The Trouble with Content: A Couple of Questions

Fiction is easy to consume-even mountains of it. Here we are, in a time where rapid consumption of data is the normal. Even data about ourselves that we might perhaps find deeply unimportant to our lives (stopped by a Mall ‘X’ last week), seems to elicit great interest from bigwigs.

So now, back to my train of thought, why have we suddenly begun to consume so much data? Why, suddenly, are we being to driven to melt the walls of reality around us? Why are we suddenly being compelled to drown ourselves entirely into lives that are not ours? Taking the scroll stroll along FB and Instagram isn’t just mild curiosity in the lives of people we don’t know too well. It is looking at the prettiest-possible pictures of acquaintances (and them, of us), enjoying the times of their lives, and then allowing the standstill traffic to vanish around us as the white screen envelopes us. After an hour of looking at smiling faces, fancy plates of food, smiling faces eating the fancy plates of food, smiling faces eating fancy plates of food in far off, beautiful locations, what am I left with, when my mind returns to the traffic? When I become completely and utterly aware of how lonely I am, of how I am not smiling in a lovely restaurant, with a beautiful view, with a man I could declare my love for. So that’s one thing I’ve wanted to talk about.

Another is the trouble with video content.

Like I said, fiction is easy to consume. It took me several years of reading to be able to finish a non-fiction book. I enjoyed it, but fiction was far easier. I fell in love, cried, laughed and everything else-without being impacted by the reality of it all. Reading was great. Back then, TV wasn’t. But now, TV is great too. A lot of shows are translations of terribly gripping and moving novels-making them all worth a watch. But TV now isn’t restricted to consumption of the story alone. So as the viewer, I once seek gratification as a direct consumer of fictional content. But after I have finished the series or the movie, I want to know-who are the people who played the leads? Who are the people who played my favourite characters? Can they sing in real life? Can they really paint, as well as their characters do? Are they as funny in real life too? The actors appear as alter egos of the characters that build stories around themselves. So then, I begin to watch interviews of these actors, consuming my secondary fictional content. They are rich, beautiful, have interesting things to say, are famous, loved by everyone, and best of all, are distant enough for me to think of their world as fiction, being played out, somehow, in reality. They are right at the cusp. How scintillating, to know that a world of fiction can be half-entered into. How thrilling, to know that one can dance between fiction and reality, and that that very dance makes one so rich and so famous? Zooming out, on the bigger scale, what are we, really, if we’re not craving for adoration and respect from most humans, i.e., how big is the tribe that recognizes me, my achievements, my value-don’t we all want that?

But why, suddenly do we find ourselves in a situation where we are so desperate to leave our realities behind us?

Is it because we have always wanted to be distracted from our lives and only now we are able to be? Have our lives always held no interest to us? When all our fundamental needs are satisfied, what is left is our mind, which, perhaps is always looking for new ways to keep itself amused. The continuous stream of video content finds new ways to engage our human emotions in constantly-new ways.

And then there’s the other tack of what drives members of our race-restlessness triggered by desire. Constantly binge-watching satisfies both of these, should I say ‘demons’? (Probably not, because they lead us to success, don’t they?)

So let’s say that most of us are slightly absent in our own lives. And let’s say that scrolling and watching raises our momentary happiness quotient. A couple of questions I'll leave you here with, then a. Is there a problem in living slightly absent lives? If so, what is it? (Is the only way to maximise living, being immersed in your reality?) and b. what is the long-term impact of content consumption on our happiness quotients(instant gratification vs feelings of loneliness and ennui)

Vanishing into a dream

I have known you to turn me around and
look me in the eye to tell me
just how much you love me
and I stare longingly at the reflection
Of me.
That'll never be me.

Who are you, I wonder,
to validate me?
Who are you, I wonder,
to see me for who I am.
Who are you, I wonder,
of all the times that I have loved you
and you have shunned me.
Where am I, I wonder
as I chase you in this maze.

I beg for your hands to touch me
for your fingers to cradle my face.
I decide to never
stop dreaming for a world where
you and I breathe together.
Love me, won't you?
Lines that I barely remember
from the words that you said to me
come floating back to me, as if
in the ghost of a memory.

Love me, darling, won't you?

I do, you whisper.

I lost you a long time ago, you say.

I blink.

