Last week’s discussion of externalities—costs of doing
business that get dumped onto the economy, the community, or the environment,
so that those doing the dumping can make a bigger profit—is, I’m glad to say,
not the first time this issue has been raised recently. The long silence that closed around such
things three decades ago is finally cracking; they’re being mentioned again,
and not just by archdruids. One of my
readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Joe McInerney—noted an article in
Grist a while back that pointed out the awkward fact that
none
of the twenty biggest industries in today’s world could break even, much less
make a profit, if they had to pay for the damage they do to the
environment.
Now of course the conventional wisdom these days interprets
that statement to mean that it’s unfair to make those industries pay for the
costs they impose on the rest of us—after all, they have a God-given right to
profit at everyone else’s expense, right?
That’s certainly the attitude of fracking firms in North Dakota, who
recently proposed that they ought to be exempted from the state’s rules on dumping radioactive waste, because following the rules would cost them too much money.
That the costs externalized by the fracking industry will sooner or later be
paid by others, as radionuclides in fracking waste work their way up the food
chain and start producing cancer clusters, is of course not something anyone in
the industry or the media is interested in discussing.
Watch this sort of thing, and you can see the chasm opening
up under the foundations of industrial society. Externalized costs don’t just
go away; one way or another, they’re going to be paid, and costs that don’t
appear on a company’s balance sheet still affect the economy. That’s the
argument of The Limits to Growth, still
the most accurate (and thus inevitably the most reviled) of the
studies that tried unavailingly to turn industrial society away from its
suicidal path: on a finite planet, once an inflection point is passed, the
costs of economic growth rise faster than growth does, and sooner or later
force the global economy to its knees.
The tricks of accounting that let corporations pretend that
their externalized costs vanish into thin air don’t change that bleak
prognosis. Quite the contrary, the pretense that externalities don’t matter
just makes it harder for a society in crisis to recognize the actual source of
its troubles. I’ve come to think that that’s the unmentioned context behind a
dispute currently roiling those unhallowed regions where economists lurk in the
shrubbery: the debate over secular stagnation.
Secular stagnation? That’s the concept, unmentionable until
recently, that the global economy could stumble into a rut of slow, no, or
negative growth, and stay there for years. There are still plenty of economists
who insist that this can’t happen, which is rather funny, really, when you
consider that this has basically been the state of the global economy since
2009. (My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest, in fact, that if you
subtract the hallucinatory paper wealth manufactured by derivatives and similar
forms of financial gamesmanship from the world’s GDP, the production of
nonfinancial goods and services worldwide has actually been declining since
before the 2008 housing crash.)
Even among those who admit that what’s happening can indeed
happen, there’s no consensus as to how or why such a thing could occur. On the off chance that any mainstream
economists are lurking in the shrubbery in the even more unhallowed regions
where archdruids utter unspeakable heresies, and green wizards clink mugs of
homebrewed beer together and bay at the moon, I have a suggestion to offer: the
most important cause of secular stagnation is the increasing impact of
externalities on the economy. The dishonest macroeconomic bookkeeping that
leads economists to think that externalized costs go away because they’re not
entered into anyone’s ledger books doesn’t actually make them disappear;
instead, they become an unrecognized burden on the economy as a whole, an
unfelt headwind blowing with hurricane force in the face of economic growth.
Thus there’s a profound irony in the insistence by North
Dakota fracking firms that they ought to be allowed to externalize even more of
their costs in order to maintain their profit margin. If I’m right, the buildup
of externalized costs is what’s causing the ongoing slowdown in economic
activity worldwide that’s driving down commodity prices, forcing interest rates
in many countries to zero or below, and resurrecting the specter of
deflationary depression. The fracking firms in question thus want to respond to
the collapse in oil prices—a result of secular stagnation—by doing even more of
what’s causing secular stagnation. To say that this isn’t likely to end well is
to understate the case considerably.
In the real world, of course, mainstream economists don’t
listen to suggestions from archdruids, and fracking firms, like every other
business concern these days, can be expected to put their short-term cash flow
ahead of the survival of their industry, or for that matter of industrial civilization
as a whole. Thus I propose to step aside from the subject of economic
externalities for a moment—though I’ll be returning to it at intervals as we
proceed with this sequence of posts—in order to discuss a subtler and less
crassly financial form of the same phenomenon.
