Ian Martin: Fracketeering - how capitalism is power-hosing the last drops of value out of us all
Once you’ve mined the earth and milked the service
industries, what is there left to frack? Us, that’s what – with everything from
admin charges and estate agent fees to blockbuster premiums and ‘cakeage’
Fracking.
Could there be a more perfect model for how we’re getting rinsed by this
current conspiracy of government and commerce? In a world turned upside down,
“conservative” now means the absolute opposite of “leaving things as they are”.
Conservative means changing everything. It means dismantling things and selling
off the bits. It means drilling into our lives and extracting the marrow.
Conservatism and conservation are now about as far apart as
it’s possible to get. Friends of Conservation are the ones protecting the
countryside. The ones who stand around self-consciously in terrible fancy
dress, holding passive-aggressive placards in praise of the noble, selfless
badger. Or basically any mammal that looks good in a waistcoat.
Friends of Conservatism, on the other hand, are the ones who
roll up on heavy machinery like a pissed Ukrainian militia. The ones who drill
deep beneath that area of local countryside whose only “use” so far has been as
a picnic site. And who then pump into the ground powerful jets of high-pressure
hydrogunk, splintering rock as easily as a walnut. And who, having sucked up a
sky’s worth of valuable gas through a massive crack pipe, then pack up and
lumber off to fracture and steal someone else’s underground treasure.
Welcome to capitalism’s late late show. If you can
power-hose the last drop of value out of something, you now have an amoral
imperative to do it. Fracking is the chief inspiration for today’s
entrepreneurs, those “heroic
wealth creators” so admired by Andy Pandery Burnham and half the
Labour party. Everything is up for grabs now. The age of the racketeer is over.
It’s all about fracketeering now.
Here is a recent example. A gang of London estate agents has
invented something called a “client progression fee”. Yeah, ha ha, the cheeky
peaky blinders are leeching an extra grand and a half out of buyers just for
accepting their offer on a property. Imagine that. Charging people for agreeing
to sell them something. Arbitrarily monetising something that customers are
obliged to do anyway.
It’s almost as if the property industry is a pirate economy
serviced by unscrupulous thieving bastards drenched in melancholy duty-free fragrances.
Let’s face it, estate agents have pretty much perfected the art of taking the
piss with a straight face. One former estate agent told me the other day he was
always instructed to make admin fees “whatever you think you can get away with
… go high, then drop as a favour”. Classic surcharge frackery.
I had decided that of all the agents – sports, double,
biological – estate agents were definitely the worst. Then I asked people on
Twitter how they had been fracked over lately and they reminded me about
letting agents. And about how every single person I’ve ever known who has had
any dealings with a letting agent has had to recalibrate their view of the
human race as a result. Has anyone ever got their exorbitant deposit back in
full without an exhausting argument pointing out that three years of normal
wear and tear can’t be classed as catastrophic damage? I’ve been hearing about
people being charged a £90-per-person “reference fee” when moving between two
properties run by the same agent, “so that’s £180 to ask themselves how we were
as tenants”. Or being charged £50 for printing six pages of a rental contract.
“I asked them to email it so I could print it. They said no.”
The world of fracketeering is infinitely flexible and
contradictory. Buy tickets online and you could be charged an admin fee for an
attachment that requires you to print them at home. The
original online booking fee – you’ve come this far in the buying process, hand
over an extra 12 quid now or write off the previous 20 minutes of your life –
has mutated into exotic versions of itself.
The confirmation fee. The convenience fee. Someone who
bought tickets for a tennis event at the O2 sent me this pithy tweet: “4
tickets. 4 Facility Fees + 4 Service Charge + 1 Standard Mail £2.75 = 15% of
overall £!”. Definitely a grand slam.
It’s amazing to think of a world that existed before the
admin charge. It almost makes you nostalgic for a simpler and more innocent
time, when racketeers would work out what it was we wanted and then supply it
at an inflated price. You remember racketeers. Snappy dressers, little
moustaches, connections to organised crime. Some of them did very well and went
on to become successful publishers or peers of the realm. Quite a few
old-school racketeers went into the “hospitality and leisure” business, where
these days fracking is in full effect.
Restaurants charging “cakeage” fees of up to £9 a person if
diners want to bring their own birthday cake. A “blockbuster” surcharge on
cinema tickets for popular films. The “tray charge” on a room service dinner
that already costs as much as the room. And a particular favourite of mine –
any hotel that charges for internet access, as if WiFi were some fancy extra
like a massage chair, or clown therapy. “Congratulations, you may now surf the
world wide web,” says the drop-down box from 1996. It might as well add: “We
would ask that you keep your visit to the internet as brief as possible as reception
may require the telephone line for incoming calls.”
The problem for fracking capitalism is finding new
territory. It is an immutable law of economics that the rich have to keep
getting richer, otherwise the whole system collapses and then what happens?
