I’m going to make myself write another post after this one so it won’t be at the top of my blog. But I just went for a run with my blood pumping heavy and hot through my body and I’ve got a couple things rattling around in my head right now and so I’m going to sit down here and shake them out.
Yesterday, on our slow bus ride to the art museum, Sophie was talking about how she doesn’t agree with men who say we have escaped the grasp of monoculture. I’m still thinking about that. I think Sophie is right, and a signifier that supports my belief arrived that same day, when Maria (hi Maria) emailed me to ask how I felt regarding something that everyone you know is reluctantly reading or talking about, every day. I don’t even have to name it. You already know. I am succumbing right now—sorry—to its exhausting emergent property of dragging every conversation back to itself. Every monoculture has its own form of universal suckage.
I always say don’t like hot takes but I sure do keep coming up with them. One of them is this: there is no such thing as a solved problem. All we do is transform problems into different shapes. True, sometimes those shapes are smaller, or easier to grasp. More often, in my country, we have just selected for shapes that can be efficiently packed off to other parts of the world so people there can be made to deal with them for us. Or shapes that can be hidden behind something else.
The core narrative I learned growing up is that the darkest stains of the past were problems until, through great deeds by great men, they were solved. The essential promise of my pursuits in education and then profession was that, in computing across networks, I would get to help solve problems for other people, maybe even some of the big problems that still remained.
My faith in those stories is not what it was. The stains of history are worn proudly. The networks I wanted to bring humans closer together are arming us against each other and our planet instead. The machines I hitched my life to have become the stakes in a great gamble that the labor performed by people can be factored out from their inconvenient personhood. And everyone with political or economic power, regardless of their stated position on the axes, seems to have bought in on the same side of the table.
I don’t think everyone performs labor but I do think that every human spends their life in work. Sometimes that work is extractive and oppressive, and people with power tend to assign it great value. Labor against these things—labor that nurtures humans, educates them, brings them pleasure or creates for their joy—is rarely granted that same valuation. We do it anyway, of course. But when your labor is devalued, you present less of a problem to those who would like you to be more efficiently grasped. Packed off. Hidden. Disappeared.
So that’s what I think about the current topical addiction of our monoculture. Maybe the specific foremost iterations of the trend will fall out of favor; they do tend to do that. That won’t wipe away the occurrence of the great wager or what it makes clear about our ruling class. I am sick at heart, often, with rumination on the consequences that are already befalling my loved ones and neighbors, and which will only increase. The people with the money and the weapons have decided that if they can just extract enough tar out of one bank of sand and pump it through some other crystallized sand then, through a process they proudly cannot understand, they will solve their fundamental problem with our humanity.
But consider my argument from its other side. We aren’t solved yet. We can still prove insoluble. And wherever you are, reading this, you can be part of the problem too.