Our Modern Canaries In The Coal Mine

            There are four basic reasons for concern about the future of humanity as a result of both the rapid pace of technological change that we have been experiencing as well as the direction in which it has been going.  First, there is the sensory distortion that is the result of the alternation of understimulation and overstimulation that people have been experiencing in their modern technological fields of experience.  In a world in which the areas of organic natural environments have been diminishing in quantity and in quality, and in which instead we have an ongoing increase of vacuum and tension-pocket environments, it has become more and more difficult for the human mammalian nervous system to adjust to the extremes – both high and low - in the levels of stimuli to which it is exposed.  The result is the growing manifestations of pathological behavior that are both self-destructive and/or destructive to the people with whom a person comes into contact.  This is where two basic categories of mental postures that I have discussed previously, come into play.

First there is conative acceleration, the speeding up of the will, in which a person tries to generate a lot of his own stimuli and thus control his own stimuli environment.  He does this by accelerating his trajectory of daily activity and thus blocking out the stimuli from around him, from the vacuum and tension-pocket environment to which he is constantly being exposed and over which he has no control.  The rapid intense activity of modern work – of corporate executives, office workers and factory workers – and the rapid intense activities of many modern recreational pursuits – intense exercise routines and extreme sports activities like bungee jumping – are examples of this behavior.  In general, manic behavior demonstrates conative acceleration.

Then there is conative anesthesia, the numbing of the will, where the person deals with sensory distortion in his living environment by withdrawing into himself, into a self-made experiential vacuum over which he again has some control.  Examples of this behavior include reclusive living, yoga, Zen meditation and certain drugs.  In general, depression demonstrates conative anesthesia.

In both of these behavioral postures, there is a sense that the mammalian human nature of many people does not permit them to fully adjust to the modern technological fields of experience.  However, there are those people who seem to be adjusting better in their modern technological fields of experience.  They are adjusting better, because, as a result of engaging with modern technology, they are becoming more like modern technology.  Modern machines like computers and robots are complex behavioral entities that mirror the actions of humans and subtly guide the humans to see modern machines as models for behavior.  And these humans gradually become more robotized.  Somehow, they become less dependent on organic flowing blendable continual stimuli and more stimulated to life by the defined discrete stimuli they find on the television, video game, computer and smartphone screens with which they directly engage as well as the peripheral defined discrete stimuli that surround them in their modern technological living environments.  It is not that these people are becoming robots yet, but rather that they are moving more in that direction.  Psychologically, they are more and more receptive to defined discrete cognitive stimuli and less and less open to the flowing blendable continual stimuli found in the sensory, emotional and creative areas of the mind.  Many of these people work intimately with computers, robots and other modern machines – what we commonly call geeks.

            Some of these people want to take the next step and become part machine themselves, what we commonly call cyborgs.  Sort of like the bionic man. This represents the means to one of the ultimate goals of human beings in their development of modern technology.  Instead of being content to create a surrogate immortality in preparation for death, an immortality based on preserved imprints that survive long after a person perishes himself, people who want to become cyborgs see it as a means to become directly immortal themselves.  As a cyborg, they would be more free from the dangers of organic perishability.  If a part of their organic body wears out, they can replace it with a mechanical part made of metal or plastic.  And if the mechanical part wears out, it can be replaced with still another mechanical part.  So technically, as a cyborg, a person can just go on living forever.

            Now it is one thing for a person to get a tooth implant, an artificial hip or a pacemaker.  Such implants don’t affect too much a person’s sense of organic unity.  But when more and more parts start being replaced, so that a person becomes what we think of as a cyborg, a person’s sense of organic unity and his sense of a coherent self are going to be significantly diminished.  And a diminished fractured sense of self will lead to a diminished level of consciousness.  The more a person begins to feel like and operate like a machine, the less alive and the less aware he is going to feel as an organic presence.  So a cyborg may be able to live for a long time, but the quality of his consciousness, of his aliveness is going to be significantly diminished.  And a person may ask what the point is of living forever, if he becomes incapable of fully experiencing himself and his forever life.  He may live forever, but it will be living forever in a kind of living death.

And this brings us to our fourth concern: that robots will end up totally replacing humans as the dominant force on Earth.  Whether this means that humans will become the servants of robots or will completely disappear at that point, it would be hard to say.  If it’s the first, with a loss of power will come a loss of intensity of aliveness, a loss of intensity of consciousness.  Humans will no longer be the complex behavioral entities driving the major narratives on the planet.

Of course, I guess it’s possible that humans could simply be put on the sidelines of major activity and not be eliminated.  They could become ever more immersed in a spectator posture than they are now.  At that point, life would truly be a living death.

So with all the pressures today to become robotized, perhaps the healthiest people are paradoxically those who experience discomfort, pain and suffering from sensory distortion.  These symptoms of pathology indicate that the people who experience them are still sufficiently mammalian to react strongly when placed in living environments that aren’t conducive to more mammalian living.  The people who suffer a lot from sensory distortion are the canaries in the coal mine, acting as a warning to the rest of us of the dangers of embracing too strongly a modern technological life style.  And the real danger to the human race from modern technology is not the destructive effects of the behavioral aberrations created by sensory distortion in the people who are the canaries.  Rather it is the destructive effects occurring in those people who don’t develop such obvious behavioral symptoms to sensory distortion, the people who seem to be adjusting better to modern technology.  Unless we find a way to significantly modify the trajectory of technological development, this second group of people may be signaling the transformation of the human race into something we would no longer recognize.

