The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  An equal swap of free modelling clay is one thing, but ownership rights are trickier if the raw material is considered valuable, like gold. Looking at borrowed materials, researchers found there were significant differences between children and adults. Given borrowed wood to make a statue, most three- and four-year-olds believed they should get to keep the statue, whereas most adults did not. Furthermore, the greater the value of the loaned raw materials, the less impact creative labour had on ownership. When one of two materials was loaned to participants, either paper or gold, even if creative labour was involved, the finished product was thought to belong to the owner of the material if it was made of gold, regardless of the amount of time the other person spent creating the finished product.

  As these cases illustrate, ownership is a slippery beast. There are no hard and fast rules, because we make and change them depending on the circumstance. To offer one final example, first possession can also be trumped by another factor: current use.

  Ori Friedman and his colleagues wanted to find out if extenuating factors could change people’s minds about an object’s use. In a series of studies, adults and three- to seven-year-old children were told different stories about property disputes and asked who deserved the rights over the object. In one of the scenarios, a boy is using a crayon to make a card for his mother, but the crayon belongs to a girl, and now she wants it back. For children, the answer overwhelmingly was to defer to the rule of first possession and return the crayon to the girl. Adults prioritized current use of the object and believed the boy should keep the crayon to finish his project. When the crayon switched ownership and was said to belong to the teacher, a neutral third party, adults and children both said the boy using the crayon could keep it.

  It’s critical to investigate and untangle our ideas about ownership, because in the real world our property disputes extend well beyond the borrowing of crayons in school. On a geopolitical scale, exactly these arguments crop up over land rights, state boundaries, and historical ownership. And in high conflict regions like Israel and Palestine, or with respect to unceded Indigenous territory in Canada or China’s historical claim in the South China Sea, these questions arise again and again. Do you own the land because you got there first? Because you are currently using it? Or because you added value to it and “improved” it?

  The argument of “improvement” is the foundation for modern property rights and was put forward by the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. In 1690, he wrote in the Second Treatise of Civil Government, “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property.” His logic is based on the idea that because we own our bodies, by extension we own what our bodies labour upon: “Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.”

  It has been said that this passage has influenced the trajectory of Western civilization more than anything ever written. It came to define how people could own the land. According to Locke, the intermingling of labour and nature is where the magic happens. And thus, as he suggests, a person who picks an apple from a tree owns the apple. Today, however, while Locke’s ideas serve as the philosophical basis for modern property law, we are a far cry from this simplistic notion. Modern fruit pickers working on farms, for instance, do not own the apples they pick; they belong to the farm, or to the corporation that owns the farm. At the supermarket, the apple belongs to the shopkeeper until we pay for it and then it belongs to us. Labour adds market value at every step along the way, also adding layers of complexity to the question of ownership. What goes unquestioned is the assumption that anyone can own it.

  That was not always the case. Writing in the 1700s, William Blackstone, famous for his commentaries on English common law, challenged our ideas of ownership. That one person could claim the right over an object “to the total exclusion of any other individual in the universe” was not anything inherently natural at all, he argued. If we were to look at an object’s history, we would begin to question the idea of that authority. “There is no foundation in nature or in natural law,” he wrote, “why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land; why the son should have a right to exclude his fellow creatures from a determinate spot of ground, because his father had done so, before him; or why the occupier of a particular field or of a jewel, when lying on his death-bed and no longer able to maintain possession, should be entitled to tell the rest of the world which of them should enjoy it after him.”

  And yet, at heart, each and every one of us knows this already: that when we die we can’t take our things with us. That’s because our things are not a physical extension of our bodies; they are only an extension of our minds.

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  AT THE KŌFUKU-JI TEMPLE in the Chiba prefecture of Japan, a bizarre ritual has been taking place since 2015. If you were to visit on the right day, you would witness Buddhist monks holding a funeral for Sony robot dogs. It sounds like a PR stunt, but the ceremony is real. Real incense wafts over the dearly departed, a real priest chants traditional sutras, and real tears fall as the robots’ owners say their final goodbyes.

  The Sony Aibo (short for artificial intelligence robot) was designed to “get to know” its human companion. Trained to bark, do tricks, and respond to voice commands, it shaped its behaviour to meet its owners’ preferences. As a result, some people grew very attached to their robotic pets, even coming to see them as family members. But in 2006, after Sony discontinued the product line, owners were left on their own with their Aibos, and problems mounted when older parts began malfunctioning. Seeing the need for repairs, a former Sony employee set up a “vet hospital” for robots that had begun to break down. And when a dog reaches the stage when it is beyond repair, there is one other avenue for it, as an “organ donor.” Terminal robots have their functioning parts removed so that they can be donated to the robots that are still considered “living.” The funeral, then, has become an important part of honouring the dead robots before they go to robot heaven after disassembly.

