"They’re too young to know that you’re not supposed to admit that the point of being very online is to avoid the self. They say the quiet part out loud. Online life is more “peaceful and calming” because online you’re permitted to be a vegetable. Online you can mute yourself, render yourself an unperson, remove yourself from existence and in so doing avoid the pain of being alive. "
I think what deBoer gets wrong, is that this is not just teenagers. This may describe yours truly (64 years old).
How do we start? By acknowledging that social media isn't the whole problem. It's the phone itself, gateway to the virtual world and dopamine dispensing seducer of innocents. As a trog who never got a cell phone I've watched the world lose its way in pursuit of the shiny object. The machine experience gives constant encouragement to those who want to power down their humanity and get in the binary groove. One silver lining: it has made old people like me aware of a valuable asset: we know there are alternate ways of being because we lived them.
I see the tv as an earlier and possibly more significant culprit. I reread Amusing Ourselves to Death last year and was astonished at how its arguments seem even more relevant today (I have a similar feeling when I revisit DFW’s essays on tv).
But I too am glad I grew up without smartphones or the internet. My parents didn’t even get cable tv until after I went away for college (this was the mid-80s). At the same time, though, I worry about the erosion of my ability to focus for a long period of time and work through difficult writing. So I appreciate reminders like this one about what’s at stake.
I recommend Johann Hari's book "Stolen Focus," the modern day equivalent of Postman's book. Also "World without Mind," by Franklin Foer.
Adults like to point their fingers at social media but the kids are merely aping the behaviors they see in their elders. It's the phone itself, the exit ramp from the world of the senses, the human world.
As a (now retired college professor and psychologist specializing in adolescence, I share your and deBoer's concerns about the degree to which lives are being lived mediated by what's on a screen. But it's not just adolescents. Not long ago I was traveling on Bangkok's Skytrain, and every sing person was either staring at a screen, talking to a screen, or listening to something over their screen. The adults had adopted the same habits. So there's no chance of striking up a conversation with a stranger, because people are permanently plugged in when in public. Sometimes I think that the fact that I refuse to wear earbuds and carry my phone in hand while in public makes me appear strange, threatening even. "Why isn't that man plugged in?"
I'll preface the body of this comment by reiterating how much I enjoy reading Brink's essays. They always give me food for thought, and I spend far more time thinking about how to thoughtfully respond to his essays than I do with any other Substack author's essays.
First. I appreciate Brink's defining the experience machine as something "that sweeps audiences up into the suspension of disbelief and the temporary occupation of virtual worlds". Brink notes that these machines can be both "natural" (as in, intoxicants) and "human-made" (literature, visual arts, etc.). And when Brink speaks of the Roundheads, I think about the Puritans in New England and their restrictions related to presentations of plays, consumption of alcohol, Sabbath observance, dancing, and the like, and I am grateful that I don't have to live in that kind of society. Remember that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. We need diversions from time to time, from the mundane to the ecstatic (to stand outside one's self), and the experience machines play an important role in that.
Second. But just how much time should we spend in experience machines? I agree with Brink that almost all of us (including me!) spend far too much time indulging in screens, and to the degree that I spend excessive amounts of time on them, I neglect more substantive tasks and pleasures, such as cultivating interpersonal relationships, working on projects (both by myself and with others), etc.
I teach in a K-12 public school system, and I can provide anecdotal evidence regarding the damage that excessive social media consumption/time spent on devices has wrought on our children. If I take a device away from a child or teen because of some infraction, they often cry or otherwise throw tantrums, even if they know the device will be returned to them by the end of the period or by the end of the school day. Science teachers whom I work with bemoan the fact that most students have great difficulty working in pairs or in small groups. These teachers noted that they began to notice this change around 2014-2015, and more students seem to have greater issues as each year goes by. My own students remark that reality is more boring than when they're occupied on their devices, and many of them don't go to sleep until midnight or after, then wake up too early, because of their desire to "connect" with their friends online. I've overheard older students talk about how they prefer porn to actual relationships with others because they can get what they want from porn without actually having to risk contracting an STD and/or having weird/strange feelings about a real person. On a more benign level, younger students have told me that they prefer working alone in class (vs. pair work or small group work) as well as their online friends because when you talk with a real person or people, there's a risk that you may have to engage in emotions/conversations that can be emotionally uncomfortable. Who wants that? If I work by myself, I control my environment, and if I interact with online people, I can either choose to delay a response to a question/statement, or not even answer it at all. They feel that this gives them more control over how they relate to others, and this makes them happy. Of course, Brink and the rest of us know that this is ultimately unsatisfying because they aren't really in relation with other people to the degree that our human nature desires.