 

© 2015 Laurence Mesirow

 

           

 

 

The Many Different Faces Of Reality

            Reality has experienced a considerable number of variations over the last one hundred years.  As people became increasingly uncomfortable amidst the sensory distortion in modern technological society, certain artists began to explore reconnecting themselves to the flowing blendable continual stimuli of nature in the only place where they knew such stimuli were still easily accessible: the world of dreams and the unconscious.  European surrealists like Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte and Mexican surrealists like Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo created visual worlds where viewers could reconnect to their own dreams and to their own organic coherent senses of self.  In Latin America, the magic realism movement was based on reconnecting to the natural world through traditional magical motifs.  In magic realism, people and animals slid into and out of magical spiritual worlds from which the conventional real world was never neatly separated anyway.  Rather than more private dreams as in surrealism, magic realism concerned itself with the collective magical dream motifs of traditional societies that were still deeply tied to their natural roots and to their mystical traditions.  Writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa and artists like Francisco Toledo brought this magic realist world to life.

            The key for both these movements was to allow people to become regrounded in created worlds filled with organic flowing blendable continual stimuli.  These movements represented attempts to temporarily suppress not only the sensory distortion of modern technological living environments, but the subtle mirroring and modeling from all the complex machines that surrounded modern people – mirroring and modeling that made them feel like robots themselves.

            Since the coming of the digital age, people have developed other solutions for dealing with the problems of living in modern technological society.  They have developed ways to create new kinds of configurations of stimuli for their fields of experience.  New kinds of reality.

            Two of the new kinds of reality are related.  Virtual reality is a temporary replacement of conventional reality.  Virtual reality is created by projecting pure defined discrete digital stimuli into an experiential vacuum.  It is an alternate reality that temporarily fills our field of experience.  Some examples of this are medical simulation to practice a surgery, flight simulation, war simulation, and simulation of new homes for prospective buyers.  Of course, there are always video games, particularly multi-player video games.  All of these realities are ones in which a person temporarily immerses himself in an alternate world, a vacuum world devoid of the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli that give phenomena substance and that create richer more nuanced backdrops.  But because of the lack of this kind of stimuli, a person experiences himself in a world that is free from the organic perishability that goes together with a sense of mortality.

            Augmented reality is a variation on virtual reality in which a technologically-created alternate reality coexists side by side with conventional reality in order to enhance it.  Google Glass gives information about phenomena as one looks at them.  At the same time, Google Glass takes pictures, finds directions with GPS and gives a person access to his e-mails.  With augmented reality, a person is never totally separated from the conventional world of primary experience.  But the alternate reality aspect of one’s field of experience when using augmented reality helps to neutralize the unpredictable and therefore potentially more dangerous aspects of conventional reality.  In this way, one doesn’t experience the perishability aspect of conventional reality while dwelling in it.  One minimizes, but doesn’t eliminate the number of flowing blendable continual stimuli that one experiences while in augmented reality.  Still in minimizing the organic perishability of primary experience in one’s conventional reality, one is also separating oneself from the sense of substance in one’s field of experience, and one is diminishing the possibility of rich vibrant nuanced experiences in his life.

            From a different perspective, reality television is an attempt to bring some kind of surrogate organic grounding to our lives through modern digital technology.  Instead of watching scripted shows, where people feel mediated from the reality of the dramatic situation by the script, in reality television, life – real life, primary experience life – seems to unfold before the viewers’ eyes.  Of course, situations are frequently developed as the premises for the human encounters we see, and these situations magnify the possibility of messy human conflict, of heightened organic friction.  Whether it is young adults living together in a strange city or people living together in a primitive environment, we get to see what appears to be authentic unscripted human life.

            The essential point in this discussion has been that in the last one hundred years, people have been playing around with some different new kinds of reality, because they have basically found their conventional reality to be lacking in some way.  As technology has increasingly taken over human living environments, there has been a loss of the organic grounding that is necessary as a template for making and receiving organic imprints, and, in particular, for a person properly bonding with other people.  There has been a loss of the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli that are necessary for rich vibrant experiences, for feeling fully alive as animals.  The fields of experience of human beings have increasingly become vacuum and tension-pocket living environments, environments that alternately understimulate and overstimulate, environments that create sensory distortion.  In order to find organic environments that fill our fields of experience, we have had to recur to the one large space that hasn’t been directly filled with technology: our minds.

            With surrealism and magic realism, painters built worlds with porous boundaries between modern technological conventional reality and more traditional organic reality, such that people could go back and forth between the two realities and try to replant the organic grounding and the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli back in the modern world.  With the surrealists, the more traditional organic reality was the private world of dreams.  With the magic realists, it was the collective world of Latin American magical motifs.

            Surrealism and magic realism were developed at a point in history before the total takeover of our attention spans by screens – television and computer screens.  There was still a sense of greater connection to the organic grounding that remained in human living environments, a greater awareness of the need for organic grounding to function properly as mammalian human beings.  In today’s world, many people try to survive amidst sensory distortion by trying to balance configurations of defined discrete figure stimuli and endless infinite continuous vacuum stimuli; that is, creating a balance among the very sources of stimuli that create sensory distortion.  These are the people who embrace virtual reality and augmented reality.

            There is also the attempt to obtain grounding by identifying with characters in reality television shows.  Reality television is an attempt to create heightened surrogate primary experience through the mediation of a television screen.  It is much more mediated than the immediate sensory experience of a surrealist or magic realist painting.  Surrealism and magic realism are explorations of grounded mental states: dreams and magic.  Reality television is an attempt to infuse grounding in the lives of ordinary people who, like their viewers, suffer from the sensory distortion of modern technological society.  But organic friction is artificially  generated through heightened social conflict between the people on the screen, and through heightened conflict with the living environment, which is generated by putting the people on the screen among those extreme primitive natural environments that remain.  Heightened organic friction between people and within primitive natural environments is an attempt to help viewers overcome their own numbness by watching other people attempt to really come alive on reality television.  But television itself is numbing, so the life situations presented on reality television have to project exaggerated tension-filled conflict and stress in order to help viewers feel alive.  This means that the life situations on reality television end up presenting negative tension-pocket static-filled friction rather than the more organic friction that the viewers really crave.

