Why Do We Wait?

One day your Apple Watch will congratulate you on correctly wiping your arse, although It’s likely that you will only get that feature on the smaller-sized model for the sake of those who are excessively handed. My watch gives me a tiny dopamine hit when I’ve washed my hands for twenty seconds. It’s very first world, relying on hearing water running while you’re making the soap do its job, and it is fooled by my gurgling drain, so I have a perfectly valid escape clause. I allow myself to be monitored because there is a considerable upside; we all benefit from others monitoring our behaviour. I’m not marginalising the privacy debate around these devices, and I will always restrict a company’s ability to ‘gamify’ my activities, but I have washed my hands for longer since the feature was introduced and so I should. When I didn’t know it was beneficial to wash my hands for longer I washed them for shorter, so to speak.

That one was easy; I changed how I did something when I saw a benefit to everyone from my actions. I’m not always that generous, especially when I’m on wheels, but washing your hands is probably the most important concept in global health, thank you, Ignaz Semmelweis. I can remember thinking about this at the beginning of the pandemic when we wondered if COVID-19 was spread by contact, as is the common cold. I was in an airport, I can’t tell you where, and in a cubicle; for traditional reasons. As I planned the next couple of minutes, poised with my folded blotter on my left thigh and a ready-rolled ‘Captain Kirk’ on my right, it occurred to me that had we been a week into a bacterial pandemic then my next few minutes would be entirely different. Following my doing the paperwork there would have been disposable paper gloves with which to raise my raiment. The flushing mechanism and the door lock would have large extensions and stern warnings. Most basins now try to respond to the presence of a corrupted hand, and we’ll all be queuing for the one that works. If you think about it for a few seconds, and I’ll spare you my usual rhetoric, the current system is disgusting. We’ve made some progress at the basin, but the throne remains as it was when Thomas Crapper invented the flushing mechanism. The door leaves you at the mercy of everyone who has used that cubicle since it was last given a perfunctory squirt of petrochemical.

Of course, the solution for this could be purely technological. The lavatory of the present in Japan is the lavatory of the future here. In the land of the rising sun, your moon will be jet-washed, dried, then powdered or moisturised. I’d moisturise were I getting on a plane, or if I needed to walk quickly to passport control. Other tasks can also be options, although the male anatomy would pose problems even for the most skilled tailor. Perhaps combining a repurposed golf ball scrubber with a system for weighing it to gauge optimism would be the next big thing. I once asked a Microsoft employee if he would put his meridian appendage in a Microsoft meridian appendage washing machine, and he said ‘Only if we’d outsourced it’.

So if we can do this now, why don’t we? Are we waiting for the next pandemic? We have failed to learn a lesson from every obnoxious chef who’s been stink-palmed by the last waiter they fired?

Why don’t we do these things now? Because we hate thinking about this stuff and it’ll be the death of us. This should not to be a surprise because we are learning to measure things at a prodigious rate, and we are being shown what is effective and what is not. There’s always a bit of friction at that point because it all changes very quickly. Early in the pandemic, we were not sure if masks were effective. Then they were, then the surgical masks were made ineffective without an air conditioning unit above your head, and then we settled upon electrostatically charged N95s. Some still use this progression of knowledge as a reason to claim that science is in some way flawed. The same with lockdowns; if you do it early, it works. We discovered this; we learned. Well, most of us did. Does your organisation have a plan for the bird flu lockdown? It’s coming soon to a poultry farm near you. We now know that the global production of dead chickens and unfertilised eggs has caused a disease which has spread to the wild bird population and has now spread to mammals, killing merrily as it goes. And yet the default response when looking up from a menu is still chicken. We will wait until H5N1 is out of control before chickens drop off the menu. Chicken farmers paid into their union for decades to make certain it happens that way.

It’s not just a question of waiting too late to mandate a change, we start too late to design. When we found microplastics in kippers we stopped using plastic straws, choosing instead a deliberately unsuitable replacement which will no doubt be replaced by a piece of lead pipe in the coming European populist revolution. Obviously we could have used a number of materials far more suitable for sucking sugar water through than is paper. Who decided upon paper? I wouldn’t put that in a comedy sketch. We can get by if companies agree to fill our sippy cups, but that’s awkward at the drive-through window, and I’d need coffee, water, and gin where most cars only have two cup holders.

The same applies to supermarket carrier bags, food packaging, and electric cars; they waited until they had to do it and they messed it up.

The main enemy is conservatism, which is seen in all political parties and movements, and which decides where the money is spent according to majority public opinion. Note that there is a tap in your bathroom which will burn you if you leave your hand under it for more than a few seconds. Why? If you ask a plumber they will say that it’s because that’s how it’s done. They will merrily point you in the direction of mixer taps, which waste a few litres while the temperatures and pressures calm down, and then decide to either freeze you or burn you. It’s how we do it. It’s how it has always been done.

I’ve been a vegan for a quarter of a century and one of the most common criticisms of the changes required away from food is that if you replace fur, feathers, fluff or epidermis with non-animal alternatives is that it will inevitably involve plastic. At the cheaper end of the market this is often true, but had we seen the problem at the end of the Second World War we’d all be wearing bamboo overcoats and linseed oil shoes, and poor Benjamin Braddock could have put his aqualung in the cupboard where it belongs half an hour earlier. Some British soldiers still wear a bear on their heads.

In general, companies do stuff when it suits them. They will cut out a damaging product or practice if it gets them customers, or if it harms a competitor. They will influence politicians to avoid having to, but they are watching. It’s a question of our forcing them to think when they bet on our not caring. It’s always about caring.