The smartphone — this is your brain on drugs
The dreads and dangers of abstract thinking are a big reason why we now all like to stay so busy and bombarded with stimuli all the time.
David Foster Wallace
In his excellent essay on Infinite Jest, Kevin Griffith expands on on the idea of technological monoculture; it is not just an exploration on the psychic life of individuals, nor the broader artistic output of society, but an unpacking of the fastidious march towards peak economic productivity. The feedback loop between economic efficiency and technological change is sealed and unceasing. The inevitability of creative destruction and structural unemployment is rarely questioned now that the pace of lasting change has moved from generational shifts in working life to something happening before our eyes. What once seemed like geological time has been compressed and, as such, has been cast in a virtuous light.
Technological change that might be deleterious for society is seen as virtuous because it creates wealth. We champion the ubiquity of smartphones, wait with bated breath for Virtual and Augmented Reality, and applaud the terminus of another career choice. Experts are dime-a-dozen, and most of us have genuinely plausible visions of the future. Yet the consistency and predictability of this change creates a handy frame of reference for churning out opinions that aren’t prescient, they are banal chatter — the clear water is thick as Frank O’Hara wrote in Mayakovsky — and we are marvelling at the quicksand that is now up to our thighs.
The reason for this is simple: technology has become so much more personal and entertaining. When it isn’t promising to connect us, it is promising to make our lives easier, and both of these are intensely and perversely isolating. The natural conclusion to this is never leaving the house: entertainment, work, education, shopping, bureaucracy, and transport all come to us. This is the cold heart of the consumer internet revolution —it is about the worship of the individual. There is no relationship that can compete with the rich infinity of the internet, no daily conversation that is more engaging than a group chat with photos, GIFs, and links.
The immediacy of the internet and entertainment is profoundly isolating, we are alone together, and, with that, the empathy deficit in society seems to be growing. In her excellent Book, Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle has documented profound impairments in the development of empathy in children as a result of the ubiquity of devices and online communication. In adults, too, there is a marked loss of empathy as online communication gives the “illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship”. This erosion in empathy has been a long time coming. Technological monoculture as it pertains to economic efficiency has armies of euphemisms to describe job losses and the death of industries. What might be the most cataclysmic blow a family experiences, can be easily described as restructuring, rightsizing, or the realignment of objectives. Basic income seems to be an attractive solution to the creative destruction of technology, but in a sense it is the same as putting all the cart horses in the early 20th century out to pasture. It is a dehumanizing process where the vocational richness — the broad range of skills and aptitudes than enliven our society — is smoothed over.
Luckily we have the soothing distraction of technology to distract us from and lure us into the coming homogenous orthodoxy of society. Operant conditioning and the brain stimulation reward function form a powerful preoccupation. The death of conversation and its intermingling of contentious opinions is a catastrophe and not just this generation’s “get off my lawn!”. It is far easier to fall into the warm embrace of entertainment, rather than grapple with hard questions of self and society. Netflix and chill, or the lazy scroll through an Instagram feed, is not fertile ground for democratic agitation or utilitarianism, it is the wellspring of apathy and, eventually, nihilism.
Technology is not inherently misanthropic, and perhaps it’s equal parts a desire to deepen human connections and a desire to avoid hard existential questions that we seek it’s powerful forces of distraction. Furthermore, we do want to make sense of our lives, and the heightened awareness of the world and our social networks might seem like a shortcut, or certainly a placeholder.
As a recent study has shown, we are hard-wired to make sense of the world: “sense-making is a drive to simplify our representation of the world”. Social media is excellent as a context-machine — we are grouped according to provenance, education, and a myriad other location- and interest-based parameters. The sense-making is done for us; confirmation bias and information avoidance are features of social media, not bugs. The sense-making trap set for us goes beyond Chomsky’s fears of media concentration and control, because we create a virtual prison for the mind that is reinforced by our narrowing interests and confirmation bias and then guarded by machine-learning.
Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil. There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides.
John Stuart Mill
Partisanship in politics is a natural outcome of the silo system of social media and information avoidance on the internet, and it is now on steroids as a result. As we sequester ourselves with like-minded individuals — through online groups and the follow/follower system — we are less likely to voice contentious opinions, and the rigidity of partisanship is unchallenged. This is an insidious process and has all sorts of traps for those who do buck the trend: unfollowing, blocking, shaming, bullying etc. There are conventions of language, too: politically correct terms that are more in line with the above euphemistic expressions of economic efficiency than they are terms to ameliorate discrimination. Indeed, as David Foster Wallace wrote in his essay Tense Present: “There’s a grosser irony about Politically Correct English, This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact — in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself — of vastly more help to conservatives and the u.s. status quo…”
To return to sense-making, this directly from the study mentioned above:
Such reference-dependence can explain why we find stimuli aversive when they are surprisingly difficult to make sense of (e.g., blurry images or text, mis-spellings, or even grammatical errors). Dependence on expectations appears to be required to capture the fact that, in a museum, we derive no pleasure or pain from the blank walls between paintings because we don’t have any expectations that sense is to be found in these expanses. Likewise, the feeling that there is sense to be made, but we are unable to make it, can be agonizing, as exemplified by people who fruitlessly ruminate about key events in their lives, in a futile effort to make sense of them..
Place a mechanism which can provide an adequate reference-dependence pathway to sense-making, and endow it with brain stimulation reward functions, and you’ve got a mesolimbic pathway to not only addiction but to a state of hyper-selfish denial where all the world’s information and entertainment leads into the palm of your hand.
Like the doomed characters in Wallace’s novel, we all have Infinite Jest playing on repeat, and perhaps it is slowly killing our democracies, our planet, and hollowing out our inner lives. For Kevin Griffith the novel is part of the answer for making meaning of our lives, and Sherry Turkle makes an excellent case for conversation and solitude to develop a well-adjusted sense of self. David Foster Wallace gave us a work of prescient genius that is an ongoing reminder that we are more than MAUs, page impressions, or the product being sold, and our lives have meaning far beyond the scope of big data and artificial intelligence.
’Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die.
David Foster Wallace
