Why are you doing what you are doing right now?

Civilization forces us to adopt artificial, nonhuman goals, and to engage in activity that serves ends that are not in our own interests.  This much is obvious.  What might be less obvious is the extent to which this corrupts our moment-by-moment experience.

If you catch a wild animal and put it in a cage, it is not uncommon for the animal to do something that seems entirely out of context.  A captured squirrel might start building a nest, for instance.  Psychologists refer to this as displacement activity.  The squirrel’s natural inclination is to escape its imprisonment and run away—that is its number one behavior of choice given the context.  But it is unable to satisfy its natural inclination, and rather than do nothing and stew in its nervous juices, it runs down the list in its behavioral repertory until it finds an activity that it can perform within the limited confines of its immediate situation, and does that instead.  Displacement activity is a form of anxiety reduction.   

Caged wild animals are not the only creatures who engage in displacement activity.  Humans living within the confines of civilization continually encounter situations in which oppressive rules, social expectations, or the restrictive physical environment prevent them from engaging in their behavior of choice at any given moment.   Eating can be a displacement activity for some people.  Numerous forms of Internet distracturbation may be more common.

There is a higher-order class of displacement behavior that some (Ted Kaczynski, for example) have referred to as surrogate activity.  Civilization prevents us from pursuing many of the goals that would be natural for us to pursue if we were hunter-gatherers, goals that are tied directly to our immediate community and our relationships with others as human beings, goals that would be entirely consistent with our evolved behavioral predilections.  And so we adopt surrogate goals and pursuits, ersatz goals offered up by the machine, pursuits that are never entirely fulfilling but that leave us with the illusion that we are doing something meaningful.  These can include anything from organizing a fundraiser to developing nanotechnology—in fact, virtually all activity in industrial society that is not directly related to biological necessity (and even much of that) is surrogate activity in the broader sense: activity that we engage to accommodate the design of the system rather than the design of our own beings. 

So, why am I writing this?  Whose goals are being served?  What is it I’m not doing instead? What personal goals has my captivity forced me to abandon—or worse: what goals have I been prevented from ever even considering as possibilities?

On the homogeneity of mediated experience

From Benjamin Barber's book, Consumed:

"Those seeking the sanctuary of electronic screens and headphones may imagine themselves seeking out the diversity of what is offered in games, films, music, and eluding the sameness of the outside world; yet bought electronic content is far more homogeneous and limiting than the actual pluralism of our natural life worlds, even if for some people it also feels more vivid and “real.” At their best, movies cannot be more heterogeneous and varied than the real worlds they aspire to capture.  All of Hollywood at its best is not the equal in variety or originality of a single summer day’s walk in a public park." 

Drowning in the shallows

Reading Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows.  Carr’s main thesis is that interacting with technology leads to physical changes in the brain.  He is specifically focused on internet technology and how spending time online changes the way the brain processes information.  One side-effect is that you lose both the patience and the cognitive skills for the sustained linear processing required for reading good old fashioned books.  He goes on to suggest that that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Nothing new about this.  A similar book might be have been written about the brain changes elicited by the invention of cuneiform, or the alphabet, or the printing press, or the telegraph, or television, or the automobile, or…

There is also nothing surprising in his endorsement of the prevalent myth that technology is progressive, inevitable, and (after some minor loss or sacrifice) ultimately good.     

What bothers me most is that throughout the book he talks about these brain changes as if they represent changes in our species’ brain.  Although he is quick to point out that the mechanism of transmission from generation to generation is cultural—through changes in experience, expectations, and education—he nonetheless talks about how the human brain worked differently 30,000 years ago, as if the brain changes caused by the internet represent a facet of our biological evolution.

The brain changes he refers to are a response to changes in culture.  And they are changes that have happened in just the last generation.  And they are changes that don’t occur until you spend some time actually interacting with specific technology.  And there are still quite a lot of people who do not have access to this technology.  And the technology the next generation will interact with is likely to be substantially different from what we are interacting with today.   

So how can Google-induced brain changes represent changes in the human species? 

