സ്ഥിരീകരണം

The wind had finally dropped, which was a considerable relief to everyone except Tony, who had spent most of the afternoon complaining there wasn’t enough of it.

They were sitting behind a low wall of coral stone at the edge of a beach near Kalpitiya, Sri Lanka, where someone had assembled a bar out of timber, palm leaves and what appeared to be several generations of washed up fishing equipment. A string of coloured lights hung between two coconut palms. One of the lights was blinking rythmically.

Anna had a cold beer pressed against her stomach.

“My abs are fucked.”

Marcin lowered himself onto a wooden bench with a noise like someone stepping on a bag of gravel.

“I think I have damaged something important.”

“Your dignity?” asked Isobel.

“No. That went last night…”

Tony was staring out towards the lagoon, where a young Sri Lankan instructor was effortlessly carrying two boards, a kite and a harness over one shoulder.

“Look at that bloke. Not even tired.”

“He’s twenty-three,” said Kelly. “You’re fifty-seven and had four beers at lunch.”

“Talking about fat c*nts, Australia and South Africa tomorrow. Kingsmead.”

“Beautiful,” said Greg. “Proper cricket. Five days of blokes standing around wondering whether anything’s going to happen.”

“Won’t last five days,” said Tony. “No bastard can bat anymore.”

“Nobody can concentrate,” said Adam. “That’s the problem. Twenty20 has ruined batting. They get a perfectly good ball outside off stump and feel morally obliged to hit it into the Indian Ocean.”

“Attention,” said Anna. “It’s everywhere, and nowhere.”

“Oh, fuck,” said Mitch. “She’s starting.”

“No, seriously. Batting in Test cricket is a very specific form of attention. You have to remain present while almost nothing happens. Four hours of deciding not to do something stupid.”

“Sounds like marriage,” said Greg.

“Your marriage, perhaps,” said Isobel.

“Well, it ended in a collapse of the middle order.”

A waiter appeared carrying six bottles and a plate of devilled cashews. He distributed them with the careful concentration of a man who had long concluded that Australians were a particular species of tourist.

“You’re a champion, mate.”

The waiter smiled politely, having presumably been called a champion because no one couldn’t remember or pronounce his name.

“See,” said Kelly after he’d gone. “Karthik. You haven’t asked his name once.”

Tony looked towards the bar, “Everything is translatable.”

The cashews were fiercely hot. Marcin ate three, made a small strangled noise and reached for his beer.

“Let’s talk about the weather” said Isobel.

“Here we go,” said Mitch.

“No, think about it. Seasons, wind, rain, economies, civilisations. Everyone’s forever announcing change. End of democracy. End of capitalism. End of the West. End of communism, End of capitalism. End of history. End of Test cricket.”

“That last one’s s f*cking lie,” said Adam.

“And everyone assumes whatever comes next must be worse.”

“Well,” said Tony, “have you seen their batting?”

Anna ignored him.

“Billionaires building bunkers, buying islands, planning to escape the consequences of the system that’s made them rich.”

“New Zealand,” said Greg.

“What?”

“That’s where they go. Apparently the apocalypse has a business-class lounge in Queenstown.”

“Good skiing,” said Mitch.

“That’s the extraordinary thing,” Anna continued. “The escape fantasy. They’ve got more wealth and influence than entire countries, and the logical conclusion is to buy somewhere they don’t have to live with everyone else.”

“Sounds rational,” said Tony.

“Collectively it’s a bit fucked.”

Anna shook her head. “They think owning the product means owning the production. The bunker doesn’t solve anything. It just moves the problem inside the bunker.”

A skinny dog wandered through the bar, sniffed Greg’s foot, found it disappointing and moved on.

Isobel was watching a family on the beach. Two children were constructing something elaborate out of wet sand while their father filmed them with his phone.

“There’s something else about that escape argument,” she said. “It assumes the world is going to shit in the first place.”

“Well, bits of it are,” said Kelly.

“Of course. But change isn’t necessarily decline. We always compare whatever’s happening now with some imaginary stable period when everything supposedly worked.”

“The seventies,” said Tony.

