Productivity: The Last Domino to Fall in the Old System

Image Source: Seen Best Website Development.

In a previous post, Subliminal Slavery of the Subconscious Self, I summarized a BBC 2002 documentary, The Century of the Self, in which director Adam Curtis maintained that the mid-to-late 20th century was a time in which cause was divorced from effect, actions separated from consequences, in the name of preventing world war and genocide.

Curtis claimed that post-World War II mass culture became a giant pressure cooker experiment. The hypothesis ran that pre-World War II societies were repressed by old social values and religions. When societies became psychologically and emotionally over-repressed, they could suddenly blow and all the dark instincts of the community would surge out in racism, mass psychosis and murder. Psycho-social repression was the hypothesized cause of the Holocaust.

Image Source: Aussie Cool Story Club.

The prescribed remedy in western cultures, and later, global cultures, was to indulge the Jungian collective unconscious and mass shadow in a thousand different ways. Smaller vices were continually encouraged to give the big collective pressure cooker a way to let off steam. Celebrities came forth to personify aspects of the Freudian Id or Jungian Unconscious, in order to push those buttons in audiences. Derived from Austrian psychoanalysis, transported into American mass entertainment and mass politics, the pressure cooker slow release experiment wasn't a great idea.

A famous, early example of the 1960s' Hell-Sell technique, used in an actual Kent cigarettes ad, with explanation of the subliminal images and colours employed from a leaked advertising training manual. Part of the blurred-out message includes giant spiders mating on the girl's leg. Images Source: Whale.

As a result, as the Cold War wore on, any kind of inhibition in the name of old-fashioned social mores was condemned as social repression, an attack on liberty. Gone was the idea that norms reflected customs based in everyday life, and that norms connected people to habit, sanity, and reality. This is the kind of freedom that really enslaves people! The adoration of the libertine came at a price, because there was one place left where actions still connected to consequences.

Creation, making things, building things, was still directly related to making money. That correlation became more and more harshly enforced, more industrial, an assembly line governed by line managers, as time went on. Productivity was also unconsciously and in real terms wedded to the rise of the computer, so that we were expected to work like machines, battling against the continual threat of lack and loss. Space and time for productivity became supreme luxuries, reserved for the top few producers.

This is the logical inconsistency embedded in post-World War II global culture. Where all the other leashes were loosened, the last one, productivity, was inhumanly tightened. Normally, productivity is associated with discipline; that discipline was somewhat mitigated when other areas of life moved in parallel. But in developed countries, social limitations, personal restraints, and boundaries were erased. A lack of discipline rewarded and eased suffering in the personal realm. Meanwhile, all base survival was tied - with threats and desperation - to machine-like performance and productivity. The only place we were still connected to reality was through productivity, measured in time and money.

This paradoxical arrangement caused enormous social and cultural stresses, glossed over by blinking, flashing mass entertainment, bent on stating and restating: "It's all right. It's all right. It's all right." When, in fact, it was not all right and it did not correlate. One could not have no inhibitions on off hours, yet turn up bang on the dot on Monday to work like a robot. Or these days, turn up bang on the dot any time of the day or night, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to work like a robot, while also somehow simultaneously blowing off crazy steam in Id-dominated playgrounds.

Social theorists, political ideologues, and cultural gurus arose to reconcile the paradox and explain it away. For a time, the paradox could be cloaked, such that it offered the only ethical way to behave. Given its original historical premise, it was always presented as the only possible social structural counter-argument to racial genocide and world war. That is, workers were asked by broader culture to suppress their own souls in the name of making money or helping others to make money. But in all other respects, it was the height of right-thinking and social correctness to invert all previously-held values and to destroy self-limitations.

This post is not a conservative screed, moralizing or condemning libertinism. I merely observe that the formula was inconsistent and thus, the pattern is not sustainable. The paradox cannot hold for much longer. This must give way: the forceful over-expectation in Millennial working life, that this is the only way that cause can lead to effect, that actions can lead to consequences, that one must work oneself into the ground, second by second, to make money. While at the same time, in all other areas of life, irresponsibility and the divorce between actions and consequences prevail. One is minute-by-minute bombarded with media messages of war, disaster, chaos, and unbridled instinct. And counter to the pressure cooker experiment, our world is becoming more, not less, brutal, savage and potentially genocidal. It is a place where online beheadings and extreme porn are the norm and barely stir any profound response in the desensitized populace. Can you even remember what outrages you saw on the television or computer two weeks ago? Or what you ate for supper?

Further, as I noted in my post, Post-Apocalypse Rehab, mass media messages insist that the money you earn while acting like a robot rewards you by removing restraint in off hours. This is why we are surrounded by images of conspicuous consumption, which beg citizens to be irresponsible and disconnected from themselves and from reality in non-work areas of life. Supermodel sumptuousness and cinematic fictions of carnage create dreamlike distances from ongoing collective trauma. They allow the carnage in, so one engages, but from a quasi-safe position of cocoon-like detachment from the weirdness of living in this heaving, struggling world.

