"The Old Oak" and utopian nonsense

Astrid and I watched Ken Loach's recent (2023) movie "The old oak" last night. Don't know how I missed it when it came out. I admire Loach's work deeply because it reflects the world we are in in a way which preserves the grittiness of daily life, but retains the possibility of magic which is the preserve of art. 

The conversations among reform voters, aggressive and angry people, young and old, the disappearance of hope, and the sheer logic of their grievance needs to be set out dramatically. This is not abstract. No warm empty words from privileged classes - politicians, educators, philosophers - can possibly get close to the rawness and realness of emotion. However, there is space for intelligent analysis of the context within which the drama plays out - the role of social media in whipping up hatred, the dilemmas of people who cannot escape hypocrisy, the sheer fear of refugees whose traumas in the UK are just the latest stage in a litany of trauma.

I have academic friends who talk of how things are getting better, how technology will bring us together, how the education system can be fixed. What nonsense. Get them to sit in the pub with these desperate people and try to explain that... "Technology will revolutionise society and make things better!" they might try to explain. "For whom?" Will come the most polite of the responses. 

"The problem is we have a false ontology!". Fuck off! - people have got no money! 

I want to think not of causes - it's too complex, and yes, ontology is part of it - but it's practically impossible to have a conversation about that even in universities! Much better to think about how to coordinate interventions. There is no one-size fits all solution, although there may be an ontological root. But when there are so many needs and demands, and so much diversity, and there are so many possibilities for addressing them, how can we select and coordinate interventions. Most tantalisingly, might we be in a better position to do this now than we once were, given the technology at our disposal?

That's going to require some ingenuity. And much of it will not work. But if we can coordinate interventions better then there may be ways we can address these deep issues more constructively, and in way that fits peoples' real lives much better than we currently do.