overcivilized, technohyped
this blog entry from George Packer's Interesting Times blog on The New Yorker is actually about how a "common person," in this case a roofer, is experiencing the economic travails of the current recession. A rooofer is, obviously, a person who fixes roofs. i personally never knew a roofer. when i was young, it was always my father who climbed up a rickety ladder to our roof to plug any leaks, while my sisters would stay down, earsplittingly yell "Ingat, Papa!" every two seconds, and hold on tight to the ladder, as if by doing so they could prevent it from suddenly toppling off from the roof, with my father holding on for dear life to the precariously swinging ladder. an image culled from too many cartoons, i agree, but that's how i view roofers until now.
anyway, to get back to the point - Packer converses with a roofer, who represents the American everyman/everywoman, suffering and yet forging through the difficult economic climate. personally, i don't think this particular roofer is the American Juan dela Cruz - see references to him as the "boss" and having a "crew" - clearly implying that he is the owner of the roofing business (a roofing contractor, apparently). honestly, couldn't George Packer interview one of this roofer's roofers instead? - that would have more appropriately painted the picture of the American "masa."
choice of interviewee aside, what i loved most about this article is the roofer's opinions on people and his indictment of their overdependence on technology. see his description of their "text shrug," mumbling instead of conversing, their inability to look directly at, listen and talk to another person face-to-face, their use of a "yuppie buffer" to be their intermediary in interpersonal communication contexts.
and the more educated the people are, our sage roofer opines, the more afflicted they are with this disease that Packer calls overcivilization - producing a new class of technophiles who live in a world so symbolic and mediated that they can no longer deal with actual, tooth-and-nails reality.
i actually know a few people like these... heck, sometimes i sometimes am one myself. but let's reserve that for another blog post...
and the roofer's parting shot is such a classic! read on!
so do you agree with the last paragraph? or any part of the article? comment!
The View from a Roofer's Recession
George Packer, Interesting Times column
From http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/?xrail
The upstairs ceiling had a leak, my neighbors’ roofer quoted a decent price, and the crew came this week to lay down new roll roofing over the old. When the job was done, I went up with the boss to inspect the work. He was from an old Brooklyn Italian family that had been in the trade since the Depression. How had the latest hard times hit the family business? “Last year I made half what I made the year before,” he said as we stood on the freshly coated silvery rubber and looked out over the brownstone rooftops. “That was enough to get by, but I can’t save anything. And I don’t know when it’s going to end.”
The roofer seemed to take the recession stoically enough-his grandfather had made it through worse. But something else was bothering him. I’d noticed that the couple of times we spoke on the phone he was irritable, snapping that if I missed his seven A.M. call the morning of the job-if my cell phone was switched off or not at hand-he’d have to send his crew somewhere else that day. It turned out that cell phones had become a major headache in his work. Customers called him all the time, expecting him to hear every little complaint even while he was wrestling with a roof hatch. Meanwhile, they were more and more unreliable, not answering their phones, missing scheduled appointments. Even worse: they had no common sense any more. They called him about a leak in the first-floor ceiling-two stories below the roof-without bothering to check the second-floor radiator, which he discovered to be standing in a pool of water. It had all begun in the last couple of years, and it was driving him and every other contractor he knew crazy. They were all noticing the same thing.
“It’s the technology,” the roofer said. “They don’t know how to deal with a human being. They stand there with that text shrug”-he hunched his shoulders, bent his head down, moved from side to side, looking anywhere but at me-“and they go, ‘Ah, ah, um, um,’ and they just mumble. They can’t talk any more.” This inadequacy with physical space and direct interaction was an affliction of the educated, he said-“the more educated, the worse.” His poorer black customers in Bedford-Stuyvesant had no such problem, and he was much happier working on their roofs, but the recession had slowed things down there and these days he was forced to deal almost entirely with the cognitively damaged educated and professional classes.
“They hire someone-this has happened several times-so they don’t have to talk to me,” he went on, growing more animated and reddening with amazement. “It’s like they’re afraid of me! So they hire a guy who’s more comfortable dealing with a masculine-type person. I stand there and talk to the customer, and the customer doesn’t talk to me or look at me, he talks to the intermediary, and the intermediary talks to me. It’s the yuppie buffer.” He wasn’t slurring gay men-he described these customers as mainly “metrosexuals”-nor was the problem all yuppies, some of whom had been his customers for years. It was a new group who had moved from Manhattan in the past few years, and who could not detach themselves from their communications devices long enough to look someone in the eye or notice the source of a leak. This was a completely new phenomenon in the roofer’s world: a mass upper class that was so immersed in symbolic and digital cerebration that it had become incapable of carrying out the most ordinary functions-had become, in effect, like small children with Asperger’s symptoms. It was a ruling class that, out of sheer over-civilization, was quickly losing the ability to hold onto its power.
