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Title: The Suffocating Void Author: Kevin Tucker Date: February 2015 Language: en Topics: anarcho-primitivism, anticiv, domestication, Black and Green Review, Social Media, Technology, the Internet Source: Retrieved on February 23rd, 2015 from http://www.blackandgreenreview.org/2015/02/bagr-1-suffocating-void-kevin-tucker.html
âIt would be imprudent to deny, or even to play down, the profound
change which the advent of âfluid modernityâ has brought to the human
condition. The remoteness and unreachability of systemic structure,
coupled with the unstructured, fluid state of the immediate setting of
life-politics, change that condition in a radical way and call for a
rethinking of old concepts that used to frame its narratives. Like
zombies, such concepts are today simultaneously dead and alive.â â
Zygmunt Bauman[1]
Something has changed. Radically. And for the worst.
It is tellingly difficult to describe something without a name. And that
something has quickly crept into our minds and psyche. We call it
âsocial mediaâ or the âsocial networkâ, but those words normalize what
is a revolutionary change in our relationship to technology. Weâre not
talking here about a mere platform of technology, weâre talking about a
mindset, a constantly flowing stream of information whereby a refusal to
participate renders the human, now reduced to the status of a âuserâ,
obsolete.
There has been a distinct turn away from the internet being relegated to
a computer and it is now not only with us at all times, but always on,
always moving, always watching. The internet has moved from a form of
communication to the increasingly predominant one. So much so that the
United Nations has declared internet access a human right.[2] As fiber
optic cables are buried in plain sight, Wifi signals permeate our world.
Your muscles twitch. You believe itâs your phone in your pocket, but
youâre holding it in your hand[3]. You didnât notice you were even
checking it. Our immersion into the world of the machine is most notable
in how little attention we pay to it.
We expect it and we are expected by it.
This is the suffocating void, the demanding emptiness of Modernity, the
obtuse compliance with the domestication process as rendered in binary
by programmers.
We need to stop.
Stop our movements, still our minds, silence our devices and for a
moment, even just one moment, just be present. Itâs not easy. Itâs not
easy to get there and itâs not easy to stay there. The air is thick, it
is difficult to breathe and even harder to get your bearings. It is
overwhelming. The weight of our stuff, our drama, our baggage comes
crashing in. In our world, stagnancy is the equivalent of death.
We are stuck in constant movement. We become the flood, the rushing
waters, a conversation with no beginning, no end, and no content. To our
nomadic gatherer-hunter minds, thereâs an inkling of familiarity. Our
bodies want to move, to flow and respond. But this is not the movement
of bodies within a rooted world: it is a trap. We are stuck within the
eye of a tornado, so we try to move with it, but it never stops and it
never ends. And when you attempt to stop and assess the situation, the
true horror of our reality, the crushing impact of what the sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman has aptly labeled âLiquid Modernityâ will overcome you.
It will annihilate you.
Our ancestors, our shared lineage that formed our bodies and minds, were
driven by movement. Within our crisis, the pathetic reflection of that
primal urge is not movement, but restlessness. We are moving, but we are
going nowhere. Shuffling to avoid stagnancy. Moving lifelessly to avoid
death.
This is not an accident.
Nothing in our reality really is any more. We are a herd of individuals
vying for attention in a sea of selfies, tweets and yelps. The ecologist
Paul Shepard long ago pointed out how domestication stunts
development[4], but technology derails it. Increasingly unable to find
or define ourselves outside of the machine, we move further inwards. And
the programmers pull the strings. We learn to express ourselves through
the machine and, in doing so, we become one.
Our distraction keeps us from seeing the monumental change taking place:
the immersion into a constantly connected, but never grounded social
network. We are, so to speak, âalways onâ. Smart phones, tablets,
screens everywhere we look, wireless signals pervading nearly all
spaces, check ins, GPS and monitoring equipment constantly reassuring
the world that we are here and we are consuming this manufactured
reality.
Within decades, we went from being sold the mythos and myths of Progress
to rendering the narrative null through immersion. We no longer need to
dream of a glorious Future, we are here. Progress is no longer spoken
of, but expected and systemic.
Like the Agricultural Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and the Green
Revolution before it, the Interface Revolution propels civilization
beyond the boundaries and limitations of earlier systems. The firewalls
of Jericho have been breached. Progress innovated, the processes
integrated.
For the programmers, this is no small feat. This is the dream of every
domesticator: people lining up and fighting for the latest technology,
fighting for a place in line, paying top dollar for devices with built
in tracking and data mining software and willing to remain in debt to
sustain the terms of our bondage. Never mind that the world is
suffocating under piles of waste, choking down makeshift mines for rare
and difficult to extract metals, while workers are forced to sign
anti-suicide clauses, villages are displaced, and sustained low budget
warfare are both form and function; the expectation isnât just that all
of this will be ignored, but that you, the consumer, will be back for
more next year. Or sooner.
And when things are really moving along, not only are the consequences
of technology (both internal and external) ignored, they are accepted
and justified.
If the architects of Uruk had the foresight, they would have been
seething with jealousy over the control and obedience this technocratic
dystopia holds.
But in their place we have the ever-present bloated smiles of Bill
Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg encoded into the machines we
carry. The smiles of billionaires who built their impossibly massive
fortunes on our desecrated earth: buried, literally, in a sea of
intentionally outdated and short-lived devices. Devices filled with
metals mined by the dispossessed under the directives of warlords.
