Portal to the Labyrinth
Or: why the cyclamen matters
Several months ago, I was walking along the elevated pedway that connects the University of Alberta’s HUB Mall to the Rutherford Library when I saw someone sitting — slumping is perhaps the more apt word — against the wall with his head flopped over at an acute angle, as if his major neck muscles had been severed. In silhouette, what I saw would have looked rather like like this: ⅂. An upside-down L. Whereas the profile of a person holding their head upright forms a capital-i: I. It was striking because when a head is bent down so limply, it usually means the presence of a heavy opioid user.
Impolitely, I fixed my gaze on this person for longer than I usually would (it didn’t matter, this person would never, not in a thousand and one years, have noticed me staring) and I searched for more clues as to whether or not he was a drug user. As it turned out, he wasn’t a drug user, he was simply looking at his phone.
“Fifteen years ago, even ten years ago, when I took a long walk, either in the city or in the natural world, it was a kind of mediation that happened without my trying,” Mary Gaitskill writes on her Substack. “I became wholly absorbed in what was around me… When I go for a walk now, it is different: even if I only look at my phone once or twice, the experience, while still soothing, is not as deep. My consciousness is kept from full absorption in the physical world by its neurological attunement to the electronic portal in my pocket — or back in my house, if I didn’t even bring the thing with me.”
It was less than two years ago that I started to pay closer attention to the conversation about smartphones. Whether from teachers or politicians or psychiatrists or merely concerned citizens, a large number of people have decided they don’t like these new gadgets, that the effect of their presence is far from useful or benign. Even Paul Krugman, who joined Substack not so long ago, got in on the pile-on (“The Plot to Poison Children’s Minds” — see link below). While his focus is on social media, there can be no doubt that a heap of blame can be attributed to phones, because without phones as the delivery device, social media would be far more benign. Imagine social media exists but smart phones do not. You have to go grab your laptop or return to your desk every time you want to share a thought or a photo or communicate with another person. That would be a very different reality than the one we live in. No, it’s because phones follow us around, it’s because they lie in wait for us even when we’ve intentionally left them behind, it’s because more and more activities require access to the phone (two-factor authentication being the most pernicious and inescapable) — in brief, because phones are so ubiquitous, they are shifting social relationships and rewiring minds. Paul Krugman compares social media to alcohol, calling for similar efforts to regulate and moderate.
I think the more apt comparison is between the invention of smartphones and the introduction of the automobile. Once a significant number of people had access to a motor vehicle, vast swathes of the built landscape had to be entirely remade to accommodate the needs of the car. The same is now happening with phones, except the effects are less visible, because you don’t need to build an overpass to accommodate a phone, you simply need to invent more and more wifi applications, and thereby make it all but impossible to navigate everyday life without one. It isn’t our built space that is remade; it’s the mental and social space that we inhabit.
When I started this Substack, there were a few promises I made to myself. Inspired by Sam Kriss, I decided that I should try my best to not comply with the usual conventions of online writing. Having dispensed advice for years as a communications professional about the need for impactful colour imagery, I decided every feature image I used would be in black and white, so that the homepage of the Substack Octopus would have no more colour than a 19th century newspaper. Having in my working life been part of the society-wide shift to short sentences and paragraphs — written soundbites — I decided I would do the opposite. I would attempt to write in such a way that the writer’s app, Hemingway, would sternly admonish me every time I used it. I decided I would not include links within the main body of the text. Why invite someone to leave when obviously it was in my best interest for them to stay? (Some of the “rules” had never made sense to me anyway.) Increasingly, I was motivated out of spite. I hated the rules and I didn’t think they were benign or useful. To follow the rules was to submit to a society that was becoming algorithmic and inhuman. I would prefer not to, I said silently to myself. If this was to be rather like Bartleby the Scrivener, whose life didn’t end well, so be it. I didn’t think of myself as a Luddite. One of the mistakes of contemporary progressives is accepting almost all technological innovation as inevitably good. Change should never be delayed or rolled back, nostalgia for the past is a dangerous conservative tendency, so say the techno-optimists, for whom there is no year earlier than 2020. But I see scarce little “progress” in the influence of the smartphone.
