This post could have been a number of things – if nothing else, I never have a shortage of material that draws my ire. I had briefly considered keeping a running count of “Things I like and Things I hate” on this blog, but abandoned the whole project when it became clear that it would be terribly one-sided. Also, I haven’t got the time nor the dedication to write on the only other even remotely ‘real’ topic I’m mulling over, so what you’ll see here is my forte: A contrived situation out of my real (or imagined) life, hopelessly expanded and abstracted until I can morph it into a bit of amateur philosophizing. If this were a book, that would be a killer introduction.
In perhaps the most pretentious move ever, I’ve begun keeping a mental list of things that need genealogies and words that need to be deconstructed. Any competent psychologist would quickly recognize this as evidence that I am insane, and any prudent peer would suggest that this sort of narcissism is provoked by either having entirely too much or entirely too little sex. However, my laptop computer, as a non-sentient (*crosses fingers, fears Singularity*) being, can do nothing to stop me elaborating on this shit at length. So: I’ve had it up to here with this ‘nature’ bullshit. One of my roommates had a big issue with technology; in particular, the internet. He hated it, and hated the way it had changed things,I’m told far more frequently than I ever desire to be that ‘the world moves too fast these days’ or that ‘the internet removes the personal element of life.’ This is ridiculous. It’s one thing to admit that you aren’t very ‘good’ with computers – this is admitting ignorance, which is OK with me because I’ve long suspected you of it. However, it’s another thing entirely to dislike technology. This is not only shortsighted, it’s absurd. At the risk of being terribly bourgeois and condescending, things in the United States are, by all quantifiable measures, better than they have ever been before and better than nearly anywhere else in the world. People have more material happiness here than perhaps 95% of the world – excepting the white upperclass existence in Western Europe that has us beat, if only by a tick. This sort of relative luxury is our domain purely because of our ability to dominate others in the realm of information. Western nations have, for quite some time, been able to control global flows of information (oftentimes directly generating them) and as a result, offer the average American the ability to have computer knowledge limited only to Facebook and msn.com, while still maintaining an eminently superior quality of life.
Now, big questions: Why? Well, if Jared Diamond is to be believed, it all started with dumb luck – western Europeans got the right grains and the right animals, and as a result, our 12 year olds get obese on Jamba Juice and Their 12 year olds sew shirts. All day. And not for themselves, either. And you know what? I bet people that aren’t trying to escape their “stressful job enviroment”, where they’re chained to a Blackberry all day (“you have nothing to lose but your chains”) would be pretty fucking excited to be able to use a computer and speed up the pace of life.
Yes, I’m aware that there’s a risk of projecting my desires onto others, or assuming that they want the things we have, but isn’t this risk balanced by it’s counterpart, an Otherization which assumes that sweatshop workers or rural peasants have some sort of idealized, bucolic lifestyle that’s free of our Western hustle-and-bustle? Of course it’s free of hustle and bustle; we have implemented a system that makes them an underclass and means they’ll never be able to afford it. This is what really irks me about this democracy all over the world bullshit: you can pump democracy all you want, but becoming a democracy does not mean becoming materially wealthy. What’s more, we see the evident conflict of interest at work here – there can only be so many democracies, because once people get rights, they don’t like being fucking slaves. The US had to support Pinochet, had to support Aristide, had to support all the bizarre south east asian leaders we’ve installed that rule with iron fucking fists. Why is that? Because when you give people access to information, they find out that they’re getting fucked.
I’ve been having these very surreal experiences here with my family, who are quintessential petit-bourgeois, where we walk into a grocery store and it just makes my head spin. There’s one unbelievably pretentious grocery store (excuse me, “Gourmet Market”) in Chapel Hill (also a theme park for the bourgeoisie) that has an entire row of the store filled with different variations of truffle oil. Across from it, they sell truffle products. What, precisely does this mean? Truffle popcorn ! At $10/2 oz. bag. If the rest of the world ever figured out that these things exist, they would hang us. Every one of us. And they should, too. Can you imagine the arrogance of a country that spends less than .5% of its GDP on foreign aid, drives Mercedes, and complains about leading a high-stress lifestyle? Unbelievable.
For one of my classes, we read an interesting deconstruction of the German term “Heimat” – a word which, roughly translated, means “native land”, complete with all the bullshit baggage about belonging, ancestry, autochthony (the greek term for born of the land; central to Plato’s Noble Lie) and so forth. What the article reveals is that contrary to being some sort of eternal longing, “Heimat” was a term invented during the rise of modernism, as a way to combat psychic distress from urbanization and industrialization. People didn’t believe in this shit 300 years ago, they didn’t want to go “back to nature” until exactly the moment at which they no longer had to live in nature – our luxuries only seem like burdens precisely because they are luxuries – this idea of being connected to the land had to be invented, precisely because they no longer were. It’s very Oedipal – that what is forbidden to you must be what you desire, because it’s forbidden. It’s an absurd delusion, a bizarre paradox – you can’t actually leave the computers and the technology and the information behind, because it’s what ensures your dominance and ensures your agency: you can leave computers precisely because you have computers. We are the masters and we are the slaves.
Edit: Last line isn’t quite right, because it marginalizes the plight of people who actually are slaves. We enslaved ourselves with the illusion of choice.