On the edge of a grey world: Learnings from 'Sapiens' and 'The Sixth Extinction'

Part III

Wading out

The Sixth Extinction covers a broad area of life on the planet. It is able to give the reader valuable insight into the damage that man has inflicted on the planet. Armed with the questions that sixth extinction brings up, it would be worthwhile to pick up Harari's Sapiens and its sequel, Homo Deus. Sapiens requires much more attention, because of the sheer volume and extent of the broad questions that Harari asks, and answers. However, from the perspective of delivering facts to the reader, from studying corals at the One tree Island,  to the ant-bird-butterfly procession in the Amazon and the upward-migrating, and thinning forests of Manaus, the reach of the Sixth Extinction is greater.

Kolbert and Harari bring up immensely important questions. Should the ideas of evolution and extinction be re-examined, with the planet having been hammered into submission by man? Kolbert’s work is touched with the hope that the hard work of conservationists and scientists stirs up.  Given that shrinking habitats and ocean acidification are both major threats to the biodiversity of the planet, it would be fair to say that only major operational changes in human societies can challenge these threats. A question that I think is relevant here is, is saving the bio-diversity of the planet a mission that the people of the world are willing to greatly modify their lives for? How does an average-wage earner of the world, fighting for livelihood and opportunities for her family, afford the means to worry about biodiversity? 

There has already emerged a city in the world that will soon run out water. Thousands more are expected to follow. Even with this background, the societies of the world have not seen any major alterations in resource-consumption. There has been, contrary to what one would hope for, an increase in the need for needless purchases. In my opinion, nothing short of planet-wide extinction would force massive overhauls in the current state of affairs of the world. Perhaps even extinction, because it would be so far away, would not force major changes. (Evidently, Kolbert’s faith in humanity does not seem to have rubbed off on me)

What do we do then, to prevent planet-wide extinction? With questions that Kolbert and Harari have brought up, it is my hope that, as a society, we are able to design strategies and lifestyles to save what is left of the wildlife of the world, and perhaps, in the attempt, save ourselves too.

On the edge of a grey world: Learnings from 'Sapiens' and 'The Sixth Extinction'

Part II

Taking the Plunge

Kolbert and Harari approach the concept of large scale extinction in different ways. In a far broader manner, as a student of biology would, Kolbert studies the 'Big Five' extinctions, examining the circumstances, possible causes, evidences and repercussions of these extinctions. With this background, she examines the actions of man that have triggered a Sixth Extinction. Harari, however, concerns himself, with human-caused extinction, and studies them in 'waves', that correspond to the evolving lifestyles of man. He attaches the First Wave Extinction with the spread of the hunter-gatherer man, the Second Wave, with the spread of the farmer, and the third wave, with the spread of industrial activity around the world. He cautions the reader against believing tales of harmony between the hunter-gatherer Homo Sapiens and the environment.  At the time of Cognitive Revolution (about 70,000 years ago), Harari offers, “about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms” trampled around the surface of the world. However, at the time of the Agricultural Revolution (about 12,000 years ago), only around a 100 remained. “Homo Sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools”. Which begs the question, is it the fate of all cognitively evolved lifeforms to obliterate the biodiversity of the species and to wreck their own destruction?  

Both writers study evolution in different ways too. While Kolbert studies evolution as it evolved as a concept of study in academic circles, she also briefly studies the evolution of different organisms, coral reefs, and ammonites among several others. She discusses different ideas attached with evolution as well. She examines the idea of how evolutionary adaptations in organisms could suddenly transform into their greatest weakness, because of a seemingly-insignificant change in their environments. As an example, Kolbert turns her gaze towards the dominance of megafauna on the earth's landscape (before the arrival of man). Megafauna emerged as evolutionary precautions-hunting immensely large animals became nearly impossible for smaller, more agile predators. This seemingly-advantageous adaptation of the megafauna, however, limited their speed of movement and their rates of reproduction, allowing the human race to hunt them, and to devour them into extinction. 

Harari contrasts this broader study of evolution with the study of evolution in the modern human race alone. The large societies of bees and ants are stable as nearly all the information that is needed to maintain these networks is coded into their genes. Cheating, for example, isn't allowed by the genetic makeup of bees, thereby rendering bee lawyers unemployed, he offers. Human societies, however, aren't held up by genetically coded information. Instead, they are held up by the inter-subjectivity of the imagined orders-the monetary order, the imperial (political) order, and the order of religions. While Kolbert offers a study of evolution as a biological concept and studies its implication from a strictly scientific perspective, Harari studies evolution in the lifestyle of the human race (through births of languages, the written word, and the imagined orders of the world that enslaved and oppressed people) with the flair of a fiction writer. 

