I am neither theologian nor philosopher. I recoil at the thought of referring to myself in such a way, despite dabbling in the methods and aesthetics of these “disciplines.” The simple truth is that I do not exert the rigorous effort needed to even casually refer to myself in such a way. It’s an insult to all of those who came before me, sitting in their study for years, staring at a dying fireplace, engaged in the sacred act of reducing their consciousness to a series of uncomfortable sensations.
I don’t do that. I don’t even like people watching.
I need not plumb deeply within myself to hit the bedrock of discomfort. Sartre said that if you dig deep enough, you will eventually confront at the basis of all human experience a “nausea” (or as cowards pronounce it, La Nausée). Whichever way you say it, I disagree. Nausea isn’t at the bottom, not even close. In fact it’s only a few meters down. Below that is a frightening yet clarifying disgust, followed by righteous indignation, then desperation, nihilism, and finally oblivion. Search oblivion long enough and, after a few million karmic cycles, you might be able to find a trap door labeled “Nirvana.”
But let me change the subject for just a moment:
There is something wrong with the world, right?
Let’s try that again, this time with a bit more precision:
There is something uniquely wrong with the world right now, right?
How should I say it? It’s as if the jig is up. The house of cards is falling. The end is nigh. Or at least the end of whatever we’ve been deluding ourselves into believing since World War II. It’s like an ominous kind of feeling, ya know? Like the things that used to mean something have sort of shriveled up, and all the things left in their wake are just not so appealing. In fact, the new stuff seems to be quite meaningless, bro.
Yeah, I know, I know: ”meaning” has always been sort of shared delusion. As I approach my 40s, I understand now the glazed-over look in my dad’s eyes as he stared into the middle distance. Almost as if…there was nothing out ahead?
I can see what he saw now. It’s not that he was looking into an empty future. He wasn’t looking at the future at all. He was looking at the past. To his childhood. To running around on the 5th of July looking for fireworks that still had the wicks. To the standing next to a skyscraper and staring upward for the first time. To walking down the staircase in pajamas on Christmas morning. He was looking back at the time just before we opened all of the Christmas presents.
“Back to the time when anything seemed possible…”
Ohhh how I do hate stepping on the optimism of the young. I remember it myself as a 23-year-old millennial chock-full of certainty that Tom’s Shoes and Uber and Zappos customer service were going to save the world. Except then Zappo’s CEO Tony Hsieh locked himself in a fiery shed and burned alive.
I was positively certain that, despite iteration after iteration of human history trying and failing to untangle the problems of our world, that it would somehow be my generation that would solve the Rubick’s cube of civilization. Turns out we were just as greedy and full of shit as the rest of them. In other words, we were human.
I guess I should have seen it coming. It should be expected. One need not be an anthropologist to observe that human history has trended toward a state of pathological optimization. Despite a few speed bumps around the middle ages that saw the world recede into a period of darkness, humanity has usually sauntered in the general direction of “efficiency.” This is not the best word to describe what is going on, but it is the best word I have been able to think of.
Efficiency is the false human belief that things could be better “if only.” If only this process were a little faster, if only this destination a little closer, if only this person a little more accessible. Efficiency is the act of folding time and space to bring us closer to what we want in less time and lower effort.
To be fair, the first few baby steps in human efficiency did yield some great outcomes: fire, the wheel, cups, and of course horseshoes, whatever those are for. But the efficiency kept on rolling through the aqueducts and gunpowder and electricity and we started getting the hang of things to the point we could even talk to someone across the world. A little bit of efficiency worked wonders, how about a whole heaping scoop of it? So we kept rolling right along until we got to the Metaverse and teledildonics. It’s not pretty and it’s not showing any signs of stopping, folks.
These are breakthroughs yielded from mankind’s desire for efficiency. That desire goes like this: I want what I want, I want it when I want it, and I want it as cheap as possible. Though it’s not always called efficiency; there are words to for different manifestations of it, such as “progress,” “technology,” “globalization,” or “neoliberalism.” But it’s all just efficiency, right? It’s all just closing the gap between you and that shiny object, right?