            People today are very concerned about reality, because reality in their daily lives is so off balance as a result of the sensory distortion in modern technological living environments.  Without a lot of readily available organic grounding, the solutions to the discomfort created by the sensory distortion found in living environments can create a reality as off balance as the reality that is readily available.  If we want to return to a more natural reality, we have to find a way of actually regenerating organic grounding in our living environments.  It is organic grounding that humans really are looking for today.

 

(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow

 

Going From Magic To Machines

 

            In previous articles, there has been considerable discussion of the notion of surrogate immortality.  This is a means by which people deal with their mortality by leaving preserved imprints that will go on existing long after they are dead.  Examples that have been given of such imprints are having a baby, planting a tree, making a work of art, writing a book, creating a business, achieving a record in sports as well as the smaller but not less important intangible imprints of the memories that have been left among the people that have come into contact with the deceased.  All these imprints deal with the sensory and/or cognitive aspects of our fields of experience.  A baby, a tree, and a work of art are all sensory phenomena.  Actually, a baby starts out as a sensory phenomenon, but quickly, as its mind develops, becomes a cognitive phenomenon as it interacts with the people around him.  A sports record is a cognitive phenomenon as a statistic, although it relates to a sensory event.  A book is a sensory object filled with cognitive content, although illustrations and prints provide sensory content in those books where they exist.  A business is based on a cognitive business plan and cognitive strategies, but it frequently involves sensory products or services as well as sensory interactions with people.  Memories of relationships are cognitive thoughts based on sensory experiences.

            There has also been discussion of how the creation of the modern technological world has been a larger means of creating an environment in which preserved human imprints can remain better protected against the perishability that occurs in nature.  From this point of view, the best way to fully preserve both directly and indirectly organic imprints is to put them into technologically-created experiential vacuums where they can exist outside of nature.

            People who have lived in preliterate societies are fully aware of the problems of perishability that they encounter living in more natural environments.  So they have developed other experiential systems for dealing with problems of perishability.  In his book The African Genius, Basil Davidson talks about how people in Africa develop a greater sense of empowerment in their perishable living environments by means of magic and frequently magic as exercised in sorcery and witchcraft.  Sorcery is a force that is external to the person using it, a force that he has to learn how to use.  Witchcraft is a force that resides within a person, a force that the witch can use automatically, even unconsciously.  This is why witches don’t always know who they are and have to be pressured to confess that they are witches.  But there is magic that can be used to defend oneself against the evil powers of sorcery and witchcraft.

            With beliefs like this, nothing that occurs in human existence is explained by chance.  Any occurrence of misfortune is explained by applied magic, and attempts are made to find the person who used magic to create the misfortune.  Translated, this represents the flows of mysterious flowing blendable continual stimuli to transform experiences and events in human life.  They are nonmeasurable mental stimuli, but to the preliterate tribespeople who believe in them, they give these tribespeople what appear to be as strong a sense of psychological control and mastery over the phenomena in their fields of experience as the people in modern technological society obtain with their machines.  It is the means by which people who live in perishable traditional organic environments, who are still immersed in the flowing blendable continual sensory stimuli of these environments, obtain a psychological sense of power and control over their living environments.  It does not matter that these tribespeople are not able to manoeuver much, shift much, change much in objective physical terms when destructive experiences and events occur in their fields of experience.  What matters is that they have developed mental systems that interpose them, the tribespeople, as active agents generating explanations and solutions for situation, where the intersubjective causal agency that they ascribe for what is happening is not obviously apparent in the sensory world.

            The preliterate tribesperson with his magic, experiences himself or other human beings as being in control over the happenings in his external environment much like the modern technological person does in his environment.  And the preliterate tribesperson experiences this without having destroyed so much of his natural living environment.

            Nevertheless, there are some differences between the organic imprints left by preliterate tribespeople and the organic imprints left by people in modern technological society, and perhaps these differences can help to explain why some groups of people evolved over time from more traditional preliterate societies to modern technological societies.

            The imprints of magic occur primarily in the form of mental experiences that do not lend themselves to verification in the external world.  When a sorcerer puts a curse on a person, and the person dies, does the person die because he has directly experienced the effects of the curse or because he and the sorcerer participate in a collective belief system wherein curses from sorcerers are supposed to have strong magical powers that can cause people to die.  There is a blurriness here, a lot of flowing blendable continual mental stimuli that make it hard to separate internalized mental experiences from externalized physical events.  As a result, there is a blurriness to the imprints that appear to be preserved.  There is a coherence to the flow of the magical action, but there is not so much crisp definition.  The magical action can be seen as an intersubjective event that participants agree has occurred, but not as an objective event that has actually occurred in the external world, where the definitions of the action can be easily ascertained.

            Furthermore, without verifications of an intersubjective event in making an imprint, and without strong definition of the imprint, it becomes much more difficult to preserve the imprint with certainty.  When the imprint is primarily in minds, it becomes much easier to wipe out or modify the imprint with the countervailing imprint of another person’s magic that can wipe out or modify the original magic spell.  The flowing blendable continual stimuli of the defensive magic wipes out or modifies the flowing blendable continual stimuli of the original spell.

