Very nice piece, as always some delicious "food for thought." I recently re-watched The Century of the Self, and I can't stress enough how important this little documentary series is. I remember watching it as a teenager, and although I probably didn't understand half of it back then and couldn't remember any of the details, I somehow think it still made an impression on me in some way. Equating freedom with consumerism always seemed a pretty strange repurposing of the term. (Also, I had to laugh hard at the image of the hamster wheels - great choice!)
I think of it this way: right now if you gave godlike power to everyone, most people would waste it on maximizing hedonic experience.
A universe where everything is delicious and never makes you fat. Mary Sue fantasies. Superporn. Fully immersive video games created by the most creative minds. Creating a universe where everything is exactly the same, but they're a billionaire, or the only rich person, or whatever.
People are just tarted up apes, after all. All they want to do is be comfortable, eat well, and exist at the top of a status hierarchy.
But the only road to a future where that's NOT true for basically everyone is through consumerism, Western decadence, and (soon) physical post-scarcity, not needing a job to live, Infinite Jest-like infohazards, and infinite VR heavens being available.
The majority will opt out of life when infinite VR heavens for free are available. The ones remaining will continue whatever humanity becomes, and will definitionally have evolved beyond comfort and hierarchy-topping as the ultimate goods, because if they hadn't, they would have been sniped by the infinite VR heavens.
Just as mild rebuttal, I see this as a chicken and egg problem. Imo we are created to be this way (hence all the millions spent on advertising to children, for example) rather than this being our natural state and capitalism/consumerism just happened along. It is our worst selves that the system preys on and in turn springs from in every mind and heart, not our normal state.
To some degree consumerist culture was one of the responses to the economic stalling of the Great Depression. Factories produced goods and the people bought them in the lead up, but reached saturation before the depression hit, stagnating economies. The American citizen would eventually become the consumer of last resort of any industrial surplus the global network could produce.
Perhaps the corporations will shift from offering shallow pleasures at rock bottom prices and figure out how to commodify a feeling of meaning and connection (megachurches are making progress on this front).
Random thought/question for you. We talked about about elephant/bonobo/human self-domestication and the persistence of childhood playfulness, creativity, and increase in prosociality that humans have compared to other non-domesticated species.
I was wondering, along the lines of mutualism/symbiosis with our domestic species, do you think that more playful, creative, and leisurely large-scale social organizations are possible even with domesticated animals and plants as the basis? As in, does the action of keeping animals for human use necessitate dominance and control etc (between humans and humans as well as with other species) as a practical matter of course or perhaps as an inevitability of that operating model?
Or are those just the types of societies that won out, and it would be possible to have a society that exhibited the aforementioned more relaxed and enjoyable values while still maintaining a useful and productive relationship with domestic plants and animals?
This isn’t really unique compared to anything we’ve talked about in the past, I am just reading more about animal husbandry lately and had those questions on my mind.
I can sense a wide range of social responses to the challenge of incorporating creative/curious/empathic biological technology into a broader cultural framework. I suspect some kind of special role in multiple local communities, akin to a religion with dedicated monks, might be a viable model. The monks will have to prove themselves to be beneficial and non threatening to local communities in order to allow them to travel widely, carrying seeds and possibly animals with them. This kind of pseudo religion could conserve and evolve the range of techniques that facilitate the creation of new symbiont species (and refreshing of old ones).
Animal symbionts don't need to be dominated. I think our industrial view of how preindustrial farmers related to their livestock doesnt reflect the reality. Undoubtedly sometimes people abused and exploited their animals, but I feel this got worse during the beginning of the industrial era (and even the late medieval period when other forms of mechanisation became widespread). Ponies hauling coal out of mines and dogs locked in tiny cages to turn spit wheels come to mind. Most of the last 10 thousand years has been more of a collaboration between man and animals. Further breeding of animals could make them easier to manage without technology (eg fences) or active behaviour management (herding/beatings) provided their needs are being met.
Always fun bouncing ideas with you, and it is nice doing it in the comments so other people can read or jump in if they wish.
