#deskilling

2) We can think about centripetal and centrifugal social forces, those that bind together and those that rend apart respectively. Centripetal forces like treating The Family, like the idea that you should put aside politics in social relationships, like the general pressures to not make a scene, not talk about ~abuse~ not make waves.

3) from both queer and anti-abuse perspectives it's easy to fall into a position in which centripetal forces are basically bad and centrifugal forces are seen as basically good. But you lose enough friends and see enough people run out of town over some bs and that starts to ring hollow.

4) These days it seems like most "community" that exists is just bound together by hierarchy and coercive centripetal nonsense. But that's because the world we have today is the product of the systematic destruction of free human life ways.

5) More and more lately I've been starting to think about social-relational approaches from a deskilling perspective. Like, I think for most of human existence people were better at this shit. That they had enduring relationships bound together by more than hierarchy. I think it follows that they had a set of skills/knowledge/sensibilities to maintain and care for relationships that made this possible. (A multitude of these for different people in different contexts).

Forget immigration, racism, wokism, taxation, social media, etc etc, the real reason Britain feels, and is, so broken is because of poverty caused by greed. Yes, this is going to be another rant about greedy UK capitalists but at least it will be a rant backed up by referenced evidence.

Britain as a country is by no means poor. In fact we are the world’s fifth largest country by GDP, with only the USA, China, Germany and Japan above us. This means the UK is still a major global economic power with a global ranking by total GDP of $4.26 trillion. (Worldometer: GDP by Country (2026)

Despite having the fifth largest economy in the world, GDP per capita is only ranked between 20th - 25th in the world, depending on which database you use. (IMF, World Bank, Worldometer.) When it comes to actual purchasing power per person, we rank lower still, coming in at 29th in the world. (newshub: United Kingdom economic snapshot 2026, gdp,per capita and forcasts) In other words, Britain’s substantial economic wealth is very unevenly distributed among the population.

The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of inequality for distribution of income or wealth. A figure of 0 equals perfect equality, a figure of 1 equals perfect inequality. Britain has a Gini coefficient of 0.59, which is extremely unequal by rich country standards. This is because the top 20% of the population hold 63% of all the wealth while the bottom 20% only own 0.5% of the wealth. (commonslibrary.parlianment uk: Wealth in Great Britain, 03/11/25)

One reason for this inequality is stagnant wages. The UK ranks near the bottom of advanced economies for real wage growth, with almost zero real wage increases over the past 14 years: one of the worst post - 2010 performances among high-income countries. So when right-wing pundits, media outlets and politicians condemn increases in the minimum wage as being unaffordable and harmful to the economy  they are being deliberately deceitful and complicit in a massive lie.

While Iceland enjoyed a +40% increase in real wage growth, Lithuania a 66% increase and the USA a 16% increase, British workers have only received a paltry 4%  rise since 2010. This makes Britain one of the weakest performers in the OECD for real wage growth. (oecd.org: Real wages regaining some of lost ground; 08/03/24)

Brits are repeatedly told we cannot have real wage increases until the economy grows, yet we are the 5th largest country in the world. How big to we have to be before British workers are given a fairer slice of the economic cake? The sad truth is we are being conned. We have the wealth, but it is concentrated in the hands of the few.

Economists will argue that we could have real wage increases if only we improved our productivity levels and they have a point. UK productivity has averaged out at 0.4% per year between 2010 and 2024, while the average for OECD countries as a whole is 1.5% per year.  Why is Britain’s productivity so low?

Those on the right of politics - Conservatives, Reform UK, GB‑News‑aligned commentators, free‑market think‑tanks – tend to cluster their arguments around five main explanations.

First, the British are lazy, work-shy and are not prepared to “put in the hours”. Second, benefits are too high and discourage people from working. Third, Britain has a “sick note” culture where GP’s sign off too many people feigning illness.  Forth, too many employment protections, rules and red tape hold back growth. Fifth, high immigration keeps wages low, disincentivising firms to invest in productivity enhancing technology.

What they don’t blame is low business investment, poor infrastructure, regional inequality, the impact of Austerity on public investment, or Brexit-related trade frictions.

Business investment as a share of GDP has been one of the lowest in the OECD since the mid‑2000s. At the same time, public investment was cut sharply during 2010–2017 austerity years , hitting transport, skills, and R&D outside the South East. Lower investment led to outdated machinery and IT, slower adoption of automation and weaker innovation.

Not only has UK business under-invested in plant and IT, it has also refused to invest in its workforce. Multiple analyses show that both the state and employers have cut skills investment over the past decade, leaving the workforce less adaptable and less productive. Employer investment in skills fell 19% per employee (2011–2022) in real terms, with even sharper declines in large firms (‑35%), primary industries (‑44%), and public services (‑38%). (neweconomics.org: Solving the UK’s Skills Shortage; 20/03/24).

A major study by the London School of Economics (LSE) found that about half of the UK’s post‑2008 productivity slowdown is due to under investment in capital and skills. While other countries maintained investment, the UK cut back hard and longer. The US, for example, now produces 28% more value added per hour than the UK, while  France and Germany  are 13-14% more productive. (lse.ac.uk: Chronic under-investment has led to productivity slowdown in the UK: 27/11/2023)

The consequences of skills under investment are visible across the economy. Skills shortages have grown significantly across sectors, including manufacturing, digital, health, construction, and clean energy. Young people lack confidence in meeting future skills requirements. The education system is under‑resourced and struggles to respond to labour‑market needs. (Edge Foundation: Skills shortage in UK economy; 2025) The governments own skills report highlights systemic challenges in matching supply and demand across priority sectors of the UK economy. (gov.uk: Skills England Annual Skills Report and Sectoral Skills Needs Assessment 2026: 01/06/26)

So, rather than being lazy as right-wing pundits often suggest, maybe they should be looking at the failure of greedy corporations who have made the deliberate decision to pocket the money they should have been spending on skills training, investment in new plant and digital innovation. Available evidence suggests that British industry has “saved” between £20-£30 billion over the past decade by cutting back on workforce skills training, and tens of billions more by persistently under‑investing in capital and inward investment.

This short-term greed of the few has led to the impoverishment of the many, both economically and in terms of skills.

Industrial methods of worker control were prefigured on plantations, which sought to maximize the labor of enslaved Black people otherwise unmotivated to produce value for those who kept them captive. While the relationship between industrial and plantation worker control is foundational, it is essential to recognize that there is no easy equivalence between the terror-enforced racialized labor regimes of plantation slavery, and industrial labor processes that drew on technologies developed on plantations.5 Plantation management—and the relations of domination that structured the plantation—was anchored in a view of Black people as commodities, as something-not-quite-human. And the conditions of bondage on the plantation defined the category of “unfreedom” against which white workers could be classified as “free.”

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In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne demonstrates that power over enslaved people was executed through bureaucratic technologies that divided enslaved workers, prescribed their routines and motions, and calibrated their movements with the goal of managing and controlling “every moment of enslaved life.”11 Her work clarifies the interplay between the strict division and quantification of life and labor on plantations, and how such segmentation served to make enslaved people observable to overseers and managers.12 The fragmentation of production, whether in the field or the factory, shifts power away from those doing the work to owners who benefit from defining and overseeing a coherent view of workers and the labor process. Such a view doesn’t emerge on its own. Rather, it is produced through records, metrics, and standardized assessments—and we must understand the term “record keeping” to be a synonym for “surveillance.” Monitoring and quantification of work and workers was the first, and arguably most important, step in populating plantation records. And these records’ demands for data and information in turn shaped how labor was divided and managed, in service of making work and workers as visible and quantifiable as possible.

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This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “Gig Work Is the Opposite of Steampunk,” about the worst-of-all-worlds created by bossware, where an app is your boss, and you live at work because your home and/or car is a branch office of the factory:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

As with so much of my work these days, the column opens with a reference to the Luddites, and to Brian Merchant’s superb, forthcoming history of the Luddite uprisings, “Blood in the Machine”:

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/

If the character is a ‘psychopath’ loner with a strong interest in torture devices then realistically they are very very unlikely to be in a position where (legally speaking) they can torture.

 I’m not saying there are no abusive individuals who fit this description. But I feel like the legal definition of torture is important here because what you’re describing does not sound like a torturer.

 For something to be torture, legally speaking, it must be:

Painful

Done by a government employee acting as part of their job (some countries also include international organised crime groups or armed groups controlling territory)

Have one of the following motives:

Punishing the victim or someone else

Terrorising the victim or someone else

Forcing a confession

Attempting to obtain information

 So no, legally speaking torture can never be ‘just for the sake of it’. If it doesn’t have one of the above motives then it does not meet the definition.

 The kind of person you are describing is the kind of person that government organisations even in regimes that openly torture actively screen out. They see these people as impossible to control and a liability.

 The evidence we have strongly suggests that torturers are normal, healthy individuals before they start torturing. It is likely that their mental health problems are a result of torture rather then the other way round.

 I also think it’s incredibly unlikely that a character who has an interest in torture devices would actually have a good working knowledge about what torture does to the body.

 Yes I realise that I am saying that as someone who clearly has at least a passing interest in torture devices and knows what different tortures do to the body.

 Here’s why I think it’s unlikely: the books that talk about historical torture and torture devices are uniformly written by people who have zero knowledge of medicine, psychology, and neurology. They often seem to have no grasp of statistics or the scientific method either.

 I say this with some confidence because I have slogged through a lot of them. And while they seemed like convincing sources when I was 13 they now make me grit my teeth and despair of the state of science education globally.

 These books are useful for collating historical sources and describing what different cultures did at different times. They are good sources of historical witness statements. They’re good for getting an idea of common vs uncommon torture practices and how practices changed with time.

 Scott, bless him, can give you a decent account of what breaking on the wheel looked like. But I would not trust him to give a decent assessment of the ultimate cause of death any more then I’d trust him to perform heart surgery.

 The people who write about the history of torture do not tend to read about the psychology, neuroscience or medicine relevant to the subject.

 And this feeds into the prevalence of torture apologia. There is a massive lack of cross-disciplinary communication which hampers our ability to tackle apologia in a concerted way.

 Unless your character is also interested in medicine and policing and psychology specific to trauma they are extremely unlikely to know anything near the full range of effects.

 I get survivors who have access to expert help telling me they hadn’t realised some of the things they experienced were symptoms. And I have yet to meet or read a single historian who knew that beatings cause kidney failure.

 It is not natural or normal for a character who is primarily interested in doing these things to know how they work.

 This is not information you find by looking for how torture was performed. It’s not even information you find by looking for how survivors heal.

 It’s information you wrench out in a hundred pieces over years of reading history, psychology, survivor accounts, medicine, scientific journals and the work of people actively trying to stop torture.

 In other words; not the sort of thing a ‘lone wolf’ terrorist type character would think to look for or find.

 If I’ve made it look as though coming by this knowledge is easy let me disabuse you of that notion. I can do this because I have spent decades building up this knowledge and because I read very widely. Much of my knowledge has not come directly from my obsession with torture but from reading widely enough to apply ideas from different disciplines to the topic.

 Frankly I don’t think anyone looking up torture devices would find any accurate information about torture at all.

 I also think that trying to give a character like this so much unusual knowledge is suggesting that torturers (or in this case abusers) are smarter, more ‘competent’ and controlled then they actually are.

 People like this do not know the effects of what they’re doing. Half the time they don’t even know the basics beyond ‘this hurts my victim’ and ‘if I do it too long they’ll die’.

 They often carry on to the point that disabling injury or death is likely.

 This sort of character really misrepresents torturers by propping up the idea that they’re somehow specialists. It is buying in to and backing up the puffed up machismo torturers spout.

 This isn’t close to a realistic torturer.

 The research we have on torturers is currently lacking but if you want to engage with the subject here are some typical traits:

Development of common psychological symptoms as the character tortures others

Loss of prior skills

Strong connection to a group of torturers who become the character’s entire social circle

Unhealthy competitiveness which turns abuse into a competition

‘Hyper-masculinity’ which equates worth and manhood with violence (not necessarily a feature prior to becoming a torturer but appears constant in torturer-sub-groups across countries and cultures)

Reduced ability to relate to others, lack of insight into their crimes

Often a delusion that torture is effective, even when confronted with constant evidence that it is not

Constant, justifiable, fear that other torturers will turn on them

Arrogant delusions about their own worth and value

Mood swings

Self centred

 These people do not look like intelligent lone wolf ‘psychopaths’. They look like anti-social, asshole trauma survivors with awful political opinions.

 If you want to write a serial killer-type character there is not necessarily anything wrong with that.

 But there are big differences in the way these people operate and the scale of violence to which they are exposed.

 One of the torturers Sironi interviewed during her work was involved in the torture and murder of an estimated 13,000 people over a period of about two years. Those are not unusual figures.

 Is that really what you’re trying to write? Because if it isn’t then you haven’t grasped the magnitude of what you suggest when you use the word ‘torture’.

 If you want to write a torturer who isn’t typical there is not necessarily anything wrong with that.

 But if you’re doing that you can not assume your audience knows what is actually typical, and the ways you choose to depart from reality are not necessarily neutral. Think about what the unusual elements you include imply.

 And if any part of that implication is the idea that this particular torturer-character is somehow ‘better’, ‘smarter’ or ‘more capable’ then understand that you are supporting the kind of delusions of grandeur that real torturers use to justify their crimes.

Availableon Wordpress.

Yesactually I do.

I’dsuggest looking up Chicago’s absolutely terrible record of policetorture and the pattern of behaviour exhibited by convicted torturerJon Burge and his colleagues.

Italk about them in my post on forced confessions here. Rejalimentions them a few times throughout his book.

RonaldKitchen, one of an estimated 200 victims and one of 17 who confessed,wrote a book on his experience of torture, forced confession and theyears he spent on death row as a result. Ihaven’t read this book yet but you can find it here.

Thereason I’m bringing up Burge is because he’s a prime example ofwhat Rejali refers to as ‘deskilling’ among torturers.

EssentiallyBurge and his team stopped functioning as investigators, they stoppedperforming basic investigative techniques and started spending moreand more time threatening and torturing people instead. They werearresting people for crimes but they weren’t the rightpeople.

Sofar as I can tell the general pattern of behaviour was to look forethnic minorities (usually black men) especiallyvulnerable individuals such as the homeless or someone who had beenarrested before for a completely different offence. Burge’s groupwould then detain their victim and torture him* in an attempt toforce a confession.

Theprocess of choosing a victim was not precisely random. But it hadnothing to do with evidence or the likelihood of the victim beinginvolved with this particular crime. The people being picked up knewnothing about the crime they’d been picked up for. Instead theywere targetted for thingsthat made them seem like less reliable witnesses or more‘convictable’.

Forbeing large, male and black. For having a visible drug problem or avisible mental illness.

Allof which means that it would be perfectly realistic and in keepingwith the behaviour of torturers to havepolice torturers in your story without a single guiltyperson being arrested.

I’massuming that the majority ofthis story is focused on or from the point of view of characters whoare involved in organised crime?

Hereare a couple of ways you might be able to include police torture inyour story without any major characters getting arrested:

A high profile crime is committed (by your main characters or not) and they observe the fallout from a distance. They notice the police have arrested a lot of homeless people and drug addicts. They may notice these background characters showing up again, twitchy, shaking and struggling to walk.

In a similar scenario a younger less experienced member of the group could ask whether they should be worried. A more experienced member could then reassure them ‘This happens every time. They’ll make someone confess….eventually.’

Use the antagonistic effect torture generally has on survivors and make one of the group members a survivor of police torture. Play into the fact that at the time they were completely innocent and just happened to be walking through the wrong neighbourhood at the wrong time. The police tried to force a confession from them and released them after a few days when it didn’t work. The character walked away with an intense hatred of the police and joined organised crime partly in opposition to the police and partly because they noticed that group members were not arrested.

Police torturers could also be brought up generally in discussion within the group. For instance if a group member wonders whether they should be worried about the police while planning a particularly risky activity. Another member could dismiss this an accurately describe what the police here do ‘They’ll pick up some nobody and beat the shit out of him ‘til he says he did it. They won’t come after us. They don’t have the balls.’

Whicheverway you choose to highlight how the police in this world act I’dsuggest emphasising their incompetence. Torture causesthe breakdown of discipline, corruption,lack of trust in police anddeskilling of officers. It cuts off the main sources of accurateinformation police usually rely on. If it’s taken root in thisparticular branch of the police then there is going to be very littlepolice work going on.

Incolloquial terms, these officers couldn’t tell their arse fromtheir elbows.

Thiswould probably breed contempt from the criminals they’re supposedto be chasing. These people have little reasonto fear the police. They alsohave a front row seat observing just how ineffective and brutalpolice methods in this world are.

Theresult is a world where members of organised crime might well feelmorally superior to police. After all the criminalsactually know what’s going on. They probably have a greater abilityto go after the ‘right’ people then the police, because relyingon torture destroys police informant networks whereas the members ofvarious gangs probably have members who witnessed many of theincidents police are supposed to be investigating.

Thecriminals might feel that they are more competent, better equipped,better informed and ‘less brutal’ than the police (because heythey’re targetting people who are actually guilty of somethingright?).

Allof this breeds contempt. It creates a view that the police arefundamentally useless brutes. And in a situation where torturers areembedded in the police- it’s not exactly wrong.

Ihope that helps. :)

*Mypronoun choice is because the vast majority of victims of thisparticular group were male.

Edit: The purpose of the blog is fiction. I am not here to debate real life incidents. And the one person I named in this post is a convicted American ex-police officer who tortured suspects while on duty. 

Pointless and cruel? Yes certainly. But that doesn’t mean this never happens.