I love my car. It’s a 2011 Hyundai Elantra, manual transmission, with knobs, levers and a CD player. I love how the car feels when I drive it up a steep hill in second; the way the car and I respond to our environment together. That I have to pay attention. I like the simplicity of it: no menus I have to click through, not too many choices to make or things to adjust. Utilitarian. I like that I can look at it and, at least superficially, understand how all the pieces work together. Writing about my car feels like one way to preserve and celebrate something that I worry is fading in the name of profit maximization. 97% of cars produced after 2023 include at least one screen, while Tesla
some people feel that way about modern cars: step forward; futuristic; proof of the limitless capabilities of humans.
and maybe I can warm up to that point of view. But what it comes down to for me is whether or not we have consented to move into this new age.
so many modern products hide their real costs; the cost-benefit analysis is hidden from us, we don’t get a say. In fact, quite the opposite: we get coerced into buying, a trend which is only on the rise given the rise of social media, rampant individualism and personal branding, and the speed with which we get bombarded by it all.
AI is perhaps the one at everyone’s forefront right now: why do tech bros get to decide how these models get trained? what biases and specs we enter; the risks “we” are willing to take with this technology, the job loss..
but it’s the subtler ways in which our consent gets eroded every day, and our agency taken away, that worries me the most: the microplastics, the child labor, the waste, the way our waste is processed, the water we drink, the clothes we wear.
I just finished reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, and she writes about this beautifully. She refers to the “Shadow Lands”.
“That’s because the surface layers of markets that middle-class people in wealthy parts of the planet engage with directly - brightly lit grocery stores and gas stations, sleek websites and dull offices - are not the whole story of capitalism; they are its storefront. All of these operations require a level of extraction from their workers, shoppers and users, but they also sit on top of more hidden parts of the supply chain, zones of hyper-exploitation, human containment, and ecosystem poisoning that are not glitches in the system but have always been integral parts of what makes our world run. ”
Who gets to decide what the future of humanity looks like? How much does that future take root from our current society, which is in a state of decay? How can we trust that we will have a say in that shiny future, in ensuring that it keeps its promise of prosperity (sources that show the impact of futurism on environment, but also honestly discuss ways it could solve; literature on AI and the economy) for all when those promises were never kept before? If that shiny future continues from a system that depends on those Shadow Lands, is that shiny future just another means of further entrenching wealth and power with the few? If the soil is rotten, can you expect healthy new life to grow from it? (ways in which futurism is connected to existing systems of exploitation)
Speaking of consent, that might be at the heart of some of the major transformations we are seeing around the world but particularly in the USA today. Naomi Klein’s book also talks about that:
“After months of listening to Bannon, I can say this with great certainty: While most of us who oppose his political project choose not to see him, he is watching us closely. The issues we are abandoning, the debates we aren’t having, the people we are insulting and discarding. He is watching all of it, and he is stitching together a political agenda out of it […] And now our critiques of oligarchic rule are being fully absorbed by the hard right and turned into dark doppelgangers of themseves. The structural critiques of capitalism are gone, and in their place are discombobulated conspiracies that sonehow frame deregulated capitalism as communism in disguise. ”