Little note on learned laziness
i am sick of substack titles
Below is an excerpt from ’s The Trend Report where he muses about the ‘imposed algorithmic passivity’ that has been brought to us by…technology. Sentences in bold are my highlights. Enjoy (:
“I’ve been thinking about another symptom of Vibe Personality Disorder™: the extreme passivity of these times, a you-do-it-for-me-ness that is sold to us tools and means to optimize life but instead make us less active and less educated while isolating us further.
You see this with the death of Pitchfork, the supremacy of Rotten Tomatoes, and the loss of media “costs.” I was talking to someone this week about this, and they were explaining how twenty (Plus!) years ago when they (and I!) started reading Pitchfork, we turned to the site to find co-signs from music critics, to read reviews, and do-the-homework of being a music fan, all in the service of purchasing music. That happens in some ways now — I look at reviews, I cross-reference comments, I check Metacritic, and I make educated decisions before buying something on Bandcamp or adding to my library. — but a few factors are at play that make the simple act of picking a song an inactive choice, which devalues media and the arts: platforms like Apple Music, Netflix, etc. tell you to engage with, there is an economy of creators telling you what to listen to or watch, and the actual media itself (songs, albums, shows, movies) don’t “cost” anything outside of a subscription, unless you’re going to a theater. You no longer make an active or physical choice when it comes to picking the music, movies, or television. This passivity makes us as audiences, as people, less engaged with what we’re doing. Everything is a screensaver. Everything is a micro-transaction instead of a building forward. We sit and push the joy button again and again and again instead of getting up, going to the shelf, and picking out a record to play. Trusted sources and informed decisions are great if you are using that information. Otherwise, this is just being a cultural lemming.
This is heightened by the very 2010s and 2020s “I can do ANYTHING!” feeling that technology enables, which started with Millennials and has evolved with Gen Z. Less people are good at specific things and more people think they are able to “do a thing” despite a lack of talent, a lack of work ethic, or a lack of learned skill. For example: interior design. I was talking to an interior designer a few weeks back who mentioned something sage, that people rarely hire interior designers anymore to design: they’re hired for brief blessings because people now “know” how to acquire furniture and arrange a room without the help of an expert service. Mind you: none of these people are interior designers, let alone creatives. These are people like you and I who feel like they “can do anything” because products like Canva, CapCut, and Grammarly along with AI brain power and YouTube University make us feel intellectually empowered when we realistically outsourced expertise to a straw man. As Sigrid Nunez noted last year, there is a confusion between developing talent and just saying you “have a talent.” This creates a culture wide Dunning-Kruger Effect: this Effect is a “combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability” which leads to overestimated capabilities. Why does this happen? “The very knowledge and skills necessary to be good at a task are the same qualities that a person needs to recognize that they are not good at that task.“ No wonder everyone can do everything but actually cannot do anything! No wonder we have a doctor shortage and that CEOs are so stupid, while all of us outsource expertise to boring tech. That sucks!
This passivity — Or macro learned laziness. — manifests in other ways, like social media and fast fashion poisoning culture by manufacturing trends that produce meaninglessness, dull individuality, while equating constant consumption with activity (Cue Barbara!). Something else: replacing varied, robust news sources with individual creators, which is another story entirely about how journalists-as-creators and platforms like Substack are dissolving more egalitarian and community-specific media. Then there’s the obvious things like a decade of binge watching and the gig economy propelling us to the hot-right-now cultures bed rot and “hurkle-durkle.” This is why we have a rise in loneliness — and the cure comes from doing more work and not less. This doesn’t mean “Get another job!” but that techno-capitalist dystopianism is peaking, that we have been ground to the point of intellectual disability, where we outsource everything to algorithms and services instead of each other. We are steeped in anti-community building that corporations profit from.
Meditate on this excerpt from the very excellent book After Work by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, which explores how technology will not save us “from work” and that the root of freedom is in each other. The future is much simpler than it seems.”
The realm of freedom is not one devoid of obligations. It is the realm of projects to which we commit ourselves – individually and collectively – for their own sake and by which we ‘recognize ourselves in what we do’. Such freedom complicates any clear-cut distinction between everyday ideas of work and leisure given that these projects can and will require immense efforts. As Marx wrote, ‘Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion.’ But this activity, though potentially demanding, frustrating, and onerous, will be free insofar as we commit ourselves to it for its own sake rather than being coerced into performing it by material need.
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Malaeka x