Efficiency is humanity’s grand quest to remove areas of friction from every aspect of daily life. The frictionless existence is motivated toward the most specific levels of organization, categorization, and expediency possible. It seeks to remove ambiguity and quantify transactions. It seeks to provide avenues for all to pursue their “real purpose” and follow their “true bliss.” It holds, as a foundational hypothesis, that all people can and should be happy, that the Earth and our lives exist for the purpose of zeroing in on exactly who we are.
Perhaps this conceptualization finds more of a home in the “global West” than places like the Far East (is saying “Far East” racist/orientalist yet?) or the Global South (I’m certain you shouldn’t say that anymore). Perhaps it is mostly Europe and the US where such a conceptualization of existence is held in the highest regard, but it should be obvious that it is only a matter of time before it shows up everywhere. Technology has made it such that the flow of culture can really only be slowed and not completely stopped. To attempt a complete stoppage requires a ruthlessness that will eventually fold anyhow, such as in North Korea.
How is it that culture can overcome the highest walls and strongest armies? Well, because “it’s all about having a good time, man.” Culture compels in ways that even cannons cannot. Culture plays on human desire, shame, and will for conformity. It abolishes old realities and replaces them with new ones. It performs this task in such a severe manner, that people can be socially sanctioned for ever even thinking it was okay to think a certain way…even if most people thought that way like three years ago. It is, for lack of a better term, the physical and behavioral manifestation of the dominant ideology.
Culture most easily infiltrates the youth because the young are most eager to rebel and to conform in their rebelliousness. What we have now in the US is a perfectly titrated brew of “conformist rebellion,” with members of the liberal left assimilating the ideas of the masses to near perfection, dominating culture at every turn, and somehow still maintaining the unwavering belief that they are under attack from all sides.
For those of us around during 9/11, you know how conveniently boogey men can be summoned up to move money, tanks, and infrastructure around the world. But the people of the Middle East just weren’t cutting it anymore, with most of them seeming pretty a’ight and all. Meanwhile we finally “killed the golden goose” of Gadaffi by actually letting him die this time, sacrificing our only reliable enemy when we needed one in a pinch. What were we to do? Turn in a circle 360 degrees and not a fake enemy in sight. We were “up shit creek with no fabricated villain” as the saying goes. That is, until we realized that the villain need not be “out there,” but alive and well - and extremely annoying - within our very own borders!
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your newest boogey man: RACIST GUYS WHO WEAR CAMO JACKETS
Most Americans would find it beyond the pale to introduce another McCarthyist witch-hunt into the culture, but this time it just hit different. There were no public struggle sessions required to get to the heart of the matter: those who are villains carried tiki torches and wore $8 JC Penney polo shirts in Charlottesville. There they were, right there for the whole world to see. And not just that - those are the same guys who blast through schools and churches, and the very same guys who march on government buildings, and the very same guys who ruined that Woodstock (the one with Limp Bizkit).
The villain is right here, don’t you see, right in our own damn country! And they can strike any time and any where! Hide yo kids, hide yo wife - the racists are coming. And no - you thought that was just a relatively psychotic group of assholes in a tiki march but in fact they are EVERYWHERE. Oh and also we have a new branch of research and scholarship dedicated to seeking out and exposing the invisible hatreds inside people such as…such as you! My goodness, little did we know that our country was filled with a bunch of white-supremacist bigots, and here I thought Barb from three houses down was just a really really kind old lady who made Christmas cookies for the whole neighborhood. Looks instead like she’s just a big ole fucking racist.
Racists everywhere…can you imagine? The threat is incalculable. Such a threat required a new accusative technology, one that heretofore the world had never seen before: political affiliation was now sufficient to prove villainy.
