The materialist is a concrete identity for many. Everyone has a character whom they conjure up to represent the epitome of modern consumerist lifestyle. A friend, a relative, a celebrity figure. Generally, a person’s reference frame conveniently places themselves at least before the worst of the materialists they know. Yet humanity does not appear so blind to its growth in ownership of things; we frequently throw mantras on minimalism to innocent ears. But our daily dependence has evolved into effortless transactions. Transactions which even the most fervent minimalist may unwittingly execute. This special type of transaction is identified by three properties:
$(1$) I, the one wanting to perform the transaction, have some desire to fulfil, whether it be hunger, loneliness, boredom, sadness, or any pick from our rich array of plights. The specific desires for the transaction find themselves high on Maslow’s hierarchy.
$($2$)$ There is an abundance of resource such that I am overwhelmed by choice. Alternatively, the ability to make my choice is unknowingly revoked from me. Think how advertisements seed priors into our subconscious.
$($3$)$ My means to get this resource is easy $($too easy$)$.
Māteria
The straight forward example to demonstrate these three properties is in humanity’s daily ritual, eating food. Let’s say I live in a quaint flat in the central hub of a Tokyo and a groaning inside of me signals a craving for food $($a desire to fulfil$)$. I weigh up the options of ordering a takeaway delivery – this will cost money –, popping downstairs to the local grocers – this will cost energy – , or patching something together from what can be discovered in the kitchen – this will cost thinking $($abundance of resource$)$. Of these three choices, which requires the least expense? All of them $($resource is easy$)$, if you are a middle-class citizen on a standard salary. Arguably, this scenario periodically occurs for lower income citizens too. Certainly, this is a positive development that you and I have so few difficult choices to make most days. Technology, in this sense, really is otiosum-ology. Otiosum being Latin for ‘lazy’. Inventions now streamline our lives by replacing both manual labour and cognitive labour, the later usually referred to as making a decision. Who decides how to get from your living room to Kilimanjaro Cafe? A*-search-coupled-with-GPS-mapping, colloquially ‘Google Maps’. What should you make for dinner tonight? Have a scroll through www.TrinasHealthyHubris.com, because Trina knows best. What to wear that represents the identity of who I am? Burban Outflitters fresh-off-the-press oversized red knit; get it before your friends so that you can stake claim to starting a trend.
‘Materialism isn’t new.’, you might protest, ‘It’s just that more people have the ability to consume than before, because the quality of life $($quality of wealth?$)$ has increased 1.’ The effort of the industrial era was to harness technology to minimise the extent to which humans had to perform manual labour. At this time, technology did not have the maturity to tackle the problem of minimising the extent to which humans had to make decisions. Decisions require manipulating logic on the basis of evidence $($think back to our earlier example of how the decision of what to do for dinner was made under various evidences$)$, and this behaviour is one of hallmarks of advanced ‘thinking’. Mathematics has been the abstract tool that has gradually lifted us from the burden of complex thinking over its approximate five-thousand-year lifetime. Suddenly, what was gentle progress changed to an unforgiving yank when we managed to speed up its processing by a ten-thousand-fold. The first computers managed about $2000$ instructions per second and I estimate a human performs one ‘calculation’ every ten seconds when solving a problem, though it agreeably difficult to know what a calculation of a human is. We could look at nerve firings. The average neuron has an impulse speed of about $50$m/s but collectively it has been approximated that there are about $2.7 \times 10^9$ spikes per second in the cortex, which is now exceeded by modern supercomputers which can exceed$300,000$ MIPS $($million instructions per second$)$. Despite the brain being more energy efficient and parallel, we can agree that meta-logical calculations of computers are faster. So dawns the information age, or alternatively, so dawns the decision revolution. Instead of my answering your initial query at the start of this paragraph, a brief historical diversion might have led you to think I have strategically avoided it. I do agree that materialism was founded when the first assembly lines awoke from their empty slumber, but now it is evident that materialism has changed after the decision revolution, living more like a viral organism that drives human progress forward so that it can feed from our energy we expend in the process. But I am not here spiel about materialism and how it has inflicted humanity with a crippling case of dementia. Within the genus of Materiales thrives a lesser known species that feeds upon a more pure and human drive: cognitionis.