“What’s going to happen if these people lose their jobs?” he said after we’d come down from the roof and were standing at the front door. “They can’t do anything else. I’ll tell you what they’re going to do. They’re going to look for help from the government. Socialism! And it’s happening while we speak!”
anyway, to get back to the point - Packer converses with a roofer, who represents the American everyman/everywoman, suffering and yet forging through the difficult economic climate. personally, i don't think this particular roofer is the American Juan dela Cruz - see references to him as the "boss" and having a "crew" - clearly implying that he is the owner of the roofing business (a roofing contractor, apparently). honestly, couldn't George Packer interview one of this roofer's roofers instead? - that would have more appropriately painted the picture of the American "masa."
choice of interviewee aside, what i loved most about this article is the roofer's opinions on people and his indictment of their overdependence on technology. see his description of their "text shrug," mumbling instead of conversing, their inability to look directly at, listen and talk to another person face-to-face, their use of a "yuppie buffer" to be their intermediary in interpersonal communication contexts.
and the more educated the people are, our sage roofer opines, the more afflicted they are with this disease that Packer calls overcivilization - producing a new class of technophiles who live in a world so symbolic and mediated that they can no longer deal with actual, tooth-and-nails reality.
i actually know a few people like these... heck, sometimes i sometimes am one myself. but let's reserve that for another blog post...
and the roofer's parting shot is such a classic! read on!
so do you agree with the last paragraph? or any part of the article? comment!
The View from a Roofer's Recession
George Packer, Interesting Times column
From http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/?xrail
The upstairs ceiling had a leak, my neighbors’ roofer quoted a decent price, and the crew came this week to lay down new roll roofing over the old. When the job was done, I went up with the boss to inspect the work. He was from an old Brooklyn Italian family that had been in the trade since the Depression. How had the latest hard times hit the family business? “Last year I made half what I made the year before,” he said as we stood on the freshly coated silvery rubber and looked out over the brownstone rooftops. “That was enough to get by, but I can’t save anything. And I don’t know when it’s going to end.”
The roofer seemed to take the recession stoically enough-his grandfather had made it through worse. But something else was bothering him. I’d noticed that the couple of times we spoke on the phone he was irritable, snapping that if I missed his seven A.M. call the morning of the job-if my cell phone was switched off or not at hand-he’d have to send his crew somewhere else that day. It turned out that cell phones had become a major headache in his work. Customers called him all the time, expecting him to hear every little complaint even while he was wrestling with a roof hatch. Meanwhile, they were more and more unreliable, not answering their phones, missing scheduled appointments. Even worse: they had no common sense any more. They called him about a leak in the first-floor ceiling-two stories below the roof-without bothering to check the second-floor radiator, which he discovered to be standing in a pool of water. It had all begun in the last couple of years, and it was driving him and every other contractor he knew crazy. They were all noticing the same thing.
“It’s the technology,” the roofer said. “They don’t know how to deal with a human being. They stand there with that text shrug”-he hunched his shoulders, bent his head down, moved from side to side, looking anywhere but at me-“and they go, ‘Ah, ah, um, um,’ and they just mumble. They can’t talk any more.” This inadequacy with physical space and direct interaction was an affliction of the educated, he said-“the more educated, the worse.” His poorer black customers in Bedford-Stuyvesant had no such problem, and he was much happier working on their roofs, but the recession had slowed things down there and these days he was forced to deal almost entirely with the cognitively damaged educated and professional classes.
“They hire someone-this has happened several times-so they don’t have to talk to me,” he went on, growing more animated and reddening with amazement. “It’s like they’re afraid of me! So they hire a guy who’s more comfortable dealing with a masculine-type person. I stand there and talk to the customer, and the customer doesn’t talk to me or look at me, he talks to the intermediary, and the intermediary talks to me. It’s the yuppie buffer.” He wasn’t slurring gay men-he described these customers as mainly “metrosexuals”-nor was the problem all yuppies, some of whom had been his customers for years. It was a new group who had moved from Manhattan in the past few years, and who could not detach themselves from their communications devices long enough to look someone in the eye or notice the source of a leak. This was a completely new phenomenon in the roofer’s world: a mass upper class that was so immersed in symbolic and digital cerebration that it had become incapable of carrying out the most ordinary functions-had become, in effect, like small children with Asperger’s symptoms. It was a ruling class that, out of sheer over-civilization, was quickly losing the ability to hold onto its power.
“What’s going to happen if these people lose their jobs?” he said after we’d come down from the roof and were standing at the front door. “They can’t do anything else. I’ll tell you what they’re going to do. They’re going to look for help from the government. Socialism! And it’s happening while we speak!”