Deductive telemetry
Jan. 26th, 2012 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138Way back in my early teens, I read Stephen King's The Dead Zone, in which the main character gained the talent of psychic telemetry-- the ability to read existing knowledge or future events in the life of anyone he touches.
There are other works in which the telemetry is extended to reading similar information about a person based on their belongings; some of them have the useful rationale that it only works if the person has intrinsically shaped the current form/function through chronic proximity-- a carpenter's favorite tool whose handle/edge has been gradually worn away to fit a habitual angle of the wrist; a shoe that's become slightly lopsided due to the wearer's idiosyncratic stride. I don't think any of them ever addressed what would result if someone tried to "read" something like, say, a sweater whose yarn had been hand-spun by one person, hand-knit by a second, and worn by a third, or how it would all balance out over time.
(Supposedly, some transplant patients get strong "hunches" about the donors their parts came from, but iirc they're usually wrong. I've thought about this a few times since my surgery-- there's now a piece of a dead person's eyeball sewn onto the back of mine-- but it's not really something I've pursued in imagination.)
Ever since reading that book, I've tried to consciously envision the lives of people whose hands a given object may've passed through before coming to mind. I used to enjoy going to garage sales and estate sales for that reason, but the reality gradually became oppressive that the latter were almost always by definition taking place because someone had died. (Someone, say, who had been born in 1910, received a delicately engraved sterling spoon as a baby present, moved from Austria to the US in the 1930s/40s, raised children in the 50s/60s, did a lot of sewing and baking, and whose widower was walking through the house right now to collect a last few things from a room before it could be opened to join the rest of the sale. I have her spoon and her uranium-glass mixing bowls. I've never gone back to an estate sale since then.)
More routinely, I do this in stores, especially with food. Looking at a ripe peach and envisioning the orchard it grew in, the delicate and doubtless underpaid labor of the person who had to spend day after day picking peaches without bruising them, the peaches' shadowy transit in crates of shaped cradles until they reach the point of sale, where someone has to lay them out in an attractive manner for me to space out at. (And that doesn't even count the occasional thought-branches about the trucker who brought them there, the people who made and sold the truck, the gas station where its fuel came from, the workers who made and maintain the roads it drove on, etc. etc. etc.)
Even a mass-produced loaf of bread carries the putative shadows of a farmer in the Great Plains riding around on a GPS tractor to sow the wheat, and so on down the line through a flour mill (I have no idea what industrial flour mills look like) and the people who run its machinery, some massive bread factory with its workers who punch in every day and the engineers who designed whatever massive breadmaking gadgets... even a mass-produced loaf of bread is there because of an enormous unseen web of people.
What really kicked off this post was wandering through a local craft chain earlier this week and seeing what looked like a little interwoven anemone bead; when I looked closer, it was one of those dodecahedral beaded beads that'd been made of tip-drilled freshwater drop pearls. I think the price came out to maybe $2-3. It was on a rack of similar pearl anemones, all made in China. With this sort of irregular pearl shape, they have to've been made by hand.
When you really think about that price, that works out to what, maybe 15 minutes of US minimum-wage labor? I'm sure it would take me a hell of a lot longer than 15 minutes to make one of those. And that price has probably undergone the typical 50-100% markup from wholesale to retail, not to mention the costs of trans-Pacific transport and the factory owner's profit margin. I really cannot imagine just how little the person who actually made them was being paid, whether by the piece or by the hour.
(Not to mention the long-term effects-- my eye surgery was needed because of degenerative myopia, which is especially common in East Asian populations. The bits of Mike Daisey's Foxconn exploration which I heard on "This American Life" mentioned some of the larger-scale hazards of factory work, but not potential blindness. Degenerative myopia isn't *caused* by prolonged close focus, but prolonged close-focus work creates conditions which can allow the underlying genetically-linked weakened elasticity of the eyeball to manifest. I have a very real sense sometimes that I may've literally cored out the holes in my retinas like/by stringing beads.)
And yet, that factory worker is almost certainly there because he or she still found it preferable to the alternative. During a month in China in 2010, I barely saw any powered machinery outside a factory/airport that wasn't a motorbike, car, or the tour bus we were riding around in. Road work in the city was eerily silent because they weren't using jackhammers or power drills-- they were just digging a trench in the pavement with big shovels. Rubble was piled onto a tarp lying flat on the sidewalk; when the tarp was full, some guy got to tie the tarp's corners together around a bamboo pole and stagger off somewhere with maybe a cubic yard of dirt and broken concrete over his shoulder like a massive bindle. (Wheelbarrows probably have too many parts that could get broken and slow things down, versus raw cheap human labor.) And even that guy probably came to the city in preference to staying in the fields at home.
Out in the country, we saw one or two ancient tractors chugging along the road, but in the fields themselves, everything was being done by hand-- small figures bent double in the rice paddies, little old ladies walking along the road half-buried under massive thatches of rice straw strapped to their backs.
