Enshittified Slop
Things (the personal & professional)
Pedro Oliveira are the guest editors of Diseña #30, themed around Minor Gestures. Full call for papers here.
I responded to 20 questions for the podcast Unique Ways, which felt strange when there wasn’t an exchange on other end. In any case, listen on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts.
My article “Moments of Palestine” was published in Disegno #40: Freedom. Buy a copy. I’ve also scanned the article so you can read it :)
Books:
Design Otherwise: Transforming Design Education in the Arab Region is available for purchase online, or order it at your favourite bookstore.
Designerly Ways of Knowing is available with a new cover (big up Pali!), and is now on its third print! Order here.
I.
In 2009, I met Yvonne, an important person at a big advertising agency who was working on developing an initiative that did not exist: social media as a form of advertising and marketing. I was fresh out of uni, working at a small marketing agency that was unstable due to the recession, and being young and fearless, I cold-called Yvonne, and she met me for coffee and gave me a job.
You don’t meet many people named Yvonne, and she was an original. She struck fear into the hearts of almost every employee that came across her. Yvonne was the type who made you cry and the subject of conversation at the “water cooler.” One of her assistants told me that when her extensive expenses were soaked in water, she made sure said assistant used a hair dryer to dry piles of paper out individually, because that was thousands of unclaimed dollars that were going to waste. The assistant hung a clothes line and started the work, ensuring all the money was accounted for.
Yvonne hated Vancouver for the same reasons I did. She chain smoked unapologetically in the era of smoking bans (she was thrown off a plane for smoking in the bathroom), and invited me to dinner in places I would have never encountered because i) I was young, ii) I didn’t live in Toronto long enough, and iii) young people are attracted to trendy places. They were places only someone who was from Toronto – a seasoned Torontonian who knew places that were beyond trendy – and who had access to a post-2007 expense account.
Some time in 2011, in a fancy hotel with a circular bar that looked like the W but was not the W, she gave me a compliment I will never forget: “I am going to look at you in 33 years and you will not have aged.”
I worked with Yvonne in two capacities: first at the advertising agency, then as a freelancer. It was brief, but I learned a lot. When she did not like your idea, or you complained, she would tell you to stop whining and bring her solutions. When she said that to me it made sense. I never went to her with a problem without a proposal ever again, and that has led me throughout my work and still does.
Yvonne did not waste time with unnecessary pleasantries and she appreciated people who did their job well. She was kind despite the fear she instilled in people.
I’m writing about Yvonne because I am reminded of her when I think about the saying “no one wants to work anymore” and the word of the year “slop”. Even though she never said no one wants to work anymore I know it’s how she felt.
Yvonne is a good leeway into slop and enshittification, and I want nothing more than to write her an email and take her out to dinner on my non-expense account because I work at a university and not tell her about my life but talk to her about how everything is so shit now, how expressing emotions is read as bullying, how companies remind everyone to be kind and considerate to their staff due to a combination of deteriorating services for a high price, a culture of feelings and oversensitivity, and increased public aggression and individualism.
I just want to hear what she would say. I’m sure she would reply to my email, even though we lost touch after I moved to London over a decade ago.
II.
When someone is good at their job, it is a truly amazing experience. The reality is however that no one wants to or better yet knows how to do their job anymore. It comes as no surprise that the word of the year is slop, but the definition should not only apply to digital content, slop is all around us and applicable to other aspects of our existence: friendships, communication, products-services.
I read an article awhile back (I’m not going to try and find it because EVERYTHING HAPPENS SO MUCH)1 pointing to the type of work people are doing rather than the actual people for this phenomena. I can agree with this to an extent, but it’s not the full story.
Over the last few years, I find myself consistently double checking people’s work due to the sheer volume of errors and mistakes. This has become so common that I feel so anxious when I make a big purchase and have to rely on someone else to ensure there are no errors.
Services are the space where slop is most visible. A Sainsbury’s grocery delivery informs me that they do not go above the first floor and I must come down to get my order (despite me telling him I have a baby and cannot come down). I reiterated that the flat is on the first floor, but it took him about 15-20 seconds to actually listen to what I was saying. I am reminded why I stick to Ocado, because the driver’s never bitch or leave your stuff without buzzing the door.
Don’t get me started on deliveries where the items weigh over 20kg. I’ve moved into a flat on the third floor without a lift (because I’m a masochist) and had to cancel a fridge freezer order from John Lewis because they could not guarantee that a two-person delivery could take it up to the third floor without a lift, they only do up to the first floor2.
Following that experience, I spent over an hour on the phone with different companies to make sure all the heavy appliances I was ordering would make it upstairs without me having to fork over even more money on top of the delivery fee to get someone to carry it. They all answered vaguely in a British fashion: it depends – they could have just said Insh’Allah. How many stairs, is there a curve, do you have parking? It’s like I have to provide a building floor plan before buying a washing machine.
Despite charging a lot of money for deliveries, you have to deal with driver’s endlessly bitching. If you want to complain about how heavy everything is, then I would suggest not having a job where you deliver kitchens all day. We even had someone who runs a rubbish removals company tell us he could not take the rubbish down without a lift. Clearly, a career change is needed there.
Then there’s my inability to get a straight answer about a 1970s gas metre taking up 1.5m of space in a 9m2 kitchen held by a small piece of wood from British Gas, who operates it, and companies like Octopus Energy who claim to remove gas for free (read the fine print). Everyone tells you something different, or follows a script where they ask you the same question over and over again and are apologetic about the issues you’re facing but they aren’t actually sorry about anything.
I feel like John Candy in “Delirious” (1991), desperately trying to reach the cable company to figure out why I have black bars on channels 2 and 7, being given an unreasonable window for the engineer’s visit, only to have someone come and not solve the issue.
But don’t worry, generative AI will save us, and it is even sloppier than the people it’s replacing.
visual roundup of things I liked/made me happy/laugh or tsk this month.
read//check out//listen//watch
I’ve moved from Spotify for a multitude of reasons so mixtapes are now on Apple Music. I’m sure GenZ will bring burning CDs back so maybe I will revisit my teenage hobby of making physical mixtapes.
Watch: Speaking of John Candy, I grew up watching him, especially on SCTV which shaped my humour, and the documentary “I Like Me” on Prime was emotional and sweet.
Listen: I devoured the LRB’s podcast Aftershock: The War on Terror. But why does the host sound like Simon Bird?
Read: I read this article and this article from Equator Magazine, which I hope does not turn into another one of those cliquey publications from New York now featuring London, that promotes the same people (like a lot of Palestine content). Prove me wrong people.
I also found this article enthralling.
Happy Christmas, Happy New Year, and be well – always.
Danah (The Pessoptimist)
I could practice the “how to remember everything you read” technique, but frankly, life optimisation is becoming more of a chore of how to do something the exact right way or it’s a complete failure that you just disconnect from it.
It was not stated on their website.