Magic and romance

And so Victoria is back in COVID-19 lockdown.

Australians have a habit of wishful thinking when it comes to what government can achieve. For all that pundits of various political persuasions love to glorify "Aussie larikins" and "ANZAC spirit" and "knockabout blokes" who all have the virtue of being muscularly independent and smarter than the authorities, when one observes actual Australians en masse a rather different picture emerges.

Above all, there seems to be an endless supply of optimism about the capabilities, resources, and knowledge of our governments. It's only this optimistic expectation that can account for the shock and outrage displayed on "social" and traditional media, as ministers and public health officials explain the latest data on COVID-19. Victoria's Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, quite understandably snapped today when asked what "went wrong with" COVID-19 contact tracing, after he'd just explained that his team has identified over 10,000 contacts of 12 cases in the space of about 72 hours.

"That is absurd... Contact tracing is an integral part of how to get control. It does not do magic."

I think it's not quite magic that people want, though. It's something slightly different. Arthur C Clarke famously declared in one of his "three laws":

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If it was magic people really wanted, they would have started queueing around the block for their vaccines before yesterday, and melting down the COVID vaccine hotline before today. Vaccines are, from the perspective of a time traveller from the early nineteenth century, nothing less than magic. Something weird happens though, when the magic wears off. We see magical technologies as boring, and then we stop seeing them as technologies at all.

For example, a few days ago I went to the local post office to pick up some mail and send a couple of postcards. As is so commonly the case, I had to wait while a older lady loudly declared that she was in a hurry because she "hadn't parked [her car] properly" (as if this was the postal worker's fault), and expressed her outrage at the "ridiculous" postage cost to send a letter to Canada. We can hand a stranger a written personal communication held within flimsy paper packets to literally the other side of the planet, with only a name and location written on the front, and be confident it will arrive at its intended destination within a few weeks - all for the price of less than an hour's work at the legal minimum wage. This is extraordinary. Yet every day you can wander into your local post office, if you still have one, and hear someone loudly complaining about how "ridiculous" the price is or that some minor bureaucratic requirement like an additional declaration sticker is "outrageous". I've never heard anyone exclaim that it is extraordinary the phenomenon of "international post" exists at all. And technology? Well, nobody ever accuses the post office of being a "tech company".

Indeed, sending a physical letter through the post is on its way to being described as something else entirely. Postal services, and especially international post, appeared in their modern sense in the age of steam railways and sailing ships. People talk not of the "magic of sail", but rather of the "romance of sail". And to be honest, it's the "romance" of sail that probably attracts me to the revival of sail-powered cargo that I wrote about in my last note. But what do we mean by "romance" in this sense?

I suspect it's partially to do with ideas of luxury, and partially to do with danger and the expected risk of failure. The "romance of steam" comes from people imagining themselves in First Class, chatting up a French duke or wealthy Russian widow. The "romance of sail", though, is something different. The romance of sail comes from living with the danger of being drowned in a typhoon or captured by pirates, the fear that your loved one might be, and the uncertainty about when your goods or your message might arrive.

This probably explains why there isn't really a "romance of post". The international postal service is, in the majority of countries, simply too reliable. It might have been "romantic" under sail, but now it runs through the same shipping and logistics channels as everything else. It's not even boring, it just ...is.

Writing in 2015, Tim Maugham had quite a different experience to Robert Hassan when he took his own trip on a container ship - this time from South Korea to China. Maugham wrote about his experience for the BBC in a piece called "The invisible network that keeps the world running", pointing to the fact that this enormous infrastructure is clearly visible in every port city, and yet also somehow not seen. Maugham gestures towards something else here. Pre-1970s ports were at the heart of cities, surrounded by the homes of those who worked there. Ports were messy, organic places, alive with both people and goods.

A modern port, and indeed the entire international shipping system, is a gigantic and well ordered machine. Sailors remain on their ships in most ports, and the docks are full of goods, but largely empty of people. And what is moving through those ports? Nobody involved really knows. They're simply shifting anonymous containers according to whatever opaque instructions the algorithm provided. It dawned on me today that the shipping container exemplifies most of the things that are terrible about modern living. Relentless stnadardisation, extreme commodification and alienation from work, and wastefulness on a global scale as products are shipped between half a dozen countries for each stage of manufacture. The creation of shipping containers killed traditional ports, which simply aren't large enough to enable efficient container operations, and they killed the jobs those ports relied on, since they are so much more efficient to load and unload. And then the dead ports got "revitalised" into "real estate assets" in the form of expensive apartments too valuable to let anyone actually live in. Meanwhile, the maritime workers unions, historically so strong and "militant", have been crushed everywhere, as the jobs melted away.

Relentless efficiency, excessive puntuality, and reliability to the point that it disappears - there's nothing "romantic" about any of this. It's magic. But it's also ...boring. The blocking of the Suez canal earlier this year was international news partially because with COVID-19 still raging a lot of people are stuck at home looking for distractions. But it was also because international shipping had become, briefly, interesting again. We suddenly had to think about how all that stuff gets to us, and then about whether we really need all of it: "Why on earth are there cargo ships that big? Maybe there shouldn't be."

Perhaps the secret to a better world is to make it romantic again, by remembering the magic around us.

=> All at sea | The invisible network that keeps the world running