Weekend Box: Unrest in Iran, Tiktok & more
Editor's Note
Welcome to The Weekend Box, Audley’s weekly round-up of interesting or obscure political, business, and cultural news from around the world.
At the end of every busy week in Westminster, ministerial private offices ask their departments to submit papers to the ‘weekend box’ for Ministers and Secretaries of State to catch up with over the weekend. Similarly, we would like to send you into the weekend with a few stories to catch up with at your leisure.
So, let’s delve inside the Weekend Box.
BIG WEEK FOR GREEK ENERGY
With the news today of Kwasi Kwarteng’s resignation from the role of Chancellor and the subsequent appointment of Jeremy Hunt, it probably goes without saying that climate policy is not a high priority at this moment in Westminster. Perhaps it should be, as this week Greece hit a climate milestone that makes Britain look at risk of falling behind.
For four hours on October 7th, Greek electricity demand was 100% covered by renewable energy, a statistic that provokes questions of how the British government wants us to fare in comparison to our European neighbours in terms of combatting the climate emergency.
The Grecian scheme to support 4.2GW (4.2 billion watts – a lot of light bulbs) of installed renewables capacity in the country is intended to support electricity produced from solar PV and solar-plus-storage for the country. This, the EU has confirmed, will help Greece “meet their environmental targets”.
Meanwhile, Britain has received warnings from COP 27 hosts Egypt not to ‘backtrack’ from the climate agenda, a mere two years on from being labelled a ‘green energy pioneer’ for its longest run of coal-free power (68 days). This may not come as a surprise, given Prime Minister Liz Truss’ policies on new investment zones where developers can ignore rules on water quality, species conservation, and space for nature. This is not to mention the sanctioning of fracking in the North Sea, approving 100 new licences for oil and gas drilling. It is difficult not to agree with ex-Conservative leader William Hague that the PM may be ‘soft-pedalling’ on her global leadership towards climate change, a posture he vehemently warns against if this cabinet wants to be successful in the next election, or indeed survive the next week.
TIKTOK SHOP STREAMS STATESIDE
The most popular social media app in the world has taken a further leap into ecommerce this week.
Video sharing platform TikTok is looking across the pond in order to expand its online shopping service, as it seeks to set up US fulfilment services. ‘TikTok Shop’ livestreams have become frequent on UK users' feeds in the last year, as ecommerce teams support those with large followings to promote heavily discounted goods; from skincare and beauty to clothing and tech.
Over a dozen job openings in Seattle and Los Angeles have been posted on TikTok’s LinkedIn page, as the company looks to expand from South Asia and Europe.
Shopping on social media sites (social commerce) is a $37bn market in the US led by Meta, who have previously referenced the threat TikTok pose to their overall business model.
In the UK, those working on the ecommerce initiative launched last October detailed in a report by the Financial Times how there were ‘cultural differences’ between Chinese owners and UK office staff. Anonymous worker testimonies of 12-hour days to accommodate global audiences along with stubborn management staff were at the forefront of the investigation, as it was revealed they were operating at a loss in June.
Regardless, the new job listings highlight how TikTok are thinking beyond merely being a medium for companies to sell their goods. If the company manages to shrug off social media competitors looking to expand in the same market, it may start challenging the giants of Amazon and Walmart in the future.
UNREST IN IRAN
Four weeks have passed since 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died after being held in custody by the Iranian ‘morality police’. Protests continue, attracting both more support and more police brutality. This has prompted calls for restraint and dialogue from some within the Iran’s political elite. Some wonder if this might be the beginning of the end for the current regime.
However, recent history suggests not. Without exception every popular protests since 1999 has succumbed to brutal crackdowns. The largest, 2009’s Green Movement against a disputed Presidential election, had its own catalysing moment: footage of Neda Agha-Soltan dying from a sniper’s bullet spread just like that of Mahsa Amini lying on a hospital bed and prompted the same kind of popular fury. It took the state six months of mass arrests, show trials, and multiple killings of protestors to suppress that movement, but it succeeded.
More recently, the fuel price protests of 2019, which became combined with the wider Iranian Democracy Movement, were also defeated. That time, the crackdown crushed the protests in three days, with some 1,500 protesters shot and killed.