Harari and Kolbert also discuss the impact of modern technology on the planet. In the Sixth Extinction we see the threat that speedy global transport networks have imposed on the biodiversity of the planet. Transport networks that connect even the remote corners of the world with each other, allow species-threatening microorganisms to hitchhike a ride, giving these microbes their license to go on a killing spree. This convenient transportation of species wasn't predicted by Darwin. He proposed that the rates of evolution and extinction were both far too slow for either to be observed in a human's lifetime. For instance, modern humans couldn't possibly hope to see an evolution of a certain type of Amazonian ant in their lifetimes. By that estimate, modern humans should ideally, also not be able to watch a species hurry towards extinction, in their lifetimes. However, in a span of little over a decade, the global population of amphibians and bats has fallen off a cliff so steeply that they went from being ubiquitous to being classified as ‘endangered’. Standard ecological rates that environmentalists have arrived at, after plodding through fossils, ravines and gorges, change dramatically when the human race is introduced into their estimates. For example, the Homo sapiens even jumped to the top of the food chain in a surprisingly short time, disallowing the gradual growth of ecological 'checks and balances' that limit a species' capacity to dominate the planet, as we discover, in Sapiens. This could, in hindsight, have seemed like a premonition of the chaos that the modern human race would inflict on the lives of their fellow earthlings and on geological timelines. 

 Kolbert remarks that it's 'amazing' that the human race is, without intending to, shutting down certain evolutionary pathways, and keeping a few open. No other creature has managed to do this, she remarks, calling this the human race's most enduring legacy. It is a mild echo of Harari's sentiment. He calls the species an ecological serial killer.  

 The human race was not inclined to benignity, even with members of a related race. Both books devote sizeable chunks to the study of the Neanderthal and the Denisovan. The Homo sapiens engaged in physical relations with the Neanderthal and the Denisovan (making modern Middle East and European humans anywhere between 1-4% Neanderthal), but wiped both races out anyway. The Sapiens-driven wiping out of the Neanderthal, allows Harari to call it “the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history”.  While Kolbert studies the disappearance of the Neanderthal on the merit of its extinction, Harari attempts to understand why the human race was driven to wipe the Neanderthal out. “They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate”, he conjectures, chillingly. 

 Perhaps there is indeed a “madness gene”, as proposed by Svante Paabo, a Swedish biologist, a genetic answer to the Faustian restlessness of the human race which gives us the ideas of romanticism that tells us to engage in consumerism to maximise human potential, to be active participants of an inter-subjective, imagined, world order, to crave global dominance that no other species in the history of the planet has sought as desperately. 

 Kolbert briefly casts her eye on what the future might hold for the planet. She enlists the help of experts in her attempt. "When he contemplates the future, he's trying to imagine what will remain of the present once the contemporary world has been reduced to fragments", Kolbert says, of Jon Zalasiewicz, a stratigrapher from the University of Leicester. She also uses an interesting thought experiment to approximate the loss of biodiversity that the planet is likely to face. Her examination of the future, however, is quite different from how Harari looks at the future. He casts his net wide, banking on the tenacity of the human race to become interstellar explorers, to bend the limits of Science as we know it today, to ensure the survival of the race. His future is built on the ramparts of the scientific undertakings of man, artificial intelligence that could easily threaten the existence of man, and the rapidly deteriorating global climate.

 We aren't looking at a planet stripped of all life, Kolbert and Harari tell us, although they do warn us of its possibility.  We are, however, looking at a far, far bleaker and colourless one; a planet where diversity of life has been hounded into oblivion. There are several questions that rear their heads at his juncture. One is a question that Kolbert examines. If a species (like the golden frog of Panama) is driven to extinction in the wild because of the growth of a species-threatening agent in the air (or any other widely prevalent, unavoidable agent of nature), should it be preserved in tanks and zoos at all? A remark that Harari makes, strikes as deeply relevant here. “The evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness” He offers domesticated chickens and cattle as examples-they breed at an impressive rate, but their lives do not satisfy any of their needs (roaming free over vast swathes of land, staying close to their young/staying close to the mother as young ones) that have been hammered into their minds by evolution. 

