MELISSA MCLAY & DR PAUL READ

‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’, says Yanis Varoufakis, maverick economist and former Greek finance minister, in his new book on Technofeudalism (2023).

Contrary to the expectations of Marx, and the assumptions implicit in the Fabians Society, the death of capitalism is not giving way to progressive forms of socialism but rather an atavistic return to feudalism, wherein obscene levels of inequality are allowing a technocratic elite to reestablish themselves as overlords of the working poor. Up until the 14th century, the medieval serfdom that dominated Europe bound people as workers of the land owned by lords. Now it’s not real estate but digital estate that allows the likes of Amazon, Google, Apple and Meta (all privately owned by shareholders) to control the way we live and work. What’s more the digital estate they own is our own data and our own content stored in cloud space and sold back to us. We are complicit in our own slavery.

The likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on, are all selling us back to ourselves, and we are tolerating it.

This is one of the multiple forces encouraging the rise of technofeudalism. The idea of packaging up our own data or indeed our own DNA and selling it back to us — the one as tailored content and the other as tailored medicine — must seem fiendishly delicious to its authors. But there is another, very similar process going on that few have identified or named. What we call Gruen 2.0 is the ability to put customer service back on the customer — to make them do the work of serving themselves — whilst confusing and blurring the lines between customer and unpaid staff.

Facebook, as just one example, has no customer service phone number or complaints department. And it seems many other companies across many sectors have realised that people will tolerate this and, since COVID, it seems most companies have dropped even the pretence of customer service altogether.

Even the supermarkets, which deal in real product, have sacked their staff, installed self-service checkouts and posted record profits, all during a cost-of-living crisis. Recently, the CEO of Woolworths Brad Banducci took home $8.4 million after bonuses for 2023. This despite (and probably because of) sacking 1350 staff in one swoop in October 2023, just after a wage underpayment scandal that blew out to $390 million. Sitting in the middle, it achieved profits of $318 million last year whilst price gouging customers, exploiting Australian farmers, and underpaying its own staff. Meanwhile customers paying higher prices than ever contend with having to supply their own bags and their own automated check-out.

The supermarket is a good place to start in our exploration of Gruen 2.0 as it seems an endemic metaphor for multiple sectors. For example, a recent Guardian investigation of the corruption in the Australian university sector said “the once hallowed institutions have become like supermarkets: they have fired so many staff that students are now like customers at the self-checkout counters, ‘checking their own goods out’, responsible for their own education.”

The supermarket was first invented in the US in the 19th century, the Gruen Effect in the 1930s and the two came together in an unholy alliance with the opening of the Southdale Centre, Minnesota, in 1956. The Gruen effect, named after architect Victor Gruen, is a tactic used in shopping centres where the layout is deliberately confusing. A maze of long hallways and hidden exits, with all the basic staples or payment areas at the farthest ends to make sure customers traverse every aisle. Exposed to more products and displays, they’re more likely to make impulse purchases. It maximises design to nudge you towards a bigger spend. Think everything from Woolworths to Ikea.

The online world is adapting the Gruen Effect in new ways altogether. On one hand, the website design and the use of hyperlinks offer endless looping through whorls of deliberately controlled information.

On the other, the basic service they purport to offer is becoming devilishly hard to get to. Anyone who’s tried to make a claim against an insurance company recently will know exactly where this is headed. So too, anybody who tries to get help from a bank, a local council, any telco (especially Telstra), most politicians, Centrelink, the ATO, Births, Deaths & Marriages, universities, local police stations, airlines, the list goes on.

Notice the majority of these are service industries.

If you want to buy an actual product, you’ll get through in seconds; so too if you want to pay a bill. But god help you if you actually demand to access the actual product. It used to be that large corporations that dealt in predominantly customer service roles put a premium on customer service. For a short while in the early 2000s they tried cutting costs by outsourcing their call centers to India, leveraging their newly found globalised status to cross borders and exploit low wages with impunity. But now, with the advent of new technologies, they’ve found new and creative ways to gouge profits whilst simultaneously frustrating their own customers to the point of incandescent rage.

They can dismantle the costs of call centers altogether and replace them with website strategies like return contact forms, hiding their phone number, installing chat bots, using answering machines on actual calls to refer customers back to their websites, especially FAQ pages, all whilst boasting of their superlative services and how much they value you as a customer. All the while putting you on call waiting for hours at a time so you’re forced to listen to their fabulousness on repeat.