Your specialized religious role makes sense and I find very interesting. Seems to be the best of both roles between requiring specialized training and knowledge but needing widespread applicability. Historically shamans were kind of on the fringe of their communities literally and socially, seen as the intermediary between the human and Other communities. This progresses later to whole secret societies seems in Native American groups like the Ojibwe for example, or the perhaps a bit in the various ‘cults’ in Greek/Roman religion. I also recall a horticulturalist group called the Gebusi who had their own shamans for healing and divining etc, but would bring in traveling specialist shamans from outside on necessary occasions (in this case when someone was killed by ‘witchcraft’ and they needed an outside pov to determine who it was and then oversee the ‘trial’.)
“Animal symbionts don't need to be dominated. I think our industrial view of how preindustrial farmers related to their livestock doesnt reflect the reality. Undoubtedly sometimes people abused and exploited their animals, but I feel this got worse during the beginning of the industrial era (and even the late medieval period when other forms of mechanisation became widespread). Ponies hauling coal out of mines and dogs locked in tiny cages to turn spit wheels come to mind. Most of the last 10 thousand years has been more of a collaboration between man and animals.”
This is very interesting to me and drives at what I was getting at. My stereotyped view of the past is that animal cruelty and abuse, and just generally working your animals very hard in poor conditions, was the norm rather than the exception. Ie more of a parasitism than a mutualism (though maybe the plants got us back with how hard we have to work for them). But if this wasn’t the real case I’d love to hear more if you wouldn’t mind elaborating? It would be nice if the default really was more of a symbiotic thing without anyone having to try to do that especially, until industry came along.
“Further breeding of animals could make them easier to manage without technology (eg fences) or active behaviour management (herding/beatings) provided their needs are being met.”
Any ideas in particular? My bad if you’ve talked about this before. Very fascinating as well. This was also part of my question, because the idea of forcing kids to do labor that they otherwise wouldn’t want to do doesn’t appeal to me. Ie making them herd animals, which again (stereotypically?) I associate with abusing the kids to make them be okay with doing it all day. But again if that’s not the case, and a system could work or did with both the nature of the animals *and* the kids/other humans in it, that’d be of great interest to me.
I think some of the native tribes would have kids chase off crows from the corn seedlings with a stick, and given what I know about certain indigenous parenting methods I’m assuming this wasn’t coercive (it sounds like it be fun and something the kids would do on their own even) so I will have to read more about this.
I have been meaning to reply to your email, but typically have to spread my effort out over ‘who am I most behind on’, so my bad for that! Haha
In many regards social media already attempts to do this, in the sense of offering a feeling of community and people who care or the idea of their approval. It is as much ‘fame’ as it is ‘family’, in a sense. But yes, it seems like every human impulse or feeling is becoming boxed up and sold back to us (perhaps most obviously in the form of rage and tribal victory and anger in today’s sportified politics).
Your domain is biological. Mine is psychological. Hence, I read through that lens and I'll offer a thought about a piece of your fascinating commentary.
Freud launched Psychoanalysis as a means to help his patients. It was about listening to internal thoughts and feelings while searching for a deeper understanding of what 'unknown' was operating in the background, causing one problems in life.
Then Behaviorism arose with the promise of making Psychology more 'scientific.' It did so by studying what could be easily measured, a process requiring attention to the visible - i.e. to behavior, not to thoughts and feelings.
Out of that became knowledge about what could be 'manipulable' - back to thoughts and feelings that fueled human behavior, in particular, buying things.
Marketing was born. And, ever since then, our personal liberty and freedom have been more and more efficiently appropriated. To the point now, we no longer know how to operate from some deeper sense of true self and true connection. We only operate through the channels provided by the powerful corporations that create our 'entertainment' and generate the apps through which we 'communicate' as isolated cells longing for true connection with real people.
Lovely reference for people wanting a solid summary of where marketing came from. I wonder if at least some forms of psychological distress associated with the industrial era comes from an ever increasing pressure of external behavioural drivers coming from church, state and more recently corporations.
