Resisting the Tyranny of Productivity

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Briefly, an additional thought on the Programmable World (in which ubiquitous wireless sensors make objects and machines “smart”): The envisioned Programmable World, as Bill Wasik has called it, is a tremendously sophisticated time- and labor-saving technology. Just think of all that we will not have to worry about or do when machines “talking” to each other will automatically do it for us.

But … the promise of time- and labor-saving technology is rarely fulfilled. See Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave for a book-length validation of that claim.

Really, the effect of such technologies is to instill in us the ideals of efficiency and productivity. And that just gets tiresome. In an earlier post I wrote that the Programmable World would enable us to sleepwalk through life. Allow me to take that back. The Programmable World will encourage us to speed-walk through life. But really, the two are not so different – sleep walking and speed walking. In both cases, you’ve taken leave of the present.

So here, free of charge, is your inoculation, for today, against the tyranny of efficiency and productivity.

Pieter Brueghel, The Harvesters (1565)

Pieter Brueghel, The Harvesters (1565)

The Transhumanist Logic of Technological Innovation

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What follows are a series of underdeveloped thoughts for your consideration:

Advances in robotics, AI, and automation promise to liberate human beings from labor.

The Programmable World promises to liberate us from mundane, routine, everyday tasks.

Big Data and algorithms promise to liberate us from the imperatives of understanding and deliberation.

Google promises to liberate us from the need to learn things, drive cars, or even become conscious of what we need before it is provided for us.

But what are we being liberated for? What is the end which this freedom will enable us to pursue?

What sort of person do these technologies invite us to become?

Or, if we maximized their affordances, what sort of engagement with the world would they facilitate?

In the late 1950s, Hannah Arendt worried that automated technology was closing in on the elusive promise of a world without labor at a point in history when human beings could understand themselves only as laborers. She knew that in earlier epochs the desire to transcend labor was animated by a political, philosophical, or theological anthropology that assumed there was a teleology inherent in human nature — the contemplation of the true, the good, and the beautiful or of the beatific vision of God.

But she also knew that no such teleology now animates Western culture. In fact, a case could be made that Western culture now assumes that such a teleology does not and could not exist. Unless, that is, we made it for ourselves. This is where transhumanism, extropianism, and singularity come in. If there is no teleology inherent to human nature, then the transcendence of human nature becomes the default teleology.

This quasi-religious pursuit has deep historical roots, but the logic of technological innovation may make the ideology more plausible.

Around this time last year, Nick Carr proposed that technological innovation tracks neatly with Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs (see Carr’s chart below). I found this a rather compelling and elegant thesis. But, what if innovation is finally determined by something other than strictly human needs? What if beyond self-actualization, there lay the realm of self-transcendence?

After all, when, as an article of faith, we must innovate, and no normative account of human nature serves to constrain innovation, then we arrive at a point where we ourselves will be the final field for innovation.

The technologies listed above, while not directly implicated in the transhumanist project (excepting perhaps dreams of a Google implant), tend in the same direction to the degree that they render human action in the world obsolete. The liberation they implicitly offer, in other words, is a liberation from fundamental aspects of what it has meant to be a human being.

hierarchy of innovation

The Programmable Island of Google Being

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Bill Wasik in Wired, on the emerging Programmable World:

“Imagine a factory where every machine, every room, feeds back information to solve problems on the production line. Imagine a hotel room (like the ones at the Aria in Las Vegas) where the lights, the stereo, and the window shade are not just controlled from a central station but adjust to your preferences before you even walk in. Think of a gym where the machines know your workout as soon as you arrive, or a medical device that can point toward the closest defibrillator when you have a heart attack. Consider a hybrid car—like the new Ford Fusion—that can maximize energy efficiency by drawing down the battery as it nears a charging station.