I know what I’ve just written is well-known by you by now, dear reader, but it deserves just a little time to reflect on this notion. To the liberal left, you are now considered a villain/racist/homophone/xenophobe/monster if you do any of the following:
Vote for a candidate who garnered close to 50% in two of the last elections.
Hang an American flag on the front of your house.
Are white.
How did we get here? I know that people at my age always seem to get a little bitter about the state of things, and it’s sort of a tradition for the optimism of youth to fade and be replaced by alienation, regret, and anger. It’s hard not to when you grow up preparing for one kind of world and then have to live in another. It tends to make us all sad in a way, to realize the world was never really ours to keep. By necessity, there will always be a sadness and disappointment when things don’t turn out like you thought they would.
But…
But there is something uniquely insane going on out there right now, don’t you think? I mean this is bigger than just shaking a fist at “those damn kids” and their rock music. It’s not about intolerance to new ideas, refusing to see the scientific truths buttressing new cultural ideas. It’s simply the fact that everyone is fucking miserable.
To me, this is the proverbial “proof in the pudding.” Look, if people were out there editing their genders, using this month’s “correct” word for this or that group of people, “smashing the patriarchy,” bringing death to capitalism, and yet were all really damn happy doing it, then hey - I’d be the first to admit that the old models aren’t working and are sorely in need of an update. But that’s not the case. People are absolutely not happy. Instead, nearly everyone is bored, miserable, lonely, angry, scared, and tired. More people are killing themselves. More people are on medications for their mood. More drug addiction and death. Crime rising in places that formerly stood as shining examples of urban safety. Oh, right - and everyone absolutely hates each other.
The entire apple cart has been upended on the very modes of discourse and decision-making that we have painstakingly chiseled carefully over millennia through millions of trials and errors. This framework has been replaced with an absurd algorithm that accounts not for strength of ideas, but from the identity that those ideas emerge from. Adults have infantilized themselves, sucking at the teet of children’s books and superhero movies hoping to extract a droplet of milky meaning. Nobody has a pension. Barely anyone has a 401k either. Benefits are drying up. People aren’t having sex anymore. Children’s movies craft stories about children defying the wishes of their parents, and ending with the parents apologizing for stepping on the individuality of the child.
I mean, I know we all like to pretend that kids have a special insight into the world, and their purity and innocence no doubt serves as a sobering reminder when things get far afield, but it’s important we don’t forget a very important thing about kids: they are children. Their brains do not work as well as ours. Their ideas have next to no nuance because their prognostications about the world are based on their interactions they’ve had with the six people they know outside of their immediate family. I get it, this all seems pretty obvious. But I feel like I have to say it because I think people have forgotten this. The complex and dire decisions that need to be made about this world should not be made by children.
And yet it seems like we are giving more and more philosophical terrain to young people who have (proportionately) suffered few true losses, who have not been responsible to provide for themselves, who have not engaged with the wide menu of human experiences that temper our extremist thinking. We have always had to contend with the optimism and idealism of the youth, but very rarely (if at all) in history have we given over as much of the reins to them.
Let’s talk turkey here: we as a species have endured great pains to civilize our world. Long standing villains and bullies have laid down their swords, admitted the unfairness of their actions, and gave up entrenched powers for the good of the order. And instead of celebrating that forward march, the swords of those formerly “in charge” have now been picked up and brandished menacingly back at those who yield them. This perfidy has been coupled with a ritualistic “dunking” on anyone of a certain type, whose only recourse is to laugh along with the jeers, lest they be declared one of the enemies. My friends - it is not good for people to see themselves as jokes.
