The tyranny of Lego blocks

Every young child learns early in their experience with building blocks that it is easier to destroy than to build. The exception to this rule is Lego blocks. Lego blocks are just as hard (and sometimes even more difficult) to take apart as they are to put together. The reason is because Legos, unlike simple smooth wooden blocks, are designed for specific attachment to other Legos.

Notice the tradeoff involved. Legos can attach securely; but to do so, severe restrictions in their mutual orientation must be applied. Two smooth wooden blocks can be oriented in any manner allowable by gravity. This freedom of orientation is possible between Legos as well, but only if they have not been forcefully joined—and once joined, gravity is irrelevant and unnecessary for their continued association. The free association between two wooden blocks allows each block involved to move any way it wants, relatively unrestricted by the structure. This is of course why constructions built with plain wooden blocks are so vulnerable to the sweep of little sister’s wrecking-ball arms. Structures built with Legos, on the other hand, are extremely durable. But this durability is purchased at the expense of freedom of movement for individual blocks.

Notice also that every projecting nib of every Lego block is emblazoned with the corporate logo.

Legos work through the homogenization of connections, through standardization. Small deviations in uniformity can be catastrophic. When I was a kid, I had a dog that would occasionally get ahold of a loose Lego and chew on it, the deformations caused by her bite marks rendering the block useless.

Three things here. First, the restriction of free association provides the means by which large and elaborate structures are built. Second, this restriction is accomplished only by force. Third, the possibility for ordered structure is orders of magnitude greater for Legos than for smooth wooden blocks, but this increase in order is accompanied by a reduction in the tendency toward novelty. If you want to build a novel structure with Legos that includes specialized shapes and objects not part of the generic block design, you need to purchase a "themed" Lego set that includes customized manufactured components. The potential for novelty is in some sense built in to the open-ended structures constructed with wooden blocks: plain wooden blocks can interface just as easily with a variety of household objects (e.g., dinner plates, beverage containers, etc.) as with each other.

What most anarchists want is the kind of open and unrestrictive associative possibilities found with plain wooden blocks. But how to achieve that in a world where interpersonal communication is increasingly mediated through standardized electronic conduits, where human beings are little more than servomechanisms, where uniform participation in the corporate orgy is obligatory, where we are groomed from infancy to be servile and dependent on the latest consumer pabulum to drip from the teats of power, where our connectivity is coerced, monitored, and enforced by subhuman servomechanisms in uniform licensed to use deadly force? 

I keep coming back to the dog and her deforming bite marks…

The Lego block analogy shows why anarchism and civilization are incompatible. Without standardization, specialization, and forced (non-voluntary) association, there is no way that any of the major institutions of civilization could possibly be assembled in the first place, let alone stand for any length of time.

ADHD and child anarchists

According to the psychiatric party line, ADHD is a mental disorder involving a dysfunction in some as of yet unspecified brain systems involved in sensory and/or behavioral inhibition and control. In the classroom, ADHD children have difficulty following instructions, staying on task, standing in line, sitting in their chairs, keeping their hands and their thoughts to themselves, and are generally disruptive of the educational process and a nuisance to the teacher and the other students. The disorder is treated with the regular application of stimulant medication, which has a "paradoxical effect" on ADHD kids and calms them down.

A few psychologists—a maligned minority—have begun to suspect that the ADHD label is really just a way of dealing with kids who are having an adverse reaction to the mindlessness of formal education and who resist the authoritarian strictures of the classroom environment. Many ADHD kids who can’t stay on task for more than 30 seconds in the classroom can concentrate for hours at a time on tasks they find personally interesting—and the stimulant drugs work precisely because, like other recreational substances, they make things more interesting.  

From an authentic human standpoint, it is the non-ADHD kids, the ones who follow the rules without question, the ones who readily take on a posture of passive subservience to adult authority and group conformity, the ones who are able to acclimate to the captivity and the mindless routines of the classroom, who are truly dysfunctional. 

Consider a recent study (full reference below) that looked at how the inclusion of an ADHD child impacts the social behavior of elementary children working in cooperative problem-solving groups. The researchers compared the performance of groups that that did and did not include a child labeled at-risk for ADHD.  Although the at-risk children engaged in more negative, off-task, and "uncooperative" behavior, the groups that included an at-risk child were more than five times as likely to be successful at the problem solving task than groups that did not include an at-risk child.  

The researchers called this simply an "unexpected result." 