… At his house, more than 200 objects, from the garage door to the coffeemaker to his daughter’s trampoline, are all connected to his SmartThings system. His office can automatically text his wife when he leaves and tell his home A/C system to start powering up …

For the Programmable World to reach its full potential, we need to pass through three stages. The first is simply the act of getting more devices onto the network—more sensors, more processors in everyday objects, more wireless hookups to extract data from the processors that already exist. The second is to make those devices rely on one another, coordinating their actions to carry out simple tasks without any human intervention. The third and final stage, once connected things become ubiquitous, is to understand them as a system to be programmed, a bona fide platform that can run software in much the same manner that a computer or smartphone can. Once we get there, that system will transform the world of everyday objects into a design­able environment, a playground for coders and engineers. It will change the whole way we think about the division between the virtual and the physical. This might sound like a scary encroachment of technology, but the Programmable World could actually let us put more of our gadgets away, automating activities we normally do by hand and putting intelligence from the cloud into everything we touch.”

In fact, if this indeed sounds to you like a “scary encroachment of technology,” Wasik’s word of assurance offers little consolation. The fact that the gadgets are unseen, activities are automated, and cloud intelligence saturates our environment means that the encroachment will be effectively total precisely because it will be invisible and, as they say, frictionless.

In a clever piece, also in Wired, Matt Honan imagines Larry Page as the master of his own island, a cross between Dr. Moreau and the Ricardo Montalban character on Fantasy Island:

“You are with my Google Being. I’m not physically here, but I am present. Unified logins let us get to know our audience in ways we never could before. They gave us their locations so that we might better tell them if it was raining outside. They told us where they lived and where they wanted to go so that we could deliver a more immersive map that better anticipated what they wanted to do–it let us very literally tell people what they should do today. As people began to see how very useful Google Now was, they began to give us even more information. They told us to dig through their e-mail for their boarding passes–Imagine if you had to find it on your own!–they finally gave us permission to track and store their search and web history so that we could give them better and better Cards. And then there is the imaging. They gave us tens of thousands of pictures of themselves so that we could pick the best ones–yes we appealed to their vanity to do this: We’ll make you look better and assure you present a smiling, wrinkle-free face to the world–but it allowed us to also stitch together three-dimensional representations. Hangout chats let us know who everybody’s friends were, and what they had to say to them. Verbal searches gave us our users’ voices. These were intermediary steps. But it let us know where people were at all times, what they thought, what they said, and of course how they looked. Sure, Google Now could tell you what to do. But Google Being will literally do it for you.

“My Google Being anticipates everything I would think, everything I would want to say or do or feel,” Larry explained. “Everywhere I would go. Years of research have gone into this. It is in every way the same as me. So much so that my physical form is no longer necessary. It was just getting in the way, so we removed it. Keep in mind that for now at least, Google Being is just a developer product.”

Not only is this a snarky critique of Page’s recent comments, it also pairs nicely with the Programmable World piece.

What’s the goal of the Programmable World anyway?  Is it that all of us in the developed world (because, of course, whole swaths of the human population will take no part in this vision) get to sleepwalk through our lives, freed from as many decisions and actions as possible? Better yet, is it the perpetual passive documentation of an automated life which is algorithmically predicted and preformed for me by some future fusion of Google Now and the Programmable World.

I’m fairly confident nothing quite so dark is really on the horizon for us, but I do wonder about the ideology driving this rhetoric and these imagined futures. What makes any of this attractive? What desires do these potential technologies answer to?

For some people at least, the idea seems to be that when we are freed from these mundane and tedious activities, we will be free to finally tap the real potential of our humanity. It’s as if there were some abstract plane of human existence that no one had yet achieved because we were fettered by our need to be directly engaged with the material world. I suppose that makes this a kind of gnostic fantasy. When we no longer have to tend to the world, we can focus on … what exactly?

Laborers Without Labor

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Kevin Drum in Mother Jones (2013):

“This is a story about the future. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It’s the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they’re computers: They never get tired, they’re never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.

