Image: Margaret Mead (Courtesy: Wikimedia)
There's a phrase floating around; I'm sure you've heard of it: the age of information. Some phrases similar to it are the digital age, the age of technology, data, etc. It's become a common part of the language-use that I come across when I wander around LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, huge media sites holding the potential of connecting millions of people. But to call this the age of information given the practices at hand is a falsity being paraded as the truth. This is not about information, this is about attention. Our attention is the priceless commodity being sold and more often than not, sometimes unawarely, sometimes willingly, we are participating and letting it get sold.
I recently started thinking about how I could make money doing what I like and think I am good at, i.e. writing and talking to people. I have been doing the work on the blog but then blogs are everywhere and they are free. Would I be paid for the work that I do, that some consume and engage with, some write to me to tell me they are moved and changed by? Would I be paid given that so much of free information and content is everywhere, especially on mass sites like Instagram and Facebook? This made me pause as I thought about the nature of the freeness.
Every page on Instagram or Facebook is the work of someone or an organization. It is curated, created with patience, time, effort. There are pages where people express their feelings in the form of poetry, art, sometimes direct journalling, taking Instagram as the place where they can openly express themselves. As often happens, when one of these pages crosses a certain number of followers (the equivalent would be "friends" on Facebook) companies and individuals who want to capture the attention of a large group of people offer them money for some of the spotlight. Sometimes these creators take them up on their offer and make space for the message or product that the company wants to share. Those who follow the pages thus get introduced to a product or brand or service that they sometimes end up buying from.
What would have happened if instead we mindfully consumed, thinking about what we are consuming? What if when reading the words of a writer that we are nourished by, that we come to during times of darkness, we associate it with an actual person who is working to put it out? What if we imagine the cost of existence for them? Would we be treating art as casually and carelessly as we do now? Would we be treating information with as much ease as we do now? Would pages that exist to educate or share their work remain free at all if we stopped to consider the cost of creation?
This shifting of attention is an old way of the world. Imagine 7 billion people and billions of living and non-living things that exist in this world; you can't. Nobody can. But the truth is that within each of those is the possibility of problems and solutions and dynamic interaction with other elements in the world. What does this mean? It means that there are that many billion things for one to possibly pay attention to, but one can't and one must choose. So, what do we pay attention to? How do we make the most of our finite lives? What does it mean to live our lives next to other mortal and finite creatures and resources? These questions are hard questions to sit with since many of us wrestle with facing our own mortality. But when we do, we can direct our attention, money and time toward what is meaningful and valuable to us. It is also how we can stop things from accumulating in one place.
I don't think I would be incorrect in saying that those who accumulate wealth and power do not easily give them up or share them. But for those who desire otherwise, is there not a better way to create a more equitable and just world? Are we really aiming to be like those who pile and hoard, or are we capable of countering by creating balance within our lives? Should we lend our resources to giant corporations or thoughtless and cruel leaders or should we try standing our own grounds and make little spaces for ourselves, living from our centers of learning and intention of creating the world we want to live in, helping each other?
Every year Wikipedia, the free, open-source, do-good website that billions across the world rely upon, puts out a call for donation. This is just one example, I'm sure that similar things are happening across different spheres. Every year when Wikipedia puts up that call for donation, I find around me friends and family who do not want to donate even a little bit. They are not poor, they are not destitute and they use Wikipedia. But when the time comes to step up, they don't donate. Why not? They know that Wikipedia is valuable to them, reliable, they go to it often for help and yet they don't help it when time comes. Why not? Similarly, I know at least 90% of my friends, all tech-savvy, use Google Maps. But they rarely leave a review, update a traffic accident, point out a wrong route, or contribute in any way to furthering Maps. Why not? I figure it's because the work of actual human beings and unseen community is invisible. What is not seen is forgotten or rather not thought about.
That is also how we live our lives, perhaps tainted with sufferings and violence that's par for course of being alive, forgetting the labour of those who build our houses, maintain our sanitation systems, construct our roads, our dams, cook our meals, clean our houses, ferry us in transports. When our shit disappears from our toilet, we forget about it. When the garbage is taken away, we forget about it. But where does it all go? More importantly, who takes care of it? And how dare the authority figures of our country talk about essential workers, highlighting doctors during this pandemic and not step up even a little bit for those who are cleaning the gutters and the sewers and our garbage? How dare rich, white countries talk about their clean roads and their garbagelessness without talking about the fact that they ship it off to third-world countries for money? Sometimes garbage is even sent into space because even waste has to be put in some place.
Without the invisible work that is done by many people, we (and by that I mean anyone who is decently off during the pandemic, irrespective of where they are in the world) would not have had lives long enough to encounter this pandemic. So, how can we collectively be so apathetic and careless? Where is the place for care in our systems? What can we, those who are interested in change, do to change it?
In 2019, when I went to Europe for a couple of months, quite a few things caught my eye. Many of them were problematic but that's a post for another day. What is pertinent here are two things: in the cities and villages I visited across countries, I found that hiring domestic help, calling a repairman, an electrician, etc. are all costly affairs. And I remember my friend telling me that in Luxembourg being a bus driver is a well-paid and secure job. It was clear as light that dignity of labour was an inherent problem in India, it wasn't systemic but it ran in the minds of people living here. Indians, well many of the ones I have met and those who seem to be running a lot of things in the country, thrive on exploitation and servitude. I know friends who talk about equality and fight, at least verbally, on behalf of labourers and workers, but they still pay their maids more or less the usual amount and don't offer leaves on weekends. When I asked one of my relatives why not offer a higher pay than the current one to their maid, I was informed that in the neighbourhood that's what's paid and paying higher would mean meeting the brunt of neighbours. Yet again, is it a surprise that governments will not pass labour-friendly laws given that they are formed mostly by people of similar mindsets? More importantly, even if laws were friendly, would we be abiding by them? It's an important point I often encounter when I look at the world: do behaviours dictate laws or do laws dictate behaviour? It seems to be a cycle of energy moving between both. But anyway to come back to the point of parasitism, how can we as a society of humans change and live better?
I believe we must come back to feeling. I think the only way to stop being parasitic in nature and start a symbiotic relationship with the world around us is by coming back to care as the center from which we live our lives. I'll share an anecdote that has floated by me a few times in the internet world and deeply impacted me. It's about the anthropologist Margaret Mead.
In one of her classes Margaret Mead was asked by a student about the first sign of civilization that she came across in her finds. The student assumed that she would mention a tool or a weapon or a pot or something like that. Instead, Margaret said that the first sign of civilization that she had come across was a broken femur that had healed. In those times when surviving in the wilderness was difficult as it was, a healed broken femur was a sign that someone had stayed behind to care for the wounded and nurse them back to health. Without care and interdependence, nobody would have survived long enough, let alone thrive and build civilisations. It's a poignant story: it reveals how one can look at the world without the armour of aggression, militancy and a particular brand of progress that I associate with a destructive tongue and thought-process. There are too many leaders and common folks who exist in the world approaching language, existence, work, anything from a place of destructive progress. Only the ends are looked at in such an approach. Relationships to the things we use, the systems we live within, the life (human and non-human) that surrounds us, become invisible. I believe we can start countering this by leaning into Margaret's understanding of what is the first sign of civilization: care.
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