Edition 021: The Doodlebug

The previous edition ended on worth. The system decides some people are worth less than others, and moves their losses onto them while calling it growth. That judgment does not stop at what a person holds or earns. It reaches further in.

A system that prices everything decides what your inner life is worth too. Your attention has a price, and the system has found it. Your time has a price. So does your solitude, your privacy, the hour you spend on something that produces nothing. The parts of you that can be measured and sold are valued. The parts that cannot are treated the way the system treats anything it cannot price, as though they were not there. The walk with the dog. The hour spent reading to your child. These do not register. Nothing about them can be entered anywhere, so as far as the system is concerned, they do not matter. The day the system can see is the part of the day that produced something countable. The rest, which for most people is the part worth having, leaves no trace because it can’t be measured.

This is exactly what this book has been tracing through data and money, now turned on the self. What follows is about what that does to a person. What it does to you—to your private life, to your judgment, to your capacity to think an original thought or have time to think at all, to your relationships, and to the things that makes you and your life different from everyone else and everyone else’s lives.

I want to start with something small and seemingly insignificant—a doodlebug.

Several years ago, I was at the gym, stretching outside before a workout. I noticed a doodlebug crossing the pavement in front of me. I watched it for a moment, and went into a momentary reverie where I thought about its life, how brief its time on this earth was, how it was slowly and purposefully going somewhere in the way that small creatures go somewhere, and what it experienced as it moved across that expanse of concrete that seemed small to me, but likely vast to it.

And then my mind went somewhere else. And a minute later, I turned back and found that I had stepped on it.

I still think about it. I am not telling you this to show you something about myself. I am telling you because a small creature was alive and going somewhere, and my inattention ended it.  I owed it something. Attention, at least. Respect. Certainly, a recognition that it was alive.

There is a famous quote controversially attributed to Marvin Minsky, who helped found the field of artificial intelligence. Asked once what humanity’s relationship to the machines would be, he said generally that if we were lucky, they might keep us as pets. So, a best case, from one of the people who built the field, is that the machines decide we are worth keeping.

The doodlebug was not kept. It was stepped on by someone who meant it no harm and simply was not paying attention. That is the question underneath everything the cultural movement of this book is about. Are we are building a world that can feel the weight of a life it has no use for, or a world that steps on us without noticing?