Devices built by the displaced and disempowered. Devices awash in toxic
residue that dilute into groundwater, streams, rivers, and contaminate
oceans.
Devices that whiten the blood stained teeth of programmers, of
billionaires: of domesticators.
And their smiles are injected into every aspect of our lives.
âWith this new âmegatechnicsâ the dominant minority will create a
uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for
automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous
personality, man [sic] will become a passive, purposeless,
machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now
interpret manâs [sic] role, will either be fed into the machine or
strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized,
collective organizations.â - Lewis Mumford[5]
Lewis Mumford long ago made the observation that the first components of
the âMegamachineâ, the infusion of technology and society, were made of
flesh and blood. It has long been the dream of the technocrats to make
the flesh the last. While Mumford was talking about the coordinated
efforts it took to build monuments and to clear and plow fields in the
Mesolithic era, the programmers of our time just want to remove the
clunkiness and messiness of their apparatus from our view.
This was the vision of Progress that we had been sold.
The Future would be better. The Machine would deliver us from drudgery.
Its âapparent purposeâ, as stated by former advertising executive turned
neo-Luddite, Jerry Mander, âis to eliminate human ailments and human
unhappinessâŠ, to expand the human potential, and to create a world of
abundance for human enjoyment.â Meanwhile driving in the âunstated
purposeâ to âfulfill the inherent drive of technological society to feed
its own evolutionary cravings, to expand its domination of the both
Earth and space, and to complete the utter conversion of nature into
commodity form.â[6]
For many of us, the failures of Progress are no surprise. This is a
mythos as distraction: your sacrifice now will benefit you later. It is
not only a religious imperative, it is the origin of religious thought
only to be readapted as seen fit through time. A cosmological delayed
return economy[7].
And within Modernity, that adaptation grew into and through the allure
of new technology.
Change comes into the picture.
Marshall McLuhan spotted it with the printing press, Jerry Mander
spotted it in the television, when Mumford saw the thread, he saw strong
hints at the potential of the computer, but he seemingly would have
hoped it could have not gotten to the point where we are now: change is
expected, integration is constant. Speed itself, as John Zerzan aptly
notes[8], has become virtue.
We have suddenly found ourselves at a strange impasse where narratives
have collided. The need for the sales pitch of Progress has been
surpassed by the want for the new. We arenât questioning the expectation
that we are always available, âalways onâ, we are lining up for the
newest devices to further those intrusions.
Fighting for them.
Getting to this point didnât happen over night, but even within the
history of technology, it all happened with unthinkable speed. The
mobile phone took a remarkably fast slide from toy of the ultra-rich to
nearly universal acceptance. By 2013, 91% of the adult population in the
US owned at least one.[9]
The unprecedented nature of this has led two industry proponents to
applaud the near universal acceptance of mobile phones as the most
quickly adopted consumer technology in the history of the world.
Gloating in their sickening book, Networked, authors Lee Rainie and
Barry Wellman state: âthe Mobile Revolution has allowed [Information and
Community Technologies] to become body appendages allowing people to
access friends and information at will, wherever they go.â The key being
âalways accessibleâ, but, in true form, they see âthe possibility of a
continued presence and pervasive awareness of others in the networkâ[10]
positively.
The architects of civilization have long understood that the power of
the domestication process lies in its ability to be internalized. The
mythos of Progress requires daily affirmation. The programmers, however,
realized that affirmation could become integrated.
They just needed to eliminate any distance between a given technology
and the user. Lo and behold, a trip into a recently built suburb or even
newly gentrified city will show that the eyesore of power lines have
been rid from sight. We go wireless so we no longer see the machine as
separate. Unsightly and inconvenient wiring goes to routers in corners
and under furniture. Corporations sponsor âWifi Hot Spotsâ to customers.
We remove the wiring from sight to internalize its function.
And this has sadly been effective. Very effective.
What you see when you step into public places are faces illuminated by
backlit devices. Groups of teens walking together and each lost in their
own virtual presence. 1.3 million car accidents in the US during 2011
were caused by drivers distracted with their cell phones.[11] You will
see people constantly swiping their screens to look for updates, feeds,
messages, or just blindly glancing out of habit at their phones, most
seemingly with no recognition of what they are doing.
The conclusion of the Megamachine, the necessary step to furthering the
goals of Progress, was to eliminate barriers. To make it so we treat
phones as an appendage, while the Programmers dream of making them one.
To make us complicit.
To make us comply without even noticing it.
I have long held that the genius of civilizers is falsely attributed to
manufacturing needs. Simply put, they arenât that smart and we arenât
that gullible.
What it does come down to is an understanding of what a human being
needs. We are social animals. In our minds and bodies, even when lost in
some ridiculous App on an iPhone, we are trying to reconcile the world
of the hunter-gatherer with the path that Modernity has set us on. For
the most part, our emotional and mental free fall is held in place so
long as our inertia is matched by social rebounding.
Community is etched in our Stone Age soul. We donât just want others; we
need them.
And herein lies the tragedy.
This is our animality being torn from us, repackaged and then sold back
to us. We want movement, we want connectivity, we want contact, and, in
the absence of the physical, the electric options are literally
inescapable waves penetrating our minds and bodies.
