Monday, October 3, 2011

Animal (Internet) Farm

In thinking about our diets, and what it is that allows us to eat the way that we do, I stumbled upon a loose connection between freedom, vegetarianism, and the internet.  I start with what I feel is the general understanding of freedom, and will end with a question of how freedom exists.

            I will assume freedom to mean being able to do whatever we want, as long as we do not harm another.  I feel like most people take this to mean that they should always be able to do whatever pleases them, so long as they don’t perceive the one who is hurt…
Animal (Internet) Farm  (© Casey Lynch 2011)
Humans are omnivorous - we can and do get nutrition from eating both plants and other animals.  However, we are not cannibals, we do not eat others of our same species.   Further, the moral law that forbids the killing of (which usually happens before the eating of) another human has been rationalized as truly ethical because to kill another is to remove the basic rights, or oppress the other.  This can be teased out to show that to make another conscious being suffer, directly or indirectly (as is so often the case with murder), is wrong.  This partial definition of freedom is a major foundation of (Westernly-defined) civilized societies.
Somehow, and in many cultures, civilization has extended to non-humans.  In the thousands of years of domesticating of animals, many of us have begun to breach the division between (human) self and (animal) other, assigning non-human animals human-like consciousness, and in turn human-like rights.  This has made it harder for many humans to be able to rationalize killing an animal for any reason, especially for our enjoyment, especially where enjoyment is the sating of hunger (that could be satisfied in other ways.)  For some, not only is the killing of the animal seen as wrong, but to alienate an animal by means of removing it from its natural habitat (farming) is oppressive.
From here I need to jump to Marx for a minute.  As most of us know, Karl Marx saw industrialization and capitalism as modes of production and commerce that were sure to oppress the proletariat and alienate them from their labor.   But alienation not only removes one from the reality of his labor, but also the labor of others.  Further, alienation inserts the proletariat into the reality of the bourgeoisie in that he is allowed not just more leisure time, but more importantly, distance from labor and its consequences under industrialized capitalism.  In this sense, part of the proletariat's alienation is (an ironic) freedom.  In a capitalist society, the proletariat is able to purchase goods made by (other) oppressed peoples without having to feel any empathy or connection to fellow workers.  For example, a normal moral person would not buy a garment directly off of a sweat-shop-factory-line attended by children, nor would he/she make a garment under squalor conditions.  In these two examples, the garment simply would not be had - but many people do buy clothes that are made under such conditions.  A moral or ethical person would not buy goods that he/she knows were made under oppressive conditions, but the alienation that occurs in an industrialized, and especially globalized, society allows us enough distance from that oppressive labor to pretend it does not exist – this is the deniable distance.  This allows to obtain what we actually desire – self gratification.
Here we can return to our discussion of humans as conflicted omnivores.  Many people would not, or are not, capable of killing an animal in order to eat it, but are fully capable of eating a dead animal that has been killed elsewhere, packaged, and presented to them in a form and place that possesses a deniable distance, i.e. the supermarket or restaurant.  We see this in many degrees, even in those who do kill animals.  Few, if any, non-sociopathic people kill an animal with his/her bare hands.  On many farms, the “processing” of cows, chickens, etc. is mechanized - industrialized.  Even the hunter uses a bow or a gun, technologies that not only give a tactical advantage, but a partial deniable distance.  Often, when the hunter obtains proximity to the targeted beast, it is already dead.  In cases where it is not, the job is finished with a subsequent shot, or a blade; rarely with the hand.  Even a relatively short blade creates a distance that makes the act more digestible.  To be extreme, even at the table we use a fork, knife, spoon, or chop-sticks to distance ourselves from our prey’s subjectivity.  Again, in the end are allowed to attain self-gratification.

Here we see freedom being defined as being able to do what one desires through the advantage of existing at a deniable distance from ethically/morally problematic acts.  It is a relative and individual freedom.  It is a freedom based in illusion, and I would suggest that all freedom in the future will be as well.

