Dehumanizing the Human Condition

Laura Penny could not have said it any better, “We live in an era of unprecedented bullshit production.” And I’m inclined to agree with her characterization of (what is in these days) an oft-repeated slogan – ‘Your call is important to us’ – how such a slogan “best exemplifies the properties native to bullshit”.

After all, how many of us have attempted to call our mobile phone service provider to inquire about vanishing phone credits only to be dismissed with some reference number, a promise that they would call back but only for us to waste even more time, effort and patience in following up on promised solutions that were never delivered? How many of us have attempted to seek technical assistance for the installation of some new gadget or availment of some facility only for the agent at the other end to just brazenly confuse us in a barrage of gibberish otherwise known as technical terms? How many of us have naïvely called to make constructive reports or register well-meaning complaints only to be given some pro-forma reply that’s about as routinary, hollow and uninspired as the regular morning commute?

Apologists would call this the age of empowerment. Ostensibly, technological leaps – chief of which ICT – provide us with the means for harnessing the human potential in ways hitherto unrealized. Never has human capacity been brought to the fore… Today, means are available to equalize the great divides that have for so long characterized our existence. So they say…

For sadly, technological leaps have also made the human condition very impersonal; indeed, dehumanizing the human condition. In place of concern and compassion are quotas and targets: in all probability, the agent at the other end just wants to be done with your call and move on to ‘solving’ somebody else’s problems; the corporation worth billions does not really care about alleviating your concerns, it only wants to alleviate itself of the costs that glitches entail. To go back to Laura Penny, that same bullshit “tries to slather some nice on the result of a simple ratio: your time versus the company’s dough”.

It is thus tempting to say that technology is but a function of capitalist greed, or human avarice (to use a term that is devoid of ideological underpinnings), albeit to do so would be all too convenient and formulaic. But whatever the roots of these problems, the symptoms are clear: technology, even as it pronounces its promises, poses its problems – problems of impersonality, impersonality that dehumanizes and undermines technology’s supposed gains.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his 1986 article in Raritan described bullshit as the “greater enemy of the truth than lies are”, for “while a lie is demonstrably false, bullshit has no truth value”. We celebrate our time as the information age, but it is ironic that it is in the information age in which breeds that stuff that is utterly contemptuous of truth.

LUIS JOSE F. GERONIMO
Entry No. 6