  The ceremony is not just for the old hardware. As Bungen Oi, the chief priest of the service, has stated, “All things have a bit of soul.” This belief in animism, that objects have a soul, is prevalent in Japanese custom and is also found in Shintoism, the country’s primary religion. Similarly, in the Kantō region, on February 8 of every year, another funeral of sorts takes place as women gather together in colourful kimonos to celebrate the Hari-Kuyō festival. In Japanese, hari means “needle,” and kuyo is “memorial.” In essence, the ceremony brings seamstresses and kimono makers together to bury their old needles in tofu or jelly cakes, a final soft resting place for their lifetime of hard work.

  These rituals are part of the larger belief that rivers, rocks, trees, places, and animals all possess a sacred essence, and that, similarly, everyday objects can have a spirit too. In fact, according to Shinto practitioners, after one hundred years, objects are said to acquire a soul. Household items like teakettles, dolls, and knives can come to possess what’s known as a tsukumogami, or an “artifact spirit.” Because of this, objects, whether they are toys, weapons, or tools, must be repaired and cared for so as not to offend the spirits that dwell inside.

  To people in the West, the idea that things have spirits may sound absurd, but the same idea is common in the West as well. There are people who name and talk to their cars as though they were rational beings, just as others get angry at their computers and photocopiers. A writer may have a “special” pen, and a baseball player a “lucky” bat. People also worship religious icons, with some claiming that statues can even weep or bleed. And, of course, ther
e are the cherished objects, like wedding rings or other personal items of significance. Indeed, a whole business has been built around psychics and mediums based on the belief that a part of the human spirit can be accessed by holding an object onto which something of the person who owned it has “rubbed off.”

  But what’s really odd is that while we come to love some objects dearly and treat them as sacred, we toss away most of our things without a second thought. Imagine for a moment a database of everything you own right now. Include everything: your house, car, clothes, shoes, bags, books, household appliances, jewellery, furniture, electronics, light bulbs, toiletries, trinkets, the items in your fridge, your music collection, right down to your last stick of gum. Now, try to imagine a second list that includes everything you have ever owned and everything you’ve ever thrown away. It’s impossible to do, because the average person owns millions of things over a lifetime. We just don’t get attached to all of them. “My chocolate bar” will be consumed and the empty wrapper tossed out, just as “my pen” will soon become unusable and unceremoniously thrown away.

  The things we keep are things we can use, or things with sentimental value, like memorabilia, gifts, and heirlooms, which come with memories attached to them. We treasure these objects because they can transport us to a particular time and place. It’s why people have garages filled with stuff that they love but never use. This kind of mass storage is considered normal in a material culture.

  Society does, however, have a name for people who don’t part easily with disposable objects. They are known as hoarders. But hoarding is not, as some might think, a disorder stemming from materialistic values. Hoarders develop strong emotional attachments to almost all objects that belong to them. Their difficulty stems from impaired decision-making, as even useless objects are seen as an extension of self. As a result, hoarders do not know what to keep and what to throw out. In a sense, this is an acute version of a problem we all have to one degree or another: the idea that we are our things. That said, normal populations could be considered just as deviant if one considers the insane volume of stuff we throw away every day.

  Historically, not all cultures have shown the same regard (or disregard) for stuff. And while hoarding is considered to be universal, with documented cases in societies around the world, on a cultural, rather than individual, level approaches to possession and materialism can differ dramatically.

  Christopher Columbus was clearly taken aback by the people of Hispaniola and their approach to ownership. In 1493, in a letter back to Spain detailing his first voyage, he wrote, “They are so artless and so free with all they possess, that no one would believe it without having seen it. Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are content with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to them.”

  Likewise, Captain James Cook was awed by the behaviour of the natives of New South Wales in Australia, who did not covet material goods and were content that nature provided them with their basic needs. They had no need for “superfluities.”

  Modern capitalist societies see the role of goods completely differently. In our era, excess is a necessity. That’s because the economy relies on growth, and growth relies on producing, consuming, and discarding ever more stuff. This is what Hannah Arendt called in 1958 the “waste economy.” In The Human Condition, she writes, “Things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they appeared in the world.” As a consequence, the cycle of attachment is short. Rare indeed are the objects that should reach the hundred-year-old age of the tsukumogami spirits, since modern products are replaced or abandoned in a much shorter time.

  It may be that we feel differently about our goods now as well. That’s because most things we own aren’t handmade. As a result, according to a study in The Journal of Marketing, they are missing the key ingredient of “love.” We treasure handmade things, knowing that personal time and effort have been invested in their creation. It’s why we love hand-knit sweaters made by our grandmothers, or simple crafts and drawings made by our children. Likewise, objects in the commercial sphere that are handmade are thought to “contain and transmit the artisan’s ‘essence.’…The customer then perceives the handmade product itself to be literally imbued with love.”

