5

When Hatsuka wakes up the next morning she finds Max sitting at the breakfast bar. ‘You’re late,’ he says. ‘I had to make my own coffee. The worst ever.’ This is a quotation from a classic movie, which Hatsuka cannot place. Max is already wearing his little green hardhat. Every student puts in an hour a day on the Holophin production line to supplement the permanent labourers. The Takin International School provides over 5,000 jobs in the local area and offers phenomenal promotion prospects. It is easy to transfer from technician to instructor and back again.

Tim Takin is a countercultural revolutionary (“I Hate the Term CEO…” – People headline). It is his wish that Holophins should improve our inter- and intra-personal communication while also replacing “the entire bureaucratic caste, including their pointless, middle-brow artists and writers.” He expresses these statements as 75% joke. Takin International School is subsidised by eleven of the world’s top financial institutions. The head’s snobbery is something of a joke: the Holophins have already been shown to have enormously beneficial effects on conditions such as dementia, Alzheimer’s and clinical depression. Even if their effect is largely to make it easier for those around the sufferer than to improve the condition itself. They create the impression of lively and engaged communication. They fill in the blanks. This in itself is healing: if your carers are happy, if they see some meaning in their own small, daily sacrifices, it is natural that they will do a better job and you will, in turn, improve [Hodge and Weisbuch].

“Why do we employ children?” from the same interview, “they work hard, they’re intensely imaginative and they don’t drink. Seriously, though, the Holophins are just a by-product of TIS’s educational programme: a big coursework project. It’s only that our students are so talented and our teaching so robust that this coursework happens to produce an aspirational product.”

In an open letter to business leaders, Takin called for a moratorium on the term ‘front-line services’. “Let’s be clear. If your job, if the thing you get money for, involves interrupting a surgeon, a teacher, a cleaner, a scientist, a chef, an engineer, a police officer, a secretary or anyone doing anything tangible and useful in the service of others, you are part of the problem. We shouldn’t need to distinguish “front-line services” because there shouldn’t be any other kind.’

Perhaps all CEOs see themselves as countercultural revolutionaries, being scions of naïve individualism ascribing their vast wealth to their own efforts alone. Is it a puzzle that systems contain the means of their own rebellion? What are pistons doing if not struggling like lobsters on their way to the pot? A good system not only contains its own rebellion: a good system harnesses that rebellion and uses it to produce over 80% of its energy.

Two weeks from now Max will have to work on Status Anxiety by himself, as I will be Hatsuka’s only project, sticker #119745863, the first Holophin novelist. The first novel is so often autobiographical, and it is best to say, ‘No comment,’ when you are asked which bits are true.