Third. Brink notes "the cultural shift toward increasing focus on personal identity and self-expression", and that got me thinking about personal identity and self-expression in other eras. To that end, I just ordered the book "Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians" by Tara Isabella Burton: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541789016?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details#customerReviews
I'm interested to see how much things have changed and how much they've stayed the same over the last 500 or so years.
Thanks again, Brink, for your essay. I'd been eagerly awaiting it!
Nozick asked whether we would want to preselect a menu of experiences that others would program for us, and then that’s it. We don’t help write the programming. We don’t get to change our selections as we develop because we’re not developing. Nothing we feel like we’re creating in the experience vat depends on our creative input, nor does it exist as our work in its own right. And what do youth too attached to their cyber gadgets aspire to? Often, content creation!
Granted, much of this content is disposable, too consumerist, too curated or “inauthentic” or whatever. Most of it’s a waste of time. But it’s so seductive because it appeals to our creative aspirations, even as it often cheapens them. Nozick designed his thought experiment so that choosing the vat means choosing to forgo any agency or creativity, and our current cyberlife promises better, even if it often fails to deliver: we can be self-creating beings, even if the self we’re creating is only virtual.
I have a tragic gardening addiction. Tragic because it’s going unfulfilled. I have mild mobility issues, and began gardening in earnest as gentle physical therapy, but I also have bad lung sensitive to outdoor allergens: as I grew up, everyone around me expected asthma to be a solvable problem for anyone with enough means and discipline (means to afford standard asthma care, discipline for fitness and scrupulous hygiene), but that promise is failing me. I’m a bad bougie asthmatic whose asthma isn’t under control. And so, the real-world activities I learned to love are often frustratingly unattainable for me.
I’m musical, and chose, of all instruments, voice. It’s easy to derogate that as a stupid choice in hindsight, but prospectively, everyone, including medicos, encouraged me to sing, to regard my asthma-free body as my real, earnable body: the body I *should* expect to have as long as I put in the work.
But the dumb beast I inhabit didn’t listen. Singing and gardening clash badly for me now: a week including one excludes the other, which is no way to garden, or to practice music. Moreover, the above-replacement number of kids I chose to have with my wonderful spouse keep me stuffed with respiratory bugs that I can’t in good conscience share with other singers, knowing what we now know about respiratory spread.
The choir I miss most, the church choir I joined shortly before lockdown, is also the most vulnerable, a coterie of mostly-ancient amateurs and younger professional singers, many of whom have serious health problems. Until my family catches up on the post-lockdown backlog of childhood “colds” (if it ever does), these people, whom I love, still need my absence more than my presence.
Meanwhile, my kids, whose mom has had to isolate more scrupulously than most, are growing up with screens, rather than community, as their babysitters.
My story isn’t special. It’s just an example of how even people who planned a life well-connected to the physical (singing! gardening! religious community! motherhood!…) might find themselves “wasting” more of their life than they expected diddling around in the virtual antechamber of life instead of “living” it. Those of us who remember Tennyson’s “Ulysses” would likely rather be on Ulysses’ crew than be Telemachus, despite Telemachus’s job being the more important for society. To rust unburnished, as if to breathe were life, remains a painful prospect for me, despite the fact it’s often what I’m doing (especially, as an asthmatic, the breathing part).
Still, not all virtual activity is waste. During lockdown, when virtual choirs briefly became the norm, my horizons for musical participation actually widened. My graduation present to myself was some composing software I’m still nursing along on a wheezy laptop. I took my degree in math, and couldn’t fit the music classes I wanted into my schedule, so I’m officially a rank amateur. And, of the instruments in the virtual music library, the human voice is the most obviously fake. I mostly store my projects as sheet music rather than as “recordings”, but here’s one I “recorded” a while back, and I think it’s… not bad, considering?… (It’s serviceable liturgical music, and it’s short):
Do I dream of someday sharing music I write with a community of people who find it desirable enough to perform? Sure! But realistically, I don’t know when or if that day will be. My best bet may be waiting till my kids are older, then having my husband and I take turns laying down tracks while they’re out of the house. (My lockdown schedule of recording while others sleep proved unsustainable.) Meanwhile, my favorite “experience machine” remains my composing software, a machine I didn’t invent, but which I drive.