The result is paradise. Global warming is a problem of the past because computers have figured out how to generate limitless amounts of green energy and intelligent robots have tirelessly built the infrastructure to deliver it to our homes. No one needs to work anymore. Robots can do everything humans can do, and they do it uncomplainingly, 24 hours a day. Some things remain scarce—beachfront property in Malibu, original Rembrandts—but thanks to super-efficient use of natural resources and massive recycling, scarcity of ordinary consumer goods is a thing of the past. Our days are spent however we please, perhaps in study, perhaps playing video games. It’s up to us.”

Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958):

“Closer at hand and perhaps equally decisive is another no less threatening event. This is the advent of automation, which in a few decades probably will empty the factories and liberate mankind from its oldest and most natural burden, the burden of laboring and the bondage to necessity. Here, too, a fundamental aspect of the human condition is at stake, but the rebellion against it, the wish to be liberated from labor’s ‘toil and trouble,’ is not modern but as old as recorded history. Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.

However, this is so only in appearance. The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society.  The fulfillment of the wish, therefore, like the fulfillment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaninfgul activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor’s way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew . . . What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them.  Surely, nothing could be worse.”

Update: A short while after I published this post, I was reminded of an article by Philip Blond I’d linked to a couple of years ago. It included this”

… according to Blond, “Neither Left nor Right can offer an answer because both ideologies have collapsed as both have become the same.”  The left lives by an “agenda of cultural libertarianism” while the right espouses an agenda of “economic libertarianism,” and there is, in Blond’s view, little or no difference between them.  They have both contributed to a shattered society.  “A vast body of citizens,” Blond argues, “has been stripped of its culture by the Left and its capital by the Right, and in such nakedness they enter the trading floor of life with only their labor to sell.”

“With only their labor to sell” – an arresting phrase that, in present context, raises the question: What if even this is taken away?

Home

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little way“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Eliot

Home. It’s a mythic notion. Two of the three great epics of the Greco-Roman world trade explicitly in its associations. Odysseus and Aeneas each journey homeward – the former back toward the home he left that yet remains, although not unchanged; the latter, his home destroyed, moves forward toward a home yet to be found. The Odyssey, then, is a story about those who have a home to go back to, and the Aeneid is a story for those who long for home but have no place that answers to the name.

And then there is the story of Cain in the book of Genesis. After Cain murdered his brother, he was condemned to be a wanderer, forever alienated from God and family. His plight presents itself as an allegory of the human condition. But then there was a twist. Cain, we are told, went on to build a city, he would not be a wanderer after all; and his descendants are reckoned the founders of agriculture, metallurgy, and the arts – in short, of human civilization. Out of the dissatisfactions of homelessness, we are led to conclude, flowed the great achievements of human culture. But the narrator has the last word. He tells us that Cain built his city in the land of Nod, a name that echoes the Hebrew word for wandering. It is a touch of literary artistry which poignantly suggests that, even when it is surrounded by the accouterments of civilization, the human soul wanders lost and alienated … homeless.

Reflections on the theme of home and homelessness are not the preoccupation of ancient writers alone. They persist because the condition with which they wrestle persists. The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod Dreher’s recently published book about his sister’s untimely death and his subsequent return to rural Louisiana, takes its place within this ancient literary tradition, and admirably so.

Rod and Ruthie Dreher grew up in the same small Louisiana town that had been home to the Dreher family for generations. During his high school years, Rod felt increasingly alienated from his family and his small town, so he left to pursue what would turn out to be a successful career in journalism that took him from one metropolis to another. Ruthie stayed. She married her high school sweetheart, became a beloved middle school teacher, and cultivated enduring relationships with family and friends.

Then Ruthie was diagnosed with a nasty, virulent form of lung cancer. It was a devastating and inexplicable diagnosis for the young mother of three who had never once smoked. For the next several months, her small hometown rallied around Ruthie and her family in countless precious ways. Rod witnessed all of this, and it changed his heart. He was moved by the generosity and love that surrounded his suffering family, and he was impressed anew by the beauty of Ruthie’s seemingly simple, but wonderfully rich, life. Then he moved his family back to Louisiana to be a part of the same community he had escaped so many years before. Without illusions, he chose to return home.

