Breaking Bread

Yesterday I called my mum using Alexa to talk her through making a loaf of bread using the sourdough starter my dad had collected from our doorstep. This, I thought, is truly the embodiment of how technology can bring people together. This is like an advert for Amazon’s devices I mused, imagining a TV commercial with emotive quirky piano music finishing with my dad popping up behind my mum at the end saying its very tasty as I call them after a long walk with my two sons. Part of me thought yes this is everything you rail against. I mean the way in which the consumer Spectacle represents life as a series of symbolic images. But then another part of me felt why should technology be seen as such a corrupting influence when invention and creative problem solving are part of the human experience? Would I care if anyone knew where I was or what my favourite google search was if I wasn’t born into a culture of Big Data duality? By this I mean that Technology has gradually shaped our sense of consciousness as something contained within a data processing machine and thus amplified the sense of individuality and now the protection of this separate unit’s privacy is paramount. Is it possible that we could decide to live like an indigenous culture sharing our technologies and constructions for the good of each other? It seems to be as simple as deciding that the tools we create do not have to create us. Altruism is indifferent to value judgements and awards it’s just a means of surviving through an embodied, collective sense of identity. Lockdown has for a time suspended the need to compete and we have had a glimpse of how we can serve each other but even now there is a creeping dread of the consumer model trying to take back control. I mean if we carry on like this the economy will collapse they cry when the economy is a just a technology we created to allow us to connect. Perhaps I mean that lockdown revealed the limits of a symbolic data-based identity. So I know my dad is telling the truth when he says the bread is very tasty and I tell my family I love them everyday now.