As
many of you know from your own personal experience, more and more purchases of
everything from clothing to electronics to books to food are being made from
the comfort of one’s home. There is a
flavor in this modern purchasing experience that is almost like making wishes
to a genie. Make your wish on a website
on your computer and, presto magic, in a relatively short period of time, what
one has wished for appears at one’s door or in one’s mail box. Of course, distinct from the experience with
a genie, one does have to pay for that which one wishes, but nevertheless,
because the whole narrative journey between desire for something and actual
acquisition of it has been reduced to a few manoeuvers and clicks on a computer
mouse and keyboard, there is definitely something that seems ethereally magical
about the whole process.
A very different situation has resulted in the
acquisition of products in many preliterate societies, both past and present. There people within a tribe or in groups from
different tribes would meet up in the flesh, and there would be an exchange of
products through barter. Each
individual, group or tribe would bring the product or products that they could
easily acquire, cultivate or make and exchange them for products they wouldn’t
normally have access to. This exchange
experience represents a situation of pure flowing blendable continual stimuli –
flowing economic exchange without the defined figures of formal places for
economic transaction. Also there aren’t
formal fixed defined discrete values for products, and people would bargain to
create temporary blurry contingent values.
Eventually,
the somewhat defined figures of formal market places have developed, and the
use of formalized vehicles for exchange in the form of currency have
developed. In these situations, there
was still bargaining done, but now it was done more through a standardized
vehicle of exchange. Initially, that
would have been things like cowrie shells and beads. And in the marketplace, people who bought and
sold from each other developed social relationships and passed gossip back and
forth about the people they knew. The
marketplace became a place of making, receiving and preserving organic imprints
in different ways through the buying and selling process, and led to the
development of meaningful life narratives.
As
some people start living in villages, towns, and cities, even more defined
figures of indoor markets and of stores developed, and the buyers and sellers
became truly distinct from one another. Currencies
become more standardized in the defined discrete forms first of metal coins and
then of paper money. Prices for
different items started to become more fixed, and many diverse products and
services could frequently be acquired in one place. Rather than selling primarily just what they
produced, shopkeepers acquired products from different producers and sold them
to customers. In these shops, there was
less opportunity to make an organic imprint through bargaining for a good
price, as prices began to represent standardized preserved imprints, more fixed
values. Particularly in villages and
small towns, there were still social relationships between shopkeeper and some
customers, and gossip about what was happening in the town was still passed
back and forth between the two. As a physical
space, each store represented a defined figure, but it was placed within the
common grounded space of the village, town or city, which had public areas like
streets and town squares and public buildings that belonged to all.
As
urban areas became more prevalent, shopkeepers dealt more and more with
customers they didn’t know. The
transactions between buyer and seller became more focused on the economic
aspects and less on the social aspects.
Nevertheless, however attenuated the social relationship between buyer
and seller became, there was still the expectation that the seller would
demonstrate his expertise in the merchandise by guiding his customer to the
right purchase. This was where the focus
of the human shopping narrative began increasingly to reside.
And
then along came shopping centers and suburban malls. The spaces in which the shops were housed
were no longer part of a larger public domain that included government offices,
government services and libraries as well as parks and community centers,
although governments do sometimes rent out an occasional space in centers and
malls for specific purposes. Shopping
centers and malls belonged to one or more private owners. They were separated from everything around
them by the vacuum space of parking lots.
The point of these stores was just to make money. The centers were not a part of a larger
public community. There was no sense of
grounding to be obtained from them. And
because the emphasis was on making money to the exclusion of any social narrative
goals, sales people were not hired on their knowledge of the area or areas of
merchandise they were assigned to sell. The idea was to get as many entry-level
workers as possible to keep wages low.
They were people who could sell the merchandise, but not necessarily
answer many questions about it. Of
course, this has particularly been carried to an extreme with the salespeople
at big box stores, people who are frequently responsible for many different
kinds of merchandise.
