EcoLogics

The following news make headlines in the Guardian today:

‘Ministers are planning to force GPs to improve their performance by posting patients’ comments about them on an NHS website, the Guardian can reveal. […] [Health Minister Ben] Bradshaw told the Guardian that he wants the site to do for healthcare what Amazon has done for the book trade and Trip Adviser for the travel industry: providing positive and negative feedback, warts and all, from consumers’(1).

Bradshaw’s comparison speaks volumes of the ideology that drives New Labour. New Labour’s promised land—what we might call ‘Amazonia’—is ostensibly a place where a combination of the internet’s panoptical eye and the rule of metrics works in the best interests of one and all. Alas, in this promised land, as in the (online) Amazon, the real order involves what Marx once described as commodity fetishism: the process whereby the seemingly magical qualities of goods—or in this case, of services— conceal the human exploitation that sustains their production. The value of human labour in the NHS, as in Amazon or any other organisation, cannot be reduced to the kind of populist measures being proposed by Bradshaw.

It is no coincidence, in this sense, that less than two weeks ago, the Times revealed that Amazon has a draconian policy when it comes to disciplining its workers—not least on matters relating to its workers’ health. According to the newspaper,

‘Amazon…employing thousands of casual workers in Britain to fetch and package items under arduous conditions. An investigation by The Sunday Times at Amazon’s enormous warehouse in Bedfordshire has found that workers were:

– Warned that the company refuses to allow sick leave, even if the worker has a legitimate doctor’s note. Taking a day off sick, even with a note, results in a penalty point. A worker with six points faces dismissal.
– Made to work a compulsory 10-hour overnight shift at the end of a five-day week. The overnight shit, which runs from Saturday evening to 5am on Sunday, means they have to work every day of the week.
– Set quotas for the number of items to be picked or packed in an hour that even a manager described as “ridiculous”. Those packing heavy Xbox games consoles had to pack 140 an hour to reach their target.
– Set against each other with a bonus scheme that penalises staff if any other member of their group fails to hit the quota.
– Made to walk up to 14 miles a shift to collect items for packing.
– Given only one break of 15 minutes and another of 20 minutes per eight-hour shift and told they had to notify staff when going to the toilet. Amazon said workers wanted the shorter breaks in exchange for shorter shifts’(2).

On the day when the King’s Fund is reporting that the NHS is ‘fast losing its compassion‘, Bradshaw’s comparison is at once richly ironic, and no doubt deliberate. The world of Amazon is the world of New Labour, if not vice-versa; the party, which is reportedly now led by Peter Mandelson, has become synonymous with the kind of neoliberalism that is embodied by Amazon’s practices, and which underpins the financierism that has led to the current economic disaster.

This ideology must ultimately lead New Labour to lose power. Most people in the party probably know this, but their leaders up and down the country are so utterly beholden to a clientelistic relationship with big business that they are unable to change political course. The corruption of the party is now arguably so absolute that the government is about to squander a golden opportunity for a change in direction—a change that would have been made possible by the collapse of the banking system, and by the need to engage in a de facto nationalisation of the sector that has pushed hardest for neoliberal policies.

The only question now is whether the Liberal Democrats will be able to regain a semblance of authority—an authority lost with the election of Nick Clegg as party leader—in order to exploit a hung parliament. In the absence of this, the New Conservatives will only be able to offer more of the same—they too, are the advocates of the kind of Neo-Darwinian jungle that is destroying the very fabric of our nation.

By way of two postscripts:

1) Since when does a government minister champion a private firm?

2) We may be stuck with New Labour for the time being, but we do have a choice as to whether to use Amazon.

References

1) ‘Patients to rate and review their GPs on NHS website’ in Guardian Online, December 30, 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/30/doctors-rating-website-nhs, viewed December 30, 2008.
2) ‘Revealed: Amazon staff punished for being ill’ in Times Online, 14 December 2008, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article5337770.ece, viewed December 30, 2008.

The origins of Pluto Plattering are open to dispute. One theory has it that the first Pluto Platters were cake tins. Another suggests that they were actually cookie tins. Yet another speaks of pie tins. Whatever the case, there seems to be a consensus that it was college students that threw the tins around.