This is how Progress was sold to us and this is why we buy into this
Void. Amongst 7 billion people and counting, in a sea of unending
electric synapse and stimuli: we are lost, alone, and confused.
While it may be utterly unrecognizable, the mound builders of
Mesopotamia and the high-tech sweatshop worker serve the same function:
to become the apparatus so that we may consume it.
And that downward spiral is driven by our consumption.
âThere is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the
world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society
for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must
be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important
problem we can focus on.â â Mark Zuckerberg[12]
Facebook didnât invent social media, but it has become iconic in its
acceptance and usage. While often being joked about as a scourge, near
the end of 2014 more than 1.35 billion people logged on at least once
per month[13]. That surpasses the population of China.
And it continues to grow.
As much as the mainstream celebrates social media, even attempting to
posture it as the tool of liberation during the Arab Spring (though
ironically demonizing it when it was used in the same way in the
Ferguson Uprisings of 2014 and beyond), our sense of how radical this
change in form really is becomes lost.
Marshall McLuhan famously made the case that the âGutenberg technologyâ,
the printing press, had made universal change in the way its users and
consumers saw the world. This pattern, beginning with the written word,
cannot be overstated. Yet it is so often lost within civilization
because everything we know is taught through the lens of symbolic
culture: the internalized whispers of domesticators reinforcing our own
perceived split from the wild world and necessary dependency on masters.
This is how domestication works, but the purpose of technology is to
update form and context. And as McLuhan famously observed: form dictates
function, the medium is the message.
So his words for the impact of the printed word hold equally true for
the updated technology: when a technology is introduced âif it gives new
stress or ascendancy to one or another of our senses, the ratio among
all of our senses is altered. We no longer feel the same, nor do our
eyes and ears and other sense remain the same.â[14]
Technology flattens our world by reducing our reliance on senses while
over stimulating particular sensory input. Our brains are, to put it
simply, overworked and underwhelmed. Mediation and representation as
evidenced by blogs, Youtube channels, Facebook feeds and Twitter
handles.
This is the form.
This is the form that creates a world filled with crushing depression,
alienation, suffering and anxiety. A National Center for Health
Statistics study found that by 2008 the usage of anti-depressants in the
US had gone up 400% over the previous decade across all
demographics.[15] The iPhone was released in 2007. The researcherâs
period of study from 2005-2008 saw an increase of Facebook users from
5.5 million to 100 million.[16] That is an increase of over 1700%. And
this isnât even touching on the horrid and dire social and ecological
consequences across the world.
The point isnât to say that Facebook caused these things, but, along
with all other facets of the social network (both past, present and
future), it exacerbates them. It amplifies on exponential terms.
The content and platforms drive each other. But they always have.
Hyper-internalized and portable technology is the form.
Domestication is the function.
As the domesticators developed technology to employ their will, the
ability to make change with intentionality arose. No longer was power in
the scythe and the stored grains. The agrarian curse of drudgery and
toil for the perceived pay off in the heavens paved the way (literally)
to updated industrial forms.
And the mythos evolved.
Collective consciousness was slowly channeled into individual
consumerism. It is no surprise that the overstressed working class in
early industrializing nations thought their liberation lied within
possessing the machine collectively, nor is it surprising that the
antidote to that notion was selling individual heavens on an
increasingly closer horizon.
Progress remains. Mythos adapt.
Technology increasingly spread from the means to the purpose itself. The
time clock led to the pocket watch to the wristwatch and now to the cell
phone. We embrace the objects that confine our minds to think on an
artificial sense of place and self.
Our world becomes both larger and smaller, so we turn to the machine, to
this bartered identity. Even in a sea of flux, the technology itself
increasingly becomes the constant. It becomes the savior.
Chellis Glendinning called this process by what it is:
âtechno-addictionâ. âIn such a society people have historically become
obsessed with anything that helps them to cope with the trauma of it
all.â[17]
We buy to know weâre alive.
And, increasingly, we Tweet to remind everyone that weâre still here.
Facebookâs creator, Mark Zuckerberg, saw the writing on the wall. He
didnât just sell it: he bought it. His rise from a computer programmer
at Harvard up to the richest 20 people in the world is sadly well
documented and pathetically emulated.
While not coming up from the bottom of the social ladder, his story is
more of an emotional rags-to-riches triumph. The reader can relate. A
teenager in the 90s, a product of great technological change and raised
in an atmosphere where âplayâ went from being outside with friends to
inside and playing video games. Or, in Zuckerbergâs case, programming
them.
This story is drenched in the turmoil of responding to adolescence
through increasingly mediated means. The starting point for what would
become Facebook was a site that rated other students by their looks. It
should not be surprising that the origin point of Facebook is driven
equally by a bullyâs entitlement and an unrelenting sense of insecurity.
And that is the tone that carried on.
Facebook didnât arise in a vacuum. This is hardly even history at this
point; weâre talking about websites that increasingly dominated the
social atmosphere over the past decade. Itâs hardly necessary for me to
recant them.
What is important here is how and why Facebook took off.
