an extended meditation on presence (we also have chickens)
I’m currently reading Marion Nestle’s What to Eat Now and Shoshanna Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism at the same time (the former for enjoyment and the latter for research). The juxtaposition is convincing me of one thing:
We live in a society whose sole imperative is mass resource extraction from the populace to benefit the ruling few.
(N.b. by “we” I most directly mean the United States, but show me a corner of the world free of the extraction imperative and I’ll happily join you.)
By “resource” I mean everything the ruling few can benefit from extracting. Money, labor, time, attention, and data are the big ones currently, but there are surely others. By “populace” I mean pretty much everyone.
Zuboff focuses directly on surveillance capitalism’s mass extraction of data to track, predict, and manipulate our behavior. Doing this to sell us products is the most popular end, but it’s by no means the only one.
Nestle repeats, in the book and on her blog, a refrain that is now stuck in my head: “Eating less is bad for business.” It is, she says, why it’s so hard to make good food choices. Every time one of us tries, we’re up against multiple industries that lose money when we make better food choices and gain money when we make worse ones. Eating less – especially of high-profit ultraprocessed foods – is bad for business.
As I was hanging laundry this morning, I realized: Here’s another example of “eating less is bad for business.”
I hang most of my clothes to dry. I have a dryer. It mostly works. But it costs me money to run, it’s noisy, and it wears out my clothes faster than air drying. In the winter, my house needs the added humidity from drying clothes in the basement; in summer, I dry them outdoors, where the sun takes care of my whites and the wind adds a scent no synthetic “fragrances” can ever hope to replace.
Using my dryer costs me money – which means the power company gets my money. It wears out my clothes faster – so clothing companies get my money. It introduces a lot of static electricity – so makers of dryer sheets, dryer balls, etc. get my money. It also wears down the dryer – so appliance companies get my money. The dryer heats up my house – so in summer, the power company gets more money as the dryer fights the air conditioner for thermal dominance. When I don’t use the dryer, all these costs vanish. In other words, companies don't get my money.
Eating less is bad for business.
There was a time when the rules of civility in the United States required our capitalist overlords to tell the fairy tale that we are a land of “freedom” and “opportunity.” Nobody seems to be telling this story anymore. I actually got indignant about it while I was hanging laundry. As if I had some birthright to be lied to. As if the lie, not the reality, is what we need.
No – the mask and gloves are off. Having spent the last fifty years stripping away privacy, money-free “third spaces” like libraries and parks, and leisure time, the monstrous system we’ve built no longer needs to pretend we’re “free” to make “choices.” Or if it does, its pretense extends only as far as the twenty different variations on dish soap in the local supermarket.
Is that really what “freedom” is? The opportunity to spend your money on blue OR yellow dish soap? Are we so assaulted with “choices” that we’ve resigned ourselves to never having real ones? If so, I don’t think that’s an individual failing. Rather, it seems like a hack of the species itself. We’re all human. Our human brains can only handle so much input before we short-circuit.
It’d be bad enough to stop there. But, as Nestle points out, the choices between this soap and that – or between this food and that – aren’t even “freely” ours. Food companies spend billions figuring out how to manipulate our behavior at every step, from ingredients to packaging to placement in the supermarket. We aren’t “freely” choosing to eat Doritos instead of cucumber slices. Nor are we “freely” choosing most anything else we encounter. Our public spaces are rife with companies trying to sell us things. Anytime we’re exposed to someone trying to sell us something, we’re being manipulated. Resisting that manipulation requires time and energy, which are often sapped from us by the very system doing the manipulation.
I’m not saying we’re hopeless automatons, though. If anything, my last year of yeeting tech is proof of that. I’m hanging my clothes to dry; I’m eating vegetables I stored in the freezer last summer; I’m spending hours watching my chickens run around the yard, riding my bike, and reading library books. Those are all the result of choices I made over the previous year. They’re supported by a whole lot of privilege – time, knowledge, basic health – but they are choices.
What I’m seeing is how tight the net has become. How our “choices” are constrained and channeled at every turn. How the simplest human acts, like sleeping or staring into space, have become acts of resistance and defiance.
Stick it to the man. Stare at a wall today.
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