Applying Ourselves: 30 Reading Experiments

From Applied African Speculative Fiction: A Toolkit (Ping Press 2026).

Here are thirty reading experiments. Choose one or two, and try them on any story in this collection. Whichever experiment you choose, strive to be specific and detailed. And if you have the time, take your time.

1. Read the story, and arrange a discussion group. Ideally print it out and make notes by hand. Come prepared with three questions: one question about the plot, one question about the technology in the story, and one question about the way the story is told.

2. Just read it. Don’t try to ‘apply’ it to anything. Let it seep into you. Perhaps it will be back in some form, some day, perhaps not. Perhaps you will recognise it, perhaps not.

3. Box up the magic.  Identify elements that you think are too fantastical ever to happen in the real world. Make a list of their narrative inputs and effects. Then rename each one ‘black box #1,’ ‘black box #2’ etc. A black box, in this context, is where we know the inputs and the outputs, but not what happens inside. Discuss these black boxes. Treat them as placeholders for events that cannot currently be foreseen or even properly imagined, but that really are possible.

4. What is governed in the story? Identify the forms of governance that take place. How might the story unfold under different governance arrangements?

5. What is evaluated in this story? Identify acts or processes of categorisation, evaluation, tagging, measurement, or similar. What would happen if these were different?

6. Draw the story as a diagram, or a series of diagrams. For example, use systems thinking to map the systems in the story. Identify key actors, institutions, infrastructures, resources, feedback loops, pressures, and points of breakdown or control. Think about how different parts of the story’s world interact, and how a change in one part of the system might ripple through the others.

7. Find an intervention point. If you wanted to change the world of this story without controlling everything, where would you intervene? Identify one plausible leverage point: a law, standard, subsidy, interface, procurement rule, bottleneck, union, dataset, piece of infrastructure, etc. Why there? (You could look up Donella Meadows’ leverage points for inspiration. Often, readers will jump to social norms, mindsets, paradigms, and education—if only people saw the world differently, they’d act differently! Maybe that is true, but worldviews are as resilient as the reflection of the moon –  a temporary shattering has no lasting impact. Worldviews can be difficult to shift, and assuming otherwise can lead to mere wishful thinking. As a challenge, try not to make this your intervention point).

8. Reimagine this speculative fiction story as a different kind of speculative fiction story. Relocate it within a different storytelling tradition. This could involve switching modes of speculation. There are many types of speculative fiction. Some stories build counterfactual institutions in breathtaking detail. Some stories erase detail, like a corrosion cast, revealing the vascular system of reality. 

9. Triangulate. Write down one thing that is true in the world of the story, but not the real world. Write down a corresponding thing that is true in the real world, but not the story’s world. You can do this just once, or several times. Then, for each pair, write down a third possibility—a place where both things are false (or both things are neither true nor false). Then begin to imagine that world.

10. Remove the fantastical elements. What is the rest of the story about? Could this show us what the story is ‘really’ about?

11. What’s on your mind? What’s in the news? What consultation is soon to close, or petition is gathering signatures, or open call for evidence has just appeared, or problem is plaguing your team? Choose a currently controversial topic within law or policy, or within your professional practice—however unrelated it may seem. Map out the main different positions on this controversy. Then use the story to inspire new positions, or new angles on the existing positions. Give yourself to responding in a loose, associative way. Treat the story like going for a walk, something you might do to clear your head, to gain a fresh perspective. Try to let it change your thinking, even if you can’t exactly explain how it did.

12. Read the story in a ‘paranoid’ way—try to uncover the ideological assumptions, especially those that are aligned with oppressive power (e.g. colonialism, extractivism, racism or patriarchy), even if the story opposes that oppression at a surface level. For this exercise, you are not very interested in the author’s intentions. What do linguistic and storytelling conventions make it easy to say, or hard to say? Who is visible and who isn’t, who acts and who doesn’t, who speaks and who is spoken for? What is treated as normal, natural, or inevitable? What is simplified, ignored, or left out? What associations do words carry, even if (or especially if) they are the obvious or natural way of expressing something? How does the story shape what seems plausible, possible, or desirable?

