Curious George and the case of the unconscious culture

Modern life is draining of consciousness

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

A tale of the modern world. It was my son’s third birthday party, which was Curious George themed. That meant a huge Curious George decal on the wall, some yellow-and-red balloons, along with Curious George toys and books for presents. And of course, there were little party favors for the kids to take home. Into which we had planned to put Curious George stickers from a set we had ordered on Amazon.

Making the party favors the night before, my wife, with an appropriately curious look on her face, called me over while distributing the stickers.

“I can’t explain it, you just have to see it.”

Reader, this is what I saw.

At first, I had a laughing fit. Not only were many of them hilarious, imagine if we had actually handed them out! We’d have been the talk of the town, forever the people who gave “Bi-curious George and the closet” stickers to toddlers. Who, I wonder, would have gotten assault-rifle George? Little Lilly?

Perhaps, one might speculate, the stickers were hard for the company to catch because Curious George has always been a bit edgy for a modern figure. Somehow the series has survived intact without cancelation or updating, but in the first book, which is still extremely popular, George gets lured into a trap, captured, and taken from an idyllic existence in Africa by the suspiciously colonialist Man with the Yellow Hat.

George is rowed out to a waiting offshore ship, cheerily shanghaied from his homeland (note the big game rifle casually slung over the shoulder).

Later, after meeting with civilization, George smokes a pipe, causes general trouble, is put in a literal prison and has to escape via balloons, all before ending up at his “new home” at last: another prison in the form of a zoo.

Of course, the series has modernized since. Later books, of which there are many, studiously avoid mentioning how George actually got here, nor have ever explored if he misses his jungle home, and certainly have never delved into whatever venture initially brought The Man with the Yellow Hat to Africa to pull George from his verdant world.

The stickers are therefore far beyond any bounds of even early Curious George. So how did they come to be?

Well, I can first give you the proximal causes I deduced: the company is Chinese, and it produces a lot of stickers for all sorts of intellectual property (almost certainly without permission, I doubt Houghton Mifflin is signing off on these). They care not a whit for why Americans need stickers about superheroes or fairy tales or kids’ books, and so someone in China automated the process. The resultant stickers (it was a set of dozens) are a mix of either being AI-generated or, alternatively, a lesser form of algorithmic generation, like merely scrapping blindly from the web. Some dumb procedure searched Google and ripped off the images and the set got sent, without overview, to the whirring sticker machines.

But what about ultimate causes? What’s the real reason?

For me, this was a perfect example of a creeping high strangeness I’ve noticed in the 21st century. A strangeness I don’t remember from my youth, the world of the 90s and early 2000s. Funnily inappropriate Curious George stickers are merely one instance, a symptom of something larger.

Occasionally, this growing high strangeness will creep through and you will find products that look like they were designed by the insane, the unhinged, the mindless. One senses that there was no conscious human behind them. Just like these Curious George stickers, because if there were, the mistake would have been caught. They are the result of what happens when culture is generated unconsciously.

I’m certainly aware that, depending on political orientation, some might say “It’s actually because of late capitalism” or “It’s actually because of offshoring jobs,” and maybe both those are true. But it seems to me the more fundamental shift is that, at every economic and social scale, the workings of our conscious minds play less of a role. The growing high strangeness I sense is that culture is draining of human consciousness, and therefore of sense itself.

Back when I started this newsletter, I would occasionally receive replies to the emails themselves (rather than as comments here). Just little musings or reactions. I still receive such replies, but a chunk have been completely drained of consciousness. They seemingly come from real people's emails, but ones often suffering from, well, confused circuits. I’m pinged back by replies like “I’m thankful for your message. Let’s keep in touch!” or “Don’t hesitate to reach out, Thank you!”—replies that make no sense in the context of what was sent.

Once made explicit, consciousness drainage appears everywhere. Go under any viral social media post to find replies written in the bland uncanny valley of the inhuman.

Have you tried to talk to anyone on the phone at a major company in a while? It’s nigh impossible. All of us listening to Muzak as we wait to reach some tiny scrap of remaining human consciousness within some great machine that is plodding along by itself, often in ways that ape conscious behavior but are really just statistical approximations, and so go pear-shaped, throw oddities, surface up spindles of weirdness jutting into our everyday reality.

If I picture the last three hundred years as a montage it blinks by on fast-forward: first individual artisans sitting in their houses, their deft fingers flowing, and then an assembly line with many hands, hands young and old and missing fingers, and then later only adult intact hands as the machines get larger, safer, more efficient, with more blinking buttons and lights, and then the machines themselves join the line, at first primitive in their movements, but still the number of hands decreases further, until eventually there are no more hands and it is just a whirring robotic factory of appendages and shapes; and yet even here, if zoomed out, there is still a spark of human consciousness lingering as a bright bulb in the dark, for the office of the overseer is the only room kept lit. Then, one day, there’s no overseer at all. It all takes place in the dark. And the entire thing proceeds like Leibniz’s mill, without mind in sight.

We might cheer at the lack of missing fingers, but at what point does the removal of consciousness drain the world not just of meaning, but of sense? For consciousness drainage is happening all the time, everywhere, in every process, ever accelerating.

Another example: I eventually had to stop using my Chase credit card because it continually declined transactions for no reason. A recurrent problem, I called the company many times to tell them to stop putting holds on my accounts for obviously valid purchases, like groceries in the zip code where I live. Each time I was told it would never happen again. Each time it did. Eventually it became clear they had no control over it. Fraud decisions were made by an AI, you see, and AIs are mathematical black boxes. Inexplicable. Chase’s financial fraud AI, some internal kami-like spirit, had decided it didn’t like my card. And there was no way they could fix it because no one at the company had the power to reach in (digitally) and re-wire the damn thing. Probably not even the people who trained it.

So now I only use a debit card, because that’s what you’re forced to do in a culture where not just “technical debt” accumulates but “unconscious debt” does as well.

In a cosmic irony, the running joke of the Curious George books is that George is fundamentally disconnected from the world around him. The Man with the Yellow Hat tries to rein him in, teach him, tell him ahead of time what to do and how to act, but George, well, George is a curious little monkey. And curious little monkeys get into trouble.

Yet for all his constant trouble finding it’s not his curiosity that’s really the problem. No, George gets into trouble because he doesn’t actually understand the systems of the world around him. Despite his hapless ignorance, everything works out. All the stories have happy endings, if only because George is god-tier lucky. It is authorial intervention alone that saves him from being a wandering idiot constantly burning down forests and destroying heavy machinery and shattering priceless artifacts.

Did you know, across all the books, Curious George never speaks? He can’t, you see. He’s a monkey. George has no language, no higher cognitive abilities. He displays no continuity, and cannot learn from his mistakes. And so the whole modern world—his museum trips, his visit to the candy factory, his fire engine adventures—is forever an exercise in high strangeness to him.

And now, I guess, it is for us too. We’ve all become Curious George, primates living amidst alien machinery far from our homelands.