The ‘around’ in ‘Threw the tins around’ is actually quite precise: the tins did spin, and, if contemporary theories of physics are valid, lift was generated by a combination of gyroscopic effects and what arguably became one of the most traditional of airfoils.

Each of these points requires some elucidation:

The most traditional of airfoils: legend has it that a bakery was established in the late 19th century by one William Russel Frisbie, who named it the Frisbie Pie Company. The company reached the peak of its production of airfoils—well, of airfoilable pie tins, with removable pies inside—in 1956, when 80,000 were distributed in shops in the southeastern corner of New England. The tins became, in effect, pie-less wings flown by the wrists of leisurely college students who yelled ‘Frisbie!’ as a kind of heads-up.

A pie tin may not look very much like a wing, but actually, if you were to cut a pie tin in half and examine it in cross-section—and if, of course, you were to know something about the physics of winging—you might well see a family resemblance between a pie tin and the wing of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The 787 is not quite a flying pie tin, even if this aircraft’s passengers might one day feel a ‘family resemblance’ with the contents of pie tins. Such differences (or similarities) to one side, the 787, like those Frisbie Pie Company tins, flies thanks in no small part to the fact that the different forms or directions of drag on the wing are such that there is far less horizontal resistance than there is vertical resistance to the air. The shapes of tin and wing are similar in that both allow their respective objects to move more easily in a horizontal than they do in a vertical direction.

Gyroscopic effects: one might be tempted leave the physics of Pluto Plattering there. But to do so would be to miss a key dimension of the flying success of the Pluto Platter. Unlike a 787, let alone an Airbus A380, a pie tin can be grabbed, and thrown with a marvellous ‘gyroscopic’ effect. In the manner of a spinning top, the pie tin’s spinning, or rather its angular momentum, has the effect of stabilizing the tin and preventing it from tilting (unless, of course, it is thrown ‘with a tilt’ in which case the same effect works to preserve that tilt). This is because an angular force spreads the mass of the pie tin away from its centre of mass at a 90 degree angle to the axis of its rotation.

This being so, the best way not to throw a pie tin (or a cookie or cake tin) is to do so as you would a ball. No, you must give that pie tin a good flip to ensure that it spins. Indeed, were it not for the combination of airfoil-ability + gyroscopic effects, throwing a Pluto Platter would be almost as unremarkable (tantrums to one side) as throwing around pans, forks, spatulas, or rolling pins.

So the pie tin had its own peculiar way of flying, and indeed if you had grabbed a Frisbie Pie Tin by the rim, if you had rotated your body slightly to the right (or to the left if you were to be so unfortunate as to be right-handed), and if you had then flung arm, wrist, hand, tin and soul into the ether, then something seemingly miraculous would have happened: the platter would have straightened out into a trajectory that, in the manner of an object not unlike a wingless top, would have maintained a marvelously angular momentum until it was vanquished by the forces of anti-levity—or indeed by the brutal catch of another wristed hand.

I refer in this way to the other marvel that is Pluto Plattering. Then as now, a Pluto Platter is flung so that someone else might be given the opportunity to enjoy the platter’s trajectory, and so that s/he might plan, without planning, to interrupt that trajectory with the most distal of the own extremities.

* * *

I’ve been so keen to explain the early history and physics of Pluto Plattering that I’ve neglected to explain how it was that flying pie tins became ‘Pluto Platters’.

Actually, before they were given this name, they had another name: ‘flyin saucers’. Both names reflect the Cold War passion for UFOs and the exploration of space. And indeed the inventor of the Pluto Platter—if we can say that any such device ever had just one inventor—sought to cash in on the twin crazes. The man in question was and remains one Walter Frederick Morrison, a WWII fighter-bomber pilot who was shot down over Italy and spent some time in the infamous Stalag 13.

