‘Efficiency Gone Mad’
Responding to our inhuman world.
Hey friends, welcome back. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written, even after promising I would be back in the new year. I found the break I took for the holidays a harder one to bounce back from than most, but I’m working on getting back into the swing of it.
I think a lot of what I’ve been feeling these days is the uneasiness of the ceaseless striving that seems to define modern society. I treat every new year as an opportunity to get myself back into the swing of better habits. But what makes a habit a “better” one in the first place?
I think a lot of what I feel is the urge to be more efficient and “productive” with my time. A quick scan of headlines and personal habits literature confirms for me that it’s not just me who feels like I should be efficient. Society seems to reinforce that notion at every turn.
A quick google auto-complete query for “how to be more…” returns efficiency as several of the top choices:
We’re a culture obsessed with how to be more efficient. We adopt new tools and systems at a sometimes tremendous cost of time and resources because of a vague notion of “return on investment,” or the timeframe until the cost of the change is made up for how much more efficient we can be.
But what does efficiency get us?
In the essay How Tech Despair Can Set You Free from the most recent issue of The New Atlantis, Samuel Matlack explains the following:
In the pandemic spring and summer of 2020, during nationwide lockdown, we read headlines about our food supply chains failing. Bizarrely, at the same time that we found shelves in grocery stores empty, we heard that some farmers were destroying crops, euthanizing chickens, pigs, and cows, and dumping milk. What on earth went wrong? The food journalist Michael Pollan, writing in the New York Review of Books, explains what he calls “economic efficiency gone mad.”
Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it.
Here is an example Pollan offers:
One chicken farmer … who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace. That chicken farmer had no choice but to euthanize thousands of hens at a time when eggs are in short supply in many supermarkets.
This is technique, “efficiency gone mad,” and we can understand Ellul’s writing on this subject as an effort to see the same underlying logic that produced our food system also producing analogous systems in areas as seemingly disparate as education, industry, and art. Society writ large runs on a logic that under normal circumstances indeed works smoothly, but the point is that we don’t run it — it runs us.1
The “Ellul” Matlack refers to is Jacques Ellul, a French philosopher and theologian, whose best-known work in the English world is The Technological Society. You can read a longer piece about Ellul from Matlack in an older article here.
Matlack shows us a world that we’ve made so efficient and orderly in the story highlighted above, and any disruption is unmanageable. We’ve created such tightly coupled systems that any piece of the machine–human or technological–that doesn’t perform at peak capacity causes the engine to fail. The “machine” doesn’t treat the humans involved any differently than its mechanical parts; hence Ellul’s notion of the all-encompassing technique encourages us all into a ceaseless striving to be more efficient for efficiencies sake.2
I noticed an interesting example of this recently in a tweet:
The justification for raising awareness of domestic violence, in this case, is not that domestic violence is bad in its own right, but that it costs South Carolina money and “lost worker productivity,” an easy stand-in for efficiency.
In the follow-up tweet here, it becomes more explicit: “‘If you want an ounce of success, you’ve got to have evidence. You can’t rely on pulling of the heartstrings.’” Our society functions in such a way that we need “data” backed evidence that things are bad before we will consider making a change.
I don’t believe any of the lawmakers or advocates here are doing bad work, but it is telling that we need to justify reducing domestic violence by articulating it in terms of cost for it to make a difference.
Matlack admits this paints a bleak picture but notes that the pessimism we feel here is the gateway to dealing with the root causes.
The despair we may feel when our technological system dehumanizes us — as in the commodification of life in fetal-tissue research, or the death wish at the heart of transhumanists’ dreams, or the way that much of public-health governance has become mass manipulation, or even just the vague sense that something stinks beneath the surface of most public “ethical” thinking on science and tech — all these are symptoms that something at the very core is rotten. Fully exposing that rotten core is Ellul’s project in his writings on technique. To what end? To produce the despair he thinks we must face in order for hope to have any real weight.3
Ellul notes we can’t be more efficient to get ourselves out of the efficiency trap; the only way out is through. Through wrestling with the despair caused by our desire for efficiency, we come to re-evaluate what’s important and how we should structure our lives. So to that end, some thoughts to consider:
Do you feel a personal or social pressure to be more efficient, and why do you feel that do you think?
In thinking about the things you do, do you find yourself wanting to be more productive for any specific reasons, or just for the sake of being more productive?
Could you articulate any reasons why it would be better to be less productive in any life circumstances?
And with that, thanks for reading. See you again soon!
This hints at the notion of technological progress as a self-justifying principle a la Technopoly and discussed here.