Universal Harrison Bergeronism, or “What does Slack lack?”
By Marielle S. Gross and Christopher R. Wain
Restraint.
Nuance.
Humanistic mechanism design.
Harrison Bergeron is the titular character in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 dystopia of universal equality. It begins, “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” This is accomplished by a set of legally mandated handicaps, most significantly, a radio transmitter mental handicap that plays a sharp noise every “twenty seconds or so” to keep people from taking “unfair advantage of their brains.”
In 2021, we have achieved universal equality via common, constant bombardment by sharp sounds followed by various transmissions that reliably prevent anyone from having a coherent thought lasting longer than twenty or so seconds.
Slack, a communications platform, is one of the virtual workspaces that dominates many professionals’ lives, its “hyperactive hive-mind” supercharged by a year of mandatory social-distancing. It is a great platform for collaboration, hypothetically. In reality, it is driving us all to distraction. Cal Newport addresses the negative effects of communication overload in his recent book, “A World Without Email.” But, email is not email — it’s everything — every layer on the stack of digital modalities which disable our concentration as often as they enable valuable communication.
Throughout the workday and into the night, we receive: informational blasts, status reports, status requests, expansive administrative minutiae, mindless entertainment, and, occasionally, actual productive communication. As we write this post, even this sentence, no fewer than three pointless notifications arrived to interrupt us.
By appearances, we have come to resemble a Bergeronesque amalgam of “Halloween and hardware,” the verisimilitude of “walking junkyards,” tied down by the many platforms which intend to elevate us. The absurdity of George Bergeron’s forty-seven pound bag of birdshot padlocked around his neck, or Harrison’s veritable Christmas tree of scrap metal, becomes less absurd when it’s normalized and normative.
In Vonnegut’s tale, the underlying motivation for the United States Handicapper General was the implementation of equality: a moral ideal. The quest for another profound American value, ultimate productivity, drives the structurally self-imposed handicaps we face today. Focus is sacrificed on the fallacy that increased availability maximizes the value of human capital. This sound theory is dysfunctional in practice as it is disconnected from the fact that concentration is how we distill value from the world around us.
We have powerful tools which provide obvious initial value as they rapidly solve long-standing challenges. Yet, as these tools are implemented, the structure of our built environment changes. New cultures, and new problems arise. Unreflective use magnifies the new harms — harms which are often difficult to appreciate, describe, and fix because they have become embedded in our worldview.
Marshall McLuhan famously stated that, “People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.” Slack, by contrast, is the now lukewarm bath we are compelled to never step out of, notwithstanding the many valuable endeavors we might have hoped to achieve that day. McLuhan also reminds us that, “The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.”
Brute force boycotts and deletion of platforms, throws babies out with bathwater. Meaningful use of our tools requires cultural course correction in which we recognize that human beings are on the other end of our Slack channels. Our actions affect them, often in real-time. We advocate for appropriate restraint, regard for nuance, and investment in humanistic mechanism design as we iterate and build for the future.