No one needs to “move aside” and forfeit their life to let someone else have happiness. Happiness need not be a zero-sum game, and though it seems like the main lessons of history involve the benefits of mutuality, trust, and respect, it now seems like the main cultural sentiment of our time is “getting even.” Did you not like those action movies where the women were used as sexual pawns in the violent games of men? Well good news - now you can watch action movies where the women use and discard men as they participate in violent games of their own. Have you ever been in a group of people and some of them talk so much that others don’t get a chance to talk?? That wasn’t very fun for the people that couldn’t talk, now was it? What do you say we fix this, not by creating a more open dialogue for all, but instead by having the perpetrators now “shut the fuck up and listen” for the next 90 years.
This isn’t utopia, it’s revenge.
Our society is one that now affords a complete arbitrariness in terms of giving and receiving blame. At any time, a person who is “higher” on the progressive stack can be accused not only of heinous actions, but also heinous thoughts, and with that accusation alone, they are summarily destroyed in the court of public opinion - and sometimes now even in actual courts of law.
Something is not right here, man.
Mathematics is a tool of the patriarchy!
Being on time is a value of white supremacy!
Trauma is a self-assigned merit badge!
Weakness is strength!
What is going on here, my dude?
Efficiency is what is going on here.
Culture does not magically spring up from nothing. There is a reason that things become “a thing” when they do. There is a reason we had pogs and Pokémon, the macarena and the electric slide, multiple personality disorder and demonic possession. Something in the material conditions shifted in such a way that caused a ripple effect. Could be a scarcity, a surplus, a lack of liquidity. Whatever it was, it created a void or a pressure, one that was either filled or valved by culture. These movements are obscured; we can scarcely trace them, something so complex as to appear as chaos. But we need only reason through this to know that it is not chaos. It is a line that extends from coal reserves in Japan straight to Dubstep
(for hypothetical example, I can’t actually trace that line).
Consider “Lemonade” by Beyoncé Knowles. A “groundbreaking” album that was taken by many as a form of high art representing Beyoncé’s full embodiment of a strong black woman. She refused to be silenced any longer - people everywhere were standing up for what they believed in and she would no longer sit idly on the sides as her corporate overlords made decisions for her! Move over rich white men, Beyoncé is coming!!
While I can’t find any reliable source for the total money she made off that album, she does appear to have sold 17.6 million copies, which at least one article says brought in close to $13 million for her.
This is on top of $25 million for her role in The Lion King
This is on top of $5 million for her sponsorship from L’Oreal
This is on top of $400 million in fragrance sales.
And oh yeah…on top of $2 million she made in 2010 performing a one-hour private concert for Colonel Gaddafi’s son.
I’m not trying to “wealth shame” Beyoncé Knowles. I think she is talented, a lot of people like her, and she definitely faced challenges being a black woman in an industry traditionally controlled by white men, let alone a woman and teen star being volleyed about by corporate assholes of all gender and shade. What I am a little miffed about is this bullshit narrative that her album was some sort of valiant act of self-expression, a brave repudiation of the status quo, or a rebellion against myriad forces aimed against her.
Beyonce Knowles is a fucking billionaire. Lauryn Hill wrote music far more brave and poetic than Beyonce, and she was so aggressively skewered for her public missteps that she went insane. Not that people care about that anymore (she’s not following the narrative so she’s not only to be discarded but also trampled upon). Nonetheless, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill came out about 18 years before Knowles’ 2016 Lemonade. As there is no accounting for taste, I suppose I can’t mount an argument that one is more artistically inspired than the other, but let’s just take a look at some lyrics.
“Everything is Everything” by Lauryn Hill:
Our philosophy possibly speak tongues
Beat drum, Abyssinian, street Baptist (Word)
Rap this in fine linen, from the beginning (Word)
My practice extending across the atlas, I begat this
Flipping in the ghetto on a dirty mattress
You can't match this rapper slash actress
More powerful than two Cleopatras
Bomb graffiti on the tomb of Nefertiti (Ooh, uh)
MCs ain't ready to take it to the Serengeti
My rhymes is heavy like the mind of sister Betty (El Shabazz!)
L-Boogie spars with stars and constellations (What?)