The brains of children born in the 21^st century are not different in any meaningful way from those of children born 30,000 years ago.   The difference is entirely one of context.  A newborn brain in 2011 expects something quite different than what it experiences when it gets plugged into the modern techno-culture.  It is a brain that will have to first be domesticated.  It is a brain that will have to be conquered and colonized and programmed and anaesthetized.  Before we even start to talk about what has to happen to the brain in order to acquire the specific conceptual skills it needs to navigate the logic of cyberspace, the brain first needs to be civilized.  And the evidence that the civilizing process is not entirely successful fills our prisons and pharmacy shelves.  

There is perhaps a more disturbing problem with Carr’s insistence that techno-induced brain alterations reflect a change in our species: it completely ignores the fact that industrial civilization is not the only mode of existence on the planet.  There are people who continue to live in societies grounded in an oral tradition, people who have no use for writing, let alone Wikipedia hyperlinks.  But these are ignorant pre-literate people living backward—subhuman—lives, so the fact that the brains of these people are different than the brains of the rest of us real humans doesn’t really matter.   

It seems to me that the claim that our communication technology is causing a change in the human species relegates non-literate indigenous folks in the Amazon and elsewhere to a subspecies classification.  Hell, with the accelerating rate of technological change, if these few remaining oral societies manage against all odds to stick around for another generation or two they may actually qualify as an entirely separate species—a species of human that can select mating partners and engage in courtship without electronic mediation and reproduce without the intervention of fertility treatment or pharmaceutical erectile assistance.

For Carr (and far too many others) it is an obvious and undeniable fact that civilization is the greatest of all human creations. Civilization is our species’ highest achievement; it is the realization of our evolutionary manifest destiny, the material bloom of our superior intellect and ingenuity.  And its present iteration, our high-tech global industrial society, represents the leading edge in the progressive development of the human species that began in the forests and savannas of Africa five million years ago.  Civilization not only provides us with uncountable and undeniable benefits, it is the foundation and source of everything that is grand and sublime about human nature—to the point where the terms we use to describe what is counter to civilization have become invective: primitive, vulgar, barbaric—uncivilized. Life outside of civilization’s benevolent embrace is, as Hobbes famously proclaimed, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, and for the technology-saturated, Viagra-popping, Facebook-addicted, tweeting urban inhabitants of the twenty-first century, literally unthinkable.

Living a contradiction

Two FAQs:

“How can you call yourself a primitivist and post on the internet (use a cell phone, drive a car, etc., etc.)?”

And the related question:

“How can you call yourself an anarchist and work for a paycheck (pay a mortgage, obey traffic signals, etc., etc.)?”

People who ask these questions are usually convinced that they have me backed into a logical corner in which the only escape is for me to confess hypocrisy (as if hypocrisy has some kind of magical power of invalidation).  Of course their real motivation is to avoid scrutinizing their own unanalyzed perspectives—and the massive cognitive dissonance that would emerge from wading into their own contradiction swamp.  A good offense is often the best defense (or defense mechanism).

Nevertheless, both questions are grounded in the same erroneous assumption: that I am somehow free to choose. 

The whole point is that I am not free to choose: I reject the system precisely because it forces me into an inauthentic lifestyle that is not of my choosing.  How is that contradiction?  Is it a logical contradiction for a plantation slave to categorically reject the institution of slavery and yet continue to pick cotton?  Is it hypocrisy for a prison inmate to strongly oppose her incarceration and yet continue to eat prison food?  

We are offered only two kinds of choice: the trivial and the Hobson’s variety.  We are free to choose the color of our shackles.  I can choose whether to continue as an indentured wage-slave or to live under a freeway overpass and scavenge dumpsters (or some equally disagreeable option).  Yes I can choose from among trivial options, whether I use Facebook or Skype or a cell phone, but unless I am willing to sever all contact with my granddaughter who lives on the other side of the country I am forced into mediated communication.  And note that it was a series of Hobson’s choices that put my granddaughter 2000 miles distant to begin with. 

I call myself an anarcho-primitivist as an attempt to reference the source of my inability to choose the life of an authentic human being.  I am an anarchist because I don’t recognize, respect, or voluntarily acknowledge the legitimacy of power or authority.  I am a primitivist because civilization is the systematic application of power and authority.  Some days I am an anarchist because I am a primitivist.  Some days it is the other way around.  That a person could be one without also being the other doesn’t make sense to me: a true contradiction?

Perhaps it is possible to reject civilization and still embrace power and authority.  But the reverse seems incoherent.      

