24 February 2026. Populism | Waiting

Populism is an information problem, but not in the way that you think // Waiting as a form of resistance [#659]

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1: Populism is an information problem, but not in the way that you think

There’s a significant British parliamentary by-election being held in British this week in the constituency of Gorton and Denton, a deprived area on the edge of Manchester in the north-west of England. When I say ‘deprived’, it is the 15th most deprived of England’s 540 or so Parliamentary constituencies, even if money is being spent on regenerating the area.

(Gorton Monastery, 2015. Photo, David Dixon via Geograph, CC BY-SA 2.0.)

It is traditionally a Labour-held seat, but given the overall performance of the Labour government, the by-election (the British version of a US ‘special election’) is being seen as a test case for the electoral hopes of Britain’s hard-right Reform party. Just Two Things doesn’t do by-election speculation, but we are interested in populism. John Harris, one of Britain’s better writers on politics, visited the place at the start of February, and found

when I ask people questions about the looming vote, I mostly hear expressions of fierce resentment.

If the Denton part of the constituency is poorer and whiter, the Gorton part is significantly Muslim, and younger. If in Denton, Harris found that voters seemed to be peeling away towards Reform, in Gorton they seemed more interested in the Greens. Max seems to be one of those people that reporters dream of running into on such trips:

In Levenshulme, I meet Max, a loquacious 27-year-old who spends his spare time volunteering for asylum and refugee charities. Starmer, he says, “needs to kind of self-reflect: ‘What do I believe? What do I want?’” He mentions Farage. “He seems to have a vision. Starmer doesn’t. And you can’t combat Reform if you haven’t got that. They’ve got better stories … I think they’re toxic stories, but they’re better at telling them.” He then brightens. “But the Greens have got a good story as well.”

Some of this is a problem of Labour’s own making. In a political strategy dreamed up by their now departed Chief of Staff Morgan MacSweeney¹, they have talked a hard game on migration, which has been completely counter-productive. As Simon Wren-Lewis wrote on his blog recently,

Labour sounding and acting like Reform on immigration and asylum was likely to increase rather than decrease the Reform vote and reduce the Labour vote, which is what has happened. But it has been far worse for Labour, because sounding and acting like Farage is anathema to Labour’s core vote, which is socially liberal. This problem is particularly acute now because of the popularity of Reform.

The party’s mealy-mouthed position on Gaza also doesn’t help with Muslim voters.

The Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, who does have a story to tell, was barred from standing by the Labour Party’s National Executive, officially on the grounds that a Manchester Mayoral by-election would be too expensive for the party to finance.² Harris’s impression from talking to voters was of

a long-festering sense of disconnection and fury reaching a new extreme, thanks to a government that seems strangely powerless to even begin to tackle it.

All of this reminded me of Dan Davies’ book The Unaccountability Machine, about the principles of management cybernetics developed by Stafford Beer (more about the book on Just Two Things here), In it, he applies some of the learning to the rise of populism:

People are overloaded with information that they can’t process; the world requires more decisions from them than they’re capable of making, and the systems that are meant to shield them from that volatility have stopped doing the job. (p.253)

Although it is hard to define ‘overload’ in this context, you can see the signs:

you can easily observe the difference between a human being that is coping and one that is overloaded. (p.251)

Often these signs are qualitative: Lexi, for, example, a mother of two, who told John Harris that she

holds down three different jobs – as a care support worker, a dinner lady and a cleaner – and says she is just about holding everything together.

But there are not only qualitative signals. The work of Anna Case and Angus Deaton showed a sharp quantitative increase in what they called “deaths of despair” in the United States, from alcoholism, opiate addiction and suicide. The qualitative insight here was in connecting these different data categories in a single frame.