“You had lead in petrol, asbestos in houses and no seatbelts in half the cars…”

Adam set his phone down.

“There’s a distinction here. Some things genuinely get worse. Concentration of wealth, declining trust, loss of political influence. Those are measurable, at least in principle. But people then turn it into a story about civilisation collapsing.”

“Exactly,” said Anna. “And the real fucking trick is that everyone’s been sold the same bullshit. YOLO, live your best life, follow your dreams, manifest your fucking destiny. Every poor c*nt in the Western world is told they’re the centre of the universe, that everything they desire is just waiting for them to want it badly enough. Meanwhile, the people who actually control the tv channels are busy making sure the rest of us pay them for our wants.”

“That’s a very useful distinction,” said Marcin.

“Not always,” said Greg. “If you’re the bloke losing his house ’cause the rates are up, ’cause Bluey started a war in Iraq or Iran, civilisation might look pretty fucking collapsed from where you’re standing.”

“Fair,” said Anna. “But that’s the point. We have to distinguish actual individual loss of agency from nostalgia, c*unts shouldn’t leverage themselves if their houses ain’t buildt on rocks.”

“They don’t know any better, a coupla mill for a fibro schack on a floodplain in Brissie, river views maaate!” said Kelly. “Told when to eat, where to sleep and what to f*cking think.”

“And we’ve never been better off.”

A fishing boat moved slowly across the far edge of the lagoon. Behind it, the sky was turning the peculiar pink of a tropical sunset, while inland a heavy bank of cloud was gathering over the palms.

“Anyway,” said Mitch, “speaking of hierarchy, I was reading something about the caste system they had over here, the thing I was wondering, is whether caste was originally about ethnicity. You know, one group arriving, dominating another, turning the whole thing into a social order.”

“That’s one of the old explanations,” said Anna. “Aryans and Dravidians, conquerors and conquered. But it’s much too simple. Languages, populations, religious traditions and social hierarchies have all mixed and changed over thousands of years.”

“So not racial in any straightforward sense. It’s inherited social status, with a great deal of local variation. Occupation, marriage, ritual status, property, political authority. Ethnic distinctions can become entangled with it, but you can’t reduce the whole thing to race.”

Greg reached for another cashew.

“Seems humans are extraordinarily good at inventing reasons why some people should be allowed to tell other people what to do.”

“Or why some people should do all the work,” said Kelly.

“That’s the important part,” said Anna. “Once you’ve got a hierarchy, you need a story explaining why it’s legitimate.”

“Religion,” said Tony.

“Sometimes. Ancestry. Merit. Tradition. Divine order. Market efficiency. Whatever works.”

“Market efficiency?” asked Adam.

“Of course. The modern version doesn’t necessarily say you were born superior. It says you’ve demonstrated superiority through the accumulation of capital.”

“That’s not entirely fair,” said Adam. “Markets can reward innovation and productive activity.”

“They can. But accumulated wealth also changes the conditions under which everyone else competes. Property earns returns. Capital buys access. Political influence can protect existing advantages. And then we describe the resulting distribution as if it were simply the outcome of individual merit.”

“So,” said Greg, “caste with spreadsheets.”

“Not exactly,” said Anna. “Caste can legally and socially constrain who you marry, what work you do, and where you belong. Economic class is more mobile, and there are real differences. But both can reproduce advantage across generations.”

“That’s the point,” said Marcin. “The mechanism of reproduction. A hierarchy doesn’t have to be fixed to perpetuate itself.”

“Like cricket,” said Tony. “Selectors keep picking the same blokes, at some point they’ll come right.”

“UNless the fundamentals are gone.”

A small gust caught the corner of a tablecloth, sending a handful of napkins skittering across the sand. Adam leaned forward to catch one.

“There’s a difference between capital and caste, though. Capital is transferable. You can sell it, invest it, lose it. You can have a political system where everyone gets one vote, but where access to decision-makers, media ownership, lobbying and investment decisions are distributed very unequally.”

“Not necessarily a conspiracy,” said Isobel.