The domestication bulldozer

Several people have made note of the fact that civilized life is rarely if ever adopted willingly. The history of Western colonial expansion abounds with examples of members of the invading culture “going savage,” but few if any documented cases of the opposite.  Civilization is imposed on the uncivilized through coercion and direct force, with genocide frequently employed to smooth out the bumps in the initial transition. This is true not just on a historical scale, but on the scale of the “development” of the individual person as well.  Children have to be “colonized,” every child needs to have all that is natural and uncivilized within them tamed, caged, quashed—beaten out of them if necessary.

Despite this, the myth persists that civilized life represents the deepest longing of those who remain in the penumbra of the global machine: the few remaining Bushmen and their subsistence farming neighbors in central Africa pine for a life with a television and a factory job.  There is not a single indigenous male in the entire Amazon basin who would not be willing to sell his mother into slavery to be able to spend lazy afternoons sipping latte and surfing porn on a smartphone.  Civilization is obviously such a great idea that anyone who is given the option would be a complete idiot for not jumping on the techno-industrial treadmill.   

There is a closely related myth that relates to the spread of large-scale domestication during the Neolithic.  The agricultural lifestyle is obviously such a great idea that once exposed, hunter-gatherers instantly dropped their spears and started planting seeds.  But Daniel Quinn’s gorilla tells a different story.  Ishmael talks about the conflict between “leavers” and “takers” in terms of conquest, annihilation, and extermination—where nomadic pastoralists and others living subsistence life-ways were pushed further and further to the periphery in terms of both geography and population.   The agricultural revolution, at least according to the cryptic homilies of one fictional telepathic lowland gorilla, was brought about through displacement and genocide—mostly genocide.

An October 2009 article in the journal Science reports the results of a study comparing mitochondrial DNA from skeletons of the first European farmers, from skeletons of late European hunter-gatherer people, and from modern Europeans.  The DNA differences support Ishmael’s contention.  The first farmers in the area were not descendants of local hunter-gatherers but came from someplace else, and the hunter-gatherers in the area at the time were not absorbed into the farming culture, nor did they decide to take up farming as a result of exposure to agricultural practices.  The emergence of large-scale domestication was not a happy bandwagon with everyone jumping onboard.  Like the emergence of civilization a few thousand years later, it was a bulldozer.

  

Technological nature and environmental generational amnesia

A 2009 article by psychologists at the University of Washington provides a brief summary of some research exploring “technological nature,” defined as technologies that in some way simulate, modify, or mediate our experience with the natural world (e.g., nature webcams, videos, virtual environments, robotic animals).  The specific question their review addresses is whether there is a difference between exposure to technological nature and exposure to actual (natural?) nature in terms of potential impact on our physical and psychological wellbeing.   

The seven studies they mention suggest an affirmative answer.  For example, one study found more rapid heart rate recovery following low-level stress when a person was in an office with a window that looked out on a natural landscape than when a person was in either an office equipped with an HD plasma screen displaying a real-time image of a similar landscape or an office with only a blank wall to stare at—no recovery differences between the plasma image and a blank wall.

The article is worth the quick read for the concise description of Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis if nothing else.  In addition, there are a couple things the authors said that I think are worth noting.  First, they begin their abstract with the claim that “Two world trends are powerfully reshaping human existence: the degradation, if not destruction, of large parts of the natural world, and unprecedented technological development.“  They say this as if these things were parallel but entirely unrelated phenomena.  

Also, and perhaps more noteworthy, they talk about something called environmental generational amnesia.  It is unclear whether they coined the term, but the idea is pretty straightforward: because the quantity and quality of engagement with the (actual) natural world is decreasing with each subsequent generation, children growing up today will have reduced awareness and understanding of features of nature that their grandparents understood intimately.  Environmental generational amnesia is an insidious side effect of the progressive substitution of technological nature for actual experience with the natural world:

“The concern is that, by adapting gradually to the loss of actual nature, humans will lower the baseline across generations for what counts as a full measure of the human experience and of human flourishing.”

Makes me wonder about how far my own baseline has shifted as I stare into the computer screen in front of me.  I suppose it could be worse.  I could be playing Farmville.

I came across another set of studies not too long ago showing that an adult’s level of environmental concern is highly correlated with the amount of contact he or she had with the natural world as a child.  Add that to this idea of generational baseline shift, and we could be looking at a very environmentally apathetic future.