13. Read the story in a ‘reparative’ way—try to read in a way where you seek pleasure, and more pleasure, and are open to being surprised, in horrifying ways as well as intensely pleasurable ways. A reparative reading asks what you can take and use from a story, not just what it gets wrong. Pay attention to moments of care, curiosity, humour, or resilience. Be open to receiving gifts from the text—an image, a feeling, a question, a way of seeing—that you can carry forward into your own thinking or practice.

14. Can you read the story in a ‘reparanoiative’ way?—our invented word for an interpretation that is both paranoid and reparative.

15. Use wordplay to come up with meanings that almost definitely were not intended by the author. “‘Every Centre is an Ant”’: perhaps every Centaur is an ANT? Centaur: half horse, half human, or more metaphorically, a human-AI hybrid workflow in which a person and an AI system collaborate, combining human judgment with machine speed or pattern recognition (see also Cory Doctorow on ‘reverse centaurs’). Actor-Network Theory (ANT): an approach from Science and Technology Studies that treats humans and non-humans (e.g. AI systems, data sets, institutions) as actors in networks, where outcomes emerge from their relationships rather than any single agent.

16. How could we make events in this story actually happen? If there are things that are impossible, what is the closest possible thing we could substitute? Stretch goal: actually do it.

17. Situate the story in relation to Africanfuturism and solarpunk. How does it contribute to, extend, challenge, undermine, or subvert either or both of these?

18. Read the story together with some theory. For example, read the story through the lens of Afropessimism (Frank B. Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman), necropolitics (Achille Mbembe), postcolonial epistemology (Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí), world systems theory (Samir Amin), Black fugitivity (Fred Moten), convivial technology and decomputing (Ivan Illich and Dan McQuillan), pluriversal politics (Arturo Escobar), or something else. What doesn’t quite fit? What would have to shift in the theory itself—its assumptions, its scale and scope, its priorities and vibes—for the theory to fully account for the story? Often the best encounters between a story and a theory are two-way: the theory doesn’t just explain the story. Instead, you end up seeing both the story and the theory differently, perhaps inventing new theories and telling new stories. 

19. Generate opposing viewpoints, and then go beyond them. Do some research, and find two philosophers, scholars, theorists, or just clever or wise people you know, who would take different views on some aspect of the story. Discuss it. Then, instead of assuming the best answer is ‘somewhere in the middle,’ try this next step. Choose the less wrong perspective, and ask what it would mean to radicalise it.

20. Conduct a kind of immanent critique of the story. Read the story ‘against’ itself. Use the story itself to generate some kind of criteria or standard against which to evaluate the story.

21. Fork the story. Identify a key decision somewhere in the story, ideally near the middle. What would happen if a different decision had been made?

22. Explore the lacunae. Look for the gaps and silences. Look for what’s missing. For example, choose one institution, technology, or social arrangement in the story. List the hidden assumptions, practices, infrastructures, or other factors that make it possible. And/or identify the absent stakeholders: who is affected but not represented in the story’s visible decision-making? And/or pick one object, service, or technological system in the story and trace what must sit behind it, e.g. materials, labour, logistics, waste, energy, land, data, standards, finance, communication, shared understandings, social and cultural practices.

23. Stress-test the solutions. Find a moment where something is solved. It could be a big problem or a small one. Think about what could go wrong. 

24. Translate the story into a policy memo, and observe what gets lost. Summarise the story as if briefing a policy audience (or some other audience, e.g. innovation lab, campaign group, regulator). What did that format encourage you to omit (or to add)? 

25. Use backcasting. If the story is set in the future, imagine what was happening a couple years earlier. And then a few more years earlier. And then even earlier, all the way to the present. Try to draw a plausible pathway from where we are now, to the world of the story.