Then came down for a little conversation (Huh)
Adjacent to the king, fear no human being
Roll with cherubims to Nassau Coliseum (What?)
Now hear this mixture, where Hip Hop meets scripture (Uh)
Develop a negative into a positive picture
Okay. Now let’s look at “Hold Up” by Beyonce Knowles:
Hold up, they don't love you like I love you
Slow down, they don't love you like I love you
Back up, they don't love you like I love you
Step down, they don't love you like I love you
Can't you see there's no other man above you?
What a wicked way to treat the girl that loves you
Hold up, they don't love you like I love you
Oh, down, they don't love you like I love you
Something don't feel right because it ain't right
Especially comin' up after midnight
I smell your secrets, and I'm not too perfect
To ever feel this worthless
How did it come down to this? Scrolling through your call list
I don't wanna lose my pride, but I'ma fuck me up a bitch
Know that I kept it sexy, you know I kept it fun
There's something that I'm missing, maybe my head for one
😐
Yes, I know I’m being petty and cherry picking some lyrics here, and I anyways I actually meant it - there really is no accounting for taste. Some very simple songs are legendary and some very complex songs are terrible. My purpose for that was…well, it was to grind an old axe of mine, certainly…but also to demonstrate that the second set of lyrics belong to a billionaire and the first set belong to a woman who would be lucky to sell out a concert in Dayton, Ohio these days.
It’s not that “this isn’t fair,” after all fairness has nothing to do with it. No - the problem is that we are somehow so very primed as a society to accept the phony explanation that Beyonce is a righteous truth warrior on the side of good for releasing this album not in 1998, but in 2016. In 2016, when the election of Donald J. Trump put the “insurgent” left into a frenetic tailspin of incredulity about the state of their perfect Obama-flavored world. Most of them far too coddled and fragile to mount an actual “resistance” (they are all terminal rule-followers, after all), they instead embarked on a quest for “revolutionary dress-up” that continues today. Their resistance is something between pageantry and kayfabe; a psychodrama in which they act out the role of “someone who is upset and will stop at nothing to make it right.” This involves super brave stuff like asking your boss off from work so you can protest “racism” or whatever the fuck.
I am starting to hate the analogy I’m weaving here, but Beyoncé is simply the best representative I can think of for this culturally substantiated insistence that I view people who are insanely rich, powerful, beautiful, talented, and successful as victims, and that I consider people whose ideas are echoed by media, movies, television, and every news station in every doctors’ office as “the resistance.” Continually asking me to view the people who are dunking on working class people at every turn as “freedom fighters” is like asking me to see Mitch McConnell as “a guy I’d like to have a beer with.” I’m sorry friend, but no.
While I certainly don’t expect the reptilian operatives of liberal culture to understand how gravely insulting and disgusting this feels to most people, I am shocked that even the “everyday people” on the liberal left cannot see this as they once did. It was this sort of buffer zone of separation and personalization from politics that allowed productive conversations to take place. But in this current climate, we have so completely “othered” the other that asking for a civil conversation between a MAGA hat and a BLM shirt seems the same as asking Elie Wiesel to sit down for an Inside the Actor’s Studio with Adolf Hitler.
This is insane. An extreme narcissism of small differences amplified to the point of mythology. I have friends and family who are diehard Trump, diehard Biden, and diehard don’t give a shit, and I hover between them and see people who have WAY more in common than they think. But never the twain shall meet. The left has used hyperbole to vilify the right to the point that there is an assumption of malignancy in the heart and soul of those on the right. The right has done the exact same.
Perhaps you are wondering why I have not levied the same level of criticism to the right that I have to the left. Well, for one thing it’s just too easy. The right has applied equal and opposite pressure to the cry-bullying to the left to the point that they now adhere to labyrinthian QAnon theories to explain away even the slightest (most obvious) differences of opinion. But this, in and of itself, should show how corrosive the beliefs of the left are on many many people. If you would rather believe that Tom Hanks was killed and replaced by a clone, rather than admit that his politics has changed, then you have truly been driven to a point of derangement beyond return.