Might this time be different? The state’s response has been all too familiar: internet blackouts, mass arrests, denouncement as a foreign plot, and some 200 protestors killed; over 20 of them children, and many beaten to death. But the nature of the movement seems to have so far defied that response. Instigated and driven by young women and girls, whose indignation and derision wrong-footed the authorities, it has gained the support of many others who also reject the imposition of a corrupt state reasserting its claim to govern women’s bodies and moral conduct. As the grievances coalesce, this has become a cultural counter-revolution, without a political leadership to neutralise and drawing popular support from the 80% who never experienced Ayatollah Khomeni’s Iranian Revolution. Regime voices may call for dialogue, but with whom?
WORKED UP ABOUT WFH
This week, a Dutch court ruled in favour of an employee who claimed their rights had been violated by an employer who requested they keep their webcam on whilst working. Chetu, a software firm, had reportedly asked the employee to participate in a virtual classroom, during which the employee had to keep their webcam on. Upon declining this request, the employee was dismissed on the grounds of “refusal to work” and “insubordination.”
Flexible working, working from home, remote working; however you bill it, the uptick in non-office-based work practices shows no signs of abating post-pandemic. The finer intricacies of these new ways of working are yet to be ironed out, but there’s no doubt for many it has meant an improvement in overall work wellbeing. A recent study found that remote working increases employee happiness by 20%, whilst another survey carried out at the beginning of the pandemic showed that 75% of UK employees were happier working from home. However, for others, especially those with more fastidious employers, it has meant an increase in overbearing work tracking or surveillance tactics by bosses who seek to regain some control of workers who are out of their direct line of sight.
The employee in question at Chetu refused such monitoring practices, stating that they didn’t feel comfortable “being monitored for nine hours a day by a camera.” The employee said the practice was an invasion of their privacy and argued that all activities could be monitored on their laptop as they were sharing their screen at the time, so there was no need for their webcam to be deployed. Chetu, on the other hand, stated that it was no different to an employee being observed in an office environment.
Ultimately, the court had the final say, using European Court of Human Rights ruling stating that "video surveillance of an employee in the workplace, be it covert or not, must be considered as a considerable intrusion into the employee's private life.” Whilst this case ultimately ended in a clear judgement, the wider issue of employers looking for new ways to keep tabs on home-working employees remains contentious.
LOTS OF SPOTS - IS ANYONE BOTHERED?
Amongst the many debates that have been provoked by the rise of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, one of the fiercest is if the tokens can truly be called ‘art’. This week, one of Britain’s most prominent contemporary artists embarked on a project to show the creative possibilities of NFTs – though whether he’s been successful is also up for debate.
In 2021, Damien Hirst announced that 10,000 unique paintings he had produced of colourful spots, similar to the famous series of works he began in the 1980s, would go on sale as NFTs as part of a project entitled ‘The Currency’. The buyers of each NFT would have a year to decide whether they would keep the physical artwork or its digital counterpart token. Whichever they chose, the other would be destroyed. Ultimately, 4,851 of the paintings were kept as NFTs. On Tuesday, to coincide with the Frieze art fair, Hirst and his assistants set about burning each of these at his Newport Street Gallery in Vauxhall.
Hirst argued on Instagram that the “value” of the physical works the owners chose to destroy will be “transferred” to the tokens through burning the paintings. However, not everyone is convinced that the project is so transformative, or that any of the value Hirst claims is being “transferred” is there to begin with. Far from sending a message about value, some believe the burning of the paintings is pure spectacle, while others have criticised the artist for destroying a reported $89m of art during a cost-of-living crisis.
The project may put you in mind of a stunt by a group of artistic radicals who, like Hirst, came to prominence in the 90s and are known for making bold statements with the corpses of animals. When Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of house music duo The KLF infamously burned a million pounds, the uproar that followed was enough to suggest that they had hit on something about how we perceive value. It didn’t hurt that aside from their controversial antics, they also had great singles (‘Last Train to Trancentral’, anyone?). Meanwhile, Hirst’s project has failed to rile anyone up, let alone provoke any serious discussion. While the former-Young British Artist may have intended something forward-thinking, The Currency may be further proof that his days at the cutting edge are far behind him.
And that’s it for this week. I hope you found something of interest that you might want to delve into further. If so, please get in touch at cwilkins@audley.uk.com.
For now, that’s the weekend box officially closed.