To change and to be changed

Human kind has long been described as an increasingly relevant force of nature. In the first hundreds of thousands of years our impact was not much bigger than that of any other animal, leaving traces of our dwellings or imprinting tracks around the places that we visited most frequently. But then, around 10000 years ago we discovered that we could change the environment to our favor and starting plowing fields, digging mines, carving irrigation ditches, felling trees. Suddenly we were not at the mercy of the environment anymore and instead we were adapting the environment to us. And not only the environment, even the plant and animal species started to experience our efforts: by selecting the right wolf in each litter they eventually became dogs, and by eating first the most rebel sheep in the herd only the tamest were able to reproduce, easing the job of caring for them. This, carried on for generations, has lead to significant differences in brain size and distribution between our domestic animals today and their wild counterparts.

However, this newly-discovered ability to influence the environment never meant a complete reversal of the interaction. Yuval Noah Harari, whom I have cited before, argues that wheat, a simple wild grass from the mountain ranges in the Middle East, domesticated humans (by providing them with regular food) and through this domestication it achieved a very wide spread around the world: not only has it become a well-established crop in many countries, but it also has managed to eradicate most of the competition too.

 

Photo: Lewis Verduyn

And wheat is not an isolated case: it is well documented how early human societies in Europe developed a tolerance for milk well into adulthood, which provided a significant nutritional advantage in pastoral societies, where milk, butter and cheese would be available almost all year round as opposed to the seasonality of many crops. In many parts of the world, like Asia, Africa and South America, this genetic trait has not spread and the consumption of dairy products is primarily limited to children.

I came to these thoughts today on the wake of an article I read in Medium about how a design failure in the B-17 aircraft had lead to a high number of accidents linked to the confusion in pilots between two very similar levers. Pilots knew that there were two but, being similar to one another and under the stress of the moment, they frequently operated the wrong one. This lead to the recognition of the fact that humans often perform below their capabilities and that systems should be designed to minimize the possibility of this kind of errors. 

Over decades, this philosophy has lead to the current trend that most devices these days do not need a proper user manual, just the "getting started" part, and the rest comes out of a combination of common sense and built-in explanations. Of course, the key part here is the common sense, which evolves over time as certain uses become more and more frequent. Just think how many times you have found yourself pulling your fingers apart trying to zoom into a photograph in a magazine or a newspaper. This gesture, which was virtually unheard of twenty years ago, is not only common knowledge now, it is of widespread use.

The article goes on to elaborate how the current marketing trend goes in the direction of collecting all the available information from each person to try to cater to their very own needs: tracking which offers are quickly dismissed as opposed to those that catch your attention, cross referencing your web and Netflix consumption, comparing your taste with those of the people near you to make a successful suggestion. The German satirist Kay-Uwe Kling wrote the light-hearted novel Qualityland taking this concept to the edge: in Qualityland you get the merchandise you need even before you realize you need it, but once you have it you always confirm that, indeed, you wanted it. The hilarious plot starts when Peter Jobless gets a pink dolphin-shaped dildo (which he obviously does not want) and tries to convince the marketing machinery that it has been an error, tries to return it (unsuccessfully) and how the situation is finally resolved.

Another remarkable example of choice direction is clearly (but almost subliminally) depicted in the Axiom Humans of Pixar's 2008 animation movie WALL-E, which live in a starliner oblivious to almost anything except the constant bombarding of offers by their premium marketer B'n'L.

My impression is that our filter bubbles are acting more and more on us every day, changing the way we think and talk, and leading the society down a rabbit hole of sectarianism and populism that can break it apart. Here is to hope that the change never goes so far that it becomes irreparable. Enjoy your evening.