This year’s Free Thinking festival at the Sage in Gateshead has been asking the question, Who’s in Control?. Oddly, or perhaps presciently, as soon as I typed that last word ‘control’, the power went off in the midst of Monday’s storm. No word processor, no internet connection, no phone line, almost no radio (since the only battery-operated radio I now possess is in the bathroom). A weekend of debates and talks about who’s really in charge of our health, our imagination, our privacy soon becomes a lot of hot air in the face of hurricane-force winds. The most sophisticated technology is useless without power, and yet in spite of this we’ve allowed ourselves to become so dependent on technology we can no longer do anything purposeful without it.
In her free-thinking feature Production Line Living (Radio 3, Sunday night), A.L. Kennedy took us back 100 years to Detroit and the very first moving assembly line. Devised by Henry Ford to make cars that were cheap enough for his workers to buy, the line could only succeed if everyone kept up the pace. It increased efficiency and made goods more available to more people but at another kind of cost — the unbearable boredom of doing small and partial tasks over and over again, every day, every week, every year, with the added indignity of being at the mercy of a machine.
Kennedy talked to the Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee, who, while researching a book on working-class life, took several factory jobs, the worst of which was spreading cake mixture that never stopped coming. ‘It was desperate,’ she recalled. As Kennedy reminded us, though, Toynbee could afford ‘to pay attention’ to what she was doing, to see the job for what it was, because she knew the job was short-term; for her, ‘resignation was unnecessary’.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in