Morrison apparently began by experimenting not with pie tins, or even cake pans (which he did later use) but with the lids of popcorn cans. After the war, and armed with his knowledge of aeronautics and the limitations of popcorn lids, Morrison played a key role in the development of the science of Pluto Plattering. In 1946 he reportedly sketched a new design for a device which he named the Whirlo-Way—perhaps the best name ever given to Pluto Platters. But the real breakthrough came about when he got an investor to provide the finance for what was to be a truly revolutionary ‘pie tin’: one that would break, for once and for all, the hitherto indissoluble link between the culinary and the whirling arts. The new tin would stop being a tin by virtue of being manufactured with an extra-ordinary substance that came to be called ‘plastic‘.

* * *

Today plastic may be reviled in more ways than one. But plastic was not always regarded as an evil, disposable substance. We have only to revisit Roland Barthes’ wonderful little essay ‘Plastic’ to get a sense of how much opinions have changed since 1957, the date when the original French version of the essay was published, and two years after the first Pluto Platters were cast:

‘Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic, the products of which have just been gathered in an exhibition, is in essence the stuff of alchemy. At the entrance of the stand, the public waits in a long queue in order to witness the accomplishment of the magical operation par excellence: the transmutation of matter. An ideally-shaped machine, tubulated and oblong (a shape well suited to suggest the secret of an itinerary) effortlessly draws, out of a heap of greenish crystals, shiny and fluted dressing-room tidies. At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished, human object; and between these two extremes, nothing; nothing but a transit, hardly watched over by an attendant in cloth cap, half-god, half-robot.

So, more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible. And it is this, in fact, which makes it a miraculous substance: a miracle is always a sudden transformation of nature. Plastic remains impregnated throughout with this wonder: it is less a thing than the trace of a movement.

And as the movement here is almost infinite, transforming the original crystals into a multitude of more and more startling objects, plastic is, all told, a spectacle to be deciphered: the very spectacle of its end-products. At the sight of each terminal form (suitcase, brush, car-body, toy, fabric, tube, basin or paper), the mind does not cease from considering the original matter as an enigma. This is because the quick-change artistry of plastic is absolute: it can become buckets as well as jewels. Hence a perpetual amazement, the reverie of man at the sight of the proliferating forms of matter, and the connections he detects between the singular of the origin and plural of the effects. And this amazement is a pleasurable one, since the scope of the transformations gives man the measure of his power, and since the very itinerary of plastic gives him the euphoria of a prestigious free-wheeling through Nature.’(1)

* * *

We find in Barthes’ writing the elements for a semiotics of whirlo-waying in its infancy. If plastic was a matter of perpetual amazement, if the quick-change artistry of plastic transformations gave men (and presumably women too) the pleasure of the measure of their power, let alone the euphoria of a free-wheeling movement through Nature, then the physics of the Pluto Platter combined this symbolic-material substrate with its flying equivalent to produce what was quite literally a revolutionary effect. Each time a Pluto Platter was thrown, we might say that a transformation was transformed again (and again and again). The Pluto Platter became, in this sense, the most modern of flying pie tins.

Better yet, and perhaps heralding what would in future become a world of all too disposable plastic, this modernity could be achieved simply by casting away—perhaps one should say casting a-side—an object that thereby acquired a life of levity in the sense of levitation, or in the sense of the etymological origin of both words (levitas, levis, light, or the lightness of being).

Of course, the Pluto Platters were not cast into the ether for their own sake, though one can well imagine that this happened quite frequently in the early days. No, the platters were whirled into that angular momentum for the benefit of co-Pluto-Platerees or co-Whirlo-Wayees. In this mutual dialectic of casting-something-a-side-to-experience-a-flight-of-equilibrium we find perhaps a foretaste of the (itself mythologised) ‘spirit of the 60s’. Unfortunately, we also find a kind of anti-model, a perfect inversion of what some might well regard as today’s ’spirit’: in 2007 we are all invited to perform the opposite (bankers might say apposite) transformation: to give up literally and metaphorically on revolutionary flights in order to become plastic objects, or the objects of plastic.

Perhaps we need to do more Whirlo-Waying.

References

Note: the historical and physical information has been drawn from several websites. See for example http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa980218.htm, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisbee.

1) Quote from ‘Plastic’, in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972, pp. 97-98.