The check-out

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

It is a sketch from countless comedy shows.  A man goes into a supermarket.  He lingers oddly over the carrots, he inspects carefully the boxes of soap.  His whole body speaks unease; he is shifty and continually looking over his shoulder.  Finally, he judges the moment to be right: he boldly seizes his prey and half runs up to the check-out till.  Just as he lays the article on the counter, from nowhere a woman appears and queues behind him.  The cashier decides to savour to the full the process of ringing up the price and finding a suitable bag.  All this while, the man's small package lies there accusingly, naked to the world; it seems to glow with obviousness.  Even in the age of AIDS, buying condoms is still not easy.

Our delicacy in purchasing intimate items such as these is purely vestigial.  For the most part, individuated goods have been reduced to abstract commodities: when you load up a trolley in a supermarket, it is almost as if you are buying generalised objects, things shucked of any purpose except to be bought, a fact underlined by the meaningless brand names and bland packaging which de-emphasise the good's real function.

So it is that we happily buy personal goods like expectorants and toilet paper without making the embarrassing connection with their final use - as we do with condoms.  Standing in the queue with these goods for all the world to see, we can pretend to disown them and their revelations, if only because everyone else tacitly agrees to do the same.

And yet that basket and each of its goods says something completely specific about you, your habits and your tastes.  If sociologists were to watch you at the check-outs, they could re-construct your daily life as an archaeologist reconstructs the past from its rubble.  Each item represents a line in the multi-dimensional space of consumerism; where all those lines intersect, is you.

This is not as abstract as it sounds.  Sociologists may not be hiding behind the sliced bread to carry out their research, but the statisticians are there.  One of the main reasons for the introduction of bar-coding in supermarket chains is to define who you, the public, are in precisely this way.  It is certainly not to speed up the process of checking out: the bottleneck is merely displaced from the pricing to the packing.  Instead it gives the stores employing barcodes in-depth and instant knowledge about purchasing patterns.

Hitherto, data on sales has been obtained by stocktaking - a slow and inefficient process.  Now, stores can see a snapshot of what is being sold at any instant by downloading the information from the automated tills and combining the data.  Moreover, if you pay by some form of identifying credit or debit card, an alternative picture could be built up, of your purchases over time.  From that it would be possible to make good guesses at your income, your family size, your tastes - even your sexual habits.  Imagine now a cashless society, and one where all such sales data were linked together: total information on every individual.  Governments are doubtless checking it out at this very moment.

(1989)

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The new Jesuits

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

As an elite, the Jesuits have always been aloof and a mystery to outsiders.  Founded in 1534 by St Ignatius Loyola, the Society of Jesus was intended as a kind of spiritual SAS to help lead the fight against the heretical Protestants.  Soon the qualities of intelligence and ambition demanded of their members meant that they found themselves as confidants of kings and confessors to queens.  From these positions they were able to exercise an enormous influence by applying a tiny force to a mighty lever.  An intense dedication to their order was both their greatest strength and weakness: actions co-ordinated centrally by the Society gave them an unmatched global power; it also called into question their ultimate loyalties, and made them hated and despised by those whose influence they had eclipsed.

Now, the sites of authority have moved.  The baroque and classical palaces have become tourist attractions, while true power is wielded from the glistening post-modern castles of the giant multi-national corporations.  And there, just as in the state rooms of yore, you find latter-day Jesuits behind the ample leather thrones of the new royalty, the Managing Directors and Chief Executives.

They are the accountants.  Like the Jesuits, they are a breed apart from their peers, the other senior managers.  Usually brought in from outside rather than promoted internally, they follow their own track and destiny.  They are the company's father or mother confessor, but now it is economic rather than spiritual rigour that they apply.  Where before they would insist that you bared your soul to them, confessing every last heinous sin, now they will probe every last budget, every invoice, every forecast.

Like the stern priests, they are unmoved by sentiment: figures alone speak to them just as they seem to speak only in figures, their personal cabbalistic language.  And the absolution they offer is through figures, to be won by painful repentance in the form of the cut-back budget's abnegation, and through the public recantation of a scaled-down forecast.

As the Jesuits were, the accountants too are figures of fear in their kingdoms, hated for their disproportionate power, their incorruptibility, for their ambiguous loyalties, for their sober-garbed otherness, and for their indifference to all this hate.

Today's Jesuits represent a movement from the spiritual to the material, mirroring society's own shift in pre-occupations.  We are beginning to enter a third epoch, that of the mental, where information becomes the primary resource, and where the world, its contents and every experience within it are reduced to data.  As this shift continues we might expect to see the evolution of a third Jesuit class, one whose power is predicated on the audit of that information.  Perhaps they will be descendants of the present data processing managers; perhaps they will be the attendants of the mighty, thinking computers that one day may seize power; perhaps they will work alongside third millennium data barons who will control the world's population through its addiction to synthetic, digital experience.  One thing is for sure: the Jesuits will be there.

(1989)

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