Returning to Marx, he and Engels saw democracy as the vehicle that would facilitate the rise of the proletariat, and even though it would have to go through the rise and fall of capitalism, ultimately, democracy would lead to the realization of communism.  The debate as to the utopianism of Marxism is not the point here, instead it is to assert that the goal of a communist society is to produce equality, and that this equality is equated with (universal) freedom.  The question now and in the future, in the time of the internet, especially Web 2.0 and beyond, is how does/will deniable distance prevent us from being free.
We all remember (and still hear) the specter of communism’s return in the utopian prophecies of the democracy of the internet.  “Everyone will have a voice,” or “everyone will have a choice.”  The partial truth that precipitates from such proclamations of equality is that as long as you can pay for or get access to a device that connects to the internet, and pay for or find access to a physical site that broadcasts the internet, you will receive some level of freedom to information depending on where in the world you actually, physically live.
First, the internet is not free.  In general, we pay someone somewhere, like the cable or phone company, to connect to it.  Once we are on it, whatever services one believes he/she is obtaining for “free” is actually being paid for by the giving away of one’s  information (think gmail or facebook), personal time/labor (this blog post is one example), or allowing oneself to be inundated with advertising that affects him/her on some level (probably subconsciously.)  In a sense, while one is on the internet, he/she is working for someone else, producing goods in the form of information, without being paid.  All the while, the entities actually reaping the monetary benefits in the real world are widening the gap between the wealthiest few and the majority.
Second, the internet does not make all information free to everyone.  The internet is much less of an anarchic utopia in China than it is in the U.S.  Also, most of us are unsure of if, and how much information is censored in the U.S.  All we know is that we get enough information to gratify our selves.
Finally, web purchases create an indefinite distance between the objects we order online, and the labor that went into their creation.  We usually have no connection to the possibility or actuality of oppression that occurs in the production of goods and services we purchase online.
So what does this mean in terms of the denial distance?  First, the internet seems free because most of us are alienated from the charges we pay to the service providers; we never actually see the physical money before or after it goes to the phone or cable company because we pay it with a credit/debit card, or even more distantly, have it automatically drafted from our account when it is due.  We are abstractly indentured servants.  Second, we essentially never-ever see the inventors/controllers of the content and services we use on the web.  Occasionally we may see a Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs on television, but most of us have never met, or even seen someone like them in real life.  (As a larger irony, I bet most people don’t even know who Larry Page and Sergey Brin are.)  The confusion of producer and consumer, as well as the gap between subject and object on the internet is especially interesting:  because of their nearness to infinity, they most clearly show how deniable distance allows the simulacrum that is democracy to function on the internet.  To further examine this phenomenon may expose an analogy to how democracy functions as ideology everywhere.

We have come to believe that the internet provides us with a virtual reality, leading us to believe that everything we experience on the web is only virtual.  Actually, it would be more accurate to call the internet a semireality.  I use “semireal” as a word descending from Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreal.  Where hyperreality suggests an indistinction between the real and a copy or simulacrum, the semireal is a reality that exists within or parallel to another, completely apprehensible reality.  Semireality places no hierarchical value in distinguishing between some hypothetical real-real versus a hyperreal, but instead emphasizes the relative strata between all possible levels of reality.
It is only in a semireality that democracy is possible, and only through deniable distance that semirealities are comprehended.  In this sense, there must be a deniable distance for democracy to exist.

The internet gives us a virtual infinity of distance between ourselves and our masters.  (Ironically, they have us closer than ever.)  The deniable distance the web provides, the fact that we don’t interact directly with others, whether equal or not, gives us the feeling that we are free to indulge in the gratification of ourselves (under the illusion that there is no ‘real’ other to be harmed by our actions.)  We see neither those who oppress us, or those we oppress.  This should quickly lead to the question of how oneself is oppressed, and if we are okay with this lack of freedom.