When the choice becomes, in essence, indifferent. ApplePhone? or Samshugo?
In a liberalised world one would believe oneself to be free right? Liberalisation has a big part of the word liberty in it, right? Yes, but from what perspective?
To understand this you have to immerse yourself in the consumer world.
You want to get a car? There are two thousand comfort, deLux, smart, professional, entreprise models to choose from. All you have to do is connect to the internet, consume data and, by comparing the millions of parameters with the hundreds of reviews on the Tube, you will arrive at your answer after weeks. Unless you simply look at the outside of the car: how cool is that? Done. Or even better, you download the app that tells you which model to choose based on your profile. For every stove, hoover, refrigerator, drill etc. the same will apply. Just as it is valid for services and apps and, let’s add, even the search for the ideal partner.
But every product is a fixed option. That is, it will never be YOU who builds your car the way you want it, your fridge, your house, your apps, your ideas. Because it will always be cheaper for you to take out a loan for something that someone else has already thought up for you.
The barrier to intimately shaping one’s world has risen enormously so that people’s practical and imaginative abilities have dropped dramatically. It is no coincidence that if one wanted to reupholster a chair nowadays, one would have to pay 50€ per chair (a cost bound to rise due to inflation at 25%).
So the options exist in the economic environment of the market that rewards productivity. What is NOT economically viable is not saleable, therefore it does not exist, it is not an Option. If economic profitability becomes the only parameter that determines the Darwinian success of a service, we can expect that only profitable things will develop in that environment. Similarly, those same profitable things, trumpeted as the logical outcome of evolution, are only the result of adaptation to survival in a given environment: cringeworthy environment -> cringeworthy things -> even more cringeworthy environment. You don’t go to the moon until there is an economic reason to justify the expense. Now, ask yourself how much of human culture was created with this perspective. Just think!, if Dante had asked himself what audience he was writing to, if his readers appreciated his work, if the editor had done some market analysis to understand to whom and how to sell the work, what would have resulted?
The other way, which has been in vogue for the past decade, is the business of laws and companies that blindly follow that legislation. Since the law is right by definition, those who follow the laws do everything right. If European legislation decides that the green transition needs to be pushed, it makes special laws that companies have to comply with and those who do not comply die. So yes, a kind of Darwinian selection is still followed, but drugged by legislation that does not necessarily follow the laws of physics (see especially the second principle of thermodynamics). But Nature and physics, after a while, come knocking at the front door again. Of course, all this has a development time of decades and quantifying it with proper predictions is basically impossible, or at least not the purpose of our unfounded and pretentious ramblings.
If one service or technology were truly a winner over another, would there be any need for so much legislation to force its transition? Probably not. When oil or gas was introduced as an energy source over coal, it was because oil is a denser and cheaper form of energy than coal.
But what if the change is forced? Let’s change the TV set-top box because the standard changes (but it wasn’t standard????); petrol is no longer good from 203X: all electric cars; no more gas boilers from 204X, switch off nuclear reactors and put in wind turbines and green photovoltaic panels, are we sure the transition is really green?
If a fridge used to last me 30 years and today the AAAA++…+…+LGBTQ* class lasts 5? Or if for ‘energy efficiency’ standards we have to throw out the old stuff to replace it with new stuff that lasts less and gets more and more expensive and complicated to repair (if not impossible)? The complexity of individual systems does not necessarily lead to greater overall system efficiency. It is not easy to come up with plausible numbers; rather, one has to wonder to what extent trends are not simply predetermined, more to stimulate consumption than to be truly green. Not least because, if progress made life cheaper, how is it that with twice the workforce than in the 1960s (well, the female workforce does count) we can no longer afford a house nowadays? Could it be that wages have halved (or the cost of living doubled) compared to the 1960s-70s? So what does the consumer do? He consumes what he is given to consume and runs on the wheel of production, complains at the bar but then it all stays the same.
Here liberalism liberates the corporations but ‘steers’ the consumer by deceiving that the path taken is the only one possible. Is this freedom?, especially if the routing is neither voluntary nor truly consensual? Has anyone ever asked you if you wanted digitalisation?
The actual presence of millions of options to choose from annihilates the only real option: choosing for yourself.
In this landscape, the choice between one thing or another is only possible from a number of options available on a pre-filled drop-down menu, and everyone knows and experiences this on a daily basis. Very often it is even ‘good enough’ for a large number of things but what if life becomes a drop-down menu? Creativity, the instinct to realise, free thinking, that thinking out of the box that can be intimately revolutionary, from Cicero to the Dadaists, are cut off and above all are cut off a priori, remaining a sterile leitmotif from managers. Why a priori? Because it is sensitivity that is lost. Individual sensitivity to see beneath society’s Mayan veil. There will soon be no way for those who have remained sane to be able to engage with the other half (in a dichotomous, not numerical sense) of individuals. Who is to judge whether the judge has lost all sense of justice? In a world of pre-packaged options, there is no freedom and no ability to be able to argue calmly and logically, there is a lack of sensitivity to the lack of that freedom. We have trapped ourselves inside a Turing machine.
So what happens? Forget cathedrals. We only do what is economic reason. Not even State reason anymore. Everything else doesn’t count. Art? Does it sell?
We buy nothing.