26. Write a risk assessment for some aspect of the story.

27. Put yourself in the story as a researcher. Write a grant proposal, seeking funding to research something.

28. Map the story’s economy. What was paid for, during the story or before the story began? How was it paid for, who bore the cost, and what forms did payment take?

29. Brainstorm as many interpretations as you can (see “Burning Down the Solarpunk Data Centre”). Then ask: Which of these says the most interesting things about the story? Which of these says the most interesting things about the world we live in? Which of these says the most interesting things about the future? Choose one interpretation, and develop it further.

30. How do we go beyond merely imagining? What keeps "alternative" approaches as merely alternatives? Might imagining alternatives sometimes help to prop up the status quo? Read the story, and explore what you (or others you care about) oppose, resist, want to abolish or to imagine differently. Then discuss how our identities can be bound up in what we define ourselves against. The thing we oppose is often also the thing that organises us. Is there a voice inside you that says: What would I be without this struggle? How does it show up? (See “Burning Down the Solarpunk Data Centre.” Do we sometimes wish for Memory Boxes, just so we can burn them down?). You could also go beyond the psychological, and think about the economic and institutional. In what ways is it sometimes in our interests to not achieve the things we want to achieve? Perhaps to make progress, but never quite arrive? Can we change all this?

Science fiction vs. left melancholy (round one)

Part one of my series on science fiction and left melancholy is up at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Then there is the more playful, fetish version of horny left melancholy: it is humiliating to always lose, to be a squirming little worm, with no general strikes and no governments. 

It asks: could speculative fiction be considered left joy, and a kind of antidote to left melancholy? It talks about Walter Benjamin, Wendy Brown, Octavia Butler, adrienne maree brown, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Seo-Young Chu, Darko Suvin and a few others.

Vimes' 'Boots' Theory

I have a chapter included in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945, edited by Caroline Edwards, which looks at Terry Pratchett's Night Watch and Making Money. It touches on a brilliant nugget from Men at Arms.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.

I write in the chapter:

[...] Here it is worth noting that Vimes’s “Boots” theory is wrong. At least it is overstated: “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.” This is not the reason but a reason, and a minor one at that. Vimes leaves out the basics: primitive accumulation, extraction of surplus value, return on capital.

Vimes argues that “the reason that the rich were so rich… was because they managed to spend less money.” In other words, he thinks the rich stay rich because they can afford to invest in quality, long-lasting goods, while the poor are trapped in a cycle of buying cheap things that break. This is true in a narrow sense, but it’s not the big reason why wealth is so unequally distributed.

The big reason is: the rich own capital, and the poor do not. Vimes leaves out history. Land and resources were hoarded, often by force ("primitive accumulation"), and the unfairness was passed down through generations, often getting bigger and bigger ("accumulation"). Long ago, people who had farmed, hunted, and gathered for centuries were suddenly told—by men with swords—that the land was no longer theirs. Instead of living off it, they now had to work for those who claimed to own it. That was the beginning of a system that still exists today.

Under capitalism, workers create more value than they’re paid for—this extra value goes to the owners, not the workers. And once someone owns land, factories, or businesses, they can make money simply by having them (as well as whatever they get from working), while workers have to keep working just to survive. No matter how hard they labour, they will never earn as much as those who sit back and collect rent, interest, and dividends.

So while Vimes is right that being poor is expensive in the short term, he misses the bigger picture. The poor aren’t poor just because they can’t afford durable goods. They're poor because of capital accumulation. And once wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, it stays there—not because of clever shopping, but because of ownership itself.

