💾 Archived View for beyondneolithic.life › posts › less_effort.gmi captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:20:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Ease is a relative concept. This fact is misunderstood and abused in a couple ways that invariably make your life endlessly annoying, stupid, and even brutal.
First, and most obviously, people tend to assume that the "easy" way of doing something for them will also be "easy" for everyone else. This is not the case at all. I'm imagining here the well-intentioned engineer or manager who says, "Hey, there's this cool new thing that automates this or that, we're going to use it now." And they don't understand that they're not making anything easier, they're actually introducing a new layer into an already multi-layered situation, and forcing you to learn how that layer works, what it can and can't do, and operate under the assumption that it will always work the way it is supposed to. In other words, they're asking you to put a lot of time and effort into learning and using an unfamiliar tool and claiming it'll definitely, surely be easier. It may appear easier to *them* because it meets some specific requirement that they have, but without discussion and investigations with the human beings involved in that process or task, you actually have no idea whether it will be "easier" from their perspective, whether it meets their real-world requirements. Basically, this is a situation where someone is demanding that you do something their way and simply couching it in terms of "ease," trying to convince you that it will reduce your burden rather than increase it.
Then there's the second, more insidious way in which "making your life easier" is a huge problem. Often, it's just a straight up scam to make a buck and gain access to new markets. I'm imagining here companies and institutions who impose their products and standards on whole industries in the name of "ease," when really what they want is to dominate. PayPal, CashApp, and similar tools are prefect examples. The point is not to actually make it easier to move money from one person to another. The point is to make sure that the money moves *through them* so they can take a piece of it. It's a way of encouraging you to spend more, exchange more, in a very specific way that benefits them. A way of turning human interactions and relationships into abstract monetized relationships. In this second case, no discussion or investigation with real humans is even possible. Why would PayPal ever think to discuss with the world whether everyone thinks their product should exist. How *could* such a conversation even take place?
Social media, cell phones, and messaging services are other perfect examples of this bait and switch scam in the name of "ease". Was there anything particularly difficult about communication prior to the iPhone, Facebook, and Slack? Absolutely not. I would actually argue that no new communications technology has truly reduced the difficulty of communication since the telephone. That includes the internet, even Gemini, as much as it rocks compared to the web. It may seem "easier" to have a computer in your pocket at all times so you can text whoever you want whenever you want, but people forget that they are now *required* to have a computer in their pocket *at all times*. This is how the situation played out socially. What was sold as a way of making your life easier in fact becomes a burden imposed on you, and often one which you can't reject without — a whole lot of effort. Yet another layer piled on top of all the other layers of abstraction, all of which are designed to turn your life and your labor into money. Surely, I'm preaching to the choir with a lot of Gemini users — I see posts all the time about folks trying to reduce the time consumed by mobile devices and computers, to simplify.
Which leads me to a third misunderstanding about "ease." Often, the effort which someone claims to be reducing isn't actually reduced, it's simply shifted somewhere else. We have these easy-to-use (but now mandatory) gadgets only because someone, somewhere, is digging holes in the Earth, sometimes as a wage laborer, sometimes as an actual slave, and invariably with tremendous effort and cost to their lives. Whether it's coal or cobalt, oil or lithium, all of this ease is only possible because the current social system forces millions of people to work much, much harder than humans at any other point in history, in the aggregate. And at the cost of the very Earth itself. It's complete nonsense. Delivery services are another great example. Easy for you, monotonous, painful, backbreaking work for transportation workers.
There's no real fool-proof guide to sorting all this out, but I think there are some good (but necessarily ambiguous) guidelines to use when trying to determine whether something really is "easier."
1. Is it adding something or removing something? If it's adding something, you should be wary. This has not always been the case throughout human history, but I think it's more or less true now.
2. Is it for sale? If it is, then you're perfectly justified in being wary.
3. Does it claim to be free, but include advertisements or require you to give personal information? Again, be wary.
4. Is it simply shifting a burden to someone else? This one's tricky, because it's not always obvious how to determine the answer to the question. But simply asking it is often enlightening.
5. Is it mandatory? If yes, then probably you're just being lied to about its "ease."
I'm certainly no primitivist or Luddite. Perhaps I'm just in a mood. But you should always, always be suspicious of anyone who offers to "make your life easier." Chances are they're really trying to make you do something their way, force you to buy something, or shift burdens behind the scenes. And I'm also not giving a lecture here about personal responsibility or asking anyone to stop using this service or that product. None of us can escape this, at least not through personal choices (organized, revolutionary, collective action, on the other hand...). I'm just trying to point out that we live in a social situation that weighs us down while telling us the load keeps getting lighter.