Dreher’s book has received numerous, invariably favorable, reviews, so I’ll only repeat what others have more eloquently observed. The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is a beautiful mediation on family, place, fatherhood, ambition, love, sacrifice, and much else that is a great human consequence. It is a moving book, but it is not sentimental. It praises the virtues of community without being blind to its vices. It raises all sorts of terribly important questions that we should all consider with great seriousness, but that we too often bury and supress. It deserves to be read widely, and I hope that it is. And I hope that it generates conversation, discussion, and debate about the assumptions that order our lives.

My Home and Homelessness

Little Way made me think again about my own identity. I grew up the son of Cuban immigrants living in South Florida. I spent the first 19 years of my life there, and then I moved away. Consequently, there are two ways in which Dreher’s story addressed my experience. I remain away from the place where I grew up, where most of my family still resides, and, as a first generation American, I inherited, at a certain emotional remove, my family’s status as aliens in a land not their own.

For reasons that remain opaque even to myself, and to the chagrin of my family, as a child I readily identified with American culture. Spanish was my first language, and I grew up in Miami where one can spend a lifetime without recourse to English.  When I was four, I was sent to school knowing only one English phrase:  “Where is the bathroom?” But within a very short period of time, and without retaining any conscious memory of the transformation, I was speaking English with ease. Today I cannot remember ever thinking in Spanish. And so it was with most every other cultural marker.

From a very early age, then, I came to feel that somehow I was out of step with my family and its heritage. It was just the way it was, and I didn’t think too much about it.  In time, that became my identity: I was the one who didn’t fit in. In fact, when I was very young, I entertained something verging on scorn for my Cuban background. Over the years, this mellowed into indifference. But more recently, I’ve noticed the stirrings of affection for certain aspects of my Cuban culture. Perhaps it is a function of growing older and coming to a better understanding of who I am. It is most evident to me in the unexpected pleasure that comes from meeting someone who also speaks Spanish and then stumbling through a conversation in the language with which I first confronted this world.

It would be disingenuous to say that I now finally feel myself to be fully at home in Cuban culture; that is simply not the case. But in ways that I would not have anticipated even a few years ago, I’ve learned that my family’s culture is very much a part of who I am. From time to time, certain cultural chords are struck that reverberate in my heart and remind me that identity is not merely a performance or a choice. Reading Little Way led me to think again about how an immigrant family can remain homeless even when they have made a new home for themselves. Aeneas will, after all, always be a Trojan. But it did something more, although I’m not quite sure I can capture it. Let me just say that it came to me at the right time. The story it told shed light on my own experience. The grace to which it bore witness helped me see the grace present in my own life.

My interests being what they are, Little Way also set me to thinking about how it might speak to our digitally augmented lives. Here again I turned to my own experience. I realized that my digital life could be read as a refusal of limits: the limits of time and place, my time and my place. The Internet — or better, those interests who create the experience we simply gloss as “the Internet”  – promises the world, all of it, now. That is especially appealing to someone who may be nursing dissatisfaction with their current state of affairs or harboring ambitions that outstrip their current place. This is not necessarily a complaint against the Internet itself or the ubiquitous devices through which we access it. Rather it is a complaint, against my own use of the Internet – or at least the shape it sometimes takes.

The Internet can be that bigger, more welcoming, more exciting reality that we seek when we are dissatisfied with the constraints of our present circumstances. It trades in possibilities and the fantasy of limitlessness. It is no longer that the big city lures the small town child with its expansive horizons; it’s that the Internet lures us all, for all of our lives seem quaintly provincial when set against the digitally augmented realities on offer, and aspects of life that are not subject to digital augmentation may begin to appear impoverished.