But one of the bigger problems here is that in modern states, even in democracies, the information channels between governments, political parties, and citizens don’t carry very much information:

The only kind of communication that such a constrained channel can carry is a scream: the signal that passes through the levels of control and announces that something has gone wrong which threatens the integrity of the system itself. This is why there was a family resemblance between the ‘populist’ movements that sprang up in the 2010s... The medium itself is the message: what liberal society ought to be responding to is the fact of mass distress, not its content. (pp250-51, emphasis in original)

On this reading, for all the national and local specificity of politics, MAGA, Farage, Bepe Grillo, Erdogan, and Marie Le Pen are basically a communication channel for the same signal,

for a population which wanted to convey a single bit of information: the message that translates as, ‘HELP! THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS IS INTOLERABLE TO ME! (p.250, caps in original)

(The Scream (mosaic), by Edvard Munch. Via Chic Bee/flickr. CC BY 2.0)

Populism, therefore, can be thought of as an information channel, but it is also a way of simplifying complexity. All of the stories that populist parties tell are of a simpler world, usually one that harks back to a time when the world was visibly less complex. A lot of the so-called “culture wars” are about a refusal to deal with the complex.

And there’s a direct link between this and the ways in which businesses shed complexity in the 1980s and 1990s, by exporting things they were no longer willing to manage (such as forms of risk) into society at large. Davies doesn’t put it like this in the book, but you can think of this corporate behaviour as a form of dumping costs onto society as externalities, in just the same way that they might dump their pollution rather than bother to clean it up themselves.

Some of this takes us back into some of the principles of cybernetics. Dan Davies book is called The Unaccountability Machine because he the book starts from his idea that modern society needs “accountability sinks” to function—places where the consequences of decisions can basically get dumped in such a way that no-one is accountable for them. This also means that there’s no feedback into the system from such consequences until they escape from the system that is supposed to manage them.

Davies also quotes the historian Peter Dale Scott, who has studied conspiracy theories. Scott prefers the term ‘parapolitics’, which Davies summarises as

the part of the government system in which the possibility of accountability is deliberately diminished. (p.28)

Most of Davies’ discussion is about company behaviour, but you don’t have to look very hard at politics to see parapolitics everywhere, usually with a heavy ideological weight sitting behind it.

For example, the idea of “bond market vigilantes”; the role of private-public partnerships in turning things that ought to be matters for politics into long-term legal (and extractive) contracts; the International Monetary Fund (and in some parts of the World, also the World Bank); even the independence of the central banks, a currently orthodox idea that was originally promoted with little evidence but has led to the management of inflation being prioritised over public investment and employment.

It isn’t coincidence that all of these systems push accountability away from politics by privileging certain forms of economics—the same forms of economics that push risk onto individuals and undermine social safety nets.

In Stafford Beer’s cybernetic Viable System Model, the top level system, System Five, is about purpose and identity. It sets the frame for the other parts of the system. As Davies notes:

If the highest level decision-making mechanisms of the world are to be viable systems, they need a philosophy that can balance present against future and create self-identity.

The political question, then, is how to restore information channels that put some accountability back into the system?

In the UK, in the 1950s, this was done by the scale of party memberships: one of the reasons why the Conservatives were one of the most successful electoral machines in the world was that they also had five million members. The connections between the Labour Party and the trades unions did something similar for the Labour party. Obviously, we’re not going back to that.

All the same, it is striking that political parties have failed to make connections with members, voters, and affinity groups, even while the cost of creating networks and communities is lower than it ever has been. This at least suggests that it’s a choice: a problem of political will and political imagination.³

I don’t know who will win the Gorton and Denton by-election: Reform were confident of winning a Welsh Senedd by-election in Caerphilly a few months ago and fell quite a way short. John Harris, who travels the country for The Guardian, says that he has found the same thing all over: “anger, disconnection and bewilderment with a party and government that are now floundering and disoriented”. He ends his piece with a Green Party leaflet

featuring one of its best campaign lines... “Make hope normal again.”

And ‘hope’ is also about purpose and identity.

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2: On waiting

I’ve been reading the work of L.M. Sacasus on technology for a long time now, without knowing much abut him. But he writes about technology in a sceptical and reflective way—in the style of Langdon Winner, perhaps—and often draws on unexpected sources.

(Waiting, by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. c.1887)

And so it was at the start of this year, partly as a result of hearing that Amazon was about to pilot 30-minute drone deliveries in Seattle and Philadelphia, that he turned his attention to the virtues of waiting. The virtues of waiting, that is, as part of the condition of being human:

I find myself wondering whether certain virtues might be encouraged by the practice of waiting—patience, say, or prudence—and that certain vices, rashness or prolifigacy, are abetted by the eclipse of waiting as an ordinary element of everyday life.