The obnoxiously entitled âBlogosphereâ matched with former Facebook
contender, MySpace, both served, as necessary steps towards what social
networking would become. The blogs were driven by an attempt at a, and
Iâm biting my tongue here, âgrassrootsâ sense of giving voices and
reporting. Often centered around contemporary topics, their necessary
role was less in what was being said, but littering the fairy tale
notion of the internet as an âinformation super-highwayâ with opinions
equally weighed with actual reporting and research. A huge part of the
lucrative Search Engine Optimization (SEO) field existing relied on the
hopes for bloggers to have their posts on a subject get the highest
ranked search results in Google or whatever else is currently being
used.
Blogs quickly became an accepted resource. The internet is, after all,
marketing. A blog is a brand for an individual. A public face: a
personalization of a perspective that transfers the subject from content
to provider. This is the cult of personality moving from the television,
books, politicians and newspapers to overly excitable and entertaining
personalities. These people were enthralling because they could be you,
the spectator. This was a move driven home even further via Youtube not
long after.
MySpace was the place to market the self under the guise of a place to
keep in touch with friends. A place to sell the image of yourself that
you wish to portray. Echoed along the lines of Twitter, where irrelevant
quips of 140 characters, and in an increasingly entangled and
over-sharing, yet selective, web, the social network became accepted
enough that the nearly stalker-esque Facebook was ready to take its
place.
The idea of posting your quips and selling yourself was worthless unless
it was the main feature: the News Feed. This is a sea of words projected
onto a constantly shifting wall as if it was news. From the
hyper-personal to the irrelevant, itâs laid out flatly for your selected
audience.
And there are no mistakes here.
These moves are intentional. They are marketing.
Sold as a supplement to the life anyone wants to live, they have become
the main course. And they become the platform for broadcasting the life
you want others to see. Far from being a tight knit group of friends,
social networking sites, as Jose van Dijck states in his critical
history, âforge personal, professional or geographical connections and
encourage weak ties.â[18]
This is that urge that we all have within us: the need for community. It
is your inner-hunter-gatherer and their band associations.
An impulse redirected for a reality supplanted.
We spread ourselves widely. We feel that having information about others
is as good as having actual relationships with them. And every time we
log on, we are selling ourselves.
The grotesque level of acceptance of the social network is apparent in
how Zuckerberg basks in it: âThink about what people are doing on
Facebook today. Theyâre keeping up with their friends and family, but
theyâre also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a
sense is their brand. Theyâre connecting with the audience that they
want to connect to.â
And to always end on a high note: âItâs almost a disadvantage if youâre
not on it now.â[19]
We buy this reality because we sell it. If you want to take part in this
society, if you want to stay connected with friends and family, both
close and distant: here is the platform, here is the place to do it.
It almost seems ridiculous to give this platform such intense scrutiny.
In the timeline of civilization, it wonât even be a fragment of a blip.
But the spread, grasp and ramifications of Facebook, its intentional and
unspoken uses, are monumental. You simply cannot escape them. Itâs not
as simple as deactivating an account (it was years before deleting was
even an option).
These have become the terms, the grounding on which this late stage of
Modernity stands.
The narrative of Progress hardly needs to sell a distant future; it has
created an eternal present. And in doing so, it has removed the
presence. It removes the essence of being human.
This is change.
This is change at a rate and depth that is unprecedented even in the
nasty, short and brutish history of civilization. Amongst all of the
critiques of technology, this is something that was predicted in
dystopian terms, but the reality is far scarier and by the time most of
us noticed its effectiveness, we are at a loss for outlets and terms to
even discuss this ongoing and worsening epidemic.
The News Feed ticks.
Against the backdrop of a 24 hour ânewsâ cycle, it is a fitting
backdrop: the techno-addicted need constant stimulation. Going outside
hardly cuts it unless itâs for taking selfiesor a necessary part of the
sale for the projected self.
The Self, driven by hyper-individualistic consumerism, takes a form and
precedence that could make even the most rampant egoist blush. This
isnât just posturing; itâs an attachment to a projected and widely cast
image. An online persona is increasingly less foreign to our sense of
identity. McLuhan was hardly off base when he claimed, âschizophrenia
may be a necessary consequence of literacy.â[20] In the digital age,
schizophrenia may very well be a prerequisite.
It is hardly surprising that cyber-bullying has become such a massive
issue. The bully and bullying are no longer physically confined to a
psychical place. And the amount of information and sources of self-doubt
of the victim are broadcast far more widely.
And these are the terms on which marketers and programmers think. The
social network is the place where they act.
âIt is a common fallacy, though, to think of platforms as merely
facilitating networking activities; instead, the construction of
platforms and social practices is mutually constitutive.â[21] â Jose von
Dijck
The link between social networking and technological production is
vital. The point is, after all, to find ways to keep participation
constant and consistent: to be always on.
Capitalists are no strangers to malicious forms of aggressive marketing.
For a technocrat like Zuckerberg, itâs clearly a two way street. New
phone technology allows for updates to his system and updates to
Facebook sell new phones.
The mobile industry is, after all, a force to be reckoned with. An
industry report projects revenues to pass $2 trillion by 2017. As it
stands now, 3.2 billion people are active mobile network
subscribers.[22]
This is a massive economic force. Planned obsolescence is no new concept
in terms of acquiring wealth. As the technology advances, so does the
life expectancy decrease. But as the cell phone and its programs become
the only acceptable form of communication, their monumental costs simply
become a begrudgingly accepted burden.
