Featured Image: Dialectic Of The Local: Zombies For Change from Philosophers For Change
Whether you agree with Karl Marx’s analyses of political economy or not, he was a darned clever creative, taking the norm and remaking it, creating something for the many from something for the few.
Better representation for more people means finding new ways to represent them, how they look, feel, experience the world. Hostilities, often against victims, by media, don’t help anyone.
As Baroness Hollick, champion of broadcasting equalities says:
‘Be persistent, be focused, but start with your own community….’January 2018 Sussex University website.
The way we represent and are represented in our social, economic and cultural currencies affects who we think we and others are and what is possible. It also, even in 2024, determines who can contribute. Social Exclusion is a very big bureaucracy and business.
At the moment, we believe mass media versions through segmented representation of divided lives that seem to do little more than perpetuate incapacities. We say ‘never again’ about wars, while increasingly using technologies to gamify and normalise ways of working and discrimination, waging security wars online against perceived enemies within our society.
In my opinion, challenging big structure everywhere, looking at ways of localising, familiarising it, creates an organic beauty beyond the kinds of fragmented representation we’ve been socialised to think is normal.
Finding something small and understanding how it works, might work, produces voices, cadences, narratives, signatures, brands and identities that come from the thing itself and can be read and appreciated by everyone whether they’re educated or not.
You could see this in the recent end of year shows for undergraduate and post graduate students at Nottingham Trent and Nottingham Universities.
Walking around these shows made me realise that access to quality from our own experience of life is the right of everyone: we need to help more people in Nottingham to understand and reach that: but how?
Particularly stunning was the work of Trent’s Department of Interior Architecture in their recent end of year show Small is Beautiful, the show accompanied by a publication, Made@ Trent, article to follow). As I walked round this exhibition I thought ‘Yes!” it moved me to think: “Here is the news, this is the form news could/should be taking, how can this way of thinking and seeing the world be shared with more people, more of the time?”
The bigger question was, could this work be developed into art that could be incorporated into the fabric of the institutions?
If you imagine anyone who is going to really make a change, it’s going to have to be someone, or some kinds of people who are just ordinary and conversational, whose only ‘vested interest’ is to produce great work and improve culture and social mobility for everyone.
Since the development of Creative Quarters in Europe, throughout world and the UK there’s been a real sense that anything is possible and particularly in Nottingham.
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There are so many people already doing this but for some reason, instead of their work being part of a wider capacity development, it falls,
drops,
becoming marketing for an existing status quo when it needs to be seen as a new insightful direction that is seen to regularly connect and document its impact on other ordinary people.
It’s vital that we realise that we need to regenerate and reach out to more people, more of the time, all ways and always. We’re all ordinary wonders.
Mosaic segmentation, historically, evolved from a post second world war vision of community and national leadership of economies that understood economic development and communities as fixed, one way, rigid, captured and captive markets, determined from the top down.
The chance for different types of people and versions of economic activity to challenge the local scene was limited. Where it was contested and new kinds of relationships, more equal, more inclusive, with capacity, they were often taken up, funded for a while and then
dropped,
becoming marketing for the old form and understanding of economics as exploitation.
The cross fertilisation of military command, too much social control, mass manufacture and data gathering after the second world war in the new consumer economy can be seen in the evolution of Cavendish Woodhouse, that used the appearance of a trading local company to sell American credit. Cavendish Woodhouse piloted mass produced furniture on hire purchase on weekly or monthly instalments to local people in the early post war austerity heady dreams of the nineteen fifties and sixties. It wanted to sell the credit more than it wanted to sell good quality furniture but it wanted to look like a traditional trustworthy family company even changing its name from the Old Colonial Furniture Company to Cavendish Woodhouse and having to pay substantial damages to the real, long established, trusted Cheltenham company.
Cavendish Woodhouse was highly profitable (working class neighbourhoods were being steered away from communitarian, sharing, never be in debt ways of working and living).
Through its massive growth and development into the catalogue companies and group, Great Universal Stores, which paid its ‘agents’ women commission only at a time when they could have been working and earning a wage, the American system of intelligence, credit and character were imposed on what actually became a form of primitive neighbourhood surveillance where the credit referencing terms would be filtered through the catalogue lady.
Catalogue credit added anything from 20% to 50% onto the price of items. Catalogues and other American Multi Layer Marketing schemes like Tupperware and later, Amway introduced an American perspective into British neighbourhoods were socially regressive and authoritarian in the sense that the people who were targeted to be catalogue or party people for the brand, were women.
Often the women’s husband would be part of a unionised industry while women would be working very hard to prove their own flawless character as she worked for nothing until she was paid commission somewhere later on in the year. Agents were also learning to surveil, discriminate and target their neighbours for the company they were working for.
This was a form of American cultural propaganda that combined with the racialising post war culture within the welfare state and public infrastructure, laid the foundations for an economic system of inequality that we need to unpack.
There’s a real difference between setting up a company to sell household goods that you know people need and want, that is the tradition of business as a service that if the goods and the service are of a consistent quality then the reputation of the company grows.
But this was never about the consistent quality of a product or a product’s reputation to working class or ethnic minority neighbourhoods. The establishment of Cavendish Woodhouse was a simultaneous, deliberative act of extraction and discrediting a whole section of society, making it hard and then so easy to buy, grooming, undermining relationship and friendship between people.
This was the same means used to establish the catalogue empire Great Universal Stores. Both highly lucrative and profitable but it was what happened next that needs understanding.
