Instant Human (Just Add Water to Credit Score)

Digital watches are a pretty neat idea

What is technology? Easy: Digital watches.

A computer, especially an Apple IIe, is technology. A Walkman, a Discman, a Zune, and an iPod are technology.

A handheld Coleco Electronic Quarterback I played with at age eight is technology and might be an effective assistant QB coach for the Chicago Bears.

Some things that don’t feel, to me, like technology: A window. A dimmer switch. A record player. A jar of orange dust that becomes something called Tang when mixed with water.

Maybe technology is simply “a product that was popularized since you were young.” All those items that were already here when I became conscious, like Tang, just seem like ‘the way things are’. Not technological. My glasses, clothes, Al Green Let’s Stay Together button, Ikea lamp, and handmade, glazed coffee cup, to name just the things within my field of vision, don’t feel like technology.

But, of course, they are.

To a hammer, everything is my ring finger (when I’m hanging a picture)

If you look around, you’ll see that most things an average person encounters are technology of some sort. From sidewalk to escalator to door hinges to surveillance drones. Even the tree outside my window is placed and maintained by the city and arguably a technological product. Its purpose is to beautify and to raise the property values of the neighborhood. We might not think of it as technology, but it didn’t float in on a coconut.

A tree was a tree until the axe was invented. Then it became firewood. Our experience of the tree is mediated through the new technology. You have a toxic relationship to your tree when you have an axe in your hand. You have a different relationship to your family when you have an axe and are the winter caretaker of the Overlook hotel.

The slug of modernity

The great passion of my life is an echinoderm called a beche de mer or sea cucumber. Close your eyes and meditate on these little creatures, whose mouths are also their buttholes, just hanging out in the shallow waters of idyllic little Pacific Islands until about 1845 or so. That’s when European traders decided our buttmouthed friends would sell in Hong Kong. The sea cucumbers were no longer sea cucumbers: they were product. The technology of trade made them a commodity. European traders tried to convince the locals that the peaceful little phalli lying in a few feet of warm water should become the focus of their society. The islanders, they said, ought to devote their days to the getting and curing of our little pals. Did they have something more important to do? Shouldn’t they perceive those varicolored slugs in the same way a trading company does?

Technology, even the simplest, changes our perception of the world. And with that, it changes how we spend our days. In this way “capitalism” is be a technology. It’s one way of looking at the sea cucumber. And by sea cucumber I mean the world. Maybe “anything which mediates our perception of the world” is technology. Then language is a technology. Are dreams? Thoughts?

(Please note: I have a PhD on this subject and am among the top twenty scholars on the meaning of sea cucumbers to 19^th century Micronesia.)

Maybe technology is “something created that mediates our experience of or understanding of the world.” Measuring time changes our relationship to the day. Cars change our ideas of distance. Tang complicates the nature of “juice”.

What is an Age of Technology?

So far:

• Technology is not just “recently marketed stuff”;

• Technology changes (or mediates) our relationship to the world;

• Technology can be (or can support) a way of organizing society, like capitalism, which turned the poor sea cucumber into a commodity.

But what is an age of technology? The axe probably changed society in profound ways, but it did not bring on an age of technology. There must be something different, besides the obvious, between the latest iPhone and an axe. It’s not just that an iPhone is more complicated and a product of myriad other technological advances. One chops a tree and the other chops your mind.

To understand this mind-chopping, it’s worth it to read or skim the great tracts of the early 20^th century whose focus is on “the worker” when the idea of “the worker” was novel. (Yes, you may have to crack open Marx. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.) With the invention of the human (as) resource, labor is separated from the individual human. When humans become useful commodities like trees and sea cucumbers, an age of technology begins. Humans are interchangeable “labor” machines; made that way by industrial technology. To paraphrase the late, great, Bill Fay: All our time was lying on the factory floor.

In the 21^st century, humans are transitioning from labor machines to data products. Labor, in the 20^th century sense, is devalued. (In fact, the closer one comes to helping someone through work, the less money one is likely to make.) Human choices and thoughts are valued at the aggregate but not individual level. It is cliche to say “you are the product” but, yes, you are the product throughout your day – driving, shopping, sleeping, dieting, listening to music, texting, posting… The attention economy and surveillance capitalism are the new assembly lines. All our time is lying on the endless scroll.

An age of technology is one where various technologies, with no single person in control, transforms humans first into commodity and then into product.

Life is a (credit) journey

What does it mean to be human in an age where technology alienates us not just from our work but from ourselves? Well, it’s not as if humans stopped being human a hundred years ago. But we do face different choices in an age of technology. We may need to choose between experiencing our life or experiencing our credit score.

Which leads us back to the foundational question of this newsletter: What does it mean to be human in an age of technology?

My Chase bank credit card page offers, for “free”, something called “Credit Journey”. Credit Journey is a text written by a machine that offers a biography of who I am based on my purchases, debts, jobs, places of residence, and history of on-time payments. Chase Credit Journey assigns me a number — which I have been told is very important — as to my worth as a consumer.

Who is the person that this text imagines?

And who am I in relation to that person?

In answering that question, if I can answer that question, I might at least begin to understand who I am in an age of technology. Who I am in this age, and what it means to be human, is the distance between my self as credit journey and my self as aging human, experiencer of the universe with one expiring and fragile meat-brain. That distance, I think, is at least as far as Tang powder is to orange juice.

Thank you for reading, skimming, scrolling through Desire Paths. If you like it, please skeet, skat, or skate it to your friends. Desire Paths lays quietly in the shallows, unobtrusively, then plops into your mailbox every two weeks. Next time on Desire Paths: Autobiography of a credit score.