The average smartphone in 2013 cost $337.[23] Imagine running into you
from a decade ago and saying thatâs what you would be paying for a phone
and that it would only have an expected lifespan of 2 years, at best.
The absurdity of it is lost both in the cost of owning and using a
cellphone (the average 2013 bill in the US weighed in over $700 per
year[24]) but, as weâll get to in the following section, the ecological
and social costs far outweigh all others.
Beyond planned obsolescence lies functional obsolescence: the perception
that a technology is no longer functional in comparison to its
contemporary options. You see this rampantly in the cell phone world
where even replacing a battery or charger on a 2-year-old phone can be a
feat. Just as with the News Feed, if you canât keep up, you are left to
believe that you will drown.
But the function here is key.
The technologies being actively developed and sold serve a single
purpose: to further entrap the user into the social network.
To become the algorithm.
When Facebook finally went public in 2012, Zuckerberg spoke to investors
like old friends: âAdvertising works most effectively when it's in line
with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to
communicate in a certain way on Facebook â they share information with
their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing âso there's
really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model
within that.â[25]
The very notion of creating an all-encompassing platform for
communication is to expand into previously unreachable areas. This is
why Facebook bought Foursquare: an application that âchecks inâ and
posts on your News Feed where you physically go. Not to be left behind,
they also purchased Atlas: an application that tracks offline
purchases.[26]
This information is key to automation.
Every time you ask Google or Siri a question, Google, Apple and the NSA
are listening.
The goal of programmers is to track your movements, decisions, thoughts
and statements to create algorithms to predict and influence your
actions. The cell phone, an early platform for GPS tracking, is the
perfect platform for this. It is on your person, it is your electronic
leash and confidant. Itâs an object you can stare at with intent when
you donât feel like making eye contact or uncomfortable small talk.
And it is a tool to continually gather information about you.
Little is telling about the power of the temporary and shallow nature of
new information from the Void than how quickly the outrage over the
exposed US governmentâs far and wide reaching surveillance programs
died. Nothing changed, but everything was accepted. If the alternative
option was to give up on cell phones and social networking, then it was
an uncomfortable, but possibly necessary evil.
The users could live with it.
Less surprising was the FBIâs official call out to social media
corporations and platforms requiring them to offer a âback doorâ to
organize, gather and collect information that might have been
unavailable through real world social networking.[27]
Though science fiction writers might have dreamed being the first to
come up with a technology as absurd as Google Glass (a literal
technologically infused lens) it is in the more common forms of
technology that the programmers claim their victories.
We chose to take part in this inexplicably vast social experiment and
database without seeing it as a choice.
Again, this comes down to a redirection of impulses. The world that we
live in is one in which every decision, purchase and action that we make
has dire consequences across this globalized, technologically dependent
world.
This is not the connectedness that hunter-gatherers knew and felt.
This is far from the relationship with the breath that moves through all
things which our wild souls are intertwined with.
This is a vast, intentional, disconnected hyper-dependence. Our minds
are wired for nomadic movements within familiar landscapes. That is how
we are shaped. Our hunter-gatherer minds are bioregional in practice and
global in spirit, but not consequence.
The unnatural world that civilization has created and Modernity has
accelerated are simply too large for our minds to even comprehend. Our
inability to empathize with the consequences of our actions is literally
out of our world.[28] Programmers and marketers know this.
And they prey upon it.
So it is hardly ironic when Zuckerberg famously proclaimed: âA squirrel
dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests
right now than people dying in Africa."[29] The use of the word
ârelevantâ obscures the horrific confluence of our realm of being and
our realm of understanding. Zuckerberg, like all other programmers,
knows that when faced with the challenge of addressing the consequences
of our actions, itâs far easier to sink back into the reality that
theyâve sold us than to address the one we live in. Weâll get back to
this, but itâs pertinent for understanding the pathological drive of the
social network for directing our impulses and how they can do it.
And the reality here is frightening.
If there is a canary in this coalmine, it should be Nicholas Carrâs
excellent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains.
As far as Iâm concerned, itâs the Silent Springfor the crisis of the
further integration of the internet and technology into every aspect and
moment of our lives.
There are many points he touches on that are crucial to understanding
how our interactions with technology, particularly the internet, impact
the function and development of our minds.
While programmers like Zuckerberg extol the faux-virtues of transparency
and giving voice to individuals through their platforms, the subtext is
about instilling their vision into our minds through channeling
synapses. Literally.
When we buy into or accept their mythos that the internet exists to make
the world a freer, better place, stuffed beyond recognition with
information, we are accepting an argument on their turf. And that turf
is a confusing place.
There is almost nowhere on the internet where you arenât being sold
products: be it physical, ideological or cosmological. This is the
message in the medium. Information, relationships, connections and so on
are all consumable. Quantifiable in nature, ever expanding in form: this
is the world stripped of life and coded in binary and algorithms.
That information that you were after, that pressing question you had to
Google, that curiosity that you had? Those are all starting points. The
internet does act like a web. Every point is measured in its relation to
others. It is a multiple-choice adventure at all times and if you
werenât aware, the hyperlinks can sell you on directions that flashing
ads might not.
They want you to click. They beg you to click.
