Reflections 10th May
The End Of Obedience?
It’s difficult to read the label on a container from inside it. Sometimes, we need to find a way to step outside it, and find the freedom to play by different rules. Having just spent a week on the island of Malta, without my tech, it reminded me that holidays can act as catalysts to playing with disobedient thoughts. Nicholas Monserrat’s “The Kappilan of Malta” provided not just a wonderful description of the Island and its history, but a provocation, and as we enter peak holiday season, I find myself wondering what it takes to turn disobedient daydreams to rebellious action.
Given the multiple threads of uncertainty we face, not much, I suspect.
A quick gallop around some research on insurgency throws up some interesting ideas to play with. Ted Gurr’s Why Men Rebel (1970) held that political violence is driven by relative deprivation: the gap between what people expect and what they receive. The argument is that political upheaval is the result of collective discontent caused by a sense of relative deprivation; the tension that develops from a discrepancy between the “ought” and the “is” of collective value satisfaction, and that disposes people to action.
It is not just the “vertical inequality” of hierarchy. It is also the “horizontal” inequality caused by the privilege of particular groups. Those working in, say, financial services are no brighter or more contributive than those in education or medicine (anything but, I would suggest), but nonetheless benefit from the ability of the sector to both corral and create wealth based on little more than stories.
Then there is the question of who actually gets pulled into the resistance when it comes. The counterinsurgency theorist David Kilcullen coined the phrase “accidental guerrilla” to describe people who are not motivated by ideology or dogma, but rather by the experience of intrusion into the space they are used to occupying. Most of the participants in any insurgency, on his account, are not the ideologically committed; they are the perfectly content, until something arrives that makes their working life feel colonised by a centre that does not understand it. A transformation programme. A return-to-office mandate. A forced ranking system. A reorganisation. Increasingly, the AI narrative does the same job, in making people feel disposable. They become accidental mobilisers, joining a resistance whose vanguard they would not otherwise have followed.
A firm can have considerable operational capacity, in the sense that it can fire people, change systems, and enforce rules, while lacking legitimacy, in the sense that employees no longer accept the moral right of the leadership to make those decisions. Capacity and legitimacy can come apart. Once they do, what looks like compliance is something else entirely.
Whereas not long ago this was a workplace by workplace issue, surfaced by polls and tutted over in HR conferences, it is now becoming systemic. It is no longer fragmented; it is generic. People are no longer pissed off by their workplace; they are pissed off by the nature of what work has become.
A software engineer at one bank, a copywriter at one agency, a paralegal at one law firm, and a junior analyst at one consultancy are now experiencing structurally similar things at structurally similar moments. They are watching the same announcements, having the same conversations with their managers, and forming the same private estimates of their own future. The horizontal inequality literature predicts that comparison between identifiable groups is what mobilises. AI does not just create the comparison. It creates a single shared category, “knowledge worker whose tasks are being automated,” that did not previously cohere as an identity. That is a remarkable thing for a phenomenon to do.
Which brings me back to Malta.
Mussolini bombed Malta for two years on the assumption that the population would break. He had operational superiority; the island was within fifteen minutes’ flying time of his Sicilian airfields, and the Maltese had little more than six obsolete biplanes when it began. His instruments could count aircraft, tonnage, casualties, and the steady degradation of the island’s infrastructure. What his instruments could not count was the limestone catacombs that were already there, dug by previous generations for previous purposes. The kappillans gathering people in the shelters and telling them the old stories. The long memory of the 1565 siege, of resisting Napoleon, of having absorbed three thousand years of invaders without becoming any of them. The bombs were catalysts for remembering what matters. Three years later, and Mussolini’s blind rhetoric and lack of understanding had cost him his life.
Most large organisations are now in Mussolini’s position. They are reading the dashboards. They are not reading the catacombs where people are sheltering.
The insurgency, when it surfaces, will not look like a strike or a march. The Hollywood writers’ strike was an early and successful case of synchronised refusal organised explicitly around AI, and it produced a cascade outcome, a contract clause and a model that other industries are now studying, without ever resembling a street movement. Expect more of that form. Coordinated reduction of cooperation with AI rollouts. Networked production of evidence about where the technology fails. Organised friction in adoption programmes, and quiet mass departure from firms that have signalled their intentions clearly. The formation of professional bodies and accreditation schemes that take the place of employer-defined competence. Quiet quitting was a faint preview.
By the time a cascading refusal becomes visible to corporate leadership through engagement scores, attrition figures, or productivity dashboards, the network that produced it will have been forming for some considerable time, on platforms the firm cannot see. The standard managerial response, which is to address the visible signal with a new comms exercise, a values campaign, or a town hall, addresses the wrong layer. It treats the insurgency as a content problem when it is a relationship problem.
But I think the most important aspect is the part we cannot see or measure. I talk about it in terms of craft, mētis, and the soul of work. Our work matters to us. It is and always has been a key part of our identity and self-worth. When we treat it like a commodity, the organisations that have done so will not recover it.
A firm may have the biggest, shiniest, most impressive brand and building in the sector, but if the Elvis that is craft, mētis, and meaning has left the building, he is not coming back.
I wonder where he will end up.