PS: Please don't downvote, just because the idea of your lifes invisible infrastructure buckling makes you angry.
My life's infrastructure isn't all that invisible and I'm grateful for it.
Stretching your analogy (perhaps too much): when you're in isolated confinement there is at least someone ensuring you get fed, clothed, receive at least some basic care and are kept somehow safe. When you're in the ruins of a city you may starve, get beaten to death, die from a preventable disease, etc. And nothing ensures that the labor will be any lighter.
For a more software-related argument, here's an essay on why rewriting Netscape from scratch was a mistake: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
If you could avoid hurting anyone out of proportion to their level of complicity, maybe you do have grounds. But I don't think you can. Because it's the entire world you'd be torching, you'd need to know at least a little about every person in it first, and how your actions would impact them, and I don't think that's realistic.
Ever since the first two caveman began exchanging their time and effort. Like stone axes for mammoth meat.
I’m not sure what that means, actually, but it certainly doesn’t mean voluntary trading of time and goods.
Even in a leisure situation, such as a party, people are going to make choices about how much time to interact with (or not interact with) certain people. Or spending time pontificating on HN.
An example of this that was told to me is imagine you're going to dinner with the in-laws (or maybe your best friend's parents). What would their reaction be if you took out your wallet and offered to pay them cash for the meal? As opposed to offering to e.g. bring a bottle of wine or helping to set the table?
Offering to pay might be the "transactional" trade meant by the grandparent. While offering to contribute [food | labour | goodwill] is more of the trading time in a leisure situation.
Intangibles would be the gain or maintenance of reputation from going to have a meal at your in laws and all that jazz.
Regardless, in this context, trade is trade, one entity giving up something for another. Simply spending the time to go to your in laws for a meal is a trade. And while many would not cough up cash to show the transactional nature, far more would simply not go to the dinner (or go less often) and opt to spend their time elsewhere.
Or, if the in laws have something you want, maybe you opt to spend more time with them.
I am not claiming one has to solely view every interaction through this lens, or should. But it is a component of most every interaction. You could strike up a conversation with a stranger with no ulterior motive and then it carries on too long and you start thinking I could spend my time better elsewhere.
Even such slavery, modern western/catholic chattel-style slavery aside, wasn't entirely transactional in that way. Many Ottoman slaves had better lives than aristocrats, for instance, and had real agency and influence.
Western European/American/Catholic imperialist slavery was somewhat unique in how dehumanizing it was.
How do you even get mammoth meat without having a stone axe?
There was no such thing as "neighboring cavemen," like you have neighbors living in personal, separate houses today. Perhaps you've been watching too much of the Flintstones. And it doesn't matter whether you "like" going on mammoth hunts. You hunt, and you gather, or you die. Again you're imposing a contemporary background of abundance on an ancient environment of scarcity.
Pre-20th century people would have much stronger family ties, religious ties, and in many places some sort of feudal ties of varying levels of onerousness. But you can also find examples of people being extremely lonely, such as press ganged sailors separated from their families.
Depersonalization is a double-edged sword. You're no longer persecuted as an individual with a particular identity, but you're no longer valued as one, either. Though obviously it's not so much a binary as a field that can be collapsed to a point on a sliding scale.
Go to a farmers market week after week, buying and talking to people. It is completely different from a vending machine. I know the people at my market, if they asked for help I'd help them for nothing in return. And I have no doubt at all they would do the same for me.
The vending machine owner would get no such help from me, nor would I expect them to help me if I asked.
The feeling of constantly being surrounded by people you can't trust is a foreign and debilitating one.
Nowadays if someone has a free moment, they have their phone to occupy their mind. I lived in a time before phones. What did we used to do with free moments? Sometimes we had reading material available. Sometimes we would day dream. Sometimes we would just think and introspect about ourselves. Sometimes we would carefully observe the world around us looking for anything interesting.
And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
Put another way… you have to let yourself be curious about, say, the garden in the park, rather than looking at your phone. And when it comes to people - talking to a stranger rather than looking at your phone - you have to not only let yourself be curious, but also be vulnerable enough to make that curiosity known (a secondary skill, that I think can be built on a foundation of curiosity).
