Disclaimer: This may read bleak, but I’m not in a bleak state of mind. I will post a comment with my thought process behind it.
The Anti-Science Infantilization of the Modern Tech World
You get up and read the news. Halfway across the world are things happening you have no control over and if you put yourself out there and protest it, you get told to stop speaking when a politician is speaking.
You go on a job website and submit an application, but you may not ever receive a rejection and if you do, you will likely receive no information on why your application was rejected and some other person’s wasn’t. Was it something you did? Was it nothing you did? You don’t know.
You go on a dating app and try to match with people. If you’re a man, you probably send out a lot of likes or messages that never get a response. Does your profile suck? Are you sending poor messages? You don’t know. Maybe they’re never getting seen in the first place. If you’re a woman, you probably receive more likes and messages than you know what to do with and a lot of them are mean and objectifying. You did nothing to provoke this other than existing as a woman and no matter what you do on there, it keeps happening.
You go to the grocery store to get food to live on, but some product you used has been discontinued again. You have no idea why and have to figure out a replacement. Furthermore, some product whose prices you relied on as stable have gone drastically up. Meanwhile, you’re being told the economy is doing well. No one ever consults you on any of these things or tells you why it’s really happening. They just say it’s inevitable and your lot in life. In fact, they may say it’s for your own good.
You go to use your favorite product and it got a major update. A bunch of features you were relying on have changed. They say it’s a better product this way and you should get used to it.
You hear on the news that it’ll be time to vote again soon. This is the one time, around every four years, that they say your decisions and your opinions matter. And they’re telling you that this time, like the last times, it’s the most important decision, possibly ever. Where with everything else, you were told to deal with being helpless to the fate of opaque systems you’re not allowed to understand or weigh in on, you’re now being told it all comes down to you. You drum up some sense of duty in you and you go do it. It’s done. You did your part. The results come out and things go back to being as they were before.
You get up and read the news. Halfway across the world are things happening you have no control over and if you put yourself out there and protest it, you get told to stop speaking when a politician is speaking.
You are discouraged from using scientific process and thought to navigate the world. Everywhere you turn, the mechanisms you’re up against are hidden from you. Instead, you are told to use willpower, told to use attitude, told to think differently, and eventually the universe will come together for you. Meanwhile, the machine of exploitation turns on scientifically designed wheels. The overseers of colonization, the overseers of the global capitalist empire, use science to exploit and place layers of indirection upon the process so you can’t see it.
You look in the mirror. You can only see yourself anymore. They’ll give you a mirror so you can focus more on yourself. You see a failure looking back, a helpless abject figure. They tell you to blame yourself. You try to work on yourself to love yourself more and build yourself up, but you keep hitting invisible walls. No matter what you try to do differently, you’re flying blind. And that too, they say, is your fault. It always comes back to you and can never be them.
They can take away every limb, deprive every sense you have, and still they will tell you it’s your fault. A failure of willpower and attitude.
I feel this. It’s also something I try to talk about with others, but I always have the feeling that it falls on deaf ears. At best I get general uncomittal agreement and some liberal platitudes about how this is just the way things are in return.
some liberal platitudes about how this is just the way things are in return.
I wonder if that relates to the intersection of it with Capitalist Realism that Larkin mentioned - people having a hard time viewing anything fundamentally different as being possible.
I’m only superficially familiar with Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism, but it speaks to the same idea. As the tagline on his book says, is there no alternative?
Functioning under capitalism is the highest form of lying. You must put nice words in white print on your resume or else a bot will reject it. You must brazenly invent years of experience in interviews for an entry-level job or else they won’t hire you. You must wear a grinning mask when dealing with a customer under all circumstances or else the deal might fail. You must act like your dearest and most interesting things in the world are spreadsheets and sales pitches, or else you’ll be reprimanded and then fired. The whole thing is a hologram of paper-mache painted to look like marble, one facade after another, there is no place for humans, only for their images. Nothing in this economic system is about truth, or justice, or even basic respect. It’s all about appearances.
I think this was very well written. And you are right. The obscurantism of modern capitalist society is by design. The less you understand the less power you have to change things.
obscurantism
Didn’t know that word for it. Gonna look into that term more, thanks.
