This is at least in the same ballpark as something I’ve been trying to figure out how to articulate for a while.
There’s some relation between people and what I hope we don’t end up calling “punk objects”. (Punk, of course, was all about DIY. In Communist countries, punks set up their own record-printing shops, and printed records on anything they could get their hands on—most memorably, used X-ray film.) And there’s a quality about the people who cultivate these sorts of relations. This might be what Heinlein was talking about when he said specialization is for insects.
The flip side of that is a sort of alienation. If you can’t fix or modify your Apple, and have to struggle endlessly with it to get it to do anything it’s technically capable of doing but that Apple doesn’t want you to be able to do (or at least to do easily), is the Apple really yours? Do you own the thing?
What this reminds me of is the recent social-media habit of imbuing large media corporations with the power to dictate identitarian dignity—for example, Elbonians petitioning Disney to make movies about Elbonia with Elbonians in them, so that Elbonians can feel better about themselves. Those Elbonians can’t pop open the hood of their own group identity—it belongs to Hollywood, and only Hollywood can tinker with its internals.
(I think Rod Dreher would take this a lot further, and would say something about Vaclav Benda.)
Now, what the Apple thing reminds me of is preschool. In one of the first preschools my parents sent me to, they had a System. You had to ask the teacher how to play with a toy before you could lay your hands on it, and you could only play with it on a tiny little rug with your name on it, and when you were done you had to roll up your rug and put it in the corner, and outside structured class time that was the only thing you could do. Grade school was more of the same. And now that I have a job and an apartment in a building owned by a faceless corporation, I spend forty hours a week tooting around with a laptop in a tedious, highly structured manner, and when I go home I feel like I’m in storage—like a dolphin at Sea World after closing time. OK, show’s over, go back to your cage.
There are a lot of things missing in the default urban life, but the thing you’re talking about here is definitely one of them, and I’m not sure what, if anything, can be done about it. I think it’s entirely possible that this is the result of an at least semi-deliberate human domestication process, and that resistance to it is difficult and socially costly.
This is at least in the same ballpark as something I’ve been trying to figure out how to articulate for a while.
There’s some relation between people and what I hope we don’t end up calling “punk objects”. (Punk, of course, was all about DIY. In Communist countries, punks set up their own record-printing shops, and printed records on anything they could get their hands on—most memorably, used X-ray film.) And there’s a quality about the people who cultivate these sorts of relations. This might be what Heinlein was talking about when he said specialization is for insects.
The flip side of that is a sort of alienation. If you can’t fix or modify your Apple, and have to struggle endlessly with it to get it to do anything it’s technically capable of doing but that Apple doesn’t want you to be able to do (or at least to do easily), is the Apple really yours? Do you own the thing?
What this reminds me of is the recent social-media habit of imbuing large media corporations with the power to dictate identitarian dignity—for example, Elbonians petitioning Disney to make movies about Elbonia with Elbonians in them, so that Elbonians can feel better about themselves. Those Elbonians can’t pop open the hood of their own group identity—it belongs to Hollywood, and only Hollywood can tinker with its internals.
(I think Rod Dreher would take this a lot further, and would say something about Vaclav Benda.)
Now, what the Apple thing reminds me of is preschool. In one of the first preschools my parents sent me to, they had a System. You had to ask the teacher how to play with a toy before you could lay your hands on it, and you could only play with it on a tiny little rug with your name on it, and when you were done you had to roll up your rug and put it in the corner, and outside structured class time that was the only thing you could do. Grade school was more of the same. And now that I have a job and an apartment in a building owned by a faceless corporation, I spend forty hours a week tooting around with a laptop in a tedious, highly structured manner, and when I go home I feel like I’m in storage—like a dolphin at Sea World after closing time. OK, show’s over, go back to your cage.
There are a lot of things missing in the default urban life, but the thing you’re talking about here is definitely one of them, and I’m not sure what, if anything, can be done about it. I think it’s entirely possible that this is the result of an at least semi-deliberate human domestication process, and that resistance to it is difficult and socially costly.