“[T]here never was a world for her / Except the one she sang, and, singing, made” (Stevens) remains an aspiration, even for the Very Online. It’s not attainable, at least not for most of us, online or off. Much of the tragedy of technology (medical as well as virtual) remains, not that it’s actually diminishing our agency (most humans throughout history have not had the luxury of very much agency), but that it did less to empower our agency than we were promised.
"As a society, with physical production absorbing ever less of our resources and labor, we devote increasing energies instead to analyzing abstract symbols. Along the way, we’ve lost a lot of our interest in remaking the physical world to serve human purposes"
This seems inevitable, no? I have an article coming soon on the topic of "dematerialization." The power of progress is to do more with fewer and fewer atoms. The smartphone, for instance, swallowed up cameras, pager, phones, radios, flashlights, compasses, music players, calendars, address books...etc. We can continue to thrive as a civilization because we have found ways of dematerializing our needs.
It should be no surprise then, that we increasingly retreat into a dematerialized lifestyle, interacting through the machines we created, perhaps inevitably merging with them. I am unsure what alternative there is, except for halting progress outright.
Yes, the superior relative productivity growth of manufacturing and consequent shift toward services, along with the more recent trend toward digitization, do create the dematerialization dynamic you describe. But that dynamic has been exaggerated by a simultaneous cultural turn against further big changes in our physical environment -- see my essays on loss aversion and the ant-Promethean backlash. I don't regard these cultural trends as part of a happy dematerialization story; I think they're a wrong turn that has deprived us of badly needed technological progress. Because the fact is that we still have massive material challenges: climate change, the negative externalities of our factory farming system, increased vulnerability to pandemics, etc. We may have lost interest in reality, but it hasn't lost interest in us! So I think we need to develop ways to sustain cultural orientation toward problem-solving in the physical world even in the face of the fact that most of us are earning our living doing something else.
This is very much symptomatic of our current culture: we pursue the easy and pleasurable in the short term and forget that what is most significant and fundamental to our happiness and fulfillment is doing difficult things.
In contrast, hiding away and shooting ourselves with dopamine is one sure way to end up numb and unhappy. The internet allows one to escape the difficult in exchange for the easy. It is not so surprising that people, especially children and teenagers who grew up with it, would prefer it over real life.
On the less dark side, the social media thing might be more a matter of the failure to develop desire for "effort" which is related to forced experience with boredom. One thing that jumps out to me about the NYT focus group was the opening graphic where kids filled in the blank "the best thing about being my age is" and they said having friends, learning, discovering your personality.
After that, the focus group questions were about social media, and not about the individuality of the group members or what kind of other things they were interested in. While many are indeed addicted to their screens, we can't know how many teenagers are also following up on idiosyncratic enthusiasms that require patience and effort. (Although I must say that Prof. Fritts' quote about her current students' willingness to Enter The Machine is a little alarming.)
Hope this isn't too dark, but the idea that usually occurs to me along this train of thought is that it'll all self-correct in a couple of generations when things get really, really bad. That idea goes back to some longstanding notions about what happens when a society has the means to deny death. I was in my 30s before I ever attended a funeral or saw a dead body (since it was an actual traditional funeral with viewing hours and an open casket.) I've always considered myself fortunate from the "experience" standpoint (as well as for many other reasons) to have been there when my mother died - an experience that normal people in our society might not have until they're old enough to usher their elderly parents through their last illnesses.
We're actually seeing the second generation of kids brought up with the ability to escape online. I think what everyone is escaping is deep existential dread, but our society no longer knows how to handle this.
Previous generations were essentially hit from all sides at once: child deaths, plagues, wars and threats of invasion, along with all sorts of apocalyptic expectations that had the same psychological effects as climate change has on us. I think they had more resources then we do for getting through life. (Yes, those resources included the "R" word so widely disparaged these days and I don't mean "Reason.") Maybe their main psychological resource was simply the experience that comes with the struggle to ensure food and shelter for their families, something most of us here grew up taking for granted.
We Boomers were having nightmares from all those drop drills, but our parents and grandparents were from the generations who knew how to confront and accept mortality. They were still around for provide traditional cultural and moral scaffolding as we grew up. In the meantime, of course, a lot of that social framework / cultural wisdom lost its immediacy and relevance. Now the challenge is to evolve it anew, which of course brings us back to Brink's questions. Sometimes I think a start might be just getting real about our own mortality, which is really nothing new.