“I think the computer has from the beginning been a fundamentally conservative force,” said Joseph Weizenbaum in an interview in 1985. “It has made possible the saving of institutions pretty much as they were, which otherwise might have had to be changed.” Weizenbaum had designed the first computerized banking system, invented ELIZA—the first “psychiatric” program—and became a professor at MIT where he taught computer science. If someone so adept at and steeped in the culture of the computer called this tool inherently conservative, it was perhaps a message to be heeded. What would Weizenbaum have said about the phone, which is, of course, a pocket-sized computer?
During the covid pandemic, the rift deepened between those people, like me, who work in what Musa al-Gharbi calls “symbolic capitalism,” and those who don’t. The rift became a chasm. I suspect this is because of the different relationship to technology held by members of each tribe. Symbolic capitalists “trade primarily in legitimation and administration.” We enjoy a share of the surplus capital in society by helping the wealthy and powerful remain in operation and in power. The work required is often very discreet, almost invisible. It’s about making the systems we rely on seem more meaningful, intentional, rational, just and beautiful than they actually are. Most of this work requires us to be on computers all day.
A communications professional working in administration for a university is a symbolic capitalist through and through. (I’m using this job as an example since I’ve done it twice.) A communications professional helps legitimize the institution of the university by publicizing and extolling the virtuous achievements of professors and students. Yet in so doing, a communications professional does not provide a single good or service that is useful to their fellow citizens. (A previous formulation of this problem that once intrigued me was David Graeber’s “bullshit jobs” theory, but the full-length book was underwhelming.)
During the pandemic, those of us who worked in the realm of abstraction as symbolic capitalists enjoyed remarkable comfort and prestige — which is all the more remarkable given that a) while most of us preserved our affluence and social position, western societies were becoming increasingly unequal and b) it bears repeating that we actually produced nothing tangibly useful! When you zoom out from your own immediate situation, it all becomes quite startling. There have been times when I have looked out from my comfortably air-conditioned / delicately heated office space, and my gaze has landed on someone who isn't a symbolic capitalist — perhaps he is charged with delivering goods on a dolly with no fellow worker to help open the doors, or he is toiling on the roof of a building in sub-zero temperatures. During these moments, I’ve sometimes thought to myself: I can’t believe they’re not coming at people like me with pitchforks.
The reason the pandemic stands out is that it exposed the disparity that exists between symbolic capitalists and everyone else. For those of us working in offices, when the lockdowns began, the chief disruption was to our immediate working environment. We decamped to our homes and remained there for long stints of time. But for those who weren’t working from offices — for workers in Amazon’s fulfillment centres or on construction sites or delivering products to homes and offices — comfort and safety were far harder to come by. This divide was felt most acutely in Canada during the truckers’ Freedom Convoy, which laid siege to the capital city of Ottawa for weeks. The convoy movement was also quite disruptive for shorter periods of time in provincial outposts like Edmonton. It wasn’t just that the convoy people selfishly rejected the need for strict safety protocols, it was also that the economic disruption of covid had weighed heavier on most of them than on most of us. My salary continued to be paid just as before. But for those working on short contracts, and this includes a good number of skilled and semi skilled trades people, the effect of the pandemic was personally injurious financially.
At the time, I despised the convoyers. It took my more sensible wife cautioning me to prevent me from yelling at them and giving them the middle finger. Leaning on their horns, flying their giant Canadian flags — these vehicle-dependent crowds composed primarily of angry and unruly white people — they seemed to me like the barbarians at the gates. They didn’t understand or accept the science of the pandemic. They wanted to be selfish and go on with their lives as if they could ignore the global crisis that the rest of us took so seriously. They were going to be “super spreaders” and imperil the health of everyone.
More recently, I have changed my mind. It’s not that I’ve become accepting of the convoyers as a movement. I’ve become less sympathetic to my own side. It was relatively easy for us to fall in line with most of the expected protocols. It wasn’t easy to care for children during lockdowns, and in this respect, symbolic capitalists were no different from anyone else, and yet this never came close to creating solidarity. Far from it.
Around this time, it became clear to me that the smartphone had moved from being a personal choice to becoming a society-wide necessity. It was an acceleration of a pre-existing trend, sure, and yet the pandemic was a critical tipping point. Phones had become mandatory. And the more ambitious your personal movements were, the more likely it was that you were going to be royally screwed without one. If you wanted to be among the first to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, you had to wave your phone at Edmonton’s Expo Centre to give proof that you’d booked an available timeslot with a nurse. If you wanted to shop for food with minimal contact with other humans, you had to show your phone to the attendant in the supermarket parking lot to confirm that you were the rightful owner of the groceries that they were wheeling out to the car. And so on.
