From the two Andrews

[cosmolinguist]

So I read this link thanks to andrewducker:

"Providing individuals with more autonomy appears to be important for reducing negative psychological symptoms, relatively independent of wealth....

"Once people reach the point of being able to meet their basic needs, more money leads to marginal gains at best or even less well-being....

"The very strong overall pattern was that individualism is associated with better well-being overall."

And that reminded me of something andrewhickey shared the other day:

Wage labor depends on imag­in­ing peo­ple as having two selves: the pub­lic self, the body which does the actual labor­ing; and the pri­vate self, the self which signed the con­tract to do the labor.... I’m here stock­ing these shelves at Wal­Mart, but it’s not really me....

But the sense of pri­vate self is clearly erod­ing. We are under con­stant sur­veil­lance at all times. Not just by traf­fic cam­eras, ATM cam­eras and other pub­lic secu­rity devices, but also by our credit cards, by Amazon.com and other retail­ers who track our buy­ing pref­er­ences. Face­book and other social media sites track our pref­er­ences and expres­sions: your car prob­a­bly includes an event data recorder and your iphone is log­ging your location....

If end­ing slav­ery required uni­ver­sal­iz­ing a sense of two selves, what larger effects will erod­ing the sense of pri­vacy have?

One of the ways in which that writer answers his own question is to speculate on the return of human slavery (in America, is the implication throughout this whole piece). I think another implication is that this kind of sur­veil­lance can add to our unhappiness.

Exactly the individualism and autonomy that is more important to our well-being than money is what's chipped away by Amazon and Facebook, by Foursquare and store loyalty cards. A study, which asked people to download an iPhone app to see how often their mind wandered and how happy they were about it, gave surprisingly high numbers for unhappy daydreams. But I wonder if it isn't just that the gadgets are draining away our happiness, turning our friends and hobbies and commutes and lunches and TVs and shoes and everything into commodities so smug men in designer clothes can market more innovatively and advertise more effectively and try to convince us to swap our money for love and acceptance and contentment and lots of other things they don't care about unless they turn a profit.

Of course all this is nothing compared to slavery. But still. Dude.

Comments

[sfred]

I think (even more) that you would really really like that book I read recently.

[cosmolinguist]

Ooh, yes! That does seem the kind of thing that, had I read it, I wouldn't have to be ranting weakly and ineffectually on this topic here :)

[haggis.livejournal.com]

This post made me thing of the latest post on Slipped Stitch (http://slippedstitch.blogspot.com/) (which I assume you've seen cos I found out about the blog from you, via taimatsu's post) about the book Making is Connecting (http://www.makingisconnecting.org/), which seems to be about using crafts and creative pursuits to get away from the passive consumption cycle. But then I think about how much money I've spent on yarn/needles/knitting books and it seems there's an awful lot of money involved there too.

[cosmolinguist]

I think the emphasis is on avoiding passivity more than consumption, though. Any gadget-avoiding interests or hobbies are bound to still require you to buy stuff at some point: cycling is great once I've got a bike and a lock and a helmet; gardening requires plants and seeds and soil and fertilizer and weed killer, painters need paint and canvases and brushes, etc.

But buying a scarf or a blanket or a jumper is a very different thing from making a scarf or a blanket or a jumper; as I said once, "I don't think knitting isn't just tangling up a lot of string. I think it's also tangling up everything that got you to that place and everything you were thinking about when you were doing it." Thus it can't help but be different, no matter if you spent the same amount on the yarn and needles as you would have on a store-bought finished article.

[andrewducker]

Fortunately, my public and private selves are reasonably coherent nowadays. It certainly makes me much happier to be one person, and not multiple people. Helps that I don't really believe in privacy.

[cosmolinguist]

A lot of people don't have the luxury of being only one person. It's great that you do, I'm glad you're happy, but this wouldn't bring everyone happiness.

It's not just horrible jobs that require us to mentally split off parts of our lives from other parts, but there are also a lot of things that might require a person to separate their public life from what is privately important to them: a lot of people fear being "out" as queer or trans or whatever among transphobic or homophobic people who might live in their house, employ them, run their government, or otherwise have power over them. They may not want to be out as poly or kinky in all circumstances. They may be fleeing domestic abuse, torture, or other things they want to keep firmly in the past. They may have children or other people in their lives they want protecting from some facet of their lives.

Some of these attempts to compartmentalize our lives may be more worthy than others; some will be more successful than others. Privacy doesn't need to be perfect or not-at-all (because I can see how a politics and technology geek would "not really believe" in privacy), it's sometimes just a matter of context: working to keep some things from some people, for reasons of personal safety or happiness.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I definitely agree that a transparent society is one of those ideals that has major problems while we still have a lot of very unpleasant people making up part of the population.