#85: Usefully Empty
Recently, The Economist published an interesting interview with documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis that largely revolved around the crisis of meaning that seems increasingly pervasive everywhere. At one point, the discussion turns to jobs and the sense that they have declined as a source of fulfillment for many people. "I've always thought that most people's jobs aren't their real jobs," Curtis says. "Their real job is to go shopping." That statement feels overly cynical, but it got my attention because it presents a view of humans less as self-directed agents than as ore that passively exists for other entities to mine: repositories of money, attention, energy, or desire, all of which power various economic and technological systems. What if the primary value that we "add" isn't any of the hard work we do from 9-to-5, but just the fact that we're warm bodies, "eyeballs," or bank accounts? Eli Schiff, writing about global standardization in tech companies' branding, articulated a similar idea: "The global shopping mall demands a fungible consumer." These visions of humans as mere resources, while stated polemically by both authors, are useful to consider because, while we obviously don't see ourselves that way, someone or something else does see us that way.
Another idea about people—the inverse of the above—is that we get in the way, take up space, and generally interfere with systems that would work much better without us. Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson has expressed a version of this, arguing for accelerated urbanization as a solution to the exploding global population and its impact on the climate. In Robinson's proposal, many currently populated places would have to become "usefully empty" as humans concentrate themselves more densely in large cities. I've written before about how technology in many ways wishes we would disappear (iPhones, for example, emerge from their packaging as perfect objects that we quickly ruin by smudging and dropping them). This state occupies the other end of the spectrum that humans frustratingly occupy: clumsily getting in the way and degrading our surroundings in the process; still having a role in those same systems because of the extractable value we represent; and occasionally attempting to rise above that tradeoff by actively making ourselves useful, with mixed results that usually don't help the system itself.
The way out of this situation, of course, is one that we have always been extremely good at: deciding, however irrationally, that we (humans) are more important than everything else, and then continuously correcting our environment according to that axiom. When technology shifts too far in the direction of pushing us out of the way so it can do its own thing, or harvesting too much value from us, or both, we can remember that we have the failsafe option of flipping the switch and shutting it off (figuratively, but sometimes literally as well). Back when "sustainability" was a more popular word for trying not to burn down the planet, Bruce Sterling introduced the phrase "acting dead," describing forms of environmental stewardship, such as "saving water," that your dead great-grandfather is currently doing a better job of than you possibly can. Countless systems are better off without people by many criteria; acting dead is a way of consenting to those systems' goals by minimizing our own presence. While we shouldn't do the opposite either, we can at least assert our own objectives rather than merely becoming someone else's.
Reads:
China's self-proclaimed version of Manhattan, Yujiapu Financial District, is different from the American version in one important way: no people. "Many of the six-lane roads in the city lack crosswalk lights, in part because they are not needed." (thanks Chandan)
Music streaming has a huge carbon footprint (not just Bitcoin). "These figures seem to confirm the widespread notion that music digitalised is music dematerialised."