While this was happening, non-symbolic capitalists, it seems to me now, were maintaining something in their connection to reality that the rest of us were rapidly losing. They had maintained a balanced understanding of the nature of danger and risk. While we symbolic capitalists held up our covid passports proudly, whether printed out or displayed pertly on our phone screens, and we felt secure in the knowledge that we were good little boys and girls, on board with the general consensus around safety, many of the non-symbolic capitalists refused to play the same game. Why? My guess is that they had never been as concerned with personal safety from the get-go. They were unloading trucks or working in fulfillment centres with heavy boxes and trying to wheel over-laden dollies down staircases and toiling away on rooftops, a fall from which would end their mortal existences forever. The physical threats they faced at their regular jobs were roughly equivalent to the threats they faced from covid, perhaps greater, in fact. Moreover, as mentioned, the threats they faced from economic disruption were potentially catastrophic.
During the pandemic, the fates of symbolic capitalists and regular folks started to diverge like never before. Now we live in parallel realities, gazing at each other with misunderstanding and a considerable degree of resentment.
In 2025, many of the people working outside symbolic capitalism are looking at those of us in our offices and wondering: um, what exactly are you all doing? Why are we supposed to care about you and your fancy word games? We can fix your broken drains but you can't do shit for us.
In late 2020, I had to travel to France to visit my parents. On the way, I did all the things that had to be done: I wore the N95 mask on the planes and in the airports, I downloaded the Government of Canada’s covid app and fed it the data it asked for, and I consulted a half-dozen different websites to understand the rights and obligations of a Canadian traveling to another country during a global disruption of unprecedented scale. Eventually, I arrived in the little village where my parents lived, and entered the house, where I witnessed the ongoing deterioration of my father’s relationship with the physical world.
A key feature of Parkinson’s is that it causes all sorts of motor impairments. For my father to get from his armchair to the dining table six feet away was a laborious operation. Once he had arrived at the new chair, his body became trapped in a series of repetitive back-and-forth motions. I felt like I was watching a video glitch. For him to descend into his new seat required his brain to forcefully stop all prior mental commands. With my mum and I holding him on each side, he executed a controlled collapse, as if the invisible cords holding him up had suddenly been cut.
On the third day of my stay, I borrowed my father’s Renault Twingo, which he was no longer legally allowed to drive. An hour of rain had given way to the sun, pressing at the clouds, which created an eerie light on the road. The asphalt underneath my wheels and the blue-grey clouds were faintly luminous, as if undergoing a chemical reaction.
I arrived at a white castle in the valley where the local river trickled, the same river that trickled through the farmer’s field below my parents’ home. I got out of the Renault and followed on foot the squared-off circle of the castle property line, starting out on the tiny bridge over a stream, and then I proceeded along a farmer’s track, where tractor tires had eaten into the mud, my path flanked by neatly trimmed hedgerows. On the last stretch of my walk, which was scarcely thirty minutes in total, I came across a section of fencing that marked the edge of the castle property.
The fence posts, each one crowned by an iron fleur-de-lis, had been painted white, and several decades ago had doubtless sparkled primly, but now they had the grime of rust on them. Weaving through the fencing were dozens of purple blooming flowers. I bent down with my phone and adjusted the settings in my amateur way and tried to take the clearest photo possible. When I looked at it, I saw my photo had captured beads of rain on one of the petals.
I had no idea what the name of the flower was. All I knew was that it was beautiful and I wanted to capture it and keep it with me. Back at the house, I showed my mum the photo and asked if she could name the flower. Cyclamen, she told me. That night, I looked it up on the Internet. In ancient days, I learned, it was believed that cyclamen could heal the spirits of depressives. At that time, I was working on a manuscript with a rather manic intensity. I was delighted about having learned the name of the cyclamen because I was immediately able to incorporate some of the background lore and knowledge of the flower that I gleaned from the Internet into my unfolding narrative project. Concurrently, I was delivering into old texts — notably the essays and letters and poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge — and was surfacing with little shards of apparent insight. My manuscript straddled the 18th and the 21st century and I thought I was very clever.
