I stumbled across a post on LinkedIn yesterday that was promoting some, admittedly, impressive AI tech that could translate what you were saying and actually change the movement of your lips while you were talking on video. The person sharing it was excitedly proclaiming, "we'll never need to learn another language again!" Unless of course you're not on a video call.

It's a good example of the way tech is increasingly mediating our interactions with each other in ways that have become so normalized that we're not even noticing it anymore. The pandemic threw many of us into a remote work setting. A side effect of this has been accepting video calls as a part of our lives; and with that has come all sorts of innovations to make our video calls even better.

Yet I can't help but think about what we're losing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for a back to the office pendulum shift. I prefer remote work, it's contributed to a much more fulfilling life rhythm. No, my interest is more around the things that contribute to a meaningful life and the ways tech is slowly eroding that.

One of the books I've been reading lately is all about the way in which our environment can have an impact on our happiness and the author makes some good points around the role that other people play in that. Not just in terms of our close relationships - though those do matter - but on a societal level. By being around other people that we learn to trust, we grow in empathy, and that increases our sense of wellbeing. The author writes,

“Not only does it feel good to experience positive social signs from others — smiles, handshakes, opened doors, bargains kept, and cooperative merging in traffic — but it feels good to reinforce those feelings of trust among both friends and strangers. It works best of all when we do it face-to-face: in the kitchen, over a fence, on the sidewalk, in the agora. Distance and geometry matter.”

This is one of my main concerns with the way tech is creeping into our lives. The digital realm is replacing many of the day-to-day touchpoints we once had with other people. Shopping, interacting with neighbours, learning, even borrowing. And what's important to note is that the tech that now mediates these interactions is made for the primary purpose of extracting profit for someone else. Yes, you can argue that a grocery store is the same; but those micro interactions with real people in the store were not.

This is why truly public spaces will always matter. Parks, libraries, trails, sidewalks/streets, community centres, public schools, etc. These are the places that belong to us all, they don't exist for the sake of profit, and they're where we practice and learn what it is to be human. This is something that online will never be able to replace.

There is always a subjective nature to happiness.

I've been reading a book that explores the relationship between happiness and the built environment, basically asking whether or not how we design and build cities can contribute to the happiness of people who live in them. The author suggests that studies have shown that people are able to accurately describe their feelings of happiness; meaning, when someone says they are happy, they usually are.

The reason this matters in the context of the book is that it cuts against some of the market logic that happiness is best determined by analyzing how people spend their money. People will spend their money for many reasons, not all of them because it's what makes them happy. This squares with the theory that increased consumption actually has a point in which it no longer brings real happiness.

It also means that even though people might accurately describe how they're feeling, they may not really understand why. Market logic takes advantage of this by promising a feeling that people only know when they've achieved it. Consumption might bring fleeting pleasure, but it does bring lasting happiness.

Understanding the role that individual, subjective experiences of happiness play is important; but we also need to go further in understanding the various factors that can contribute to a long-lasting experience of happiness across an entire population.

Been reading a bit about Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, who attempted to change the trajectory that the city was on. Throughout the 20th C, Bogotá had become dominated by private vehicles and had privatized much of its public space. Peñalosa believed that cities could inspire happiness if they were planned for people, rather than cars. During his time as mayor he scrapped highway expansions, installed bike paths and public parks, put in a highly ambitious rapid transit system, increased gas taxes, and began to ban cars from the city centre.

Of course not all of these changes were readily accepted by the public and certain demographics pushed back. But he held to a conviction that we don't have to just give in and do things the way they always have been. Cities can be whatever we want them to be.

“A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can't be both.” -- Peñalosa

It's amazing how easily we acquiesce in our planning to car centric thinking. We look at busy streets, backed up traffic, drivers making unsafe decisions, and think we can solve this by adding more infrastructure for private vehicles. Give them more lanes, make it so they don't have to wait at lights, make parking more available. The results of this are always the same: if you make streets better for cars, more people will drive on them. We need to fight this impulse. Instead of making things easier for drivers, make them harder. De-prioritize the convenience of private vehicles and invest in helping people get around in other ways.

In every way this makes a city better.

Jason Hickel, author of Less Is More, wrote a great article advocating for universal public services as a way forward for a just transition. His underlying point is that when we privatize these essential services and goods, people need more money in order to afford them. This keeps them in jobs creating even more things that puts extra strain on our natural resources. His solution is to ‘decommodify’ these essential goods - to which he includes healthcare, education, housing, transit, nutritious food, energy, water, and communications — and eliminating artificial scarcity.

“Right now it is impossible to take even obvious steps toward climate mitigation (such as scaling down fossil fuel production or other destructive sectors), because people in affected industries would lose access to wages, housing, healthcare, etc. No one should accept such an outcome. With universal services and an emancipatory job guarantee, we can protect against any economic insecurity and guarantee a just transition. There is no necessary contradiction between ecological and social objectives. The two can and must be pursued together."

His ideas are worth engaging with, mainly because we need to take seriously the limits of something like green capitalism as a solution. This is a compelling vision of a society that seeks the welfare of all alongside the welfare of the planet. He ends by suggesting that these demands should be part of a united climate and labour movement.

I agree.