This wouldn’t be such an issue if it were just one company playing what amounts to a game of ‘Call Centre Prisoner’s Dilemma’. But it’s not one or just a few — it’s all of them. En masse the impact on our lives has become unbearable. The time wasted trying to get a straight answer for a simple problem, or even the actual product they pretend to supply, has ballooned to the point where it actually represents a major cost to national productivity.

The Australian Customer Experience Professionals Association (ACXP) estimates the total cost of call  wait times in Australia to be more than $1.28 billion. If this figure factors in lost productivity for customers put on hold, then it actually represents a form of theft where the equivalent value has been funneled back to corporate shareholders as profit from ‘efficiencies’ whilst divesting themselves of old school service. The customer service is outsourced back onto the customer themselves, via loops that urge them back to automated website systems and endless queues, simultaneously wasting the customer’s time and pocketing that value as their own profit.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the companies, if left to measure their own performance, report glowing statistics aiming for answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds. Ask anyone who’s tried to call a bank, insurance company or (god forbid) Centrelink, and the wait times are closer to half an hour and up to three hours, often dropping out after long waits. Whilst waiting on hold to a call centre is bad enough, it seems getting a response or resolution is even harder. A 2023 survey of 1037 Australians by software company ServiceNow extrapolated that Australians spent 107 million hours waiting for customer service departments to resolve issues, an 11% increase from last year. Multiplied by the median wage of $39.50 (ABS Employee Earnings, August 2023) this amounts to a national productivity cost of $4.2 billion. 

The 107 million hours figure is determined by a survey sent to 1,037 Australians, and the data is weighted to the latest population data sourced from  the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Their report also revealed that 80% of customers are fed up with bad service, one in three have completely lost trust, and it’s taking businesses one work week (5.1 days) on average to resolve customer issues. The industries with the highest volume of complaints were retail (62%), utilities (61%) and financial services (60%).

Services Australia, which covers Centrelink, Medicare and Child Support, aims to answer only 70% of calls within 15 minutes. Instead, for the 2022- 23 financial year, 9 million Centrelink calls received a congestion message. In October 2023, Senate Estimates revealed they only achieved answering around 60% of calls within 15 minutes. The worst- case scenario reported a wait time of three hours.

Table 1 shows the wait time I experienced in a simple exercise where I checked the website contact and called each company listed below. In some cases, companies, mostly banks, hung up because the robot could not verify identity. Lifeline, the gold standard, is provided for context at 1 minute’s call waiting time.

But wait there’s more. The advent of passwords and multi-authentication systems has equally driven people to distraction. A Microsoft study in 2017 found employees waste an average of 28 minutes a week resetting forgotten passwords. If the same can be extrapolated across industries, we could argue that 14.3 million Australian employees (ABS) wasting 28 minutes weekly at a cost of the median hourly wage of $39.50 amounts to lost productivity worth $14.69 billion. Based on our estimates, the lost productivity due to call wait times plus password issues alone could amount to roughly 2.72% of Australia’s total GDP (assuming 2023 GDP at $691 billion AUD). And this is an underestimate based on median wages without even considering the same unmeasurable effect on private users.

Nobody is systematically measuring this and the more pervasive impacts of techno-feudalistic tactics on either national productivity or quality of life. But the issue is becoming bigger. With some organisations like Centrelink, public transport and hospitals, major campaigns are launched to reduce abuse against staff. The sad thing is that some customers are rightly driven to fury by the systems in place to save costs and efficiencies, unfairly unloading on frontline staff. Meanwhile a minority of frontline staff can sometimes use these directives to hang up or refuse services to irate customers.

Many companies are now deliberately making their direct phone numbers harder (or even non-existent) to find on their websites. Indeed, many prefer a contact form that gives the company the option of returning the message to the customer or not. Some that regularly do this are politicians and even some emergency housing charities, for example. Contact forms can streamline the initial communication process, allowing companies to gather essential information before assigning inquiries to the right representative, but the more likely explanation is that maintaining a phone support infrastructure is expensive. Contact forms offer a more cost-effective way to manage customer inquiries — especially by completely ignoring them!

Endless forms, ID authentication which, if not answered correctly can send you back to the start of the form because of bad website design. Page failure often happens mid-form, or else asking for password resets via emails that can’t be accessed precisely because the password is forgotten. It’s no longer that pages and website systems fail but it seems they fail on purpose.

