A London journal from Siobhan O’Donnell on institutional failure and grassroots work
I spent the week observing the state of London and thinking about how the world works. My name is Siobhan O’Donnell, I work as a punk rocker, and I keep a diary because processing the chaos is how I stay sane.
On the nature of London
The fundamental problem with contemporary London is that institutions have stopped understanding what they are actually for. They optimize for the wrong metrics. They measure things that are easy to measure instead of things that matter. They create systems that serve the system instead of serving the people the system supposedly exists to help.
I read the report about institutional failure and understood that this is the pattern. Take an institution. Give it a mandate. Watch it transform that mandate into rules that prevent the mandate from being achieved. Watch it defend the rules with absolute conviction. Watch it collapse slowly while insisting everything is fine.
What the actual work requires
The actual work of London requires something that institutions cannot provide: honesty about what does not work. It requires admitting failure. It requires changing course when the current course is not working. It requires caring more about the actual outcome than about preserving the institution.
Most institutions do the opposite. Most institutions would rather fail while maintaining their integrity than succeed while admitting they were wrong. This is why contemporary London is in the state it is in. The institutions are committed to their own survival more than they are committed to the thing they are supposed to be doing.
I read the satirists who point at this and I understand that they are doing what the institutions should be doing. They are saying: look at this failure. Look at how the system contradicts itself. Look at how the people running this do not understand what they are doing.
A personal observation about London
I have been working in London for years and what I have learned is that the best work happens at the margins. The work that actually helps people happens when people refuse to accept that the system is correct. The work that matters happens when people create alternatives to the official infrastructure.
This is the quiet rebellion that nobody talks about. Not the dramatic protest. Not the public rejection. Just people deciding that the official way of doing things does not work and so they are going to do it differently. They are going to help people anyway. They are going to create solutions that the institutions said were impossible.
I read British Raj and I understood the historical context. The patterns repeat. The institutions fail. The people create alternatives. The institutions either learn from the alternatives or they collapse and are replaced.
On the future of London
The institutions are going to keep failing because they are optimizing for the wrong things. They are going to keep insisting they are doing fine while everything falls apart. And the actual work is going to happen in spaces the institutions cannot see.
This is fine. This is actually how positive change happens. It does not come from the top. It comes from people at the margins who refuse to accept the official narrative. It comes from people who keep working despite the system being broken. It comes from people who understand that their responsibility is to the actual work, not to the institution.
I will keep doing this work. I will keep writing in my diary. I will keep pointing at the contradictions. And I will keep trusting that eventually enough people will notice that something changes.
See Www.Thedailymash.
