Techno Demonology 1: The politics of designed artifacts
turkishb left a comment in my recent cautionary tale about political centrism in the US, directing me to the work of an author that has inspired me to articulate some thoughts on technology, politics, the relationship between morality and design, and a critical failure of market libertarianism. The explanation is necessarily complex, and will meander
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I, for instance, see the people jogging through the parks with their MP3 players and evian water as taxpayers. This means they've spent money to have that park and those benches built. The same cannot be said for the homeless people. The higher income people have a problem with homeless people sleeping on their benches because it usually comes with a price. It's a statistical fact that people with lower incomes commit more crimes.
I'd rather not be hassled, panhandled, or god forbid mudded/killed on my stroll through the park. I'm not so heartless as to give these people a helping hand, but I'd rather it be in some sort of government work program and not my parks begging for money.
On the subject of tomatoes: in most places there exist organic food markets where you can purhchase tomatoes in their most natural state. This does cost more because of the reasons you mentioned in your post. They are harder to ship and sometimes have to be packaged by hand.
I am not that choosey when it comes to which tomatoes I eat, so I purchase the cheap massively produced tomatoes. That's a choice I think everyone should be able to make.
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...and I'm sure there are other mistakes. I should really consider proofreading these things.
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Great! Now let's find out whose perceptions are correct.
"I, for instance, see the people jogging through the parks with their MP3 players and evian water as taxpayers. This means they've spent money to have that park and those benches built. The same cannot be said for the homeless people."
We should start by correcting this matter of record. It would not be factually correct to declare that homeless people have not contributed to financing public facilities, unless we could verify that they had _never been_ taxpayers at any point in their histories. This would be an extraordinary claim to demonstrate, as it would require us to verify that the homeless population consisted of a kind of reproductively isolated community. One where subjects were _born into_ destitution, and sustained the homeless population through completely internal breeding, completely and discreetly isolated from moneyed, taxed populations from birth to death. The reality of course, is that our homeless population is comprised principally of people formerly and intermittently employed, suffering the effects of job contraction and soaring costs in real estate. And they shift in and out of homelessness as their financial situation permits. The Urban Institute's data estimates approximately 3.5 million Americans experience "episodes of homelessness" each year, with about a quarter of that figure being children. The average duration of these transitional periods is six months. Further, the US Council of Mayors data confirms that 41% of homeless in the US consist of families with one or more dependent children. That's an increase of 7% since 2000, making this demographic one of the fastest growing homeless populations in the country.
But even the requirement of demonstrating a claim as extraordinary as your assumption of "reproductive isolation" would be too generous, since it would still leave broader assumptions you make unchecked. For instance, your assumption that any _currently homeless_ population doesn't pay taxes _during the duration_ of their homelessness. This is an enthusiastic libertarian narrative you're promulgating, where the homeless are vividly imagined as "shiftless layabouts." But this is wildly at variance with matters of public record. If you were to appraise your position completely rationally, you'd need to inquire about what percentage of homeless in the US are currently employed. The reality naturally varies from city to city in the US, with 45% of total homeless in Denver employed at least part time, and increasing to 60% employment for homeless adult males in Cincinnati. Nationally, the percentage of the homeless population that is employed at least part time hovers at around 28%.
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Your description celebrates "the evian jogger" as a "taxpayer." And you specify that "this means they've spent money to have that park and those benches built." And that much is correct. It does mean that they've paid for these parks. But that's all it means. What you seem to want to infer from this is that this uniquely entitles them to
set the limit's of it's disposal. It doesn't. It's _public space_. It's a function of the state's ameliorative intervention. The purpose is to improve the quality of life for everyone, without respect to their financial resources. You're treatment wrongly imagines it as a product that you purchase. This is a reading the libertarian injects into the dialogue unnaturally.
A more important error you've made here, is in treating the moral rights of the parties involved as something that is purchased from potential aggressors at a price. Moral patienthood consists of _entitlements_. Not purchases. The demonstration of why patienthood can't rationally be treated as a purchase is something I touched upon in this exchange about the moral status of abortion with user oakalyptus. As I stated...
It places the locus of moral worth _outside the subject_! With some unnamed multitude that holds dominion and demands payment upon pain of death. The subject would retain the same morally relevant qualities _before_ being granted protected status by this mob that she would _after_ providing whatever payment they require of her for citizenship in their community.
Moral agency requires us to intervene in a crisis, in the form of the state's ameliorative projects. The entitlement of the homeless to make use of the state's public facilities follow from the intrinsic properties of their moral patienthood. These properties do not become compromised by destitution, and greater financial resources do not compel us to privilege any other population. The higher income population your position arbitrarily privileges, lacks the authority to deprive another party in the way you prefer.
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I don't really doubt that this is true, but I'll wait for you to cite your source anyway. Once you've done that, we can begin to test it to see where it fails. I anticipate one failure will be that you've managed to conflate "people with lower incomes" with "homeless people" in appealing to this really real fact. Even assuming the obvious correlation between the populations, as a strictly statistical reading, we wouldn't be able to assume that the graph was representative of an embedded sub-population in a sample. I also notice that your statistic doesn't distinguish between violent and non-violent crime, even though you automatically appealed to apprehensions of muggings and assault. And I wonder, is your statistical fact correcting for any embedded lurking variable precipitated by the criminalization of homelessness at the state level? Like I said though, I'll wait for you to qualify your premises before correcting you.
