The recent post by L. M. Sacasas in honor of Albert Borgmann is very good. This follow-up post on “the tyranny of tiny tasks” vs. “the fidelity to daily tasks” is also very good. And it reminds me of the very first post I ever made on the commonplace blog.
Here’s Sacasas:
What precisely are we saving time to do?
I think the implicit answer is always something like “to enjoy the goods and services of consumer capitalism” as if this was our highest calling as human beings, that which would bring us true happiness and satisfaction. But it is never quite put this way, nor do we put it this way to ourselves. Instead, the terms of the offer are far more vague and generic. Most of the persuasion, if we may call it that, is done by how our tasks are framed whenever a machine or system is created to do them for us. Suddenly, previously dignified work becomes “drudgery,” labor that some might have found satisfying becomes insufficiently “creative.” The sense is that we might unlock some higher plane of existence if only we adopt a more efficient technique or outsource our involvement in a task to a new technology. Then and only then will we be able to do “what really matters,” and “what really matters” is always sufficiently vague to allow us to imagine that we are choosing these ends for ourselves and simply being empowered by new tools to achieve it.
In truth, this is just how we are convinced to give up on living. As Lewis Mumford put it in 1964, “Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.”
Most importantly perhaps, I think that we should recognize that with all the talk of automated labor and outsourced intelligence we are being distracted from the one element of most profound human consequence—care. Care is what creates the possibility of purposeful action. Care is what issues forth in meaningful knowledge of the world and others. Care is ultimately what transforms the quality of our involvement and engagement with the world so that we pass from “getting things done” to living.
Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.
If the point [of life] is to care and to love and to keep faith, then what is to be gained by outsourcing or eliminating the very ways we may be called upon to do so?