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I often say that having a bad day is a choice. Well, today we’re having rain/sleet/show/dust/thunder and I feel like having a bad day. So please enjoy this piece from 11 years ago, which I was first pondering the nature of “work.”
A century ago, work was hard and physical. People mostly worked in either factories or fields and produced something tangible at the end of the day or season. Work was all about manipulating the real world and making things.
It’s been twelve years. On a miserable April night in 2007, Barataria began.
Like everything, it had a humble beginning. And a rather humble middle. I’m not sure how it will end, but it remains primarily whatever I am thinking about at the moment, the place where I unload my brain to get on with things that actually pay me a living.
Somewhere along the way, it started to feel like I had something. Since you’re reading this far, I hope that means that you agree. So please allow me a somewhat drifting and personal reflection on this anniversary.
Since the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, CFO and daughter of the head of Huawei, the company has been in the news lately. Popular media has placed this story at the center of deteriorating relations between the US and China on both sides of the Pacific. In the US, the implications of Huawei acting as, essentially, an agent of the Communist Party of China have peppered the stories. In China, it’s all been another front on the trade war and effort to keep China itself down, yet again.
Which side is right?
Without a lot of context, it’s impossible to tell just what is going on. Huawei is indeed a fast rising company, and its connections to the government have definitely played a role in that. They’ve also played the free market game like any fast rising company by working incredibly long hours, poaching top talent (and their information), skirting around inconvenient laws, and slapping things together with blazing speed.
But, in the end, it’s not entirely Huawei which is the issue after all.
The world is divided into two types of people: those who believe, and those who don’t. Or those who accept, and those who don’t. You’re on one side or the other. It doesn’t matter what the issue is, there’s one side with their perspective and then there is that other side. Everything which happens is seen through this lens and stands as proof of the belief.
Except, of course, reality doesn’t work that way.
Most people don’t actually fall into one group or the other, but retain a healthy dose of skepticism on any given topic. You may have a point, but you may not. While any set of true believers is likely to be vocal, given the ability to self-publish text or video or even, God help us all, snarky little memes. So what’s a person to do who doesn’t buy into this nonsense – whatever this nonsense might be?
It’s a technique I call “filing away.”
The politics of this moment have little space for something as esoteric as market forces. In much of the developed world, popular media and politicians alike seem to have run back to the safety of a warmed-over 19th century discussion. Is the way forward based on industrial nationalism or international socialism? The language has been updated, but the basic platforms have not.
It seems particularly strange given that half of our waking hours are at work, and for most people the world of work has nothing to do with either view. It is changing, yes, and may not seem to have a coherent vision of just what is happening in any way that affects politics. That disconnect is certainly the first problem.
But there are lessons to learn from the one force which does indeed shape the world of work and directly affects the daily routine of hundreds of millions of people in the developed world. These are the forces of the global market, and they are not going away.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 