July 29, 2017

Escaping death is easy when you’re not really there

I sat in the corner of a great cathedral this week, paying my respects to a person I hardly knew. Funerals really aren’t my thing, but I try to take them seriously when I go. After all, you’re honoring a person’s entire life in the span of one hour. A little standing and kneeling won’t kill you.

I became especially irritated that day. Gazing around the enormous building, I noticed so many people clicking away at their phones — tapping on little glowing squares in boredom. To be fair, this was a Catholic mass — it was long — but even the organist was clicking away.

I was mad because I found myself with the same itch. Despite the fact that all my colleagues and superiors were there with me, I still felt the need to check my phone — three times.

Of course there were no emails.
 

Frederick Winslow Taylor, the great father of automation, long ago brought the stopwatch onto the factory floor, mandating the first set of efficient rules. In doing so, he stripped craftsmen of work’s reward — say, building a beautiful mahogany table — in exchange for the exactitude of automation. As a result, Taylor easily tripled production output while relegating workers to button pushing and lever guiding (think George Jetson). In his Principles of Scientific Management (1911), Taylor describes the necessity of his “stupid” factory worker:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work.

It is not hard to see why these jobs were (and still are) grinding. In fact, they were so morally debilitating that turn of the century managers struggled to find and keep labor. In The Legend of Henry Ford, Keith Sward describes the Taylorist situation Ford found himself in:

So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that towards the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963.

The working man’s value in his labor may have been put to death, but families still needed food on the table. In order to incentivize laborers, something had to replace the substance of work. Ford’s answer? The doubling of wages. 

Here, automation had a double effect. By simultaneously increasing the output of goods and the material wealth of laborers, Ford and others were able to replace the value of work with modern consumerism — focusing workers instead on “what they could buy” with their labor and not the drag of they were doing.

By removing the craftsman’s brain and regulating his movements, factories could maximize their productivity, minimize mistakes, and offload the intellectual weight of creation to a system with no personal wants and needs.

The laborer no longer needed to work — only comply.
 

We find ourselves in a similar situation with our media. In centuries past information was difficult to acquire and costly to send. The craftsman building a table in the 1800’s also found his communications much more purposeful and refined — by necessity. He sent letters that took months to arrive and read stories that were relevant to his life or trade (maybe the occasional gossip arriving months behind). He learned and read what he could act on and acted on problems he could readily resolve.

The telegraph, and eventually radio and television, changed that quiet resolve forever. By automating the flow of information, we could now more quickly talk to each other, aggregate details, and dwell on narratives of (supposedly) greater consequence. Much as Taylor erased the moral value of human work, Claude Chappe — the inventor of the first successful telegraph — eradicated the moral value of correspondence.

1. The assembly line, in removing the value of human work from labor, opened up a whole new world of material goods lacking human value.
2. The telegraph, by removing the value of human work from information, opened up a whole new world of media space lacking human value.

Today, we find ourselves amidst a sea of communications, none of them important and fewer relevant. Too few of us are powerful enough to combat the temptations of our notifications because, like Taylor’s good lever pullers, we have been taught well. The consumerism that drove laborers to continue working despite lacking the rewards of real work imitates perfectly the consumption that keeps us clicking.

By ripping away the value of our communications and equalizing all communications, we struggle now to distinguish the important types from the unimportant. Email? Tweet? Letter? All are the same. And when we do finally identify the important ones, we fail at knowing how to resolve our anxieties — we feel powerless. 

An American man in the 1790’s would have had a hard enough time caring deeply about the French Revolution — let alone putting any amount of effort into learning about one small dying boy named Charlie Gard. However, had he learned of him, he probably would have spent a great deal of time in prayer.

In the wake of easy-anywhere information, we no longer need to worry about communicating well — as long as we are communicating.
 

We have trained ourselves to dwell on small things and, by doing so, found ourselves ultimately unable to handle the larger ones when they turn up.

Reflecting on this, I now find myself empathizing with the packed church of Candy Crushers last week. Set in their ways, they too, like I, have lost the ability to focus their attention on something greater than themselves — even for the span of a mere hour.

The word “inattentive” is most apt to describe this illness, but the word itself is a paradox. Because while attentiveness speaks to one’s ability to focus, inattentiveness does not suggest a lack of focus; instead, it is a focus on the wrong things.

By ushering in the glamorous age of human-free automation, steamrolling past the human value in work and correspondence, I would say it is quite clear that we have either lost focus of the important things or stopped paying attention altogether.