Everything is futile, resist the machines

In early industrialization, workers' sabotage of machines was treated as a serious crime.

"On March 5, [1812,] two days after Childe Harold was published, the Frame Work Bill passed both hosues of Parliament.
Anyone convicted of dismantling a machine could now be put to death."
— Brian Merchant. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Little Brown and Company, 2023.

It maks me think that, if you were to ask a political scientist today: Terrorism is ideologically motivated violence against what or whom? they'd likely answer: Civilians. But 200 years ago, there was a different prevailing view: Terrorism was workers' intentional destruction of a rich man's property.

The Luddites weren’t necessarily protesting machines, Merchant explains, but “the social costs of technological ‘progress’” forced upon them, according to Ruha Benjamin in Race after Technology. Imani Perry says that they were resisting “the conversion of oneself into a machine,” especially for the purpose of making someone else rich.

“It is deemed only rational to surrender and rejoice in new conveniences and harmonies, to wrap ourselves in the first text and embrace a violent ignorance of its shadow.”<
— Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.

"The thin line between flourishing and failure is also a theme of the [Sukkot] holiday’s scripture. In synagogue, Jews traditionally read the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, a ponderous and often pessimistic tract that opens with the famous words: 'Futility of futilities, everything is futile.' But the original Hebrew holds a secret that is not readily apparent in translation. The Hebrew word for 'futility' is havel or הבל. The word for 'everything' is hakol or הכל. As you can see from the lettering, the difference between the two words is a single stroke of the scribe’s pen. That’s all it takes to turn 'everything' into nothing, utility into futility. Observing this point, the Oxford scholar John Jarick wrote, 'we might say that [Ecclesiastes] has crafted the most compact form of parallelism to be found in the Hebrew Bible.' It is as though the biblical author wanted to illustrate how the slightest shift in a life story can completely change its contents."
— Yair Rosenberg. When You’re Not in Control of Your Life This week’s Jewish holiday reminds us that the line between our success and failure is thinner and more fragile than we like to think. The Atlantic, Oct 4, 2023.

If we don’t know what we’re promising, is the contract valid?

Do you read the internet’s endless pop-ups by which you’re asked to “consent” to “cookies” every time you visit a new website? You may know that “cookies” essentially mean you’re being tracked, and you may be aware that you’re passively receiving a report of this tracking rather than actively consenting to it. The tracking probably already started when you landed on the webpage and were first presented with the question, right?

You probably don’t read the pop-ups. I don’t. You probably don’t go to each website’s ten-page Terms of Service to learn more about the supposed rules of each individual webpage. I don’t. Reading those legal documents would require more effort than reading the brief article you showed up for.

We know we’re being tracked all the time, whether we actively consent or not. Why waste time reading documents that are designed to be impenetrable? Why try to memorize the stated legal differences between websites? Especially when those documents may be obsolete or false?

Shoshana Zuboff points this out in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, 2020):

"In many cases, simply browsing a website obligates you to its terms-of-service agreement even if you don’t know it. Scholars point out that these digital documents are excessively long and complex in part to discourage users from actually reading the terms, safe in the knowledge that most courts have upheld the legitimacy of click-wrap agreements despite the obvious lack of meaningful consent."
—Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

She explains how this may be a devolution or degradation of the original idea of a contract.

“Legal scholar Margaret Radin observes the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of such ‘contracts.’ Indeed, the sacred notions of ‘agreement’ and ‘promise’ so critical to the evolution of the institution of contract since Roman times have devolved to a ‘talismanic’ signal ‘merely indicating that the firm deploying the boilerplate wants the recipient to be bound.’ Radin calls this ‘private eminent domain,’ a unilateral seizure of rights without consent. She regards such ‘contracts’ as a moral and democratic ‘degradation’ of the rule of law and the institution of contract, a perversion that restructures the rights of users granted through democratic processes, ‘substituting for them the system that the firm wishes to impose. ... Recipients must enter a legal universe of the firm’s devising in order to engage in transactions with the firm.’”
—Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (citing Margaret Jane Radin's Boilerplate)

When we don’t act consciously, we aren’t using our free will, and then it’s hard to describe ourselves as “agreeing” or “promising.” In this situation, what is a contract? Is it only an assertion of power? Someone telling us: By reading this, you agree...?

