This essay by Tim Wu exposes insightful concepts essential to the solarpunk movement. Six pages is only too inconvenient to read for those who are most trapped by convenience.
The importance of Solarpunks reading the ToC essay became starkly clear when someone said they ticked a box in a voting booth and essentially said: I’m done… I give up. They got ~75+ pats on the back for this hard work whilst condemning taking further action (activism).
Voting in an election is the bare minimum duty expected of everyone. It’s not even activism. In some countries that much effort is obligatory (Belgium). Tim Wu covers voting in his essay, speculating that younger generations stand in lines less than older generations had to, suggesting that this inconvenience might be attributed to lower voter turnout among the young (2018, so pre-mail-in ballots).
Convenience is the beaten path of the mainstream. Convenience zombies don’t even have to be cattle-herded because our corporate adversaries have designed the infrastructure to ensure the path of least resistence automatically leads the masses to feed them revenue. Solarpunks resist. We do not accept the path of least resistence. We bring resistence because we understand that convenience is the enemy of activism more often than not.
But not everyone is on the same page. More Solarpunks need to become familiar with Tim Wu’s essay for their own benefit and also for solidarity and empowerment of the movement. We need to get better at recognising tyranny of convenience when we see it.
It’s even worse than that in some cases. The destination can be wrong as a consequence of convenience. The convenience of neglecting the duty of an ethical consumer to boycott leads to a bad place -- financing and enabling adversaries of our values.
The NY Times article is inconveniently enshitified in a paywall. Since this essay is something folks would want to keep a local copy of anyway, I have linked a PDF instead of the original link. The text is also below for those who prefer to exand a spoiler over a PDF.
Tyranny of Convenience, by Tim Wu
“The Tyranny of Convenience”
by Tim Wu
Feb. 16, 2018
The New York Times (opinion)
Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in
the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the
illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the
mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is
boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial.
In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is,
more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as
perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our
economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all
the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether
convenience is in fact the supreme value.
As Evan Williams, a co‑founder of Twitter, recently put it,
“Convenience decides everything.” Convenience seems to make our
decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true
preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so
convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest
is best.
Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once
you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems
irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced
streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems
silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience — not to own a
cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of
dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.
For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater
power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where
it is doing so much to structure the modern economy. Particularly in
tech‑related industries, the battle for convenience is the battle for
industry dominance. Americans say they prize competition, a
proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for
convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the
economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use
Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it
becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural
bedfellows.
Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of
life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and
to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force
for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often
opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate,
and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most
vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.
But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a
complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though
understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience
has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it
threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give
meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on
what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.
It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But
when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.
Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early
20th centuries, when labor‑saving devices for the home were invented
and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first
“convenience foods,” such as canned pork and beans and Quaker Quick
Oats; the first electric clothes‑washing machines; cleaning products
like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the
electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven.
Convenience was the household version of another late‑19th‑century idea,
industrial efficiency, and its accompanying “scientific management.” It
represented the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life.
However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of
humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and
eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And
with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning,
hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would
make available to the general population the kind of freedom for
self‑cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way
convenience would also be the great leveler.
This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its
headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings
of the mid‑20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics
and from goofy entertainments like “The Jetsons” we learned that life
in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared
with the push of a button.
Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes
would clean themselves or perhaps self‑destruct after a day’s
wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be
contemplated.
The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical
work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be
emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes
expressed in inconvenient actions and time‑consuming pursuits. Perhaps
this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been
those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because
they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to
their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things
that matter to them.
By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to
sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like
society’s greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The
counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves, to
fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature
rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the
guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables or
fixing one’s own motorcycle. But such things were seen to have value
nevertheless — or rather, as a result. People were looking for
individuality again.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience
technologies — the period we are living in — would co‑opt this
ideal. It would conveniencize individuality.
You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony
Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental
shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience
revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second
promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were
catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self‑expression.
Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with
his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment
of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of
self‑expression he once could experience only in his private den. A
new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only
to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.
So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our
existence. Most of the powerful and important technologies created
over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of
personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the
Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no
longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that
anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental
exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves.
Convenience is one‑click, one‑stop shopping, the seamless experience
of “plug and play.” The ideal is personal preference with no effort.
We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than
we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for
example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it
possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed
themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music
free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of
the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than
illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free.
As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of
convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get
left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks
that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the
line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in
an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have
never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at
which young people vote).
The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of
individualization are technologies of mass
individualization. Customization can be surprisingly
homogenizing. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the
most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in
theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet
Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions
strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality,
such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select
as our background image.
I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in
important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services,
open‑source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or
none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising
choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust
upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult
tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to
human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and
requirements and preparations have been removed?
Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a
constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all
destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from
taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We
are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at
risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.
Convenience has to serve something greater than itself, lest it lead
only to more convenience. In her 1963 classic, “The Feminine
Mystique,” Betty Friedan looked at what household technologies had
done for women and concluded that they had just created more
demands. “Even with all the new labor‑saving appliances,” she wrote,
“the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework
than her grandmother.” When things become easier, we can seek to fill
our time with more “easy” tasks. At some point, life’s defining
struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions.
An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is
“easy” is that the only skill that matters is the ability to
multitask. At the extreme, we don’t actually do anything; we only
arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life.
We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more
of the time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at
least some inconvenient choices. You need not churn your own butter or
hunt your own meat, but if you want to be someone, you cannot allow
convenience to be the value that transcends all others. Struggle is
not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the
solution to the question of who you are.
Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without
thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names
to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations,
callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that
help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve
an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the
limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw
ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or
facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel
against him.
Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They
expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can
teach us something about the world and our place in it.
So let’s reflect on the tyranny of convenience, try more often to
resist its stupefying power, and see what happens. We must never
forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the
satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of
inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of
total, efficient conformity.
