Devil’s Advocate: Marching backwards to the Promised Land

The increasing power of big business, the curbing of civil liberties and customer 'fobbing off' hardly count as progress, argues Martin Brampton. Just look at recent developments...

We have no choice but to move forwards in time and natural human optimism likes to suppose that we progress as we go. But it seems we are pretty selective in the measures we use to demonstrate progress. How does the European Commission's recent ruling on Microsoft fit into our ideas for a hopeful future?

Interesting questions have been raised by New Economics Foundation, which has advocated the use of its Measure of Domestic Progress or MDP in place of the familiar Gross Domestic Product or GDP. It is pointed out that GDP can be highly misleading because it measures only the formally constituted economy.

Any economist knows that if, instead of doing their own washing, everybody were to do their neighbour's washing for a fee, household budgets would be unaffected. But the GDP would increase, because laundry would have moved from a domestic chore to the formal economy. Indeed, a good deal of this kind of thing has actually happened, as people tend to work more and pay for services they might once have done for themselves.

MDP is designed to reflect progress in quality of life, sustainability and the benefits of unpaid work such as household labour. And while GDP has risen dramatically since the end of the Second World War, MDP has struggled to rise at all. In fact, it did rise for a while but peaked in 1976 only to fall sharply during the 1980s.

This seems to coincide with a period in which big organisations, both commercial and government, have moved to distance themselves from the individual. While there are occasional examples of genuine communication taking place through call centres, mostly so-called customer service groups exist to persuade and pacify rather than to provide any kind of service. They are better described as fobbing off departments.

Regular readers will recall the hardly untypical case of the high street bank that hides its 0870 telephone revenues behind a screen of confusion. Its customer service groups repeatedly denied the existence of such revenues until confronted with indisputable evidence, then retired crossly behind an assertion that the bank could do whatever its commercial judgement chose.

Politics is now no better, as government and even political parties adopt the same tactics. Put your views to the party that you think can represent you, and what happens? Quite likely you will be encouraged to phone a call centre, where whatever you say will be discarded and every effort will be made to advocate the ideas the party wants you to support. The conversation will probably add to your phone bill and to party funds but the communication is likely to be strictly one way.

What does this have to do with Microsoft? It is simply a striking example of how large organisations are steadily advancing their own goals at the expense of their customers. The EC is claiming to be exerting a degree of control over Microsoft, yet the reality is that current political and legal action is inadequate against ruthless corporate development.

In the time since MDP peaked, companies have become much more assertive and less inclined to conform to legal constraints. Microsoft calls it playing hardball. The technique is to do whatever is required to advance corporate interests on the assumption that by the time legal action can become effective, opponents will be too weakened to count and the issues will have moved on.

While all this is going on, the individual is steadily losing rights. You are still welcome to take a holiday abroad. But before long, you are likely to have to carry identification, with a trend towards the inclusion of RFID tags to allow your every movement to be tracked. Increasingly, when you leave your own country, you are exposed to the risk of being put in prison without trial for indefinite periods. Or even forcibly removed to another country that deals violently with prisoners.

Is this an inexorable trend? Is the world becoming a place fit only for the rich and powerful? Does the individual now have a role only as a cipher in the process of consumption that supports our economic system? Are all our real choices steadily disappearing?