There is a paradox embedded in consumer capitalism involving the distinction between the personal and the nonpersonal. All interactions with the economic system, from ordering fast food at a drive-up window to filing income taxes are assumed to operate in the realm of the nonpersonal. There is nothing about the interaction that is meant to be relevant for you personally, as a unique individual human being. It is not you, what’s relevant to the exchange is the specific systemic role that you are playing at the time.
When you are interacting with the machine of civilization, you are not acting as a person. An unspoken requirement of participating in the system is that you first relinquish a substantive portion of your personhood. There are some situations—herded like cattle through the roped cue for a flight at the airport, for instance—where this is uncomfortably obvious. But not to worry, everyone else is being dehumanized in the exact same way, so it’s nothing personal.
“It’s nothing personal” is how a workplace supervisor ended the conversation several years ago after he informed me that I was being passed over for a promotion. Let’s be clear, it’s always personal. All experience is in the first-person (or first-bird, or first-catfish, or first-grasshopper). There is nothing that you could possibly experience that isn’t irreducibly personal even if everyone on the planet was experiencing the exact same thing.
It is relatively easy to trace the ways that the idea of the nonpersonal serves the interests of power. What would happen if we refused to accept the lie? What would happen if we insisted on making it all personal?
Q: Why has the US been reticent to demand a ceasefire in Gaza?
A: US corporations supply an enormous amount of arms to Israel, which means massive profits for weapons manufacturers when the weapons they produce are used and need to be replaced (in November of last year, the US pledged 14.3 billion in military aid to Israel; one estimate has Israel on track to burn through at least 50 billion in military expenditures before the end of this year). Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, Boeing, and General Dynamics all hear a tiny *chi-ching* with every incinerated Gazan child.
Q: Why is the US only now deciding to provide substantial emergency aid to Gaza?
A: There first needs to be a massive humanitarian crisis (and justification in the form of a sufficient level of domestic public outcry) in order for the corporations that produce and supply the physical aid products (e.g. food, medical supplies, personnel, transport mechanisms) to glean the maximum profit. But it is also important to act while there are still people left to “save.” Judging by the recent announcement that the US plans to air drop emergency aid, the situation has finally entered the corporate-profit sweet-spot range.
Also, in case you need reminding, the US is a corporate oligarchy.
There is a traditional Japanese Buddhist ritual called Segaki in which ghosts and monsters are offered food and drink to address their insatiable hunger and reduce their restless wandering. The ghosts, unfortunately, are unable to get any relief because, being ghosts, they have no way to ingest the offerings presented to them. One might think that being a ghost would also prevent them from feeling hunger in the first place, but hunger, like other forms of deficiency-based craving, is not an entirely physical experience, and the presence of the food is apparently enough to calm them for a while.
I don’t know to what extent the human participants in Segaki believe in the veracity of the hungry residents of the spirit world or, if they do believe in such implausible creatures, whether their ceremonial offerings have any actual impact. For the residents of science-saturated Western civilization, however, the whole idea is clearly ridiculous.
The modern scientific world view deals in objective testable facts—a.k.a., reality—and has long ago dismissed such notions as primitive fantasies from a bygone era, silly myths concocted by uneducated minds. One of the hallmark conceits of modernity is its anti-mythic posture, its successful demythologizing of the world. Scientifically grounded understanding leaves no space for myth, and has soundly dispelled the childish fantasies of yore. Science deals with what is real.
Or, rather, that’s how science is typically portrayed by its most vocal promoters. But the truth of the matter is something quite otherwise. The world that science constructs is a mythical world of its own, stocked with a panoply of mystical beings. And those same science-informed residents of modern civilization who would be quick to dismiss the Segaki as ridiculous, spend the lion’s share of their waking hours feeding the hungry ghosts that populate their own phantastic imaginations, what Max Stirner referred to as “spooks” and “wheels in the head.”
Stirner, a mid-nineteenth century German philosopher, championed a perspective known as egoism. The name is unfortunate in its lexical proximity to egotistic, but the two terms do not share the same set of connotations. Stirner’s egoism is centered on the notion that everything anyone ever thinks or does is always ultimately for themselves. Many people have probably come to the same realization at some point. I remember the specific moment as an adolescent sitting at the kitchen table with my mother one day after school, when I had the moral epiphany that altruism in its pure form was logically impossible. No one can ever do anything that isn’t at some level directed at their own benefit. Even acts of “selfless” bravery on the battlefield are not at their core actually selfless, but driven to satisfy a personal compulsion in the moment.