That form came in for discussion in
the same post two weeks ago that brought the issue of externalities
into this blog’s ongoing conversation. Quite a few readers commented about the
many ways in which things labeled “more advanced,” “more progressive,” and the
like were actually less satisfactory and less effective at meeting human needs
than the allegedly more primitive technologies they replaced. Some of those
comments focused, and quite sensibly, on the concrete examples, but others
pondered the ways that today’s technology fails systematically at meeting
certain human needs, and reflected on the underlying causes for that failure.
One of my readers—tip of the archdruidical hat here to Ruben—gave an elegant
frame for that discussion by suggesting that the peak of technological
complexity in our time may also be described as peak meaninglessness.
I’d like to take the time to unpack that phrase. In the most
general sense, technologies can be divided into two broad classes, which we can
respectively call tools and prosthetics. The difference is a matter of
function. A tool expands human potential, giving people the ability to do
things they couldn’t otherwise do. A prosthetic, on the other hand, replaces
human potential, doing something that under normal circumstances, people can do
just as well for themselves. Most
discussions of technology these days focus on tools, but the vast majority of
technologies that shape the lives of people in a modern industrial society are
not tools but prosthetics.
Prosthetics have a definite value, to be sure. Consider an
artificial limb, the sort of thing on which the concept of
technology-as-prosthetic is modeled. If you’ve lost a leg in an accident, say,
an artificial leg is well worth having; it replaces a part of ordinary human
potential that you don’t happen to have any more, and enables you to do things
that other people can do with their own leg. Imagine, though, that some clever
marketer were to convince people to have their legs cut off so that they could
be fitted for artificial legs. Imagine, furthermore, that the advertising for
artificial legs became so pervasive, and so successful, that nearly everybody became
convinced that human legs were hopelessly old-fashioned and ugly, and rushed
out to get their legs amputated so they could walk around on artificial legs.
Then, of course, the manufacturers of artificial arms got
into the same sort of marketing, followed by the makers of sex toys. Before
long you’d have a society in which most people were gelded quadruple amputees
fitted with artificial limbs and rubber genitals, who spent all their time
talking about the wonderful things they could do with their prostheses. Only in
the darkest hours of the night, when the TV was turned off, might some of them
wonder why it was that a certain hard-to-define numbness had crept into all
their interactions with other people and the rest of the world.
In a very real sense, that’s the way modern industrial
society has reshaped and deformed human life for its more privileged inmates.
Take any human activity, however humble or profound, and some clever marketer
has found a way to insert a piece of technology in between the person and the
activity. You can’t simply bake bread—a simple, homely, pleasant activity that
people have done themselves for thousands of years using their hands and a few
simple handmade tools; no, you have to have a bread machine, into which you
dump a prepackaged mix and some liquid, push a button, and stand there being
bored while it does the work for you, if you don’t farm out the task entirely
to a bakery and get the half-stale industrially extruded product that passes
for bread these days.
Now of course the bread machine manufacturers and the
bakeries pitch their products to the clueless masses by insisting that nobody
has time to bake their own bread any more. Ivan Illich pointed out in Energy
and Equity a long time ago the logical fallacy here, which is that using a
bread machine or buying from a bakery is only faster if you don’t count the
time you have to spend earning the money needed to pay for it, power it,
provide it with overpriced prepackaged mixes, repair it, clean it, etc., etc.,
etc. Illich’s discussion focused on automobiles; he pointed out that if you
take the distance traveled by the average American auto in a year, and divide
that by the total amount of time spent earning the money to pay for the auto,
fuel, maintenance, insurance, etc., plus all the other time eaten up by tending
to the auto in various ways, the average American car goes about 3.5 miles an
hour: about the same pace, that is, that an ordinary human being can walk.
If this seems somehow reminiscent of last week’s discussion
of externalities, dear reader, it should. The claim that technology saves time
and labor only seems to make sense if you ignore a whole series of
externalities—in this case, the time you have to put into earning the money to
pay for the technology and into coping with whatever requirements, maintenance
needs, and side effects the technology has. Have you ever noticed that the more
“time-saving technologies” you bring into your life, the less free time you
have? This is why—and it’s also why the average medieval peasant worked shorter
hours, had more days off, and kept a larger fraction of the value of his labor
than you do.
