Fracking the Poor
What should we call the complex, abstract tyranny that results in a 1% version of The Matrix
“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The merits of hydraulic fracturing have been debated for the past decade and a half. Fracking has created a lot of wealth and made energy cheaper, however it arguably hurts the environment. Activists claim it can poison drinking water, and it may also cause small earthquakes, but the evidence for that is shaky.
I'm generally more pro-fracking than anti-fracking, but I’d prefer that we nuclearize the grid as quickly as possible. Either way, I buy into
’s “energy is life” principle. Cheap, abundant sources of energy are vital to life. There are different tradeoffs to every type of energy production, and reasonable people can disagree about which they're willing to accept, but our modern standard of living requires lots of energy. We have to get it somehow. So while I’m ambivalent about fracking, I am sure that it’s far better than mining and burning coal.Mining coal sucked. It still does, but it was much worse.
did an awesome podcast about the battles between coal miners and mining companies in West Virginia in the early 1900s, and it's a pretty incredible story. The work was dangerous, and the miners had to literally fight the tyrannical mining interests for the right to organize. As I listened to the pod, a thought kept occurring to me: “Life is way better now than it was back then, but there's still something wrong. What is it though?”For my money, this is the defining question of the early 21st Century. Boot to your face, strike-breaking, fire-hosing-Civil-Rights-protestors, knock-down-drag-out tyranny is pretty rare in the West, but things are fucked up anyway. Why?
A fancier version of that thought is: How do you bridge the divide between Angus Deaton and Steven Pinker?
Deaths of despair, loneliness, opioids, mental illness, obesity, we have a lot of problems, pick your poison. Why is there still so much of this misery in the absence of traditional tyranny?
We’re being taken advantage of in cryptic ways. Over the years, direct tyranny has mutated into this emergent, abstract kind of tyranny we’re subject to now. In searching for the right words to describe this phenomenon I’ve landed on calling it human fracking.
In case you don't catch my drift, please allow me to beat you over the head with an analogy:
Fracking is a new technology whereby gas companies shoot water into wells to harvest commodities that were harder to reach before: oil & gas.
Human fracking is a suite of new technologies whereby governments and companies shoot algorithms at our brains to harvest commodities that were harder to reach before: attention & health.
To put a finer point on it: human fracking is the asymmetric use of technology to the benefit of an institution, at the expense of individuals who don’t grasp the harm being done to them.
This has always gone on to some degree. From the Jews in Egypt, through the Uighars in China, extracting value at the expense of some “other” is not new. What’s different is, the exploitation has moved from the work we do, to our brains and our health. Old-timey value extraction was driven by the threat or imposition of direct physical pain. Now, we experience fracking through a pleasant user interface, but at levels we don’t initially understand, something is hurting us.
Human fracking manifests itself in several different forms, but the underlying dynamic is the same in each case. So let’s walk through three important types of human fracking, Limbic Hijacking, Junkification, and Government/ Media Cooperation. Human fracking occurs along several more vectors than just those, but you’ll get the picture.
Limbic Hijacking
Limbic Hijacking is the quintessential example of human fracking.
If you watched that Social Dilemma documentary that came out a couple years ago you know what Limbic Hijacking is. If you’ve been living under a rock, which actually kinda sounds like it’d be a nice break actually, it means tech companies leveraging their understanding of neurology to design software that’s addictive. Addicted users spend hours and hours on their app and see zillions of commercials.
Unless you’ve looked into it, it’s not obvious to social media users how these app’s algorithms are designed. It doesn’t feel like it when you’re doing it, but infinitely scrolling your phone is basically you doing unpaid work for a social media company. You think you’re just checking out what your friends are doing and in-between posts you get an annoying ad. The thing is, the platform exists just to serve you ads. You are basically an unpaid commercial watcher, and Meta, Youtube, or whoever eles makes money off you.
Meta and Google and whoever else don’t have to pay any price for doing this to their users. It’s the principle of internalize profits and externalize harm in its purest form.
Junkification
I don't love everything Bret Weinstein does, but he did coin a phrase that speaks to part of this problem. Here’s a chunk from his podcast episode with Daniel Schmactenberger:
“I’ve called this the junkification of everything and it is directly an allusion to junk food where we can most easily see this. … When you are wired to seek the umami taste that tends to be very tightly correlated with meat, you will tend to get a lot of nutrients along with it in the ancestral context. In the modern context, we can figure out how to just trip the circuit that tells you to be rewarded and it’s no longer a proxy for the things that it was supposed to lead you to.”
