Rootedness

The immobile future, our robot usurpers, and unexpected consequences

The Set Up

We all have a sense for being rooted in our church communities, in our families, and in our hometowns. As children we have instruction units about the home state we grow up in in order to make us feel as if we are tied to the land. This is necessary today because we aren’t tied to the land in the manner of our ancestors. In the age of industrial agriculture it is rare for anyone to work the earth, care for the animals that themselves provide sustenance, and be reminded daily that their lives and the life of the earth are bound together.

The roots that we put down, then, are the friendships and communities we cultivate throughout our lives. America, however, has a long and storied history of being a restive and dynamic people. After all, the Puritans that are largely identified as being the ancestors of the nation in myth left their ancestral homelands to come to America. After the colonies are firmly established we have the creeping and conquering of the east coast pressing inland. Then we skip ahead to James K. Polk’s Manifest Destiny and the idea that we are destined or pre-ordained by God Himself to span the continent.

My man

Thus it was, as the frontier bounded ever Westward and calls for men and families to go settle it were answered. These men then uprooted their lives to homestead on land grants, delve for the silver of Colorado, and the gold of California. While the nation is now full, with no more room for any additional people (contra Yglesias), there is still a widespread cultural understanding and expectation of moving around within the United States. This isn’t moving around just within the state or local area, though plenty of people do that, but of pulling up and moving all and sundry. We are also a nation, perhaps the nation for whom our modern society is most constructed around the use of the personal automobile. Keep that one in mind.

I have a hunch that for many people being moved or moving around is deleterious to their lives. This might be simply an introvert/extrovert divide, where I could have been a hermit, and the flipside of that coin is losing my church and high school friends to moves (themselves and myself both) means that the number of people I count as friends, and who I regularly maintain contact with, is minimal. When military personnel families move around there are two effects: the first is preventing attachment of troops to particular people, places, and commanders; the second is the formation of new cadres of military brats who are cut off from receiving the community’s values, traditions, and life patterns.

This isn’t limited to military families, though, there are a number of reasonably well-off ones that will move to a new house in order to get into a better school district. A move such as this naturally entails cutting off much of the regular interaction and moving-together-through time of having a consistent set of schoolroom classmates. The child who goes off college out of town or out of state is likewise faced with the same problem: time to establish oneself in the community again. Whereas being given a community and raised within it is a fairly normal default; to know one’s place and expectations thereof, to see everyone around you engaged in the same cultures and traditions that have been handed down for generations is, I think, the human default¹. When I visited yon ansestril homeland of Angleland I experienced what many others, when they return to their ancestral country’s lands, do: it literally felt like home being among the green expanses, constant overcast, and low-lying rolling hills. To this day, I feel uncomfortable on open plains with no hills in sight, and this is either ancestry (Anglo-Norwegian), growing up in a valley, or both.

American culture and tradition, such as it is, appears to me a watered-down and increasingly denigrated-by-the-coastal-elite product. There were worries in the 1910s, during the outbreak of World War I, that the ethnic and communal ties people felt would override their sense of American citizenship-patriotism and communications theory began to be developed to address this seeming issue. If you look at the term “melting pot” you will see prior to the 1900s mostly talk of literal melting pots, with a book about the Melting Pot in 1901, the idea as we accept it today: an America where people from various background are fully assimilated into Americanism. This is the explosion of coordinated use in an effort to forge a stronger and overriding American identity.

What coincidental timing

Ultimately, however, this gave birth to a broad American national culture which is pop culture, is mass culture, and is thus malleable and changing over time. Americans are seen as brash, loud, dynamic, and uncouth in stereotypical fashion, but this is not a culture that is merely outward traits. The culture that we promote and push overseas is not one tightly intertwined to our history and properly reverent, it is irreverent and dismissive; eschewing of anything that doesn’t fit neatly within it’s current outlook. Cosmopolitan comes to mind, and cosmopolitans are a joke in history. People of every city are people of no city, which is fitting when you consider the below diagram is showing two groups of people which both consider themselves the True American. On the left hand side is strength of loyalty/duty/obligation to family, friends, community and on the right side is strength of loyalty/duty/obligation to all people, all animals, and all things. (1 is self-family, 16 is everything-everywhere). American mass culture serves and promotes the latter view of things, much to the detriment of localism. This is how you can morally sell anything from mass immigration of climate refugees to our next topics.

