Reprivatization in the last two decades has not put an end to shortages or blackouts, but it has changed the political constellation between consumers and producers. On the one hand, it has made disruptions once again politically more sensitive and confrontational. As in nineteenth-century London, the fact that companies were making profits while their customers went without services created public anger and conflict (Morgan and Trentmann 2006). After the blackout in Buenos Aires in 1999, people took to the streets and burned tyres in protest. The situation was only defused when the electricity company Edesur accepted liability and began to compensate users (Ullberg 2005). More recently, some commuters have set trains on fire near Buenos Aires in protest against delays during rush-hours. Likewise in Soweto, privatization in 1999 has made the utility company Eskom a target in grass-roots battles over cut-offs (Egan and Wafer 2004).
On the other hand, the move to private ownership has come with a new recognition that consumers are not just recipients but co-producers, whose behaviour is vital for managing shortages. In Britain, in 2006–7, water companies defused criticism of ‘fat-cat profits’ through a consumer-orientated campaign with information on expected shortages and water-saving tips. The Californian ‘Flex Your Power’ campaign in 2006 told consumers that they had it in their power to resolve the power shortage collectively (Todd and Wood 2006). It could be argued that we see here a general trend of providers trying to recruit users to assist with maintenance, repair, monitoring and servicing, already widespread in the commercial service sector (self-service, customer service) but also reaching into public services which seek to capitalize on users’ competence and voice (Clarke et al. 2007).
Disruptions deserve more respect than they tend to be given. If it were unwise to romanticize breakdowns, it would be equally wrong to see them purely as a temporary, external intrusion or an irritating nuisance. Breakdowns are a systemic part of everyday life. Consumers are not only their victims. They play an active role in absorbing and coordinating them, in some cases even generating them. Breakdowns can serve as a temporary flashlight, illuminating dynamics of everyday life that lie obscured in more continuous and holistic accounts of consumer culture. There are synergies here with an older intellectual tradition, that of pragmatism, which recognized the insights to be gleaned during irregular moments when habits are broken or switched. Looking at a landscape with our head upside down, William James argued, makes the colours grow richer and more varied, and the contrasts between light and shade more marked (James 1890: 81; see also Brown 2003: 74–80).
80
Frank Trentmann