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
Turns out that making it too easy to avoid the hell that is other people has some less than great side effects.
Not to say the phones aren't having an impact of some sort, but yeah, I always knew how to distract myself.
I think this is the core reason for so much video arcade machine related nostalgia. Those that experienced this the first time around will know about stacking coins on the machines, playing against those you didn't know and so on. Now that is back to table football etc. but an entire category came and went in the space of 30 years.
Two days ago I was in Best Buy looking for a DAC for my headphones. They have a section of gaming keyboards and headphones where a kid in his mid to late 20's started to strike up a conversation with me. It went from whether I play video games, to if I live in town, to his story on dropping out of college.
The entire time all I could process was the question of why this kid was talking to me and I kept giving him short bland responses. Not that long ago I would have sat there for an hour talking with this guy and loved every second of it. Then I would have come home and annoyed my wife by telling her all about it.
I know it's cliche to say but something changed in me over the initial COVID lock-downs where I went from socializing being a necessity in my life to just wanting to be home and not dealing with people. A point that bums me out the more I think about it.
You won't be approachable when you are paying attention to a phone.
And it's valuable. There's a lot of people you'll find interesting, but they happen to not be within 2 hops of you. If you want to put a number on it, look at what people pay (opportunity cost) for educational or work opportunities. The social network you'll get is often touted as one of the main benefits of private school, for instance.
Despite being a bit of an introvert, I often reach out to randoms. Just to see what's there. It's been a great strategy thus far.
It's the things that don't scale and instead have high barriers to entry that are most likely to produce actual healthy human connection.
Or in Omegle’s case…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegle
Ends up with alt right trolls.
I usually avoid talking to women because I’m obviously married wearing my ring and no matter what, it might come across as creepy and women usually have their guard up and are probably there with spouses somewhere around.
Many people typically want to chat with people unknown to them, but not completely random either (especially for women).
On the other hand, I feel a lot of media is pushing us to ignore, suspect or otherwise be scared of strangers. I don't know that this is uniquely tech driven though.
i used to be one of those with a book. now i listen to audio books which incidentally allows me to appear more extroverted because i can make eye contact and i guess people assume i am just listening to music and am therefore approachable.
And yet, more integrated into society weren't they. Rich or poor, you had your social clubs, your church scene, your neighbourhood contacts. You had to, since you didn't have TV or internet.
Yes, you'd be far more likely to have a chat with them. But that's because they didn't have micromanagement of delivery times and the person they were delivering to was often a housewife.
We replaced branch offices with call centers, then outsourced them to people we will never see and cannot relate to in a foreign land. Then we replaced them with chatbots and TTS, anything to reduce support times and save more money for those at the top.
We built out infrastructure that met our needs and revolutionized how we worked. We did this on-site, with glorious rooms of consoles and equipment that, while fragile, were also impressive to behold. Then leadership got on a treadmill of “also needs”, bolting on new kit of questionable value, outsourcing expensive jobs abroad or to contracting firms. As internal knowledge dried up, it became easier to embrace the perpetual bullshit machine demanding you adopt ERP as a medium-sized business, demanding you hoard data, demanding you surrender sovereignty to “the cloud”, to embrace per-second billing over amortization schedules. Fewer humans in the loop, knowing the business, understanding its needs. Just some guy at the top slapping their name over a Gartner or Big Three report before sending it to the board.
And now in this “age of AI”, the attack continues at record pace. Gone are the people who know and understand your code, replaced by chatbots who can only predict what they’ve already seen. Gone are the developers, the engineers, the architects, replaced with armies of temps and contractors who aren’t allowed to engage with the workers or incentivized to solve a problem, but merely meet arbitrary KPIs decided by algorithms they had no say over.
Robots are meting out punishments to gig workers, our devices spy on us to send data to companies hostile to our existence as consumers, with products designed to break but never be repaired, sold by stores online with no human interaction for questions or to identify flaws.
