The Mediated Life

Beyond "Touching Grass", Part 2

As I mentioned in part one of this series, I have found myself back in the city. With the exception of my emergency hospital trip last year it’s the first time I’ve been any place with a population north of a few thousand people in at least four years.

Nonetheless, because of my in-again/out-again relationship with urban life over the last eleven years, I’ve got a pretty solid feel for the difference between the country and the city, and although you couldn’t drag me back, I don’t have (too much) trouble making the transition when I have to.

This time, however, I’m traveling with a fresh urban expat, so I’m seeing all the difference with new eyes—and that’s on top of all the new post-Covid differences, not a single one of which can I characterize as “a change for the better.”

And they keep showing up in the damndest places.

Also, keep in mind that I’m visiting one of the “good” cities, one that’s still experiencing growth and is not subject to the kind of high crime/social collapse spiral induced by malevolent governance that is currently being enjoyed by all the major cities on my native (i.e. west) coast.

A Trip to the Grocery Store

You wouldn’t expect grocery stores in parts rural to be all that different than they are in urban areas, would you? I certainly didn’t. And, to be fair, at first glance, the differences are fairly subtle…but once you notice them, they’re impossible to un-see.

The first thing—and the one I found most surprising (and my companion found most shocking):

Everything smells.¹

I don’t mean the smells of exhaust and machinery and tire dust (yes, you can smell that if you’re not used to it), I mean that literally everything is scented, and the cacophony of scents do not work together at all. Dryer sheets, laundry detergent, packaging, body wash, perfumes, soaps, lawn fertilizers, pesticides, hair products, air fresheners, and scent vaporizers in rooms and zones of rooms (employed across a number of retail establishments like they’re departments in a cut-rate Disneyland).² Everything, everywhere, all at once. Given that the chemicals used as carriers in perfumes stimulate an agitation response in the brain, it surprises me not a whit how many of you city-dwellers suffer from migraines and irritability on this basis alone.

Not that there aren’t more bases for agitation.

Once I got past the smell factor³ and started browsing the grocery store, another thing jumped out at me, one I was not expecting at all:

The food isn’t food.

Well, okay, that’s not fair. But where I grew up (in the San Francisco Bay Area), all the produce and meats were local-ish, because all the produce and most of the meats came from the Central Valley, the north coast, and the ocean.

The Bay at the center. To the right are the central valley farmlands, ranchlands, and cities. Toward the top is the Napa Valley, Mendicino, Sonoma, and other such agricultural areas. Cattle ranches, wineries, and produce farms are scattered throughout the region.

The “bakery” bread was real bread (made of flour, yeast, salt, water, bacterial cultures, and nothing else), because the area was lousy with large scale bakeries.

And, of course, those things that weren’t local were still fresh, as they came in right off the boat less than a day before.

That was all in a big city.

In the rural places I’ve lived, it’s been much the same, although the variety of foods hasn’t been as abundant, and the quality of out-of-season produce is far lower since it has to be shipped in overland from the ports (leading to that produce being either over-or-under-ripe. Where I live now, the bulk of the meat comes from a handful of local farms, and the in-season produce comes from a farming area just over the hill.

Now consider my current (and thankfully temporary location):

Even though this city is surrounded by farmland as far as the eye can see, the meats are from a major national meat processor. The produce quality is poor and bears all the markers of having been shipped overland over the course of a week or more.⁴ The dairy products are all national brands (not a regional brand in sight).

What’s more, a substantial portion of the shelf space is taken up by single-use packaging, even for items that a single person might use every day.⁵ In a city with a greater-than-average proportion of families with young children, this shouldn’t be the case…but it is.

Odder still: during prime-time shopping hours, the grocery store was very empty—there just weren’t many people shopping.

