Forum / Unplug-8

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    strannikov
    Nov 10, 02:53pm

    Now that we’ve somehow managed to enter the final quarter of 2024 CE, we might pause to consider our continuing reliance on electricity.

    As national, state, and local policies concerning energy, energy generation, energy supply, and energy distribution entail more and more political dithering within domestic polities worldwide, citizens who decide they no longer care to rely entirely on political action from the top-down in fact have at least one practical option with respect to the cumulative onset of Technogenic Climate Change.

    This simple idea might well yield only negligible outcomes: whether it can help equip human volition sufficiently remains doubtful (though I prefer to think that its practice would prove more substantive than gluing oneself to a busy city street or splashing tomato soup or Day-Glo paint over some innocent painting or sculpture). Whatever it might lack in significance of outcomes, though, it yet possesses a dual purpose: while it can help us reduce further contributions to the onset of Technogenic Climate Change (however modestly), it also can mitigate participation in the maturing spread of “tech totalitarianism” (the global ubiquity of technology, tech gadgetry, “tech culture”, and tech-driven commerce) and permit us to carve out for ourselves hours each day unalloyed with the imposed tyrannies, mandates, and imperatives of “mediated existence”.

    “Mediated existence” is exactly what the name says: it is a human life (yours, mine) divided into sequences of twenty-four-hour days, eight of which optimally might be devoted to sleep, eight of which might be devoted to work/career/labor/schooling, and the remaining eight to alimentation and digestion, hygiene and grooming, tending to domestic obligations and personal responsibilities, and management of individual physical, spiritual, intellectual, economic, political, and social affairs. In and across each day’s sixteen waking hours, entire blocks of hours commonly are devoted to or entail passive, mediated existence in front of some screen—“participating in life” via some appliance of electronic mediation, “keeping in touch with the world” via some electronic mediating device: “living” (or, perhaps more exactly, “monitoring existence”) up to fifteen hours each day courtesy of helpful, marketed, and sold (or subscription-supplied) mediating appliances or electronic devices.

    I call this proposal “Unplug-8”.

    Unplug-8 recognizes the following: apart from c. eight hours of sleep per night (still possible without assistance from any mediating appliance or device) and apart from c. eight hours of work, career, labor, or schooling each day (with obligatory interactions with various technologies for respective purposes), the meagre eight hours a day that anyone has to call his or her own can be lived, whole and entire, without the first contribution of any mediating electronic appliance, device, and service.

    In its extreme form Unplug-8 means: unplug your mediating appliances and electronic devices for the eight hours a day you might reasonably be permitted to call your own (that is: unplug yourself from them). Do not use or consult your mediating appliances and devices for a full and entire eight hours a day: instead, live unmediated life for eight hours each day in touch with the palpable reality of your immediate surroundings, your actual domicile (not the virtual one), your actual neighborhood (not your virtual neighborhood), in the city, town, or rural setting where you actually dwell, in the actual hours of your actual fleeting life.

    No doubt, many will shudder. “Detach myself from internet, cable, satellite, and streaming fare? Rely on my own cognitive and sensory resources?” Fearful prospects!

    —but be of good cheer: Unplug-8 is not proffered with any dogmatic or ethical imperative of its own, and realism (even in this age of mediated human existence), when invoked, has to concede that few of us will feel psychically fit or psychologically ready to undertake such an abrupt about-face. Unplug-8 can be understood thus as a voluntary but viable option. (Keep in mind, though, that the unavoidable onset of Technogenic Climate Change already has begun to make substantive responses a compelling and increasingly practical necessity.) Even if commitment to a full eight-hours-a-day unplugged from all mediating appliances and devices is or seems impractical, never forget that mediated existence (with its ubiquitous commercial prodding and continuous commercial cajoling, its sidebar appeals and its pop-up notices) is neither aesthetically attractive nor spiritually hygienic, short-term or long-term. At least at first, Unplug-8 can surely be practiced for just a portion of the eight hours out of twenty-four that modern allowances of “free time” permit: if not “Unplug-8”, then “Unplug-6”—if not “Unplug-6”, then “Unplug-4”, “Unplug-2”, or “Unplug-1”.

    The significant facts remain: electronic technologies proffered by their inventors, designers, engineers, manufacturers, and marketeers have become so ubiquitous across the face of the entire planet as to’ve begun to acquire and display the aspect of “global tech totalitarianism”. (“Ubiquity” and “convenience” pose the dual challenge of “ceasing to think about the role and extent of technology in human life”, perhaps constituting not so much a two-way street as two one-way streets running however closely parallel: once a product or service has become ubiquitous in its provision, we commonly no longer think of the product or service itself, becoming alert to its existence only when a service or system disruption occurs.) The prospects of life-long, seamless mediated existence—run according to the clocks and calendars of unelected tech tyrants and their commercial interests and goals—have begun turning the entire globe into a planetary, motor-driven treadwheel, in which all of us begin to acquire traits of panting lab rats, racing in endless circles and loops, only to die of exhaustion or frustration at the end of short lives of circular labors.

    Unplug-8 thus responds both to the advent of Technogenic Climate Change (less electricity consumption cumulatively) and to whatever threats or incursions are or might yet be posed by the rival advent of ubiquitous and intrusive (and unelected) tech tyrannies. While Unplug-8, being voluntary, does not entail any ethical or dogmatic imperative of its own, it does offer breathing room for harried humans who have been taught and trained from birth to jump through the numerous colorful hoops of vacuous and dubious consumerism, while it helps curtail some of the very energy consumptions that help drive and accelerate Technogenic Climate Change.

    Unplug-8 at any level of adoption offers small oases in the deserts of time for people to catch breath and to encounter ephemeral existence without any need for or appeal of electronic mediation. Unplug-8 thus can permit moments for other thoughts on how we might prefer to live our short lives on this hurtling globe, no matter the future of tech totalitarianisms and unelected tech tyrannies, no matter the local extents and specific impacts of oncoming and ineluctable Technogenic Climate Change.

    -END-

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