I have no real conclusions, except to reiterate that the world is made of people connected to each other-- sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through the things they make or do. My parents always told me not to waste food, especially rice. I'd never really understood how much work-- how many *people*-- it took for rice to be planted and harvested, and rice is a relatively unprocessed food. And now I have a cat resting his chin on my hand while I try to type, so I'll stop now :b
There are other works in which the telemetry is extended to reading similar information about a person based on their belongings; some of them have the useful rationale that it only works if the person has intrinsically shaped the current form/function through chronic proximity-- a carpenter's favorite tool whose handle/edge has been gradually worn away to fit a habitual angle of the wrist; a shoe that's become slightly lopsided due to the wearer's idiosyncratic stride. I don't think any of them ever addressed what would result if someone tried to "read" something like, say, a sweater whose yarn had been hand-spun by one person, hand-knit by a second, and worn by a third, or how it would all balance out over time.
(Supposedly, some transplant patients get strong "hunches" about the donors their parts came from, but iirc they're usually wrong. I've thought about this a few times since my surgery-- there's now a piece of a dead person's eyeball sewn onto the back of mine-- but it's not really something I've pursued in imagination.)
Ever since reading that book, I've tried to consciously envision the lives of people whose hands a given object may've passed through before coming to mind. I used to enjoy going to garage sales and estate sales for that reason, but the reality gradually became oppressive that the latter were almost always by definition taking place because someone had died. (Someone, say, who had been born in 1910, received a delicately engraved sterling spoon as a baby present, moved from Austria to the US in the 1930s/40s, raised children in the 50s/60s, did a lot of sewing and baking, and whose widower was walking through the house right now to collect a last few things from a room before it could be opened to join the rest of the sale. I have her spoon and her uranium-glass mixing bowls. I've never gone back to an estate sale since then.)
More routinely, I do this in stores, especially with food. Looking at a ripe peach and envisioning the orchard it grew in, the delicate and doubtless underpaid labor of the person who had to spend day after day picking peaches without bruising them, the peaches' shadowy transit in crates of shaped cradles until they reach the point of sale, where someone has to lay them out in an attractive manner for me to space out at. (And that doesn't even count the occasional thought-branches about the trucker who brought them there, the people who made and sold the truck, the gas station where its fuel came from, the workers who made and maintain the roads it drove on, etc. etc. etc.)
Even a mass-produced loaf of bread carries the putative shadows of a farmer in the Great Plains riding around on a GPS tractor to sow the wheat, and so on down the line through a flour mill (I have no idea what industrial flour mills look like) and the people who run its machinery, some massive bread factory with its workers who punch in every day and the engineers who designed whatever massive breadmaking gadgets... even a mass-produced loaf of bread is there because of an enormous unseen web of people.
What really kicked off this post was wandering through a local craft chain earlier this week and seeing what looked like a little interwoven anemone bead; when I looked closer, it was one of those dodecahedral beaded beads that'd been made of tip-drilled freshwater drop pearls. I think the price came out to maybe $2-3. It was on a rack of similar pearl anemones, all made in China. With this sort of irregular pearl shape, they have to've been made by hand.
When you really think about that price, that works out to what, maybe 15 minutes of US minimum-wage labor? I'm sure it would take me a hell of a lot longer than 15 minutes to make one of those. And that price has probably undergone the typical 50-100% markup from wholesale to retail, not to mention the costs of trans-Pacific transport and the factory owner's profit margin. I really cannot imagine just how little the person who actually made them was being paid, whether by the piece or by the hour.
(Not to mention the long-term effects-- my eye surgery was needed because of degenerative myopia, which is especially common in East Asian populations. The bits of Mike Daisey's Foxconn exploration which I heard on "This American Life" mentioned some of the larger-scale hazards of factory work, but not potential blindness. Degenerative myopia isn't *caused* by prolonged close focus, but prolonged close-focus work creates conditions which can allow the underlying genetically-linked weakened elasticity of the eyeball to manifest. I have a very real sense sometimes that I may've literally cored out the holes in my retinas like/by stringing beads.)
And yet, that factory worker is almost certainly there because he or she still found it preferable to the alternative. During a month in China in 2010, I barely saw any powered machinery outside a factory/airport that wasn't a motorbike, car, or the tour bus we were riding around in. Road work in the city was eerily silent because they weren't using jackhammers or power drills-- they were just digging a trench in the pavement with big shovels. Rubble was piled onto a tarp lying flat on the sidewalk; when the tarp was full, some guy got to tie the tarp's corners together around a bamboo pole and stagger off somewhere with maybe a cubic yard of dirt and broken concrete over his shoulder like a massive bindle. (Wheelbarrows probably have too many parts that could get broken and slow things down, versus raw cheap human labor.) And even that guy probably came to the city in preference to staying in the fields at home.
Out in the country, we saw one or two ancient tractors chugging along the road, but in the fields themselves, everything was being done by hand-- small figures bent double in the rice paddies, little old ladies walking along the road half-buried under massive thatches of rice straw strapped to their backs.
I have no real conclusions, except to reiterate that the world is made of people connected to each other-- sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through the things they make or do. My parents always told me not to waste food, especially rice. I'd never really understood how much work-- how many *people*-- it took for rice to be planted and harvested, and rice is a relatively unprocessed food. And now I have a cat resting his chin on my hand while I try to type, so I'll stop now :b