I want to be careful on this point. I do not want to deny that the possibilities created by the Internet are sometimes genuinely good. I am very glad, for instance, that it provides the means to easily keep in touch with friends and family that are scattered all over the country and beyond. But scattered they are and scattered they will likely remain. The comforts of social media are real, but they are at best partial and they have their very real limits which must be acknowledged. Dreher’s story reminds us that all of the affordances of communication technologies are a poor substitute for the aid and comfort that can only be offered in person.

As I’ve written before, the problem is not so much with the technology under consideration as it is with us. After all, Dreher, who makes his living as a blogger, could not have come home  without the work made possible by the Internet. The problem arises when we make the Internet an unhealthy escape from the sometimes difficult realities that confront us as we do the hard work of living and loving. It arises when our digital practices amount to a refusal of responsibility and a perpetual deferment of commitment. But these problems are not created by the Internet, they are a function of our own disordered loves.

Limits

Some have complained that Dreher naively offers up the mythic small town as the cure for all that ills our weary souls. These people, it seems to me, have missed the point. It is true that Dreher came to see the remarkable love and support one small town offered up to a family that had long lived in that place and cultivated those relationships. The city may offer some unique challenges to the cultivation of such a community, and so may the suburbs, but they do not render community impossible. The real enemy of community is the refusal of limits on our ambition, the unchecked pursuit of autonomy, and the narrowly construed quest for personal fulfillment. These are the ideals that must be, to some degree, sacrificed if we are to build abiding communities with the resources to sustain its members through times of sorrow and suffering and provide the deep social context in which joy and meaning are possible.

While reading Little Way, I thought often of something Wendell Berry wrote a few years ago:

“… our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible … A small place, as I know from my own experience, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure—in addition to its difficulties—that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.”

That is so well put I can hardly improve on it. This is what Ruthie Leming practiced.

Most of us live as if we believe that the surest path to happiness is that which spins out endlessly and offers up the least resistance, but traveling that path is a futile business. I’ve confessed elsewhere my assumption that the highest form of freedom is not the ability to pursue whatever whim or fancy may strike us at any given moment, but rather the freedom to make choices which will promote our wellbeing and the wellbeing of our communities. And such choices often involve sacrifice and the curtailment of our own autonomy. To put this another way, happiness, that elusive state which according to Aristotle is the highest good we all pursue, lies not at the end of a journey at which every turn we have chosen for ourselves, but along the path marked by choices for others and in accord with a moral order that may at times require the reordering rather than immediate satisfaction of our desires.

This vision of the good life does not play well in the society we have made for ourselves. In fact, it has become counter-intuitive. If it is ever to gain any traction, it cannot be merely preached. It must be lived, and its beauty must of its own mysterious accord draw us in. This is, I believe, Dreher’s great accomplishment. He has faithfully and honestly written that beauty into his story so that it may speak to his readers, may they be many.

Love

The search for home is, finally, an eschatological quest. For many, this means that it is an impossible quest, or even that it is no quest at all, but a tragic and pitiable misunderstanding of the nature of things. For others, like myself, it means that it is quest whose end will not be found within the horizons of this life. We are always on the way and it would be the gravest mistake to think that what we long for, truly, when we long for Home is tied without remainder to any one place. But that does not mean we cannot, in our present experience, seek good approximations of that Home which our hearts seek.

Talk of love, like talk of home,  always threatens to spill over into triteness and cliché. But as David Foster Wallace has reminded us,  ”clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.” Centuries earlier, St. Augustine wondered, “What do we love when we love our God?” This is an endlessly useful formulation. What do we love, we might now ask, when we love Home? What desire really drives our pursuit for the ideal of Home? Have we merely incorporated the search for Home into our project of self-fulfillment? If so, we’ve likely undermined the quest from the outset.

The quest for Home, like the quest for happiness, is such that, if it is to yield even its modest and partial fulfillments, cannot be undertaken for its own sake. Its success is premised on our loving something other than the idea of Home. We must love our place and we must, to borrow Auden’s apt phrasing, love our crooked neighbor with our crooked heart. We must abide. We must lay aside our self-interest and the project of self-fulfillment. We must be willing to sacrifice. We must give up our comfort. We must invest ourselves in the lives of others. And in so doing, we will find that we have been all along building a good and modest home for our pilgrim souls.