Nobody knows, but the rich drop hints from time to time that if their margins
are eroded we might all find ourselves in some Riddley
Walker dystopia where humans have to hunt food again and keep wild
dogs at bay and it’s raining all the time and people tell wistful stories about
the old days when there were ships in the sky and pictures on the wind, so to
stop this happening keep making us richer.
But once you’ve mined the earth and milked the service
industries, what is there left to frack? Us, that’s what. Heard of Kwasi
Kwarteng? He’s a rising star in the Tory party. Always a danger signal, this.
To qualify as a rising star in this context you have to make Judge Dredd look
like the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Kwarteng’s suggestion, which has gone down very well with
literally everyone I hate, is that a young person who hasn’t got a job and
therefore hasn’t paid any national insurance contributions should get their
unemployment benefit in the form of a
repayable loan. Even if someone was out of work for the entire seven years
between 18 and 25, he says, “the total sum repayable would be £20,475 –
considerably less than the tuition fees loan repayable by many of his or her
peers”. The clincher, there. You might be unemployed, but think yourself lucky
you’re not going to university.
Redefining citizens as frackable units is precisely where
all this current terrifying unpleasantness with the NHS is leading. Once you
apply the laws of fracketeering to the NHS it’s a short step from monetising
cataract operations to privatising them. Procedures that are highly profitable
for shareholders, however, may be out of reach for the poor. Perhaps we can
come to some arrangement. You owe us for restoring your eyesight, but you can’t
seriously expect to seeand get a full state pension …
Nearly everyone had an NHS dentist once. God, it’s been years
since you were in with a shout for one. What did they look like, can anyone
remember? I’ve got this image of a Victorian gentleman, top hat and cape. Nowadays the poor just put up with bad teeth. It’s the same
with physio. GPs round my way now simply advise you to book privately to avoid
a months-long waiting list, but even a short course of sessions costs over a
ton. It might as well be a grand if you’re on a tight family budget.
I’ve been getting free prescriptions for years. Of course
I’m incredibly grateful. The meds are keeping me going. Indeed, they’ve kept me
going for longer than was originally anticipated. I’ve paid in all my life; now
I’m being looked after. It was always taken for granted, this arrangement. NHS.
Free for all, paid for by everyone, from each according to their means to each
according to their needs, let’s have a knees-up, God bless us all, boom
bang-a-wap diddly bosh. But I can’t be the only one on regular meds thinking, “how
much would they cost me without an NHS?” and Googling the market price.
I don’t want to sound overdramatic but fracketeers are
faceless evil wizards and algorithms are their flying monkeys, dispatched from
the anonymous castles of corporate service providers. You can’t tell me the
people frackers aren’t looking at the meds people are on, too. And wondering
how quickly the UK can be shunted into an American reality, where “unpaid
medical bills” is now the number one cause of bankruptcy.
We are already living in a capitalist sci-fi horror story,
where masters of the universe are trading stuff that doesn’t even exist yet.
Future grain harvests in Canada, milk yields in Wisconsin, next year’s batch of
Japanese whisky. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has a wide variety of “weather
derivatives” available for trade if you’re interested including “temperature
ranges, snowfall amounts and frost”. If fracketeers can think it, they can
monetise it. There are no moral boundaries. The only limit to fracketeering is
imagination.
For all I know, there’s a cabal of trillionaires sitting in
a Jacobean library somewhere discussing how they might trade futures in trading
futures. Or trying to fix the odds on farmed stem cells, or fat-burning
nebulisers. Whatever’s round the corner, though, you can be sure humanity will
be the harvest. People are the basic material of an economic world. Of course
the frackers will drill into us.
Aspects of our physical existence will be divided as spoils.
One day there will be a giant respiratory multinational that will own all new
lungs. Babies will be born with their pulmonary systems on a lifetime
leasehold. When they grow up they’ll face severe penalties for breathing
polluted air. The manufacturers of cigarettes and vaping devices aren’t going
to like that much, so maybe it’s Big Tobacco that sees where the future’s going
and cleverly snaps up all the lungs in advance.
Sex, sunshine, sleep, singing. The best things in life are
currently free. We’d better make the most of them, because in a frackable
future they’ll all be metered and chargeable. Libido International or whoever
would be alerted to any sexual activity via, I don’t know, some sort of
monitored hormonal “thinkernet” and would shut it down after 60 seconds unless
you authorised a debit or had a prepaid sex account.
Maybe people will be fitted with retinal paywalls to allow
in sunshine, which will be owned by a solar consortium based somewhere
tax-efficient and warm. Sleep would be traded on the international sleep
exchange – imagine the premium new parents would pay for an hour of ultra-deep oblivion.
And all human singing would be automatically Shazammed to a central licensing
bureau for billing, the days of “out of copyright” having long gone. Everything
out of copyright will be automatically the copyright of Singinc, who own “trad”
and “anon” now, too. And your vocal cords.
In the future it will probably be best to stay celibate, in
the dark, awake for as long as possible and quiet. So let’s live a little now,
before we’re all fracked.
