I worked in a sugar factory in my youth and I remember the ten minute smoke breaks every two hours. The breaks made the mind-numbing work tolerable and then at the end of the week came the paycheck reward, which made the work week tolerable. It was all part of the system.
I researched tobacco once and discovered that the industrial process that made packs of cigarettes possible co-evolved with industrialism itself. In order to obtain the factory friendly texture, it was necessary to ‘toast’ the tobacco, which raised the nicotine level making cigarettes more addictive. The makers also adjusted the burn time of the cigarettes to align with the ten minutes of breaks.
This is so good. Solutionism! I’ve been writing about this sort of thing in lieu of green energy technocracy. I didn’t know there was a name. Excellent.
I've been trying to articulate the false sense of pioneering that you've characterized in the fintech reference at the end: the story that businesses tell themselves and the world about 'heading towards the future' while essentially anchoring us deeper into this monetary system. Today's version in my head is "There are no leftist startups." Yes to acknowledging where we are. 👍🏽
I like the addiction metaphor but feel it's worth distinguishing between the individual physical addition to a substance and the collective addiction, which is probably not really addiction.
What's happening underneath the metaphor is that as the money system becomes part of society, then society builds on it; the more layers are built on it, the more we depend on it. If we are addicted to money we are also addicted to government, to language, to any number of technologies. I'm addicted to my fingers, my liver, my glasses.
And withdrawing from our 'addiction' to money is almost not even an option and the health benefits are debatable. Overall I would probably prefer another framing.
This is the first time I have had "solutionism" defined in such a way that is both meaningful, makes sense, and generates a framing I mostly agree with. We make our tools and, in turn our tools make us. It is a symbiotic relationship we have far less control over then we'd like to believe.
That said, I find the paragraph you begin with "But let’s get real." to be somewhere between annoying and infuriating. Quickly returning into a system where "non-monetary interactions that economic anthropologists have observed for a very long time would be recreated and foregrounded again" would certainly involve mass death and be the kind of thing that those involved would describe as a 'horror' or 'tragedy'. Those previous systems, whatever their strengths, were not capable of sustaining a population as large as those that currently exist. There is a cost to "simply fragment(ing) into thousands of smaller networks with closer social ties" that you gloss over that makes you sound very callous in a way I do not believe you intend.
This is not to imply that no other system is possible without collapse - I think the space of possible social systems is very large and hope that many exist that both fulfill fundamental human needs better then the current one and sustain at least as large a population. But although such systems would likely take some inspiration from the past, they would probably be as alien to us as our current system is to those of our ancestors.
I live on a canal boat in London. While I’m personally still dependent on money, a few of my neighbours use it a lot less. They go skipping for food and other necessities; they have little in terms of income, but they rarely need to use money anyway – just for things like the occasional beer. They have savings for a rainy day (unlike me).
They’re in their 30s, have their own floating homes with no mortgage and an abundance of both food and free time. They’re university-educated and could have chosen the well-trodden path, but decided not to.
Me, on the other hand, I’ve got a £20k debt to pay off after being pushed out of the fintech I founded (which had raised £5m), by my cofounder and VCs. So I’m forced to earn money, but when you earn money, it’s tempting to spend it too — and the cycle continues. I did default on a £4k Amex bill though, which felt great, and they seem to have given up on me.
Indeed, as the article points out, the tragedy of addictants is that, after the honeymoon period is over, they generally only bring the addict back up to the hedonic level that they experienced prior to their addiction. The 'pleasure' that the addictant brings is the relief from 'jonesing'.
I know this is also true for my morning coffee, but there's a personal intimate ritual associated with making and drinking coffee in bed. Although I have never smoked, I have watched enough movies to know that this is true for cigarettes too. These addictants, they readily interpenetrate and infiltrate our lives and become part of our rituals.
In these rituals (repetition x significance) the addictants encourage repetition and associatively acquire significance. They become one of the "sacramental instruments" of the ritual. So, contemplating giving up an addiction feel as if part of the meaning in one's life is as about to fall away -- and that alone is quite a scary thing. Of course, one will recover from the illusion once one has successfully quit, but there maybe a lasting social rupture.
