Primate Change, page 30
The Lion Man is a remarkable sight to behold because so much of us is already there, 40,000 years ago on the ice sheets of northern Europe. This was a society made by hand; social cohesion carved from a mammoth’s tusk.
Just as handmade objects are highly individual, require skill and intelligence to produce and have limited possibilities for distribution, once knowledge, customs, ideas and ways of living can be transferred at distances greater than an arm’s length (visually or through the written word) the possibilities become endless. Instead of having close social connections with only the people in your immediate environment, you can nowadays email someone in another country because you read some of their research, then go there, arrange to meet them, go home, write up the meeting and put it into your book.
The ability of the hand to create this distance between people and ideas seems more important in terms of our evolution than any individual body part might be. Once you have knowledge transfer, the possibilities for biological transcendence begin. This is the point at which the limitations of the body can be treated, enhanced or bypassed because intellect, whether individual or of a group, can work around a particular problem.
It all sounds rather idyllic, and perhaps it is. An idyll in which the body “boldly goes” beyond the supposed sociological limit of being connected to 150 people – basically, a medium-sized tribe. Our hands now do the work of this sociological connection, whether through text, WhatsApp, IM, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or email – our fingertips are always at the rock face of communication, although we are fool enough to think that it is our mouths. And here there might emerge a peculiar mismatch disease – handmade, it seems.
The cognitive work of modern life is as easy to miss as it is substantial. It is difficult for city dwellers to imagine a world in which strangers are a novelty. For most, they are the majority of those we encounter and our way of coping is to behave in public as if we were alone in private.
The media environment in which we exist is one which is equally overwhelming. We evolved in small groups, gangs in which there was not a great deal of cognitive dissonance, without competing political world views, contradictory religions or alternative ways of being. As a result, we lack loyalty and the strong social bonds that would have been an inevitable outcome of tribal and manual relations, as would a world view shared by everyone in the group. We are, on the other hand, overwhelmed by choices and often conflicting ideas and views and we have to sift through great quantities of information.
In the Anthropocene, though, our hands seem just as taxed and overworked as our attentional faculties. There is always something for them to do. Our hands suffer from overuse; if we are not at a computer, we are texting, tapping and swiping our phones or tablets. In our spare time, we are gripping and wrestling with console controllers. If you don’t share in these customs (and the numbers suggest there are about 33 million gamers in the UK alone), you are almost certainly surfing the net or using a computer all day, but despite this, our hands are weaker than ever.
Globally, internet use has unsurprisingly risen steeply since the beginning of the century. In 2000, the internet was still getting going with only about 2 billion people regularly online. In 2018, that figure has nearly doubled, with user-percentages well into the nineties in high-income nations. China alone accounts for about 750 million of internet users. The youngest users are the busiest: 70 percent of the world’s youth are regularly online. In the UK in 2018, data tells us that 99 percent of people aged 16–34 are digital natives.^
Those are some busy habits. We are all using our hands nearly all the time and this has led to a new kind of digital morbidity known as RSIs (repetitive strain injuries). These are a whole range of pathologies associated with overuse. Their rise is connected to the shift in ecologies of labour – even in the Industrial Revolution a wide variety of work was still done by hand. No doubt people’s digits were as exhausted as the rest of their bodies, but they were fulfilling a variety of activities which made their hands stronger, more tolerant and gave them better resistance to complaints. How long before our digits refuse to compute?
I clearly remember the excitement when the internet first arrived. I also remember getting my first computer in about 1995, and in 1998, getting dial-up installed at home. This technology has been digital in both senses of the word for decades. Today, it is still dominated by manual input, but the times are changing. We can hail Siri or Alexa from across the room, and as long as we ask, “What’s the weather like today?” we are guaranteed a correct response. However, if we ask them to dim the lights to 60 percent, that becomes an approximation of their success rate.
When I bought my first computer some speech recognition software was included with it. It was clumsy and had to be trained for 4–5 hours, but it nearly worked. Since then, home computing processor power has increased by at least 3,000 percent, but speech recognition seems only marginally better. It has gone from about 97 percent accuracy to perhaps 99 percent; these sound like good numbers, but they mean an error per line and if you try to use them seriously they are frustrating. Nonetheless, the technology is en route and due to arrive soon.
HEY SIRI! WHAT’S RSI?
I had this dialogue with Siri.
“Hey, Siri. What’s RSI?” I asked.
“What’s our Açai? I didn’t find any information over the next few months.”
“What is RSI?”
“It’s 9.53, good morning.”
“No, what… is… R… S… I…?”
“I couldn’t find any information for Our S I.”
“WhatisRSI?”
“I couldn’t find any information for rice eye.”
“Whattttt. is. RSI?”
“OK. Here’s some information.”
Siri then loaded the Wikipedia page for the mismatch disease that is the scourge of occupational health practitioners. The above interaction is hardly likely to inspire fear that the machines are about to take over, but these Siris and Alexas will be nothing if not quick learners. The machines are coming, but in the meantime, it’s still all down to our hands and they are not happy.