This is what the life of Ruthie Leming teaches us, and I’m grateful to Rod Dreher for writing this book that tells her story, and his.

I’m grateful to my parents for the home they made for me.

I’m grateful to my wife for the home we are building, and I’m grateful for the friends who are a part of it.

Deo gratias.

Excerpt from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming

“‘When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another,’ writes the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry. ‘How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another’s stories? If they do not know one another’s stories, how can they know whether or not to trust one another? People who do not trust one another do not help one another, and moreover they fear one another. And this is our predicament now.’

Those of us who have moved away are not necessarily callow and ungrateful people. We live in a time and place in which we are conditioned to leave our hometowns. Our schools tell our young people to follow their professional bliss, wherever it takes them. Our economy rewards companies and people who have no loyalty to place. The stories that shape the moral imagination of our young, chiefly by film and television, are told by outsiders who were dissatisfied and lit out for elsewhere to find happiness and good fortune.

During the decade leading up to Ruthie’s death, I had spent my professional life writing newspaper columns, blog posts, and even a book, lamenting the loss of community and traditions in American life. I had a reputation as a pop theoretician of cultural decline, but in truth I was long on words, and short on deeds. I did not like the fact that I saw my Louisiana family only three times a year, for a week at a time, if we were lucky. But that was the way of the world, right? Almost everyone I knew was in the same position. My friends and I talked a lot about the fragmentation of the modern family, about the deracinating effects of late capitalism, about mass media and the erosion of localist consciousness, about the consumerization of religion and the leviathan sate and every other thing under the sun that undermines our sense of home and permanence.

The one thing none of us did was what Ruthie did: Stay.

Contemporary culture encourage us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come for you — and it will — you want to be in a place where you know, and are known. You want — no, you need — to be able to say, as Mike did, ‘We’re leaning, but we’re leaning on each other.’

I deeply believed then, and believe today, that one day I will be asked to give an account of my life to my Maker. That fateful week in Louisiana I wondered: When I meet the Lord, will I be able to say that my life had been about giving, not just taking? Would being able to discern the difference between a Bordeaux and a Burgundy bring me any closer to tasting the cup of salvation?

In short: Did I have love?”

FYI: April Hiatus

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April is the cruellest month … well, it will be a busy month anyway. I’ve decided, given other commitments and responsibilities, to put The Frailest Thing on hiatus. I expect to resume posting sometime in May. And, in case you’re following on Twitter, through April you can count me out there too. I will, however, keep sharing some links via the Facebook page and posting to the Borg Complex tumblr.

See you in month.

Cheers!

“Terce”

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“Terce,” the second of seven poems constituting WH Auden’s “Horae Canonicae: Immolatus vicerit”:

After shaking paws with his dog
(Whose bark would tell the world that he is always kind),
The hangman sets off briskly over the heath;
He does not know yet who will be provided
To do the high works of Justice with:
Gently closing the door of his wife’s bedroom
(Today she has one of her headaches),
With a sigh the judge descends his marble stair;
He does not know by what sentence
He will apply on earth the Law that rules the stars:
And the poet, taking a breather
Round his garden before starting his eclogue,
Does not know whose Truth he will tell.

Sprites of hearth and store-room, godlings
Of professional mysteries, the Big Ones
Who can annihilate a city,
Cannot be bothered with this moment: we are left,
Each to his secret cult, now each of us
Prays to an image of his image of himself:
‘Let me get through this coming day
Without a dressing down from a superior,
Being worsted in a repartee,
Or behaving like an ass in front of the girls;
Let something exciting happen,
Let me find a lucky coin on a sidewalk.
Let me hear a new funny story.’

