Ranthropologist

Tag: change

  • Technology and Its Discontents: Alienation

    Technology and Its Discontents: Alienation

    As the industrial age took hold in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and began its saturation of the globe, a curious phenomenon began to take place. People who had once labored for themselves – doing what they needed to do to support themselves, their families, and their communities – began laboring for others. They quit their simpler lives and moved to bigger towns, then cities, seeking and finding employment in factories, assembly lines, and sweatshops, laboring to produce things over which they had no ownership. The logical outcome of a capitalist world system began to spread and solidify, requiring that people work for others to support themselves, but have no ownership of the fruits of their labor. Yes, these laborers were paid for their work, but unlike when people engaged in farming, hunting, small trades such as blacksmithing, horseshoeing, wheel-wrighting, candle and soap making, carpentry, and all the simple but vital labors for which people could once get paid, the only thing this new class of laborer owned was themselves. All they could sell was their labor.

    This is the microcosm of what is called industrial alienation. It’s what happens when all people can sell is themselves, and they have no ownership of the means of production. They become a commodity, no different than the raw materials used in manufacturing the things they are paid to make. In the modern world system of capitalism, most people can only sell themselves for the money they need to support themselves and survive. To an enormous extent in the Western industrialized world, this has meant that nearly everybody has forgotten how to survive in the way our ancestors did – by knowing actually how to find and produce food and shelter. Labor has become so extraordinarily specialized in this brave new world that most people no longer have any connection with the basics of survival. Even worse, we have become alienated not just from what we do, but from our very purpose for living. Why are we here? What is the point? Do I even matter? These are not questions asked in cultures where people are still able to support themselves with the knowledge of actual, physical, animal survival. That, itself, is the point: survival. In the face of securing it for yourself and your group, there is no need, no room, for existential questions. Those questions are created by alienation.

    This is a winding road to some thoughts about technology. Humans have always sought to answer the basic question of why we are here, probably since the dawn of the species, and have found a variety of answers (often in the supernatural and religion). Now, though, I think technology is filling the hole of our alienation. Specifically, we are filling our existential emptiness with social media. Posting, Tweeting, sharing, Instagramming – they all provide a sense that we matter. They give us a way to be acknowledged (or so we think) by others. They remind us: I exist. The urge, the compulsion, is so strong that we will risk our relationships, our jobs, our educations, our safety or even our lives to fulfill it by doing all those things while driving, or walking, or cycling, or eating, or watching TV, or at the movies, at work, at school, at a football game, at a wedding, a funeral, anytime, everywhere. Yesterday I could have mowed down a woman glued to her phone, scrolling endlessly, as she walked obliviously down the center aisle of a parking lot. I have sat with friends while they pretend to be engaging with me, but they are staring, staring, staring at the phone. I have been accosted with pictures, videos, websites, texts that the other person insisted I see. And, I have done most of those things myself. I understand.

    Humans are extraordinarily social primates. It is no surprise to me at all that social media has exploded into a frenzy of self-referential attention seeking. Humans are also status-seeking animals, and the feedback we crave from our social sharing is highly addictive. It is a constant lure for us to try to elevate or affirm our status amongst our peers. But as with anything, there can be too much. Just as the buzz of alcohol can make us feel attractive, funny, and smart, so can the buzz of our relentless technological distractions make us feel noticed, important, and liked (if not loved). But the alcohol buzz wears off, and so does the brief high we receive from seeing who has responded to our online presence. Alcohol can become an addiction, and so can technology. It is not a good way to fill the hole left by our alienation.

    I am not immune to the lure of technology, but I am thinking deeply about it and making some decisions about how much I am willing to let it intrude upon my life. I understand that there are also positive aspects to our use of phones and computers, et al (for example, the fact that I can write and share these thoughts). But at the moment I am deeply uneasy, and I am making a conscious effort to concentrate on the world outside the screens.

  • Technology and Its Discontents: A Preface

    Technology and Its Discontents: A Preface

    I suppose its ironic that I’m writing a rant about the drawbacks of modern technology using modern technology. Really, though, I want to write about something I’ve ruminated on at length already: communicative strategies. More specifically, I’m concerned about the ways in which modern technology is changing communicative strategies, and along with it, our approach to the world in general. Let me preface this with a new personal goal of mine: I want to unplug, at least once a week, from electronic distractions. On the opposite pole, I want to make sure I update my electronic rants more frequently; that is, at least once a week. Are these dichotomous goals? I don’t think so; but like all things, there is a limit to both. I find myself far too distracted by modern communicative technologies but simultaneously I sometimes feel that I don’t use those technologies as constructively as I could.

