The Irony Party of Australia
Encephalatronicalogical Pamphlet
September 5th 2006
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Digging Things Out of the Ground
Demand for Australian resources has led, apparently, to substantial growth and improved profits for corporate behemoths and their shareholders (for the most part other corporate behemoths). It has also generated a slew of media reports - on the profit reporting season, on the likelihood of the continuation of the boom in the sector, on the danger of an imminent peak in international demand, on the threat of new sources of supply, on executive appointments. The public broadcaster, the ABC, now screens an unenthralling business report after its popular current affairs programme Lateline, forcing large sections of their audience to take refuge in radios or go to bed. In this new forum and in others prime-time (and Sunday morning, for the love of all that's holy) a parade of thin-haired, jowly, besuited executives look sensible while apparently delighting interviewers with interesting tales of profit margins and lease acquisitions that could at some future time become lucrative scars on the landscape.
But the devotion of the media to the wealth flowing to massive corporate entities as a result of digging things out of the ground is in itself representative of a significant problem - not so much an economic problem as a philosophical one. An existential problem. We dig things out of the ground in order to import the components to put together the sophisticated high technological society we take for granted - a society in which we are bombarded with information about the things we've dug, and their export to countries that use the same materials to construct the technology we purchase in order to broadcast the good news about the trade. And here is the difficulty - one of compromised purpose. In moments of stark clarity the current affairs and information flowing to us from our many communication channels appear devoted to producing content about digging stuff out of the ground (and associated activities), which process meanwhile continues to facilitate the development of the content about itself ... and so on.
If your reaction to this recursive, reductive disaster, is similar to mine, the result is that an element of futility appears to enter into the entire operation. If the purpose of the machinery of advanced industrial production is the generation of reports on the machinery of advanced industrial production, it seems a weak premise, and hardly worth continuing - might it not be easier simply to abandon the gears and levers of the machine altogether, and find a more leisurely mode of existence? Taken another way, at what point has our horizon fallen so low, our attention so close on the minute details of the maintenance of our present existence, that there is no prospect of ever again lifting our gaze?
All this may be the natural dilemma facing a resource-based society that serves the world as an outpost from which raw resources are gathered, or of a nation that is part of a civilisation in grudging but inescapable decline. To contextualise, imagine explaining the virtues of your culture to an alien who has never heard of you or your planet before today. My civilisation is vast, powerful, and of ancient origin on my world, you tell the alien. We dig things out of the ground in order to provide our citizens with the ability to hear lengthy dissertations on the efficiency and profitability of digging things out of the ground. Those executives who organise the digging of things are granted the highest status our society can confer. Don't you understand? With the things we dig we are able to build the devices with which we communicate, comment, and converse about what is dug. What a beautiful synchronicity!
It sounds awful, says the urbane offworlder. There must be something else, some greater reason for perpetuating this empty existence. Some cultural aspiration, some project, some endeavour...
Ah but there is, you explain. A system of rewards. Incentives. In return for labouring to produce all that our society has to offer, we are rewarded proportionate with the perceived value of our contribution. We buy ourselves vehicles and entertainments and personal items for our homes. You see it's far more complex than it at first appears.
At this point it will be obvious to the observant alien that it is not only one horizon that has fallen on the culture you describe, but many - that it is a society in a kind of gloomy twilight. The rewards for serving the machine of production are shiny devices that celebrate the technology and culture of production and improve the efficiency of the individual in serving the machine. There are diversions - entertainments - provided, but, incredibly there is no attempt even here to divert attention from the machine. Instead adoration is redoubled in the form of entertainments that thematically and stylistically embrace the same banal idolatry. What might appear the most mundane themes - resource management, production volumes, the activities of crass profiteers - are treated as though of the highest importance, and more, as though they are real achievements of an aspirational culture, and not the weak self-referential rituals of a civilisation in steep decline.
'The affluent human, then' asks the alien, perturbed 'has as a principle reward and symbol of status the chariot used to travel for the purpose of labouring for the machine that produces the artefact?'
'Well its not quite...' you begin.
'Imagine,' he goes on without pause (erecting a hypothetical situation of his own from within the implausible hypothetical conversation of which he is a part), 'an entire civilisation obsessed with plumbing... your civilisation does have plumbing, I take it?'
'Of course,' you say, indignant.
'Naturally. Well then, this is your position: your culture can be compared with one that has become obsessed with its plumbing - with the infrastructure that draws bodily waste away from dwellings and elsewhere for treatment at a safe remove. In this analogous civilisation the plumbing pipes have been rerouted so that excreta no longer travels unobtrusively away. Now shiny pipes course directly through bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens, entirely visible, and regularly polished. In the homes of the affluent, [the near-pun is not obvious to the offworlder, whose own language is being translated for your ears by machine]. At dinner and at other social functions the pipes and their contents - volume, flow, maintenance, management of maintenance, policy - are the principle topics of conversation. On all the electronic communication channels, even those devoted to entertainment, the most watched programmes will be punctuated with brief reports on the latest statistics on the production of fertiliser, the vast populations serviced, threats to the continuation of the smooth evacuation and processing of effluent and the conditions of trade that pertain in the by-products produced.'
'It's horrible,' you say, already resenting the condescending tone of the other.
'Exactly,' says the alien. 'But you see how closely your own society resembles this degenerate analogue. Like them you - with your trinkets and baubles and shiny machines - no longer excrete in order to live as is the ordinary course of things for sentient beings. Instead you live in order to excrete. On one level it's a particularly unpleasant variation on navel-gazing, but worse, it's a closed loop - a cultural dead end very difficult to escape.'
Of course, none of the imaginary xenotype's musings really bear consideration, since its easy to be depressed by the thought of the entropic forces represented here. Even withoutthe alien's astute, imaginary analysis sometimes its possible (by concentrating hard) to hear the faint hiss of escaping substance, the insidious emptying of content from the world by virtue of the recursive intrusion of form. As the process is relatively gradual, it advances largely unobserved over generations, and is allowed to progress without hindrance. Warnings are delivered by a paranoid few, their messages already truncated by the limitations of modern expression. It occurs less and less to the occupants of the civilisation what a high-tech, highly sophisticated and mature civilisation is for.
There is another problem here, or perhaps it is the same problem taken through another recursion. It's hardly desirable to introduce the neurotic loop of thought presented here into the reified environment of a media obsessed with the means of its own production and maintenance. In the unlikely event that the meme were permitted to be heard above the babble of economists and journalists, and financial editors, and commentators, obeisant interviewers and corporate representatives, it would in one sense only introduce another version of the recursive problem, and compound the damage, since a keen and conscious everpresent awareness of the futility of this great wheel of production and consumption might itself then as completely occupy the media and the public mind.