:D
We say:
"Life is as free as a dog on a leash"
Very nice piece, as always some delicious "food for thought." I recently re-watched The Century of the Self, and I can't stress enough how important this little documentary series is. I remember watching it as a teenager, and although I probably didn't understand half of it back then and couldn't remember any of the details, I somehow think it still made an impression on me in some way. Equating freedom with consumerism always seemed a pretty strange repurposing of the term. (Also, I had to laugh hard at the image of the hamster wheels - great choice!)
I was stuck on an image for this week's post until I remembered that the job of an artist is to notice significance in the familiar.
I think of it this way: right now if you gave godlike power to everyone, most people would waste it on maximizing hedonic experience.
A universe where everything is delicious and never makes you fat. Mary Sue fantasies. Superporn. Fully immersive video games created by the most creative minds. Creating a universe where everything is exactly the same, but they're a billionaire, or the only rich person, or whatever.
People are just tarted up apes, after all. All they want to do is be comfortable, eat well, and exist at the top of a status hierarchy.
But the only road to a future where that's NOT true for basically everyone is through consumerism, Western decadence, and (soon) physical post-scarcity, not needing a job to live, Infinite Jest-like infohazards, and infinite VR heavens being available.
The majority will opt out of life when infinite VR heavens for free are available. The ones remaining will continue whatever humanity becomes, and will definitionally have evolved beyond comfort and hierarchy-topping as the ultimate goods, because if they hadn't, they would have been sniped by the infinite VR heavens.
Just as mild rebuttal, I see this as a chicken and egg problem. Imo we are created to be this way (hence all the millions spent on advertising to children, for example) rather than this being our natural state and capitalism/consumerism just happened along. It is our worst selves that the system preys on and in turn springs from in every mind and heart, not our normal state.
To some degree consumerist culture was one of the responses to the economic stalling of the Great Depression. Factories produced goods and the people bought them in the lead up, but reached saturation before the depression hit, stagnating economies. The American citizen would eventually become the consumer of last resort of any industrial surplus the global network could produce.
Perhaps the corporations will shift from offering shallow pleasures at rock bottom prices and figure out how to commodify a feeling of meaning and connection (megachurches are making progress on this front).
Random thought/question for you. We talked about about elephant/bonobo/human self-domestication and the persistence of childhood playfulness, creativity, and increase in prosociality that humans have compared to other non-domesticated species.
I was wondering, along the lines of mutualism/symbiosis with our domestic species, do you think that more playful, creative, and leisurely large-scale social organizations are possible even with domesticated animals and plants as the basis? As in, does the action of keeping animals for human use necessitate dominance and control etc (between humans and humans as well as with other species) as a practical matter of course or perhaps as an inevitability of that operating model?
Or are those just the types of societies that won out, and it would be possible to have a society that exhibited the aforementioned more relaxed and enjoyable values while still maintaining a useful and productive relationship with domestic plants and animals?
This isn’t really unique compared to anything we’ve talked about in the past, I am just reading more about animal husbandry lately and had those questions on my mind.
I can sense a wide range of social responses to the challenge of incorporating creative/curious/empathic biological technology into a broader cultural framework. I suspect some kind of special role in multiple local communities, akin to a religion with dedicated monks, might be a viable model. The monks will have to prove themselves to be beneficial and non threatening to local communities in order to allow them to travel widely, carrying seeds and possibly animals with them. This kind of pseudo religion could conserve and evolve the range of techniques that facilitate the creation of new symbiont species (and refreshing of old ones).
Animal symbionts don't need to be dominated. I think our industrial view of how preindustrial farmers related to their livestock doesnt reflect the reality. Undoubtedly sometimes people abused and exploited their animals, but I feel this got worse during the beginning of the industrial era (and even the late medieval period when other forms of mechanisation became widespread). Ponies hauling coal out of mines and dogs locked in tiny cages to turn spit wheels come to mind. Most of the last 10 thousand years has been more of a collaboration between man and animals. Further breeding of animals could make them easier to manage without technology (eg fences) or active behaviour management (herding/beatings) provided their needs are being met.
Always fun bouncing ideas with you, and it is nice doing it in the comments so other people can read or jump in if they wish.