The Story

Dwindling mobility appears to be in the cards for a highly mobile and personal-travel-freedom oriented society. Car regulations are becoming increasingly burdensome on manufacturers who pass the expense of meeting the regulations right on down to their consumers. As it is popular to note: the average transaction price on a new car these days is a cool $30k which is about half the median income of an American household. CAFE regulations keep ratcheting, some countries have announced laughable target dates for retiring consumer ICE vehicles, and even if they miss them the intent is still there: increasing cost and regulatory barriers to cheap transportation and freedom to move around at will. This can be done in the name of the environment, for the good of all the world (see above) even while China and India spew multitudinous amounts of pollution into the air.

If there were an advent of cheap electric cars with magic batteries: there would still be ever-increasing regulation from tire particulate taxation to simple road use tax, registration fees, and strict inspection compliance. The hoi polloi may end up unable to travel freely as they can today.

There is a lot of ballyhoo and words being spent around ChatGPT (Generative pre-trained transformers :: text generator) and it’s various iterations. What I have not seen is the following: access to ChatGPT is free; and, as the saying goes, if it’s free then you’re the product. People are inputting their work into ChatGPT, never mind the works that were loaded initially for training and for which no one was compensated for, and training it to do their jobs or at least most of their jobs. At least you need a special account to run ChatGPT, you have to go out of your way to do it. I don’t because I don’t see a value add for myself, and because I think it’s a portent of bad things to come downstream.

A few days ago, Microsoft announced MS 365 Copilot and the highlight reel included automating tasks such as generating PR releases, bullet point emails, and so on and so forth. Presumably, much like MS buying Github and training their code-generator (which is pretty meh for specific use) on all of Github, this will be a two way feed and the data will be used to further train the Large Language Model. All these people who are excited, “Check out this powerful new tool!” are revealing themselves to be tools and they are selling themselves out.

The Punchline

Women are the majority of the population who are in training for, or have, a college degree. They are the people who are going to be most affected after they train a robot to reword someone’s documents as a press release. They are the ones who will be found redundant as secretaries executive assistants when Copilot writes up the boss’ condensed email for them. The soft-skilled, language oriented, minimal value add jobs that have bloated the workforce en masse are going to put the gun to their own head and pull the trigger because they think it will make their job easier. Well, not working is a lot easier.

There might be a silver lining here. Those women are not going to shift to blue-collar physical jobs, and the inherent cognitive distribution differences mean that ultra-high end intellectual jobs will be the last to go. Roles that are traditionally masculine, and carry significantly more physical risk and hardship, will not be replaced, and they will not be competed for by women at any scale. We might end up seeing the sea-change-movement of the past fifty years blown up and discarded almost by accident. Imagine women having to return home and rely on men in the manner that has been normal for much of human history. Outrageous.

When we combine this with immobility on a broad scale there is also the chance for the resurgence of local rootedness. If you must stay in a particular locale, or near it, then the people there are going to be forced to find a way to make a life out of their situation. People might take root once more, and a genuine American culture could be revivified. Perhaps, instead, the internet provides enough faux community, and the Metaverse² covers the desire to travel and wanderlust inherent to much of the American experience. I hope not. Otherwise it's archipelagos of UBI (Universal Basic Income) communities and fungible economic units from Sea to Shining Sea.

1. I’m sure some historian can come in here and brain me on how much the average person moved around, but outside of Pax Romana I don’t know how true or normal that would be for people to wander readily

2. lol, lmao