Crisis narratives frame our response
This genealogy of refusal explores crises and the ways in which we respond to them. Why? Because "stories of futures in which disaster strikes and we rise to the occasion are a vaccine against the virus of mistrust. Our disaster recovery is always fastest and smoothest when we work together, when every seat on every lifeboat is taken" (Doctorow 2017b). As explored by Drabinksi (2016) and in our companion short piece, crises, both real and constructed, are behind the narratives that frame our individual and collective responses to disaster, scarcity, and refusal.
The tragedy of the RMS Titanic is an event retold over and over. The story of the unsinkable ship's doomed voyage shocked the world. It's a real crisis narrative. But the story is also a tragedy because it didn't have to be that way. Half the seats on many of the Titanic’s lifeboats were empty. The very name of the Titanic carries connotations about hubris—it was too big to fail so it didn't need enough lifeboats for every person... and went full steam ahead regardless of the conditions. It's a story that illustrates the danger of calculated risks and compounding troubles of constructed scarcity: Let's cast off without enough lifeboats, then later when the ship's going down let's deploy the lifeboats half-empty.
"This is the thought experiment of a thousand sci-fi stories: When the chips are down, will your neighbors be your enemies or your saviors? When the ship sinks, should you take the lifeboat and row and row and row, because if you stop to fill the empty seats, someone’s gonna put a gun to your head, throw you in the sea, and give your seat to their pals?"
--"The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories" (Doctorow 2020)
Crises can be both real and constructed, as Bert Spector (2019) explains in Constructing Crises: Leaders, Crises, and Claims of Urgency. Either way, crises can be a powerful tool for leaders. Real crises can be borne on the wings of natural disasters or a global pandemic. Constructed crises tend to fall into different smaller narratives. Even still they can be utilized in the wake of real crises to form a larger narrative. Constructed crises are often used as cover by those who seek to claim (or hold onto) power and resources, especially in an urgent or "exceptional now" manner.
Constructed crisis often manifest as calls for urgency, which always stem from the desire for power. Scott Adams captures that aspect of constructed crisis perfectly in this Dilbert cartoon of workplace life:
In librarianship, crises are leveraged by administrators, politicians, and others to justify that "there just aren't enough resources" to make working conditions safe/effective or "there just isn't the time to wait!" to follow the advice of a specialist. These scarcity narratives then become the backdrop libraries use to boast about their ability to "pivot" or "do more with less," while at the same time they over-rely ad nauseum on the self-sacrifice and resilience of library staff in the face of adversity.
Staying open without personal protective equipment (PPE) during a pandemic, disincentivizing vacation, working people after hours without compensation, or simply allowing an understaffed, repetitive manual task to persist (that will never be efficient enough to beat the backlog) can all be positioned as stop-gap solutions in service of a noble mission. Underneath, such choices are typically justified by scarcity narratives about how resources are unusually scarce or how the matter at hand is more urgent than ever.
As you explore our genealogy of workplace refusal, we invite you to consider: How long should we do more with less? Is it okay to simply exist? Instead of demanding exceptional resilience in the face of adversity could we focus on surviving with some semblance of quality of life? How do we know if there actually IS a crisis? Or if resources are, in fact, scarce? Leah Zaidi tackles this from the perspective of design and argues that by "embracing solarpunk and biophilic design" we can "subvert the systems that prevent a brighter future from emerging." (Zaidi 2021)
How could we get out of the cyberpunk dystopia, because really no one wants to live in the dystopias...and how to design our way out [of the cyberpunk dystopia] we're in right now? ... We ultimately want to pull out new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things for today.. for thinking about what does it mean to enable a certain future? What does it mean to prevent a certain future? Then, you need to start looking at the actions that you're taking in the present, whether that is as an individual, or as an organization, and understanding how that will relate into the broader world and then perpetuate into the future as well." (Zaidi 2021)