He’s on to something here. We get marketed highly processed food that’s stripped of anything nutritious. Nestle, Coke, Pepsi, Unilever, Kraft Heinz, General Mills, all of the largest food companies engineer snacks and drinks to keep you craving their food, while not satisfying your hunger. And they do this using the least expensive ingredients possible. Making matters worse, the USDA does dumb shit like the food pyramid campaign to legitimize their junkification.
Bret goes on to explain that Junkification is happening to several other human universals: Porn is the junkified version of sex. Social Media is the junkified version of friendship. Wokeness and Trump worship are junkified versions of religion.
Back to food though. This situation is asymmetric because food companies know what they’re putting into your food, you can kind of know what’s in it some of the time, but you don’t always have other great options. They also have massive marketing budgets, and global distribution networks. Society has evolved in a way that for middle class and poor people, the path of least resistance is to eat shitty processed gas station and fast food. Eating healthy requires time and/or money. The less time and money you have, the easier it is to give into the temptation to get a ridiculous drink from CosMcs. If you look at the top 10 food companies, in 2020 they did $375 billion in revenue. Now, not all of the food they sell is junk, but a substantial portion is. Those companies make a fuck ton of money, poor people suffer from obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and Nestle doesn’t have to pick up the check for their care. That’s human fracking.
Government / Media Cooperation
The US Government ran a multi-faceted anti-smoking campaign starting in 1964. It succeeded in de-normalizing cigarette smoking anywhere, anytime. This is a decent example of a powerful institution pushing back against a type of human fracking. Tobacco is addictive (asymmetric), it makes tons of money for tobacco companies (benefits institutions), and it harms individuals in ways they didn’t fully grasp (slow forming cancers, heart disease, lungs, ect). As a result of the anti-smoking campaign, the percentage of adults who smoke has plummeted. This is good, although sadly, there are no more ashtrays at McDonalds.
Also sadly, the government has flipped and instead of doing the anti-fracking work it used to, it has become one of the most prodigious human frackers out there.
They do this in at least two ways: legitimization, as in the previously mentioned Food Pyramid, and direct action against citizens.
One of the ways the US Federal Government fracks its own people is via collaboration with media companies. For details on this I’d recommend the work of Michael Schellenberger, Matt Tabbi, or Bari Weiss, but the best thing I’ve read on this is Jacob Siegel’s “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.” Here’s how he summarizes the problem:
“Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.”
In this state of affairs it’s impossible for citizens to understand what their government is doing, because the government is working hard to confuse them and keep them from knowing. It gives the government some ability to shape narratives to their own benefit. See Hunter Biden Laptop, Twitter Files, Jeffery Epstein, ect.
When people are in the dark about the shady things their government is doing, it keeps them from voting against policies that hurt them.
Other Types of Human Fracking
If this was going to be a lot longer than it already is there are plenty of other examples we could dig into where an industry emerges to clean up the externalities of a different part of society. Here’s a few of my favorites:
Horribly designed school systems that leads to millions of children getting prescribed Adderall and other stimulants for life
Tax prep companies that only exist because the tax code is stupidly complicated
Parts of Criminal Justice System: Bail system, civil forfeiture, private prisons
Contracts/ Terms of Service
Weight loss industry as the shadow of the Fast Food industry
Banking: Predatory loans, overdraft fees, credit card terms
Globalization
Most of the Higher Education system
Military Industrial Complex: mostly just one Trillion dollars worth of fracking every year.
In each of those cases, technology gets used asymmetrically to the benefit of an institution, at the expense of individuals who don’t grasp the harm being done to them.
What does all this human fracking add up to?
Emergent Tyranny
We exist in an exceptionally complex global economy, and emergence is one of the cardinal properties of complexity. According to Wikipedia:
"emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole…"
In other words, a system can behave in a way that no individual actor within the system intends. Here’s what emergence looks like in the American economy:
The board of directors at Davita Dialysis would never publicly encourage you to eat McDonalds every day, but they’d be delighted if you did. In fact, they’re depending on a lot of people doing it. Davita’s business model is centered around lots of Americans being in late stage renal failure. And the most fun way to destroy your kidneys is by slamming sugary, processed crap down your gullet every day for a few decades. My point is not that Davita is a particularly evil company, although they may be. Davita is serving a market they didn’t create, and the treatment they dispense adds years to the lives of their patients. But the situation they’re profiting from is morally hideous. The American economy sickens millions of people who don’t have to be sick. Fortunes are made sickening them, and other fortunes are made treating that sickness. Davita is not the problem per se, they’re just one node in this complex problem. The problem is the system. It’s this vicious cycle where one bad thing creates an niche for some other bad thing to thrive. The need for a company like Davita emerges from all of the other incentives that result in the widespread destruction of kidneys.