This
certainly is a long way economically from the barter that too place in some
preliterate societies and from the sales in outdoor marketplaces, where there
was bargaining and bonding and the exchange of gossip. But the distance both physical and
psychological between buyer and seller grows
even more when we get to e-commerce.
Here not only is there no bargaining on most sites, no bonding, no
exchange of gossip, and no demonstration of expertise by the seller, but there
is also no physical journey to a store in external world reality and no
physical encounter with a sales person.
Without the journey and the encounter, there is no making, receiving and
preserving organic imprints. The sales
process does not become a part of a meaningful life narrative for either buyer
or seller. A vacuum experience connects
the buyer to the product. So many
ancillary benefits are lost when a person buys something online. There is no journey in the external world to
the place of purchase. There is no
social bonding with the seller. There is
no exchange of gossip about the community with the seller. There is no fine-tuned matching of the buyer’s
desires with a product that truly fits his needs and is appropriate.
A
product or a service is not simply an isolated figure that is useful in and of
itself. A product or service is a
vehicle for connecting a person with the whole physical and social world in
which he lives. A product or service is
a vehicle for having a rich vibrant experience in the art of purchasing
something from a traditional flesh-and –blood seller in the external
world. A product or service is a vehicle
for making, receiving and preserving the organic imprints that come with the
encounter with a more traditional salesperson.
A product is a vehicle for creating memories that, as preserved organic
imprints, help to build a more meaningful surrogate immortality for both buyer
and seller in their preparations for death.
Purchasing
products online means purchasing figures bereft of their grounding and of their
possibilities for grounding for humans.
What is left is figures floating in the vacuum of the screen reality of
a computer or a smartphone. These are
figures that no longer have the spatial grounding that comes from being bought
in the external world reality of a marketplace or a store. They also no longer have the temporal
grounding that comes from being the endpoint of a narrative process that
involves a person going from his home or place of work to a place where the
product is displayed and sold as a result of an interaction with one or more
live humans.
But
nowadays, the vacuum is increasingly no longer the backdrop that surrounds the
product. Instead the vacuum is
increasingly the product. Books for
kindle, MP3’s, Spotify and Pandora for music, Netflix for movies and
television. And a myriad of different
apps, many of which have to be purchased for your smartphone. People are increasingly involved with all
these vacuum products which contribute to the vacuumization of their living
environment. In some cases, even the
currency has been vacuumized in the form of mobile payments and virtual
currencies like bitcoin.
The
history of humanity started with people evolving out of enveloping nature,
living a very guarded existence to protect against organic perishability. Then as people’s reflexive awareness grew and
their desire to avoid organic perishability and develop meaningful surrogate
immortalities grew, people focused on surrounding themselves with hardened
defined discrete figure products and becoming hardened defined discrete figures
themselves. But figures could break apart
into their component parts. Machines can
rust and shatter into pieces. What is
left is the vacuum of pure consciousness.
From living in grounded nature to being surrounded by manufactured
products to being surrounded by vacuum services and processes and consciousness
in screen and virtual reality. This
seems to be the course of human history.
Just
as the figures of manufactured products and buildings grew out of the grounding
of natural resources, so the vacuumized phenomena of images and data are
growing out of the movie, television, computer, smartphone and tablet figure
screens. With advances in modern technology, more and more the focus on
phenomena in the external world is shifting from the solid masses of figure
products to the emptiness of vacuum services.
The archetypal figure today, a complex behavioral entity, is a machine
or robot. Is there a vacuum complex
behavioral entity? Traditional societies
dealt with angels, ghosts, spirits, and, of course, gods or God. Today it is the images of screen reality, the
phenomena produced in virtual reality and the disconnected human consciousness
proposed by the Transhumanists – the consciousness that is kept alive somehow
apart from its perishable organic human body. But how does one leave organic
imprints with only consciousness, how does one have a meaningful human sensory
encounter with sentient beings? What
does it mean to live forever without a sensory human narrative? Does it become a kind of living death?
(c) 2017 Laurence Mesirow
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