Back to the chapter:

However, if Vimes’s theory were to have captured the main reason for poverty, then neoliberalism would have an easy and effective solution: improved financial inclusion. This is precisely what Vetinari and Moist oversee in Making Money. New paper fiat currency is inserted into the money supply as micro-loans. In this respect, the idea that “to back the currency [...] [y]ou just needed the city” is slyly equivocal. On the one hand, “the city” suggests the people of the city, workers and entrepreneurs like Dibbler, as well as the communities and material infrastructures in which they are embedded. Ankh-Morpork is a city-state, and “the city” also suggests the government: Vetinari backing the currency with his sovereign power to detain. Finally, the City is also the colloquial term for the UK’s financial services sector, including investment banks like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and HBSC. Dibbler may be free to participate in the city that “turns worthless gold into … everything,” but his freedom depends upon “the Silence of the Law,” and that silence depends on his usefulness to the Discworld version of financialisation. [...]

After Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo

ay you

stood there nude

you’re mud 

& you won’t forget

only really

you’re a foetus

of labouring dark,

on lunar milk

binging 

by this low wall

inch by inch

into full bole life

crossed over

by flowers’ dreams

& summer sleeps’

perfumes, just

to feel, believe that

from your feet

push out, race & 

worm roots,

& snakelike 

seek your deep 

& wet 

source to slake, &

& already 

bind you to it, you,

O tree alive unknown

untaxonomized

who forms the fruit

you will yourself forage

the bone of your crown

within your hair

that the wind plays with

hides a nest

of immaterial birds

and when you come to bed

and I acknowledge you

my errant brother

your touch, your breath

will awaken the flutter

of mysterious wings

right up to the edge of death

 

Queuetopia: Notes on Queues

If you had a group of people and a pile of treasure, and had to improvise a mechanism to distribute it, you might seize upon something like this. ‘We’ll sit in a circle. We will take turns. Each may choose one object from the pile. We’ll go round and round till there is nothing left.’ 

Then, thinking about it some more, you might add something like this. ‘Who gets to go first? We will seat ourselves and choose someone at random. And then, we’ll go round and round the circle, clockwise, until every last precious item is claimed.’

Real randomness is hard to come by. Cryptographers know this. Sometimes randomness is even sold, it’s so scarce. But good enough randomness is easy enough to generate. 

‘Who goes first? I’ll sing a song we all know, and with every beat I’ll point to one of you, until the final word of the song, when the person I’m pointing to will begin.’

In Duck Soup (1933) Chico Marx chants a counting-rhyme apparently of his own devising, ‘Rrringspot, vonza, twoza, zig-zag-zav, popti, vinaga, tin-lie, tav, harem, scarem, merchan, tarem, teir, tore.’

The circle is a kind of curved queue, where once you’ve been served at the front, you automatically rejoin again at the back.

What kind of legitimacy does it confer, being ‘there first’? Is there something in common between pushing to the front, and dispossessing indigenous peoples? 

*

A line of people can serve as an economic mechanism. It can regulate the distribution of resources and/or tasks, and coordinate a milling throng into a system of meaningfully interacting agents. As an economic mechanism, however, queueing is somewhat incomplete: you’d really want know what is permitted at the front before you can assess its dynamics. 

Does the same thing happen to each person? For example, does each person draw close enough to the deceased queen that their respects can penetrate her lead-lined coffin? Does Ottessa Moshfegh sign her name in each person’s copy of Lapvona? For example, does a cardamom bun happen to each person?

Or do events at the front vary? When you are ‘processed’ (as queueing theory calls whatever happens at the front of the line), can you alter the conditions for the person behind you? By eating the last cardamom bun, for example? 

*

A queue is, conspicuously, even smugly, a non-crowd. It is a rejection of the potential for collective agency. That is why liberals love it: it is the emergent order which insists on the lonely sovereignty of individuals, strung out like paper dollies.

*

Queueing can serve as an economic mechanism. What if we were to think of queueing as money? Does it function as a ‘unit of account’? There is no unit, exactly, unless the queue itself be considered a unit. But there is a crude ordinal accounting going on, an ordering from first to last. These values adjust to reflect the evolution of the system. Furthermore, you do have something to lose if you leave the line, so perhaps there is something resembling a ‘store of value,’ the second touchstone of the textbook definition of money. It’s the last criterion — a ‘means of exchange’ — where the comparison really breaks down. Yet exchange sometimes occurs, in the sense that people do sometimes exchange places. And there are excitingly different opinions about the propriety of saving a spot in the queue, or briefly leaving and rejoining.

