Technology, Care, and Convenience
On finding community and care in the face of capitalist individualism.
Haweya J.
Laurie Metcalf and Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird (2017)
In your typical coming-of-age story, there sits a teen feeling disillusioned at the centre, wanting to break free of their ordinary life. Of nagging parents and the same safe mundanity.
And though Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird fulfils this mandatory trope with the main character who wishes to break free, it simultaneously allows for an acknowledgement of how her hometown and family have shaped her into who she is. The overbearing mother she took for granted did love and care for her in ways she could not see until she leaves home for New York. Christine and her mother, Marion, hit several landmark moments in the script, but the one that stood out to me was when her mom picks her up from her boyfriend's house. Christine asks why her brother couldn’t pick her up as planned, and her mom responds that it was just easier. Not easier for herself but for her kids.
When we think about love, we often view it as grandiose— coded with dramatic displays of affection.
However, it’s usually these small moments that reveal a deeper and more complex type of affection. Due to this continuous attention, Marion gives her kids she can anticipate those small moments and go out of her way to offer her kids not only convenience but safety. Earlier in the film, we witness a sweet moment between Christine and her guidance counsellor. The counsellor points out how fondly Christine speaks of her hometown (Sacramento) in her college essay, but Christine brushes it off, saying she just paid the place some attention.
The guidance counsellor then asks, “Don’t you think maybe that they are the same thing? Love and attention?’”
What happens when we take this care shown by humans and communities to one another and apply it to the booming technological sector? Whilst not the intended purpose of the film, there’s a parallel that can be drawn between the care that Christine’s mom showed and the ethos that many tech companies seem to wish to replicate. I recall my dad telling me that a book he ordered from Amazon had a little dent, and so when reviewing the purchase, he mentioned it in passing, not thinking so much of it. This was picked up by customer service, who profusely apologised and sent him a new copy unprompted. As we all know, Amazon is a site that amasses lots of data from its users, utilising it to provide the best service possible. It is difficult to imagine any one person having the capacity to compete with such attention to detail.
But if love and attention truly are the same thing, why is it then that the service-mindedness of sites like Amazon does not intuitively feel like love, or at the very least, care? The late bell hooks highlighted the different forms of love and how it presupposes interdependency in her acclaimed book all about love. She points out how capitalistic structures undermine communal bonds:
‘Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy this larger unit of extended kin (…) Moving from solitude into community heightens our capacity for fellowship with one another. Through fellowship, we learn how to serve one another’.
There is no shortage of technology that seeks to give convenience, relief, and simplify tasks that people usually rely on people from their community for. To forgo shopping or cooking, we order Uber Eats or Instacart. Everything is available to us on a whim. Thus, there really isn’t much to be done interpersonally— it is already provided for.
This imminent readiness has a twofold effect: we underestimate the value of the service provided, and we underestimate the labour creating the product itself. Most tragically, though, we dismiss the fact that the attention provided by a company is inherently different and can never be the same as what your community can provide you with. To these conglomerates, you are not a loved one but a mere customer. A means to an end.
This becomes clear when we receive kindness from a loved one and the warmth that that inspires. There is no doubt that being brought warm soup by a friend when you're sick resonates more than having Uber Eats deliver it to you. The cognitive gap between the value and the labour is bridged, and you become acutely aware of the effort it took to make the food and bring it over. I understand that many don't have the opportunity to be interdependent like this.
People are forced into individualistic lifestyles, given that they must spend most of their physical, mental, and emotional labour on work, leaving little left over for the people around them. It’s here where technology seeking to give convenience comes in, with its veneer of ease and care, but at the cost of atrophying communal bonds. It seeks to undermine what hooks described as the necessary sacrifices to maintain communities:
“The willingness to sacrifice is a necessary dimension of loving practice and living in a community. Giving up something is one way we sustain a commitment to collective well-being. Our willingness to make sacrifices reflects our awareness of interdependency”.
The bar becomes unnecessarily high to ask for help or offer it, which might further develop into underestimating our capacity for caregiving. It’s not surprising how we then resort to forms of affection like physical gifts or grand symbolic gestures, which are prevalent in popular media. Christmas, birthdays, Valentine's Day, Mother's and Father's Day are all touted as opportunities to express appreciation for your loved ones, especially those who sell something associated with these occasions.
It’s nice to have a formal excuse to celebrate and spend time with your loved ones, but losing the ability to give convenience to each other seems significant. It further laments this idea that love should always be effortless, convenient, quick, and easy—that is, if you can afford it. Returning to Lady Bird, Marion is an exemplary community member. She might have some harsh moments with her daughter, but she took in her son’s girlfriend when she was thrown out of her home, despite the fact that they already had little money to stretch. She consoles Christine’s teacher when he becomes depressed. She sews her daughter's clothes so she could look nice at her boyfriend’s Thanksgiving dinner. All acts of deep and profound care. To me, she illustrates how caregiving is the glue that holds communities together.
Communities sustain life, not the rugged individualists.
Haweya J. is a writer, techie, and recovering software developer from Norway. She writes about whatever falls at the intersection between technology and philosophy on her Substack.
