sad men kissing

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

While I am a little personally disappointed in Tron Legacy for not reflecting contemporary computer technology the way the original Tron did, I do think it has an interesting thematic reflection about the state of the tech industry, somwhat similar to what I've previously written about the original being an allegory for the move away from centralized computing. I'm not sure if it's intentional, but I think Tron Legacy can be seen as an allegory for modern tech "gurus" and other big names in the industry (white dudes, mostly) suffering from the classic "engineer's disease", that is, thinking "I'm good at programming computers, therefore I must be good at everything else", wanting to apply their tech knowledge to fields such as philosophy and politics. "Creating the perfect system", if you will. Not to mention how this seems to have lead to many of these people embracing right-wing, reactionary, or even fascist ideas.

Kevin Flynn seems to be what we'd like to think these "techbros" should be, a laid-back, idealistic genius wanting to use technology to create a utopia. Meanwhile, Clu is his dark reflection, the flaws in his ideals and problematic aspects of his supposed utopia taken to an extreme. Or, in other words, what "techbros" have actually turned out to be. Of course, if the film had been *really* daring, it would have made Flynn the actual villain, but I guess they didn't want to tarnish the image of the hero from the original film too much. Still, making the villain look exactly like him, and be a reflection of his flaws, is pretty interesting.

As I said, I'm not sure if this theme was intentional, mainly because I'm unsure when people seriously started questioning the intentions of the Sillicon Valley geniuses. But that might be because I personally wasn't following those kinds of discussions at the time. The first film I remember where I was actually thinking "okay, they're clearly making the villain Mark Zuckeberg" was Batman v Superman.

In any case, it would be fun if the upcoming third Tron film continued with this theme now that more people have become aware of it (what with Musk embarrasing himself almost daily). But I'm not expecting Disney allowing it to be too radical, at best the filmmakers might manage to sneak some aspects of it in to be picked up by those looking close enough. Who knows, maybe that was what the creators of Tron Legacy did.

And the thing about the outdoors and the way that the human species evolved in the outdoors, all the information that we encounter, the sensory information that we encounter in nature, is processed really easily and effortlessly and efficiently by the brain. Our sensory faculties are kind of tuned to the kind of information and stimuli that we encounter in nature. And so this is, again, this is the scientific reason behind what everybody knows, which is that you feel more relaxed and more at ease when you take a walk outside and when you spend time in nature.

But what that has to do with attention is that that kind of diffuse attention that we’re able to spend in nature, where we’re not focusing very intently on anything but we’re just kind of allowing the gentle movements and the sort of soft contours of the things that we see outside just entertain our attention but in this very diffuse way, and the phrase psychologists use that I like is called soft fascination. It’s not a hard edged concentration. It’s a kind of soft fascination that you might experience when you’re looking at leaves rustling in the wind or watching waves on the ocean.

That state restores our attention. It kind of refills the tank in a sense. And so then we can return to our desk and we can return to that hard edged kind of concentration that we have to do to complete our studies or do our work. So I would say in your example that if you need to concentrate but you’re feeling frazzled, even a brief look out the window can have this kind of restorative effect. But ideally, a longer walk in nature would be good.