We have allowed a system to be built that does nothing to improve the daily lives of the average human anymore. These “innovations” do not drive meaningful growth in a majority of businesses. New technologies are little more than checkboxes to be met rather than profound improvements in processes or automation to enable leisure.
We let this happen. We can also choose - at any time we want - to stop.
> *‘Instead, customers just point and say: “OK, yeah, just put it over there,” and then I drop off the stuff, and they just tap it. I think they see it as more of an – I think they see it as automation. They see you as just a system.’*
A transactional exchange is not the right place to look for meaningful human connection.
In fact, if I COULD hire robots instead of humans to do things like drive me places or deliver my groceries, I WOULD. Robots are predictable and reliable, a random human may or may not be.
When you are old and gray, I hope strangers continue to honor your wish by seeing you as a worthless husk because you no longer capable of offering any services they care about.
Old people I know that treat employees like robots don't have many friends or family they care about them. Maybe, if you coincidentally end up in that position too, you can pay robots to keep you company. I hear they're very reliable and predictable.
Marxists have the theory of "alienation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
They posit that people are alienated, estranged and invisible. "Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society" It's alienation that is the driving emotion behind people coming together (leading to things like socialism / communism).
Given that it's a core left wing idea, it's a bit strange to see only this applied to right wing populism. Possibly it's a signal of the authors own politics. Maybe the recent adoption of identity and group politics tends to keep people separated and increase alienation than towards a togetherness in a common shared struggle. Reducing alienation could lead to a weakening of certain political stances. Today's technology appears (falsely) to be apolitical, amoral and independent of the traditional things politics are about.
But its important to be fair, that was a tiny bit of the article and there's not much politics in this interesting piece which is really about technology and neither "Marx" nor "alienation" nor any old school theoretical background on the phenomena being observed is talked about.
The very fact that you have free time, weekends, paid leave, enough money to enjoy these things (until the last few decades anyway), etc are the result of anti-capitalist collective action. People quite literally died so you can have these things.
It's no accident the society is so hyper-individualistic now. That's be design by the capital-owning class to destroy any form of collectivism because it's a threat to the economic order.
So things like "third spaces" disappearing can't be viewed in a vacuum. It's a foreseeable consequence of hoarding property (ie ever-increasing housing prices). The powers-that-be love that. You're not forming bonds with your fellow human beings. You're also not "wasting" time on recreation instead of working a third job you hate just to make ends meet and make somebody else more money.
A key part of Marx's alienation is the alienation of labor. This is where you're not paid enough to afford the goods or services you produce. We see this in the developing world: literal children being paid pennies to make clothes they can't possibly afford. We are increasingly seeing the alienation of labor in the developed world.
You are monsters who mistake luxury for bliss, money for agency, and power for love.
I speak directly to the likes of Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, and all those who follow them. They are false prophets who deny us all our humanity. Monster is the perfect word for them.
there are four key things that "obliged" people to meet in the local area:
1) organised religion
2) organised fun, ie drinking, sports, location based hobbies
3) organised politics (social clubs dressed up as poltical movements, or vicaversa but crucially meeting regularly to do activities together)
4) work
In the UK at least there has been a strong but steady shift away from 1 & 3, to the point where they just don't really exist at any critical mass for people under 60. work is now more remote, which mean less concentration of people
Combine that with digital means to form your own virtual groups, You have less and less ties to your local area.
sprinkle on top that parents are utterly horrified by the idea that children might be left to wander, means that meeting your best mate (because there they are on the same street and the same age) becomes digital only.
In the UK is has (almost) never been safer to walk about in public https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand... yet we are paralysed by fear that young people are going to be mugged, drunk, mixed up in drugs.
There is also a massive decline in funded social venues, as council budgets have been slashed.
So whilst tech could be blamed for this, I strongly suspect that its only making it more bearable. The UK at least needs systematic cultural change.
Its like a fog, slow, suffocating, hard to grasp, hard to agree on where it starts or ends. But we agree its there, and agree its a problem.
