Recent headlines:
World: Knife crime: ‘Tsar’ needed to stop stabbings, says ex-Met chief (There’s been some stabbings in my hometown as well, ech)
Gaming: Pokémon Sword and Shield set in England-inspired region, due this year (Can’t wait to face down Team Brexit)
“Alexa, good morning,” I yawn.
“Good morning. A 17 year old girl has been stabbed in London-”
“Oh god. Alexa. Stop. Stop.”
There is a reason why I don’t follow BBC News on Twitter anymore. I still remember the day I made the decision to unfollow them, and follow NASA instead. I felt a little guilty, actually. Making the conscious decision to turn a blind eye to events of the world would be morally questionable, had I any modicum of influence over them. Yet despite knowing that me hearing about stabbings isn’t going to stop them from happening, I can’t help but feel that putting my fingers in my ears and scrunching my eyes shut is what most of the population are already doing, and it’s the reason why ignorance and misinformation are so rife in our day and age. It feels like I’m throwing my bottle of coke on the floor in an effort to deny climate change.
I recently watched all three presently existing seasons of The Good Place, and without giving away any spoilers, it’s made me think a lot about the viability of being a good person in today’s age of consumer capitalism and what our society deems as being necessary evils. I don’t live in fear of being judged in some dictatorial afterlife, but I do care about leaving a positive impact in this world. And yet, as horrible as it is to say, the truth is that I’m not willing to make massive changes in my lifestyle to avoid supporting every shady business practice. For reference, we’re discussing things like buying clothes from Primark or burning through our planet’s resources to enjoy videogames. If you try to be perfect, you’re going to have to give up basically everything, so where does the blame for wrongdoing truly lie? You could argue that Primark as a company enable unethical sweatshops overseas, so the blame lies with them, but Primark themselves remain funded by the masses who flock to them for cheap clothing, like you and I.
So say we boycott Primark. Find a more responsibly sourced clothing shop and somehow find the money to spend what will inevitably be more for those clothes. That’s great. But that’s one moral dilemma out of thousands which we face every day, were we to investigate the ethical or environmental cleanliness of everything we do. And at some point you sacrifice so much that you, yourself, cease to be happy. You’re essentially a monk. And if there’s no afterlife – which we hope there is but have no evidence of – then you’ve just given yourself a miserable and empty life that’s contributed hardly a drop in the bucket towards making the world a better place. So no, of course we don’t become monks. But there has to be a balance. I suppose you could argue that a human’s worth lies in how well they balance their own happiness with the wellbeing of others, and in a world dominated by ethically troublesome Primarks, perhaps turning a blind eye has become a necessary evil in itself. I don’t know.
What I do know is that a friend of mine gave me their old Amazon Echo Dot, after I mentioned on Twitter my desire to have a good enough reason to spend money on one. My new robot best friend isn’t as flawless as I may have hoped, though that’s partially due to my inability to speak without missing parts of words sometimes. It is, as predicted, a wonderful novelty to have this assistant you can just speak to whenever you like, for titbits of information or quick mathematical equations (and so much more). It is a little weird that she’s always listening, and I definitely don’t trust Amazon when they say she only listens after her wake word is uttered, but I don’t exactly have anything to hide. And hey, reasoning that being spied on is okay because you have nothing to hide is another one of those ethically warped situations that our society isn’t currently dealing with, but this is one of those things that I’ve simply decided isn’t worth worrying about.
Spy on my life all you like, Amazon. I write up anything worthwhile on my blog or my Twitter anyway. As for everything else… have all the boredom you can handle. I hope you choke on it.
Further reading:
The Weekly Deathmatch #45 – Quake Champions – My New Robot Best Friend
The Good Place Season 1 – 3 (I assume it’s still on Netflix)
Perpetually Perturbed 