Nonetheless, shopping commenced. The few strangers I bumped into had eyes downcast, shoulders hunched, and had a generally suspicious demeanor. This isn’t the polite standoffishness of the personal bubble that I knew from the San Francisco Bay Area lo these many years ago. Nor is it the aggressive defense-of-territory style of dealing with the hyper-concentration of people that I have encountered in East Coast cities like Boston and New York.

This is surly, rage-and-fear-boiling just-below-the-surface paranoia—and in a region and city that has a reputation for polite (if distant) friendliness.

Despite the dearth of good food on offer (and the extortionate post-inflation pricing),⁶ I did make it to the checkout stand with my nutrition and wallet relatively intact—which is when I discovered the next Eldritch horror on offer:

Not only were all the checkout lanes self-checkout-only, none of them accepted cash.

Now, for those of you that live in these places, this is all going to be so normal to you that it’s barely worth a shrug, but bear with me. This simple little excursion reveals much about your strange and alien way of life, including the answers to many of the questions y’all burn up so much money, air time, and and bandwidth wondering about.

Taking It Apart

If you look at all those items above, you might notice that something connects them all:

They are all either an organ or effect of a highly mediated life.

The no-cash policy, the insane number of single-serving packaged foods, the lack of high-quality fresh foods all point to a lifestyle where there’s not much contact between the individual and the things which sustain life.

Instead of doing direct work to sustain one’s own body (cooking, gardening, etc.), one outsources it to the food science labs of megacorps, who have figured out how to provide enough satiation to quiet the loudest parts of your hunger, and to do it at a low enough cost that they can harvest a very fine profit indeed from your impatience and impulsivity.

Instead of drawing your fresh food from the land you live on or near, it comes overland from parts unknown, courtesy of conglomerates that are sufficiently removed from your opinion that they don’t have to worry about doing more than keeping you just-barely satisfied.

Instead of dealing directly in cash, your payments to the store are mediated through a card connected to a balance sheet, via a system maintained by a series of third-parties who otherwise would not be involved in the transaction, all of whom charge you for the privilege and still profit from you as a data point, and who can shut down your ability to do business if they (or the governments and other corporations they answer to), for whatever reason, do not approve of the business that you’re doing. This works out well for the store, because it’s always easier for the customer to spend more than s/he intends to if they’re paying with plastic—actually having to count out the dollars makes a person much more aware of their spending, and much more conservative about it.

The social paranoia I witnessed in the supermarket reveals a specific flavor of defensiveness that comes from too much isolation—from social lives insulated by suburban walls, and mediated largely through the Internet. People afraid to make eye contact or say “hello” because it might provoke a confrontation or draw them out of their protective bubble, making them feel vulnerable. People who don’t know their neighbors very well, because if those neighbors find them annoying, there could be turf wars, police calls, HOA disputes, and all other manner of unpleasantness.

The lack of foot traffic is a symptom also of the social paranoia and, though this is guesswork, I’d wager that it’s a leftover of the Covid ordeal. My sense from talking to locals here in the big city is that people got used to ordering take-out in order to avoid public spaces (and bring a little sense of excitement and luxury to their locked-in lives). Once the Covid era passed, the habits established therein remained.

Now, all this is as may be, but what is the actual harm in it, beyond making it slightly more unpleasant to go out of the house than it otherwise would be?

Before we get to that, I want to look at the other thing that shows up as a common thread between these dysfunctions.

Optimized…But For What?

Consider again all the items on my shopping-trip bitch list:

The packaged foods. The scents. The automated check-out kiosks. The people who stay in all the time. The exclusively-electronic payments. Other than embodying a highly-mediated way of living, what else do they have in common?

Each one is optimized for a single purpose.

For example, it’s nice to have soap that smells pleasant. It makes showering more pleasurable. Same for laundry detergent. So, adding scents to soaps so that you can always be smelling something vaguely pleasant seems like a pretty decent idea.