Human fracking is not the result of a devious plan by the evil rich guy from Squid Game. It's the result of a very complex system doing what complex systems do. Corporations, the government, universities, are all pursuing their own interests. But because they are each pursuing their own interests, and no one is concerned about the net effect of that interest pursuing, tyranny emerges without anyone trying to be tyrannical.
Human Fracking: The 1% Version of The Matrix
As machines and automation have become more and more sophisticated, unskilled labor has become less and less valuable in Western countries. It takes far fewer humans to grow food, or build cars than it used to. As that’s happened, it’s become more profitable for the economy to treat people as a commodity, from which value can be extracted, rather than the means of adding value.
We were the miners, now we’re the ore.
We’ve ended up in a world that is like a 1% version of the matrix. Instead of evil robots, we have a complex of unethical institutions. Instead of jacking directly into our brains they use a screen in front of our eyes. And instead of turning humans into power plants, they turn humans into profit centers.
As of right now, it's possible to resist. To opt out. You can limit your screen time, grow your own food, go hiking in the woods, all that crap. But it's hard. It's a choice to give up all the goodies, and all the fun everyone else seems to be having. So, not everybody resists. And if you're poor, and scraping by, it's much harder to resist. So, the poor are the easiest group to frack. It's not that anyone is trying to pick on the poor, the system wants to frack us all. Its just that the poor deliver higher yields when fracked.
The problem is, people don’t like being fracked even if they can’t quite understand who is fracking them. People want to resist, want to fight back, but they don’t know who to fight back against. So blame ends up getting thrown at undeserving targets. White People, Drag Queen Story Hour, Russian Bots, Democrats, Trump Voters, Plagiarist Professors, Qanon, Blueanon, Zionists, The Non-Binary, Pizzagate, The IDF, Hamas or whatever other villain du jour is hitting this week. This is all their fault, right?
In reality, society is dogged by emergent and abstract problems. That may be true, but nobody wants to hear that shit. It’s a lot simpler to pin all these complex problems on a scapegoat, which is what we’ve always done with complex problems.
In reality Drag Queen Story Hour is responsible for maybe 0.0000000000000000000001 % of the social breakdown we’re experiencing. But if we try to point the finger at what’s really wrong, its just too much. It’s too hard to tease out the insane web of complexity. It’s too daunting to begin to understand how to fix it. It’s terrifying to think that by trying to fix what’s wrong we might make things worse! So people resort to nihilism. They say, “Fuck it, yeah, it is the Drag Queen’s Fault,” and then move on. I understand why it happens, but its not going to work though.
If we’re in the 1% Matrix then where is 1% Neo?
First off, fracking humans is very bad, but I need to contextualize it for a second. It’s not in the same category as Treblinka, the Gulag Archipelago, or atrocities like that. If it keeps up unabated we might get to that level eventually, but we’re a long way away right now.
Now, here’s the part where I piss off anyone who’s still reading.
Maybe until now this has read like Noam Chomsky fan-fic, but I don’t think Linguistics Gandalf has the correct answers to these problems.
As far as I can tell Emerson offered a much better solution for these problems than Noam the White or Marx did. We need way less government, and more self-reliance. The centralization of power has enabled human fracking technologies to thrive. There’s no way centralizing further will help.
Sure, it will take some organization to overcome the forces of fracking, but just like those miners a hundred years ago, we can’t wait for the government. We’re going to have to do this ourselves.
The abstraction, and complexity of the bullshit we’re facing makes resistance difficult. It's hard to organize people to push back against this kind of tyranny when, there’s not a clear antagonist who’s doing the oppressing, and when the oppression comes in the shape of delicious treats, a never-ending flood of funny videos, and drugs that make you feel better.
The first step to fixing this is to understand that it is happening. A problem well defined is half solved, right?
We live in an out of control complex system. Humans end up doing whatever this system incentivizes, not what people would like to happen. This is not sustainable, and it will get worse if nothing stops it.
We need to tell more nuanced stories. If the most sophisticated our public debate can ever be is the dumbed down, linear, scapegoat stories that predominate now, the population will continue to be fracked. But it can’t last forever, something will break. If companies, with embedded growth obligations, depend on harvesting ever increasing amounts of attention, and they can't get enough attention, bad things will happen. Well, I mean, much worse than what’s already happening.
Hydraulic fracking may or may not cause earthquakes, but I’m sure at some point, human fracking will.