It's difficult for me now to look back on this period with anything other than embarassment. Spending a huge amount of time on the Internet, whether on JSTOR or in Google Books or a few obscure academic websites — all this turned out not to be a productive way to produce a new narrative. I was deluding myself. Even as I sat down with my father and recorded an interview (again using my phone), the conversation being staggered out over four days, I was recording words that I thought belonged in my project but, in fact, were really only for posterity.
Yet if I am more forgiving about how I handled the writing project, I am still left with the cyclamen. It is probably excusable that I didn’t know its name, because I was in an area of France that was not my home. But even on the very Edmonton street that I live on now, the name for the huge trees that provide a canopy of shade all summer long was unknown to me for over three years. I remained ignorant until there was a city-wide scare about Dutch elm disease. At that time, I did some online research, looked closely at the trees for the first time and realized, yes, they are elm trees.
Clearly I had been raised and educated in such a way that the words of things in nature were not given high priority. Neither of my surviving parents were biologists or botanists or in any other way responsible for knowing the names of things from the natural world. And yet such words were part of their knowledge hoard, the same way they would know the words for a belt or suspenders or an egg whisk and an egg cup.
Over time I had become accepting of my relative ignorance because it seemed to me that most contemporary readers were, by and large, just as ignorant. What would be the use of dropping the word cyclamen into a piece of prose if it failed to evoke the corresponding image of the purple-leafed flower in the minds of readers? I can also accept that most people these days no longer live the way they did in previous centuries. There is less exposure to nature, and they feel themselves to be less dependent on lifeforms in the natural world (even if that’s an illusory feeling), and so very few people would ever learn these words as a matter of necessity.
It wasn’t until I read those words by Mary Gaitskill above that I could exactly pinpoint why my encounter with the cyclamen still bothered me. The rapid feedback loop in which I snapped the photo of a flower whose name was unknown to me and only an hour later learned its name by showing the photo to my mum and then just a few hours later found out all sorts of added information about the flower thanks to the Internet — all this was happening too fast for any genuine reflection and discovery to take place.
Everything about the culture of the smartphone is about speeding up. There is nothing about the culture of the phone that encourages you to slow down. It’s not just a matter of us constantly being rushed along in our lives with no discernible benefit, it’s also the great difficulty we encounter in simply being present which also hurts us. In his long lament for the passing of the 1990s, Freddie deBoer writes, “Now we’re never doing anything — we’re always getting through something to get to something else to get through, using various time-saving techniques that maximize the amount of time we have to get through things while keeping our attention divided into a thousand things we then get through.”
I was in a hurry to capture a photo and then I was in a hurry to find out the flower’s name and then I was in a hurry to obtain more information about the flower and then I was in a hurry to incorporate this information into a manuscript. All of this in a frenzied attempt to make meaning out of the fact that I was losing my father. It was the very moment in my life when I should have hit pause and yet I gave in to technology and did the reverse.
I no longer believe that everyone is entirely stuck in the same technology trap. We’re all stuck to varying degrees, but some people are more stuck than others. Those who are not working in symbolic capitalism are arguably less stuck. This is because the knowledge required to carry out their jobs is carried in their bodies, because they have a different relationship to the physical world than symbolic capitalists like me. They spend more time beyond the reach of the circuits that integrate symbolic capitalists into systems of seeing, believing and, for the most part, non-feeling (usually our jobs are eerily devoid of tactile sensation).
This is a difference of degree, not a simple binary. I know people working in symbolic capitalism who can comfortably set aside their laptops and smartphones and look at a dilapidated garden fence and know how to dismantle it and build a new one. Yet when the question of remuneration comes up—do you want to be the person that is paid to fix a garden fence or the person who earns a living through laptop labour?—the choice is different and so the career trajectory and relationship to technology become different. Those that earn money by changing something in the physical world, by leaving a trace of their presence, by moving things along, are engaging in a particular type of labour, the withdrawal of which en masse would immediately bring capitalism to a grinding halt. People like me, on the other hand, are not essential. In particular cases — journalism, for example — the withdrawal of or loss of our labour, especially if we’re plying our trade honestly, will impoverish the larger culture of which we’re part, but the change is very subtle and hard to measure.
