It’s 10 years since we moved from Toronto’s suburbs to the downtown core and while, for the most part, we are glad for the change in lifestyle, one thing I find disturbing is the endless succession of posters pleading for help to find missing people. Most of the stories are tragic. One of the first posters I saw when we settled downtown turned out to be a victim of serial killer Bruce McArthur. The appearance of Covid-19 has brought no abatement in this epidemic of missing people.
I don’t like to confess such a thing, but I note a shift in my personal attitude to these posters. I’ve grown inured to their presence. It reminds me of the fire and police sirens that blare at all hours of the night. After years of exposure to them, I’ve grown used to the sound and often don’t even notice anymore.
But I think the issue runs deeper than that. It’s not simply a matter of growing so accustomed to something that we cease to notice it anymore; it’s also a function of a broader cultural trend. People have becomes units of labour, fungible cogs in the neoliberal machine. Marx and Engels had documented 170 years ago how a nascent industrialization was changing the relationship of capital and labour. Their problem was that they suffered from a failure of imagination. Today, their jaws would hit the floor if they learned about cryptocurrency and the gig economy. And it would astonish them to witness the manipulations we apply to persuade people that today’s forms of work belong to reasonable social arrangements.
People do express outrage. For example, Twitter exploded when somebody leaked a supreme court opinion on abortion that cites with approval a CDC report that addresses the “domestic supply of infants.” It suggests that maternity wards are production lines in a factory. But the outrage dissipates because the most active Twitter accounts are managed by gig peons. Nobody pays them enough to sustain their outrage.
Like our bottled of water, like our masks and hair clips, like our myriad plastic widgets, our people are disposable.