Brink, you make some great points as usual. I have been requiring my students to visit local museums and historic sites and write papers based on the exhibits they see and what they think about them. There responses are eye opening for sure. But I am convinced they are spending too much time online (as are the rest of us) and that it is better for them to get outdoors and physically engage with authentic history. Some moan and groan, but after visiting they seem to come back in a better mood and are more lively. Some of the sites also include significant natural beauty and I think that is good for them too. Interestingly, the main student complaint about the assignment is the hot weather. Which I think is a warning light for the future effects of anthropogenic climate change. Increased heat will likely keep people indoors and make them even more disconnected from the outside natural world. But hey I enjoy making a dent in the situation. Well done essay Brink!
Thank you for this thoughtful piece. I have four children between the ages of 16 and 27 and I have experienced along side them their struggles with social media, climate disaster worry, online and IRL bullying, the allure of retreat, the fun/addictive qualities of gaming online alongside the benefits of an online community during lockdown, and their experimentation with activism, advocacy and scholarship towards positive global outcomes. All four engaged in conversation with me about "how to live a life" as the growing, curious, sensitive beings that they all are. I think that when our youth can identify and verbalize their internal struggles, whether to a parent, peer, teacher, coach or religious leader, it can make the difference between retreat and action. Being in "community with" even just one other older human who can comfort, guide and engage with our young people may be the antidote to the chaos, apathy, and retreat from reality. Teachers can help through bibliotherapy- assigning more hopeful and helpful texts. Michel de la Montaigne's Essays are as relevant today as they were in the late 1500's- selected passages from great thinkers have absolutely positively affected my kids. We as "elders", parents, coaches, guides, friends, teachers are "influencers" -let's not forget our power to guide, help and inspire IRL and vow to offer a counterbalance to the allure of virtual retreat. There may not be any single answer- but I think the concept of counterbalancing and proactively reaching toward young people with compassionate, wise care can help.
"They’re too young to know that you’re not supposed to admit that the point of being very online is to avoid the self. They say the quiet part out loud. Online life is more “peaceful and calming” because online you’re permitted to be a vegetable. Online you can mute yourself, render yourself an unperson, remove yourself from existence and in so doing avoid the pain of being alive. "
I think what deBoer gets wrong, is that this is not just teenagers. This may describe yours truly (64 years old).
How do we start? By acknowledging that social media isn't the whole problem. It's the phone itself, gateway to the virtual world and dopamine dispensing seducer of innocents. As a trog who never got a cell phone I've watched the world lose its way in pursuit of the shiny object. The machine experience gives constant encouragement to those who want to power down their humanity and get in the binary groove. One silver lining: it has made old people like me aware of a valuable asset: we know there are alternate ways of being because we lived them.
I see the tv as an earlier and possibly more significant culprit. I reread Amusing Ourselves to Death last year and was astonished at how its arguments seem even more relevant today (I have a similar feeling when I revisit DFW’s essays on tv).
But I too am glad I grew up without smartphones or the internet. My parents didn’t even get cable tv until after I went away for college (this was the mid-80s). At the same time, though, I worry about the erosion of my ability to focus for a long period of time and work through difficult writing. So I appreciate reminders like this one about what’s at stake.
I recommend Johann Hari's book "Stolen Focus," the modern day equivalent of Postman's book. Also "World without Mind," by Franklin Foer.
Adults like to point their fingers at social media but the kids are merely aping the behaviors they see in their elders. It's the phone itself, the exit ramp from the world of the senses, the human world.
As a (now retired college professor and psychologist specializing in adolescence, I share your and deBoer's concerns about the degree to which lives are being lived mediated by what's on a screen. But it's not just adolescents. Not long ago I was traveling on Bangkok's Skytrain, and every sing person was either staring at a screen, talking to a screen, or listening to something over their screen. The adults had adopted the same habits. So there's no chance of striking up a conversation with a stranger, because people are permanently plugged in when in public. Sometimes I think that the fact that I refuse to wear earbuds and carry my phone in hand while in public makes me appear strange, threatening even. "Why isn't that man plugged in?"
I'll preface the body of this comment by reiterating how much I enjoy reading Brink's essays. They always give me food for thought, and I spend far more time thinking about how to thoughtfully respond to his essays than I do with any other Substack author's essays.