Something else is being externalized by prosthetic
technology, though, and it’s that additional factor that gives Ruben’s phrase
“peak meaninglessness” its punch. What are you doing, really, when you use a
bread machine? You’re not baking bread; the machine is doing that. You’re
dumping a prepackaged mix and some water into a machine, closing the lid,
pushing a button, and going away to do something else. Fair enough—but what is
this “something else” that you’re doing? In today’s industrial societies, odds
are you’re going to go use another piece of prosthetic technology, which means
that once again, you’re not actually doing anything. A machine is doing
something for you. You can push that button and walk away, but again, what are
you going to do with your time? Use another machine?
The machines that industrial society uses to give this
infinite regress somewhere to stop—televisions, video games, and computers
hooked up to the internet—simply take the same process to its ultimate extreme.
Whatever you think you’re doing when you’re sitting in front of one of these
things, what you’re actually doing is staring at little colored pictures on a
glass screen and pushing some buttons. All things considered, this is a
profoundly boring activity, which is why the little colored pictures jump
around all the time; that’s to keep your nervous system so far off balance that
you don’t notice just how tedious it is to spend hours at a time staring at
little colored pictures on a screen.
I can’t help but laugh when people insist that the internet
is an information-rich environment. It’s quite the opposite, actually: all you
get from it is the very narrow trickle of verbal, visual, and auditory
information that can squeeze through the digital bottleneck and turn into
little colored pictures on a glass screen. The best way to experience this is
to engage in a media fast—a period in which you deliberately cut yourself off
from all electronic media for a week or more, preferably in a quiet natural
environment. If you do that, you’ll find that it can take two or three days, or
even more, before your numbed and dazzled nervous system recovers far enough
that you can begin to tap in to the ocean of sensory information and sensual
delight that surrounds you at every moment. It’s only then, furthermore, that
you can start to think your own thoughts and dream your own dreams, instead of
just rehashing whatever the little colored pictures tell you.
A movement of radical French philosophers back in the 1960s,
the Situationists, argued that modern industrial society is basically a scheme
to convince people to hand over their own human capabilities to the industrial
machine, so that imitations of those capabilities can be sold back to them at
premium prices. It was a useful analysis then, and it’s even more useful now,
when the gap between realities and representations has become even more drastic
than it was back then. These days, as often as not, what gets sold to people
isn’t even an imitation of some human capability, but an abstract
representation of it, an arbitrary marker with only the most symbolic
connection to what it represents.
This is one of the reasons why I think it’s deeply mistaken
to claim that Americans are materialistic. Americans are arguably the least
materialistic people in the world; no actual materialist—no one who had the
least appreciation for actual physical matter and its sensory and sensuous
qualities—could stand the vile plastic tackiness of America’s built environment
and consumer economy for a fraction of a second. Americans don’t care in the least about
matter; they’re happy to buy even the most ugly, uncomfortable, shoddily made
and absurdly overpriced consumer products you care to imagine, so long as
they’ve been convinced that having those products symbolizes some abstract
quality they want, such as happiness, freedom, sexual pleasure, or what have
you.
Then they wonder, in the darkest hours of the night, why all
the things that are supposed to make them happy and satisfied somehow never
manage to do anything of the kind. Of course there’s a reason for that, too,
which is that happy and satisfied people don’t keep on frantically buying
products in a quest for happiness and satisfaction. Still, the little colored
pictures keep showing them images of people who are happy and satisfied because
they guzzle the right brand of tasteless fizzy sugar water, and pay for the
right brand of shoddily made half-disposable clothing, and keep watching the
little colored pictures: that last above all else. “Tune in tomorrow” is the
most important product that every media outlet sells, and they push it every
minute of every day on every stop and key.
That is to say, between my fantasy of voluntary amputees
eagerly handing over the cash for the latest models of prosthetic limbs, and
the reality of life in a modern industrial society, the difference is simply in
the less permanent nature of the alterations imposed on people here and
now. It’s easier to talk people into
amputating their imaginations than it is to convince them to amputate their
limbs, but it’s also a good deal easier to reverse the surgery.
What gives this even more importance than it would otherwise
have, in turn, is that all this is happening in a society that’s hopelessly out
of touch with the realities that support its existence, and that relies on
bookkeeping tricks of the sort discussed toward the beginning of this essay to
maintain the fantasy that it’s headed somewhere other than history’s well-used
compost bin. The externalization of the mind and the imagination plays just as
important a role in maintaining that fantasy as the externalization of
costs—and the cold mechanical heart of the externalization of the mind and
imagination is mediation, the insertion of technological prosthetics
into the space between the individual and the world. We’ll talk more about that
in next week’s post.
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