The Inevitable

I recently had coffee with a friend who was applying for a job at what I consider to be one of the more unethical, medium-sized tech companies. We discussed the potential cultural, ethical and technological implications of the work briefly, before a wall came up. “Ultimately, if they don’t build it, someone else will,” he said, and continued to justify a likely brief tenure as a chance to learn during this manifestation of inevitability. This kind of technocratic fatalism is nothing new in the Bay Area, but at a moment when people are increasingly questioning how their values and their worlds are out of alignment, this acquiescence to not only participate in something potentially unethical, but to treat it as an intellectual curiosity really struck me. This sort of mindset has more extreme parallels in industrial militarization - if we don’t build the most powerful military, someone else will, and they will come and destroy us, so we may as well not only build it, but profit from it along the way.

There’s a dark humor to the country’s supposed-brightest minds falling victim to this scarcity-mindset holdover from our hunter-gatherer days, when food for me likely meant less or no food for you. In a country with staggering food-waste statistics and staggering wealth-inequality statistics - including the world’s most billionaires - there is no longer a question of whether there is enough to go around, but instead a question of whether what there is is being distributed evenly enough. There is also the question of whether people are awake, educated, and acquainted with their agency enough to understand that they can change the status quo, rather than accepting surveillance-capitalist hyper-accretion and technocratic shareholder-value-optimization as inevitable.

In her essay Authoritarianism Feels Surprisingly Normal - Until it Doesn’t, Gisela Salim-Peyer digs into the waves of fear, hopelessness, and normalization that enabled inevitability in Venezuela. “Each authoritarian milestone—the first political prisoner, the first closure of an opposition media outlet—is anticipated with fear. Then the milestone goes by, and after a brief period of outrage, life continues as before. You begin to wonder if things will be so bad after all. […] The problem with constantly hearing about impending collapse as life goes on looking very much the same is that the urgency tends to dissipate.” This type of long-term normalization leads to a numbness, a rote acceptance of unacceptable circumstances.

This cycle of normalization, acceptance and ensuing passivity often seemed understandable, even excusable until recently - after all, we are increasingly conditioned to accept fragmented streams of information, stripped of context, placed against other now-more-context-less information, and even expected to keep up with much of it, all while being increasingly crushed by the accelerating daily demands of capitalism. It is simpler, easier, and ultimately more self-serving to accept all that we think we cannot change, expanding that umbrella and leaning more heavily on that part of the common Serenity Prayer. In a review of the movie No Other Choice, Jenny Odell writes that “for an individual trying to make ends meet, there is often ‘no other choice’ but to accept self-abasement. Other people become objects blocking the way to freedom.”

What motivates us to begin to shift our focus, to look at what could or should change? Writer Kola Heyward-Rotimi, at a recent talk called “On Futurities” at Bathers Library, discussed the idea of Hope as a motivator: an idea that has been sold to us over and over. “It’s such a big part of how we shape our political action that one of our previous bombers-in-chief made it his own one-word slogan.” But, he insisted, hope is “an unreliable driver. We need to act regardless if the hope is there. We are in an increasingly hopeless situation right now […] But does that change the reality of the fight? Because things are hopeless, does that forfeit your will to survive and live?”

When our basic survival is on the line, this shift in perspective or motivation to act becomes undeniable. We find ourselves increasingly and often forcefully falling out of what Ernst Fraenkel, in his analysis of authoritarian Germany, termed this “normative state” of acceptance and normalization into a second, “prerogative state.” Discussing Fraenkel’s ideas in the context of Minnesota, Sigal Samuel writes that “suddenly you’re in a realm where the rule of law does not exist, where citizens can be killed with impunity, where you — even you, who thought you were invulnerable — can become a target.” Now, it is time - even past time - to push back, to re-consider the ways we participate in and even co-create this system, including through our work. “There is a choice: not to succumb to a kind of Stockholm syndrome, absorbing the anti-human values of a game that benefits so very few. The people who actually do the work have a right to the conversation about what purposes work serves in our lives and in society, beyond the brute measure of efficiency” (Odell). To surrender to passivity, hopelessness, and fatalism that the outcomes, the products, and the technology are inevitable is to surrender ourselves, our values, our morals, even our humanity to a few dozen deeply unwell people obsessed with a number going up.

Aristotle (lol) wrote about the idea that politics are the continuation of ethics at the level of the community - an idea that is becoming increasingly clear to many who previously might have hand-waved away “political” discussions in social settings, but now find themselves participating in workplace unions, mutual aid networks, creative communities, and more. “Taking some kind of action is in everyone’s best interest — not because of an abstract moral obligation, but because it’s in moments like these that we choose what kind of people we will be, and what kind of legacy we’ll leave behind for the next generations to follow” (Samuel). In his reporting on Minnesota, Adam Serwer notes that if there was “an overarching ideology, you could call it ‘neighborism’ - a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.” People are increasingly stitching together social fabrics interlaced with intentional collective ethics, which allow our world to function without relying on the oppressive, top-down structures that have begun to crumble. Jenny Odell, taking it back to work again: “Our collective ability to decide what work should mean takes time and space, and this time and space can only be the fragile product of mutual commitment. It’s the image of the future that appears when we take off the blinders of individualism. Whatever we do, we should each reject the lie that all of this is inevitable. There is always another choice.”

Misc

• Happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrate! I enjoyed my acupuncturist friend Ally’s recent newsletter about the upcoming lunar year, some insights from traditional Chinese medicine, and some intention-setting questions. You can read that here

• I have been thinking a lot about ways to translate the above into tangible elements in my own business, and recently documented or codified a lot of those ideas publicly here

• I have been enjoying reading about the ideas of new, collectively-owned business structures through the documentation of Subvert.fm’s alternative to Bandcamp, outlined in their compellingly-named “Plan for the Artist-Owned Internet”

• I don’t know how I missed the band Lip Critic, but they’ve been hitting the right zone for me - sort of like The Streets meets grime meets Show Me The Body maybe?