Magic, dissected
I didn’t start off well with Jason Benlevi’s Too Much Magic, a 2011 book subtitled “Pulling the plug on the cult of tech: Secrets they won’t tell you about your digital life.”
I should have known better with a sensationalist title like that. I’m only a few chapters in, and much of the early material takes a predictable us-versus-them stance that panders to the disgruntled nostalgic. It feels like he’s just whining about kids these days, (really, though, his beef should be with marketers these days) and it’s unfortunate, because underneath the chagrin he actually has some good points about how so many of our interactions today are mediated by technology that we don’t even think about.
Benlevi’s not the first to mourn the common scene of a couple, on a date, both looking at their phones and not each other. I’ll give him that—it is pretty pathetic. And his point isn’t just that it’s sad how these people aren’t just getting it on or whatever, it’s that they’re training themselves to view the world primarily through the information that filters through their phones.
The bitterness Benlevi expresses about this is downright distracting, though, and turns into a “Wake up, sheeple!” kind of message that struck me as obnoxious. In later chapters, which I’ve so far just skimmed, he’ll get into his meatier argument, which is that this gadget dependency comes too often at the price of consumers’ private data—something large corporations stand to profit from.
I don’t think he’s wrong about this, though I do wish he’d spared the hyperbole. He paints technology consumers as mindless souls, as though iPads were like modern slot machines and its users are just feeding in quarters. But I don’t think that’s what draws people to things like, say, Facebook. I think the drive to participate on sites like that really is based on a human instinct to seek out social interaction. Does anyone, honestly, sign up for Facebook because they’re interested in the targeted ads? I’d argue it’s because, for some bizarre reason, people seem to like staying in touch with each other.
And yet. It’s important to remember—and I think this is part of what Benlevi actually is getting at—that any web interaction is a mediated one. Really, this is by definition: you aren’t connecting directly with that other person, you’re doing it through the medium of two computers. This doesn’t make the human parts of that connection any less genuine, but it brings a third character into play, a silent presence that’s easy to ignore.
There is a very legitimate comment to make on the importance of distinguishing when you actually are in charge of representing yourself, and when you're just fitting yourself into a creatively-drawn box supplied by a third party. It seems like you can control nearly everything about your profile page on Facebook, but you have to remember that the company has the power to share this data with advertisers—that's the agreement you made in their Terms of Service. You feel connected, of course, but it's at the expense of becoming part of a dataset. When someone at Facebook (or one of their associated advertising groups) wants to create a story out of a particular group of datapoints, suddenly you're more defined by that one datapoint than any of the others you willingly entered. You become a spokesperson for something you may have only accidentally endorsed.
Benlevi’s presumption, which annoyed me, was that the people who embrace technology with this kind of fervor are doing it because they like being told what to do by corporations with big shiny advertisements. Who wants to work on putting together their own life story when you’ve got an auto-generated Facebook Timeline? I don’t think this is true. I think people do want to be the authors of their own lives, and see Facebook as a tool that enables this. And, to some degree, sure—it does enable its users to express themselves. But what not everyone entirely appreciates is that they’re only doing so on Facebook’s terms, not their own.
This isn’t really about technology, in the end. It’s way too easy to demonize technology; I mean, why else would “magic” be used in the title of Benlevi’s book?
Like so many things, this comes down to money, and marketing, and is really a very old and recurring problem we have. The mediated experience is sold as something that benefits people socially. Sign up? Why not! For the skeptical, it's too easy to simply demonize that mediated experience and write it off as something cheaper than reality.
He’s half-right, of course; certain things are cheapened by this, but it's naive to blame the technology itself; even its designers surely didn't set out to isolate people from one another. The “cult of tech”, as Benlevi has it, is just the modern context where this drama is playing out. The real problem is broadly-applied consumerism.
This is the thing that truly cheapens our interactions, after all: the idea that everything, and everyone, has a price. We don't need technology to think this way; however, there certainly are instances where it obscures the underlying mercenary nature of some of these mediated interactions.
Technology isn't soulless. It's just that having a soul means you have to make difficult and strange choices sometimes, and to a society like ours where we instinctively distrust the fringe elements, the hum of commercialism is simply more reassuring and feels easier.
Benlevi is shouting at us to stay awake. This is a valid and worthwhile argument, and the fact that it’s focused on technology is actually misleading. I hope he’ll get into this nuance later in the book; it seemed like he spent the first part trying to incite a mob against the “cult,” which is a bogeyman at best.