The profit from Cavendish Woodhouse and Great Universal Stores were used to create CCN Information Systems which was a new form of credit referencing for businesses: it was sold to the businesses on the basis that they were in because of who they were (subject to bank references) but that this new tool could identify people who would be a credit risk to them.The horrendous injustice that the people who’d financed Cavendish Woodhouse and Great Universal Stores, in fact brought them into being were discredited by this new tool, excluded from the very credit system that their money had financed.
When you think about how slave owners were compensated for the loss of slave income, this was a version of the same process. This was the beginning of the post war period of the great disenfranchisement of the working class really.
Instead of people on the newly built estates who might want to break away from increasing social conformity to set up their own business from the home they believed was theirs, to make things, to solve things, to drive a many faceted version of post war development, they found their home ground had been curtailed and would be increasingly surveiled.
CCN Information Systems became Experian in 1997, the same year as the County Council Network was established, also the idea of under and over employed, core and peripheral staff, normalising the notion of a workless underclass that everyone needed to avoid (because, for example, they wanted something for nothing, a trope that privileged comedy writers satirised, reality TV profited and extracted from.
People who were mocked because of the way they found themselves, or the way they bought things, on credit, from catalogues (or worse). Experian feeds on the structured inequality, confusion and harm it created within working class and ethnic minority families, households who rented, worked, claimed benefits because it relied on administrators to decide. During this time tech platforms were being written where underemployed working class people would be offered financial advances on jobs they hadn’t had yet.
Supported by successive governments who either didn’t realise, didn’t know or didn’t care, this system overshadowed the ability of the institutions to do their jobs, to have control of their vocations: education, medicine, social services, infrastructure Experian was in there, burrowing away, extracting the heart of institutions telling everyone who was who and why.
The scary thing was that even though Experian has extracted everyone’s data and sprayed it all around the data gathering world, there are so many data bases inside our institutions now but none of them work properly because of Experian’s control over who is a problem (Experian financial call centre data centre technology is not used properly to administer the Multi Agency Support hubs which are supposed to be democratically responsive with resources, skills and development opportunities for under resourced neighbourhoods, not simply (visual counter answerphones) where the few council staff left type faster and faster more and more person of interest data for agency social workers unsupported to pursue…
This massification of ‘the working class into underemployed class, then unemployed, then underclass’ (itself a self serving mass fiction created by really hostile propaganda), was literally pouring weedkiller on difference and social change from the ground up, challenging the notion of all men and women having equal citizenship because if your ability to save and buy were structurally limited then you could try and try but you aren’t (ever) going to succeed.
By 1997, CCN Information Systems became Experian. Experian had evolved into the arbiter of access to work, to the supply chains that increasingly determined whether companies won contracts, or individuals would be seen as the right kind of compliant, agreeable workers and the history of just where all of these socially questionable rationales had come from wasn’t ever questioned.
This is important as the values and purpose of our society has been undermined by this desire to control the lives and outcomes of working class and ethnic minority lives denying access to the economy, discrediting people who paid for the systems that exclude them.
The Experian Mosaic works everywhere and has been sold on to the health, education, local government construction, infrastructure development environments: it defines and structures attributes confusingly and randomly creating false norms creating a mistrustful and socially distancing society.
If I could visualise Experian, I’d say its mosaic expresses societal decomposition (and pixelation!), fragmentation and alienation, where local, regional, national and international representation into ‘identities’ are sticky fixed and determined but for manipulation and a kind of permanent attrition rather than the insight and enlightenment we can find in the ONS and other open source ways of looking at the world.
Although there is some truth hidden in the continually sparring, divided and managed groups and individuals that these data sets express, the problem is that it’s increasingly treated as the working reality by commissioners of all kinds of services who are themselves increasingly bullied in and by bureaucracies into producing more metrics and outcomes based on increasingly limited views of social capacities.
es theft and crime through notions of entitlement that are not met in society.
We’ve now got a situation where we have ‘pick and mix ‘equalities as marketing for a ‘vibrant culture’ that’s effectively managed by people who come from the same kinds of backgrounds and culture but with no drive to encourage equalities as a fact and a result as the recent Select Committee on Communication explained.
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If we’re going to create social mobility we need to get out more, use our own eyes, talk to people about how damaged and under siege their lives are and how they feel at home and work by massification and the division between luxury and throwaway that’s been with us since the 1950’s.
Creativities don’t belong by proxy to the next big company that as a city we blindly woo in the next iteration of the story of the contribution of the BIG over the small. Shock and awe tactics of the war time periods need to be challenged, they’re obsolescent and need to be satirised and overcome.
Above: Court Bushes Community Hub Sign
Creativities, like regeneration, come from the micro climate of who we are and what we aspire to be. If we’ve deliberately poisoned the ground for the many in giving too much support to the history of the Mosaic of human misunderstandings then we need to repair, reuse and mend that damage.
Above: Julia K Szołtysek’s study of caricature of difference as exoticism in Opera which looks at how we can localise and normalise our sense of difference and other.
Creativities are our birthright -not just something that we exploit to encourage Mr and Mrs Big to invest. To produce really outstanding and really different work, more of us need to own the right to bring our difference to work and play with it and relate it to what went before, create new versions that mean something to our home audiences.
We need to create challenge, to reference our work, concerns issues on the walls in the buildings we walk through and work in through all kinds of arts, to produce art as news about the things that matter to us in our immediate institutions and we need to communicate that desire beyond our immediate networks and groups and certainly beyond becalmed groups of community visitors who’ve had their capacity stolen from them by these gigantic processes.
signsofanopencity 
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