I believe the soul – by which I mean our essence, the unhackable watermark that separates you from me - is incubated in silence, in the unmediated reaches of consciousness, in the free play of the imagination.
Imagined events, hypothetical arguments, our fear of death and the smell of rain, all these cycle through our minds - a never-ending, free-associating ticker-tape of songs and silliness, outrage and resentment, till death or senility do part us from the voice in our heads that is us.
It plays while we’re taking a walk, or staring into space, or reading a book.
It’s how we get to test out the world – and how we might react to it. It’s how we discover what we believe, and therefore, who we are.
If that’s true, if the inner life is where our identity is forged, it might be time to consider the extent to which we’ve outsourced that work to others.
A quarter century ago, in a book called War of the Worlds, I argued that it was possible to see, in a number of technologies spawned by recent developments in the computer world, an attack on reality as human beings have always known it. A great tinkering had begun, I said, a tinkering that promised to separate us from many of the things that sustained us: the natural world, the physical touch, the direct, unmediated experience. There was no reason to expect we’d handle it well.
In the years that followed billion-dollar tech companies ballooned into trillion-dollar tech companies, screens became ubiquitous, and a large part of the world’s population found itself addicted to the dopamine kick of the cell phone’s ‘ping.’ Computer technologies – ever smaller, ever faster, ever-more invasive – metastasized into every sphere of human endeavor and infiltrated the sanctum of the individual mind.
The analogy is to a wilderness – silent, diverse, teeming with life – going under the backhoe’s blade.
Under the banner of ‘progress’ and ‘inevitability,’ a layer of technologies has been insinuated between us and the world we inhabit, a mediating presence that has the potential to shape us in ways we’re only beginning to understand. In effect, we’re being colonized. Already it’s compromising our resilience, homogenizing our days, undermining our capacity to be in the present moment - to enjoy the unwired task, the undistributed hour. Already it’s undermining sources of pleasure and systems of meaning that sustained us for millennia.
Already – something I witnessed over thirty years of university teaching – it’s compromising our ability to be still, to focus on the problem at hand.
The price is not just psychological, but profoundly political. Close, critical thinking is a martial art. A distracted mind is a vulnerable one, as our current crisis so amply proves. How many Americans today would have the attention span to grapple with the arguments laid out by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in The Federalist Papers, which were first published in New York’s daily newspapers in 1787-88 not for academics or political elites, but for ordinary citizens?
None of which is to say that the new technologies aren’t extraordinarily useful - if they weren’t, none of this would be an issue – only that utility, like convenience or speed, comes at a cost.
So why are our would-be colonizers doing this? Well, they’re not doing it because it’ll make us happier. Or stronger. Or more intelligent. They’re not doing it, in most cases, because it answers some essential need. They’re doing it because replacing “dumb” things with “smart" things will make the dumb things obsolete, create an economy of dependence (otherwise known as addiction) and, incidentally, make them a great deal of money. A very great deal of money.
But there’s something else at work here besides the lust for market share. From its inception, the digital revolution has attracted a certain type of CEO, an individual devoid of humor and humility, supremely removed from the world and its troubles, swaddled in the kind of abstractions only the truly privileged and self-absorbed can indulge. To this kind of individual, messianic, hungry for transcendence (as long as transcendence comes with a fleet of private jets), world-building is a heady business, a business that doesn’t entertain questions.
Do Musk and Zuckerberg know what affects their next generation of toys will have on the human psyche which evolved over millions of years in direct relation to the physical, sensual world? Not a clue. They’re making bank. They’re a half-step from God. What could go wrong?
The answer to that question is all around us. The mediated world is everywhere now, sitting in the restaurant, waiting at the bus stop, walking down the street. Constantly wrenched out of the moment we’re in, distracted by the image, the disembodied voice, the never-ending scroll forever drawing us to the next thing, and the next, we’re learning to endure - and worse, accept as normal - a level of psychic interference that is unsustainable.
You’re tanking up the car on a summer morning when a certain smell reminds you of a dream. Something about your daughter - you were going to tell her something, something important . . . you’ve almost got it . . . and then your phone chimes with a notification.
This static in the brain - the interrupted thought or memory or conversation, the fractured emotional response – has the power to separate us from who we are, which is one definition of madness.
An argument could be made that the predicament we face is inherent in the very nature of technology, which exists to make our lives easier (or did), but hides the fact that each new convenience builds a hunger for more. For millennia, this was all well and good, but the evolution of technology from the moldboard plow to the smart fridge raises some interesting questions. At what point does easier stop being better? At what point does the encroachment on the ecosystem of the mind (sold to us as ‘progress’), begin to enfeeble us like the recliner-bound human characters in Wall-E?
At what point do we wake up to this land grab and begin to reassert our dominion?
Of course some will inevitably argue that things should just be allowed to run their course, that the invisible hand of the market will sort the wheat from the chaff. It’s a happy thought. Alas, anyone who still believes that the free market is actually free, that certain paths aren’t lubricated by capital, smoothed by propaganda – excuse me, advertising – isn’t paying attention.
When it comes to the market, the bias is baked in: whatever doesn’t make money is invisible.
After all, who’s going to advertise going for a walk in the park? Or just looking out the window, thinking your thoughts?
These strike me as legitimate questions: Are we happier or smarter today, for all the extraordinary wizardry at our fingertips? Are our children happier, more confident, more creative? Or are we, to the contrary, exhibiting all the symptoms of social breakdown – increasingly irritable, divided, hunkered down in our interactive bunkers, suffering from epidemic levels of depression, stress, sleeplessness, obesity? This is progress?
If our answer is no, then the next question belongs to Tolstoy: What then must we do?
My answer would be something like a revolution in fashion, a revolution built from a thousand incremental gestures of resistance.
A revolution that devotes itself to reclaiming the territory we’ve lost.
It comes down to this: If our ‘connectedness’ is disconnecting us from the inner life, robbing us of our birthright, why not steal it back?
Going for a no-tech walk is an act of resistance.
Submerging in a novel is an act of resistance.
Asserting the sovereignty of your inner life is an act of resistance.
Maybe even a revolutionary one - the declaration of a new independence.
It won’t be easy – we’re all addicts now to one degree or another – but one thing working in our favor is that it feels good. Once we’ve broken through the initial jitters – the nervousness, the insecurity that comes with being disconnected for a time – a different kind of connection begins to reassert itself, a connection to the people we’re with and the place we’re in. Something we’ve known for millennia. We begin to hear ourselves again. Bit by bit, minute by minute, we’re disenthralled. A joke, a kiss, a bee walking the length of a picnic knife, these are just what they are – uninterrupted except by us.
As are our thoughts.
Mark Slouka writes Thought Salad
I want to add to my thanks for joining us, Mark, that this fine essay has a lyrical quality in its specifics with the closing lines and a breadth (Zuckerberg and Musk--what could go wrong?)-- that reaches far. "A joke, a kiss, a bee walking the length of a picnic knife, these are just what they are – uninterrupted except by us.
"As are our thoughts."
Well-written, beautifully thought out.
I really enjoyed this essay. Thank you for beautifully describing the ache of our time. And for giving us some hope and fire at the end, too.