At this hour we all might be anyone:
It is only our victim who is without a wish,
Who knows already (that is what
We can never forgive. If he knows the answers,
Then why are we here, why is there even dust?),
Knows already that, in fact, our prayers are heard,
That not one of us will slip up,
That the machinery of our world will function
Without a hitch, that today, for once,
There will be no squabbling on Mount Olympus,
No Chthonian mutters of unrest,
But no other miracle, knows that by sundown
We shall have had a good Friday.

(October 1953)

It’s Not the Smartphone, It’s You and It’s Me

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There’s this line you’ve probably seen before, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” It’s often attributed to Plato or Philo, but they almost certainly said no such thing. Nevertheless, I like the sentiment; there’s a good deal of truth to it. Sometimes, though, it is a battle to be kind. It is sometimes a battle even to be attentive to another person or to take note of them at all.

This is not a recent phenomenon. It is not caused by the Internet, social media, or mobile phones just as it was not caused by the Industrial Revolution, telephones, or books. It is the human condition. It is much easier to pay attention to our own needs and desires. We know them more intimately; they are immediately before us. No effort of the will is involved.

Being attentive to another person, however, does require an act of the will. It does not come naturally. It involves deliberate effort and sometimes the setting aside of our own desires. It may even be a kind of sacrifice to give our attention to another and to be kind an act of heroism.

I’m thinking about all of this after reading Evan Selinger’s essay in Wired about technology and etiquette. In it Selinger reminds us that “effort is the currency of care.” That is remarkably well put.

Here’s another line that I like: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” That one is from Simone Weil. Simone Weil did not have a smartphone, they weren’t around then; yet attention was still considered rare.

But the smartphone is not altogether irrelevant, nor is any other technology to which we might lend our attention. The thing about attention is that we can only direct it toward one thing at a time. So when we are in the presence of another person, the smartphone in the pocket may make it harder to pay attention to that person. But the smartphone isn’t doing a thing. It’s just there. It’s not the smartphone, it’s you and it’s me. It’s about understanding our own proclivities. It’s about understanding how the presence of certain material realities interact with our ability to direct our intention and perception. It’s about remembering the great battle we fight simply to be decent human beings from one moment to the next and doing what we can to make it more likely that we will win rather than lose that battle.

Maybe that means putting the smartphone away or turning it off or getting rid of it altogether. Maybe it means doing the same thing with a book. But it also means recognizing that you’re doing so not because of what you know about the smartphone or the book, but because of what you know about yourself.

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Being-With Technology

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Carl Mitcham’s “Three Ways of Being-With Technology” opens with the following claim: “In any serious discussion of issues associated with technology and humanity there readily arises a general question about the primary member in this relationship.” A bit further on, he adds:

“This is, of course, a chicken-and-egg question, one not subject to any straightforward or unqualified answer. But it is not therefore insignificant, nor is it enough to propose as some kind of synthesis that there is simply a mutual relationship between the two, that humanity and technology are always found together. Mutual relationship is not some one thing; mutual relationships take many different forms. There are, for instance, mutualities of parent and child, of husband and wife, of citizens, and so forth. Humanity and technology can be found together in more than one way. Rather than argue the primacy of one or the other factor or the cliché of mutuality in the humanity-technology relationship, I propose to outline three forms the relationship itself can take, three ways of being-with technology.”

The first thing that came to mind when I read this paragraph was the digital dualism debate. One could, for instance, substitute the human-technology pair above with the online-offline pair and retain the sense of the paragraph. Once mutuality is established, the next, more interesting move is to explore the different forms this mutual relationship takes.

As far as the human-technology relationship is concerned, the three ways of being-with technology that Mitcham outlines are ancient skepticism, Renaissance/Enlightenment optimism, and Romantic uneasiness. I suspect you might already have a pretty good idea of how Mitcham fills out those categories. (The chart below gives a decent summary.) Perhaps this being-with model could also serve to illuminate the online-offline relationship. Might it be useful, in similar fashion, to outline the forms the online-offline relationship takes?

