whatever reason, have simply fallen out of the known universe. Often these are sensible well-educated people who try to exist outside of the recognized institutions (universities, private companies, pubic sector organizations, families) which once tethered them to the world by starting their own business, coming out of nowhere to campaign for office or quitting their job to travel indefinitely. For every Mark Zuckerburg and Barack Obama there are millions who end up like the elderly guy in my local coffee shop who sits on his own every day and listens to the same Nat King Cole album on a battered CD player.

Consider J, the company’s on again off again web developer. When J appeared on the scene a few months ago, besuited and coldly confident, we were all convinced that he had the money and the experience to rescue Shoutcar. Emitting greasy balding sparks of nervous energy J is the kind of white guy who refers to fellow men as “brother”, hollers at women on the street and hands everyone in the room two business cards (“one for you, one for a friend.”). Over the months this slimy yet moneyed exterior unraveled to reveal a shiny pebble of pure madness.

J’s life is a mirage, a thin sparkling subterfuge hanging over a terrifying abyss. His website – (“brilleant”, the word “brilliant” spelt phonetically – I’m not making this up) a search engine which he hopes will one day compete with Google is riddled with spelling mistakes. On close inspection the back seat of his Mercedes is littered with children’s toys, relics, apparently, from his ex-girlfriend’s child (he still lives with her, and it turns out the car is hers). Behind the chat, the suit and the designer glasses J is just another of the desperate and lost victims of the entrepreneurial state of nature.

J and D are two blazing comets of madness whose paths briefly crossed in the sky before continuing on their own self-destructive trajectory. Last week J sent D photos of his own erect penis in the bizarre hope that it would convince D to bring him back on board. Aside from providing the final piece in the jigsaw of his insanity, it was a move that torpedoed any possible chance J had of being able to sue D for withholding payment (“your honor, as you can see from these images, I terminated his contract for misconduct”). What’s more J begging to work for D is like Jack Nicolson in The Shining begging Russell Crowe in a Beautiful Mind to be his assistant code breaker. One fantasist pleading to another as they gaze up through the crack they both fell through at the shaft of light above.

Segregation and the African night at OM

Last week I met S and her friends at the official party thrown for all of the incoming Harvard graduate students. S arrived in America from Ethiopia five years ago and has grown up in Houston, highly Americanized and (judging from photos of her collection of cars that she showed me on her Iphone) extremely wealthy. She is beginning a PhD in Physics. Her two friends are K, PhD candidate in American History and D, on a one-year program at the education school. K is a former community organizer from the Dominican community of Washington Heights, a neighborhood in the very northern fringes of Manhattan and D hails from a small town just outside of Richmond, Virginia. The three women had known each other less than a week, and had already formed a tight circle. In many ways they are the most entertaining and sociable of the rather dour class of new grad students.

On paper the three women have almost nothing in common, not in their academic disciplines, their social class, their national origin or the location of their hometown. They have found each other because they are among a small handful of black Harvard graduate students. Orbiting around their group are several people whose names and backgrounds I haven’t yet discovered, including a stiff geeky guy and a skinny short girl with a malting afro, who are also all black. When S added me as a friend on facebook I joined her friend list as an awkward white speck in a sea of black faces.

Last night I was invited out with the three of them and a few others to OM, an upmarket bar with a dancefloor about two blocks from Harvard Square. I arrived late and as soon as I stepped inside it was instantly apparently that I was the only white person in the club. S and her friends were highly amused by the situation (explaining that it was ‘African Night’ at OM). The night was made more awkward by the resident club photographer who rarely strayed more than fifteen feet away from me, blinding me with picture upon picture which will presumably appear at some point down the line to promote the club (as one of S’s friends said “they want to show diversity”). At one point we stepped outside so S could smoke and the photographer followed us, lining us up in a row with me in the middle for a shot.

The majority of people in the club were most likely to have been Harvard students. Few of them would have grown up in Boston and like S and her friends I imagine many had little in common apart from the colour of their skin. I also have a strong feeling that S and her friends are more willing to befriend me as an English outsider to the situation and that had I been American I would not have been invited to OM yesterday evening. In Europe, or in Britain at least, segregation is inextricably bound up with nationality (black neighborhoods in London tend to be first and second generation west Indian immigrants), religion (the new thuggish far right English Defense League pride themselves on their black members and target only Muslims) or by class (it is inconceivable that Oxford’s, albeit tiny, group of black students would exclusively befriend and date other black students). Its hard to know where to stand or how to feel about this. On the one hand this kind of segregation perpetuates feelings of confused hostility and misunderstandings between black and white Americans. On the other hand the more distinctive American black culture becomes, the more it fosters a new language, a unique art and distinct patterns of consumption, the more desegregation risks looking like assimilation and subjection. At the risk of being naive and drawing conclusions too many conclusions from a single club night I am going to sit squarely on the fence.

Later on in the evening another photographer appeared, a freelancer who seemed to make money out of taking photos of people dancing. He would give you his card after photographing you, leave you with the option of buying the pictures the next day. I absent-mindedly visited his website, half-considering purchasing an image of myself in the club for the blog, and saw that all of his clients, all of his models and all of his facebook friends, are black. It seems that even as banal a practice as freelance club photography remains thoroughly segregated.

