The Vacation to Nowhere

The American Dream mill family goes on vacation!

On July 1966, this picture appeared with an article in the local newspaper, showing a proud, young mill worker and his family.  The article detailed this happy, “american dream” mill family and a caption explained how they were loading the car to go on a family vacation because the mill closed on July 4th.  The family all looks proudly at their father, the head of the household and family provider.

But it was a lie… the suitcases were empty and the family simply went back home after the photo was taken.  The car wasn’t even theirs and drove away after they were done.  In reality, this family never went on this vacation.  The photograph was staged and the article was fiction.

This was taken just after the mill company mergers in 1965 and public relations would have been important to maintain in local communities.  New interested needed to be generated about working in textiles to increase the production base and availability of workers.  The dominant ideology of the time was being reproduced by the media and pictures like this reinforced the hegemony of the mill companies.  This shows what a powerful ideological state apparatus the media had become and how it was being utilized to create ideology and maintain the current status quo.

Cyborgs in My Food

Lately I've found that more of our population has become subservient to our machines and its increasing at an alarming rate.  While conspiracy theorist ramble about the coming Skynet-like machine take over that will happen in the future, I shake my head.  The takeover isn't coming, it’s already happened. 

I've noticed it more commonly in public settings; in my daily interactions.  It used to be that when I interacted with my fellow human beings, I was interacting with another person whose actions were controlled by their own consciousness.  But lately, especially in retail and food service, I noticed I no longer interact with a person, but instead the biological extension of their electronic master. 

As a selective consumer, there are times I don’t want a product (in this case it was fast food) exactly as it is described and today I wanted to make a small substitution of ingredients.  After my request, the bewildered cashier attempted to enter it by pressing a few buttons and afterwards received back a series of angry beeps.  She looked up and told me, “I’m sorry, it [referring to the point of sale system] won’t let me do that.”  When I pointed out that the workers making the food were directly behind her and suggested she could perhaps ‘manually’ rely the substitution, she replied that the workers needed to see it their screen too and the only way to make it was by putting it into the computer.

I shouldn't be surprised by the shift to the apparently cybernetic control over eating establishments.  We as consumers have been driving up in our machines and screaming our orders into an electronic box for years, why shouldn't inter-employee communication follow the same evolution.  It appears we are at the next logical step for higher the higher efficiency and faster service that our society demands – just put the machines in charge.

In another instance, I used a coupon that was to make my order free.  However, the cashier insisted that the register still wanted payment.  Not wanting to make an issue of it, I decided to go ahead and pay; it wasn't worth having to attempt to argue with the machine and its biological lackey.  She rang up the order, took my money, and put it in the register.  Then she counted out the change the machine displayed, handing me back the exact amount I just paid her.  When I questioned the necessity of the process, she simply replied “That’s what it told me to do.”

While contemplating where we the next step will be, I’m reminded of work I did in graduate school regarding our apparent postmodern cyborg integration.  One of my favorite authors on the subject, Donna Haraway, observed the increasingly common phenomena, “Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature). Is this the end of our species? Have we started a new cybernetic branch of our evolution?  Is the time of Homo sapiens near the end and will we see the coming of Homo cyborgis?