Hawthorn / Ends of Sleep / Uninvention

[haptalaon]

Hawthorns are a miracle. I couldn't take my eyes off them today. Everytime I saw one, was like seeing something spectacular and rare - which is absurd. They are a very common tree. And yet, all covered in red berries, every single one was like the only one.

And I was at a wildlife park - there I was, standing around by the tiger enclosure and the lions and the cheetahs, but my attentions being drawn against my will to the hawthorns - and the other trees as well, big old oaks filled with baboons and okapi by the silver birches. What marvels they all were

---

I've been working on a new webpage which diagnoses your urge to go online, and provides some alternatives. To do this, I've been trying to pause and observe my feelings and needs in those moments. I've come up with a whole set - loneliness, overstimulation, understimulation - but the one that's most common is just tiredness.

My new fave book on this (or any) topic links the two concepts together 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, but he's talking about capitalism as expressed through constant connectivity, and among other things, how it turns your free time into labour time leaving sleep the only time one is at rest, and cannot be monetised.

I'm reminded of the common justification people use when they feel defensive/judged around their internet use (or, how much they like Marvel movies, w/e - this comes up a lot) - which is 'I don't have energy for anything else'. But what is the body telling you? It's telling you to sleep. It's not telling you to go on facebook, it's telling you to sleep. If you don't have any energy for anything but doomscrolling, then perhaps the loudest communication there is that you don't have any energy.

I was sitting in the pub & looking around & monitoring my own blip, blip, blip urge towards my lurking phone, and naming each of them - as tiredness. & one of the characteristics of this generation is sleepiness - all eras are hardworking, and our ancestors were forced into labour we cannot imagine, but in terms of the psychodrama of this moment. It's all about burnout, 'I'd rather be napping' pajamas being in fashion, tiredness, an exhaustion. & I wonder if that's an internet thing, if not just me but close-to-everyone is training themselves that 'i'm too tired to do anything else' is not a cue to sleep

---

One thing I've been thinking about wrt technology - I feel quite defensive against the pre-emptive challenge that I'm anti-tech in a bad way, so it weighs on my mind, and especially trying to consider if I actually AM anti-tech in a bad way; but Crary notes that even the construction of 'pro-tech/anti-tech' is false, as it lumps every possible technology into a binary argument so one can imply that a dislike of twitter is code for hating vaccines and the washing machine.

One thing I've been thinking about wrt technology is consent. It cannot be uninvented, only imposed on the world. It is a vast theft of agency. For example, artists did not ask to live in the world of AI art, and yet nontheless they have no choice but to endure it. Similarly - my bugbear being the net - I didn't ask for this, and I don't like it, but I can't make it stop, and even my own attempts to be outside perhaps just make it larger in my mind by comparison; and in any case, I can't - for example - fill the local gay bar or fill the streets or fill the woods, in a world where it's so much easier to stay indoors. I can't unmake that invention for the entire world.

In that sense, can technology ever be said to be inherently liberationary? As the ordinary person will rarely have much say in whether it is invented or not. They'll be living in its wake in any case.

nevertheless - i think I do tend to view 'technology' as 'bad' when viewed on the whole, because technology on its own is rarely sufficient to create an actual change in social relations. Without the change in social relations, what happens is the same bad stuff but in new ways.

I was trying to think of a technology I felt was unambiguously good, and what came to mind was the washing machine. Historically, women would put in days a week of miserable, difficult labour to keep clothes clean. So the washing machine (and other household labour saving devices, like the vac and the tap) are a miracle.

and yet. and yet. Do modern women now have three free days of time? no lmao. and ok, they went into work, but does that mean the average het couple are twice as well off as once they were? also no. And all studies show that women still do the bulk of childcare and house chores on top of their jobs; in 2018, british women did 60% more housework than their partners.

So...yeah. Technology alone isn't enough. And those technologies did produce some good, of course - some changes in society, widening women's aspirations and providing them more freedom and opportunities. I'm not knocking that. But they didn't give women more free time. Because underlying social relations didn't change (capital, labour, property, working hours, &c) there was a limit on how revolutionary a washing machine could actually be. It didn't give women a four day working week.

So yeah. I think that's my take on technology as a whole, if you have to treat all technologies as this single monolithic thing called Technology. Regardless of what you invent, it'll be more of the same shit. New ways to do old things.

Comments

[goatgodschild]

"Three things to be wary of:
A new kid in his prime,
A man with all the answers,
And a code that runs first time."
-- Duane Elms, "Threes: Rev. 1.1"

I agree with the idea that not everything we label as "technology" is an unalloyed good, but there are parts of this that I disagree with as well. I think things labelled as tech can exist from "I don't want to have life without this" to "why did anybody think this was needed or useful".

I was actually thinking about this today, because we were at the beach and I saw a young semiverbal woman in a wheelchair enjoying the water. Even as far back as the mid-1990's, beach-accessible wheelchairs were prohibitively expensive, if not outright novelties. The Space Race ended up having a useful knock-on effect for more mobile, independently controlled wheelchairs. And without 20th-century surgery, I might not be talking to anyone, myself -- I had a perpetual sinus infection from the time I was two, to when I was eight and I got my tonsils removed. My family is a bit "medical", so I could go off on this for a WHILE.

But when I see an Apple Watch, I am immediately slammed with the spirit of General Ludd.