“No. That’s what makes it interesting. You don’t need one. Everyone can behave quite rationally within their own incentives and still produce a collectively damaging result.”

“There’s your economics again,” said Greg.

“There’s always economics,” said Anna. “The problem is that economists sometimes describe a system as if the preferences, resources and rules are independent of the activity occurring inside it. Every transaction changes the distribution of resources. Every investment changes future productive possibilities. Every advertisement potentially changes preferences. Every political donation can alter access. You can’t just pretend the system is standing still while everyone optimises.”

“Thermodynamics,” said Greg, “but with LinkedIn.”

Kelly looked towards the children on the beach. A sandcastle had acquired a moat and a rather impressive outer wall. The father was filming.

“What I find strange,” she said, “is how much attention is now devoted to persuading people they have agency while making it increasingly difficult for them to exercise it.”

“Explain,” said Mitch.

“Everything’s a choice. Your career, your brand, your health, your investments, your personal development. You’re told you can become anything. But housing costs what it costs, employment depends on decisions made elsewhere, and half the services you use are controlled by a handful of companies.”

“Choice of fourteen different streaming services,” said Greg.

“Exactly. Infinite entertainment. Limited power. Eating cake. Bread and Circus”

“Not infinite,” said Marcin, “if we’re talking about attention, that’s the scarce resource. You can generate cat content almost without limit, but you cannot generate more human attention.”

“Ah,” said Anna. “And that’s where it gets particularly nasty.”

“Here we fucking go,” said Tony.

“Think about the cricket. You said nobody can bat because they can’t concentrate. But attention hasn’t simply disappeared. It’s being competed for. Entire industries are devoted to capturing it, interrupting it, measuring it and selling access to it.”

“Still the batsman’s responsibility to leave outside off stump,” said Adam.

“Of course. Individuals retain responsibility. But if you build an environment designed to fragment attention, you shouldn’t be surprised when sustained attention becomes harder.”

“You’re saying capitalism ruined the forward defensive,” said Greg.

“I’m saying there’s a commercial incentive to keep people engaged with things that produce revenue, which isn’t necessarily the same as keeping them engaged with things that matter.”

“Finally,” said Tony, “a relatable economic theory. Maximising individual scoring rates has become more important than maximising collective totals.”

The waiter returned with another round. This time Kelly asked his name. He told them it was Nimal.

“Thanks, Nimal,” she said.

Tony looked faintly embarrassed, “champion.”

The air was becoming noticeably still. The sea beyond the sandbar had lost its whitecaps, and the palms stood almost motionless against the approaching clouds.

Isobel took a drink. “There’s a problem with the attention argument, though. It can become a bit patronising. People aren’t passive idiots being hypnotised by their phones.”

“No,” said Anna. “And it would be ridiculous to pretend there was some golden age of universal critical thinking. People have always been distracted, manipulated, frightened, bored and occasionally thick.”

“Occasionally?” asked Mitch.

“But the scale and precision of the mechanisms have changed. And more importantly, attention isn’t just an individual capacity. It’s social.”

“How so?” asked Adam.

“And if we all spent the next hour watching different videos, we’d still be physically together, but that collective attention would disappear.”

“Which is why,” said Marcin, “the individualisation of attention might erode social cohesion.”

“Yes. And if you combine that with a concentration of economic and political influence, you get a strange asymmetry. The people with the most influence can coordinate, while everyone else is increasingly addressed as an isolated consumer.”

“Hold on,” said Adam. “That makes it sound as though social media only fragments people. It also enables collective action. Organising protests, exposing corruption, finding communities that couldn’t previously communicate.”

“Exactly,” said Anna. “The same technology that allows millions of people to coordinate also allows whoever controls the technology to coordinate millions of people. And those millions think they’re acting independently.”

“Well, they are, aren’t they?” said Mitch.

“Individually, yes. But someone else decides what they see, who they reach, what gets amplified and what disappears. One week it’s Black Lives Matter, next week everyone’s got a rainbow flag on their Instagram profile, then some poor bastard called Jane Doe becomes the centre of the universe for forty-eight hours. Everyone thinks they’re participating in a movement, but half the time they’re just participating in whatever the algorithm’s decided is worth giving a f*ck about this week. You can organise a revolution on their platform, but they still own the f*cking light switch.”