Until, that is, you wash your hands in rose-scented lotion-soap and then go and try to eat pizza, or a hamburger, or an orange. Then, suddenly, the persistent perfume from the soap that lingers on your fingers wafts up in your nostrils and fucks up your ability to taste properly. Your food either tastes bad (because, thanks to the cross-linking of your taste sensors and your olfactory system you’re now tasting the soap’s perfume) or your sense of taste simply turns itself down to cope with the confusion, so everything tastes bland.

The efficiency of not accepting cash minimizes the retailer’s overhead—no more worries about cash handling protocols. In a sufficiently large operation, security where cash is concerned can quickly add up to a set of expenses and irritations that make the 2-6% transaction fee charged by credit card companies seem reasonable (especially since you can pocket the difference). And that works well enough, until there’s a corporate dispute, or a power outage, or a network outage, or a war, or any one of a few dozen other things that can knock the payment system offline.

But coming off of 80 years of relative stability, nobody thinks about things like that anymore—and they still seem not to think like that even after the god-awful mess of the last five years of supply chain disruptions, cyber-attack danger to energy infrastructure (and the recent major attack that knocked the Colonial pipeline off-line), overland shipping difficulties, and that series of fires a couple years ago at food packing plants.⁷

The convenience of a packaged food is hard to beat, and even if that food is not all that nutritious (or harbors ingredients that are downright bad for you), it is nonetheless a very desirable thing to have access to grab-n-go food if you’re on, for example, a road trip, or a through-hike, or wrangling kids during a long excursion. If kids are involved, the extra convenience of not having to make your own grab-n-go food (as my mother often did when I was young, as we were too poor to afford packaged food which was, back then, something of a luxury good).

But convenience isn’t the only thing you want out of food—and the compromises involved in making food long-term shelf-stable, and appealing/addictive enough to induce brand loyalty and habit formation, are compromises in which nutritional completeness generally loses. In a diet where such foods are an occasional addition, this isn’t a problem. But in a diet where they’re the regular feature, they can actually, no kidding, kill you (as can any kind of long-term lopsided nutritional profile).

This philosophy of single-point optimization carries through to the buildings themselves: designed to be build-able anywhere, using commodity materials and generic designs, as if they came from nowhere. Optimized for brand recognition and cheapness of construction—not for any other important consideration (such as longevity, locality-appropriateness, aesthetics, or human scale).

And when you get humans optimizing for low conflict and maximum convenience, product designers and venue owners optimizing for smell appeal, food packagers optimizing for securing brand loyalty and impulse buyers, grocery store buyers optimizing for margin, and banks optimizing for maximum control, you get an environment perfectly optimized to utterly isolate the individual. You also get a cascade of secondary effects that look…weirdly familiar:

Poor nutrition and inflammation-inducing ingredients encourage problems with gut health, which alters hormone balance and can lead to mood disorders, emotional regulation problems, outsized weight gain, gynecomastia, fertility problems, diabetes, dementia, heart disease, and some cancers.

Lack of regular substantive contact with other humans in the wild (or with nature in the raw) leads to the moving baseline problem, whereby the individual’s expectations of the world gradually become more and more idealistic and fanciful, which leads, in turn, to problems such as extreme politics (authoritarian, totalitarian, Utopian, ideological, etc.), radical distrust of “outsiders” (manifesting in racism, sexism, political polarization, and other forms of pronounced tribalism), simmering rage (which erupts everywhere from the ballot box to the neighborhood bonfires we call “protests” and “riots”), disenfranchisement, nihilism, terrorism, economic erosion, revolution, and civil war.

And, of course, all this is happening in a context where humans have been trained—almost from the time they could walk—to hyper-specialize and sort themselves into baskets, to be used as cogs in a machine, to spend the bulk of their hours working for money to buy things from the corporations that have taken their world away from them and to fund the government that charters these corporations for its own ends⁸ (and often provides them funding—directly or indirectly—from the public purse).

