Originally published on Glenn McDonald’s blog, Furia.
The consumptive future that billionaires and their power-consolidation corporations are trying to sell us is a future of vending machines.
The collective future that we want is a future of kitchens.
Vending machines present a shallow illusion of overconstrained “choice”, but no meaningful agency. The insidiousness of vending machines, however, is not this quantitative overconstraint. Adding more products to the vending machine does not change its nature. Amazon is a very large vending machine. The insidiousness is the conflation of choice with agency, and thus of consumption with participation.
A vended economy is supported by a complaisant vended politics, increasingly of its own making. Voting is the nominal structural basis of democracy, but encouraging people to vote, in itself, is anodyne and power-friendly. Voting in elections with only one candidate is bad theater, but voting in elections with only two candidates is only one better. And the math never improves: if you have no control over the candidates, and in particular if the candidates are never you, increasing their number doesn’t benefit you.
We don’t immediately recognize this as dystopia, because dystopian story-telling usually oversimplifies the format of the oppression. In 1984 the government controls the meager supply of drab consumer goods, and the single broadcast/surveillance channel. But of course Walmart has endless aisles of things, and the TVs in the TV aisle have endless channels. We have choices.
But our choices are stocked by Walmart. Or Amazon, or a handful of morally interchangeable competitors. The TV channels are numerous in frequency, but monotonous in signal, and monopolized in control. You can have any innocuous flavor of filler surrounding your advertisements (for innocuously flavored fillers). Orwell thought this gray-goo of a world would be imposed on us by the State, but the capitalist innovation is to invert this. Power is consolidated by money, not vice versa. Citizenship is portioned into voters, who are then repackaged as consumers. Anything functional in government is absorbed or disassembled until it can impose no miserly restrictions.
And so we get: self-destructive grievant feudalism wielded by a petulant debt-powered narcissist, supported by gutless symbiosis with a solipsistic social class of robber barons. The narcissist only sees himself in the (legacy) media, which is controlled by the same fear-sellers who picked him as their sacrificial agent. Dissent isn’t so much crushed as is organized into slots, each of which are manipulated to go temporarily out of stock, and then those empty slots are filled with something more colorful, but more completely owned. A few protesters gather in front of the machine to demand the return of the most recently discontinued snack. Their attention validates the machine. The machine gleams eagerly, its buttons patiently awaiting their fingers. They are angry now, but anger turns into hunger over so little time. Soon they will want something. The machine has the things. It waits.
We have kitchens. So many of the things in the kitchen came from rows on shelves in stores, vended with only slightly less structure than from the machine. The kitchen is not anti-business or anti-capitalist, exactly. But the things in the kitchen are material, and tools. The difference between a 5lb sack of flour and an individually-packaged snack cake is the difference between potential energy and the bill for energy consumed. At the end, we still eat. The difference is not the overall topology of the system, but our place in it. We come to the kitchen to take up knives, not coins or tokens.
Instead of a flat grid of processed choices, all lit from a consistent angle, the kitchen is an unruly space. Most of the things in it do fairly little of their own accord. A few of them have very particular purposes, but many do not. A bagel-cutter, but then 4 knives for all other needs combined. One adorable pan you use twice a year to make æbelskivers, two sizes of skillet, a saucepan, a soup pot. Inspirational cookbooks you mostly don’t actually open. Turn on the stove; grab a pan, put a little olive oil in it; get a knife. We’re going to make something out of ingredients and tradition and imagination and love and heat and garlic.
But even when we do, we are mostly alone. The capitalist rendition of Community Supported Agriculture is a telling example of both potential and challenge. The farmer solicits patrons, who each subscribe to a share of the farm’s output, driven conveniently from the farm into the city every week. But while the community’s support is collectively tangible to the farmer, albeit not regally so, the community is mostly only abstract and implicit to itself. Maybe you say hi to other people picking up their shares at the same time. Maybe there’s a mailing list where you can exchange ideas for what to do with 8 zucchini at once. But there’s probably no shared kitchen where you could all make zucchini chocolate cake at once. The community of the CSA, in isolation, is not only asymmetrical, but inherently hard to manifest. Most of your actual neighbors aren’t CSA subscribers. Half of them only shop at Trader Joe’s and think you’re making a gross joke with the thing about zucchini in cake. Some of them shop at the part of Amazon that says Whole Foods, and at least cook. One of them belongs to a different CSA. These fragmented micro-collectives don’t worry the billionaires. You are more likely connected to your immediate neighbors by baseball. The billionaires own the baseball teams.
The “smart” phone, which is now just what “phone” mostly means (in the same way that “social” media is now just what “media” mostly means; and thus a few more billionaires), is sometimes dreamily described as a computer in our pocket, but of course what it really is is a vending machine in our pocket, neatly lined with buttons. Behind the buttons, increasingly, are “apps” that are themselves in turn essentially vending machines of prepackaged choices. Like a tapas dinner with our friends, this doesn’t sound bad by definition. But the tapas restaurant has a kitchen, and knives. A decent restaurant is a complex celebration of human agency put into the form of edible performance, and should make us want to cook in the way that, hopefully, a good song makes us want to sing. We can sing while we cook.
Our computers, even the tiny galley computers in our pockets, can be more like kitchens full of singing. The thing that would make them different would be a different kind of software. But the thing that would make a different kind of software likely is a different economy and a different social structure of not just how software is made, but how computation is applied to human problems. Power must be distributed, but we also have to want it, have to want to make our own decisions instead of delegating them to our choice of 5 omniscient oracles. The oracles aren’t going to tell us to figure it out ourselves, so we have to want to not ask them. A CSA doesn’t require that its recipients eat differently than TJ’s customers, but 8 zucchini constitute a provocation to cook in a way that a frozen stir-fry does not. If the only “ingredients” we can easily buy are frozen entrées, all meals are snacks and it doesn’t matter if our knives are sharp. Especially not if the snack troopers come for our knives, pretending it’s for our safety.
We do not need more applications. We do not need new vendors of fancier and less predictable ways to make the same snack apps. We need the same things for data and data-tools and the things we can make out of data with data-tools that a community needs from a communal kitchen. But because communities formed in computational space can use tools for self-development and self-determination that would be harder to provide in physical space, maybe examples in our software can help lead to similarly catalytic ideas in our cities. Maybe data maker-spaces will inspire us to make communal kitchens, and the kitchens will give us new data needs, and thus new ideas. The spaces are different, but the communities are all made of people, and the people are us.
We do not need more snacks. We do not need robots that make more snacks. We do not need machines that turn our zucchini into snack cakes that they then confiscate and sell back to us. We need a place where, when we get hungry, it is still harder to reach for a knife than a button, but only in the way that tells us the results will be satisfying. A place in which the vending machine gathers dust until we replace it with an extra refrigerator. A place with noise and joy and knives.
We do not need safety from ourselves. The knives are not weapons. Stabbing is not a cooking technique. The newly unbillionaired can have some zucchini chocolate cake, too. This is our argument against oligarchy and our restorative consolation to those who thought safety required demonization: We have enough. Dominance is a rich person’s poor substitute for collaboration. Aspiring to dominance is a poor person’s poor substitute for working together on our collective wealth and taste.
We do not have to settle for poor choices, bought and swallowed whole. We do not have to buy what we find in machines. We do not have to quietly comply with our own commodification. Together, we do not have to be consumed.