Once you do, you start down their rabbit hole: this fog of consumption
of information and products, opinions and trivia. Thereâs no explanation
for how you found these random factoids when you paste them in on your
News Feed, but thereâs a science to it. Click. Share. Integrate.
At its heart, this visceral assault is not a new concept. Weâve known
from the inception and integration of the television how this external
and contrived fantasy (especially when driven by fright) deeply impacts
our fight or flight synapse. We are overwhelmed with options even if
they all lead to the same complicity.
This is how our brains work.
And this is what the programmers know.
That is why they can adjust algorithms on Facebook as a social
experiment to see how the tone of a News Feed can impact worldviews.
They call this âemotional contagionâ. To date itâs been clearly exposed
at least once as part of a weeklong emotional experiment conducted
through tweaking the tone of shared content in your News Feed on
Facebook.[30]
This is your cage.
While we are told that life without civilization was a struggle, we
ignore that while things can happen fast, our minds and bodies have
evolved to cope with them. Should we suddenly realize that weâre being
tracked or should a hunt take an immediate turn: our bodies are built to
respond.
On the other hand, we were not built for prolonged exposure to
over-stimulation. If anything, our inability to process the overwhelming
input from life in Modernity is testimony to how much more relaxed our
nomadic hunter-gatherer life really was. And yet we continually attack
and offend our sensibilities. The result is exhausting, stimulating,
exciting, depressing, crushing, lost, and searching all at the same
time.
In true form, that is what the internet looks like: a barrage of ads,
information, stimulus, and options. It is a visceral and literal
distraction.
Following McLuhan, being on the internet forces the use of some senses
at the expense of others: âWe can assumeâ Carr observes, âthat the
neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are
expanding and strengthening, while those used for reading and thinking
deeply, with sustained concentration, are weakening or eroding.â[31]
And the biology behind this is worse.
Not only are we impacting what senses are being used; we are altering
the way our brains take in information. To move from short-term to
long-term memory, a particular event or piece of knowledge requires a
sense of depth, a memorable moment. It stops the flood of input in our
waking lives long enough for the mind to find a reason to hold on to it.
As enraging as your online arguments can get or as off-putting as
something might be, when read on the internet, the form dictates
function in the mind. In a sea of distraction, all things are given
equal footing. And our minds donât take the sensory overload of one site
more seriously than others.
We are losing the ability to remember.
Our brain treats the internet as an external source: the very warehouse
of information that the programmers have sold to us. We donât need to
retain this full information because we can access it at any time
through our computers or, more commonly, our phone. To say, âGoogle itâ
is hardly a passive phrase, it is an intrinsic change in the way they we
find information.
We no longer gather it; we just seek it out when we need to reference
it.
And then it is released again into the internet. This is not an
intentional process on our part, but it is absolutely underpinning the
nature of our relationship with the world through the megamachine. This
is the suffocating void: that fogged sense of place, filled with the
pressures to maintain existence while always searching for another
reason to prolong the presence.
As Carr states, we are âoutsourcing memoryâ and in doing so, we are
outsourcing function. This is our integration with the machine, our
delusional participation in the Spectacle and yet itâs as though weâre
not even there.
Itâs worth quoting Carr at length here:
âThe influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online
not only overloads our working memory; it makes it harder for our
frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process
of memory consolidation canât even get started. And, thanks once again
to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the
more we train our brain to be distracted â to process information very
quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps
explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when weâre away
from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at
remembering. Our growing dependence on the Webâs information stores may
in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As
our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our
biological memory, weâre forced to rely more and more on the Netâs
capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us
shallower thinkers.â[32]
The machine is not controlling your mind: the machine is absorbing it.
This eternal present comes at the death of memory while the future hangs
in the balance. It is widely noted that nomadic hunter-gatherers lack a
sense of anything other than cyclical time. Living within the realm of
an immediate return subsistence, itâs easy to conflate our sense of
immediate gratification. These are two greatly opposing realities: one
lives in honor of the past and the future, the other exists at their
expense.
The real world struggles to keep up. Amazon, the largest internet
retailer in the US, pushed Sunday delivery as an option, is working on
same day delivery, always offers one or two day shipping, and is just
one of many corporations trying to cash in on streaming and immediately
available content.
While our nomadic hunter-gatherer lives are typified by immediate return
interactions, this sad repackaging of immediate gratification is an
entirely different beast. It sacrifices long term relationships and
sustainability for short-term acquisition. Another impulse to feed.
Another plug to fill. A furthering of our integration with technology.
We are addicts.
But we wind up here for the same reason, every single time: we are lost.
Our minds are wandering instead of our bodies, but they remain
untethered and the internet provides an oasis for the search.
This is the restlessness.
The search is trying to find a light within the void. But the search is
complacency. As long as we are lost, we are logged on. Our memory is as
long as our News Feed. Our feelings are as deep as our memories.
Our tragedy is that as our world burns, we lose the very ability to even
remember it was there.
And so civilization pummels along. Taking all of us with it.
âIn the event of non-accidental injuries (including suicide, self
mutilation, etc.), I agree that the company has acted properly in
accordance with relevant laws and regulations, and will not sue the
company, bring excessive demands, take drastic actions that would damage
the company's reputation or cause trouble that would hurt normal
operations.â[33] â Foxconnâs required anti-suicide clause for employees.