    So what’s the rant? This is a huge topic, but I want to start with unpacking the idea that the modern communicative technologies offered by computers, smart phones, tablets, etc., and in particular, the instant updates possible via social media, news sites, streaming video, et al., are enhancing our ability to communicate. I believe that these tools are actually decreasing our communicative abilities. How should we define communication? At the very least, it is the passing of a message from one individual to at least one other individual. That communication does not have to be face to face, or even ear to ear, but the point is that ultimately a message is transmitted. The human ability to transmit messages via what we call language is almost certainly unique to Homo sapiens; although other species do have complex forms of communication, there is tremendous debate over whether any non-human form of communication can be called language (a topic which may someday earn its own post). But if there is no one to receive the message, can the messages we send rightly be called communication? As just a small part of my overall questions about modern technology’s impact on communication, I often find myself wondering if we are mostly shouting into the dark. I would like to venture the hypothesis that modern technology is highlighting some of our species’ basest and most primitive inclinations.

    We are only ten or twelve thousand years removed from the time when all humans were living in small, close-knit tribal groups in which the survival of the individual depended on the survival of the group and vice versa. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that in small, egalitarian groups there was no social striving, no quest for power, no competition. All those things existed, but in general the needs of the group would check any one person from assuming too much power. Enter agriculture and more complex technology, and some of the checks on power and status-seeking began to be eroded. Agriculture made it possible for more people to survive with less effort, and to live in much larger groups where it became increasingly difficult to know every individual, much less communicate with them regularly. When you don’t know someone, that means you don’t need them; and if you don’t need them, there is no reason to care about that person’s survival. Fast far forward to today (and skipping over, for the time being, the cultural, social, and technological changes that ultimately led to the capitalist world-system in which we now live) and status-seeking is a prime motivator of human social, economic, and political behavior.

    What does any of this have to do with modern technology and modern communication? In a strange way, all these rapid-fire communication tools that are literally at our fingertips have made it possible for us to, once again, communicate with the entire group. This is not to say, of course, that every person’s status update or tweet or blog post is being transmitted to every person in the world. But, it is to say that we are able to pass messages to complete strangers, whether intentionally or not, and we are finding that those messages aren’t crafted carefully enough to avoid misunderstanding or insult or any number of misapprehensions. We are having to learn from scratch how to communicate deliberately and carefully, but all too often people are using what should be a fine-grained tool as a bludgeon. We can communicate with an enormous group, but we seem to take little, if any, responsibility, for the consequences of the messages we transmit.

    We are learning a new process the hard way. I am fascinated with how our adaptation to the modern communicative age will proceed. I will have much more to say about this in future posts; consider this a preface.

  • The Evolution of Pink Slime

    The Evolution of Pink Slime

    So-called pink slime has been all over the news lately. Friends have posted links and comments about it on Facebook, I have heard stories about it on NPR, and I’ve heard people talk about how they can’t believe our government would allow the meat industry to sell the stuff as food. Pink slime, known formally as lean, finely textured beef trimmings (LFTB), is certainly not a food product that is likely to provoke anticipatory salivation. The term pink slime is itself deliberately crafted to instead provoke a reaction of disgust. And, the associated news that the stuff is treated with ammonia to remove potentially harmful bacteria just adds insult to our collective sense of injury. But there’s a problem here: making decisions about what to eat based on a visceral reaction to something that has been uncritically dubbed with a description designed to elicit just that reaction is not a way to make choices about what we eat.

    I find the whole uproar rather silly, myself. First let’s tackle the linguistic angle: the name pink slime. Some might argue that it’s misleading to relabel this edible meat substance with a name that does not reveal what it really is. The name “lean, finely textured beef trimmings” does not evoke the actual cow parts that are used to make it. The stuff is made by combining fatty trimmings and ligament material from the cow and spinning it in a centrifuge to separate the fats. It is pink and looks slimy; hence the media-friendly and consumer-alarming moniker “pink slime.” One thing to note is that this stuff is not sold as-is; it is combined with regular ground beef as a bulk additive, and can be up to 30% of the final ground beef product (whether raw, bulk meat or items such as hamburger patties). So we are not unwittingly consuming unadulterated pink slime; nor is it being fed as-is to kids in school. A second thing to note is that we use all manner of euphemisms to describe the things we eat, especially when it comes to meat products. Filet mignon sounds much more appetizing than “hunk of cow flank.” Bacon cheeseburger stimulates the appetite in a way that “salted fatty pig belly cheeseburger” does not. In fact, when raw, most meat is pretty slimy, so we might as well add that adjective to all our meats. The point is that these are subjective reactions. Call things what they really are and lots of people might think twice before eating them. It reminds me of the failed “toilet to tap” initiative that was proposed in San Diego several years ago. Once the descriptor “toilet to tap” caught on in the media, there was no way the public would abide this water treatment program, even though the reclaimed water from the sewer system was just as pure and clean as regular municipal tap water. The name killed it because people could not reconcile themselves to water that came from the toilet, no matter how much scientific evidence there was that the water was clean. I find this fascinating in light of the fact that municipal tap water is held in reservoirs before treatment, in which people drive boats, fish, and probably urinate, and which is filled with all sorts of animal and plant matter, both alive and decomposing.

