Resistance Is Necessary

It started years ago, partly of our own devising, and partly due to the zeitgeist, the German word the means “spirit of the times”. No one knows how it gets here or how it comes on a nation, but everybody seems to believe it because “it’s so logical”. The zeitgeist was “Be greedy. Be for yourself”.

COVID made it much worse, and the length of our isolation, due to an inept government made it exponentially worse.

Post-COVID, the specter of greed returned full strength, and the number of walls between us and life increased, and many of us don’t notice they are there.

In order to see clearly, in order to get our needs met, we need to identify those walls and the filters that they become.

When I was a kid, playing with Matchbox cars in a sandpile with others, I remember thinking that an experience wasn’t real until someone saw it and could reproduce it. Flying cars that could leap five times their own length weren’t real until somebody else said “That’s cool! Let me do it!”. Television could be that other person, because “flying” cars, talking cars, cars that never ran on gas, were everywhere in the cartoons. Later, if a sports event happened, it became more real somehow if it was “the clip of the day” and repeated on every channel.

That was 1967 or so, when the height of technology was 13 channels “in full color” on your tv. That may have been the first wall. For the first time, people in faraway lands could die right in your living room .

They were actually dying in a faraway land, but in the living room, without the tv, they weren’t. They existed in a weird “hyper reality but non-reality”. The images on the screen came with a second piece of separation from actual reality : news anchors like Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley would tell you what you were seeing. A reminder: Mister Cronkite, Mr. Huntley, and Mr. Brinkley also weren’t in my living room. Neither were the 1969 Mets when they won the World Series. TV had its good sides and its bad side even then. But reality was now different.

As I think about it, unreality had consequences on reality when imaginary aliens had landed in New Jersey on the radio and thousand of people in real life panicked due to the War of The Worlds broadcast.

Stories, narratives, tales of our imagination have brought us a different reality since they were first told, whether as a book or a play, radio, movies, tv and now video games and streaming services. They can bring all the promise of television— education, new experiences, new and shared wisdom, but they also inherently have a downside. They separate us from our reality and place before us another reality. That new reality is neither good nor evil, necessarily, but it is there and it’s important to know that it is. Each separation between humans leads to loneliness on some level. The more of them there are, the lonelier and more frustrated we feel because we can see it, but can’t manipulate it to meet our needs. For example, a picture of an apple when you are hungry doesn’t fill you in quite the same way that an actual apple does.

This is the same frustration one feels when they call the store and are offered options to get information and “Press 5 to leave a message” or “look on our website” is the best you can get after spending time pushing buttons for a few minutes. It’s a small frustration but it doesn’t have to be there at all. An actual person could answer the phone, or you could shop in person and get direct contact with your need.

But I digress. Knowing that there are walls or filters between us is the first step. Knowing if those walls were intentionally created or not makes a difference and finally who owns the walls and why they do is something vastly important to understanding the situation we’re in.

It’s always bothered me that an event could be owned by a sponsor. The Schlitz Beer Game of The Week irked me when I first heard it as kid. It may seem ridiculous to worry about, but it’s an important piece of our world which adds yet another wall between us and reality.

Someone back then realized that we could monetize those walls and we now pay for them. For example, having a Game of the Week meant there were now TV revenues to be had. The owners of the team depended on them. Players wanted more of them. Player’s salaries skyrocketed. Ticket prices skyrocketed until they were unavailable for your average person. On the other hand more people can now see the game. Is it a net loss or a net gain?

It’s a net gain for complication either way.

Furthermore, it distorts reality. It elevates sports players to the front of your attention and says what they do is now worth so much more than doctors, lawyers, social workers and teachers. Their images become both desirable and both out of reach.

Take that example and multiply it by thousands and you have Facebook and the multi-millionaires at Facebook. If you and I live near each other, we can be actual friends. With a phone call we can converse with people we know.

In this generation, students will sit in a circle and text each other rather than looking at each other and talking. This too seems like estrangement leading to loneliness.

In the political world, nothing speaks more of the times than the richest man in the world owning the largest wall for trading media stories. Elon Musk owning Twitter is just that example. His algorithm both makes him money while and offers him no responsibility for what happens there. This is a set up for ethical problems of all sorts.

“All the money, none of the responsibility” is what much of society sees as enviable, and that is what Musk has.

Think about it, though. What many people want is a set-up for ethical failure, because they want all the money and none of the responsibility. Success and irresponsibility are now linked and owned by the owners of our walls.

Is it any wonder we feel isolated and disempowered?

The way to fix this is to connect with each other in real time, in person, without filters, without walls and without the owners of them. In conversation you can fix loneliness, touch the environment, and do something with it that meets your needs. You can fix a small part of the world over lunch and feel better about yourself without making anyone financially wealthier.

There was a time when we talked about “appropriate technology”. It’s time we re-calculated what that is.

Resisting with Simplicity,

John