All of this must finally give way to a different way of living. The last domino to fall will be the outmoded way productivity is inflexibly correlated to money. This domino will fall in the name of consistency. You cannot train human beings to be hedonistic libertines for half a century, but deny them access to that final realm of freedom, within their own souls. Thus, in the last area where they are ordered inflexibly to be obedient, making money, they will rebel, because all other rules have been relaxed, inverted, abrogated, redefined, or overturned. The manner in which they redefine productivity and profitability may go either way: a soulful path or a libertine one.

The Internet is Ground Zero for this change. Cyberspace was supposed to broaden libertinism; it was a fantasyland, a computer playland. Cyberpunk was an extension of 1960s' and 1970s' drug culture. What a surprise, then, that after the initial wallowing in porn and LOLcat bullshit, computerland instead turned out to be a tough-as-nails Spartan training ground, which is now having radical impacts in the real world.

Big Data, the Internet of Things, and the Futility of Control

There are constant attempts to control evolving productivity. Cyberspace offers massive behavioural shifts in workforce productivity and workforce actions. For example, where corporations and institutions previously dominated the routes by which artists and producers could make money, the Internet has begun to allow those producers to take their products directly to consumers and buyers with no institutional middlemen.

As a result, the new hot interests are the Internet of Things and big data. These are attempts to make networked gadgets ubiquitous, generating ever more information which can be monitored, harnessed, rationalized, to corral us. Ultimately, the aim is to re-contain and streamline productivity and consumption with algorithms, which collect data on, and seek to predict, the minutiae of human life. But if one thing can be predicted here, it is that humans will evade the algorithm.

The ultrasound CDT ecosystem. #33c3 pic.twitter.com/dnLjfvh6Gs

— ⛆ Janine Ⓡömer ⛆ (@J9Roem) December 29, 2016

Summary of how uXDT works. #33c3 pic.twitter.com/lZGaWPN031

— ⛆ Janine Ⓡömer ⛆ (@J9Roem) December 29, 2016

Cross-device tracking: a privacy-invasive marketing tracking method. (Thanks and Hat-tip: Janine Römer.)

This is part of a struggle by the old system to harness the power of the new system, which is growing too quickly and too unpredictably. It is a race against time. There are redoubled efforts to recapture and imprison productivity within new control structures, under the guise of enabling creativity. Meanwhile, human beings are escaping, and making things in ways that are not dictated by time, money, and their gatekeepers.

In the face of real Internet freedom, leaders of the old system do not manage well. When they find they cannot control the Internet, they demand that it be suppressed. This is why there is an emerging battle between tech giants which serve the aims of the old system, and hacker culture, some of which is deeply misguided, corrupt and criminal, some of which is the cutting edge of what we have left of our own souls.

Video uploaded 7 July 2016. Video Source: C-Span.

As an extension from my previous post on the subject of the Clinton e-mail investigation, the video of the House Oversight Committee inquiry above from 7 July 2016 demonstrates the futility of attempting to control cyberspace. Politics aside, notice that top officials from the alphabet-soup American government agencies cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Highly trained professionals, competent, seeking order, they nevertheless admitted: it is impossible to collect and archive government documents from the electronic era in the old way. They could not and cannot bridge cyberspace and real reality with old rules and systems. The latter just don't work anymore. The hearing became convoluted and futile as it attempted to impose rational bounds and businesslike proceedings on chaos. While the Republican chair of the hearing, Jason Chaffetz, blamed Mrs. Clinton for the chaos, it is likely that part of her e-mail scandal is symptomatic of more general flux.

This investigation found that not only Hillary Clinton, but previous US Secretaries of State - with the exception of Condoleeza Rice - used private e-mail accounts to conduct state business. Rather than condemn Mrs. Clinton for corruption, in terms of my argument here, consider only the expression of the human will to move outside the lines. The inquiry discussion touched on this. Regulate people how you will; force them to work inside constraints. But if they can find any way around the fence, they will do it, especially when they are trying to get things done or achieve certain goals.

They will start breaking rules in association with their effort toward productivity. I am not advocating breaking rules, or commenting on the specifics, rightness, or legality of Mrs. Clinton's actions or goals. I am merely observing that this is a pattern of human behaviour. And when people break rules, others do too. Just as Mrs. Clinton wanted space to communicate as she felt she needed to in her capacity as Secretary of State, so others inevitably hacked her system. This is the nature of a new environment, still fluid, its impact on human productivity not yet fully understood. This post will continue in January, with Big Data's Strategic Inflection Point.