Some customers have also noticed that government departments are increasingly asking for information not related to the inquiry or the remit of the agency; for example, Centrelink asking respondents for a detailed list of personal effects. The ATO and other such agencies also ask for inquiry numbers, customer service numbers, full names, DOB, address, email address, and secondary security questions, all amounting to seven ID questions before getting to the inquiry. These are usually requested by bots with mellifluous voices prompting keypad entries from the consumer. During call wait times, the customer is repeatedly urged to handle their issue using automated online forms.

For commercial operators this often takes the form of endless reams of terms of conditions that you must agree to before accessing the information you need. Sometimes this takes the form of having to subscribe to them and telling them your email address, which allows them to bombard you with advertising offers and spam with no way of unsubscribing. Worse still, is forcing you to subscribe to a monthly direct debit only to find no way on their website to actually unsubscribe.

So how do these strategies fit with the Gruen Effect 2.0? Just like Gruen used piped-in music and curved walkways to seduce shoppers, websites and social media also use subtle cues to nudge users towards more purchases. This can include things like visually appealing colour schemes and aspirational imagery, strategic placement of calls to action, ‘buy now’ statements and ‘Add to Cart’ instructions, positive social proofs like endless testimonials, reviews and social media prompts.

Curated content and gamification elements like loyalty programs, points and badges create a sense of accomplishment and act as positive reinforcement. Other online tactics include content marketing like blog posts, articles, infographics, videos and social media posts, targeted advertising based on customer algorithms, demographics and interests, social proofs from people deliberately portrayed as similar in all ways to the customer, push technology and prompts, pop-ups and login pages, limited editions or low stock signals to heighten a sense of urgency in the buyer.

Easy navigation to what they want you to look at but never directly to the material you’re searching for.

Whilst they make sure you are forced through their endless aisles of curated content the actual product is hard to come by. In making you work for your product, it’s now got to the point where many people, having spent considerable sums, merely give up on demanding the product they paid for in the first place. Wasting your time is theft enough. Taking your money without delivering the product, which used to be mostly customer service itself, particularly in financial service industries, is outright theft, even if it emerges entirely from a sense of learned helplessness — the customer essentially giving up.

Centrelink is a perfect example of when it’s good business to make your customer give up. Deliberately obfuscating access to your own services, when already paid for by taxpayers, is theft. As an example, a pensioner calls Centrelink in relation to a simple inquiry and finds the call wait time is up to an hour. During that time, they hear recorded messages on repeat asking them to hop on the app and the self- help pages to answer their inquiry themselves. After 40 minutes of sitting in a queue and not progressing further they decide to take it online as they’ve been told every five minutes on a recorded message. Then caught in a loop of FAQs, hyperlinks and pop-ups asking whether the page is helpful even when their original question remains unanswered. Deciding to physically visit Centrelink themselves to speak to an actual person and they’ll guide you to a self-serve computer where you go through the same thing all over again. If you can’t work it out you have to stand in the queue again to be allocated an appointment for a future date, having never had your question answered. This is a form of deliberate obfuscation and it amounts to theft. In some ways Centrelink is worse than Woolworths forcing people to serve themselves for over-priced supermarket items because the service offered by Centrelink is mostly customer support.

By not engaging with the customer they also cut the customer off from their more substantive product in the form of Centrelink payments.

Learned helplessness is not a bad explanation for this process. The concept, thought to be the foundational process leading to reactive clinical depression, was first observed in puppies who were put in a Skinner Box, an item designed to reward and punish certain behaviours like lever-pulling. It emerged when the animal was continuously punished instead of rewarded, often using an unescapable electric grid. The animal began fighting and trying to escape, reached a crisis, and then collapsed into helpless submission, enduring shocks and punishments without moving. There are two forms of punishment in the behaviourist literature — one is the positive application of a punishment like an electric shock, the other is the negative withdrawal of a reward such as a piece of food. Or indeed a product you paid for but never received.

The Gruen Effect 2.0, when applied to the online world, is a form of Skinner Box from which none of us can escape. No wonder rates of depression and suicide are rising in this brave new world of techno-feudalism.

This article is based on the concept of Gruen 2.0 as originally described by animal rights activist Melissa McLay in her workshops on the physics (and metaphysics) of consciousness. Melissa is an entrepreneur from the art and music industry with works exhibited in the Copenhagen Museum.