The Wonder Of Work, And Why The Answer Is Never More Billionaires
Last night I had pretty much decided what I was going to write today - then I read an interview with an author, and not a word of it survived...
The Week
… came to a pleasant end. After a visit to the dentist, I bolted. I hadn’t got the energy for the last night of a jiu jitsu seminar I’ve been going to all week as my back had stiffened up, so I got in the car and drove to our little cottage to gingerly attempt some renovation.
All week I had been pondering how the pandemic has changed how we live our lives, and if young people will ever accept being “packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes”, as Stewart Copeland once wrote in a post-apocalyptic song by The Police called Synchronicity II.
Then I read an interview today with journalist Sarah Jaffe, who has written a book called Work Won’t Love You Back, which turned everything on its head.
There is no guarantee that future generations will accept being stacked together and forced to perform tasks and pledge their undying loyalty in return for a wage - they may just skip that part of the society we have built entirely.
I consider myself lucky in that, despite the insecurity, I get to do something that I love and I get paid for it - that said, I’m well aware those I work for can drop my like a stone at any given time.
Some of those are media outlets whose work and ethos I have grown to love, but I know that it is not reciprocated. The moment I am worth less to them than what I bring in, I’ll be gone.
The Challenge
The other day I spoke to an industrialist on this very subject. He works for a global company that have a very big factory in a very small town. He told me that the people there had dreams like people anywhere - becoming a movie star, a singer, or a professional athlete, “and if they didn’t make it, they knew they could always work at our factory.”
His problem is that young people no longer want to work there. This factory is far from the kind of Victorian-style slavery one hears about from the likes of Amazon, but that doesn’t matter - much like fighter Conor McGregor, whose burning desire to succeed was fuelled in no small part by his greater desire not to be a plumber for the rest of his life, they are rejecting the industrialist and his factory.
If people like him can’t understand why, then their whole business is facing an existential threat. Given the choice between standing on a production line for eight hours a day and, say, having no money and no pension but teaching surfing in Costa Rica, young people are, shockingly, deciding against being a factory drone and heading for Central America instead.
The threat of automatisation has long hung over industry, but what if it wasn’t a threat at all? What if it is actually our saviour, changing how wealth - not money, actual wealth - is generated and freeing us up to so the things that we always wanted to do, but only a privileged few actually got to do?
Would I keep writing and creating and podcasting? Probably. But I’d do it with a freer mind and spirit, knowing that the bills would still be paid. Maybe capitalism is not so bad, as long as it’s the machines doing all the work.
The Deal
Sometimes a story breaks in Scandinavia and I really, really hope I don’t have to deal with it. Invariably those stories have to do with royalty or other rich people, and so it was this week when Spotify founder Daniel Ek started talking about buying Arsenal Football Club.
Which led me to the conclusion - the answer to the problems of football, and indeed society, is never more billionaires.
Football, and sport in general, is in a mess precisely because people who don’t know anything about the game, its history or its culture are given a controlling stake in it.
Ek describes himself as an Arsenal fan for the last 30 years - I’ve been a Boston Celtics fan for 35 years and, if I had all the money in the world, I would never consider buying the ball club because I know the sum total of fuck all about running a modern NBA franchise.
Other clubs get Qatar or Abu Dhabi or Russian oligarch money; Ek’s is scarcely cleaner, in that it is built on creaming off money from creators and paying Covid vaccine misinformation spreader Joe Rogan $100 million for his podcast.
Being a fan of Arsenal qualifies you to do precisely nothing, other than get in the way of football people trying to do the right thing with the club.
There are no good billionaires. There is no need for them. Nobody needs that much money, and invariably it’s not even theirs to begin with - it’s always made on the back of other people smarter and more hard-working than them.
Arsenal don’t need a different billionaire. They, sport and society in general needs to get rid of the existing ones. They won’t, of course, but we’d all be a lot better off if they did.
The Books
Yesterday morning I happened to see a tweet where ex-Swedish footballer Viktor Elm was talking about how Allsvenskan club Kalmar FF had a reading project for kids set up. About half an hour after I saw it I was in touch with the club to send them a couple of copies of the youth novels about football I’ve written together with Haidar Hajdari.
The easy part for me is always writing the books - the hard part is getting them in front of people, getting the message out there that there’s books for kids who are interested in soccer and that mirror their own lives.
Will Kalmar FF help us make the breakthrough? Who knows, but it won’t be for the want of us trying. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
The Podcast
… this week was about sport, where I was joined by a hugely enthusiastic Seán Sheehan to talk about everything from the Super League fiasco to Jake Paul. Seán is an avid podcaster and sports fan and sees the world a lot differently to me, so it led to a fun discussion.
Have I found my love of sport again? Maybe. I always have and always will love some aspects of it, but by no means all of it. It’s like a member of the family at this stage, and we all know how hard that can be…
Have a great week, wherever it takes you.