Yet what do you expect when the worldview of the left has conformed to the unproven hypotheses of standpoint theory, a way of seeing people as possessing internal compositions nearly completely decided by their external identity? How do we think young men and boys will react to being repeatedly told they are rapists and that their base level of operating is born from culture-bound syndromes of violence and competition? How do you think some white people will react after being told repeatedly that their skin color has tainted them and made them racist, no matter how much they have done internal work to absolve themselves of prejudice.
Now pause - if you feel compelled to say, “yes but that is exactly what white people thought about black people for years! Should I really feel sorry for white people having to feel a little bit bad for something that another person was - and still is - suffering far worse consequences for?” Well here is my bone-chilling answer: yes!
Yes, absolutely! And the reason I am so brazenly in the affirmative on this issue is because we should be building a better world, not one that more efficiently punishes those who once punished! What the hell are we up to, and who in their right minds thinks this will work? Do you think “calling out white supremacy in all of its forms” is ever going to have an endpoint? Do we think there will be some massive realization and surrender? That there will be some future points in which the sins of the past are expiated and we can move on? Never. It will either be not enough to satisfy or too much to bear.
I want to be clear that I am absolutely not suggesting that people need to “move on.” Wrongs of the past ought be recognized, memorialized into lessons and traditions that prevent the same from happening again. Symbolism and ceremony should be used to the fullest to remember those subjected to the horrors of time gone by. Earnest and productive conversations need to happen that work to reconfigure the system into one that advances an equality that our forebearers did not have access to. But there absolutely must be an assumption that - ultimately, unfortunately - history never provides a full “satisfaction.” We will have to march forward, and against all odds we must march forward together.
Humankind has not seen the last of its great tragedies. The future holds massacres and disasters and catastrophes that will completely alter our moral landscape and how we categorize each other. We need to be ready for this. We need to be prepared for the messiness ahead, and cannot prepare for this by making fun of white people for not washing their legs in the shower or cleaving Latinos out of certain categories of protection and privilege because not all of them vote for who we want.
I mean, what the hell are we even doing?
Really, I don’t hold any ill will toward Beyonce. I just don’t think she did anything brave. She released Lemonade at exactly the right cultural moment. Even a smidge before that and she would have alienated a huge part of the customer base for being partisan in the way she did. She knew this, her handlers knew this, the execs knew this, everyone knew this. EVERYONE knows this, but only half of us haven’t given ourselves over to the blatant denial of reality so that we can feel like we are “the good ones.” This is the hallmark of the current liberal left - safe and supported on all sides, and still screaming for protection from the racists and fascists surrounding them.
What has emerged from this is a sort of anti-humanity. Firstly, the ideology of the Hillary/Kamala left is one slowly being saturated by not only an acceptance but a celebration of antinatalism. I need not belabor the political side of this in Roe v. Wade, but I do want to talk about the “cousins” of this sentiment that are appearing in culture. Among the branches of this antinatalist tree are the “Childfree” movement who views “birthers” as selfish people over-filling the planet (the one we live on as humans and have continued to occupy because of procreation), an aversion to actual physical sex concurrent with an explosion of strange and grotesque fetishes and obsessions that tend toward objects more than people, a reconfiguration of gender in ways that seem audacious for the purposes of provocation, and of course - a nearly ubiquitous addiction to porn curiously tied to a plummeting sperm count and testosterone level in men.
I could write entire essays on all of these, including the ever burgeoning “sexual freedom” that is accepting of just about every obscene insertion and harness imaginable, along with all other strange preferences all conveniently laid out on a spreadsheet that people print out and hand to people before they engage in emotionless sex without any intention to see their “partner” again. When did we start wanting this level of efficiency in our sexual interactions? We stray further and further from the light of God and closer and closer to the light of…flesh? The flesh of light. Fleshlight? Didn’t work.
