A Day is a Struggle
The tools with which we make the world, and their less than stellar side-effects
What are the conceptual, social, and physical tools or technologies that shape our relationships to land and place, and can we make choices (both individually and collectively) about them?
This is one way of framing the question underlying several of the recent pieces here at Unsettling. Can we map places differently (and in a way that allows for difference)? Can we navigate differently? What happens when we do? What happens when we challenge both internalized and external norms around the exclusionary nature of modern property ownership?
On that same theme, this week I’d like to share an excerpt from a newly published piece I wrote for an anthology project of “feminist writing about how precarious life is,” called A Day Is a Struggle. The invitation by the editors, in the call for submissions, was very broadly to write from personal experience about precarity in our present time:
When you’re in a precarious place, a day is a struggle. Somehow we’re supposed to live through toxic institutions, gendered and racialized violence, economic crisis, pandemic and environmental disaster, overwork and bad pay, emotional overload, sheer exhaustion… And all this is happening in increasingly atomized societies, without a reliable social safety net or any sense of security for what tomorrow will hold…
But writing can still be a force for survival. …
Consider how Avery Gordon has described Toni Cade Bambara’s “usable” utopianism: “There’s a great force, Bambara is suggesting, that comes from refusing to cooperate with grief, from insisting on the capacity and the right to be better than and in a sick society… [from] the capacity to let go of the ties that bind you to an identification with that which is killing you”.1
So what exactly is killing us? How are we getting by? What alternatives can arise from collectively recognizing our vulnerability? What kinds of writing can help us survive?
My piece is an attempt to look at the tools that promise ways out of precarity and yet tend to reinforce it nonetheless. Through an account of my own uneven use and attempted avoidance of standard modern technologies, I look at the difficulty of choosing different methods for survival when more and more technology can be described as what philosopher Ivan Illich referred to as a “radical monopoly.” What are radical monopolies? What do they mean for how we connect to and move through and relate to places? Well, check out the excerpt below, or read the whole piece: My Shoulder Hurts From Typing This: an essay on computers, bicycles, and debt, thinking about the relationship between tools, pain, and precarity.
My life, it would seem, has become an uneven experiment in resisting the dominant social and physical technologies of the 20th century, with mixed results. Cars, computers, and credit: they come loaded with a bevy of advertised benefits. Cars and computers, especially, are sold with a promise of simultaneous escape and access, of autonomy and transcendence. Yet in reality they cut short any true fulfillment of these through their outright denial of physical reality and our actual, physical bodies. Through their promise of a fantasy mobility, they physically immobilize us: one sits in front of a screen, then moves slightly to sit in a car in traffic, all routes to unencumbered motion cut off by the need to remain in communication with the object ostensibly “taking you places.” They are precisely “a lure of exclusive happiness”2 that trap us into distorted and injured forms of our own selves, delivering not escape and transcendence but calcification and torpor, an inability to use one’s own self, as wrists stiffen, glutes weaken, hips lock, and our practice of movement atrophies.
Credit, or debt, similarly promises a social mobility, a transcendence of one’s current financial status, the opportunity to move beyond current limitations and come closer to a glimmering dream of the future. Only in its current configurations it likewise restricts mobility, if not outrightly forcing movement in the opposite direction from what its holder intended, as they find themselves working more hours to pay off interest and additional payments, and that moment of “getting ahead” or simply respite from the game of “getting by” never arrives.
The rapid transcendence of these technologies makes them feel necessary, as though there is not a free choice to be made about their use. The lack of choice, while manufactured, is not entirely an illusion; as presently structured, they both operate in the manner that Ivan Illich, in his Tools for Conviviality, calls “radical monopolies.” In a radical monopoly, the infrastructure set up for a given tool to be useful increasingly requires ever more use of that tool, and stymies those who would opt out. According to Illich: “Radical monopoly exists when a major tool rules out natural competence. Radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption and thereby restricts personal autonomy.” More simply: cars make it difficult or impossible to walk. Computers cut off other routes of finding and sharing information. A credit-based financial system denies work or access to goods to someone lacking a past history of debt—i.e., a credit score.
This, despite the cost we know they bring: oil spills, gas explosions, and 1.35 million killed on roadways globally each year. Wars over coltan, mass suicide at Apple factories, mercury and lead leaching into drinking water. The harm spills over not just on the production side, but for users, our individual bodies. And then it scales back up again: debt destroys not merely individual livelihoods, but captures the foreseeable future of untold generations in nations who have taken on IMF and other loans.
These radical monopolies, with all their varied harms, have predictable sources. Both the car and the computer make labor accessible to serve capital as needed; one allowing labor to travel to a factory or office, another allowing it to be captured wherever it might be found—at home during a pandemic, say. Credit has become requisite for accessing basic goods—housing is the obvious example—reinforcing the need for additional labor to access the resources to pay off such debts. Radical monopolies are precisely those tools that make us available to servitude. Available not only for an employer, but for the expansion of the monopoly of the tool itself.
So here I am again, asking: how do we face up to what’s killing us when it seems to be the very tools that provide us with a living? Resistance to radical technological monopolies isn’t simple (surprise!) and while Illich’s writing does a fair job of elaborating the need to challenge them, I don’t think he does much to guide us about where we might go next. What, for instance, might Illich think I should do with my keyboard?
Here’s the full essay again. The entire anthology is available online for free, or you can order yourself a print version if you so fancy.
Avery F. Gordon, “Something more powerful than skepticism.” In Keeping good time: Reflections on knowledge, power, and people (2004), p204. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
“A lure of exclusive happiness” calls back to an earlier passage in the essay, pulling from the same work by Avery Gordon discussed in the anthology’s introduction. Here’s the relevant paragraph:
“Freedom means facing up to what’s killing you, healing the damage, and becoming in-different to the lure of sacrificial promises of monied or exclusive happiness and the familiarity of your own pain.” This is sociologist Avery Gordon summarizing Toni Cade Bambara, through a reading of Bambara’s short fiction as well as The Salt Eaters, all works in which the characters must sort through their pain and its link to freedom: both the unasked-for pain dished out by the world, and the pain one can make for oneself, especially in the quest for freedom, especially if one has any confusions involving freedom as an object to be achieved or handed out. For freedom isn’t a place where we arrive, as Gordon reads Bambara, but a process or practice: “Freedom is the process by which you develop a practice for being unavailable for servitude.”*