Anti-civilization mythology

A nice critique of Lierre Keith’s anti-vegetarian book here, although it was written by an anarchist who is an obvious civilization apologist.  We can’t go back to the days before the agricultural revolution, she says, because there are just too many of us now.  Killing 5 billion people is simply not an option.

I know I’ve ranted on this before, but it is worth repeating: the massive die-off argument is a straw man—and a very weak one at that.       

It is true that best solution (for humans and for the rest of the planet) is for us to find a way forward to something resembling life prior to agriculture.   And it is true that the planet will probably comfortably support fewer than a billion people living subsistence gatherer-hunter lifestyles.   But it certainly doesn’t follow that 5 billion people will need to be killed first.  It took us 9 thousand years to get this far off course.  It’s not like we have to fix everything by tomorrow, and start by immediately eliminating 80% of the population.  There are numerous ways of reducing population over time that don’t require any existing person to die.

An interesting aside: to say that 5 billion people is too many begs the question of how many fatalities would be acceptable?  Is there some threshold of, say, 300 million? 900 million? A billion?  And of course one can always ask the counter question: how many billions are guaranteed to die if we continue with business as usual?        

The one thing that we surely can’t do is continue with business as usual.  And there is no manner of tweaking the current system, rearranging the power structures, or refashioning the political or economic topography that is going to change the ultimate fact that civilization is unsustainable. 

The critical distinction between tools and technology:

People use tools.

Technology uses people.

The relevance of disengagement

When I told her that I haven’t owned a television since the late 90s, I killed my Facebook account last year, I've never tweeted (bleated?) in my life, and although I have a cell phone, I don’t carry it with me and only use it to talk to my daughter and granddaughter who live 2000 miles away, she said I was just being stupid and making myself irrelevant.

And she is right, I suppose—about making myself irrelevant, that is. People have relevance only in terms of their role within the machine of civilization.  From inside the machine, the machine is the only frame of reference from which to assess relevance.  It is the only frame of reference, period. 

But to resist technology is to begin to disengage in the most mechanical sense of the word, to separate from the flywheel, to uncouple from the gears.   And something very interesting happens to your frame of reference in the process.  A redundant and easily replaceable sprocket has very little relevance while its cogs are neatly embedded in the chain.  But pull that same sprocket off its bearings and twist it a little sideways...

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OK, stop with the bullshit.  It isn’t enough to reduce your personal dependence on technology.  I think some level of disengagement is probably necessary in order to get a glimpse of what is really going on.  But personal enlightenment is not going to change anything.  It is not enough to refuse to play the game.  We need to smash the game table and burn all of the pieces.        

Civilization is a Black Swan

I’m reading through Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, Black Swan. As soon as I finish, I am going to read it again.

Black Swans are extremely low-probability, highly consequential events that are entirely unpredictable beforehand but easily accounted for after the fact.  A nuclear meltdown caused by a tidal wave generated by a record-breaking earthquake is a paradigmatic example.   Specific Black Swan events are exceedingly rare by definition, but the occurrence of Black Swans as a general phenomenon is ubiquitous.  Every major event in history and every major feature of industrial society is a Black Swan.  Even our personal circumstances as individuals turns out on close inspection to be a result of numerous Black Swans. 

Our expectations for the future are driven by prior experience.  Because of this and the fact that Black Swans are readily “explained” after the fact, we grossly overestimate our ability to successfully predict and plan for the future.  We are lethally overconfident.  And paradoxically the more specific information you have about the past the less prepared you are for what actually happens.

Taleb reworks a cautionary tale used by Bertrand Russell: 1001 days in the life of a turkey.  The story goes something like this.  Suppose you are a turkey, and for the last 1000 days, your entire life to this point, the humans in your world have gone to great lengths to see that your needs are taken care of.  Someone is always there to help you down when you get stuck in the apple tree.  You always have enough food, your water trough is regularly cleaned, and you are given shelter from the cold and a fine strip of pasture in which to stroll during the day.  When you wake up on that crisp 1001^st morning, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, you have every reason to expect more of the same.  There is nothing in your past experience to prepare you for what is about to happen to you. 

Civilization is a Black Swan.  

Civilization’s end will be a Black Swan.