RSIs are a set of diseases that you, or someone you know has suffered from. A repetitive strain injury affects almost everyone at some point in their lives and can strike at any age. It affects the muscles, tendons and soft tissues of the hand and is associated with repetitive work, excessive vibration, compression and exertion (especially high-intensity activity) – usually the result of a sustained pose or awkward working position.
Before we had computers – and this is something every schoolchild is aware of, particularly at exam time – an RSI might simply have been writer’s cramp from holding a pen too long, a condition that our Italian friend Bernardo Ramazzini noticed in 1713 when he wrote about scribes who had the condition. Keyboards and mice are particular culprits, but typists and factory hands also suffered, along with musicians and sports people. In the past, RSIs were rare; today they cost UK employers in the region of £500 million a year in lost productivity – with six people a day leaving their jobs because of them.^
As many as three out of five sedentary workers in Sweden are affected, as well as up to 40 percent of Dutch university students. Across the board, women are affected by the disease more than men as noted in a report prepared for The Robens Centre for Health Ergonomics European Institute of Health & Medical Sciences.^
It is not understood why particular RSIs develop in some people and not others; the associations are mighty strong, though. The symptoms include pain, aching or tenderness, stiffness, throbbing, tingling or numbness, weakness and cramp. Circulation is disrupted and the muscles in the hand, wrist or arm are strained, causing inflammation. In extreme cases, symptoms can last for years or become permanent. Writers are known to complain of the pain of writing, but some take it to extremes1.
Arthur Munby (1828–1910) was a poet and a lawyer, but is famous today as a diarist who recorded, among other things, his fascination with working-class women. He walked the streets to converse with them, recording their stories and observing their ways, clothes and habits. He often compared his own plump, soft white hands with those of his subjects. He noted in his journal on 21st August 1860 how a subject’s right hand appeared to be “a large red lump, upon her light-coloured frock; it was very broad and square & thick – as large and strong as a sixfoot bricklayer… The skin was rough to the touch” whereas his own appeared “quite white and small by the side of hers.”^
Like our strained and jangling wrists, their nerves twanging in pain, that was a working hand. Munby’s pale and pudgy digits were as much a sign of class as the stooping backs and the grey faces of the factory workers.
There is also the case of the novelist George Eliot, whose odd hands have been the subject of biographical debate for generations. She was said to have possessed a right hand that was large and robust, supposedly a result of having spent much of her youth churning butter. It is not important whether or not she had such a hand (of course she didn’t), but why should the question matter? Perhaps because so many
Victorian codes of dress meant that apart from the head and hands, the body usually remained covered, especially women’s bodies. Hands also seem as indicative of a life as the shape of a body or the lines on a haggard face, but hands in particular articulate the marks of a working life with greater eloquence than physiognomy can. After all, the hands do all the work.
While it is inevitable that the bone density and muscle mass in a favoured hand will be greater than in the other, the difference will not be noticeable; people do not grow absurdly large hands because they have churned some butter or, as in the case of the gentleman observed by Sherlock Holmes, wielded a carpenter’s hammer. Championship tennis players have spent their entire career favouring one arm and one hand to stratospheric excess, but after a gladiatorial Centre Court final when Andy Murray goes to shake the hand of, say, the Princess Royal, she doesn’t lurch back in horror at a proffered arm that looks like a paella pan wearing a sweatband. That’s because although the forearm of most champion tennis players is noticeably larger on one side than the other through training, the hand is not. It’s not possible to enlarge a hand in the same way as the muscles of the forearm. Despite 30 years of daily training, it is a dense, muscular, but normal-sized hand.
Now so many of us suffer from RSIs a question emerges: is it because our hands are weaker than those of previous generations? Bone density scans suggest this is the case, but because RSIs affect the soft tissues of the hand, wrist and arm, they leave practically no trace in the fossil record. We do know that early humans engaged in many repetitive and high-load activities, more so than modern humans, such as scraping animals’ hides, as well as making and using stone tools, but the strength of their intrinsic muscles was certainly greater, too. We know this from the bone scans of pre- and post-agricultural women, both of whom had bones much stronger than Olympic rowers today.
What about manual labourers of the 19th century? If William Dodd is to be believed, a Victorian child labourer was less likely to have any fingers at all, “young children are allowed to clean the machinery, actually while it is in motion; and consequently, the fingers, hands and arms, are frequently destroyed in a moment.”^
From 1839–40 Manchester Royal Infirmary, one of the few places that kept data, recorded 57 amputations of feet and hands in that region alone. Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class also recounts some horrid accidents in which children either lost a hand or died from the resulting complications.
We know that hands were so inherent a part of factory work during the period that it became the collective name for the workers themselves. But this applied equally to pieceworkers, too. While lace workers and matchbox makers, for example, were less likely to lose their hands in their work, they still worked with their hands all the time, and nowhere can I find reference to anything resembling an RSI. Even as the cascade of Factory Acts were passed during the period, it was more likely that new activities had to be found for the idle hands.
