The constructed Environment

As someone born and raised in Germany, having spent nearly all of my time in industrialized countries. I have been immersed in an environment shaped nearly entirely by human hands and minds. Nearly everything that I touch in a normal day was either shaped by or put there deliberately by humans. In our late-capitalist/neoliberal society so many things are done in pursuit of eventually selling the result of that action on "the Market" and making a "profit" without ever defining why that needs to be done beyond making sure that as many people as possible have reliable access to the necessities of human existance. Being surrounded by so much stuff I have come to think that making things must be an easy. This turns out to be quite wrong, making the previous observation so much more puzzling.

I derive great pleasure from making things. At the end of the day however, I end up inventing some problem for me to solve by building a someting that then solves the problem. As I spend more and more time working with and thinking about computers, this is becoming more and more abstracted from problems that have interested me in the past (like building aircraft, even though I would still really like to spend some time doing that).

Then I see that so many people want immaterial things like compassion, companionship, the ability to express themselves and for that to be appreciated by others. What our societal systems ends up doing, is to force so many people to do things they would not have done voluntarily. It does this simply to legitimize the imagining of numbers on spreadsheets which humans attribute value to (for some reason). By exploiting this system, very few people to live in never before seen wealth while much of the population could have been given the material goods for them to live a dignified life otherwise. All this while at the same time exploiting the people doing that work in the first place. And systematically prohibiting any one but the wealthiest to even think of not optimizing for profit.

On top of that the things that are produces are often fundamentally flawed. Being driven by a profit maximization motive, the products of capitalist systems are often built to eventually fail (preferably at exactly the point where it has lasted long enough as not to cause the people that bought it to produce too many negative reviews). We could be designing and building things that last. Things that where built to solve a problem, improving peoples lives. Things should not be soley built to create profit for the producer (even though some benefit must arise from producing the goods as to motivate the production of said goods in the first place) where the actual utility of the product is treated as merely a necessary feature to make a human want to purchase it at all.

This way of thinking leads to so many fundamental problems with how society is organized. All of the value is placed into the production of objects and services related to the tasks directly involved in producing material goods. Very little value is given to tasks and occupations that do not have a close relationship with the production (and especially sale) of material goods (with the exception of the extraction of royalties from owning/operating distribution channels).

I beleive that there needs to be a renaissance of the humanities. We need to shift our focus and attention away from the quick thrills and false promises of consumerism towards the things that have proven time and time again to provide long-term and stable happiness. I hope people can stop thinking that material goods can provide meaningful happiness. We need to stop producing goods that serve to satisfy the short term cravings of the few while simultaneously leading to the exploitation of the most vulnerable people by inhuman systems. I want to see the creativity, compassion and good that comes from allowing people to express themselves. I want to start to heal the wounds that capitalist greed has torn into our social fabric. I want us to change our system to one where humans are given the time and space to care for others and show them compassion. I want to escape the rat race and have time to appreciate the marvelous beauty of the world around me and I would love to be able to share all this fascination and wonder with others.

What do we as humans really need?

After working for CERN for the last year, I have seen that inventing and then actually making something is far from easy. It requires a lot of time and effort over many iterations to arrive at something that actually acheives the goal set out in the beginning. This is not to say that figuring out what the goal should be is trivial.

This touches upon a similar theme discussed earlier. The answer to why do this? should be a better one than 'earn money'. Money after all is at its core an invention, a figment of our collective immagination. Finding a problem that needs to be solved and then taking the time to consider the myriad of ways the problem could be solved along with the benefits and drawbacks of the different approaches is no trivial task. Sure thre are obvious problems, which are however so complex that comprehending the problem and coming up with a solution is likely impossible for an individual to do. The only option in that case is to split the problem into subproblems recursively unitl the resulting problems are able to be solved by individual humans in a rather short time. These solutions could then be integrated with each other to solve the problem that was the motivation to begin with.

Finding out what people want or need is one of the things the market is not particulary good at. Instead of working towards finding out what maximizes the overall happiness in the society, the market participants are incentivised to try and convince as many people that they need whatever product the participant is producing.

In fact there are very limited mechanisms that allow for the exploration of possibilities or needs beyond the directly marketable. If governments where not a player in modern society and everything where left to the markets, there would be very little innovation that would go beyond the immediately applicable. Even in the rare case where there are large scale research efforts made by commercial entities, I think we as society should view them skeptically. The only reason that a commercial entity would engage in resarch that costs millions or even billions of dollars is that the results must change some established process so profoundly that the the results of that research allow the company to effectively generate a monopoly and exploit it as much as possible.

Sadly I think this is what is currently happening with large language models. If at one point a monopoly forms, it will exploit it's capabilities to the detrement of every one else. This is however not the first kind of 'natural monopoly' to arise in human history so there is a chance that this will somehow work out. I think however with the continuing evolution of 'artificial intelligence' will result in even more people being pushed into more precarioius positions that make those people easier to exploit.

If I think about what I'd want to see in the world, if I think about how I would like to spend my time, I would like to spend it exploring the world and doing this together with other motivated people. I think most people would rather have a happy life than a lot of stuff. Thinking about this I find this very peculiar that the society that humans have constructed is a system where most of our efforts are pointed towards making a lot of stuff.

Why not focus on capabilities?

When I think about my life and how I lead it, I really don't want to own many things. Things need attention and care, they need to be cleaned and maintained to continue to work. For most things I really don't want to invest that time and effort to care about things. I needed to care a lot about a car for the time that I had one. I needed to spend a lot of time and money to have the capability to go places, even though that capability already existed in the form of public transport. Again this is a sad example of car companies influencing policy as to push car dependence and increase the car company profits as a result. This had the obvious detremental impact on our mental and physical health, showing once again that much of the capitalist institutions run on the motto "money over people".

Any way, the point I would like to make is that I care about being able to do something way more than I care about owning something. I think that one of the most compelling reason for owning something is having a sense of control over ones close environment. I beleive that this sense of security is important for a healthy psyche, but I also only think it is necessary for very few of the most used parameters.

Minimizing ownership of stuff really frees up mental space for me to focus on and think about the things that I find interesting and actually want to spend my time on.

Appreciating the work of other people and realizing your dependence on it

Using computers, and even relying on them for my income is only possible due to the absolutely unimaginable amount of work put in by many other people. Someone needed to design the computer, the keyboard, the transistors the machine making the transistors and all the logistics and all of the machinery and procedures to make all of that too. As is has been said in other places along the lines of: no one actually knows how to make a pencil. This is because of this massive combined effort that is human civilization. Thinking of this the whole concept of ownership is kind of weird. Without the help and expertise of countless other people I am not able to live my life. In the same way I use my skilles to solve problems for other people that are relying on me to do so. So the more we focus on the things we actually want to do and build an incentive system for people to do things that need to be done but no one wants to do we could all be spending more time on the things that are actually important to us. We can spend time with the ones we love and show appreciation and affection to each other. We can tackle the problems ahed of us and hopefully, someday stop fighting over things that are only craved by us to fight our insecurity and narcicism.