Itâs easy to see the abyss of nothingness that is being sold to us as a
First World problem, yet the fact that nearly a quarter of the Earthâs
population regularly uses Facebook indicates the depth of its
pervasiveness.
Our daily lives, now more than ever, the fabric of our âsocialâ lives,
are soaked in blood.
While our ability to comprehend or empathize wanes, our footprint
spreads exponentially.
Letâs start with those phones.
Most of our phones are made in Shenzhen, China. And it is a city built
on cell phones. âTwenty-five years ago it was a fishing village
surrounded by rice paddies. Today it is an urban sprawl of 12 million
peopleâ observes journalist Fred Pearce.[34]
This is the home of Foxconnâs now notorious sweatshops.
Foxconn runs the leading technological production facilities. This is
currently where most Apple and Sony products are made, Blackberrys as
well in their heyday. The reason they got some news was shocking:
employees were forced to sign an anti-suicide clause. According to
Wikipediaâs numbers, up till 2013, at least 24 workers had killed
themselves: the wretched working conditions, exposure to toxic
chemicals, monotony of industrialized production, and overall depression
being the clear common causes.
The most common method of suicide was jumping from the rooftops of the
factories and corporate housing (if we can use the term that liberally),
so the response of the corporation? Install netting around the rooftops
to catch jumping workers.
Foxconn, for many living beings, sounds like hell.
The marketers promote the myth throughout civilization that you have a
choice. And to some degree it is true. You can not purchase a
smartphone, the catch is that it is that you are expected to. Consumers
laud this as a choice: you lose your right to complain once you bought
in. This is the Litmus Test for compliance in the Void. The presumptions
here, however, are disgustingly off.
The presumption carried on is that people go to sweatshops because they
want jobs. This may be true for some, but thereâs a long standing
colonial and imperial legacy that is endemic (predominantly, though not
exclusively) throughout the southern hemisphere whereby subsistence
societies live in areas that would otherwise be useful for, letâs say,
the production of rare earth metals.
In some places, itâs just easier to demolish any access to subsistence
just to build factories and create a work force. If you can no longer
harvest from the land directly, then you need to buy food.
But back to the rare earth minerals example (believe me, there are many
options), your phone would not exist without them. Here in Shenzhen,
tantalum is used to help make phone batteries lighter and last longer.
That tantalum, however, comes from Congo, where forests are cleared by
military leaders (often not on the Stateâs side) to build what can only
be considered shanty-mining villages.
And who works there? Prisoners, those caught in the crossfire, and,
quite often, children.[35]
And these places are horrifically dangerous.
But for your phone to be lightweight and last longer off the charger, a
constant and ongoing civil war will find bodies to fill, dig, and exhume
those mines.
Then those materials are processed and assembled by overworked and tired
hands in China before being sold to you. And while this new phone has a
separate light to notify you when something is happening on your
Facebook News Feed, every part of that contraption was possibly the
worst part of another dozen peopleâs lives.
And this goes on for every single piece of technology that you have in
your pocket.
Never mind that those metals are both rare and irreplaceable.[36] Or on
that they are on the verge of non-existence.[37] Or that they and their
processing are absolutely toxic.[38] We are killing the earth, poisoning
water ways, driving species to extinction, forcing labor, keeping
sweatshops open, and on, for a device that allows nearly half of the
earthâs population to remain constantly in contact without ever just
being there.
And this is how civilization ends: consumed by an uncaring and unfeeling
impulse to reach out to those who are strangers surrounding us.
Lest you think the problem is simply capitalism, those operating the
mines, work camps, poppy fields and mono-cropped farms are quite often
socialist revolutionaries. No matter who is in control: this is the
point that Modernity has gotten us into.
It is a quagmire of drifting along on limited resources with a sense of
infinite wants and no fulfillment.
And it is here that our lives, the lives of all beings on this planet
and the earth itself are bound. And as we sheepishly reload our News
Feed, this is the world that is passing us by.
Itâs not okay.
Weâre not okay.
The problems that surround us, the emptiness of Modernity, the thing
that has us looking at screens instead of into eyes is a distraction. It
is life automated. As you shudder away from that frightening noise, the
clutter, the crowds, the moment you look up mindlessly from your phone;
you are confronted with all of this.
And it is too much.
It is suffocating. It is an endless nothingness, a weight on the lungs,
a turning in the stomach, an unidentified repulsion.
The temptation is to look away. That is why we donât even have the words
to address this plague, to address how the hardwired matrix became an
invisible leash. We arenât confronting it. And the programmers, the
domesticators of Modernity, are counting on the fact that we are losing
the very ability to even situate or reconcile our loss and context.
They are counting on our inability to recognize the world around us.
And yet this is not the world as it exists.
The earth is suffering from the consequences, but it is still alive. The
wildness refuses to be tamed. It refuses to succumb to the machine.
Our hunter-gatherer minds and bodies know this, despite everything that
we have been taught. These misdirected impulses and synapses linger
amidst the confusion. That is why we still reach out in the first place.
That is why these caged birds Tweet.
In that moment, that second when we look up, that second when we feel
the crushing realness of our circumstance, we are human. We are afraid.
We are scared. We are lonely.
And we do have a choice.