 In an attempt to, what might perhaps be seen, as a call for action, both writers, in their different ways, seek to bring about awareness in terms of the number of species that have been driven to extniction by the human race. Harari says knowledge of the number of species that were wiped out in the First and Second Waves of Extinction would force people to be less nonchalant about the Third Wave of extinction. In contrast, Kolbert travels to conservatories around the world, and shares the stories of altruistic, deeply driven, passionate and hardworking conservationists and scientists, to kindle in the reader, a profound sense of guilt and a sudden, albeit directionless, urge to contribute towards saving the biodiversity of the planet. 

Concluded in Part III

On the edge of a grey world: Learnings from 'Sapiens' and 'The Sixth Extinction'

Part I

Dipping a toe in

The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert makes for an immersive experience. Written about the circumstance, i.e., the sixth extinction that man has driven the planet into, it makes for a fascinating read. In parts, it reminded me of Sapiens, an absolute ripper of a book by Yuval Noah Harari. Although the areas of discussion in the books overlap in a few places, the differences in perspectives and narratives allow the reader to take away different ideas from each read. In this three-part series, I will attempt to juxtapose what I saw as the major joint-takeaways from the books. 

The Sixth Extinction examines the repercussions of man's steamrolling of every possible delicate ecosystem that the planet amassed over billions of years. Kolbert is meticulous with her details, and doesn’t ease up on the rate at which she plods through fact after fact, species after species (with their scientific names). The writing is detailed and occasionally humorous, with a touch a flourish thrown in. Kolbert traipses across geographical boundaries, examining threats that various life forms-corals, rhinos, amphibians, bats among numerous others, face because of the actions of man. Unlike Haari, she does not concern herself with the evolution of the lifestyle that has led the planet into the sixth extinction. She busies herself with museum and field visits, discussions with scientists and conservationists, and with the study of endangered species. The Sixth Extinction is a demanding read, because of the sheer number of species, their lifestyles and their battles against a rapidly changing environment that she discusses. She is objective with her findings and, in spite of bleak future projections, remains hopeful for the biodiversity of the planet. 

Kolbert begins her book with a journey to Panama, where she traces the phenomenon of the Panamian golden frogs (Atelopus zeteki) dropping dead, almost as if cursed. The rate of their disappearance forces the locals to demand of the conservationists, "What happened to the frogs? We don't hear them calling anymore". The reader learns that frogs are dropping dead, across the world, even in pristine places. Kolbert handles the narrative like a proficient student of science. Journeying from the banks that mark mass graveyards of frogs, to labs (where the killer is identified as a type of fungus), Kolbert’s interactions with field biologists and conservationists make it an extraordinarily thorough, and engaging narrative; heartbreaking, but deeply engaging. She uses this specific narrative arch later on in the book as well, when she writes about the dying bats of the world.

 Sapiens, for its part, is the entire story of the human race. It traces the history of the evolution-genetic, cultural, societal and technological; of the Homo sapiens. Harari's writing is deeply enjoyable. He is witty, insightful and has no qualms in calling out the innumerable fallacies of the human race. 'Sapiens' is impeccable in its efforts. Harari travels linearly along the timeline of man, offering observations on the cultural evolution of the species-from the days of a hunter gatherer to the modern days of a coder. Sapiens is idea-driven, with Yuval Noah Harari introducing idea after astonishing idea on the human race and then proceeding to supplement them with evidence.

An example of the many interesting ideas that Harari examines, is how the evolution of the human language (among other things) led to the global dominance of the species. More important than knowing where a killer-lion licks its wounds, Harari says, it was more important for the hunter-gatherer human to “know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat”. As a subsection of the miracle of human language, it is incredibly interesting to read that ours is the only race that is able to talk about “entire entities that have never been touched or smelled”. It isn't a shockingly new thought, one could argue, it is one that could have entered a reasonably proactive mind. But Harari doesn’t merely introduce distinct ideas; he uses multiple ideas to uncover interesting ways of examining the human race. Another key to understanding what lead to the sapiens domination is how staggeringly vast numbers of the race are willing to cooperate with each other. When Harari puts the two ideas together, of the human ability to fiercely believe in “things that don't really exist”, and the ability to cooperate in large numbers, we arrive at ideals that rule our world today-patriotism, religions, legal codes, and numerous other beliefs that dictate our lives. 

Continued in Part II