We Don’t Care, Because We Don’t Have To

Other people’s train horror stories are about as fun as other people’s dreams, so I will spare you the details.

But I do think trains being so reliably awful has clear implications for the PR trade.

The short version is that I was travelling at slightly the wrong time (20 minutes too soon). And via a route that did not require a change in Doncaster. (I was going from Nottingham to London.)

No one involved – no other passenger, not the lady who sold me the ticket, not the train staff – thought that the £92 I had spent shouldn’t entitle me to a seat in first class in a nearly empty carriage.

Only the actual ticket itself thought otherwise and it seemed to be the most powerful personality on board, an immovable object that denied common sense or discretion to anyone.

I fought for a bit. Then they said the train cops at Leicester had been alerted and would arrive in perfect time to a) fine me b) kick me off.

So I moved.

An aside: how can East Midlands Railway make it so the wi-fi works just fine in first class, but not in the second-class carriage literally 40 yards away?

I’m no techno expert but that seems almost neat. The wi-fi cuts off when you walk past the bathroom. How do they do that?

By chance – and I swear this is not a journalistic set-up – I was catching up on some weekend reading.

The FT magazine had a brilliant piece by Cory Doctorow about what he calls the “enshittification of absolutely everything”.

The gist is that tech companies made themselves impossible to avoid. Then just slowly made everything worse, in their own profit interests.

It is an irresistible force, an era defined “by the spread of degradation from the web to the real world, to our jobs, privacy, politics and beyond”.

Doctorow cites a character on a TV show called Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In who ends all adverts for the phone company with the words “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

We don’t care and we don’t have to isn’t the official slogan of our train companies but if it was, it would at least clarify the situation.

One other small example from Doctorow.

A few years back Amazon decided it wanted to buy a business called Diapers.com.

Diapers.com said no.

So Amazon spent $100m (pennies to Amazon) on selling cheaper nappies, until Diapers.com went bust.

No government anywhere in the world bothers to enforce rules on predatory pricing anymore, because it realises that Amazon, Facebook and the rest are just too powerful.

Even the train companies aren’t worth messing with.

So increasingly large chunks of our lives are effectively out of our reasonable control.

Which means the companies involved don’t need any public relations. They don’t care. Because they don’t have to.

Which means I’m stuck in Doncaster. And you’re out of work.