And our leadership classes, which advance this way of thinking through their propaganda apparatuses (public school, public policy, and popular media), have themselves become examples of single-point optimization—trained to climb bureaucratic hierarchies, rather than in the variety of arts and letters which are essential (in addition to management and bureaucratic savvy) to running any competent system of human government.

In nature, the more highly specialized a creature is, the more vulnerable it is to extinction.

This also holds true in tn the human realm.

The Inhuman City

The net result of all these things coming together is a type of city whose entire rationale is to induce humans to live as machines.

With the widespread adoption of zoning laws after World War 2, the American landscape optimized itself for being friendly to the large corporation. This meant, for example, being designed for travel by car to boost car sales, and further designed for long commutes to serve real estate developers who were putting up distant suburbs to take advantage of the free home-buying financing offered to veterans of World War 2 (which, by the way, is where we get the middle-class mortgage.

Before this point, people really did usually buy their properties in cash⁹ and often built their own houses from kits ordered from the Sears Catalog and similar publications.¹⁰ Free government money meant that developers—after lobbying for zoning laws to restrict the supply of housing and the ability of individuals to build their own homes—could charge more for their product, and the customers wouldn’t blink.

The predictable result is the housing inflation that secures the retirements of older Americans and guarantees the homelessness and/or renter-status of their children and grandchildren. Housing becomes a fungible asset, to the detriment of its function as the incubator for a family, a piece of a long-term community, an architectural monument, a hub of small-scale industry, or a legacy.

Fungibility—the easy-convertibility of one asset class into another—is great for financial instruments.

But on human consciousness, it’s hell.

When humans live in fungible environments, they have very little that helps them locate themselves in physical or social space. The fungibility of housing, the generic nature of jobs and professions, the uniformity of suburbs and their HOA regulations, interchangeability of strip malls and big boxes, the chaining and franchise-ification and nationalization of everything, makes for a fully fungible world in which the easiest way to know one’s own place is to hunker down behind the walls of one’s house and live as if the rest of the world doesn’t really exist.

When animals can’t locate themselves in social or physical space, they go crazy.

Humans are no different from other animals.

A sizable part of the epidemics of what we currently call “mental illness” are downstream from this trend towards the fungibility and control-ability of everything.¹¹ Psychiatric drugs and talk therapy are marvelous inventions with some very potent use-cases, but they can only do so much to un-sick a psyche that has been twisted by its needs to conform to the every-changing demands of a zoo constructed for the benefit of the companies that make zoos.

What Cities Can Be

Today’s cities are zoos of this kind. They’re made to harness human energy while bleeding humans white so that those humans don’t have the excess energy to cause problems. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is the vision of the planners, and has been extolled in public by everyone from Walter Gropius John Maynard Keynes to Adolph Hitler to Joseph Stalin to Karl Marx to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Walt Disney.

It’s a holdover from a world in which machines were seen as perfect in a spiritually edifying sense, and it found voice in the disciples of Hegel who sought to make a “new man” who would be worthy and well-suited to the Utopian dreams of the planners. Humanity was seen as the imperfect, but useful, raw material from which to fashion a more perfect world.

But before these bumbling buffoons got their hands on the machinery of state, humanity had already found a far better way to do things. You can see it in any old-world city, and in some parts of older American cities like Philadelphia, Boston, New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Charleston S.C. (at least, the parts that haven’t been bulldozed and given over to the “new plan”).

These places centered around neighborhoods with cafes, locally-owned stores, tradesman’s establishments, bazaars, and pubs. People played chess in the local commons, smoked and argued and drank coffee, shared dinner and wine and beer, and had their private spaces (which were generally fairly modest, because life was lived outside the home). Far from being sequestered in “residential” areas, houses were never far from local shops, and apartments normally sat atop them (a situation now known as “mixed-use development”).

And, for those who didn’t vibe with the city, there was always the rural life of the farmer or the craftsman, which could be had just a few miles away—walking distance, really, if one were so inclined.