Shoutcar.com

The school year is over and I am still living in America. My stipend has dried up and my library cards have expired. The professors and secretaries who hold the university together have set their email servers to auto reply and disappeared into the night. I am currently in Somerville, the next neighborhood over from Cambridge, on the top floor of a flimsy wooden house crammed with an illegal number my friends from the past year. I am unemployed. Which means I have time to write this. Both my followers are jumping for joy I’m sure.

The current job market resembles the first few scenes after a plane crash in a war zone. Sheets of flaming wrecking are pouring from the sky and the survivors are being shot at from every angle, screaming for help. I have been steadily firing out job applications like flares into the night for the last four months. Every application seems to vanish into an online Bermuda triangle. I’ve repeatedly checked through my resume to make sure I haven’t accidently written “biting the heads off kittens” under ‘interests’ or mentioned an internship in an Al-Qeada training camp. Anything which might explain the radio silence.

The closest thing I have to a job right now is an unpaid internship with a Boston-based internet startup company. We shall call it shoutcar.com. One of the more surreal aspects of working for shoutcar is that no one actually really knows what the website does. Whether we are a social network, a careers website, or an online magazine remains a mystery to the entire workforce including the CEO (who we shall call D). Much of my time in the office seems to consist of “pow-wows” where the entire staff (all five of us) gather around a whiteboard the size of a small car and scribble sentences such as “roundtables”, “virtual classroom technology” and “networking in the twenty-first century.”

The company is run out of D’s apartment in South Boston. The first one to arrive normally wakes D up. He will then shower noisily as the staff take up their positions, perhaps giving us a brief pep talk wearing nothing but a towel. I once arrived at work to find his dirty laundry on the desk where I normally work. On some days it feels like the epitome of the American dream, a small group of misfits gathered around an eccentric but brilliant leader, preparing to change the way we use the internet forever. On these days it feels like D is running for President and we are his loyal staff, looking forward to a day in the future when we will be reaping the benefits of office and commanding vast armies to victory. On other days it feels like we are being promoted through the ranks of a Brian Jonestown-esque cult and that our team is more likely to discover cold fusion than come up with a working revenue model.

Meanwhile D’s small apartment has become the incubator of some explosive emotional drama. Today, for example, 33% of the workforce at some point left the room in tears. Among the six regular employees and the boss’ friend G who shows up almost every day with a manic grin and pockets full of medicinal marijuana there are, or rather have been, four different disastrously awkward romantic situations. It feels like we are a dysfunctional family and that every workday is a Christmas Day on which everyone has had a little bit too much to drink.

Tattoos

Tattoos are everywhere in America. Walk down any street in summer and you will be greeted by flashes of color on skin: humming birds, orange flames, tiny rashes of black stars, cartoon dragons and thin circles of barbed wire. Unlike in England where tattoos are relegated to the cultural fringes, usually found on the skin of greasy haired record store proprietors or pale-faced suburban goths, tattoos in America appear to be spread evenly across the population. Indeed, tattoo parlors often occupy pride of place on American high streets and come equipped with their own car parks and television commercials. The number of tattoos in America was always something that confused me. After all, young Americans on average dress, drink and date more conservatively than their counterparts elsewhere in the west. Why would a young American guy or girl turn down alcohol before their 21st birthday yet not think twice about inscribing a Chinese character the size of a dinner plate onto the flesh of their lower back? Over the last year I come to think that tattoos may betray a hidden truth about how Americans see themselves and imagine their future. I would like to argue that Americans get tattoos because they assume they will be the same forever. In England we grasp in vain at a fixed selfhood only to watch it slip through our hands like a panicking eel. Sixty years of post imperial decline, internal migration and a social class system that has partially collapsed like a failed soufflé has left us confused, divided against ourselves and prone to sudden and violent reinvention. We bend our subjectivity into different shapes to suit different occasions, acting working class in shops, professional at work or parental at school open days. We take the fragments of our upbringing and piece them together to form an infinite number of different collages which we project to the world at different occasions. Our ability to self-consciously perform, yet never quite live up to, a multitude of different roles is why working class kids at Oxbridge will wear tweed and join the hunting society, all with a twinkle in their eye. A tattoo is thus out of the question. Our mental configuration would almost certainly be different within years, weeks or even hours of leaving the parlor. What’s worse a tattoo might compromise our ability to manipulate and reconstruct every element of our subjectivity at a moment’s notice. We might get found out. Americans, however, appear not to have this problem. Short of some rare cataclysmic event, the average American selfhood evolves slower than the movement of tectonic plates. In America the bodily movements, speech mannerisms, dress codes etc… that are external signifiers of the composite factors that constitute their identity act in perfect harmony with the fixed selfhood which lies beneath. In other words, imagine a sheet of tracing paper placed over an image. While the image is all of the fixed or semi-permanent aspects of our identity (race, gender, sexual orientation, regional upbringing), the tracing paper represents our day-to-day behavioral practices (speech, dress, political beliefs etc…). In America the tracing paper is placed perfectly over the image beneath, allowing it to be neatly and seamlessly traced (in many cases, literally onto their own skin). In England, however, someone has nudged the table at the crucial moment and the tracing paper has slipped slightly away from the image, leaving a blurred mess of marks and scribbles. This can, of course, be at great detriment to Americans’ own self-awareness. It goes some way towards explaining why the Boston Irish glue shamrocks to their houses, or why you can discern someone’s sexual orientation by a mere glance from a car window. It perhaps explains why we think Americans are brash, self-centered and prone to mawkish sentiment and why Americans think we are inhibited, inarticulate and foppish. Its why self-deprecation in England is playful, in America is violent iconoclasm.