"...the way the hammer shapes the hand." Jackson Browne
I watch people who are very dear to me work to better understand themselves and improve their life experiences. Common approaches are some combination of professional assessment and counseling along with self directed research and engagement with various online communities. There are diagnostic terms and criteria. There are labels. I see these providing comfort for that sense of being out of kilter, not feeling settled or well fitted to one's circumstances and surroundings. If it can be named, sorted and boxed it can be tamed.
At the outset, I question whether the sense of being a cat always on the wrong side of the door, always being in some way out of alignment, being otherly may actually be an inherently human and healthy force, the creative tension in life that moves us to strive, create, struggle, question, change. I question whether the labels and criteria help us on our way or perhaps divert us from embracing our unique struggles to be well-adjusted, organized, emotionally stable or whatever. It is probably both.
What I am really writing about today is a different kind of categorization. The one which is king in the age of data harvesting and analysis. Twenty or so years of social media presence in our lives has fundamentally transformed how we see ourselves and each other. Tech giants make their billions by observing behavior, eye movements, clicks, scrolling and stopping, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not aware of. These galaxies of information are useless without categories to sort the data into in order to advertise us and manipulate emotions during elections and international conflict. Categories are not complicated. Gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, red, blue. They can be chopped finer and finer, but ultimately must be narrowing and limiting in order to be useful for data analysis and getting us to buy supplements or make political donations.
Despite the promise of the internet to expand and connect, in the age of King Data, our interactions and perceptions are narrowed and limited as we engage with technology - the way the hammer shapes the hand. We find community based on shared experiences of our categories. More importantly for Meta's and X's revenue streams, we also find villains based on categories. We've learned to self-segregate based on demographics because that's what is relentlessly programmed to us in our social media engagement.
Since so much of our social engagement is now through these channels, the more natural and organic interactions with others, say at a party or gathering or just in passing on the street are now parametered by those same categories instead of what we see and hear right in front of us. Even though we step away from the phone/tablet/computer screen, we're still looking through it. We don't need Google glasses because we're already there.
I've been dismayed by our culture's transformation to this point where we validate experience and validate people not by their individual character and life experience, but solely by the groupings and affiliations that fit the commercially useful recognized categories. In this way, vast swaths of our life experience and our collective selves are erased from our cultural landscape.
I find it impossible to have a conversation about tough issues of the day or in history because the category filter is the only one given air time. Anything that doesn't fit the 21st century boxes into which human lived experience is sorted doesn't exist.
And there again, the hammer shapes the hand. Tech companies don't simply have the power to fine tune content in order to sell our eyeballs to advertisers, they have the power to narrow, to segregate and to control our current lived experience.
We want to hold onto the sense that we are unique and in charge of how we see our world. The reality is that Alphabet, which makes this platform available to me, knows what I'm thinking better than I do. Perhaps I should have asked Gemini to write this for me. Also in on the truth are political operatives, disinformation factories and governments around the world.
This whole enterprise is about to take a giant leap forward as Palantir prepares to create a centralized database of personal information at the fingertips of the most powerful government in the world. It won't be tech competitors taking turns spinning us around blindfolded, but The One.
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