First. I appreciate Brink's defining the experience machine as something "that sweeps audiences up into the suspension of disbelief and the temporary occupation of virtual worlds". Brink notes that these machines can be both "natural" (as in, intoxicants) and "human-made" (literature, visual arts, etc.). And when Brink speaks of the Roundheads, I think about the Puritans in New England and their restrictions related to presentations of plays, consumption of alcohol, Sabbath observance, dancing, and the like, and I am grateful that I don't have to live in that kind of society. Remember that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. We need diversions from time to time, from the mundane to the ecstatic (to stand outside one's self), and the experience machines play an important role in that.
Second. But just how much time should we spend in experience machines? I agree with Brink that almost all of us (including me!) spend far too much time indulging in screens, and to the degree that I spend excessive amounts of time on them, I neglect more substantive tasks and pleasures, such as cultivating interpersonal relationships, working on projects (both by myself and with others), etc.
I teach in a K-12 public school system, and I can provide anecdotal evidence regarding the damage that excessive social media consumption/time spent on devices has wrought on our children. If I take a device away from a child or teen because of some infraction, they often cry or otherwise throw tantrums, even if they know the device will be returned to them by the end of the period or by the end of the school day. Science teachers whom I work with bemoan the fact that most students have great difficulty working in pairs or in small groups. These teachers noted that they began to notice this change around 2014-2015, and more students seem to have greater issues as each year goes by. My own students remark that reality is more boring than when they're occupied on their devices, and many of them don't go to sleep until midnight or after, then wake up too early, because of their desire to "connect" with their friends online. I've overheard older students talk about how they prefer porn to actual relationships with others because they can get what they want from porn without actually having to risk contracting an STD and/or having weird/strange feelings about a real person. On a more benign level, younger students have told me that they prefer working alone in class (vs. pair work or small group work) as well as their online friends because when you talk with a real person or people, there's a risk that you may have to engage in emotions/conversations that can be emotionally uncomfortable. Who wants that? If I work by myself, I control my environment, and if I interact with online people, I can either choose to delay a response to a question/statement, or not even answer it at all. They feel that this gives them more control over how they relate to others, and this makes them happy. Of course, Brink and the rest of us know that this is ultimately unsatisfying because they aren't really in relation with other people to the degree that our human nature desires.
Third. Brink notes "the cultural shift toward increasing focus on personal identity and self-expression", and that got me thinking about personal identity and self-expression in other eras. To that end, I just ordered the book "Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians" by Tara Isabella Burton: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541789016?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details#customerReviews
I'm interested to see how much things have changed and how much they've stayed the same over the last 500 or so years.
Thanks again, Brink, for your essay. I'd been eagerly awaiting it!
Thanks for your insightful comments! I've been thinking I need to get the Burton book.
DeBoer is an outstanding writer.
Nozick asked whether we would want to preselect a menu of experiences that others would program for us, and then that’s it. We don’t help write the programming. We don’t get to change our selections as we develop because we’re not developing. Nothing we feel like we’re creating in the experience vat depends on our creative input, nor does it exist as our work in its own right. And what do youth too attached to their cyber gadgets aspire to? Often, content creation!
Granted, much of this content is disposable, too consumerist, too curated or “inauthentic” or whatever. Most of it’s a waste of time. But it’s so seductive because it appeals to our creative aspirations, even as it often cheapens them. Nozick designed his thought experiment so that choosing the vat means choosing to forgo any agency or creativity, and our current cyberlife promises better, even if it often fails to deliver: we can be self-creating beings, even if the self we’re creating is only virtual.
I have a tragic gardening addiction. Tragic because it’s going unfulfilled. I have mild mobility issues, and began gardening in earnest as gentle physical therapy, but I also have bad lung sensitive to outdoor allergens: as I grew up, everyone around me expected asthma to be a solvable problem for anyone with enough means and discipline (means to afford standard asthma care, discipline for fitness and scrupulous hygiene), but that promise is failing me. I’m a bad bougie asthmatic whose asthma isn’t under control. And so, the real-world activities I learned to love are often frustratingly unattainable for me.
I’m musical, and chose, of all instruments, voice. It’s easy to derogate that as a stupid choice in hindsight, but prospectively, everyone, including medicos, encouraged me to sing, to regard my asthma-free body as my real, earnable body: the body I *should* expect to have as long as I put in the work.