“Unless the revolution takes the switch,” said Greg.

“Now you’re getting somewhere,” said Anna.

“So what’s your actual proposition?” asked Isobel.

Anna considered the question.

“That increasing concentrations of capital and political influence can contract individual agency, and that this contraction is reinforced when attention becomes individualised and capital is progressively freed from social obligations.”

“Better,” said Adam. “But deregulation isn’t automatically bad. Some regulation protects incumbents. Removing it can increase competition.”

“Agreed. The question is what gets deregulated, for whom, and with what consequences.”

“And capital concentration isn’t automatically bad either,” he continued. “Large firms can mobilise resources that small firms can’t. Infrastructure, research, industrial investment.”

“Also true. So the proposition isn’t that all concentration is harmful. It’s that concentration becomes socially damaging when it translates into unequal control over the conditions of everyone else’s agency.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Isobel.

Greg scratched his chin.

“Can someone explain why this isn’t just caste again?”

Greg looked towards the bar. “The question isn’t whether you’re a Brahmin, a billionaire or the bloke who owns the pub. It’s who gets to decide what we fucking drink. The Pope, the barman, some Instagram guru telling you to manifest a healthier liver, or your girlfriend deciding you’ve had enough. And the real bastard is whoever gets to make the rules while convincing you it was your own fucking idea.”

Mitch was staring at the sky.

“There’s something bothering me about the whole argument.”

“Only one thing?” asked Kelly.

“If power concentrates, attention fragments and people lose agency, isn’t that decline? Why are we making such a fuss about not calling it decline?”

“Because,” said Anna, “decline of what? Which part? For whom? Compared with when? Suppose women gain legal rights, workers gain political representation, life expectancy improves, but economic inequality increases and community participation weakens. Is society improving or declining?”

“Both,” said Isobel. “Change is multidimensional. There isn’t one universal scoreboard called Civilisation.”

“Unless it’s cricket,” Tony shot in.

“Yeah, but no one’s building bunkers in Durban,” Anna continued. “Imagine the team’s got genuine structural problems, but instead of fixing them, everyone starts banging on about the collapse of Test cricket. Once collapse becomes inevitable, every bastard decides the only thing left to do is have a slog.”

“And then,” said Tony, “the c*nts collapse.”

Marcin looked towards the sea. “Yeh, but you cannot escape being part of the team. Even if the future is uncertain, even if everything changes, your existence remains relational. You’re here, among other people, dependent on the same system.”

“Sounds suspiciously spiritual,” said Tony.

“It’s quite practical,” said Marcin. “The bloke in the bunker still needs food, energy, maintenance, medicine. He is not outside society. He has merely constructed a very expensive and inconvenient relationship with it.”

“With neighbours that f*cking hate his guts,” said Greg.

“And no pub,” said Kelly.

A few heavy drops of rain struck the palm-leaf roof. Somewhere behind them a motorbike started, coughed twice and roared away along the sandy road.

Adam was turning his empty bottle between his fingers.

“There’s still a question of agency. If we’re saying individuals are shaped by their social and economic conditions, how much responsibility can we reasonably assign to their choices?”

“Some,” said Anna. “Otherwise the whole argument collapses into determinism. But we have to recognise that the conditions of choice are themselves socially produced.”

“Like caste.”

“Yes. And class, education, property, geography, citizenship, ethnicity. All sorts of things can shape what options are actually available.”

“Not the same things,” Isobel said.

“No, not interchangeable. Ethnicity isn’t caste, caste isn’t class, and none of them can be reduced to money. But they can overlap and reinforce one another.”

“Then why do people keep treating ethnic identity as if it explains everything?” asked Mitch.

“Because it’s visible, emotionally powerful and relatively easy to turn into a story,” said Kelly. “You can point at a group of people and get them to shoot other people not like them. It’s harder to point a gun at a structure of property rights, tax rules and inherited advantage.”

“Probably why the rich c*nts keep their money in trusts,” said Greg. “Hard to shoot a trust.”

