The Highest Stage of Alienation
As technology and our understanding of ourselves deepens, humanity walks on an inexorable path towards the realization of its destiny, the globalization of production. GDP figures constantly tick up, and as market failures strike in ever expanding cycles they do not stop the rising speed of financial exchanges. A world unfurls itself before us, a myriad of possibilities to be realized. As the horizons of production expand so too does our consumption. A beautiful future (or so it seems) is actualized in the present.
This brings us to this ineffable notion of progress, as an all encompassing constant state of liberation. Social progress, technological progress, even sentence structure can’t keep up with this constant state of change. As Hegel says, world history is a constant march towards its own freedom. But how is this freedom expressed in our own terms, that is, human terms? How does the human mind and the society it finds itself in synthesize its experiences of freedom and progress? The answer is quite simple: through consumption.
When we speak of a new technology the question is always “what is its’ use (to us)?” When we speak of social progress the question is “what freedoms (to us) does it entail?” Certainly the question might change depending on the asker but whether it is “us” or “I” or “them” this question always remains anthropocentric, and firmly tied to our consumption. Only by exhausting the possibilities before us, by consuming them, whether in the form of commodities or realities, can we truly experience this feeling of freedom. This thinking seems natural, ingrained into the very foundation of our understanding of reality.
The satisfaction of a demand inherently carries an opportunity cost. That which is not consumed is left behind as a non-object. The abundance of commodities within the present state of capitalism already attests to this. Food uneaten. Clothes unbought. They did not suit the taste of their prospective customers. The sole purpose of such non-objects is to fill space. The enormity of this is outstanding. Millions of goods are produced to be carried thousands of miles as freight, placed on the shelves of super-stores and then at some time of their physical or social expiry — to be unceremoniously thrown into the dumpster. Thus the continued satiation of consumption demands not only greater production but also greater overproduction. Overproduction appears as a production of possibilities.
The finality of consumption and the ultimate freedom can only be experienced at the corresponding terminus — the height of production. Our scarcity limits our consumption, and so we quantify it and generate more and more productive forces to sustain this drive. It is with this massive expansion that we can finally imagine a culmination of the march of progress, reaching post-scarcity.
The Question of Post-Scarcity.
Post-scarcity (or fully-automated-luxury-space-communism) promises an inexhaustible satisfaction to every want and every need. Yet in doing so it obliterates meaning, strips choices of moral value and reduces the human to its basest appetites. The ability to receive anything you want without effort or struggle fundamentally damages the meaning ascribed to the struggle in the first place.
Consumption without meaning can seem like a boon to the underfed. After all, not having enough food leads to the ascription of the state of satiation to the highest extent of aspiration. To the individual living in scarcity (which is all of humanity to differing extents) it is impossible to conceive of the profound lack of meaning within abundance. But finding oneself in abundance, always existing in abundance makes consumption an act of routine. When have we last given significance to a cup of water? Perhaps only after a period of exertion can it serve as a refreshment with some little significance.
Aspiration here is a superlative, above all our other needs, not an independent form of desire, but rather a form constructed from the currently unfulfilled desires within our daily existence. We naturally aspire to what we are not, to what we have not — and as such unrealized consumption is also that which we consume. That is not to say that removing barriers to aspiration is inherently a bad thing, in fact the opposite, for a key part of aspiration is the expectation of victory. What is the difference between feasting and gorging? The first carries a sacral meaning, a victory tied to the fulfillment of an aspiration. The second is resolved in the automata, an empty action devoid of any greater significance, a void that fills that which we cannot obtain. Panic buying, panic eating, all consumption as a surrogate to aspiration unfulfilled.
As we approach the terminus we begin to see more room for retreat. Those who are well fed can now choose to go hungry. “I am done seeking meaning in the aesthetic cycle of commodities” Helena Saint Tessero proclaims as she trades in her gaudy designer clothing for a plain white robe, embracing designer monasticism. Yet at this point of abundance even defection from the existing pattern of consumption becomes another reproduction of the cycle. Those who turn to asceticism and seek meaning in self-discipline become another trend, another “target demographic” for smart-marketing. This kind of disjunction is already apparent in our still limited (by scarcity) world. Books on dieting fill the shelves of the local bookstore, while the other side of the street houses a McDonalds.