We Americans tend to bridle at talk of “walk-able neighborhoods” and “fifteen-minute” cities because we have nearly a century of experience of the cascade of unmitigated disasters that central planning creates, and because we understand (correctly) that our ability to get in a car and get the hell out of town is our ultimate security against the tyranny of local and state-level dysfunction—and that only an idiot would give it up.¹²

The irony is that, to achieve the fifteen-minute city, all the Utopian planners need do is…stop planning. Scale back or repeal zoning laws, step back from the subsidies (direct and indirect) for megacorps, relax or repeal at least the non-life-and-death code restrictions, and let nature take its course. It won’t be more than a few years before people start naturally gravitating back to the mixed-use, walkable, fifteen-minute neighborhood—I know this, because literally every city in the history of the world has wound up with a similar layout and structure, because those cities were optimized for humans, and how humans prefer to live, and work, and socialize, and innovate, and worship, and have families, and form governments.

It’s no wonder so many of you city slickers are sick, depressed, lost, confused, emotionally dysregulated, polarized, and generally unhappy with life:

You’re living in a nightmarish zoo, and treating yourself like a machine.

And it’s a goddamned shame.

Next time, I’ll talk about some other things I’ve noticed on my trip to the big city, and what I think you (yes, you personally) can do to make life a lot better without upending your world (at least, not too much).

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1. This isn’t exactly a new thing, but during my time out of the city the issue has gotten more pronounced. It ain’t just people and soaps that smell now.

2. Disneyland, if you didn’t know, prompts hunger and creates a sense of theme by employing scent atomizers all through the park—that’s why you smell ice cream sundaes when you’re hundreds of feet from the ice cream stand, and you smell the swamps when you’re in Adventureland, etc.

3. Notice how carefully I avoided using the word “stench.”

4. I am told by locals that nearly all of the local farmland has been leased to large agribusiness concerns or locked up in exclusive distribution contracts with companies that serve either the east coast or the export markets.

5. Really, this is NOT normal out in the rural areas I frequent. Sure, we’ve got all the same national brands, but having nearly everything packaged for single-serving/single-use (or a handful of uses only)? Not only would nobody have the shelf space, but (for a variety of reasons) it’s unlikely there would be the demand even if there was enough shelf space.

6. This is coming from a dude who’s seen the prices in his local grocery store increase 250% in the last three years.

7. It’s worth noting that several analysts consider this series of fires to be within the margin of error for the industry. Nonetheless, their timing was unfortunate enough that it added to already considerable supply chain difficulties as the world was recovering from the Covid insanity, so it is still a valid data point here for my purposes.

8. To be clear—the problem here is not business per se, nor is it private property, nor is it the “joint stock corporation” corporate structure. It is the particular legal and regulatory environment that exists around these entities which requires them to optimize around a single point (“shareholder value”—which, you’ll notice, is not the same as “profit”), and that gives them an enormous edge if they operate a manner which is conducive to the maintenance and furtherance of the dynamics described here.

Why this particular legal and regulatory environment exists is a long story filled with corruption and some pretty nasty twists of fate, but it’s far too long of a story to get into here.

9. Or from small loans drawn from fraternal orders, union chests, and community banks such as the Building & Loan depicted in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.

10. You can see several examples of these kit homes and their advertisements here: https://www.architectmagazine.com/practice/assembly-required-a-brief-history-of-20th-century-kit-house-designs_o

11. These are not the only causes of such problems, of course. But if the comparative anthropology is to be trusted on this point, even mental problems as serious and obviously-biologically-rooted as schizophrenia can be mollified without drugs, in the proper social context. See this write-up for more details: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28543089/

12. And those of us who don’t live in cities tend to get very prickly at very real prospect that our cars might be made more expensive, or inaccessible, due to state laws passed by city-dwellers who have no clue whatsoever what it means to live in a place where your nearest neighbor lives a mile away.