Materiales cognitionis
Let us return to the three components of the effortless transaction. Note that these do not encompass general transactions as we are familiar with them in markets, but a type of transaction where my desire entwined with abundant and easy resources makes me inclined to perform an automatic, least-effort transaction. You are strolling along the streets of Victoria England, in conversation with a close friend. Together you contemplate the blueness of the sky, something you had both never wondered about until the trajectory of your conversation averted both your attentions upward. Perhaps the conversation would evolve like so:
You: “You know, it just occurred to me that the sky is blue and, from what I know, has always been blue. Why is it not a brilliant vermilion at times, a shy yellow at others, or speckled orange on Tuesdays?”
Friend: “My you are onto a rather clever point there. Certainly we can say it has been blue for all of human civilisation, what with the blue skies we see in paintings of, say, Michelangelo or Bosch.”
You: “Well of course – how scoped of me – the sky does have flavours of blood red at the rise and fall of our Sun, and black is the sky when the Earth is rotated away from the Sun’s cone of light. By that reasoning, the blue sky must be an Earthly origin and not a property of the space in which the Sun, Earth, and our neighbouring planets subsist–”
Friend: “–and the uniform colour of the sky appeals to the theory that it is invariant to how our Earth positions itself relative to the Sun.”
You: “I conjecture it is possibly a cause of the electromagnetic field and how light from the Sun interacts with it. Ah no, or perhaps a property of the atmosphere itself.”
Friend: “You could certainly be right. Perhaps…”
And so on, until you both reach a suitable conclusion – which may be no conclusion at all – or part ways to ponder the blue origin alone, promising to ask a colleague “who knows about these sorts of things.” Now let’s relatively accelerate our twosome from the year 1850 to the year 2015, where the same high street they are walking along is now a patchwork of shop lights screaming ‘OPEN’ and tech adverts dancing at the peripherals.
You: “You know, I just had a thought: why is the sky blue, and maybe not some other colour, like green?”
Friend: “Let me Google that.”
Thus our twosome’s conversation is an abrupt two-line quip. Cut short before different angles of the question are pondered. But alas they have arrived at the correct answer, and more! A wiki page of such girth and depth that you are instantly lost within streams of texts on topics about the world that are deemed the current truths of human progress. But let’s decompose the situation further. At the beginning of the conversation, we had the desire to know an answer to some question, whether that desire was about properties of the world, as in the example of the sky, or a fact about some event, person, or invention. The resource is the collective knowledge of humanity. And, my, this is an abundant resource for a 19th century Victorian or a 21st century millennial. Lastly, how easy was it to access the knowledge? Here is where the asymmetry develops between our two conceptual conversations. Knowledge in the 19th century was recoverable if you knew where to look and invested the time to find it. A discussion on the blueness of the sky might not be worth the effort unless you were a budding meteorologist, perhaps. But for you and I, living in a tightly coupled world, knowledge can be plucked from the air, literally. There is a certain uneasiness about the second dialogue. It certainly lacked in content, but almost definitely lacked in thinking and reasoning. Something we associate with lower animals and vacant computers. In my early days of education, I recall taking an advanced biology course in which our teacher dismissed herself halfway through the year for maternity leave. The replacement teacher was a retired, clumsy old man who drove through content faster than a closed time loop. He justified his lack or rigour by stating that during examination he would allow us to have one note card filled with whatever information you would find useful on the test, justifying his choice with the statement that, “You don’t need to memorise facts any more now that we have Google.” When this was announced I became uncomfortable, mostly because this format gave my classmates a strong footing to perform well on the test, and I enjoyed outperforming the class, being the immature young student I was at the time. I decided to take the test without a note card, much to the perplexity of many of my classmates. I still feel, to this day, that if it were not for exam scores driving our success, I got more out of the test than those that went to extremes and invented new word tessellations to maximise information transit on their note card.