Despite constant use, our hands seem weaker than those of previous generations. While there are no bone density scans for the working Victorians, there is little doubt that the range of manual work that was normal for the majority of the population would have meant that they had more muscle and bone than we have today. Instead we work at computers all day, then at night we game or double-screen (watch TV while fiddling with a phone or a laptop).
Our hands seem as restless as our attention. It’s as though we have become addicted to the limitless dopamine rewards from satisfying curiosity and we don’t know how to let them go. Touching, clicking, swiping and digital manipulation are all an inherent part of this reward system (unlike other parts of our body – even our genitals), the links between the hand and the brain are disproportionately strong.
One of the profound changes we are making to the world in the meantime, (which seems to be driving most technological innovation at the moment) is that we seem to be committing enormous resources to creating an environment in which our hands will no longer be necessary. Siris and Alexas are muscling in on day-to-day tasks such as the creation of to-do lists and reminders, diary entries, sending messages, looking up movie times, adding items to our shopping deliveries; while at the other end of the scale, the dream of the technological future that is fast becoming reality is the driverless car.
For now, hands remain key in interacting with data. With phones and tablets it became possible to touch the software itself, rather than using a mouse or keyboard. And while Apple and Microsoft are both busy (as they have been for years) filing patents for hand gestures, the long game is to get rid of another link in the short chain between the brain and the processor. Facial recognition on newer phones means that our fingerprint will soon be surplus to requirements in verifying our identity. Speech recognition is not far behind.
An update to Windows 10 will add increased support for eye-tracking technology which will allow those with the right hardware to control a mouse, type using an on-screen keyboard and perform simple commands such as playing and pausing video. The software is in its infancy, but it will no doubt gather pace quickly. Digital input will soon become only a secondary mode of interacting with an artificial consciousness.
What all this means is that our hands are in the process of becoming orphaned. And what then? The one thing that modern life has taught us is that our hands do not like to have nothing to do.
In January 2018 I looked about me on a train coming out of central London and noticed that there was no one in the busy carriage not using their phone. “Look at all these phone zombies!”, I thought. I threw my disdainful look about the carriage. At least, I did this for the nanosecond it took me to realize that the only reason I had looked up was because I too had been looking at my phone. Why has this become the norm in the last five years?
It is odd that phones are not ergonomic; they are designed for our pockets and not our hands. Surely our hands are changing as a result of this change in workload?
Today, articles clamour for our attention, claiming the discovery of a new mismatch disease such as “text talon” or “phone claw”, but such prophesies have a long history. During the 1980s there was similar concern about “Nintendo thumb” and around the millennium there was “Blackberry thumb”; but the names never stick. And the reason they don’t is that no distinct pathology emerges. People are referred to clinics and for surgery for phone-related pain, but their numbers are thankfully small. Addicted Instagrammers and obsessive Tweeters may suffer from scrolling thumb, but there are only a small minority with very serious habits.
In the 1980s and 1990s, how many people used Nintendos and other consoles too much? I’d imagine quite a few, perhaps 1–2 percent of the population. But compare this with phone use for which the numbers are huge. Yet where is the epidemic?
Because phones aren’t ergonomic, there is no right way to hold one. It’s just like the kinds of writer’s cramp that strikes exam candidates: once your hand hurts, it’s time to rest it for a bit. More than anything, RSI of any kind – be it from knitting, sewing, working a loom or sharpening a flint – means your hand needs a break. These symptoms arise from doing too much of a specific activity. The rise in cases of RSI is really connected to the way our working patterns have changed in the last 20 years.
Many of us are now mobile workers, who use time and opportunity to work a bit more on whatever is at the top of the priority list. The latest figures published by the Health and Safety Executive suggest that RSI affects 0.0073 percent of people, up from 0.006 percent five years ago; these are people who have sought treatment. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in the US estimates disease rates of 7 percent, and according to them RSI accounts for about 50 percent of work-based injuries.^
A decade ago the picture looked a little different. The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy in the UK estimates its cost to employers at £300 million per year, and that 3.5 million working days were lost to the condition in 2006–7.^
These numbers may seem acceptable (£300 million is a drop in the ocean compared with the cost of back pain or type 2 diabetes, for example – or the US GDP of $1.2 trillion), but consider the research, money and resources poured into this problem by physicians, employers and health services over the last couple of decades and the idea of the numbers rising is concerning. It feels like we are breaching capacity. The environment around our hands is changing and we are reaching the point where we all perform the same tasks with computers and phones in both our work and our leisure.
The fact that RSIs cost more than $20 billion a year in workers’ compensation in the US (that they are so expensive to employers and insurers) is also perhaps a key reason why we don’t hear similar complaints from Victorian pieceworkers or factory hands in tales of working life. They were either too busy (and grateful) not having their hands ripped off by machinery, or spending all that they had earned yesterday on today’s subsistence to worry about a bit of pain in their wrists. Neither group had recourse through employers or their underwriters.