Stirner takes this realization quite a bit further, however, and talks about how it is that we could possibly imagine things to be otherwise. How is it that we think that our motives could be directed at something other than our own personal needs? In order for this to occur, it is necessary for us to invent transcendent fictions, generalized abstractions that somehow magically possess power over us. Some examples of these that Stirner offers include such things as law, marriage, a good cause, family, the common good. To this list of fabricated entities I would add such things as financial obligation, tradition, reputation, property, and any form of authority.
Civilized life forces us to spend the majority of our time and energy engaging with these abstract fictions, feeding these ghosts, and we end up neglecting what is real and truly important. One notable result of this is that our relationships with each other have become degraded relative to what they could be otherwise. By adopting egoism, Stirner claims—and in direct contradiction to what might be expected of such a self-focused perspective—our connections with each other take on an authenticity that would be impossible otherwise: “If I cherish you because I hold you dear, because in you my heart finds nourishment, my need satisfaction, then it is not done for the sake of a higher essence, whose hallowed body you are, not on account of my holding you a ghost, an appearing spirit, but from egoistic pleasure: you yourself with your essence are valuable to me, for your essence is not a higher one, is not higher and more general than you, is unique like you yourself, because it is you.”
All civilized activity is feeding hungry ghosts, providing succor to phantastic entities whose pangs must be continuously assuaged. We spend our days trying to satisfy the unreal privations of empty fictions, attempting to placate their imagined needs through ritual offerings. And somehow we fail to notice that all of our pious compliance is in vain because, like the spiritual targets of the Segaki ritual, the monsters of civilization are insatiable.
The form of the word, civilization, with its -ization suffix, carries entailments that both assume and perpetuate a particularly pernicious set of thought-forms.
Consider the grammatical distinction between -ize and -ization suffixes. The former, as a verb form, entails the action of a subject: a person can rationalize; a group of laborers can unionize; a globalizing state can weaponize and then colonize. There is some person, group, or thing that is doing something. The latter, however, converts the verb into a noun, stripping it of its need for active agency.
Colonization, for example, is a transformational process that embodies its own particular genocidal logic regardless of the nature of the colonizing state. Colonization is something that happens to people, the result of a process, rather than something actively being done to them by specific other people.
Because an acting subject is not a necessary entailment, processes identified with -ization nouns are frequently treated as if they are self-generating and self-sustaining. Corporatization and globalization are thought to proceed according to their own inertial inevitability in the same way as do physical processes like oxidization or crystallization.
Civilization is understood to proceed in just this way, as an unavoidable and unstoppable process. You and I as individuals are just along for the ride, and cannot possibly hope to resist a process that is inevitable and proceeding according to natural law.
Civilization in its noun form may be ultimately beyond us. But in its verb form? Here is where I think there is some promise, and perhaps even some strategic insight. It is not against civilization as an abstract entity, but against the concrete forces that civilize where our efforts need to be directed.
And it is not resistance that is needed, but for you and I to resist.
I opened up my email today to find the following important message about a workshop that I apparently must attend if I don’t want to be left behind in the fossilized digital dust:
Escape the Stone Age! Don’t be a Dinosaur! Quickly Learn ChatGPT Tools!
I’m pretty sure the marketing geniuses who crafted this gripping subject line acquired all their knowledge of natural history from the Flintstones. The real irony, however, is that the FOMO bandwagon marketing strategy being used here is among the most ancient advertising ploys in existence—archaic even, practically Paleozoic.
But nerd-out with me for just a second, and take the “dinosaur” reference at face value. Dinosaurs existed for more than 180 million years. And they managed that unprecedented feat, it should be noted, without a single nested algorithm.
Modern humans have only been around for between 300k and 160K, depending on how you define what a modern human is. That’s not even in the same ballpark as dinosaurs, but still a couple orders of magnitude longer than the existence of civilized humans like the ones who sent me this important message about the workshop.
Despite their miniscule 9k existence, civilized humans have managed to make a lasting mark, however. For example, they have successfully orchestrated an impressive mass extinction event that is on course to completely eclipse the one that ended the dinosaurs. It is (perhaps not) unfortunate that this extinction event will be taking civilized humans along with it—sparkly dehumanizing AI tools or no.
