John T. Hamilton

To be sure, countless appliances, devices and gadgets, along with a vast repertoire of platforms and services, have greatly reduced the time and effort required to perform our jobs and realize our projects. An ever-increasing amount of what we wish to accomplish or acquire can be fulfilled with ease and efficiency, through channels that are nearby and accessible, and in ways that ideally suit our needs and accord with our personal agenda and schedules. In our overburdened lives, any opportunity to save time, effort and energy is held to be a value that hardly needs justification. When given the choice between an easier and a more difficult way of doing what we urgently need or desire, the preference is perfectly clear. The expectation that our chores, errands and tasks should be completed with minimal difficulty and frustration, that goods and services should be available on call, that delivery should be quick and gratification almost instantaneous has become prerequisite for our well-being. By extension, convenience becomes a moral concern that addresses ideals of equity and justice. Every person everywhere should have equal access and equal opportunity to thrive—physically, mentally, emotionally and financially. No one should be excluded from resources and services; no one should be unnecessarily inconvenienced.

From a historical perspective, digitization can be regarded merely as augmenting the capacity for the kinds of convenience that machines and technologies have always afforded: the promise to reduce effort and labor, the opportunity to save time, the ability to travel vast distances quickly and comfortably, the benefits of bringing the far near. Accordingly, there has been no lack of prophets and evangelists who champion the advantages of new tools and media which furnish exciting means for scientific advancement, for social connection and collaboration, for sharing and disseminating novel ideas and opinions, for granting everyone an equal voice in democratic conversation and making institutional power transparently accessible. By comparison, older forms of physical work and engagement seem like unnecessary burdens: inexpedient, suspicious and grossly inconvenient.

Nonetheless, although opting for the path of least resistance may well be logical if not innately biological, there lurks a palpable disdain for taking the easy way out. It is commonly feared, for example, that convenient technologies breed incompetence, that surrendering more and more tasks to automation may detract from our capacity to intervene. Routine abstractions, shortcuts and acronyms may function as time- and labor-saving devices, yet they also seem to prevent new ways of recognizing and responding to complex issues. Computational thinking is said to reduce intellectual activity to unreflective calculation, while free moral judgment is delegated to algorithmic processes. As big data makes nuanced arguments superfluous, artificial intelligence threatens to replace human cognition and cause it to atrophy. Even when it is affirmed that we seek convenience only for tasks considered to be of less value, there remains the serious risk that, when practically everything can be achieved with convenience, everything may come to be depleted of substantial value.

Perfectly content with what digital technology can do for us, we tend to shy away from asking what it is doing to us. We acknowledge yet generally ignore the ramifications of constant, ubiquitous surveillance, we complacently accept the commodification of our personal data, and we cope, however begrudgingly, with the exhaustion that invariably occurs with restless multi-tasking and super-human speed. In our war on idleness, we become burnt out. More broadly, although touted as an engine for global exchange, communication and democratization, data capitalism appears only to exacerbate social inequalities and promote exploitation. Analogously, the digital economy adduces many environmental repercussions: the unsustainable mining of rare minerals, the energy depletion caused by round-the-clock consumption. Such downsides are concomitant with the demand for alleviating work, ensuring accessibility and promoting leisure; and may be inherent in the very concept of convenience.

Derived from convenire, the Latin verb for coming together, convenientia denotes an “agreement” between two parties or a “conformity” between two poles, the way one side fits with another. In the modern sense of convenience, limits are readily overcome to facilitate the passage from subjective intentions to objective goals, to smooth the route from Here to There. On the one hand, the effect is liberating: By eradicating obstructive limits, there seem to be no more strict distinctions, no more hierarchies of power, no more exclusions. At least potentially, everything is accessible to everyone. On the other hand, however, by removing bothersome constraints, convenience threatens to eliminate the very limits that define horizons of meaning. When everything and everyone is but a click away, we come to expect that we can attain what we want whenever we want without physically going anywhere, without leaving the convenient comforts of home. Whatever There we may imagine turns out to be already Here, which means there is nowhere left to go, no specific place or transcendent ideal that would make one’s existential position meaningful.

Multiculturalism and Reactionism may account for the political polarization that defines today’s brave new world and seems to represent a complete reorientation of the traditional Left and Right. Transformed by a lust for convenience, both sides seem to expect total conformity, complete agreement, either by entertaining otherness superficially like a tourist or protecting one’s homeland from outside incursion. Because modern technology has made convenience itself convenient, we seem to have reached the point where saving time and energy is not simply a wish but rather an emphatic demand, where the avenue taken is expected to convene perfectly with the planned destination, with any conflicting view discredited as annoyingly valueless, a merely technical problem in need of a technical solution, as if otherness could be swiped off the screen with the flick of a finger. When shortcuts are favored and patience short-fused, sober debate yields to heightened rhetoric, courtesy slips into fits of road rage, and with magical networking technology, impulsive tweets race along a superhighway, traveling the globe with exorbitant alacrity and damaging impact. When convenience becomes the ruling criterion, when easy is always better and easiest is best, disagreement must be dispatched as quickly as possible, without hold-ups, without hurdles, without difficulties.

Today’s culture of unparalleled convenience may try to convince us that our lives can be lived without disappointment and frustration, without losing time or even without loss itself. Yet such a worldview would appear to be driven by a rather shallow and anaemic understanding of what life is, if only because we can only be who we are with difficulty, that is, inconveniently, by taking the arduous, painstaking detours of what we are not.