Industrial Design

For a cognisant species we are terribly efficient and dehumanising ourselves and others. The rationale for it is a comedy and its non-rational/non-logical nature is inevitable. What is logical though is the dynamic as a whole, beginning with individuals willing to dehumanise themselves first which is necessary to dehumanise others.

Dehumanisation is not always a reductive action, often it’s additive. There is the pursuit of becoming meta-human driven by what’s likely to be an urbane combination of fear and ego. I get that. I’ve done it. I still do at times and I try to crush it every time I observe it to varying degrees of success. It is one of the more disgusting of our behaviours, nevertheless it is one we’re stuck with until we can beat it out of ourselves which of-course is no mean feat.

Through life there are a variety of situations in which one must accept a degree of dehumanising. It doesn’t have to (and won’t once some fairly easy cognisant processes are exercised) actually have any effect internally, but it still governs a whole stack of dynamics you’ll be subject to. That it is such a non-human frame is perhaps what’s most difficult. To dehumanise is necessary in the absolute in order to create a machine that economises. That’s not a moral issue, there is no morality in machinery, it’s just not very interesting nor very intuitive. There are machines within machines and not all individual instances of them are as reductive as others. Some aren’t at all. Blah blah blah balance, but I still get the feeling that many of our machines – broader cultures and subsets of cultures, are created by design and not just by the few over the many. We can be supine creatures, habitual in avoidance of effort mental and physical. We are offered a compromise for a benefit and we are complicit in accepting it and affirming the engine of the machine. I accept it. I don’t want to accept it but I’ve built myself into a machine of my own, crafted entirely by my own hand and there are none responsible for it but me.

So my tasks for today (and every day henceforth) are:
– Examine the machines I have built, that I build – machines are not moral, they will either facilitate order on a diminishing scale or chaos on an expanding one. Build (now personally moral/ethical) good machines. Build economies that are conducive to creativity, self-assessment and intelligent cultural criticism that seeks to cultivate growth and evolution. Not for altruism, but instead for fun, because that is more interesting.
– Figure out how the fuck I’m going to completely destroy the machines built on the precepts of past compromises.
– Help others to do the same before we’re all crushed beneath the weight of things without meaning.

Addendum: I keep thinking that children are completely innocent. Each new generation is ignorant of the myriad of human machines. We are supposed to be breaking them. We are supposed to be building them. Systemically disassembling the great machines of our history and rebuilding a greater number of smaller, more intelligent machines but we don’t. I don’t think scale has anything to do with it. It’s also extremely difficult. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible and I suspect we get lazy. I get lazy. I will always try to justify cultural criticism by accepting my complicity. I didn’t challenge machinery on this level until much later in life. Why? I was educated and mentored in cognitive ability, and indeed cultural criticism. But to this level of detail, challenging these strictures, even I was lax in not pursuing a gap in my dynamic education. I should have seen it. I should have sensed it. I did sense it.

That’s the brutal efficiency of the machine though – it generates so much benefit that it obscures cost. We don’t look at the material going in any more, we focus on the goods produced, and many of those are decent goods worth having. Seeking an alternative means of production to manufacture the same goods is tricky particularly when you have an established economy and infrastructure – and now the parallel with technological progression emerges.

It’s not complicated at all. It’s just a huge weight to shift. That’s partially discouraging. Were it complicated, there would be an interesting and engaging process to address it. Simple but immobile is much more difficult. Fuck.

Enough of this shit for now.