Tyranny In A Thermostat

I hate to break things. Glass, especially. You can never get it all. I find myself picking up tiny pieces of it years after the damn glass hit the floor and shattered into a gazillion sharp bits.

I’m really careful when I wash a glass. I fill it with soapy water and dip the sponge into it and then take the sponge and maneuver it around the rim and the sides of the glass mindfully, delicately, heedfully. I rinse it and put it in the drying rack.

Or sometimes I’ll just rinse the glass and stick it in the dishwasher. The dishwasher is eminently convenient but I’ve got a somewhat troubled relationship with it. It’s new, and like all new things, it doesn’t stay new. When I say new I mean five years. Which really isn’t new. Five years is five years. 1,825 days. 43,800 hours. 63,072,000 minutes.

When we first got it a little blue light at the bottom of the dishwasher used to come on and shine a little blue dot on the floor. I liked that. Blue is such a sad color. I liked that announcement to come in blue, like a note on an electric guitar. Like Stevie Ray Vaughn at the El Macombo.

I’ve got a troubled relationship with all technology. That’s because all technology is infected by capitalism. Everything manufactured these days is compromised by a system of built-in obsolescence. This is done to maximize profit at the expense of the customer. Corporations stopped giving a shit about their customers a long time ago.

Remember flying in the 80s? The leg room? The service? The food? Total shit now. Corporations operate on a premise of sociopathic greed.

Remove accountability from the equation, and you’ve got an all-devouring monster, a bloated enterprise with cockroach CEOs and a minimal amount of service for an extortionate price.

That little blue light on our dishwasher vanished some years ago. The washer still works fine, but the computer is showing signs of confusion. There’s a black panel on the upper rim of the dishwasher door offering a number of options. To the left, we have Fast Wash, Pots & Pans, Normal Wash, Eco, & Quick Rinse. In the middle, we have tiny lights indicating the sequential operation of the washer: Clean, Sanitized, Locked, & Low Rinse.

To the right, we have Hi Temp, Sani Rinse, Air Dry, and Delay Start. And to the immediate right of Delay Start is a circle with an arrow and the word ‘Start.’ None of these options are actual buttons, but respond if pressed with a finger. The dishwasher appears to be functioning as it should with regard to these cycles, but the light for Low Rinse won’t go off. This isn’t a serious problem as yet, but a worrisome sign that the computerized system is on the verge of malfunctioning. This has been a common problem with the washing machine as well.

Life was decidedly simpler – and easier – before computers were installed in everything. I’m not a Luddite. I love electricity and running water. But I’m not a techno-utopian, either. I have a profound distrust of technology that exceeds what is necessary. Technology that controls behavior and draws on resources in the environment that causes ecological mayhem and collapse.

A friend recently espoused that all technology controls behavior. Does it?

Language is a form of technology and it most certainly has a powerful influence on behavior. But influence and control are two separate things. Language can have an insidious affect on one’s attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions. But control? No. There’s always a part of one’s being that is capable of remaining free and clear of the buzz and stain of words. The goo of syntax. The chitin of a sentence and its multiple legs.

Burroughs called language a virus. That suggests that it gets into our DNA and wreaks havoc there, shaping us into victims of state control. The jury is still out on that one.

But computers: no doubt about it. They control.

For example: surveillance. In an April, 2016 article by Glenn Greenwald titled “New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship,” the opening paragraph states that a “newly published study from Oxford’s John Penney provides empirical evidence for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free expression.”

“There are also numerous psychological studies,” he continues, “demonstrating that people who believe they are being watched engage in behavior far more compliant, conformist and submissive than those who believe they are acting without monitoring. That same realization served centuries ago as the foundation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon: that behaviors of large groups of people can be effectively controlled through architectural structures that make it possible for them to be watched at any given moment even though they can never know if they are, in fact, being monitored, thus forcing them to act as if they always are being watched.”

If the increasing blandness of our friends and neighbors has you feeling a little spooked, this could be one reason why. Another might be that they’ve been possessed by some form of alien vegetable.

These are weird times. Unprecedented. The imminent, existential thread of abrupt climate change aside, who could’ve predicted that there would come a time when almost every person you see in the street is gazing fixedly at a handheld computer and walking along as if in a trance, paying minimal attention to their surroundings, nudged quietly by algorithms and psychically neutered by an omniscient leviathan of artificial intelligence.

“There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of authority crave surveillance,” Greenwald concludes. “It’s precisely because the possibility of being monitored radically changes individual and collective behavior. Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective conformity. That’s always been intuitively clear. Now, there is mounting empirical evidence proving it.”

Or how about the Nest Thermostat? In a recent interview at Science Node, Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, stated “today you can’t buy a thermostat or many other appliances without privacy policies and licensing agreements. The NEST contract says 'if you don’t agree to our surveillance terms, then your thermostat can stop working at any time and we will stop upgrading the device and we have no responsibility for making it work, so you have to sign it.' Then your data goes to dozens or hundreds of third parties, and NEST says it is your problem to read THEIR privacy policies, and so on in an infinite regress. And that’s one thermostat — multiply that by all the devices they want to put in your home. What’s the independent variable? It’s not technology. It’s capitalism.”

Hopeless? Not really. Here’s another quote to throw out there, this one from Bob Marley: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.”