If liberation was once conceived as the freeing of the human faculties from the base prejudice of nature, now it sketches a rather bleak view of existence where our consciousness is no longer needed. To be alive in a world of abundance is to depreciate one’s humanity and become an alienated blob focused on the eternal chasing of meaning through endless and pointless consumption. The destruction of commodities becomes an unnamed ritual which is both utterly alienated from humanity (the creation of abundance means that decisions on production are no longer meaningful) and also totalizing in its replacement of any self-creation and self-fulfillment (which require a now absent personal struggle).
The vision of such a future where meaninglessness predominates with no possibility of escape is one that is slowly creeping into the present. We all aspire to that which we are not, and yet by becoming obtaining all that we wish for we cease to be at all.
A Return to the Present.
Our current social-metabolic state means that consumption cannot be separated from its own production, the ability to consume is still predicated on the capacity to act. In order to satisfy even our basest desires we need to perform many complicated ambulatory, social and intellectual actions. The system that we operate in recognizes this and seeks to eliminate the difference between our internal desire and the object of desire, cleaving through physical and social realities.
Buying a cup of coffee requires a certain basic level of social skills and conversation capacity that while seeming relatively minute to most people with normal levels of socialization can be hard for neuro-atypical people. A sour mood can also make the interaction costly. While to any well-adjusted person such marginal distinction doesn’t seem to matter it still carries a certain significance. The cost of a cup of coffee can therefore not be reduced to its monetary price, but rather extends beyond it. Increasing our ability to produce coffee and thus decreasing its monetary price is not the only way we can decrease the costs of obtaining it. Removing the need to interact with humans in procuring the coffee (automatic machines), removing the need to travel to get fresh made coffee (coffee-maker machines) all of these allow for the fulfillment of our need for coffee without the necessary expansion of production.
Such an architecture is well known throughout the world, and moves at a constant pace under the nomenclature of “automation.” Humans are replaced by machines, which are made and commandeered by even more humans. Usually, however such actions are thought of as purely within the realm of production. Decreasing cost (replacing labour with capital), increasing production and the like. Yet, the slow and constant replacement of workers by machines in operations across the globe does not only diminish the costs of labour inputs but also serves to remove the alienating factor of social interactions for the purpose of consumption.
For what changes is our tolerance, the functions that we as consumers have to carry out outside of the immediate productive sphere. The horizons of our supposed freedom are not only expanded through the growth of productive forces but also through the reduction of this consumption in consumption itself.
The Final Circle of Paradise
There is an interesting work of Soviet fiction — The Final Circle of Paradise by the Strugatsky brothers which addresses a society built upon abundance. In a small resort city in the far future where Communism has triumphed, an enclave of capitalism still reigns. Yet within its system money has become a mere formality, even the poorest can gorge themselves without end. Consumption of all secular things being guaranteed, the citizens turn towards the affective spectrum. The inducement of extreme fears, desecration of art, extreme drug consumption — the hedonism of the city is presented as a sickly (and terminal) tumour. Having no more aspiration beyond the fulfillment of basic affective desires, the citizens regress to pseudo-children. A philosopher who extolls the order of such a city says:
“Free a man of the worry about his daily bread and about the morrow, and he will become truly free and happy. I am deeply convinced that children, yes, precisely the children, are man’s ideal. I see the most profound meaning in the remarkable similarity between a child and the carefree man who is the object of utopia.” ~ pg.33 Final Circle of Paradise (archive.org)
Such a vision is precisely that of a “bourgeois utopia” that the Strugatsky brothers openly despise. A place of sin and depravity where consumption without meaning rears its ugly head and regresses the human condition. The meaning of the book is clear: if one is to construct a utopia of abundance, it would lead to the end of humanity as a subject and embrace a new era of decay.