            There is a blurriness to these magical imprints which leads some people to find other fields of experience in which to be able to leave more crisp and, therefore, more defined organic imprints.  Technology is a way of bringing the focus of imprint making from the more blurry continual world of intersubjective mental experiences to the more crisp discrete world of objective events. Technology deals with hard sensory phenomena that can be touched and therefore verified in terms of their existence.  Furthermore, technological imprints can be conceptually built upon one another.  Whereas magic is conservative and does not tend to lead to the development of new more effective modalities of magic, technology is progressive in that one invention leads to the possibility for another inventor to come up with the idea of either a significant modification or else a completely new invention altogether.  The flow of technological thinking allows for the possibility for many more people to leave crisp new imprints through technological development.

            Furthermore, the opportunity to leave crisp discrete imprints through technological development acts to stimulate a greater defined consciousness.  In other words, experiencing crisp discrete imprints acts to stimulate our capacity to absorb other discrete phenomena, wakes us up out of the more blurry continual consciousness associated with the more blurry phenomena connected with nature as well as with magic, sorcery and witchcraft.  What we create, what we surround ourselves with, both physically and mentally, subtly helps to create who we become and who we are.  And so those preliterate tribespeople who, at some point in our faraway past, started the slow trek through various stages of civilization until arriving at our modern technological society, not only created increasingly crisp discrete imprints as the technology evolved, but also an increasingly crisp discrete consciousness of the world.

            However, this is still just one side of the story.  Gradually as technology has, as it were, covered over nature and natural surfaces, there are fewer and fewer organic surfaces on which to make new imprints.  The technology has enabled us to effectively preserve imprints from the past, but it is now gradually impeding our capacity to leave significant new non-technological imprints.  And as there are fewer and fewer organic surfaces left and fewer and fewer organic phenomena and fewer and fewer blurry flowing blendable continual stimuli left in living environments, our new imprints may continue to be defined, but they suffer from so much definition and so little coherence, they begin to fragment.  And our consciousness, of course, fragments as well from the lack of blurry flowing blendable continual stimuli that are needed to stimulate more coherence in it.  So our journey in technological development has now taken us to the opposite experiential problem from that experienced by those preliterate tribespeople who started the long slow trek to technological development.  But the one thing we can say is that we are at a point where further technological development will not lead to improvements in organic human imprints and improvements in human consciousness.  Quite the contrary!

 

© 2015 Laurence Mesirow

Service with A Robot Smile

            A lot of the use of robots in our modern labor market has centered up until now on performing work related to products: manufacturing and warehousing.  But it was inevitable that robots were going to creep more and more into the service industries.  A new hotel in Nagasaki, Japan intends to make androids a significant part of the staff.  Adrian Bridge in his article for The Telegraph, “Robots to serve guests in Japanese hotel” (Feb. 3, 2015) discusses the Henn-na Hotel (which appropriately means “strange hotel” in Japanese).  Among the categories of workers that will be robots are reception desk workers, porters, housekeeping staff and a cloakroom attendant.  The article says that many of the robots resemble a young Japanese woman.  If this means that it will be the same Japanese woman robot over and over again, that would be pretty spooky.  These Japanese woman robots will be able to speak Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English.  They will also be able to gesture with their hands, move their eyes in a human way and smile.  They belong to a group of highly developed androids called “actroid” androids.

            The hotel where these androids will work is situated in the middle of a theme park that looks like a Dutch town.  In addition, the hotel is surrounded by nature.  There will be along with the androids, 10 human staff members.  The theme park is hopeful that if the hotel is successful, another hotel will open in 2016, and after that, others could be opened in Japan and around the world.

            A hotel is required to deal with small intimate details in order to satisfy a customer.  The commercial entities that it sells are not discrete pre-made product categories that can easily be reduced to a series of pre-programmed potential interactions for the androids.  The commercial entities that it sells are spontaneous interactions.  The commercial entities that it sells are nuanced flowing blendable continual interactions with customers, who often have special needs based on anxieties about travel, desires to maintain unique lifestyle routines even away from home, and a need to use service staff as surrogate family, friends and even therapists.  Sometimes a member of a hotel staff has to deal with an unusual crisis. What if a guest suddenly becomes sick and requires first aid and/or a doctor or even an ambulance.  Well, we might say, this is where the human staff members come in.  But with only 10 human staff, what if they are involved in other important tasks?  What if they are in meetings?  What if by the time they would get to the guest, the guest had already become very sick as with a stroke or a heart attack?  And what if a guest needs CPR or the Heimlich manoeuver?

            There are so many different unique flowing blendable continual situations which require nuanced decision making.  These unique situations can’t possibly be effectively programmed as formal categories of life situations that would require certain discrete formulaic operational responses.  All a robot can do is to try and take whatever problem situation with which a human may present him and fit that situation into one of the discrete problem situation categories with which it has been programmed for an operational response.  It would appear to me that what could arise would be similar to having a computer translate a text into another language.  The computer has been programmed to translate the formal denotation of a word, but is going to have trouble picking up when certain connotations come into play.  The result is translations that can be bewildering or even ludicrous.

            There is an additional major problem involved in using android service employees.  Because of all the nuances involved in the services that can be requested by a hotel guest, there is something much more intimate involved here than using robots for blue collar work.  It may be a shallow bond, but a kind of bonding does take place in the interaction between a guest and a hotel employee.  The hotel employee is there to take care of you, to take care of your wants and needs.  The employees at the front desk try to match your special requests for an ideal preferred room with the rooms that are available.  The employees in room service have to deal with requests for meals that aren’t on the menu and that can involve very special details.  Handling properly these special requests from guests is not a programmable science.  Rather, it is an art.  So what does it mean to interface with complex behavioral entities (namely, androids) who are there to respond to your human wants and needs, but who can do so only in a very imperfect way?