So thinking about loneliness and alienation is really easy through the lenses of the hyperpositivity and the rise of narcissism. Suddenly these are all aspects of the focus on the individual and the "You can" ethos.
> too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being
It's really hard to feel seen when everybody only interacts with everybody else if it serves their own project of self improvement.
It's the same story everywhere—regardless of whether or not you live in a big city or a small town: It's "jobs", not people.
Liberal hyperindividualism understands human beings as atomized units that enter into transactional relationships only. (Collectivism commits the opposite error of atomism by dissolving the person into a tyrannical amorphous social soup, likewise rendering persons disposable, but for the "greater good of society" instead of the "greater good of the self".) But the problem is that human beings are social animals, and our humanity is realized and actualized in our relations with other persons. Atomism dehumanizes us.
This liberalism is what we sleepily embraced a couple of centuries ago in parts of the West, but the consequences of such choices can take decades if not centuries to fully materialize. So as liberalism has wound through the traditional social fabric and institutions of the world — like family and community life — it has, over time, eroded those institutions and brought the world more in line with what was always there in liberalism. The famous "neutrality" of liberalism is anything but, and this presumption of its neutrality and thus what's taken to be its obvious correctness is the source of its power to erode. When something enters into a disagreement with liberal postulates, then by definition, that something must give way to those liberal postulates. They quietly determine and police what is taken to be normal, and what's more, from this position of presumed neutrality, as contradictions emerge, it automatically "wins" and thus penetrates every more deeply into traditional institutions until those institutions have effectively withered away.
W.r.t. the first example given in the article, notice the delivery guy's desire for a personal connection with the person he's delivering to. What's that all about? Sure, in small towns where everyone knows everyone, we might know the mailman who's been making the same rounds for 30 years and he might know us, but in any polity of macroscopic size combined with the churn among delivery people and the residents moving in and out of neighborhoods, this is never going to happen. It's a weird expectation on those grounds alone. The world is too much in flux, too transitional.
Of course, some people may lack basic civility (the usual "hello, thank you, have a nice day", things I reflexively say when addressing those serving me in these kinds of jobs). What is the cause of this boorish lack of basic incivility? Either bad manners, or a lack of humanity on the person lacking them. But we're not talking about bad manners.
Boorish behavior and misplaced small village mentality aside, the reason it might bother the delivery person this much might just be that he lacks a social base himself and is looking for substitutes in all the wrong places. And that would make sense: why would this person be any different than the people he delivers to? The difference might be that people in relatively stable corporate jobs, for example, might find some kind of weak surrogate for social stability and community in their workplace.
Community needs a reason for its existence. There must be a reason for people to be together. A family has in this sense the strongest justified bonds of community, surviving all sorts of life events and changes. It is no mistake that it has been the basis for all the other forms of community we enter into, voluntary and intentional, or involuntary. That is why liberal hyperindividualism's final battle is with the family. It is the last remaining obstacle to the fully "liberated" atomic self. But liberalism's notions of what constitutes authentic freedom are flawed, and so we pursue with zeal our own misery. The answer to collectivist tyranny is not atomistic sterility.
jleyank•3h ago
lapcat•2h ago
Some do, but 36% of the eligible population did not vote in 2024. I don't think there's any evidence that "invisible" workers disproportionately vote.
I think the article makes a very questionable—and unnecessary—connection to electoral politics: "A sense of feeling invisible clearly animates working-class rage in many countries, and may have powered Donald Trump to victory in the US presidential election last fall." Note the weasel words "may have", as well as the vague, unsupported "clearly animates" claim, which I would dispute. Although Trump did try to appeal to the working class in several ways, I don't recall him ever discussing the issue of depersonalization, the subject of the article. What do immigration and tariffs, for example, have to do with depersonalization?
supriyo-biswas•2h ago
lapcat•1h ago
In any case, that seems to contradict "and know what’s going down." It would be misplaced resentment to blame depersonalization on immigration, for example. It's possible that immigrants are depersonalized more than any other group. And ironically, Trump has aligned himself with a number of tech lords who are at the forefront of depersonalization.