The point is that, from a logical/factual standpoint, neither dinosaurs nor Stone Age humans are a good choice here. But don’t ask me to rewrite the ad copy for them. I’m pretty sure that my suggested edits would not be very welcome.
I stepped into the daylight and started across the concrete-paved courtyard in the center of the small urban college campus. The courtyard contains several trees—literally “contains” them, sequesters them, seals them in bricks and cement, allowing just slightly more exposed earth than is necessary to accommodate their trunk girth—Japanese maple and ornamental crabapple, but also a variety of oaks with slender leaves that look like serrated arrows. It was early November, and the ground was lightly littered with recent leaf fall.
I was in a somewhat playful mood, and it didn’t take any effort for me to imagine the arrow-shaped oak leaves on the ground were speaking to me directly, each one offering its own suggestion about what path I should take across the flat open space between the buildings. “Go this way,” said the one to my left. “No, this way is really much better,” said the one directly in front, while the one next to it disagreed wholeheartedly: “You need to turn around and go back the way you came.” I noticed that many of the leaf-arrows seemed to be pointing in one of three distinct directions, corresponding to the three different paths that I have taken across the courtyard in the past. I did a quick mental calculation to see which route was represented by the largest number. Then, for some reason, I altered my course to accommodate the majority of the leaves.
I feel obligated to pause at this point to say that this is not one of those tales of spooky coincidence that ends with some fortune or misfortune experienced or avoided as a result of the particular route chosen. Nothing happened, good or bad. My day quite likely proceeded exactly as it would have if I had chosen either of the other two routes across the courtyard (although, one can never really know…). What I’m interested in exploring here is the content of my imagination, the blatantly irrational idea that there could be a message—and one directed to me personally—expressed in the way the leaves happened to be arranged.
These kinds of irrational thoughts, notions that a chance event or something as mundane as the arrangement of fallen leaves embody a nonrandom pattern or reveal a personally-directed message, are examples of what clinical psychologists and psychiatrists call ideas of reference, and they are symptomatic of certain types of mental disorder, most notably schizotypal personality disorder. Ideas of reference can take a variety of forms. Someone might think the people at the next table at a restaurant are laughing at them; or they might think that the crow cawing in the tree outside their window is speaking to them directly, trying to tell them something important; or perhaps they interpret the passing of two yellow cars in close sequence as a sign of impending danger. Ideas of reference are not unusual. They are fairly common in folks who are not suffering from mental disorder; and probably everyone has experienced the sense that some pedestrian event might have more to it than meets the eye. For some people, however, it can get a bit out of hand.
Mental health professionals make a distinction between ideas of reference and delusions of reference. With ideas of reference, the person is to some degree aware that the ideas are not entirely valid or consistent with reality. Of course, I know that leaves don’t point. Oak leaves are not arrows. Obviously, I was just bored, and changing my path to align with an imagined leaf suggestion was a kind of game I was playing with myself. With delusions of reference, on the other hand, the person truly believes that the universe is speaking to them personally. They really are the target of the laughter coming from the next table. The crow really is telling them something. The leaves have fallen that way on purpose. One of the diagnostic difficulties that mental health professionals face is that self-referential ideas and delusions fall on a continuum that incorporates substantial gray area.
But how crazy is it, really, to think the world speaks to you personally? Learning to see the personal relevance of everyday phenomena and events is a capacity that is likely hardwired into us from our earliest animal beginnings. Our mental systems evolved in circumstances in which the natural world really did speak in meaningful ways, ways that would be dangerous to ignore. In addition, most of us now live in an artificially constructed reality in which many phenomena are in actual fact directed specifically at us; numerous concrete features of civilized society are designed with the specific expectation that we will respond to them in a self-referential way: the orange flashing hand is clearly telling you to wait to cross the intersection; the advertisement popping up on your social media was put there specifically with you in mind. My ability to imagine the leaves as arrows indicating a potential direction of movement is itself a product of experience with the many actual movement-directing arrows that I am confronted with on a daily basis: on the highway, in the supermarket, on my computer screen. So, given that both our evolutionary predilections and the intentionally designed nature of our present circumstances encourage us to interpret events and phenomena in personal ways, what criteria should we apply to ideas of reference in order to separate those that might be considered normal from those that are indicative of mental dysfunction?