And in fact the result makes no sense at all if you assume that ADHD reflects mental dysfunction. But if ADHD is simply a label given to kids who refuse to relinquish their freedom and autonomy, kids who can still think outside the box because their thought process has yet to be totally boxed in, then the result makes perfect sense: adding an at-risk-for-ADHD kid to the group should lead to better problem solving success relative to groups consisting entirely of children who are already firmly on the path to becoming full-fledged sheep.

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Zentall, S. S., Kuester, D. A., & Craig, B. A. (2011). Social Behavior in Cooperative Groups: Students at Risk for ADHD and Their Peers. Journal Of Educational Research, 104(1), 28-41.

It knows exactly where you are and exactly what you want

You work the night shift, and you just got off work. It’s 9:30 in the morning. You step out into the street and the screen of your phone lights up with an ad from a local business: a restaurant, literally across the street from where you are standing, is open early and has a special on Thai basil, one of your personal all-time favorite foods. Your friend who works with you is standing right next to you, but the screen of his phone is aglow with Margi-Rita, a particularly pneumatic redhead who is scheduled to appear on stage at a strip club around the corner later this afternoon. It turns out your friend has a weakness—a fetish, really—for busty redheads.

Machines using algorithms continuously collect and collate data from your email, your text messages, your internet activity, your credit card and debit card purchases, your organizational memberships, and a potentially open-ended variety of other sources. What emerges is a profile of you that can be used to predict your future consumer desires better than you can. These algorithms can also be used to tailor commercial advertisements and political propaganda to your individual psychology, tapping into your weaknesses and idiosyncrasies for maximum effect. And by tracking your cell phone (something already done without your consent to monitor traffic flow patterns), the ads can be localized and continually updated to accommodate your every movement. Think of the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, where the wall-mounted video billboards greeted people personally as they walked by—only you carry the billboard around in your pocket.

   

The technology for this particular kind of direct micro-marketing, individualized to the point tracking your movements and delivering content relevant to your specific location (in addition to your personal habits and your specific idiosyncratic preferences) is available and will be business as usual by this time next year.

A friend of mine, whose upper lip is deeply stained with a techno-koolaid moustache, told me that there is really no downside to this. He happens in fact to like Thai basil, and the fact that the restaurant across the street has a special on it is something he wouldn’t want to miss. What I didn’t think to ask him was how he originally found out about Thai basil. How many of our most cherished things (and people) were a result of an unplanned encounter? Chances are that he stumbled across Thai basil by accident. Perhaps his car broke down in front of a restaurant that he would have never visited otherwise. 

Our desires and preferences are already highly groomed by corporate marketing. Many of them are completely manufactured and would have no traction at all if our lives weren’t so deeply embedded in consumer culture. The more complex mass society becomes, the more we need the corporate machine to sift our priorities. The more individualized this process becomes, the more that our preferences become canalized. A fundamental paradox of mass society: more options mean less real choice. In the case of micro-targeted advertising, each choice you make leads to a further restriction in the range of possibilities presented.

Mint raita is at least as good as Thai basil, and the restaurant two blocks over has the best Indian food in town, but your phone will remain forever silent about that fact. And your friend may never have the opportunity to acquire a deep appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of waifish brunettes.

The electric eye of god

Michel Foucault used Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison design that renders the behavior of inmates perpetually visible to unseen guards, to explore the power potential of mere surveillance. The logic of the Panopticon is simple: if at any moment someone in power might be watching me—and I have no way of knowing when or if—then at any moment, to be safe, I need to assume that I am being watched and adjust my behavior accordingly. 

The true beauty of mere surveillance as a form of control is that it turns the target’s own psychology into a weapon, over time generating a docile personality while greatly reducing the need to apply overt coercive force.   

It seems to me that this has something non trivial in common with the logic of religions organized around a personal god in terms of their utility for controlling the behavior of the masses. God is unseen, but sees all and punishes those who disobey his proscriptions. Since he might be watching me right now, I need to adjust my behavior accordingly.  It is interesting to speculate about the functional significance of the emergence of monotheism in the late Neolithic in terms of this panoptic form of behavior control over the masses. 

The savvy and skeptical inhabitants of a sophisticated 21^st century are far more difficult to control with tales of a vengeful and all-seeing über-being.  His divine presence has had to be upgraded. God has had to become digitized and sequestered somewhere behind a semi-opaque dome projecting from the department store ceiling, a lens embedded in an ATM machine or suspended from a traffic light, a seventh-grade student’s school laptop computer, or a camera mounted in the grill of a cop car or hidden in an innocuous trinket sitting atop the television to spy on the babysitter.