Brain training games guilt trip you into turning every opportunity to relax, into a chance for self-improvement. What if you don’t improve? That’s your fault – sorry!
Brain training is everywhere. Because of the benefits of “neuroplasticity”, the brain can be constantly optimised and improved to perform cognitive functions – memory, problem solving, whatever – more efficiently. Take the Lumosity website, for example, which promises a personalised, progress-tracking suite of twee games that turn “common neuropsychological tasks” into “fun”.
“Our members are amazing athletes, talented artists, and hard-working parents,” boasts the site, “but no matter where they come from or what they do, they can challenge their brains with Lumosity.” Between the exhortatory vignettes of hard-muscled youngish personages of various sexes and ethnicities engaging in strenuous, virtuous activities, it’s impossible to escape the real message here: don’t relax for a moment.
Or, rather, Lumosity guilts you into turning every temptation to relax into a challenging de facto program of self-overcoming. Even games aren’t a break from productivity or self-optimisation exercises any more. “Play” is now a networked big-data-enhanced technology for further opportunities for getting ahead.
Walter Benjamin called capitalism the purest and most extreme religious cult ever, which brooks no divergences from its rapacious program. In fact, the current tagline – be a lifter, not a leaner – is about as close as we get to a universal moral imperative in our globalised world. What’s life now, but the unrelenting ramping-up of demands for productivity, at every level, for everyone and everything? You’ve gotta work longer, harder, better, smarter, happier, faster, etc., etc. — or you’re obviously doing something wrong in both an economic and an ethical sense. (But now you can do it with games!)
Immanuel Kant’s moral theory stated “you can, because you must,” contemporary capitalism urges “you must, because you can”. Now that’s a motto: “Lumosity: you must play, because you can be better.”
What if you can’t neuroplasticise your way to the optimum you? Too bad. Failure has become personalised and moralised: you haven’t taken enough advantage of the options out there that would have helped you avoid your failure, which is in itself evidence you deserve everything that’s coming to you. No wonder polities around the world are currently doing their best to enforce extraordinary austerity budgets as a genuine moral duty. You’ll get what you deserve.
This excited transgression of all existing limits demanded by contemporary techno-capitalism — whether biological or cultural or religious or moral or ecological — has received a massive shot in the arm from post-WWII corporate technologies, ranging from psychopharmacology to probability theory to plastic surgery.
You’re ugly? That’s unfortunate, because statistics show that ugly people make less money. (Physical beauty, said Aristotle, is a better passport than any letter of recommendation.) But you’re very lucky, too! Now aesthetic sculpting enables you to get your stomach stapled, your facial warts removed, and plugs for your bald spots. Welcome to the world of the “quantified self”.
Don’t have time time to optimise yourself? Too bad. As Jonathan Crary fulminates in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, “there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life”. Sleep is lost time – just ask Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, or the other members of the high-powered four hours a night club. If you must sleep, you should, as Rob Lucas details in an essay titled Dreaming in Code, solve at night those workplace problems you couldn’t put to bed during the day.
As the so-called “internet of things” envelops the earth, it’s in the regime of virtual technologies that the contemporary anxieties around productivity are most fruitfully exacerbated and exploited. The gap between your sluggish body and the affordances of high-tech accelerationism has to be closed at all costs. Not only are you likely to carry your smartphone or tablet with you everywhere, but you’re more than likely to be answering work emails on it way out of hours, when you’re not eagerly working on your electronic-self-fashioning through one or another social media platform or improving your brain – with Lumosity™.
Because these technologies function precisely by an unavailing, incontrovertible real-time monitoring of every fumbled key-stroke or imperceptible biophysical spasm, there’s no longer anywhere to hide. Even leaving aside the ongoing harvesting of your data by websites, service providers and the NSA, the possible sharing of your health information between employers and insurers, ubiquitous CCTV surveillance, and so on, we have a situation from which there’s no real opting-out. Your only choice is to opt-in; that is, optimise-in.
But where, exactly, are you going? And if nothing in your body or brain is permitted to escape monitoring and enhancement, who are you? All the evidence suggests that the planet is currently experiencing what’s widely called the sixth great extinction — and there’s no reason not to feel this at a personal level too. If you’re not showing yourself constantly prepared to run ever faster – even just to stay still, in a Red Queen kinda way – the chances are that you’re going to go extinct faster as well.
In principle, there is no internal limit to the technological paradigm of infinite self-transformation under conditions of extreme economic competition, so I suggest that we all get with this program immediately, and disappear ourselves, one way or another. If that means altering yourself at a neurological level – let alone retraining your beliefs, behaviours, circumstances, or locale – so be it. The alternative is the trash heap; there is no I in technology.