You are not a gadget
If you've never read Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not a Gadget you really, really should. It is, for me, an incredibly important read and helps separate some of how we often talk about ourselves from what we really are.
Humans, humanity, life, those things are all much larger and more complex than our ability to describe or measure. While I wouldn't want to stop or criticise anyone from description or measurement, Lanier makes an excellent case about what we miss when we design things that treat people like widgets. In the book he writes, I think quite well, about how internet platforms more or less treat every form of interaction as equal and, therefore, head boundlessly towards both a less and more - less depth more volume.
In some ways this is nothing new, except he wrote it in 2011. In some ways it's not insightful, except he has this incredibly interesting passage about how digitising what a musical note is inevitably reduces what it can be. I think about this a lot - how the definition of something that was inherently undefined both enables a standardisation (and therefore a lot of digital instruments and music) but also at the same time tamps down on something expansive and immense. What was 'C' before digital tuners? Well maybe it was slightly sharper here and slightly flatter there, it was a lot looser and more relative. Which seems somewhat antiquated and kind of cute.
There's an article I remember reading about the brain and the author contended that we knew so little about it that not even neuroscientists could describe aspects of the brain without machine metaphors. When the writer attends a neuroscience conference he asked every speaker 'can you describe your research?'. They ALL would say things like 'I'm looking at how the amygdala is like the firewall of the brain'. He'd prompt again 'could you describe it again but without using any IT/computing terms?'. I can't remember exactly, but something like only 10% could. His conclusion was that the research was inevitably tied to the closest thing we have to a brain that we understand: a computer.
But a brain is much more than a computer, isn't it? Just like a note is much more than a frequency.
Sometimes I observe my friends tracking their heartrate, sleep, goals, aspirations, holidays, steps, activity levels, work output, etc, etc and, to some extent, that's fine. Except we haven't really evolved to just crank out tasks and hit arbitrary goals. For someone like me, where the whole point of something is how it feels, I'm often flummoxed: who cares if I ran 3 or 4 or 5km, it's whether I enjoyed it or not. Who cares if I hit my sleep goal: do I feel refreshed or worn out? Surely that's the thing that matters.
In my day job, over the years, I've occasionally been asked to track both meaningful and pointless measurements. An example of a meaningful one would be something that indicates if people are learning - this could be anything from grades, to test scores, to student self-reflection. The method isn't important here, what's important is that it's worth interrogating: well, if this kid has come to school have they learned anything at all? If so, how much? You can't answer that completely, but you can answer it a bit, and it's an important question.
But there's also total bullshit measurements. At one Uni job I had to record how many people clicked on an email newsletter I sent, but that didn't matter. I was running workshops and classes - so who cares if someone clicks on a newsletter? All that matters is how many people turn up. The newsletter facilitates the attendance, but the attendance is what actually means something.
A lot of these examples don't necessarily mean anything - people aren't worse than me for preferring numerical clarity and I'm not worse than them for finding it frivolous. But I do wonder why we treat ourselves like gadgets: why we describe ourselves as machines, why we prioritise completely made up outputs rather than intrinsic outcomes, why everything, everywhere feels like a metric and not at all like something more complex.
One of my favourite youtube channels is by a guy named Ben Horne - he doesn't advertise, doesn't ask for subscribers or likes. He's completely middling in terms of popularity. He just has these multi day hikes in national parks and takes like 2 photos a day. There are long sections of his videoes where he is lying down in the shade, staring at the sky, waiting for sunset. It's incredibly decent. It would be somewhat absurd to then have some insane ad pivot, or for him to chase 10% growth. Man's trying to unwind and decompress.
Anyway - neither you nor I are a gadget. We may not be able to escape computing metaphors, considering ourselves as machines or confusing outputs and outcomes, but it's a good thing to consider. Maybe we should be less gadgety this week.
In other news, Tall Poppy Press has two new books for pre order. They're pretty cool, have a gander.