  Nowadays, the vast majority of our goods are made by robots and machines. Each plate, or sweater, or cell phone is a clone of the next. It’s soulless, making it easier for us to part with it. On another level, as anyone who has seen the TV show How It’s Made is aware, the scale and speed at which consumer goods are produced is dizzying. But this model of production also forces us into a perpetual loop. Machines don’t get tired. They never complain about overtime. They are fast, efficient, and precise, and outperform any human when it comes to their endless ability to produce.

  That leaves us with the corollary: to match the needs of hyper-intense productivity, we now have one key role, to consume.

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  THE CHAOTIC SCENE at the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch, California, was captured on cell phone video. At 10:10 P.M., crowds waiting in line began screaming and yelling, wiping madly at their burning eyes while trying to flee. The crowds had gathered to purchase the latest Xbox 360. But as aggressive pushing and shoving began, an “unhappy customer,” retaliating against her fellow customers, unleashed a canister of pepper spray.

  If an alien were to observe our current state of affairs, they might note that the human species had gone crazy in its desire to own things. Over the years, Black Friday sales have become notorious for this type of behaviour, as shopping riots break out and people trample over each other and get into verbal and physical fights while competing to buy the latest electronics and home appliances. The website blackfridaydeathcount.com keeps track of these shopping fatalities. After 2018’s Black Friday was over, the total stood at 12 deaths and 117 injuries.

  Black Friday fisticuffs are in fact beginning to die down, as the buying frenzy is leaving bricks-and-mortar stores and shifting online. The growth here has been staggering. In 2013, Amazon alone sold 26.5 million items on Cyber Monday, or about 426 items per second. That number has now been eclipsed in China by a sales event called Singles’ Day. What started as a kind of anti–Valentine’s Day in 1993 by a group of Nanjing University students was co-opted by the e-commerce giant Alibaba in 2009 and transformed into a consumer marketing blitz. In 2017, Alibaba’s Singles’ Day sales hit $5 billion in the first fifteen minutes and reached over $25 billion in the course of the day, working out to 256,000 purchases per second.

  This consumer boom, while healthy for the economy, is a catastrophic bust in terms of its physical consequences. Greenpeace Asia calculated that aside from the product waste, manufacturing, packaging, and shipping, the CO2 from the 2016 Singles’ Day shopping bonanza in clothing alone would require 2.58 million trees to absorb the emissions.

  This out-of-control consumerism exacts a human toll as well. We are, quite literally, shopping ourselves to death. A recent study by Steven Davis and his colleagues at University of California, Irvine, found that 760,000 air pollution deaths annually are directly linked to consumer goods production.

  From the outside, of course, this situation looks absurd. So it’s worth asking ourselves why we do this. And the simple answer is we believe that having things makes us happy. But the happiness we get from material goods is only ever temporary. Planned obsolescence and the need to upgrade, stay fashionable, and maintain social status have us trapped like hamsters on a treadmill.

  This concept of a “hedonic treadmill” was first put forward by psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell to refer to the process by which humans experience short-term mood shifts from external events but then quickly return to a set point, or baseline, for happiness. That’s why we experience the initial thrill when buying a new pr
oduct. As Derren Brown writes in his book Happy,

  I desire at the time of writing, the 6th incarnation of the Apple Macintosh internet-enabled smart telephone but I know it won’t really make me any happier. After a short while, roughly equivalent to the time it takes me to explore its new features and get used to its new shape and weight, I will feel exactly the same about it as I do about my current one. Clearly, Apple know this and keep developing new models at such a pace that will make my non-ownership of the newest and best painfully obvious to me, adding a negative reinforcement to the process. There is the pleasure of the new model and the displeasure of knowing mine does not have certain features being enjoyed by everyone else. How pathetic.

  Happiness is not the same thing as self-esteem. Researchers have found that people can have high self-esteem and be unhappy, or be happy and have low self-esteem. Perhaps unsurprisingly, studies have found that social media has a negative effect on self-esteem. As people compare and gauge their material status with others online, they begin to feel dissatisfied with where they are in the social hierarchy. Exposure to Instagram accounts where users flaunt their luxury goods, for instance, frequently creates a negative social comparison and lowers the self-esteem of the person browsing.

  According to Tim Kasser, who has spent thirty years studying the psychology of materialism, “What research has shown in literally dozens of studies is that the more that people prioritize materialistic values, the less happy they are, the less satisfied they are with their lives, the less vital and energetic they feel, the less likely they are to experience pleasant emotions like happiness and contentment and joy, the more depressed they are, the more anxious they are, the more they experience unpleasant emotions like fear and anger and sadness, [and] the more likely they are to engage in the use of substances like cigarettes and alcohol.”