The senses go first
People talk about expensive restaurants, post photographs of adult birthdays, and spend time and money on hotels, lounges and podcasts.
· 2 min
Each of these looks like a matter of personal taste, but I do not read it that way. I think people are carried along by a current that was there before them, repeating the same reactions without ever asking themselves what they want.
Inside that current, what a purchase means lies in what surrounds the thing bought. At an expensive restaurant, having been there counts for more than the food. A birthday turns on who is watching rather than on the day itself. A hotel tells others who you are before it gives you rest, and a podcast is more background noise than a way to learn. People do not judge by their own senses; other people's reactions do the judging for them.
Over time people seek ever shallower stimulation, and deeper perception, left unused, withers. Once the senses have gone, nothing resists the change that follows.
I see the zone control of electric cars as one example of that change. Once a system decides how far and when a person may travel, and who may travel at all, getting about changes in kind and is no longer a question of technology. Digital currency is much the same: when an algorithm rather than a person settles in advance what can be bought, where money can be spent and who can receive it, the way choice is made is rewritten.
People call this policy, but a policy has an intention, while a system has only a direction that is never explained. A rule written as a condition neither argues nor feels, so a refusal has nobody to hear it and comes to mean nothing.
As the senses dull, the world seems simpler, and in a simpler world any change looks natural. By the time a change looks natural, it has already happened. Meanwhile people go on posting photographs and reacting to them, with no idea what current they are in.
None of this comes by force: amid the noise people quietly lose the use of their senses, and only afterwards feel that something has changed. Freedom goes from the senses first, and later from language and memory.
Freedom goes from the senses first, and later from language and memory.