Back in May I interviewed Judi Bonilla, a San Diego gerontologist, as research for my articles about modern old age for Bay Alarm Medical. I also read tons of articles about seniorhood and society’s response to its own greying. These leftover notes have been sitting around on my computer since then, so I figured… let them see the light! I didn’t organize this stuff into an actual article, so your interest may be limited if you’re not already obsessed with aging. If you happen to be writing about this, feel free to use the material! Just link back to me. Or get in touch — whatever.
“[People] are not passive victims of an inherent, accelerating logic of digital technology. We can and do make choices about how we interact with machines. […] Human beings build the present and imagine the future with tools designed for certain purposes, and there are more reasons than ever to think about what kind of society we want those tools to advance.”
“Objects — even ones that seem beautiful or benign — communicate ideologies and narratives, and sometimes those ideologies and narratives are ugly and oppressive and violent.”
Phillips is talking about “things” in the sense of “general events”, but his observation is equally true when “things” are material objects. Humans have an uneasy relationship with stuff. We want it — lots of it — but we also worry about being tethered to our possessions. We wonder, “Will I be distracted from what’s really important?” We wish we could suppress the desire to acquire. Someday our warehouses will subsume us, those buildings formerly called “homes”.
I’m happy to worry about this; the alternative is misery porn on Hoarders. At the same time, anti-materialist fretting is odd, because we are physical creatures and therefore inherently bound to a material world. (Should we all be as unabashed as Madonna?)
Stuff is scary because it occupies a stunning amount of mindspace, without us noticing that the mental real estate is taken. We intellectual types prefer to understand what’s going on — control is even better. Interacting with the basic layer of life, the touch-smell-taste experience, tends to be fairly unconscious. Sure, there are think-pieces aplenty about the Apple Watch and every other new comm-tech offering, but when you use something all the time — for instance, the internet, which to be fair is not exactly an object — you can’t constantly meditate on the implications of your habits. Brew K-Cup coffee every morning and I promise that you’ll stop thinking about the environmental impact. (Or just buy a reusable steel version!)
We don’t notice until after the fact, but the expectations paired to objects are fluid. Look at the history of the telephone. What began as a device for limited audio communication is now the most boring feature of a pocket computer. What started as a newfangled contraption only used when the great expense was worth it has evolved to be a prerequisite to American normalcy. Alright, “normalcy” overstates the case, but circa 2013 more than 50% of American adults owned smartphones. Also in 2013, my parents got rid of their landline. The meaning of the word “phone” has changed substantially. The concept of a thing begins to morph immediately after its inception.
What do we do about any of this? What’s the call to action, the kicker? IDK. Maybe: we need to pay attention to our stuff and what we do with it. Archaeologists and anthropologists will tell you, a society is defined by its material residue. So is an individual life. To which we must respond…
“The whole point of being a person and not a brand is to at least try to get some dumb enjoyment out of things.”
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