Technology and Tradition

Home for Christmas again, I’m greeted by the smell of cinnamon scented febreeze, cloves, salt, heat, dust, fabric softener, guilt. The half hearted crucifix suspended round my neck leads me back here once again in search of some divine appeasement, an elusive sense of moral worth, a hunger that I will never fill. I spent too much on presents this year, again, as an offering to the eldritch freudian god: a deeply held yearning to cross a barrier of understanding that is probably constitutionally impossible. I will hold the original sin - the incomprehensible trauma and love of my forefathers - until I pass it on to my own children, or die, and in either case pay it forward to the next generation of people. The powerhouse of capital is not rational at all but rather the incalculable cosmic guilt of being alive; the purest form of debt.

Capital is a death star that orchestrates this debt; that finds ever more inventive and creative ways to turn the inertia of our existential pain into activity. To this effect, it is dazzlingly brilliant. It obliterates all that would destabilise this notion altogether, its ontopower (Massumi, Politics of Affect, 2015) being onticidal (Warren, Onticide, 2017) it technologically demolishes all oppositional, or even merely alternative, forms of existence. Genocide is the original ontocide. The commodity is the second. Our capacity to imagine is being systematically eroded by this power, our ability to exist in ways not encapsulated by the commodity form: our families, our gifts, our traditions. It’s weapon of mass destruction; communication technology.

Technology is accelerative, and I suppose this is why people believe it will converge to some singularity; where the accelerative rate exceeds the rate at which we perceive time to pass. Why we see a convergence in the facial features of celebrities (Tolentino, 2019). Now we open instagram and see finely tailored recommendations for products, ever inflating in specificity. This, too, will converge to the same product forms to be gifted to each other. Entropy converges us to homogeneity. Human beings, as far as civilisations have existed, are counter-entropic. A self-observing decision making machine, our brains being capable of reconstructing the world as much as observing it directly, allows us to choose actions that will preserve and maintain our structures. Maybe there is an entropy in this that will accelerate us to our demise, but if we imbue our technology with its own world-reconstructive powers, we may stand a chance of avoiding it. Marketing technologies as they stand are crude maximisers that have no understanding of their own embeddedness in the world, and so will suck every last molecule out of it until its death.

My life has seen an acceleration in Christmas. What was once a simple tradition has become year on year more consumerist. Each year, the commodity form grows new tentacles to ensnare its unsuspecting sentimental prey; the marketing technologies obtain new avenues of affect. Our attentions grow ever more sophisticated mathematical representations in the eyes of the infrastructure of capital and it knows our weaknesses. To sell is to commit an act of war on the mind of the customer; to wrestle with the neural and cultural pathways that instantiate act - and machine learning is the nuclear option. We lack the firepower to ever win against these weapons of mass de-stocking, and facing this we feel lost. Enslaved by the subborn fact of our own reward systems, there can surely be no escape without escaping the technology altogether. This is not without tradeoff, we may wish to maintain our channels of communication, but these are enriched by using the apps wholesale. The momentum is always in the direction of more activity, more discussion, greater rapidity, and this is what poses the fundamental challenge. No change can ever occur without an analysis of convergence, of equilibrium; an idea of where your revolution will stabilise- and if it always pulls back to the same place, with enough time and entropy it will be as if there was no revolution at all.

I emplore the world to take a step back; to cease engaging in activity for activity’s sake. To live in the world fully and not allow these mechanised pathways of reward and guilt and debt to enslave us. For the project- as long as we have had knowledge- is the abolition of the spirit of slavery on earth, from moses to jesus to marx, and to what lies beyond. The spirit of slavery and the spirit of entropy are one and the same: to be free is to grow, forever.

Go back home.