To the Soviet Union which served as an ailing (and fatally flawed as we found out in the 90s) but otherwise passable welfare state, the provision of material goods was a matter of course. Yet in many ways the Soviet Union was consistently an importer of western cultural products. Jeans, rock and roll — these western ideas were a form of aspiration for young soviets. One could imagine from their point of view in the mid/late-20th century that the United States and other western nations were still some way off, yet heading towards the conditions described in the story. Thus the accusation of abundance as a kind of moral degeneration would be not only understandable to the Soviet citizen but also serve as a soft form of propaganda condemning the relative abundance of the West.
It would be easy then to dismiss the socio-political implications of the book as mere propaganda, yet the focus on the affective spectrum reveals that which the authors themselves did not predict. If abundance of material goods was dealt with by the self-destructive consumption of affects which was still limited (by the books publication), then the advent of virtualization through advances in computing has made affective consumption even simpler and more detailed than our material consumption. While it is not easy to procure and destroy a work of art (as the book’s Society of the Arts engages in), the defacement of a digital image takes mere moments.
The Problem with Consumption in Virtual Reality
This reaches its apex with virtualization which is capable of colonizing affect. If consumption is virtual then even complex social interactions can be captured and monetized. Consider the notion of “virtual status”, that is status which arises from the virtual world and is entirely separated from physical reality. One can simply play a game in order to experience it, with no human interaction at all. Or one can achieve real status as an “online personality” without their physical self at all being involved. This isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. Books already allow us to vicariously experience the feelings of others. Yet they are firmly locked into discrete worlds separated by the medium which allows us to only experience the feelings of others within their worlds and not our own feelings within the constructed worlds of virtual reality.
Our effective consumption within the virtual slowly replaces the real. Humans continue spending increasing amounts of time on their computers, increasing amounts of time in the online world outside of physical space. They engage in small pleasures mediated by the images that are cast adrift from their physical origin and reformatted for the online world.
If the question was simply one of consumption then the problem would have already been described by this point. The use of virtual reality would be fulfilled in providing us with new forms of consumption, and in reproducing at a faster rate that which I roughly described as a “consumption of consumption.” In this sense it would only be another expanded and iterative form of automation. Yet the issue that arises within the virtual world is one of images being distinct from reality.
With the internet one can break down, separate and commodify experiences in order to package them up — affective consumption becomes a matter of very detailed commodity differentiation which does not exist in real life. People in desiring affective consumption want to separate certain kinds of behaviour from others. In the real world a relationship cannot be constructed upon unrequited love, (without reproducing some pattern of emotional abuse) but within the narrow and selective confines of the internet it is possible to obtain any kind of emotion you desire chopped up and shipped the form that you want. Consider the way content-creators present themselves on social media and video (youtube, twitch) platforms.
Within a regular mechanical interaction (let us return to buying a cup of coffee) it is possible to reduce the person at the register into nothing more than their job (a living coffee producing machine). That is the extent of the alienation produced by automation. If it is possible to reduce a human to their role and thus ignore their humanity then the internet allows us to recreate a false humanity on top of that artificial role. One cannot be simply a “video content creator” or a “media personality”, one has to play themselves within a role. Being suicidal is a nono, unless your agony can sell. Problems? Disorders? All ok if the audience is here to laugh, but otherwise the content creator is not paid to splay their pain and troubles onto the video screen.
Within this new online abundance we discover a new form of alienation. An alienation of self- in presenting a false self to society far beyond the mores and rules which compel in our daily lives. This erosion of intentionality leads to the human disappearing into a flawed and brittle image of itself as it closes itself off from any interaction with the Other (which now symbolizes the rest of humanity). One does not even have to be themselves anymore as we see with “Vtubers” virtual personalities who only take a voice from their creators.
The attachment of this technological prosthesis does present a new way of self-expression but also engages in a most profound mutilation of the human psyche. This new trend of the times is waging an opium war against our full affective spectrum: from the social media attack on our attention and perception to the massive brand offensive promising to sell us family, love, success all in the shape and pretty wrapping of virtual commodity form.