I use it because I am reminded of the medieval practice of keeping peasants illiterate so that they have to rely on clergy to interpret scripture for them. In the same way, most people today are reliant on the high priests of capital, the so-called economists, who perform what for all intents and purposes may as well be arcane divinations and reading the entrails of goats, to interpret the whims of the markets. When it comes to politics they are reliant on the media and “political commentators” to interpret the byzantine electoral intrigues of so-called liberal democracy. And when it comes to tech they turn to all sorts of charlatans and shysters who would have you buy into their gnostic prophecies of a magical AI future and billionaire space colonization. It’s like they have turned capitalism into a religion, asking you to have faith that if you obey capital’s divine commandments, are pious and perform your daily rituals and sacrifices of labor you too can be redeemed and exit the purgatory of poverty.
if you haven’t read Marx on Capital as a Real God I think it will interest you
Good point, well said.
The magic of the market!
This really resonates with me. Thanks for sharing!
this is pretty inspired. were you thinking about fight club? the style reminds me to palahniuk
Not consciously, but I watched the movie a long time back, so maybe some of the influences seeped into my brain. I just know I can pick up inspiration from all kinds of places, but may not remember where in the long-term.
Background:
Got inspired to write this when thinking about how disempowered people can be, in the face of the systems they’re working with. A lot of stuff in the US context, for example, expects you to be okay with it being “out of your control”. Now some therapists would tell you “nothing is under your control” (other than maybe yourself) and while that might be “technically the truth”, we absolutely have influence over the environments we exist in and they have influence over us. But when we live among processes that are so removed from us having any influence and so removed from us even understanding them, what does it leave us with other than being hopeless and helpless? Personal willpower, positive attitude, and magical thinking. Which as a method are nowhere near a dialectical, scientific way of moving through the world. It is beneficial to the imperialists for us to be in this position, blaming ourselves and not knowing how to bring about different through a quantifiable, reproducible process. What strikes me as important here is that it’s not only whether someone is educated to approach things in a dialectical way, it’s whether the systems they’re working with provide any sort of meaningful feedback that even allow them to assess and adjust. This is why I use the word “infantilization”. There is this common design of things where “you don’t need to know and don’t get to know”, and as a result, you become further and further from being able to influence anything, your own life or that of others. And where with an actual infant, you are normally taken care of at least, there is a stark difference here: you are infantilized while simultaneously being left to fend for yourself. And the only tools the capitalists, the imperialists, the colonizers expect you to use to overcome are a magical force of will and disposition that they themselves do not have and did not use to get to where they are.
Curious to know if this resonants you or not and in what way(s). I will read any responses I get, even if I don’t have a reply for them all.
I think you’re independently converging on Mark Fisher’s concept of Capitalist Realism.
So I watched the video and that was an interesting breakdown of the concept. One aspect that stood out to me was the idea of the bureaucracy of auditing labor and the sort of facade of accomplishment paved over practical use of labor. As an example, I have a contracting job that is hourly and online, and so a certain amount of time and energy and system-level process is put into recording time mostly accurately, in order to bill hours accurately and protect against fraudulent reporting of hours performed. And while this is somewhat understandable given the nature of the job, most of it would be unnecessary if it was salary based work rather than contracting; so, in order to cut costs through the contracting (or even just hourly) labor form, additional labor and bureaucracy is added on top of it to make sure it performs as intended. This, I would say, is counter to the narrative contracting tends to get, of “independence” - the practical reality of the contracted form seems to be, in reality, a greater level of scrutiny needed. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, a more invasive level of scrutiny. I hesitate to say that in a sweeping way, as not all expressions of it will be identical, but I think of the nature of things like Airbnb and how I’ve read things in passing of renters who install cameras to an invasive degree, in order to make sure nothing untoward happens. Without organizational trust, the fear of the relative stranger taking advantage and the subsequent efforts to control them, seems to deepen. It is possible this also correlates to the overall estrangement of a society deep in capitalism as a whole; that there is, to some extent, more invasive monitoring the more estranged people are from each other and from any kind of reliable shared beliefs, morals, goals, etc. That might be too hasty of a generalization, but I do wonder if there is something to it that plays into the rise in invasive monitoring of people.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Interesting, I’m familiar with the general concept of Capitalist Realism, but never got around to knuckling down and reading the book. I’ll have to make a note to look into it in more detail.