Ask yourself, just as an experiment in culture and psychology, how you feel about two people behind you in a queue swapping places. Is it any of your business? Does it feel different if they are ahead of you? Does it feel different if one is behind you and one ahead of you? Depending on what the processing rules are, either of the last two might have some bearing on what you encounter when you reach the front.

*

The value of queue positionality is ordinal. It is tantalisingly ambiguous between the qualitative and the quantitative. 

*

Cory Doctorow writes, “Who gets to do what and when at a themepark may sound like a trivial question, but I think it's a perfect little microcosm for the distributional problems that are at the heart of all political economy.”

*

Imagine a queue that follows this rule: when you reach the front, you can set any processing condition you would like for the person behind you. That person must fulfil your processing condition or go to the back of the queue. If the entire queue cycles without anyone fulfilling the condition, the condition is nullified. 

This structure needs a good name.

*

Do people queue in the UK more than in other countries?

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true. I have been trying to find some kind of league table on the internet, so I can confirm that UK is in the top ten queueiest countries, and be surprised and delighted at the quiet queuers, the countries that queue even more avidly but don’t pretend it is their national pasttime.

How is delay imagined, interpreted, instrumentalized?  

Perhaps what is more interesting is precisely how queueing is celebrated, and what is celebrated along with it. It is a mixture of faux self-deprecatory and self-deprecatory. Aren’t we silly, for being so well-behaved? We are pussycats, though ha ha ha, we’ll show our claws if our little rituals are disrupted! Luckily, these little rituals are also resonant with a deep and irresistible moral drive, just as using the correct cutlery keeps the cosmos from crumbling. That is, principled fairness and egalitarianism to the queue, and a sort of elegant commonsense efficiency. Of course this is all bollocks: the formal consistency of first-come-first-served is not worth dignifying as ‘fairness,’ as you would feel keenly if you were bleeding out in an ER waiting room without a system of triage. Queueing is so civilized, and who was it who civilized half the world?

‘The most British thing ever’ says the most British thing ever, The Guardian. The Guardian is perhaps the most Hobbesian of the British papers, in its unwavering insistence that any order, however arbitrary, is preferable to disorder, which can only be understood as a war of all against all.

Royal mourner: of course not in the sense that the mourners are royal. They are common. Ennobled, perhaps, by their grief and gaiety.

*

Liberals (not in the American sense, although maybe that too) also love more complex emergent order: the price mechanism, supply and demand, the market. You could imagine a different kind queue, with more ambitious equillibria. You exchange information with the person in front and behind, perhaps you gradually adjust your positions until the queue is optimized. But this is anathema. Perhaps because it is too embedded in the interpersonal, the social? It is in the nature of the queue that you cannot shop around for queue buddies.

*

In Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, money is abolished in favor of a sort of system of coupons that directly links labor and consumption. The idea is to correlate what you contribute to society with what you are allowed to take out from the common wealth, while avoiding all that catastrophic usury and exploitation. It does turn out to be easier said than done, and Bellamy’s system has a somewhat ungainly feel. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, nobody cares if you take out more than you put in. Or more precisely, they do care, they care a lot, but the caring is the only mechanism that regulates what economists might call ‘free riders’ and the tabloid press might call ‘scroungers.’ Shame disincentivises such behaviors, but if you can endure the shame, there is no law against it.

You just go to the common storehouses and take what you need. If a lot of people arrive all at once, do they start a queue? A conversation? Both? Something else?