One other thought: It seems to me that what I’ve been describing as a “Borg Complex” could be understood as a being-with relationship of the sort that Mitcham describes. The “resistance is futile,” adapt or die rhetoric is what led me to identify this rhetoric as a Borg Complex, but the symptoms I’ve compiled also suggest something more expansive than this techno-fatalist attitude. They encompass an entire posture toward the human-technology relationship — one that has certain affinities with Mitcham’s Renaissance/Enlightenment optimism, but departs from it as well.

So, looking at this chart, I’m wondering if it might not be updated with a category that accounts for the Borg Complex and then also one that accounts for what Leo Marx has called postmodern pessimism.

I’ll leave these considerations with you this afternoon. More thoughts along these lines may be forthcoming in the not-too-distant future.

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Miscellaneous Observations

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So here are a few thoughts in no particular order:

I have nothing of great depth to say about Google’s decision to shut down Google Reader. I use it, and I’m sorry to hear that it’s going away. (At the moment, I’m planning to use Feedly as a replacement. If you’ve got a better option, let me know.) But it is clear that a lot of folks are not at all happy with Google. My Twitter feed lit up with righteous indignation seconds after the announcement was made. What came to my mind was a wonderfully understated line from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. When a relative goes on and on about the Belgian trading company bringing the light of civilization to the Congo, etc., etc., Marlow responds: ”I ventured to suggest that the Company was run for profit.”

Over at Cyborgology, more work is being done to refine the critique of digital dualism, especially by Whitney Boesel. She does a remarkably thorough job of documenting the digital dualism debates over the last year or two here, and here she offers the first part of her own effort to further clarify the terms of the digital dualism debates. I may be making some comments when the series of posts is complete, for now I’ll just throw out a reminder of my own effort a few months ago to provide a phenomenological taxonomy of online experience, “Varieties of Online Experience.”

Speaking of online and offline and also the Internet or technology – definitions can be elusive. A lot of time and effort has been and continues to be spent trying to delineate the precise referent for these terms. But what if we took a lesson from Wittgenstein? Crudely speaking, Wittgenstein came to believe that meaning was a function of use (in many, but not all cases). Instead of trying to fix an external referent for these terms and then call out those who do not use the term as we have decided it must be used or not used, perhaps we should, as Wittgenstein put it, “look and see” the diversity of uses to which the words are meaningfully put in ordinary conversation. I understand the impulse to demystify terms, such as technology, whose elasticity allows for a great deal confusion and obfuscation. But perhaps we ought also to allow that even when these terms are being used without analytic precision, they are still conveying sense.

As an example, take the way the names of certain philosophers are tossed around by folks whose expertise is not philosophy. Descartes, I think, is a common example. The word Descartes, or better yet Cartesian, no longer has a strong correlation to the man Rene Descartes or his writings. The word tends to be used by non-philosophers as a placeholder for the idea of pernicious dualism (another word that is used in casually imprecise ways). The word has a sense and a meaning, but it is not narrowly constrained by its ostensible referent. When this is the case, it might be valuable to correct the speaker by saying something like, “Descartes didn’t actually believe …” or “You’re glossing over some important nuances …” or “Have you ever read a page of Descartes?” Alternatively, it may be helpful to realize that the speaker doesn’t really care about Descartes and is only using the word Descartes as a carrier of some notions that may best be addressed without reference to the philosopher.

This, in turn, leads me to say that, while I’ve always admired the generalist or interdisciplinary tendency, it is difficult to pull off well. In the midst of making a series of astute observations about the difference between academics and intellectuals, Jack Miles writes, “A generalist is someone with a keener-than-average awareness of how much there is to be ignorant about.” This seems to me to be the indispensable starting point for generalist or inter-disciplinary work that will be of value. The faux-generalist or the lazy inter-disciplinarian merely re-combines shallow forms knowledge. This accomplishes very little, if anything at all.

Come to think of it, I think we would all be better off if we were to develop a “keener-than-average awareness” of our own ignorance.