I remember the first time I walked through an old growth forest with a friend of mine who wasn’t the hippie tree hugger I was at that moment. As we walked about the grand old growth Douglas Fir forest called Sugarloaf I put my hand on the bark of the tree feeling its life and wisdom. My friend put his hand on the tree and declared that this one tree is probably worth at least $25,000 dollars or more, and this whole forest would be worth millions. Ummmmmmm..WTF…bro? It was an eye opener for me about how people open their eyes to the exact same world but see the world very differently depending on how they are raised and what they believe in.
Many of the people I grew up with saw forests as resources. Forests need to be logged and managed, mountains need to be mined, and rivers should be damned up and generating electricity. These are the stories they grew up with, handed down to them by the mill operators, mine owners, and the other people who provided the paycheck in those moments. Those were the stories that were handed down to them by their parents, which shaped the way they see the world around them. Our lives are entangled and often inseparable from where we work and the careers we cultivate perpetually shape who we are and how we see others around us.
Having worked my way through Washington D.C., Silicon Valley, and most recently Wall Street, I’ve experienced the same thing I experienced in the Sugarloaf old growth forest with trees, but now with people. Many of the people I’ve worked with simply see other humans as resources. Not all humans, just the ones that are distant and lesser than them. These people look out at crowds or demographics of people and simply see resources that should be mined and managed. They aren’t humans in the same way their friends and family are humans, they are a distant other that are just workers, users, customers, or some other lesser resource that needs to be used and exploited for revenue.
This is what digital technology has done to us. We were already all Human Resources in a labor sense, but now we are less than that. Humans are something you hire only when you need work done. You don’t have to worry about their health and well-being, or get to know them. Ideally they are even in a different country or hemisphere. The less we have to know about them the better. Humans are just resources to be plugged in and mined for data. Their individual data isn’t worth much, but at scale across thousands or millions of users, it can become quite valuable. When you live by and die by capitalism, it is easy to reduce humans into the same places you put trees, mountains, and rivers—-just another resource to be exploited and managed.