But the dumb beast I inhabit didn’t listen. Singing and gardening clash badly for me now: a week including one excludes the other, which is no way to garden, or to practice music. Moreover, the above-replacement number of kids I chose to have with my wonderful spouse keep me stuffed with respiratory bugs that I can’t in good conscience share with other singers, knowing what we now know about respiratory spread.
The choir I miss most, the church choir I joined shortly before lockdown, is also the most vulnerable, a coterie of mostly-ancient amateurs and younger professional singers, many of whom have serious health problems. Until my family catches up on the post-lockdown backlog of childhood “colds” (if it ever does), these people, whom I love, still need my absence more than my presence.
Meanwhile, my kids, whose mom has had to isolate more scrupulously than most, are growing up with screens, rather than community, as their babysitters.
My story isn’t special. It’s just an example of how even people who planned a life well-connected to the physical (singing! gardening! religious community! motherhood!…) might find themselves “wasting” more of their life than they expected diddling around in the virtual antechamber of life instead of “living” it. Those of us who remember Tennyson’s “Ulysses” would likely rather be on Ulysses’ crew than be Telemachus, despite Telemachus’s job being the more important for society. To rust unburnished, as if to breathe were life, remains a painful prospect for me, despite the fact it’s often what I’m doing (especially, as an asthmatic, the breathing part).
Still, not all virtual activity is waste. During lockdown, when virtual choirs briefly became the norm, my horizons for musical participation actually widened. My graduation present to myself was some composing software I’m still nursing along on a wheezy laptop. I took my degree in math, and couldn’t fit the music classes I wanted into my schedule, so I’m officially a rank amateur. And, of the instruments in the virtual music library, the human voice is the most obviously fake. I mostly store my projects as sheet music rather than as “recordings”, but here’s one I “recorded” a while back, and I think it’s… not bad, considering?… (It’s serviceable liturgical music, and it’s short):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ugzsq_NFkCj3WxrLjOpVAfnqmBEHwa7c/view?usp=drivesdk
Do I dream of someday sharing music I write with a community of people who find it desirable enough to perform? Sure! But realistically, I don’t know when or if that day will be. My best bet may be waiting till my kids are older, then having my husband and I take turns laying down tracks while they’re out of the house. (My lockdown schedule of recording while others sleep proved unsustainable.) Meanwhile, my favorite “experience machine” remains my composing software, a machine I didn’t invent, but which I drive.
“[T]here never was a world for her / Except the one she sang, and, singing, made” (Stevens) remains an aspiration, even for the Very Online. It’s not attainable, at least not for most of us, online or off. Much of the tragedy of technology (medical as well as virtual) remains, not that it’s actually diminishing our agency (most humans throughout history have not had the luxury of very much agency), but that it did less to empower our agency than we were promised.
"As a society, with physical production absorbing ever less of our resources and labor, we devote increasing energies instead to analyzing abstract symbols. Along the way, we’ve lost a lot of our interest in remaking the physical world to serve human purposes"
This seems inevitable, no? I have an article coming soon on the topic of "dematerialization." The power of progress is to do more with fewer and fewer atoms. The smartphone, for instance, swallowed up cameras, pager, phones, radios, flashlights, compasses, music players, calendars, address books...etc. We can continue to thrive as a civilization because we have found ways of dematerializing our needs.
It should be no surprise then, that we increasingly retreat into a dematerialized lifestyle, interacting through the machines we created, perhaps inevitably merging with them. I am unsure what alternative there is, except for halting progress outright.
Yes, the superior relative productivity growth of manufacturing and consequent shift toward services, along with the more recent trend toward digitization, do create the dematerialization dynamic you describe. But that dynamic has been exaggerated by a simultaneous cultural turn against further big changes in our physical environment -- see my essays on loss aversion and the ant-Promethean backlash. I don't regard these cultural trends as part of a happy dematerialization story; I think they're a wrong turn that has deprived us of badly needed technological progress. Because the fact is that we still have massive material challenges: climate change, the negative externalities of our factory farming system, increased vulnerability to pandemics, etc. We may have lost interest in reality, but it hasn't lost interest in us! So I think we need to develop ways to sustain cultural orientation toward problem-solving in the physical world even in the face of the fact that most of us are earning our living doing something else.
This is very much symptomatic of our current culture: we pursue the easy and pleasurable in the short term and forget that what is most significant and fundamental to our happiness and fulfillment is doing difficult things.