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I suppose I should emphasize here, that we were never on the subject of tomatoes. We were on the subject of Winnerian reverse adaptation. The phenomenon merely exhibits itself in industrialized agriculture, which is why I used the tomato example. I could have used any number of other examples from within or without agriculture, but since you've taken the time to brandish about this narrative about organic food markets with all the delicacy of a wooden club, I should correct you for the errors in it which are pertinent to the topic of reverse adaptation.
Your remark... "in most places there exist organic food markets where you can purchase tomatoes in their most natural state..." is incorrect. Organic farming has nothing in particular to do with the reverse adaptive features of the tomatoes that were under consideration anyway. They could have easily been grown without the use of pesticide. The runaway technological "agency" shaping agricultural technology that was under discussion though, is more pervasive and malignant than you are sensitive to. The slow food movement's "Ark of Taste" compilation from the early nineties is instructive in the mechanism by which market forces precipitate reverse adaptation in agriculture, and how the effects become pervasively distributed throughout the market. The ark was a taxonomy and conservation effort for a broad variety of edibles that were in real danger of extinction, due to industrial selection and propagation of a very few species, combined with the natural trend towards increasing industrialization of agriculture alluded to in my thesis. The material consequences of reverse adaptation then, are far reaching, excluding species from cultivated land aggressively enough to catalyze biological extinctions in multiple species. Far from this imagined marketplace of diversity you have concocted, Supermarkets stock fewer varieties of produce now than at any point in our history, due largely to selective strategies which distinguish species for compatibility with an existing technical system. And these things don't cost more because it takes migrant farmers more units of energy to get them in a box. They cost more because they've been artificially driven into rare obscurity. People think that potatoes _are_ Idaho russets because Idaho russets are what have been marketed to them as potatoes.
Just as with your remarks upon homelessness however, the problems with your position don't end with your counterfactual statements. Your normative premises require real scrutiny. It's important to emphasize that you have not attempted to dispute the deleterious effects of reverse adaptation I enunciated. Instead, you seem to be weaving a thoroughly embroidered narrative in which we don't need to concern ourselves with those effects, and where the limits of how we are able to respond to a crisis are preset to unchecked libertarian assumptions. And it's conspicuous that you imagine an "ennobling" role for the market with this narrative. Nevermind the deterioration of food quality at any scale, or so you say; I should just "take my business elsewhere." So apparently, I'm intended to understand that my options are limited to the choices that market forces yield, even while they continue to shrink the nutritive options that had been in place already. I should even be compelled to spend more, as long as I understand that the expense, artificially precipitated by an emergent market agency, is something I'm obligated to defer to. It never even enters your mind that market forces possess no authority to artificially set the limits of my choices in this way. No one is obligated to defer to their arbitrary selection. And where they come into conflict with any moral patient's quality of life, they ought then, to be suppressed. There are no exceptions.
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No one is stopping you from doing that. Just as noone should be stopping the advancements to industry and capital gain.
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No. _You_ are lingering under the selfish assumption that we are there _for the market_. That our objectives always begin with servicing it's perpetuation and that moral patients are at it's disposal. We've established that the market artificially contracts the nutritive options available to us through reverse adaptation. You've then declared that my options to respond to this are automatically limited by whatever conditions the market embodies; that I may "pay a price" artificially inflated by the market mechanism, "settle for lesser quality" artificially diminished by the market mechanism, or farm my "own little plot of land" artificially limited by the market mechanism. My options are not limited in this way however, and the market possesses no authority to set such limits. In this way, you arbitrarily privilege the market, and you are not permitted to.
My thesis enunciated the important properties of non-intelligent emergent systems, like markets, that distinguish them from design intervention. The point (articulated in the last paragraph) is that emergent systems lack any kind of moral content, so they can never be appealed to for normative purposes. I'd encourage you to reread the whole thing carefully, because you clearly haven't absorbed this crucial distinction.
"industry exists for one reason --to make money for the producers."
Well it exists to make money for someone. "Producers" sounds like a polite libertarian aphorism for "people who majored in business in college" though, and this won't suffice as a definition, because those people don't tend to "produce" much of anything. They rely on people with more impressive credentials for that. But this is immaterial. What's important is this:
You concede that industry functions for the singular purpose of enriching a certain population, but you neglected to confirm that this function satisfies the actual obligations of industry. For instance, it's obligations to the requirements of moral activity. We've established in this exchange that industry diminishes the quality of life of various moral patients. Mildly, in the case of Kim's tomatoes, or catastrophically in the case of the crisis of a self-propelled automobile infrastructure. It even deprives moral patients of their lives in the case of wildlife lost to industrialized deforestation. Industry does not become less obligated to defer to the requirements of moral activity by it's function of enriching certain others, however. So where it comes into conflict with morally desirable conclusions like this, then it should be suppressed.
"If you have a problem with the market you can cultivate your own tomatoes on your own land."
Of course. But as I've made clear, this is not my only appropriate option. What's interesting to me about this statement is the way you've reduced every condition problematicized by the market to "consumer alternatives." How my farming my own plot would ameliorate the market-born conditions of worldwide extinction of indigenous edible organisms, third world deforestation, or reverse adaptation of technologies is never even considered by you. Your thinking (severely abused by libertarian rational failures) has not gotten beyond the idea of my servicing my immediate material desires. A tastier tomato...
...When the bulk of my thesis is dedicated to the _institutional_ crisis suffered by others. The libertarian aggressively markets this narrative in which we do not consider the institutionalization of other's impoverishment/suffering. We are expected to understand our moral obligations to end with our individual self-preservation, and be strictly limited even in that by arbitrary market constraints. Of course moral activity requires more of us than self-aggrandizement and consumer choice, so if you wish to maintain this premise, you will need to qualify how these limits you set satisfy moral activity.
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