To make sorting this out even more difficult, each one of us has gone through a period in our personal developmental history in which such irrational thoughts were a normal feature of our daily experience, a period during which the distinction between animate and inanimate was not at all clear, when chance events and natural phenomena were reflexively interpreted as having an agentive source. For a four-year-old, the sun purposely shines into her eyes, the chair leg intentionally puts itself in the path of her toe. On some level, this prelogical cognitive posture is still with us as adults, despite the fact that we have learned to treat animate and inanimate as mutually exclusive categories, and to separate agentive purpose from the inanimate features of the natural world. It takes very little for us to reinhabit the primal animism of our childhood minds. Consider how easily it is for many people to converse with their digital voice “assistants,” interacting with a collection of nested algorithms as if speaking to a sentient entity.
Not all cultures recognize a clear animate-inanimate distinction. Although it plays a critical role in the mythos of Western civilization—especially as regards the foundational materialism of Western science—such divergent categories are not found in actual experience. In a more traditional human society, chance events and natural phenomena are not mere mechanical artifacts of an insensible material world. They are signals and indications and messages. In a nature-based society, the world is continuously speaking to you, telling you things that you need to pay attention to. The sudden change in the wind can presage an impending weather event. Animal calls can alert you to the presence of a dangerous predator. The flight path of a pair of vultures can lead you to food.
In a traditional nature-based human society the transition away from childhood animism may happen somewhat differently than it does for the civilized. In civilization, childish ideas of reference are replaced by a sterile world of mechanism and mindless mechanical operations. Perhaps in a society intimately embedded in the natural world, childish ideas of reference will eventually mature into a deeper understanding of a universe that is active and alive, a world that speaks in the most personal ways.
There are many ways that the world is speaking to us directly, personally, on a daily, momentary basis that we have been taught to ignore. What are the consequences of our conditioned deafness? What would life be like if we could refamiliarize ourselves with the ever-present voice of the living world?
There may have been a meaningful message in the leaf-fall in the courtyard, but I have been too-long isolated from nature’s voice to notice. The pattern of leaves on the ground was not at all random. Leaf shape is not arbitrary. Each leaf is designed to move in the breeze in specific ways. This, in complex interaction with the movement of the air, led to the particular ways they arranged themselves across the concrete. The leaves fell and landed as they did as a result of the subtle features of the wind at the time that they were dislodged from their sockets, the nuanced interference of the buildings surrounding the courtyard, the ways in which their unyielding structures impeded and channeled the air, the ways the currents and whirls and eddies were shaped by the buildings’ intrusive edifices. The pattern of leaves on the ground embodied a library’s worth of information about air and land and form—voiced in a language that I once knew, but have long ago forgotten.
The media have been all abuzz about the latest AI language platforms. It is clear that these systems are going to have a dramatic impact on just about everything, perhaps greater than the impact smartphones had a couple decades ago. It is also clear that the net impact will be negative: these platforms represent a solid and resonating click of the ratchet of techno-dependency.
It goes far beyond students cheating on term papers. It’s future students never learning to write—because why would you ever need to write if your smart device can do it for you with zero effort on your part? And it goes far beyond the classroom. There are a large number of jobs—entire career paths—that are going to evaporate because they will have been completely outsourced to the technology.
News stories and articles about these systems follow a familiar techno-sycophantic pattern. They lead with the obviously problematic features of the new tech, reveling in the dystopian implications. But then they quickly shift to excited declarations of imagined future benefits. “They can be beneficial for kids with learning disabilities” and “they can be incorporated into the classroom as a powerful teaching aid” are two entirely unsupported claims that I heard recently.
Sounds familiar. When smart phones entered my classroom and immediately siphoned off my students’ attentional reserve, I distinctly remember many of my colleagues gleefully altering their course curricula to include “smartphone activities.”
This is how all major technological innovations are received: first acknowledge the obvious negative, and then exaggerate any crumb of potential positive until the negative fades into the background as a small price to pay for progress. The technology itself is always seen as entirely neutral and benign. “It’s not the technology’s fault that students are using it to cheat.” It is also always seen as being completely inevitable, like a force of nature that emerges from the techno-ether and develops according to its own ontological imperatives.
On second thought, maybe the net impact of these AI systems might be positive after all. Here’s a possibility that just occurred to me. ChatGPT and its relatives are only the early stages in what is quite likely to be a complete technological absorption of public communicative acts. In a short time, social media content will become entirely AI generated and AI curated. There will eventually be nothing “social” remaining. It will be robots responding to tweets and memes and videos that were created by robots. And at that point, there will be no reason at all for actual human beings to engage with the system. Real life will be the only place left where actual humans can interact with other actual humans.