The story about my substitute biology teacher, the simulation of a dialogue about the sky’s colour, and our trend towards using technology to make decisions, all provide clues towards how Materiales cognitionis behaves. If we define a materialist as someone that seeks ownership of many items, driven by some force of desire $($see some examples of forces of desire discussed in the first paragraph$)$, then we can define a knowledge materialist as someone that seeks ownership of much knowledge, driven by some force of desire. It stands that all materialists are consumers, but not all consumers all materialists, so therefore our knowledge materialist is a knowledge consumer by trade. Humanity is a fluctuating balance between consumers and producers. This balance is not a simple adjustment of a distribution over a constant total sum of assets. Currently, we live in a time where a rapid growth in consumers has triggered a rapid growth in producers and this has subsequently steered our planet on a route marked, “WARNING: Self-Immolation Imminent”. Within this abstraction of a consumer-producer society, we have the consumers and producers that exchange a particular resource we call knowledge. As I outlined earlier, there has always been a large amount of collective knowledge in humanity, at least within the past two-hundred years, but the connectivity of the modern world has allowed the number of knowledge consumers to grow unchecked. A knowledge consumer can now be anyone who has access to the world wide web and chooses to assimilate it 2. To satisfy the growing demands of a knowledge-hungry culture, the number of knowledge producers must also increase to uphold the depleting knowledge source. Can you ‘deplete’ knowledge? Squeeze every ounce of information from its propositions and conclusions until there is no more to be garnered? For knowledge that is timeless, I believe this isn’t so, or at least the knowledge has a lifetime that is long enough for it not to be affected by local fluctuations in knowledge history until becomes superfluous. But for shallow knowledge – knowledge not worth more than a second’s deliberation – this can certainly deplete, and deplete fast. But why would humanity, being such the superior species that we claim, try to sustain itself from a watering hole where we can see the bottom? Because we aren’t just knowledge consumers, but knowledge materialists, and therefore we like our knowledge to be given to us on a silver platter with an ample garnishing of easy. What the physicist would call a ‘low-energy configuration’. To rub salt into deep wounds, materialists usually spend more time consuming than producing, so their subsequent net contribution to the world is as a consumer. This means if knowledge materialists are as rife as it seems, humanity is nose diving towards a net decline in knowledge. Even if this it is not necessarily a net decline, certainly the quality of the knowledge we are creating to sustain or relentless demands for information needs to be seriously considered.
Time to fight knowledge consumerism.
There have been many stones left unturned in my presentation of this subject, especially during the climactic points in the last paragraph. Some interesting follow-up questions to motivate future discussion:
How can we more rigorously quantify someone’s knowledge consumption/production? Is more timeless $($sustainable$)$ knowledge being produced as humanity moves forward, or, worse, is less ? What are the most common sources of knowledge $($news companies, universities, research associations, the general populace, etc.$)$? Are universities, being the esteemed frontier of knowledge fruition we so believe, just as clogged with shallow knowledge as news mediums are?
I welcome you to consider the above questions deeply and perhaps compose some useful knowledge to add to our growing knowledge pool. To finalise this essay, I want to end with a call to action. You have seen, and perhaps witnessed yourself, how when consumption outweighs production, production has to cut corners to meet the growth in demand. You have seen that materialism is not exclusive to tangible items crafted in factories, but also encompasses abstract items like knowledge. You know that tangible materialism can be fought against by locally sourcing goods, hand-making your own products, and building sustainable products. Therefore you must agree that knowledge materialism can also be fought against by locally sourcing your knowledge $($at your library?$)$, hand-thinking your own knowledge, and building sustainable knowledge. I argue that we should read less books and spend more time thinking and writing about the books we read, learn less facts and spend more time compressing and comprehending the facts we already know, and query less search engines, querying, instead, more acquaintances or reasoning about the questions we ponder. Release some interesting body of work to the world and avoid sitting at your machine, greedily eating web page after web page of knowledge bytes.
1 Of course, this is certainly not true world wide and I am heavily leaning on a position founded within a wealthy sub-population of western and eastern culture. Within my staked grounds though, this is true $($see Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now for a presentation of this trajectory$)$.
2 I use assimilate here because the number of knowledge mediums is now quite abundant, from books, to podcasts, to videos, to lectures.
The graphic at the top of this post: “A Lesser-Known Species in the Materiales Genus” via VQGAN+CLIP.