There’s something strange in the neighbourhood. It’s definitely happening right across the cultural sector. It may well be happening in other sectors, too. It may well be happening everywhere. All I know is, it’s rampant in my world of work, so I’ll confine myself to what I’m observing there, and leave you to decide how far and wide the rot might have spread into other areas.
What I’m talking about is people in positions of power, salaried people for the most part (but not always), who all seem to have simultaneously settled on a way of dealing with any correspondence or with any remotely difficult or awkward conversations they don’t want to deal with — ghosting.
Here’s how it works. You’ll either be looking to initiate a new working relationship with someone, or, more likely, build on an existing relationship. To start with, your interactions with this person/these people seem to go well. In extreme cases, you might end up actually making some work as a result of this, and getting paid some actual money for it, especially if you’re able to leverage that money from the power people to secure even more money from bigger funders.
In the most extreme cases, this situation can continue for some time — sometimes even for years. And eventually you think you’re invincible. You think nothing can possibly go wrong. You choose to ignore warning signs which hint, like the sun-whitened bones on the Sirens’ beach, at any possibility of danger: such as those occasions when you cross paths with someone who’s fallen foul of these power people in the past, and who tries to tell you how ruthless or unkind or unsupportive they can be. You may even know someone who’s been rejected, mistreated, cut off by the power people.
No, you tell yourself, in your confidence, perhaps in your arrogance. It’ll never go that way for me.
But then, one day, quite suddenly, the power people do fall silent. It’s as if they’ve vanished, been vaporised. The last email or message you sent them just sits there, unacknowledged, unreplied to. You wait, but nothing comes. You keep waiting, telling yourself that eventually, surely, eventually, they’ll respond. They have to. But they don’t.
After waiting what you consider to be a reasonable and respectful time, you might quite naturally try reaching out again, popping up with a little reminder, especially if the thing you’ve been discussing is time-sensitive or money-sensitive for you. You might actually broach the issue of that time sensitivity or that money sensitivity, hoping that they’ll get the note within the note — hoping they’ll understand that you can’t afford to wait much longer, that you need an answer because something very important to your livelihood and your wellbeing depends on it.
So you send this message off, convincing yourself deep down that surely they’ll reply now. SURELY!
At this point, two things might happen.
The much less likely option is that they do finally get back to you, and when they do, they behave as though no time has elapsed at all, either ignoring the length of time they’ve ignored you, or hinting at some great all-consuming busyness at their end that sounds like a veiled rebuke at your audacity for having expected to hear from them any sooner. They, after all, must be far, far busier than you could ever be, is what their tone implies.
The much more likely option is that you will continue to hear nothing. And the period of waiting and anticipation just gets longer and longer, weeks teasing out into months. In all likelihood, you will never hear from them again.
You’ll agonise over this, stricken with self-reproach about what you can possibly have done to make them fall silent. You’ll analyse every email, every interaction, every formulation of words they might’ve used with you, in order to try and pick up some clue as to where it all went wrong — as to where you went wrong.
But the fact is, in 99.9% of cases, you didn’t do anything wrong at all. Except to believe that things would be different for you, and that you wouldn’t end up out in the cold like those other poor unfortunates who might have tried to warn you this would happen. The Sirens’ beach was littered with the bones of those who’d swum to shore, remember.
This, dear Reader, is the New Professionalism.
It’s not just endemic within the culture sector now — it’s positively epidemic. I could (but won’t) regale you with anonymised tales of umpteen people who’ve ghosted me over the last three years; the most recent instances occurred within just the last month. I also know from firsthand conversations and through second- and thirdhand reports that pretty much every freelancer and a large number of independent organisations are experiencing this, everywhere, all the time.
We’re often told the pathway to success lies with who you know, not what you know. But longstanding relationships are no defence against this. Neither are friendships. Some of the worst cases of ghosting I’ve endured were at the hands of people who I had come to consider foremost as friends rather than work colleagues. But when push came to shove, for whatever reasons, a tie of friendship was still not enough to prevent radio silence from descending.
Strictly speaking, we shouldn’t be using the word “ghosting” to describe what’s happening here. The existence of ghosts is still not indubitably proven (despite what some people would have you believe), so a lack of reciprocal communication from ghosts is not just understandable, but is to be logically expected.
By contrast, we KNOW that the power people we’re trying to correspond with are real. We don’t get an Out Of Office message to say they’re on long-term leave or have left the organisation. We see them on social media, happily posting about what they’re up to. We get two blue ticks on the WhatsApp message we sent them. We see them out and about in cafes, or almost bump into them in supermarkets, or narrowly avoid colliding with them at theatre Press Nights or in mutual friends’ back gardens. So we know, incontrovertibly, that they have not ceased to exist, even though they seem to be trying to behave as though that’s exactly what has happened.
I can propose no solution to this, much less enforce one. The power people’s silence is a devastatingly effective move on the game board. It is impossible to complain, to reason, to cajole, to argue or to plead with someone if they do not enter into correspondence with you.
It’s like the situation in Fiasco, the wonderful 1986 novel by Stanisław Lem, in which an exploratory mission to the planet Quinta ends in ignominious and catastrophic failure because the Quintans refuse to be communicated with; no matter what the visiting crew tries, the Quintans simply will not engage with them. Unlike Fiasco, though, I haven’t obliterated anyone who has been persistently silent with me.
The only available response, and it’s not an entirely adequate one, is resigned acceptance. You have to concede that the well has run dry, and move on. Send your bucket down a different well. Or dig in the dirt for a fresh one. The difficulty with that, though, as those of us who freelance are painfully aware, is that there’s precious little water flowing down there anymore. And part of the reason for that drought, at least, is because the power people are still often the ones in charge of the tap.
We’ve become the Sirens now; like Odysseus’ crew rowing past, the power people have stopped their ears with wax against us; we can sing as hard as we want, but now, the only ones facing annihilation on the rocks seem to be us.