            There are similarities between this kind of interfacing and some of the interfacing that has been discussed in previous articles with other kinds of robots.  I am talking here about how robots are being developed as companions for humans – in particular, the very young and the very old.  With children, robots are being programmed to be educators and caretakers.  With the elderly, robots are being programmed to do housekeeping tasks and to help take care of health tasks like distributing medicine at the appropriate times.  I have discussed how this kind of interfacing with respect to more intimate human tasks sets up subtle relationships where the robot mirrors back to the human the human’s defects in imitating the smooth crisp discrete defined angular efficient actions of the robot.  At the same time, the robot acts as a model for how the human should behave in the future.

            Now obviously the intensity of the bonding and therefore the degree of individual influence is not going to be great between a human hotel guest and an android hotel service provider.  But what is diminished in terms of intensity is more than made up for by the pervasiveness of the robots in different sections and activities of the hotel.  The modalities of robot activity are spread out through a relatively large swath of the human hotel guest’s field of experience.  With robot companions, there is frontal mirroring and modeling – the human is influenced as a result of his direct face-to-face interaction with the robots.  But in a situation like the Henn-na Hotel, the robot activity can literally surround the hotel guest and influence him more easily preconsciously on the periphery of his field of experience.  The mirroring and modeling influences can enter a hotel guest’s mind when he is not directly paying attention.

            And this kind of enveloping experiential influence by android service providers may not be limited to hotels in the not-so-distant future.  Robot staffing in shops, department stores, restaurants, amusement parks, zoos and nightclubs.  Why not?  It would certainly be more economical for the owners and management.  No need for salaries, wages, health benefits, pension plans.  But apart from the fact that an awful lot of people would be put out of work, the effect of having a pervasive presence of robot service providers would be enormous.

            There would be an enormous growth not only in frontal encounters with androids but also in peripheral awareness of them and their behavior and their activities.  With the peripheral experiences of androids, there would be ongoing mirroring and modeling from them, even for those humans whose direct frontal encounters with them would only occupy a small portion of their day.  In other words, the boundaries between what constitutes a human and what constitutes an android would become more and more blurred.  People would become influenced by the presence of so many androids in their fields of experience, much the way that non-smokers can experience health problems from secondary smoke.

            This is why I view the opening of the Henn-na Hotel with such concern.  If it is the harbinger of a lot of things to come, the way its developers want it to be, it could have an enormous influence on the evolution of the human sense of self.

 

 (c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow 

Disposable Furniture and Disposable Lovers

            Ikea is a Swedish company that has had incredible success worldwide.  In an article in the online newsletter, the Robin Report (Jan. 14, 2015), Warren Shoulberg discusses the secret of this success.  By creating affordable furniture that is assembled by the customer, Ikea has made it permissible for people to easily dispose of furniture should they have to move geographically, should they move up economically or should their tastes change.  The furniture is not meant to last forever.  A person no longer has to be married to furniture that he can’t replace.  The same principle applies to the houses which Ikea produces.  Again, the customer assembles the house himself.

            Ikea has acted as an inspiration for many stores in other kinds of merchandise like clothing.  Stores like H & M and Zara create clothes that aren’t meant to be durable and that are relatively inexpensive.  It allows customers to change their clothing look more often, and thus, supposedly, to be more physically attractive.

            For many people, there is a preference to not even acquire books as things anymore.  It is much lighter to acquire a book as an e-book and read it on your nook or kindle.  Then you don’t have to worry about storing a lot of books in your residence.  For many people, the old appreciation of books as valuable, well-made and even decorative objects, sometimes with beautiful illustrations, has long since disappeared.

            This does not mean that there are no longer many people who search for quality in certain categories of products.  In previous articles, I have pointed out that many people accumulate products in order to cling to some kind of tangible material things and, thus, to defend themselves against the emptiness, the entropy found in the experiential vacuums of modern technological living environments.  But this new twist in the accumulation of disposable products represents a new kind of motivation for today’s consumers, and it is something that is definitely worth exploring.

            A disposable product is one that lasts much less time than the traditional product made for that particular product category.  It falls apart or wears out more easily.  As a phenomenon, it goes from being a highly defined figure to one that is eaten away by the disintegrating influences of entropy.  It is a phenomenon that moves in the direction of emptiness, of a vacuum.

            So if people have been accumulating figure products, to bundle them together as an island to which they can cling while floating in the experiential vacuum of modern technological living environments, why would they want to obtain figure products that fall apart into a vacuum state, and that can’t provide a long-term surrogate grounding for them?

            This leads to a discussion of what aspects of the accumulated figure products provide people today with a sense of surrogate grounding.  If it is not the solid durability of products that protects against the emptiness and entropy of the experiential vacuum, what does protect?  First of all, as has been previously noted, the accumulation of figure products is a very imperfect protection, because even many figure products don’t create the sense of pull or gravity that being anchored in a more traditional organic environment does.  So people desperately keep trying to accumulate more and more figure products in the vain hope of creating the kind of grounded connection found in a more natural living environment.  And each time the addition of a new product fails to provide the difference that allows a person to feel a long term grounding in his collection of figure products, the person becomes numb to and disconnected from his new possession.  Furthermore, there comes a point where a person’s residence runs out of room for new products.  The person gets swallowed up by his large collection of figures rather than grounded in them.