“There’s something in that,” said Marcin. “We always think of social stability as the absence of change. But maintaining any social arrangement requires continuous work.”

“Yes,” said Anna. “Institutions, relationships, trust, infrastructure. They persist because people keep reproducing them.”

Greg leaned back in his chair.

“All right. Suppose we’ve got this society where capital’s concentrating, everyone’s staring at their phones, politicians listen to people with money and nobody trusts anyone. What’s the actual answer?”

“Depends what you’re trying to change,” said Adam. “Competition policy, political finance, education, taxation, labour institutions. Different problems require different mechanisms. There’s no single policy switch labelled Fix Society.”

“Could be,” said Mitch. “Probably owned by a private equity fund.”

Anna laughed. “I think the starting point is recognising that agency is not purely individual. Your capacity to act depends partly on the capabilities and cooperation of other people.”

“So freedom isn’t just being left alone,” said Isobel.

“Not necessarily. Being left alone is wonderful if you’ve got sufficient mates. resources and opportunity. Less wonderful if you’ve maximised your isolation and are still completely dependent on everyone else, whose gunna make the chips baby.”

The children had abandoned their sandcastle. The tide was working its way into the moat, slowly dismantling an afternoon’s engineering. Their father took one last photograph before the outer wall collapsed.

“Look at that,” said Mitch. “Everyone remembers Canute as the arrogant c*nt who thought he could stop the tide” said Greg. “Poor bastard understood the limits of power and went down in history as an idiot.”

For a while nobody said anything. The lagoon had become almost perfectly still, and the first mosquitoes were beginning to investigate the exposed ankles beneath the table.

Adam checked his phone again. “Tommorrow, one pm. our time.”

“Perfect. We can get a morning session in and be back for the cricket.”

“You know what the other problem is with all these theories of decline? They assume the future ought to resemble the past. But the past isn’t available. Every action changes the conditions of the next action. You can’t restore some previous equilibrium because the people, resources, institutions and information have already changed.”

“So the solution isn’t going backwards.”

“No. Nor is it assuming forwards means better. Forwards is just inevtiable given now. The point is to work out what forms of change preserve or expand people’s capacity to participate in shaping their own lives.”

Greg frowned.

“That’s a lot of words for ‘don’t be a c*nt’.”

“Not quite,” said Adam. “Because c*nts aren’t the only problem. You can have perfectly decent people making individually sensible decisions that collectively undermine the things they depend on.”

“Such as?”

“Everyone driving instead of taking the bus. Everyone buying property as an investment. Every company trying to minimise labour costs. Every platform competing for attention.”

“Every bloke trying to get upwind of everyone else on the lagoon,” said Mitch.

“Exactly,” said Anna. “And when everyone does it, you end up with a very different outcome from the one anyone intended.”

Tony looked offended.

“I was upwind because I had right of way.”

“You were upwind because you couldn’t turn.” Kelly smiled. “There’s your theory of society. Eight billion peeps trying to get upwind of each other, nobody able to turn, and everyone claiming right of way.”

They looked out at the lagoon. The instructor was packing the last of the equipment into a small truck. He waved towards the bar. Tony waved back.

“Champion,” he said.

“What’s the instructor’s name?”

The lights came on above the bar, and the one that had been blinking finally surrendered altogether.

Greg drained his beer.

“So what have we established?”

“That caste isn’t ethnicity,” said Mitch.

“That wealth isn’t necessarily merit,” said Kelly.

“That concentration isn’t necessarily domination,” said Adam.

“That change isn’t necessarily decline,” said Isobel.

“That agency is relational,” said Marcin.

“That no bastard can bat for more than a session anymore,” said Tony.

Anna looked at the empty bottles, the darkening beach and the seven people who had spent the better part of an hour disagreeing without managing to fall out.

“And that social cohesion isn’t something you possess,” she said. “It’s something you keep doing.”

Greg considered that for a moment, stood, stretched, and looked towards the bar. “Time for another round.”

A distant rumble of thunder rolled across the lagoon. And outside, beyond, the first proper rain of the evening began to fall.