If given the chance, these realities will never be reconciled. These
words might be etched forever in silicon and roam electrical feeds so
long as the power lasts, but that feeling is real. This world is real.
It is our work to smash the distraction. To pull the plug. To render the
machines useless.
To see this world the way our bodies feel it and our minds know it,
there is no other option but the annihilation of civilization. We have
guides. We have instincts.
We have our wildness.
So before we are lost in a sea of unending, constant nothingness: to
take the first step, we must first look up. Breathe deep.
And fight back.
[1] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity. Blackwell: Malden, MA. Pg. 8.
[2] http://www.wired.com/2011/06/internet-a-human-right/ Retrieved
12-29-2014.
[3] This vastly increasing occurrence does have a name: âPhantom
Vibration Syndromeâ. A word first used in print in 2003 by Robert Jones
who reiterated his earlier thoughts ten years later with the following
comment: âWhether PVS is the result of tissue over-stimulation,
neuro-psychological unconscious bias, a genuine mental health issue, or
all of the above, this persistent phenomenon indicates that we long ago
crossed the line in the sands of privacy in this âalways onâ society.â
From:
http://inclusiveworks.com/cn-executive-coaching-corner/phantom-vibration-syndrome-update/
Retrieved 12-29-2014.
[4] See Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness. University of Georgia Press:
Athens, GA. 1998 and Coming Home to the Pliestocene. Island Press:
Washington DC. 1998.
[5] Lewis Mumford. The Myth of the Machine. Harcourt, Brace & World: New
York. 1966, Pg. 3.
[6] Jerry Mander. In the Absence of the Sacred. Sierra Club Books: San
Francisco. 1992, Pg 190.
[7] The link between domestication and religion is vital. Iâve touched
on it elsewhere and will be elaborating on it in upcoming works. A solid
book on the subject is Morris Bermanâs Wandering God. State University
of New York Press: Albany, 2000.
[8] See John Zerzanâs on-point essay âFaster!â in this issue of Black
and Green Review.
[9] According to a PEW Research survey:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/06/cell-phone-ownership-hits-91-of-adults/
Retried 12-29-2012.
[10] Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, Networked. MIT Press: Cambridge.
2012, Pg. 12.
[11] http://www.textinganddrivingsafety.com/texting-and-driving-stats/
Retrieved 12-29-2014. Thatâs 23% of car accidents in case you were
wondering.
[12] http://readwrite.com/2012/02/01/zuckerbergs_letter_to_shareholders_personal_relationships_are_the_fundamental_unit_of_our_society
Retrieved 12-31-2014.
[13] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/11194049/Facebook-profits-pass-1bn-as-more-users-log-on-every-day.html
Retreived 1-1-2015
[14] Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy. Signet: New York. 1969, pg
35.
[15] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db76.pdf Retrieved
1-2-2015.
[16] http://news.yahoo.com/number-active-users-facebook-over-230449748.html
Retrieved 1-2-2015.
[17] Chellis Glendinning, My Name is Chellis & Iâm in Recovery from
Western Civilization. Shambhala: Boston. 1994, Pg. 101.
[18] Jose van Djick, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of
Social Media. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 2013, Pg. 8
[19] http://www.wired.com/2009/06/mark-zuckerberg-speaks/ Retrieved
12-31-2014.
[20] McLuhan, 1969, pg. 32.
[21] ibid, pg. 6.
[22] http://www.gsmamobileeconomy.com/GSMA%20Mobile%20Economy%202013.pdf
Retrieved 12-31-2014.
[23] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24461213 Retrieved
1-2-2015.
[24] http://www.dailytech.com/Average+Mobile+Phone+Bill+in+US+is+Growing+Despite+Competition/article34485.htm
Retrieved 1-2-2015.
[25] http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1644040,00.html
Retrieved 12-31-2014.
[26] http://www.wired.com/2014/12/facebook-atlas-google/ Retrieved
1-3-2015.
[27] http://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-we-need-wiretap-ready-web-sites-now/
Retrieved 12-30-2014.
[28] I touch on this point in more detail in my essay âEverywhere and
Nowhere: the Pathology of the Machineâ from my book, For Wildness and
Anarchy (Black and Green Press, 2009). Itâs also, ironically, easy to
find online.
[29] David Kirkpatrick. The Facebook Effect. Simon & Schuster: New York.
Pg. 181.
[30] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/
Retrieved 12-30-2014.
[31] Nicholas Carr. The Shallows. WW Norton: New York. 2011, Pg. 141.
[32] Ibid, Pg. 194.
[33] http://shanghaiist.com/2010/05/26/translated_foxconns_employee_non-su.php
Retreived 1-1-2015.
[34] Fred Pearce. Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the
Sources of My Stuff. Beacon Press: Boston. 2008, Pg. 200. Despite itâs
liberal guilt sounding title, itâs actually a really great book.
[35] Ibid. Pgs 203-206. Kevin Balesâ Disposable People (University of
California Press: Berkeley. 2000) is also an indispensible source on the
matter.
[36] http://gizmodo.com/the-metals-in-your-phone-arent-just-rare-theyre-irre-1477904295
Retrieved 12-28-2014.
[37] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544212008055
Retrieved 12-28-2014.
[38] http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/rare-earth-mining-china-social-environmental-costs
Retrieved 12-28-2014.