    My second issue with this uproar has to do with food supply in general. There are seven billion people on this planet. They all need to be fed. In many places people subsist on foods that we here in the US would find appalling, and not merely because of cultural differences, but because some people are so poor that they will eat whatever they can. Our objection to LFTB is a beautiful example of a first-world problem. I know many people are rethinking where their food comes from and signing on to local food and slow food movements, and that’s all well and good, but within a country like the US, that is (for the most part) an upper-middle class movement. Poor people in this country do not have the luxury to worry about where the food comes from, much less exactly what is in it. For a poor family, knowing the kids will at least get lunch at school is a bigger concern than whether or not that lunch may contain pink slime.

    When agriculture arose 10,000 years ago, humanity began the evolutionary road towards pink slime. Agriculture allowed previously nomadic people to become sedentary. Sedentism led to expansions in technology and booms in population. Ultimately, agriculture allowed for centralized cities ruled by top-down leaders, supplanting the egalitarian cultures of hunting-gathering and small-scale agricultural groups. Technological innovations continued to abound and populations continued to boom, and to feed all those people, intensive, factory-driven, and mechanized industrial agriculture became necessary. Can we really turn back that process now, and all start growing our own gardens and raising and slaughtering our own livestock? I’m not talking a fancy herb garden, heirloom tomatoes, and hobby chickens; I’m talking feeding yourself and your entire family by the products of your own labor. We do not live in that world any more. We live in a world where a beef supplier will use every part of the cow. Our industrial food complex has grown so efficient that almost nothing goes to waste.

    I’m not blind to the fact that the beef producer is also trying to turn as much profit as possible; this is capitalism, after all. But I have no objection to seeing otherwise wasted parts of the cow get turned into an edible substance. As for the ammonia gas issue, it is simply a way to make the stuff safe. A chemical like ammonia is certain to provoke another knee-jerk: it’s in glass cleaner! It’s a poison! Well, yes; but without understanding how the process works people somehow conjure a picture of the pink slime getting dipped in a bright-blue Windex bath, which is far from the case. I can see the other side of the coin if the stuff didn’t go through this process: how dare the government allow us to eat beef that has not been treated for bacterial contamination! (Which reminds me of another rant I have against what I see as a massively over-reacting food safety process in this country; I think it’s ludicrous to destroy thousands or even millions of pounds of a food because a few people got food poisoning – but that’s a rant for another day). In fact, much of our food goes through similar sanitizing processes to prevent illness. As far as I can tell, no one has ever died from eating ammonia-treated LFTB, but they have died from food poisoning caused by the very bacteria the ammonia treatment is designed to prevent.

    I can understand, to a degree, the people who argue that we have a right to know what is in our food so we can make an informed decision about whether to consume it, and I don’t object to the idea of more comprehensive food labeling. However, I still think this is a first-world and middle-class problem. How many people actually read food labels? Yes, the information should be there, but then the consumer does have some responsibility to think critically about what they see on the label if they decide to read it. I would bet that many of the people upset about pink slime have never bothered to really research what is in the other foods they buy at the store. Some people make it a point to not buy food products with lots of chemical additives and unnatural ingredients, but that is a tiny minority. Most of us are happy with the “ignorance is bliss” approach; and I would argue that if we didn’t take that approach then we might be paralyzed with largely unnecessary worry. Does anybody ever really stop to think about how many other people’s mouths have been on the fork they use at a restaurant? Wow, that’s gross, isn’t it? Of course the dishes at the restaurant are cleaned between uses, but to me, pink slime is no more dangerous than using a cleaned fork that has been in 1,000 different mouths. It’s gross if you think about it – so, don’t think about it!

    This controversy will fade as other things grab people’s attention, but what I fear is that whatever the next issue is, people will still have the same knee-jerk, uncritical reactions. Sometimes those reactions turn out to be completely justified, but that is irrelevant to the initial reaction. People need to come to conclusions that rely on more than a sound bite and an unappetizing label or picture that is designed to grab attention. Thinking critically means gathering facts and forming a provisional opinion that may be modified in light of future information. Being grossed out is not a good reason for objecting to a food product.