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Previously published July 5, 2022 to the Episyllogism blog. This article is no longer on that blog, so now it is here.

On capitalism and compassion

Peter Levine wrote that "if you have voluntarily spoken for hours to a person about matters of shared interest, you must show greater concern for his welfare. It is not always desirable to incur obligations of this kind; there is such a thing as being over-obligated. Yet a life with very few such relationships would be narrow and impoverished."

Most people, including most defenders of capitalism, defend the value and power of sympathy, at least in words. The economist Adam Smith said, "The charm of life is sympathy; nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast."

What emerges from capitalist systems in practice, however, usually doesn't look like it comes from human sympathy. Parker J. Palmer wrote: "Deep caring about each other’s fate does seem to be on the decline, but I do not believe that New Age narcissism is much to blame. The external causes of our moral indifference are a fragmented mass society that leaves us isolated and afraid, an economic system that puts the rights of capital before the right of people, and a political process that makes citizens into ciphers." Our social systems affect our inner lives. "Thus we see the secret failure of American capitalism," wrote Edward Abbey. "For all of its obvious successes and benefits...capitalism has failed to capture our hearts. Our souls, yes, but not our hearts."

"Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) — the urtext of the new individualism — dismissed Christian kindness as a psychological absurdity," Phillips and Taylor wrote. The political philosopher John Locke, who was 19 when Leviathan was published, argued that states form to protect the self-interest of individuals. Locke believed, in Jeremy Rifkin's explanation: "Society properly becomes materialistic and individualistic because...this is the natural order of things."

"The variant of industrial capitalism that rose to dominance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries," Shoshana Zuboff said, "produced a specific kind of moral milieu that we sense intuitively even when we do not name it." There was a division of labor "haunted by the specters of conformity, obedience, and human standardization" that influenced "schools, hospitals, and even aspects of family and domestic life, in which ages and stages were understood as functions of the industrial system, from training to retirement."

Erin A. Cech, author of The Trouble with Passion, said in an interview:

"By 'diversify your meaning-making portfolio,' I mean finding places outside of school and work to center our self-reflexive projects. It can look like starting or reviving hobbies, engaging in community service, joining a civic theatre, taking language lessons, and otherwise nurturing senses of identity and fulfillment that exist fully outside the realm of one’s paid employment.
* * *
The more anchors to sources of fulfillment and identity we have outside of paid employment, the more protected we are from the existential threat of putting all of our meaning-making eggs in the capitalist employment basket. We should be asking: How can we shrink the footprint of paid employment in our lives?
... To put it bluntly, the capitalist labor force was not designed to support us in our personal growth and sense of fulfillment; it was designed to increase profit and value for the owners and stakeholders of the places we work."

Sources

Adam Smith, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," quoted by Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (1792) Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1996. p. 92.

Edward Abbey, "Appalachian Pictures," in Desert Solitaire, p. 149

Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor. On Kindness. New York: Picador, 2009. p. 7.

Jeremy Rifkin with Ted Howard. Entropy: A New Worldview. London: Paladin Books, 1985. p. 34.

Parker J. Palmer. A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004. pp. 37-38.

Peter Levine. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.

The Trouble with Passion: Erin A. Cech on "choicewashing," the passionate applicant, and radically reconsidering career advice, Erin A. Cech interviewed by Tyler Burgese, published on Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Study (Substack), April 21, 2024

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, see my thoughts on Joel Edward Goza's America's Unholy Ghosts, a book that discusses Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes. My article is a 5-minute read, and the link I provided is unpaywalled. Read more on Medium, where I publish many of my essays.