            But the person doesn’t give up on trying to ground himself in his products, because it is the only apparent option that remains for him.  So the person continues to obtain products that he can dispose of, because in truth his sensation of temporary grounding lies in the acquisition of a new product rather than holding onto it for a long period of time.  It is the equivalent of a kick or a temporary high that provides him with the sensation of the grounding for which he is searching, before it disappears.  And by having products that are disposable and therefore cheaper, he can more easily get rid of them to provide space for other new articles.  It is like a drug addiction where there is no true sustainable level of satisfaction.

            In truth, it is the active acquisition of figure products that seems to provide a temporary sensation of grounding in our modern experiential vacuum, rather than simply holding onto them, clinging to them.  It doesn’t matter whether the products are only going to last for a short time, because the sensation of grounding obtained from them is also only of short duration.  It is the novel aspect of the new possessions that leaves a new imprint on the person and temporarily jolts him out of his sense of emptiness.

            At the same time, because there is a relatively rapid turnover within categories of products, there are more and more transitions between products that provide brief periods of experiential vacuums.  When the old sofa falls apart, it usually has to be taken out of the house or apartment, before a new one is installed in its place.  That is a physical vacuum moment.  Sometimes the vacuum moment comes from simply switching emotional attachment from the broken-down product to the new one.  Buying a new sweater to replace an old worn-out sweater.  The accumulation of these numbness moments results in a growing need to fight them off with more and more experiences of surrogate grounding through the accumulation of more and more new products.  Hence, there develops an increasingly frantic and frenetic pattern of consumption.

            In the long run, this pattern of disposable products bleeds into our relationships. When there are too many isolated phenomena floating around in our field of experience, we blur them together to create an artificial mental grounding.  Different phenomena can blur back and forth into each other.  In this case, disposable products like Ikea act as an implicit model for how we deal with the people in our lives.  More and more people fall into having Ikea connections with people.  In the area of romance, this means Ikea boyfriends and girlfriends.  And because there is little grounding from organic environments that can act as a template for solid durable relationships, the Ikea relationships don’t offer a sense of secure grounding within them.  People become disconnected, bored and numb within the relationships and try to stimulate them to life with the jolts of conflict.  Either the numbness or else the static from the conflicts or both leads to the disposing of the relationships.  And as people develop an accumulated sense of numbness from the vacuum spaces between the periods of the relationships, people can end up going through more and more relationships more quickly to fight the numbness.  So a supposedly solid commitment ends up becoming one more disposable product.

            The application of Ikea purchases as a model for modern relationships fits well with a previous explanation that was developed in this column for growing sexual freedom today.  I have discussed how people today have many lovers at least partly as a substitute for the sensory variety of natural living environments that is of course missing in modern technological living environments.  One human body disconnected from the template of a natural living environment may contribute to new physical sensation, but it doesn’t offer a sense of secure grounding.  So with each new lover, a person gets more sensory variety in his life, but, at the same time, a greater sense of the lack of meaningful grounding available in the emotional commitment to one person.

            We need more durable furniture, more durable clothing and more durable relationships, if we are going to maintain a durable organic human society.  The rapid ongoing turnover of products and people in our lives, even if it is an attempt to stimulate us to life, can ultimately lead to the disintegration of human society.  Ultimately, the durability of products and people relationships in our external world helps to maintain the organic cohesion of our senses of self in our inner world.  When everything in our external world becomes transient, we become transient within ourselves.  We reinvent ourselves over and over to adjust to the new circumstances resulting from the shifting Ikea phenomena in our surroundings.  We end up losing our core sense of self.

            On the other hand, the gradual change created by evolving organic flowing blendable continual stimuli is an important part of life that is necessary to stimulate us to life and to provide new configurations of stimuli and new experiential surfaces on which to leave new and different organic imprints.  Imprints that can give us novel rich vibrant experiences and that can form the basis of our individual surrogate immortalities and our collective group surrogate immortalities in preparation for death.  But this gradual organic change has to be balanced out with a sense of continuity, a sense of firm principles and material order that gives us fundamental conceptual figures that we can focus on, fundamental conceptual figures planted firmly in psychological grounding.  Basil Davidson in his book The African Genius (1969) talks about the importance of the equilibrium between continuity and change among African tribes.  We in modern technological society have lost this equilibrium.  Technological change is occurring so rapidly.  We are being pummeled by the defined discrete stimuli from data and from disposable products.  The danger is that the loss of continuity among the phenomena in our living environment will contribute to a loss of psychological continuity in ourselves and a loss of social continuity in our human groups and ultimately to our personal and collective disintegration as organisms.  And, of course, with some of this disintegration already happening, it is no wonder that some people are already embracing the organizing principles of cyborgs and robots.  We have to find some way to bring back some of the aspects of natural living environments into our lives, if we want to survive as humans.

 

(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow

 

Personal Data And The Pixilated Human

            There has been much discussion lately of the accumulation of personal data by Internet companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google. But certainly the invasion of people’s private lives started long before these companies existed.  In the social sciences, people have been doing surveys for a long time, asking people to fill out questionnaires, or interviewing people on the telephone or face-to-face.  And behavioral psychologists have done experiments trying to acquire hard evidence with regard to how people would respond to very specific defined focused circumstances.  What these psychologists have been looking for is scientific evidence in the manner of the hard sciences like physics, chemistry and biology.  Hard rules that could give them an understanding that would allow people to be controlled and manipulated in different situations.  These behavioral psychologists have total contempt for psychodynamic psychologists who built models on more speculative intuitive theories that couldn’t be tested in a more formal scientific way.  For these behavioral psychologists, there were no meaningful truths to be obtained from a more passive observation of people as they freely discuss their feelings and thoughts and live their lives.  Such truths were too fuzzy for them, and these truths were not useful for social engineering.

