Great Thinkers: Michel Clouscard

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Clarissa

July 16, 2024

Do you know how you car works? When you get into it in the morning, do you give a thought to how much work of many different people went into making sure that it starts moving whenever you want it to?

The oven, the AC, the phone, the washer and dryer, the microwave. You push a button, and it works. Everything works. Very complicated things that were created by veritable feats of human intelligence and the labor of many just work at a push of a button.

And that’s great. We want things to work. Not just objects but institutions, organizations, and systems. I always wonder when I see my university awaken from its summer torpor and roll into action smoothly each August 16. Thousands of people begin simultaneously to do what they must. They know what they should do and they all do it. And the place springs to life. It’s extraordinary.

We live in complicated societies and we are surrounded by complicated objects, is what I’m saying. And it all works. Sometimes something malfunctions but we notice the malfunction precisely because it’s so rare. My memory will retain that one time this month when we didn’t have electricity for a few hours precisely because the rest of the time we did have it.

As everything in life, this has a huge downside. We get so used to things just working that we lose sight of the complexity of things. Whenever something is uncomfortable, we start looking for a magic button to push or a magic pill to swallow. The need to plod along little by little is perceived as an insult. Aren’t things supposed to just work? Give me my magic button to press right now! As Michel Clouscard used to say, “the hard work of some guarantees the eternal adolescence of others.”

Why is this bad? Because when we start demanding magic buttons and easy solutions, things tend to stop working. Our political space has been completely conquered with appeals to eternal – I wouldn’t even say adolescents, but rather, infants – who jump up with joy at promises of magical handouts in the form of college debt forgiveness or untaxed tips.

Everybody has sat in a meeting or with a group of friends or family members and knows how hard it is to arrive at a group decision. How hard it is to make anything happen. How everybody gets distracted, everybody has their own interests, emotions, physical states. But even that personal experience is easily defeated by the belief that everything must be as easy as pressing a button and having the lights go on.

[As always in these posts, these are my thoughts inspired by my reading. I hate retelling what other people said. Instead, I talk about what their ideas suggested to me. Michel Clouscard didn’t say any of this except for the quote I gave in inverted commas.]

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2 responses to “Great Thinkers: Michel Clouscard”

Anonymous

July 16, 2024
Ironically enough I do think about how our tech works. Unfortunately I’m come to a few conclusions.
1. I could figure out at best how 2/3rds of any device I was considering works, but I have never been able to successfully decipher any of them. (Note: this is working from my base level knowledge, not going online to find blueprints, or guides for how the tech works, etc.)
2. If something happens to destroy our power generators, we are screwed on an unbelievable level. I fully expect that creation of steam generators is beyond 95% of everyone at this point. (Note: I did look into this and you actually need a fair amount of calculations for anything beyond a model steam engine, unless you want it to explode in your face.)
3. Repair wise modern tech is …. not made to be repairable. Tech made up to roughly the 1950s/60s was made to last, made to be repairable, a lot of stuff from then is still working today. Fast forward to today, stuff is mass produced as cheaply as possible, and is deliberately made to be replaced. My grandparents and parents (when they were in their 30s) could repair any problems in their cars, dishwashers, dryers, etc., or you could hire someone who could fix it for you. Today it cost more to repair an appliance than to buy a new one. Fix a car, not impossible, but I doubt many could outside of a flat tire. Radios and TV, forget about it.
Some of this is obviously new tech overtaking older stuff, and being more complicated, using microchips and programing to work. And as much as no one wants to admit, no one really wants to spend months learning to code simply to try to patch whatever got scrambled on a microchip. Likewise no one wants to admit that if their appliances stop working that they have no idea how to repair any of it. Minor fixes, (ei: flipping the break switch, changing a filter,) but how exactly it works, yea no I doubt anyone really has a clue at this point.

I would be willing to wager money that Millennials and Gen-Z haven’t the foggiest idea how anything actually works. I would also be willing to bet that Gen-X and the Boomers might be able to use modern tech, but have long sense stopped trying to understand it or how it functions.
- – W
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1. methylethyl
  
  July 16, 2024
  
  The thing about fixing programming on stuff that has circuitboards… it’s way worse than that. My sibling, who spent years doing appliance repair professionally, says it simply can’t be repaired, because when the electronic “brain” goes, it’s not because of the program running it, it’s usually because it’s been exposed to heat and/or moisture. It was always a bad and short-sighted idea to put circuitboards into heat-generating appliances like stoves and clothes-dryers and dishwashers. The heat eventually destroys the delicate electronic components (nothing’s ever insulated well enough to prevent this), and those components are the most expensive, least replaceable part of the appliance. Very often, when it goes bad they have simply stopped manufacturing them, and it is not even possible to replace.
  
  And that’s before you get into the metastasizing-complexity bits where everybody involved has their own area of expertise, and they don’t talk to each other. For example: back in the early 2000s it suddenly, and for no discernible reason, became fashionable to build houses with a laundry room in the center of the dwelling. Why?? Nobody knows. Before that, the washer and dryer had been banished to the garage, or to a laundry room off the carport, or somewhere on the perimeter of the house where it made sense. It minimized the amount of waste heat and moisture from the appliances getting into the house. But suddenly, we’re sticking all that right in the middle of the house. Where does the dryer vent to? Well, they put a long, long vent hose under the floor to the outside wall of the house (if you’re lucky. I’ve heard some of them didn’t even do that!). Some of these hoses had to turn a couple of corners to get there, which makes the dryer vent basically non-functional. Even if it was a good straight line, a tube that long accumulates lint. And there’s no good way to clean it out. It also sheds heat *through your floor* and in the right circumstances the lint can catch on fire. Appliance guys ended up inventing weird drill attachments on the spot, because there was an epidemic of permanent 20′ clogged dryer hoses under the concrete floors that suddenly needed a professional to fix, when that had never been a thing before. Millions of houses are like that now.
  
  Modern life is rife with idiocies like this.
  
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