*

Why should a book about the end of money be interested in the internal quasi-currencies of game shows? Why should a book about the end of money care about alternative and complementary moneys, about Indigenous moneys, about the accounting practices of Net Zero transitions and the biometric practices of wellbeing interventions, about the speculative currencies of science fiction, and in the avant-garde financial experiments of artists and activists? Doesn’t all this imply more money, not less?

We can draw parallels both with police abolitionism and family abolitionism. Money abolition means unsettling our ideas of what money is in the first place. Money abolition must be understood not as subtracting something from society, but as multiplying and transforming relationships already latent in society. Just as abolishing the police must mean greater safety, not less, and abolishing the family must mean greater care, so abolishing money must mean more of whatever it is money is supposed, by its most fervent proponents, to be doing for us.

*

Making economic mechanisms work well often is framed as a matter of internalising the externalities. The producers do not naturally bear the cost of the carbon they emit, so a carbon tax must be applied to correct the market failure. But then . . . things get more complicated. These wisps of carbon are only so deadly because they join the vast clouds emitted by Western colonial powers since the nineteenth century. Can the externalities of the past be addressed in this way, by some kind of time travelling tax?

Anyway, the queue: the key is that some people won’t join at all. It looks too long. It elicits valuation. Wow, look at that queue! Let’s not bother. It isn’t worth it.

Queuing theory calls this balking.

*

When the beloved Queen Elizabeth lay in state, a great queue formed. It was predictable that many people would wish to pay their respects. A queue visible from space! Not really. But visible, through media devotion, across the country. 

London excels at processing thousands of people through boutique experiences, in intimate spaces, in batches of five or twenty or a hundred at a time. This is done via online booking. You get a slot. You get a QR code or something.

Of course a deliberate decision was made, instead, to eschew digital queueing. Instead allow people to wait in line for eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hours. Participate in the spectacle.

*

Queues and quasi-queues. Conveyor belts. Queuing at the lights. Traffic jams. Emergency Room, with or without triage. An instruction sent to a CPU. A bucket bridage. A line of succession. Snowpiercer.

A protest march is sort of a queue. But of course you can skip backwards and forwards, so not really.

Disneyland and abbatoirs both have insights in queue-space architecture.

*

The BBC has become MournHub.

The queue is queuetopia.

The Queen, lying in state. A queue visible across the country. Not joining a queue is part of how a queue operates: a queue invites valuation. This particular queue, there is really no way not to participate. You join, or you wish you could join, or you decide it’s not worth it, or you create hot take memes about the Queue Dystopia. 

If it were more convenient, probably fewer people would do it.

One Twitter user (Curious Iguana): I have no interest in seeing the queen! I just want to join the queue!

In terms of big crowd events, it’s not that big. If you did it at Wembley, the stands would look empty. If you did the Euro Cup Final that way, perhaps with spectators filing past a table football table, that would be a very long queue.

*

Queue abandonment. According to the classic Erlang-A model introduced by Palm (1943), each participant has a maximum time they are willing to wait. If they reach their max, they quit, no matter where they are in the queue. 

It is a deliberate simplification for analytic purposes, but can you imagine? How funny, all those internal timers pinging the queuers out at apparent random. My favorite would be the person who got to the very front just as their internal timer elapsed.

‘Can I help you sir?’

‘I’m not waiting any longer!’

That might be Curious Iguana, to be fair.

*

‘Queue’ sounds a bit like ‘queen.’ In fact, if you just heave the ‘n’ over the ‘e’ so it lands up-side-down, there it is. A queen is just a queue with a queue-jumping letter, or vice-versa.

*

In German, a queue is a ‘snake.’ 

*

‘The British love to queue!’

The British also love to lambast the queue as a symbol of incompetent, lazy and corrupt public services.

So the celebration of queueing might be read as a characteristic centrist response to the right: yes, you are absolutely right about the way the world works, but you haven’t counted on one thing: some of us don’t mind. 

*

Instead of a market with supply and demand for two commodities, imagine two queues.

Each individual is constantly weighing the utility at the end of the queue against the disutility of joining the queue.

