“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” the science fiction writer Ted Chiang told New York Times columnist Ezra Klein in 2021. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”
As far back as 1968, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, in a speech about “late capitalism,” asserted that “the world has been so thoroughly determined by an unimaginably-extended technology, that the corresponding social relations which once defined capitalism are becoming irrelevant.” In remarks that preceded the invention of Facebook by 36 years and TikTok by 48, but which may as well have been referring to these technologies explicitly, Adorno observed that “it has become possible to homogenize the consciousness of countless individuals from just a few points through the selection and presentation of news and commentary.” Late capitalism, he contended, incentivizes the sacrifice of distinctive personal characteristics. “The kernel of individuation”—the development of a unique human identity—“is beginning to come apart.”
Recently, another Times journalist, David Leonhardt, reported that while United States gross domestic product has increased considerably since 1990 (when it was already the world’s largest by far), other measures of a thriving society, such as life expectancy, life satisfaction, prevalence of depression, unemployment, social isolation, and suicide rate, are trending negatively. This same period, of course, overlaps with the irresistible centering of mobile, networked, ubiquitously distributed, and intentionally addictive technologies in daily American life. “Unimaginably-extended technology” has long had the capacity to “homogenize the consciousness of countless individuals,” as Adorno warned us. Now it can monetize their consciousness as well. Research would not suggest that late-capitalist Americans work excessively so much as we get worked excessively. We are not making product so much as we are becoming product.
“It is simple to be happy, but it is difficult to be simple.” Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, playwright, and Nobel Prize winner, is generally credited with this fitting wisdom for our late-capitalist, hyper-technological age. Tagore exposes capitalism’s relentless intrusion of future imagining into present living. (“I would gladly pay you Tuesday,” Wimpy promises in Popeye cartoons, “for a hamburger today.”) Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko laments this same distraction in her masterful novel Ceremony, one of whose characters, Rocky, dreams of assimilating into mainstream American society. “He was already thinking of the years ahead and the new places and people that were waiting for him in the future he had lived for since he first began to believe in the word ‘someday’ the way white people do.” Paul Simon’s Train in the Distance speaks to the power of “someday” too: “The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.”
(The contemporary Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who last year published a collection titled Joy in Service on Rue Tagore—which is at least an indirect allusion to Rabindranath Tagore—happened to write a poem 30 years ago about the sound of a train in the distance. There are times when all the world feels connected. It is simple to be happy.)
At MICDS we stand astride the late-capitalist conundrum as best we can, indulging the future’s unfolding—the procession from grade level to grade level, the preparation for college, the anticipation of adulthood—but being consistently present, grounded, and in community with one another as we do so. Challenges abound for children and adolescents in our world today. It is difficult to be simple in the face of them, but, seeking happiness, we will seek simplicity at our wonderful school ever the more intentionally, and keep our fears and anxieties at bay. We will believe in the word “someday” the way it should be believed in—the way that our students’ futures deserve—not as a distraction from the present moment, but as a fulfillment of its promise.
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. My best wishes to you and your families for a joyful weekend.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist: Train in the Distance by Paul Simon (Apple Music / Spotify)