            Even before the Internet companies, private marketing companies have been doing all kinds of different surveys to discover people’s preferences for different products and services.  There is one company in the United States, Nielsen that attaches a machine to televisions in private homes in order to determine what stations are being watched and at what times.  On the Internet, product preferences based on Internet purchases lead to targeted advertisements being sent to people.

            In the collection of data, we must not leave out the use of government techniques for snooping on telephone calls, e-mails, texts and tweets for purposes of national security.  Sometimes, there is a blending of private and public sources of data, as governments pressure private companies to give up their data in the name of national security.

            Increasingly, there are more and more techniques being used for gathering data without intruding into people’s lives, without making them a part of experiments, and without formally asking them questions in surveys.  So much information can be gleaned from computer and smartphone usage.  But something happens to a person when he gradually is reduced to a bundle or to bundles of data.  Something happens not only in terms of the way he is perceived by the people collecting the data, but also in terms of the way the person perceives himself.

            Collecting data assumes that a person can be reduced to a series of clear cut facts.  The whole point of these defined discrete facts is to eliminate the ambiguity with regard to a person’s life, to perceive a person in a defined job, in defined relationships with defined beliefs, thoughts, hopes, expectations and feelings.  Collecting data converts aspects that are unformed or partly formed, aspects that have fuzzy flowing blendable continual borders, into aspects that are fully formed with defined discrete borders.  A person becomes a series of firm categories: he likes this, he believes that, he wants to be this, he wants to buy that.  He is fully alert, fully conscious, fully congruous with a series of characteristics that are designated about him.

            To the extent that collectors of data act on the definitions that they create of the people under investigation, they act on the knowledge that they gather in order to control their subjects in different ways.  Some collectors, in finding shopping preferences, send advertisements for products that fall into the categories of their subjects’ preferences in order to stimulate purchases.  They want to increase sales by making shopping as frictionless as possible.  Not only is the search for products and services minimized by having them available for purchase on a computer or smartphone screen, but by stimulating only partially formed desires through the promotion of products and services similar to those pursued, the consumer doesn’t even have to go through many mental machinations to formulate his desires for what he might want in the future.  The Internet companies do that for him.  The consumer becomes a bottomless pit that is stuffed with products and services to purchase, much like a goose is stuffed with feed in close quarters in order to make foie gras.  There is certainly a loss in the narrative of the active pursuit of the right product or the right service for the right purpose.

            But the accumulation of data allows an Internet company to think it knows a consumer’s taste.  And by being reduced to these data, it becomes that much more difficult for a consumer to develop new kinds of desires, new tastes based on personal transformation.  It is as if a person can be boxed in by his likes and dislikes. 

In a way it could be said that governments also use their accumulation of data on people in order to box them in.  Governments use their collection of data to find people who might go against the policies that they, the governments, espouse.  Some of these opponents are actually dangerous people that could do real harm to their societies.  Others are peaceful citizens who simply are considering alternative solutions to the problems that the governments are trying to deal with.  Governments that are not democratic frequently perceive the people in the second category to be as threatening to their power as the people in the first category.  Data are used to keep all opponents in line, even people who are simply expressing doubt as to the efficacy of government policies without any really strong adversarial solutions.  Collections of data create strong definition in various aspects of individuals, when often such definition doesn’t really exist in real life.

It is not only that people are boxed in by the uses of data by public and private entities and prevented from easily growing, evolving and transforming in different ways.  By becoming overly defined, by becoming a list of traits and characteristics, a list of desires and beliefs and thoughts and expectations, etc., people become fragmented or, using today’s language, pixilated.  They lose a sense of the coherence of an organic sense of self, a core of who they are at the center of everything.  They become defined discrete data, defined discrete stimuli, bundles of little mental fragments, and lose their connection to the flowing blendable, continual feelings, emotions, ideas and intuitions that bind them together as whole people.

            Today, with our strongly scientific orientation towards knowledge, which correlates with our strong focus on technological innovation, we increasingly see our knowledge of people and things as based only on hard evidence, only on discrete pinpoints of knowledge, only on facts, only on data.  Fuzzy intuitions based on more passive observation, on soft empiricism, just are not taken seriously.  Social sciences like behavioral psychology, sociology and economics try to imitate the hard sciences by developing experiments and statistical studies and try to generate data based on hard numbers.  All this data supposedly helps us to understand and manipulate people in the aggregate, so they can be properly slotted, kept relatively happy and kept relatively trouble-free, so that life in society as a whole can be kept relatively frictionless, free of significant social turmoil and disruption.

            But ultimately, it means treating people as if they were simply social machines, simply robots.  As people see themselves mirrored in the endless streams of data generated by university research groups, by private companies and by government agencies, they experience themselves as bundles of data, as bundles of free-floating figures in a vacuum.  And with fractured pixilated senses of self, they are subject to the kind of manipulation that occurs with machines and robots.  Is this really the kind of life that we humans want to live?

 

© 2015 Laurence Mesirow

 

 

 

The Lost Art Of Postponing Gratification

 

            Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss my article “The Need To Have Things Right Away” with my good friend Dr. Jorge Cappon, professor emeritus of psychology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and well known psychoanalyst.  Dr. Cappon had his own ideas regarding the influence of technological innovation on the need for immediate gratification, and I thought it would be informative to discuss his psychoanalytically-based ideas here and then to elaborate on them further with some of my ideas.  Dr. Cappon is interested in the relationship between technological change and human emotional development.

