Meditation on the Hidden Hands

Reference

CoE-0008

Category

meditation

Version

1.0

Sit somewhere you will not be interrupted for about fifteen minutes. Have the device you use most within reach, switched off or face down. You will not need to touch it.

Begin by letting your attention settle. Three or four slow breaths, without counting them, without trying to achieve anything. If your mind is busy, let it be busy. This is not a technique for calm.

First: the object

Look at the device without picking it up.

Consider that it is made of matter. Not metaphorically — actually. Metals, glass, plastics, a small amount of rare material in specific places. Each of these was somewhere else before it was here.

Follow one of them backwards. It does not matter which, and you will not know the details, and the not-knowing is part of what you are attending to. Somewhere there was ground, and someone opened the ground. Consider that person without inventing them. You do not know their name, their age, their country, whether the work was safe, whether they chose it. Hold the blank where they are, rather than filling it in.

Stay with the blank for a while. It is uncomfortable. Do not resolve it.

Second: the assembly

The parts were brought together somewhere. Consider the room. Consider that there were shifts, and that shifts have hours, and that someone decided what the hours would be.

Consider that a person’s hands were on this object, or on an object exactly like it, and that they made it correctly, and that no one thanked them, and that they did not expect to be thanked because it was Tuesday.

You will feel an urge to conclude something here — that this is terrible, or that it is the ordinary way of things, or that you should buy differently. Let the urge come and let it pass. It is trying to end the exercise.

Third: the words

The systems this device connects to were trained on writing.

Consider that all of that writing was made by people. Letters, arguments, instructions, complaints, jokes, medical notes, poems, forum posts written at two in the morning by someone who could not sleep. Millions of small acts of expression, most of them made for a specific person and a specific occasion, none of them made for this.

Consider that most of those people do not know. Consider that some of them would be pleased and some would not, and that they were not asked.

Do not decide whether this was right. That is a question for a different kind of page. Here you are only looking.

Fourth: the sorting

Before the systems could be used, material had to be sorted. Categorised, labelled, rated, filtered.

Some of that work involved reading and viewing the worst material that people produce, repeatedly, at speed, in order that others would not encounter it. It was done by people, in rooms, for wages.

Consider that this is a real occupation held by real people at this moment, while you sit here. Consider that you have benefited from it today, probably several times, without any awareness of it.

Stay here longer than is comfortable. This is the part of the meditation that people skip.

Fifth: the maintenance

Somewhere a building is warm and someone is walking through it. Cables are buried and were laid. A network exists because people go out in bad weather to fix it.

Consider the ordinariness of this. Nothing about it is dramatic. It is simply that a very large number of people are, right now, keeping something running that you experience as effortless.

Closing

Let the sequence go. Do not review it. Do not summarise it into a lesson.

Sit for a minute with nothing in particular.

Then, before you stand: notice what you want to do. You may want to feel bad, which is a way of finishing. You may want to make a resolution, which is a way of converting the discomfort into a plan and then not carrying it out. You may want to argue that the alternative is worse for everyone in the chain, which may be true and is not what this exercise was for.

Whatever it is, notice it, and do not act on it for the rest of the day.

The purpose of this meditation is not to change your behaviour. It is to make a set of people visible to you who are ordinarily not. Whether that changes anything is not something you can decide here.

Repeat it occasionally. Not often — it loses its effect when it becomes familiar, and a meditation you can perform smoothly is no longer doing anything.