Your specialized religious role makes sense and I find very interesting. Seems to be the best of both roles between requiring specialized training and knowledge but needing widespread applicability. Historically shamans were kind of on the fringe of their communities literally and socially, seen as the intermediary between the human and Other communities. This progresses later to whole secret societies seems in Native American groups like the Ojibwe for example, or the perhaps a bit in the various ‘cults’ in Greek/Roman religion. I also recall a horticulturalist group called the Gebusi who had their own shamans for healing and divining etc, but would bring in traveling specialist shamans from outside on necessary occasions (in this case when someone was killed by ‘witchcraft’ and they needed an outside pov to determine who it was and then oversee the ‘trial’.)
“Animal symbionts don't need to be dominated. I think our industrial view of how preindustrial farmers related to their livestock doesnt reflect the reality. Undoubtedly sometimes people abused and exploited their animals, but I feel this got worse during the beginning of the industrial era (and even the late medieval period when other forms of mechanisation became widespread). Ponies hauling coal out of mines and dogs locked in tiny cages to turn spit wheels come to mind. Most of the last 10 thousand years has been more of a collaboration between man and animals.”
This is very interesting to me and drives at what I was getting at. My stereotyped view of the past is that animal cruelty and abuse, and just generally working your animals very hard in poor conditions, was the norm rather than the exception. Ie more of a parasitism than a mutualism (though maybe the plants got us back with how hard we have to work for them). But if this wasn’t the real case I’d love to hear more if you wouldn’t mind elaborating? It would be nice if the default really was more of a symbiotic thing without anyone having to try to do that especially, until industry came along.
“Further breeding of animals could make them easier to manage without technology (eg fences) or active behaviour management (herding/beatings) provided their needs are being met.”
Any ideas in particular? My bad if you’ve talked about this before. Very fascinating as well. This was also part of my question, because the idea of forcing kids to do labor that they otherwise wouldn’t want to do doesn’t appeal to me. Ie making them herd animals, which again (stereotypically?) I associate with abusing the kids to make them be okay with doing it all day. But again if that’s not the case, and a system could work or did with both the nature of the animals *and* the kids/other humans in it, that’d be of great interest to me.
I think some of the native tribes would have kids chase off crows from the corn seedlings with a stick, and given what I know about certain indigenous parenting methods I’m assuming this wasn’t coercive (it sounds like it be fun and something the kids would do on their own even) so I will have to read more about this.
I have been meaning to reply to your email, but typically have to spread my effort out over ‘who am I most behind on’, so my bad for that! Haha
In many regards social media already attempts to do this, in the sense of offering a feeling of community and people who care or the idea of their approval. It is as much ‘fame’ as it is ‘family’, in a sense. But yes, it seems like every human impulse or feeling is becoming boxed up and sold back to us (perhaps most obviously in the form of rage and tribal victory and anger in today’s sportified politics).
Thanks.
Your domain is biological. Mine is psychological. Hence, I read through that lens and I'll offer a thought about a piece of your fascinating commentary.
Freud launched Psychoanalysis as a means to help his patients. It was about listening to internal thoughts and feelings while searching for a deeper understanding of what 'unknown' was operating in the background, causing one problems in life.
Then Behaviorism arose with the promise of making Psychology more 'scientific.' It did so by studying what could be easily measured, a process requiring attention to the visible - i.e. to behavior, not to thoughts and feelings.
Out of that became knowledge about what could be 'manipulable' - back to thoughts and feelings that fueled human behavior, in particular, buying things.
Marketing was born. And, ever since then, our personal liberty and freedom have been more and more efficiently appropriated. To the point now, we no longer know how to operate from some deeper sense of true self and true connection. We only operate through the channels provided by the powerful corporations that create our 'entertainment' and generate the apps through which we 'communicate' as isolated cells longing for true connection with real people.
Here's an interesting link outlining some of the origins of marketing: https://www.newdesigngroup.ca/blog/digital-marketing/short-history-psychology-advertising/#:~:text=John%20B%20Watson%20(1878%2D1958,also%20for%20a%20scandalous%20divorce.
The page, of course, was launched in the service of: advertising things.
Lovely reference for people wanting a solid summary of where marketing came from. I wonder if at least some forms of psychological distress associated with the industrial era comes from an ever increasing pressure of external behavioural drivers coming from church, state and more recently corporations.