A longer queue may imply both a greater reward (what lies at the end must be more desirable) and a greater penalty (the wait is longer).

*

Queue width. A queue can fatten, and turn effectively into a stack of small lateral queues. Or sometimes the internal organisation of the lateral units may be heterogenous: the five of us are behind the five of you, but when your unit reaches the front, you will use one method to order yourselves, and then we will use another. You will draw straws, we will fight to the death.

Consider that the queue for the toilets may actually be a ‘fat’ queue disguised as a ‘thin’ one. Each person is an assembly of two or three or four or five or more entities, each with its own principle for determining which will go first.

*

Following the passing of the monarch, as a mark of respect, a number of medical appointments have been postponed.

Do you still keep your place in the queue? Maybe not. It would be complicated to bump everyone along. 

*

Queueing is, supposedly, a very British thing. People in the UK are supposed more likely to form a queue, in situations where other nations would select some other resolution mechanism, such as an undignified scrum. Unless maybe there are just more things worth queueing for in the UK?

I am interested in queueing because I am interested in postcapitalism. 

I interested in all the everyday distributive mechanisms we already use that are non-capitalist or not-quite-capitalist. 

Everyday, or ‘queue-tidian’ life. 

Bread queues: a favorite image of anti-communist propaganda. Winston Churchill claimed in 1946 that ‘Socialism meant queueing,’ after the postwar Labour government rationed bread.

Deliberation is another such mechanism: talking about it. Who should have what? Who should do what?

Largesse is another. The king or queen, the warrior hero, the big man, dispensing treasure. You shall have this ring.

Game shows are another. Game shows distribute resources, resourcefully.

AI is another. Instead of two queues, imagine two neural networks.

Surely the British don’t love prefiguring postcapitalist distributive mechanisms?

*

A very British thing. Or, occasionally, a very English thing. George Orwell writes about the orderly behavior of the English crowds, and how striking foreign observers might find it, in ‘The English People’ (1944).

But then, Britishness is so very quintessentially English, isn’t it?

*

King Charles has been queueing for some time.

*

George Mikes memorably describes the lone Englishman as an orderly queue of one in How to be an Alien (1946).

*

Can there be a queue to join a queue? Maybe. There certainly can be queues to join a queue: for example, following the principle ‘one from this queue queue, then one from that queue queue.’

*

Queues with a variety of transformative gates scattered along the way, so that who you are when you complete the queue is not who you were when you joined.

Is it ever?

*

The historian Joe Moran proposes a more nuanced and mercurial construction of queueing and Britishness. ‘‘The notion of queues as the embodiment of fairness and equality has also existed alongside other discourses which have seen them as tedious, unfair, and inefficient. [...] The celebration of the orderly British queue began not in a more decorous time of courtesy and consideration in public place, but a period of national crisis.’ In the postwar years, as Labour built the welfare state, Tory quips associated long queues with drab egalitarianism, inefficiency and red tape. No one’s time could possibly be more valuable than anyone else’s. Labour were the party of the queue, Churchill once claimed, and the Conservatives, the party of the ladder. This trope would be adapted and reinforced throughout the Cold War era, to assert the inferiority of command economies and communism generally. A partly overlapping discourse associated queues with national decline. Long queues for post offices and banks during the economic turbulence of the 1970s brought back memories of wartime austerity. Satchi and Satchi’s famed ‘Britain isn’t working’ Conservative Party poster made political capital from the image of the dole queue. 

*

A sense of queuemmunity. The legacy of queuelonialism.

*

Social mobility is often figured, implicitly, as a queue. The myth runs: you are poor now, but if you wait long enough (working hard while you wait) your turn will come. 

‘I got mine’: as though yours always existed, was always waiting for you, just as you were waiting for it.

Age is often used as a euphemism for economic class. As though all young people were poor, all elders ‘comfortable’ or ‘well off.’

*

I am tempted to join the big queue to see the queen. 

But I am in France.