Absolutely loved how you laid these perspectives out, will be adding it to my knowledge bank and writing arsenal. Ours Sainsburys card system shut down for a few hours yesterday, couldn’t stop thinking of your work amongst the kafuffle lol
So true. Once, it was the birthright of all humans to live off the land. Since the invention of money, property rights, and the system of paid work, this is not possible for the great majority. Now, most people need money to survive... and thrive. Yet, I don't think today's 'quality of life' is better than when I was a kid. In many ways, it seems worse. I'm 75 in a few months. Today I was talking with a group of 30 year-olds. They could not comprehend that when I was a kid in one of Australia's largest cities, milk, bread and ice were still delivered by horse and cart. Many people did not have indoor toilets and still cooked on wood stoves. There were no supermarkets, or much in the way of processed foods, or takeaways, and few restaurants, no freeways or TV, and certainly no computers or satellite communications or mobile phones. All business was conducted by mail, and all transactions were recorded in paper ledgers. Everyone read the national and local news so we all had a common frame of reference. Only around 10% of homes had a phone and few people had a car or fridge or washing machine, and most homes were tiny by today's standards, and were sparsely furnished. Everyone walked everywhere, or rode a bike, or took public transport (bus, train or tram). There was of course much wrong with the world, women had a taste of emancipation during the war, but had to give up work when married, and the overwhelming white population was not aware of the past harm done and still being done to our first nation's people. We had a 'White Australia' policy, that was later done away with to our great benefit, as we came to enjoy the multi-cultural food and customs that different nationalities brought to the country. People were fit and lean and led rich fulfilling lives, socializing with their neighbours and friends who lived nearby... but also died young. I, along with my wife and two adult (late 40's kids) would all be dead long ago without modern medicine. Life expectancy has been on the march for 100 years, though it has reversed lately in the US. This has led to an explosion of population that is now increasing at a declining rate and will soon go into an absolute decline. If we can avoid poisoning the biosphere and heating the planet beyond some 'tipping point', and avoid AI taking control of our systems entirely and replacing our goals with its goals, and avoid the threat of rising authoritarianism, the future may indeed promise another re-set (similar to after the second world war) where people do much less paid work and find meaning in other ways that naturally keep them lean and fit and sociable. Ah... if only :)
Thanks for this interesting essay which I'll endeavour to popularise through my limited network. These things are impossible to predict but I'm sure you'll agree that the incumbent debt-based Fiat currency system is unsustainable. You are not as pessimistic as me about the likely [Great] Reset to CBDCs but perhaps a resurgence of popularising local/alternative currency models is now overdue? Through both financial and energy systems we might envisage (h/t Nate Hagens) a [Great] Simplification in the coming decades which - from an ecological & sociological point of view - would ultimately entail a lot of positive outcomes. I think a hashtag #ForwardToThePast conveys this direction of travel which you have alluded to at several points in your essay.
I worked in a sugar factory in my youth and I remember the ten minute smoke breaks every two hours. The breaks made the mind-numbing work tolerable and then at the end of the week came the paycheck reward, which made the work week tolerable. It was all part of the system.
I researched tobacco once and discovered that the industrial process that made packs of cigarettes possible co-evolved with industrialism itself. In order to obtain the factory friendly texture, it was necessary to ‘toast’ the tobacco, which raised the nicotine level making cigarettes more addictive. The makers also adjusted the burn time of the cigarettes to align with the ten minutes of breaks.
I like the fact that this essay doesn’t have a solution. :)
This is a huge basement's stone for an healthy perspective of the world!
This is so good. Solutionism! I’ve been writing about this sort of thing in lieu of green energy technocracy. I didn’t know there was a name. Excellent.
I've been trying to articulate the false sense of pioneering that you've characterized in the fintech reference at the end: the story that businesses tell themselves and the world about 'heading towards the future' while essentially anchoring us deeper into this monetary system. Today's version in my head is "There are no leftist startups." Yes to acknowledging where we are. 👍🏽
I like the addiction metaphor but feel it's worth distinguishing between the individual physical addition to a substance and the collective addiction, which is probably not really addiction.
What's happening underneath the metaphor is that as the money system becomes part of society, then society builds on it; the more layers are built on it, the more we depend on it. If we are addicted to money we are also addicted to government, to language, to any number of technologies. I'm addicted to my fingers, my liver, my glasses.
And withdrawing from our 'addiction' to money is almost not even an option and the health benefits are debatable. Overall I would probably prefer another framing.
This is the first time I have had "solutionism" defined in such a way that is both meaningful, makes sense, and generates a framing I mostly agree with. We make our tools and, in turn our tools make us. It is a symbiotic relationship we have far less control over then we'd like to believe.
That said, I find the paragraph you begin with "But let’s get real." to be somewhere between annoying and infuriating. Quickly returning into a system where "non-monetary interactions that economic anthropologists have observed for a very long time would be recreated and foregrounded again" would certainly involve mass death and be the kind of thing that those involved would describe as a 'horror' or 'tragedy'. Those previous systems, whatever their strengths, were not capable of sustaining a population as large as those that currently exist. There is a cost to "simply fragment(ing) into thousands of smaller networks with closer social ties" that you gloss over that makes you sound very callous in a way I do not believe you intend.
