We have created a monster.
I can open up a browser on my computer, or an app on my cell phone, and, with 1-Clicktm I can have anything from baguette slippers to bacon-scented soap to chopsticks shaped like lightsabers (use the force) instant underpants (just add water, or at least, liquid) to a statue of a garden gnome riding a dachshund. Seriously.
And in two days to two months (depending on if it qualifies for prime and where it is shipping from), that thing will show up at the post office.
From the perspective of the person on the receiving end of the package, it’s super convenient.
The only person I have to see in this whole transaction is Theresa when I hand her my package notice. No muss, no fuss, no messy social interactions.
It’s what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls the Dumbwaiter Effect in his latest book, Survival of the Richest.
That book looks at tech bro billionaires and their prepper strategies for the end of the world, be it the next plague or the collapse of civilization due to global warming.
It also looks at how we got to the point where the super rich are asking Rushkoff (in all seriousness), whether Alaska or New Zealand is a better place to build their bunker and how do they, if society has collapsed, prevent their security force from just shooting them and taking over their secret lair.
And one of the things he identifies is this Dumbwaiter Effect.
We think of the dumbwaiter as a similar convenience. Instead of having the “servants” carry the food up from the kitchen, a box opens and, voila, inside is all the food and wine, like magic.
But instead of being there simply for convenience, the dumbwaiter had another, much more sinister application: it meant that the white landowners and their guests didn’t have to see the slaves who laboured away creating the food and transporting it to the dumbwaiter. It just appeared there, as if by magic.
In the same way, Amazon and other online mega-corporations hide the human cost of this convenience behind a system designed to industrialize and mechanize. The farther we are removed from the reality of human labour, the less meaning it has. The more we value technology, the less we value human beings.
But while they work hard to automate the process, there are still humans involved at every step of the way. Humans pick the cotton for the clothes. Humans mine the raw materials used to create the products.
At the Amazon warehouse, humans run about, picking items from shelves, tossing them in boxes and getting them ready to ship out. And if Americans get too uppity, we can always ship the work overseas.
Take the manufacture of semiconductors in the United States. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was discovered that some of the chemicals used in the manufacture of these chips caused women to have miscarriages at a rate of about twice the national average.
The companies that manufactured these chips vowed to eliminate the use of these chemicals. Which they did.
In the United States.
Elsewhere—Taiwan, Korea and China—these chemicals were still in use at least up until a few years ago, nearly twenty years after studies were published about their health risks, nearly twenty years after these chemicals were no longer being used in the States.
They push the health effects farther away—install a dumbwaiter that gets computer parts not from the basement but from overseas—and keep doing the same things they were doing. Is it any wonder why these tech execs are worried that when society collapses, it will be their heads on the chopping block?
We are getting better as a society—sometimes, in some small ways—at identifying some of these issues.
But convenience, as music wonks will tell you, usually trumps fidelity, and its hard to argue when that mini hand squirrel (only $22.57!) will be on your metaphorical doorstep in less than a week if you order today.
And it’s hard to feel anything for the poor kids who have to pick through the garbage dumps in India, looking for things they can bring to the local recycling centre to make enough money to buy themselves enough food to make it to tomorrow where they’ll repeat the cycle when we can rest smug knowing that new widget uses 40 percent post-consumer recycled plastic.
Out of sight, out of mind. We offload the detritus of our consumer culture onto the backs of widows and orphans in some of the poorest countries of the world.
And yet…
And yet what would happen if we suddenly stopped buying these goods? Who would be harmed most by the economic backlash? Certainly not Bezos, sitting high atop his phallus-shaped rocket, wondering if there is enough time for him to build a retreat on Mars before the collapse of civilization.
We used to buy bread from the local baker, who would buy flour from the local miller who got his wheat from the local farmer. It was a system that didn’t scale very far, but it was robust. People looked out for one another.
At least, that’s the way it was supposed to work. Now, we buy bread that is made in an industrial kitchen, automated and dehumanized. Each loaf exactly like the last. Industrialists are taking and squeezing out every last penny that they can, while at the same time, squeezing the joy and wonder out of the people who work for them.
Every day, the super rich are getting super richer, the super poor are still getting exploited, and we are left wearing our baguette-shaped slippers, dreaming our capitalist dreams of someday being just like Bezos, believing that maybe, if I work hard enough, I, too, can be part of the one percent, building rockets to fly away from all this instead of working to fix the mess they created.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