Clearly, the notion of “waiting” has been changed by the ubiquity of personal devices and the various infrastructures that they have enabled, whether it is delivery or distraction in those moments where waiting is unavoidable—even to the point of drivers sneaking a look at their phones in the infinite tedium of waiting for a red light to change.

Or at least it has been changed for those people who have sufficient resources not to have to wait.

Sacasas riffs here off Blaise Pascal’s Pensees, because Pascal suggested—at least in the paraphrase here—that

in these unfilled moments that we may find ourselves becoming acutely aware of our anxieties, failures, and fears, our loneliness and desperation, the futility of our labors, and, naturally, our mortality. It’s why we can’t abide solitude and stillness, and why Pascal believes we are so quick to turn to diversions.

Without diversions, we begin to feel the passage of time, and we become the focus of our self-reflection. The French philosopher of time. Henri Bergson, came to a similar conclusion.

The literary scholar Harold Schweizer explained Bergson’s perspective in this was in his book On Waiting:

In waiting, the waiter thus feels—impatiently—his own being: it is a feeling of the un-measurable, perhaps immeasurable, that which cannot be protracted or contracted... we experience time only then when it is not exactly calibrated to the will, when it is other than, or in conflict with, how we thought time should run.

And so waiting positions itself as the opposite of agency: often, “we wait because we must”, as Sacasus puts it.

But not always:

Schweizer, elsewhere in his book, suggests that “we might think of waiting also as a temporary liberation from the economics of time-is-money, as a brief respite from the haste of modern life, as a meditative temporal space in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights.”

Because although waiting might be associated with a lack of agency, hurry can have the same quality, especially in the 21st century, where “busy, busy” is still regarded as a conversationally appropriate response to the social question, “How are you?”. Waiting, in these circumstances, might also be a form of resistance:

Many of us live under the conditions of the just-in-time economy, that is to say of a techno-economic order that thrives when we feel ourselves deprived of the time and freedom to so order our lives that we are not lured into availing ourselves of the costly, last-minute conveniences proffered by the digital marketplace. Under these conditions, waiting, while not without its own costs, is power.⁴

In this context, Sacasas makes a striking link to the philosophy of Irish Murdoch, who

conceived of freedom as a liberation from fantasy, which she defined as “the proliferation of blinding self-centred aims and images.”... And this liberation from fantasy begins with “attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.”

In other words, one can connect the experience of waiting to our experience of the real by paying attention to attention. Murdoch was following the work of Simone Weil, and Harold Schweizer makes this point explicitly in his book:

“waiting, as the French activist and philosopher Simone Weil advocates, must be relearned as a form of attention.”

In other words, a moment of waiting might not be wasted time: it might, says Sacasus, be a moment of human potential:

To seize and capture a moment for waiting against the imperatives of efficiency and time-saving is to secure a space of psychic liberation in which the virtues of patience and loving attention can be cultivated.

In this parade of philosophers, Hans-Georg Gadamer also gets his moment, having observed that “the essence of our temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry.” In the context of art, Schweizer writes of “lingering” rather than “waiting”, of deliberately taking time. Tarrying. Lingering. They are both from Middle English, and since they have mostly fallen out of everyday use, their presence in the text almost slows you down on the page.

Bit this does not just apply to art. Sacasus again:

To tarry or to linger at the table, the park bench, the shore, or even busy city street is to invite the things of our common world to make their appearance... It is to unlearn the impatience born of the desire to master, predict, and control the world that is first and always a gift.

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j2t#659

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1. MacSweeney’s fall was some second-order fallout from the Epstein files, but he only had himself to blame.

2. Nobody believes this version, since Burnham is a credible candidate as a future Labour Party leader who has been outside of Westminster during Starmer’s fractious years as party leader. But he’d need to be a Member of Parliament to stand.

3. Because it is worth noting that Labour party membership soared after Jeremy Corbyn became party leader, and the community organising unit his leadership created was effective. Morgan MacSweeney made it his work to push out new members and closed the community organising unit.

4. A footnote links to an engaging article about waiting by Christine Rosen who writes inter alia about the forms of waiting adopted by monks in religious communities as a different example. And — at the other end of the spectrum — the leisure engineering deployed by Disneyland to distract people from the ract that they are waiting in the queue for rides.