As I hurtle toward the age of fifty, I am under no illusions that I am particularly useful from a broader socio-economic standpoint. When Pierre Poilievre, who everyone now concedes will be Canada’s next prime minister, says “build the homes,” he’s not asking for another comprehensively researched and succinctly written report on the housing crisis, to be issued by a Canadian university, subsequently shared at two conferences and covered in three newspapers and promoted via a meagerly funded social media campaign. He is literally calling for people to get their hands dirty and build the homes.
One thing is for sure: it won’t be me building the homes. I “helped” with the renos in my own house. I know my limitations. While my friend masterminded the project, I stuffed insulation into the walls and ceiling, I took twice as long as necessary to get screws into my share of the drywall, I painted a few layers of pink and blue, and I was a go-fer, heading to Duplex and Home Depot as many times as it took to finish the job. I did all this to try and prove to myself that I was not going to turn out exactly like my father. His relationship with the physical world had become frayed long before Parkinson’s. Decades ago, he used to look out at the yard of our house in southwest Edmonton and the sprinklers would come on automatically and then the gardening crew would come to fertilize, rototill and cut the grass and all this would happen while my father’s eyes had a faraway haze to them, as if he were looking out of an airplane window at something happening in another country. I have to go back to being a boy of six to recall my father making something out of wood — it was a bookcase from a DIY kit. And I never loved him any less for this. It just made me sad, that’s all. Because it seemed that he, and by extension me, were not as fully present in the world as we might have otherwise been. He couldn’t teach me to use tools because he never used them himself.
My growing conviction is that this is not a good state of affairs; that the knowledge of doing a job must be physical. It must be something you carry with you. To have a job that primarily owes its prestige to an institution is to live on someone else’s estate. The smartphone is a means of tethering us to the estate. Meanwhile, the circuitry of the phone and the circuitry of our minds are increasingly interconnected. The electronic portal doesn’t open up to the broader majesty of the universe but instead takes us deeper into a labyrinth that expands its domain every minute, getting bigger and harder to escape.
We are at risk of having less freedom to think for ourselves than medieval serfs. We need to live, if not for God, then at least for ourselves and for each other. We can only do this by proclaiming defiantly our subjectivity, which resides in our bodies, and which can be valorized by asserting the value that each one of us carries.
In the nineteenth century, novelists like Thomas Hardy or Gustave Flaubert would have carried, as if in a toolbelt, large inventories of words about the natural world. In the twenty-first century, most writers are different. One of the major differences is that, after the modernist turn of Virginia Woolf and her peers, our gaze has turned increasingly inwards. Whatever is in our bodies bears less of the imprint of the physical world; we’re also less likely to leave our own marks on the physical world. Yet I don’t think we have reason to retreat. For as long as we maintain a connection to physical reality, we can be barometers for what the weather in this weird world feels like. We can warn of bad weather coming. To do our work properly, we’ve got to disentangle ourselves from the circuits of the phone. We have to look up at the buildings and the trees and the sky. We have to look at the people around us. We need to hold our heads upright, striving — each one of us — to be an observant I.
NOTES
I didn’t make any reference to it in today’s post, yet I still want to give a tip of the hat to the remarkable Substack I recently discovered, called Working Man. It’s a memoir of a life working in construction: a brilliantly articulated perspective on what the job of labouring in the physical world feels like.
Articles, etc.
"The Despair of the Young... and the madness of academia," Mary Gaitskill. April 14, 2023.
"It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive," Freddie DeBoer, February 6, 2023
“The Plot to Poison Children’s Minds,” Paul Krugman.
"Weizenbaum examines computers and society," Diana ben-Aaron, April 9, 1985
https://web.archive.org/web/20211002104454/http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html
About Symbolic Capitalism
https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/about
Photo
“Last call: New York City bids an official farewell to its last public pay phone,” Rachel Triesman, NPR, May 24, 2022
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/24/1100931534/last-pay-phone-new-york-city-public-nyc
The other photo, the one of the cyclamen, is mine.
So much rich food for thought here, Octopus, even if I didn’t always agree with you. One could look at symbolic vs non-symbolic capitalism differently; i.e., the physical stuff is crucial to maintaining the equally important non-physical labour, which gives meaning and direction to it all. Otherwise we’re ants, right? Not to disparage ants, which are wondrous.