            One of the most important things that a child learns as he grows up is self-control.  A baby wants what he wants right away and, to a certain extent, during his early days of life, his basic needs are usually satisfied in a timely manner.  A baby needs to get fed frequently and needs to be held frequently.  On the other hand, even a baby experiences a certain time lag between expressing his needs through crying and actually satisfying them.  A caregiver may be in another room or involved in a task that requires his immediate attention before he goes to the infant.  So even a baby experiences a little frustration.

            Dr. Cappon suggests the following hypothetical situation.  Suppose a baby could be fed on demand with a machine connected to him in such a way that he wouldn’t experience any frustration at all.  Such a baby would never develop his mental faculties properly.  When a baby doesn’t get milk right away, he develops his creative thinking by fantasizing about the milk.  Without any frustration, and while continually attached to our hypothetical machine, the baby would become an idiot.

            In the real world, as the baby grows up, he is increasingly expected to postpone gratification for what he wants.  Different cultures have different timelines for this self-control, some expecting more self-control earlier than others.  But all of them look at self-control and being able to postpone gratification as being an essential part of growing up and eventually becoming an adult.

            Growing up is a painful process.  It is so much more comfortable to remain immature.  It is uncomfortable to have to postpone gratification by having to study in order to obtain diplomas and degrees and thus to have the qualifications for a good job.  It is uncomfortable to have to work in order to obtain the money that allows one to buy the products and the services one desires.

            Now how does all this relate to the influences of modern technological living environments.  In pre-industrial societies, most of the products and services that people desired would require work to obtain them and these products and services took time to create.  In the world of traditional primary experience, things did not simply appear in one’s field of experience by pressing a button or a computer key.  But when radio, phonographs and television appeared, whole mini-worlds could be created or at least recreated by the consumer, with a few effortless frictionless processes relating to turning on the machines.  Now there are video games and computers.  Video games are magical game worlds, where one can play quickly and win (or lose) quickly.  Whether one wins or loses, one has the control to keep playing quickly and relatively frictionlessly until one does win.  With a computer or iPad or smartphone, one has the opportunity to find, create, and control many different kinds of phenomena.  As technological innovation advances on, many processes that occur on a computer occur quicker and quicker.  Furthermore, many life processes are now made more frictionless through the Internet of Things.    As all this happens, the capacity for patience and self-control gradually breaks down in young people, as they increasingly develop expectations for what they want to appear quicker and quicker.

            We are accustomed to looking at frustration as a negative phenomenon, but there is a difference between frustration that puts a drag on moving towards a goal, and frustration that puts a total block on moving towards a goal.  In the first case, the frustration creates an ongoing  moving connection to one’s grounding while traveling over it.  This kind of frustration is basically a constructive emotional friction that actually keeps one connected to the external world while moving towards a goal.  This kind of positive frustration can lead to dreaming about the goal (as Dr. Cappon noted), while experiencing the drag created by external impediments.  Nevertheless, the dream just reinforces and guides the movement towards the goal in the external world.  It is a dream that is grounded in certain important aspects of the real external world.

            This is very different from the frustration generated by an impassable obstacle on one’s journey towards a goal.  This latter situation leads to dreams that replace reality rather than guide and reinforce reality.  The kind of dream that replaces reality leads to mentally dwelling in frictionless experiential vacuums that compensate for the unbearable static stimuli created by the impassable obstacles in the real external world.

            However without some frustration, one experiences his external world as a kind of frictionless experiential vacuum.  One floats towards his goal in a numbing mental state.  More precisely, there is no traction, no friction-filled connection to the external world.  One arrives at his goal, at his product or service, in a state of numbness, so one is incapable of savoring, fully enjoying, fully appreciating the product or service.  Neither the journey to the product or service, nor the product or service itself, contribute in any way to helping the person to truly feel alive.  There is no meaningful organic imprint as can be found in a grappling assertive acquisition of the product or service.

            Postponing gratification through a frustrating experience that acts as a drag rather than a  block can ultimately increase satisfaction and enjoyment when the product or service is finally acquired.  One can stay grounded in the product or service for a while without immediately having to move on to another product or service.

            So frustration is not always something that is a negative.  By providing friction, it provides a meaningful conscious focused journey to the desired product or service, a meaningful life narrative, a rich vibrant experience.  By overcoming the drag from the friction, a person feels empowered, as he actually grapples with elements in his field of experience and makes meaningful organic imprints.  By providing traction in his field of experience, the frustration allows a person to stay grounded in his living environment, so that he can fully experience the product or service.  By staying grounded in his living environment, the person doesn’t float off into a numbing experiential vacuum, where he would constantly need to fill up his inner emptiness with more and more products and services to overcome his numbness.

            A baby is not fully aware, not fully focused, and because he can’t satisfy his basic needs by himself, not fully grounded in his field of experience.  There is always a little lag time between when a baby cries for milk and the satisfaction of that need, even when he has a doting mother.  As he grows up, he gradually is expected to postpone his gratifications for longer and longer periods of time, and as has been indicated, this is considered a basic part of psychological maturation.  But the process of psychological maturation is being gradually more and more suppressed as modern technology increasingly diminishes the time of postponing gratification in many different life situations.  With smartphones, with wearable computers, with the Internet of Things, everything is happening right away.  As a result, young people aren’t growing up in the way they are supposed to, and they are becoming addicted to immediate gratification.  How are people like this going to be able to survive unforeseen crises and catastrophes?  What is going to happen to the human race, when people develop such fragile psyches?  This is why we should look very carefully at technology that supposedly does us the favor of making life easier and easier for us.  Easier now may mean life becoming much more difficult in the future.

(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow