Doing nothing. Being. That’s the key. All the way down to Staines, on the car radio, I was hearing about economic disaster, global recession, the collapse of Marconi’s share price. Even the biggest, most ruthless conglomerates were going belly up because they made the mistake of investing in product. Manufacture something, anything, and you’re dead. Fashions change. Mobile phones will go the way of kipper ties. Play smart. Do nothing. New Labour (lessons of the Dome fiasco learnt) have it absolutely right: take soundings, soothe your critics, commission reports. Talk in colourless catch phrases: ‘Best Value. Economically viable, environmentally sound.’ But do nothing.
The ideal is a building with no function other than to carry, discreetly, the company’s name. Siebel. The telescopic tower with its green-glass wings sits alongside the M25, but it is not of the M25. The motorway is as archaic as a Victorian railway, a fun fair ride. You can think of it in terms of traction engines, stagecoaches, ox carts. A Little England folly from the day it was built. Off-highway, faux-American science parks are now as pertinent as Legoland or some model village in the Cotswolds. Those CCTV camera-boxes, poking out of the shrubbery on stalks, are SF hardware from another era. Surveillance, the fortress estate, boastful flag poles, paranoid architecture: redundant.
Siebel understand. Siebel have created this beautiful bird of a building, a swan of the motorway: curved spine and neck, angular wings. Tinted windows through which you can see nothing very much. The car park comes on two levels and is almost deserted, eight or nine unostentatious motors — with space for sixty or eighty more. A roof park, spiky Mexican plants as a border. A ground level space beneath, more conceptual gallery than garage.
Yesterday there was nothing here. The Siebel building appeared, fully formed, from nowhere. You can’t date it: elements of the Thirties, Sixties, Nineties. No irony, no pastiche. Something clinical or forensic, germ-repelling. The building doesn’t impose, it insinuates: no sweat, today is your first tomorrow. A metal arm, a gesture that divides Siebel-world from the Egham underpass, creaks. The only sound in a perfectly smooth acoustic environment. A car arrives, the arm cranks up. A man in a lightweight suit, no papers, no case, saunters to the entrance, the green world of indoor tree shadows and underwater light.
Surveillance systems are unnecessary. Siebel have created a force field. Egham, a town trading on a loose connection with Runnymede and Magna Carta (sandstone effigy of King John outside the yellow-awning pavement café), needs Siebel. Siebel have put up a number of other buildings — no product mentioned — as a rebuke to earlier, urban rim outfits that made the mistake of hugging the railway. Businesses give the appearance of being on the verge of bankruptcy by simply having the wrong address, being stuck in some cosy little town rather than in the zone, the slipstream of the M25.
A car’s width from the hard shoulder, anything is possible. Siebel could be an illusion. A photo-realist hoarding. We walk towards the central tower, the bottle-glass Panopticon. And then we’re inside — with no memory of having passed through an automatic door. The building has no inside. There is more space as you approach the great ledge of the control desk than when you stand in the car park, looking in. The air is better, the temperature gentler. Light dazzles from every surface.
Unlike Bishopsgate in the City, or Canary Wharf, no one challenges your right to wander. The women at the desk are charming; young (but not too young), elegant (but not intimidating). They smile. They know nothing. You are welcome to see whatever you want to see, but there is no content. Glass lifts rise and fall like water features. Strollers drift from level to level, doing nothing; nodding, avoiding conversation, argument, the testosterone urgency of the market. What Siebel are peddling is: absence of attitude. Zero attrition. No cutting edge. The right decision — which is no decision.
Road-ragged pedestrians, such as Renchi and I, are welcome because we do not register. As far as the women at the desk are concerned, we do not appear on the screen. We come from another universe and very soon we’ll go back to it.
Can we make an appointment to inspect this marvellous place? Of course. But not now, not here; another tomorrow. What does Siebel produce? Who can say? Siebel is. A shimmering mirage. A virtual oasis on the edge of a collapsing motorway system. Siebel sibilates. A near anagram of e-libels.
I pick up a brochure. Fatter, glossier, more anodyne than an in-flight magazine. The atrium is the least resistant hotel lobby in the world. The ultimate waiting room. Blue-grey magazines can be carried, but not read. We settle ourselves in a set of criminally comfortable armchairs; leather too soft to wear, so tender it feels as if it’s still alive.
Siebel, The Magazine has a man in a suit on the cover. He’s not smiling, or frowning. He wears a beard that isn’t a beard; it’s a quotation from a film nobody can put their finger on. ‘Customer satisfaction,’ says the brochure. ‘Seamless integration.’ ‘Comprehensive upgrade.’ Of what? I want to scream. ‘Solutions provider.’ Siebel has solutions for questions that have not yet been asked, will never be asked.
A Sino-American businessman holds a tiny screen in his hand: ‘You’re always connected and always available. Some call it a revolution; others call it evolution.’ Language is de-fanged, homogenised. Yellow E-tab faces leer at you. Ecstasy without frenzy. Satisfaction, whether you want it or not. ‘The Siebel eRoadmap to Successful eBusiness.’
I’ve had enough. I’m with Georges Perec, whose novel La Disparition was written without the letter e. The commonest letter in the pack is an untrustworthy creature. A nark, a grass. They use it to crack codes. Too much tail, too much wiggle. A high-pitched sound. A petulant fly in an afternoon bedroom.
If we believe in the Siebel world, we might as well give up the walk now. But there’s another option: I decide to visit J.G. Ballard at Shepperton. How does he feel about predicting, and thereby confirming, the psychogeography of Heathrow’s retail/recreation fallout zone?
It was a day when the weather was so warm, the view from the slow train (M3 across golf paddocks and ‘refuse transfer stations’) so seductive, that any sane North European would begin to think the unthinkable: climate change. This greenery with its huddles of loud-leisure golfers, traffic breezing westward, is future desert. The Drought. Ballard isn’t dealing in metaphors, he means it. The wise men (poets, social scientists, demagogues, Diggers, anti-psychiatrists) gathered at the Roundhouse in Camden Town in 1967, for the epochal ‘Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation’, all talked about one thing: Gregory Bateson’s riff on melting polar ice-caps, carbon dioxide emissions, the squandering of fossil fuels. Bateson wasn’t messianic. He didn’t rant and rage like Stokely Carmichael. He didn’t hide, junk sick, behind dark glasses, muttering apocalypse and revenge (like Emmett Grogan). He was very reasonable, steady voiced; the dark humour of an implacable logic.