The commoditization of the "other"

A child learns to see faces before she learns to walk. By eight weeks, she tracks her mother's expressions with urgent attention, reading emotional weather patterns that will guide her through a lifetime of human connection. This capacity for recognition—not just of features but of personhood itself—represents one of our species' most remarkable achievements. We are born to see each other as irreducibly real.

Yet something has shifted in the quality of that seeing. The headlines tell a story our ancestors would find bewildering: young men who murder classmates as casually as deleting files, confidence artists who bilk retirement funds without apparent remorse, cyber-criminals who drain a grandmother's retirement savings through elaborate deceptions, killers who treat human lives like items in a video game inventory. These aren't mere criminals—they're people who seem fundamentally unable to perceive others as fully real.

The Great Flattening
Consider how we encounter most people today: as voices on customer service calls, profiles on dating apps, avatars in digital spaces, faces glimpsed through car windows in traffic. We interact with more humans than any generation in history, yet most of these encounters reduce complex beings to single functions—service provider, content creator, obstacle to our progress.

Even our face-to-face interactions have become increasingly transactional. The restaurant server exists to deliver food and validate our dining experience. The grocery clerk processes our purchases. The sports stadium transforms us into consumers of entertainment, while athletes become commodities we cheer for or against based on their utility to our team's success. Online, we become sources of attention and clicks for others, while they become content for our consumption.

This isn't accident but design. Consumer culture requires us to view everything, including people, through the lens of utility. We have become commoditized to one another—valued not for our irreducible humanity but for what we can provide in the endless exchange of goods, services, and attention. The grocery clerk becomes a checkout function. The Uber driver becomes a transportation service. Even our friends become curated feeds of carefully selected updates.

The very language of business seeps into how we think about human relationships. We "network" rather than befriend. We "leverage" connections. We speak of "human resources" and "content creators" and "end users"—terms that transform complex beings into productive units in someone else's system.

The Empathy Recession
When people become functions, empathy struggles to take hold. It's difficult to feel genuine concern for a customer service representative when you've been trained to see them as an obstacle between you and your desired outcome. It's hard to recognize the full humanity of someone whose primary identity, in your experience, is their utility to your needs.

This flattening creates a peculiar form of blindness. We begin to see others the way a video game trains us to see non-player characters—as sophisticated but ultimately hollow entities that exist to advance our personal storyline. They have scripted responses, predictable behaviors, but no inner life that truly matters.

The most troubled among us take this logic to its horrifying conclusion. If other people aren't quite real—if they're more like complex automatons than conscious beings deserving of care—then manipulating or even destroying them becomes a technical rather than moral problem. The serial killer often describes victims in mechanical terms. The con artist speaks of marks as if they were particularly challenging puzzles to solve.

The Screen Between Us
Digital mediation has accelerated this process dramatically. When most of our human contact happens through interfaces designed to maximize engagement rather than genuine connection, we lose practice in the subtle art of recognizing full personhood. The algorithm shows us people as content—entertaining, useful, or ignorable.

Social media teaches us to experience others as performers rather than persons. We see their highlight reels, their political opinions, their carefully curated presentations of self. The messy, contradictory, vulnerable reality of human existence gets filtered out. People become brands, even to themselves.

The Recovery of Presence
Yet the solution isn't to retreat from modernity but to recover older ways of seeing within it. Some people somehow maintain their capacity to recognize full humanity in others, even in our flattened culture. They're the ones who remember the grocery clerk's name, who see the person behind the customer service script, who treat digital interactions as contact between real humans rather than transactions between functions.

This capacity can be cultivated. It requires what might be called sacramental attention—the practice of looking for the irreducible person hiding within every role, function, and digital avatar. It means remembering that the driver cutting you off in traffic is someone's beloved child, that the difficult customer is struggling with problems you'll never know about, that the person disagreeing with you online is as complex and worthy of regard as you are.

The stakes of this recovery couldn't be higher. In a world where people increasingly encounter each other as functions rather than persons, the capacity for genuine recognition becomes both rare and precious. Those who lose it entirely become dangerous to the rest of us. Those who preserve it become essential guardians of what makes civilization possible: the simple, radical recognition that other people are as real as we are.

***

Discussion Questions

1. Has digital mediation fundamentally changed how we perceive other people's reality, or merely accelerated existing tendencies toward dehumanization?

2. What role does economic pressure play in reducing people to their functional roles, and could different economic structures preserve more space for full human recognition?

3. How do we distinguish between necessary social efficiency (not deeply engaging with every person we encounter) and harmful dehumanization?

4. What practices or institutions in our culture still successfully preserve the recognition of full humanity in others?

5. Is the apparent increase in antisocial behavior real, or are we simply more aware of it due to media coverage and global connectivity?