In contrast, hiding away and shooting ourselves with dopamine is one sure way to end up numb and unhappy. The internet allows one to escape the difficult in exchange for the easy. It is not so surprising that people, especially children and teenagers who grew up with it, would prefer it over real life.
Very interesting post!
On the less dark side, the social media thing might be more a matter of the failure to develop desire for "effort" which is related to forced experience with boredom. One thing that jumps out to me about the NYT focus group was the opening graphic where kids filled in the blank "the best thing about being my age is" and they said having friends, learning, discovering your personality.
After that, the focus group questions were about social media, and not about the individuality of the group members or what kind of other things they were interested in. While many are indeed addicted to their screens, we can't know how many teenagers are also following up on idiosyncratic enthusiasms that require patience and effort. (Although I must say that Prof. Fritts' quote about her current students' willingness to Enter The Machine is a little alarming.)
Hope this isn't too dark, but the idea that usually occurs to me along this train of thought is that it'll all self-correct in a couple of generations when things get really, really bad. That idea goes back to some longstanding notions about what happens when a society has the means to deny death. I was in my 30s before I ever attended a funeral or saw a dead body (since it was an actual traditional funeral with viewing hours and an open casket.) I've always considered myself fortunate from the "experience" standpoint (as well as for many other reasons) to have been there when my mother died - an experience that normal people in our society might not have until they're old enough to usher their elderly parents through their last illnesses.
We're actually seeing the second generation of kids brought up with the ability to escape online. I think what everyone is escaping is deep existential dread, but our society no longer knows how to handle this.
Previous generations were essentially hit from all sides at once: child deaths, plagues, wars and threats of invasion, along with all sorts of apocalyptic expectations that had the same psychological effects as climate change has on us. I think they had more resources then we do for getting through life. (Yes, those resources included the "R" word so widely disparaged these days and I don't mean "Reason.") Maybe their main psychological resource was simply the experience that comes with the struggle to ensure food and shelter for their families, something most of us here grew up taking for granted.
We Boomers were having nightmares from all those drop drills, but our parents and grandparents were from the generations who knew how to confront and accept mortality. They were still around for provide traditional cultural and moral scaffolding as we grew up. In the meantime, of course, a lot of that social framework / cultural wisdom lost its immediacy and relevance. Now the challenge is to evolve it anew, which of course brings us back to Brink's questions. Sometimes I think a start might be just getting real about our own mortality, which is really nothing new.
Brink, you make some great points as usual. I have been requiring my students to visit local museums and historic sites and write papers based on the exhibits they see and what they think about them. There responses are eye opening for sure. But I am convinced they are spending too much time online (as are the rest of us) and that it is better for them to get outdoors and physically engage with authentic history. Some moan and groan, but after visiting they seem to come back in a better mood and are more lively. Some of the sites also include significant natural beauty and I think that is good for them too. Interestingly, the main student complaint about the assignment is the hot weather. Which I think is a warning light for the future effects of anthropogenic climate change. Increased heat will likely keep people indoors and make them even more disconnected from the outside natural world. But hey I enjoy making a dent in the situation. Well done essay Brink!
Thanks, David. Your new practice of requiring museum and historic site visits is such a great idea!
Thank you for this thoughtful piece. I have four children between the ages of 16 and 27 and I have experienced along side them their struggles with social media, climate disaster worry, online and IRL bullying, the allure of retreat, the fun/addictive qualities of gaming online alongside the benefits of an online community during lockdown, and their experimentation with activism, advocacy and scholarship towards positive global outcomes. All four engaged in conversation with me about "how to live a life" as the growing, curious, sensitive beings that they all are. I think that when our youth can identify and verbalize their internal struggles, whether to a parent, peer, teacher, coach or religious leader, it can make the difference between retreat and action. Being in "community with" even just one other older human who can comfort, guide and engage with our young people may be the antidote to the chaos, apathy, and retreat from reality. Teachers can help through bibliotherapy- assigning more hopeful and helpful texts. Michel de la Montaigne's Essays are as relevant today as they were in the late 1500's- selected passages from great thinkers have absolutely positively affected my kids. We as "elders", parents, coaches, guides, friends, teachers are "influencers" -let's not forget our power to guide, help and inspire IRL and vow to offer a counterbalance to the allure of virtual retreat. There may not be any single answer- but I think the concept of counterbalancing and proactively reaching toward young people with compassionate, wise care can help.