Why is everyone so sexual now but barely anyone is sexy? Why is the only model of sexual shaming supported by the culture the one that punishes men for showing desire and chastises anyone who does not engage in a conversation of sexual preference that looks remarkably similar to….a contract.
A contract…now that’s a very efficient thing, is it not?
More and more of the textured, sensual, luxurious, lovely human interactions that we live for are being reduced to a contract-based transaction. “Who could possibly oppose such a thing?” the weirdest weirdos walking down the weirdest street in the weirdest neighborhood of any major city muse aloud to one another. “Isn’t it always better for people to communicate and reach mutual agreements about what they want? Especially in terms of something as important as sex?”
In a word: no.
No, it’s actually not always better. And do you know why it’s not always better? Because efficiency yields little in the way of stories. Every story beloved by humans involves a central tension - a messiness - that must be resolved in order for the pleasure of the resolution to feel so damn good. Can you imagine a story that has no tension? Can you imagine a romance novel that begins with each party stating whether or not they like spanking, and if they are “red, green, or yellow” about being spit on? No, you can’t imagine that. And neither can anyone else.
Which is why we are seeing less and less new stories. It is why we are seeing an endless recycling of the 1980s and 90s, resurrecting plots time and again, and attempting to create a story without tension, without conflict, without the violence of human misunderstanding. We are running out of ideas because we are finding it less and less acceptable to even mention friction. Humans crave stories, and yet we find ourselves now indentured to efficiency.
Stories are not efficient, they are defined by their inefficiency. They cannot move things within us unless they evoke a momentary sense of doubt and discomfort. The best stories cause us to confront even ourselves. Look at Game of Thrones, with 4-5 seasons of the best writing around, only to end with a capitulation to tension-less whimsy. We got to see Arya Stark’s ass, which NO ONE wanted to see, and about 140 hours of character development for Jamie Lannister ending with him running back to his toxic incestuous relationship with his heinous murderer of a sister. Killed with bricks falling on his head.
Seems tidy. Seems efficient.
Humans love stories because they remind us of the beauty and excitement and robustness of this life, even despite its danger, confusion, unfairness, difficulty, and heartache. We love stories because they capture the best parts of being alive. And the best parts are not the tidy parts. Not the easy parts. Definitely not the efficient parts.
The truth is that if you can fight for anything in our world right now, you should be fighting for inefficiency. This is not some reactionary technophobic plea to defy modern technology and live in a cabin. This is not a “call to arms.” Instead it is a call to revolutionary apathy. We need to start declining the “next big thing.” We need to actively say “no thanks” to more cameras and amazon microphones in our homes. We need to start waiting a few days for our deliveries. Less dating apps. Less posting about books and more reading. Less pictures of the ocean and more swimming. Less wedding engagement photos and more love. More love between just two people united against the world, not on display for it.
We have passed the point at which more efficiency is a good thing. It is no longer a good thing. The great creature comforts that we wanted - they’re here! They have arrived and they are in our pocket. Just look at the new iPhone - which is the same as the old iPhone. We aren’t breaking any new ground. We don’t need more efficiency. We need more slowness. More lag. More frustration and boredom. We need to have nothing to do except stare forward and think. You don’t need any more megapixels. You don’t need a new way to organize your apps. Stop looking here on Earth for satisfaction. Let’s start looking skyward.
Let’s start making new ideas, and let’s start refusing the tired ones we’re being fed by the people who stand to benefit the most from our sloth and stasis. Fuck them.
We are all participating in something that we scarcely understand. We are paving a way for a world that sees efficiency as a higher value than humanity. It has seemed like a stretch - a science fiction fantasy - for nearly my whole life. But I cannot deny it anymore. I feel it is incumbent on me to brave the slings and arrows that come my way for shouting about the falling sky. And unlike Beyonce, I won’t make $13 million for my “bravery.”