This is not to imply that no other system is possible without collapse - I think the space of possible social systems is very large and hope that many exist that both fulfill fundamental human needs better then the current one and sustain at least as large a population. But although such systems would likely take some inspiration from the past, they would probably be as alien to us as our current system is to those of our ancestors.
Your metaphors are always so spot on. Well done, Brett !
I live on a canal boat in London. While I’m personally still dependent on money, a few of my neighbours use it a lot less. They go skipping for food and other necessities; they have little in terms of income, but they rarely need to use money anyway – just for things like the occasional beer. They have savings for a rainy day (unlike me).
They’re in their 30s, have their own floating homes with no mortgage and an abundance of both food and free time. They’re university-educated and could have chosen the well-trodden path, but decided not to.
Me, on the other hand, I’ve got a £20k debt to pay off after being pushed out of the fintech I founded (which had raised £5m), by my cofounder and VCs. So I’m forced to earn money, but when you earn money, it’s tempting to spend it too — and the cycle continues. I did default on a £4k Amex bill though, which felt great, and they seem to have given up on me.
What a great piece
Indeed, as the article points out, the tragedy of addictants is that, after the honeymoon period is over, they generally only bring the addict back up to the hedonic level that they experienced prior to their addiction. The 'pleasure' that the addictant brings is the relief from 'jonesing'.
I know this is also true for my morning coffee, but there's a personal intimate ritual associated with making and drinking coffee in bed. Although I have never smoked, I have watched enough movies to know that this is true for cigarettes too. These addictants, they readily interpenetrate and infiltrate our lives and become part of our rituals.
In these rituals (repetition x significance) the addictants encourage repetition and associatively acquire significance. They become one of the "sacramental instruments" of the ritual. So, contemplating giving up an addiction feel as if part of the meaning in one's life is as about to fall away -- and that alone is quite a scary thing. Of course, one will recover from the illusion once one has successfully quit, but there maybe a lasting social rupture.
Absolutely loved how you laid these perspectives out, will be adding it to my knowledge bank and writing arsenal. Ours Sainsburys card system shut down for a few hours yesterday, couldn’t stop thinking of your work amongst the kafuffle lol
Extremely thought provoking.
Very interesting and well written edition.
So true. Once, it was the birthright of all humans to live off the land. Since the invention of money, property rights, and the system of paid work, this is not possible for the great majority. Now, most people need money to survive... and thrive. Yet, I don't think today's 'quality of life' is better than when I was a kid. In many ways, it seems worse. I'm 75 in a few months. Today I was talking with a group of 30 year-olds. They could not comprehend that when I was a kid in one of Australia's largest cities, milk, bread and ice were still delivered by horse and cart. Many people did not have indoor toilets and still cooked on wood stoves. There were no supermarkets, or much in the way of processed foods, or takeaways, and few restaurants, no freeways or TV, and certainly no computers or satellite communications or mobile phones. All business was conducted by mail, and all transactions were recorded in paper ledgers. Everyone read the national and local news so we all had a common frame of reference. Only around 10% of homes had a phone and few people had a car or fridge or washing machine, and most homes were tiny by today's standards, and were sparsely furnished. Everyone walked everywhere, or rode a bike, or took public transport (bus, train or tram). There was of course much wrong with the world, women had a taste of emancipation during the war, but had to give up work when married, and the overwhelming white population was not aware of the past harm done and still being done to our first nation's people. We had a 'White Australia' policy, that was later done away with to our great benefit, as we came to enjoy the multi-cultural food and customs that different nationalities brought to the country. People were fit and lean and led rich fulfilling lives, socializing with their neighbours and friends who lived nearby... but also died young. I, along with my wife and two adult (late 40's kids) would all be dead long ago without modern medicine. Life expectancy has been on the march for 100 years, though it has reversed lately in the US. This has led to an explosion of population that is now increasing at a declining rate and will soon go into an absolute decline. If we can avoid poisoning the biosphere and heating the planet beyond some 'tipping point', and avoid AI taking control of our systems entirely and replacing our goals with its goals, and avoid the threat of rising authoritarianism, the future may indeed promise another re-set (similar to after the second world war) where people do much less paid work and find meaning in other ways that naturally keep them lean and fit and sociable. Ah... if only :)
Thanks for this interesting essay which I'll endeavour to popularise through my limited network. These things are impossible to predict but I'm sure you'll agree that the incumbent debt-based Fiat currency system is unsustainable. You are not as pessimistic as me about the likely [Great] Reset to CBDCs but perhaps a resurgence of popularising local/alternative currency models is now overdue? Through both financial and energy systems we might envisage (h/t Nate Hagens) a [Great] Simplification in the coming decades which - from an ecological & sociological point of view - would ultimately entail a lot of positive outcomes. I think a hashtag #ForwardToThePast conveys this direction of travel which you have alluded to at several points in your essay.