Imagine what that would be like. Imagine how wonderful it would be if you and I could spend all our time with each other IRL.
Football season has started, apparently. Professional football, of all of the so-called sports, is perhaps the clearest example of successful corporate exploitation of male fragility. But civilized males are not fragile by nature. They have been rendered fragile by intentional design.
Marketing 101: create the perception of a deficit and then offer your product as the needed solution.
But the culture industry goes one step further than mere perception. It actually creates the deficits to be filled. It emasculates in ways both physical (e.g. the powerful phytoestrogens in beer) and psychological (the many narratives of masculinity that are embedded from earliest childhood). It then offers up testosterone replacements in the form of highly commodified professional sports, sponsored by products that acquire a potent masculine aura through association (“Dodge trucks are ram tough”).
The mojo-dojo bro-verse will claim that football is about competitive skill and strength and strategic intelligence. And this is probably true in terms of explaining the vicarious fascination and obsessive attention it elicits from fans, the majority of whom display a demonstrable deficiency in all of these things.
An interesting contrast: compare what a running back is required to do (or choose your favorite sport and player position) with a hunter-gatherer climbing 130 feet up a tree freestyle in order to pull a honeycomb out of a massive and occupied beehive. When the hunter-gatherer hangs out with the other guys later on, he is very unlikely to be engaged in any competitive sport involving tests of skill or strength or strategic intelligence (despite Yanomamo-inspired myths to the contrary). It is much more likely that he will be engaged in games of chance, where luck plays the deciding role. After all, there is no need for him to demonstrate his skill or strength or strategic acumen because he just climbed 130 feet up a tree and pulled the honeycomb out of a massive beehive.
Someone forces you at the point of a gun to climb up a very tall ladder that somehow keeps getting taller the farther up you climb. When you eventually start to complain about your situation, someone else happens to wander by, hears you complain, and stops to tell you that you should be grateful that the ladder is sturdy enough to hold your weight otherwise you would fall straight to the ground.
Free time reflects an entirely civilized thoughtform. The uncivilized don’t have free time. The idea would make no sense in a hunter-gatherer context. For free time to have any meaning whatsoever, it is necessary that we endure some proportion of our lived experience in which we are not free.
According to Theodor Adorno, “free time is shackled to its opposite.” Inmates in prison are granted “free time,” and yet there is never a moment of time in which they are free. And the same is no less true of those who happen to live on the other side of the prison walls.
Adorno makes a distinction between free time and leisure time. One of the primary differences is that when a person is acting leisurely, they are under no obligation to act in any specific way at all. That is not the case with free time, however.
Free time, as an idea, is a creation of modern civilization (specifically what Adorno calls “the culture industry”), and involves the commercial cooption of recreation, the commoditizing of whatever time a person has available that is not already committed to wage labor and biological necessity. It is not enough to simply rest and recover between periods of work, but we are expected to seek out commoditized forms of distraction and entertainment as well.
Consider how the average civilized person populates their so-called free time. Consider how much time is typically spent interacting with various internet-connected devices, much of which boils down to the seeking out of simple distraction. All forms of electronic distraction, however, are fully saturated consumer spaces. And even in those rare cases where you are not being marketed to directly, your online activity is being exploited for profit.
But even prior to the internet, so-called free time was never meant to be leisure time. It has always meant to be filled with activities linked to consumable products: sports, entertainment, camping, hobbies, beach vacations. Free time is free only in that that there is a deceptive sense that free choice is involved: we are free to choose from a wide and ever-expanding array of consumable products and activities to fill our time, but the options come to us preformulated—we do not have the ability (or the psychological tools) to stock this array of options ourselves from scratch. And the idea of doing nothing, of not “filling our time,” is anathema, with boredom looming just around the corner as a pernicious side effect to be avoided at all cost.
We need to see free time for what it really is, and to understand that if there is any portion of life that is not free, then there is no portion of life that is truly free.
We need to reclaim our time—all of our time. We don’t need to increase our free time, or whatever you choose to call the temporal space between obligatory bouts of coerced labor. Instead, we need to truly free our time, we need to reoccupy the present moment and begin to dislodge it from its civilized fetters.
