Mind Matters
Annie Dillard + Karl Marx // Digital Gardens // The Future
Hello, fellow humans.
Thank you to all those who read, shared, & reached out regarding my recently published long-form essay on hyper-capitalism & human development. It’s been a blast to hear from so many people, & I hope it might continue reaching others with similar interests. It feels like the beginning of something, rather than the culmination of anything.
I just published a “policy long” on UBI. It’s a collection of all the UBI research I did for the long-form essay, organized so that you can skip right to parts that interest you. Section on that below.
I’m working on a policy proposal for a negative income tax tuned to the 21st century (why not, right?). If you have any interest/relevant experience, I’m sharing it with friends for feedback. Let me know if you’re interested in reviewing.
An Unlikely Harmony: Annie Dillard & Karl Marx
I’m dwelling on an unlikely harmony between the writings of Annie Dillard and Karl Marx. I think they converge on an idea I discussed with David Perell: time inequality. “Harmony”, because they surely operate in different octaves. Dillard wanders her backyard in Virginia, tracking both muskrats and God through sunlit fields and careening brooks. Marx twirled and flipped Hegel’s philosophy upside down, setting it loose upon the economic basis of human life. But bear with me.
Their harmony is composed of two notes. There's Marx's distinction between use and exchange value. And Annie Dillard's simple observation that opens up like a blossoming tulip the more you think about it:
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing”
We generate exchange value when we do stuff for the purpose of exchange. So if I’m building a table that I plan on using in my living room, that table has immediate use-value for me. But if I plan on selling it, I’m interested in its exchange value - how much money can I get for it?
Or, if I’m working an office job exclusively for the paycheck, the time I spend working is generating exchange value (money) that I will use to purchase access to the actual things that have use-value to me. Things that I consider ends in themselves. The job is a means.
Ok. So. If we spend most of our waking hours generating exchange value - doing things that are never for themselves, but always a means for something else - we are then spending our lives, according to Dillard (and Marx’s theory of the commodity form) as commodities.
Here’s the formula:
To generate exchange value is to commodify time (I sell my time to my boss in exchange for money).
To commodify time is to subject our behaviors and psyches to commodity logic (I can only do that which earns, which requires thinking in ways that earn)
To subject our behaviors and psyches to commodity logic is to become commodities (if both what we do and how we think bend towards commodity logic, this is what we are becoming).
So long as the majority of the population must spend the majority of their time acquiring exchange value (money), capitalism impels us, as by an invisible hand, to turn ourselves, into commodities.
Picture the mass-production lines of Ford automobiles - is that also the best model for producing human beings? Assuming that a system turning human beings into commodities is a bad thing, the lens of time inequality offers a clear path forward.
‘Progress’ could be understood as decreasing the proportion of their time ordinary people (or perhaps those who are worst off) must devote towards generating the exchange value they need to support themselves.
The less time that must go towards the means of exchange value, the more time that goes towards the ends of use-value. And this, I suspect is where meaningful progress and innovation come from. When people are free to do and explore those activities they consider ends in themselves.
Consider this paragraph from a (fascinating) paper titled “How Economics Shaped Human Nature: A Theory of Evolution”:
An economic commitment to reducing time inequality would employ innovation and development to increasingly free people from the necessities of exchange value. In other words, it should enable us to spend less time laboring for means, and more time playing with ends.
Of course, this hasn’t been the story. Marx saw how the logic of capitalism wouldn’t allow for such a story. Capitalist power dynamics ensure that the free time generated by productive innovations is not distributed in democratic fashion. Rather, it’s appropriated by the growth imperative and reinvested back into the production process, creating surplus value.
I tried to draw this up in my essay on the capitalist production of consciousness:
I think this whole thing should conclude back with Dillard, but I’ll need to dwell on it a little longer. I expect to continue drawing out this idea of time inequality. If you have any suggestion/associated ideas, send ‘em over.
A Guide to UBI: A Policy Long // + // How to Design Digital Gardens?
Last time I shared the long-form essay I wrote about hyper-capitalism, human development, and basic income. I did a lot of research on UBI for that essay that didn’t get used. So I’ve packaged it all together in a UBI “policy long”.
The idea was to design it so that you don’t need to linearly read it from start to finish. Rather, I made a clickable table o’ contents with most of the popular questions on UBI. If you see a question you have, click it, and it’ll zap you to the relevant section in the document.
This raised some interesting design questions. The table of contents is full of one-way links. So if you click the link for “shorter working weeks”, it brings you to that section. But once you’ve read it, then what? Either keep reading whatever’s arbitrarily next, or manually scroll all the way back to the top and see if there’s anywhere else you’d like to look at.
How can I structure an information-dense piece like that to be more of a garden, with teleporting mechanisms scattered throughout?
I gave other sections mini-maps with click-able sections, like so:
And:
Which is helpful, but still not all the way there. This question broke out in a little corner of Twitter recently. How to design “digital gardens”?
If you have any thoughts, insights, or recommendations on this kind of design, reach out!
And if you’re interested in the policy long, you can check it out here: A Guide to Universal Basic Income: A Policy Long.
UBI Makes Recipients “More Confident in Their Own Future”
The most recent 2-year UBI trial in Finland recently released their findings.
It was a small trial, but notably, they conducted intensive interviews (subjective evaluations to go alongside the objective indicators like employment figures) to explore how UBI affected people’s mental well-being.
The most interesting finding was this little passage:
How can we possibly make sense of what kind of knock-on effects making people “more confident in their own future” will have?
Mark Fisher once wrote:
“The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”
For too much of society, the past 50 years of economic development has enshrouded us in an atmosphere of impossibility. You can hear this in Fisher’s voice, when he describes the 1960’s as “a moment more vivid than now - a time when people really lived, when things really happened.”
Today, it feels like we are not really living. Things are not really happening. Of course, they are. But too many of us feel disenchanted from that process, largely because time inequality precludes most people from really thinking about, or participating in, anything other than how to stay afloat.
I’m interested in the psychological consequences of basic income, exploring whether it revitalizes this sense of possibility in ordinary people. The Finnish results are an exciting data point in that question (they made a cute little video if you’re interested).
That’s it.
As always, you can respond directly to this email with thoughts or suggestions. Or reach out on Twitter. I’m here for conversation & community.
If you have a friend who might enjoy this newsletter, consider sharing it. The more people on this network, the more possibilities we can cook up.
Until next time,
Oshan
Free time creates innovation because it allows people to play. Play is one of the single largest reasons we have anything like a wheel, cars, this computer. Humans seem to be at their best when at play.