The Convivial Society

A week after the fact, here is the audio version of the last installment: “Notes from the Metaverse.” Ordinarily, the audio version accompanies the essay, but in this case you’re getting it a bit later. Nothing new in this version, so if you’ve already read the essay, feel free to disregard. But for those of you who do prefer listening, here you go, with my apologies for not getting this out sooner.

I will add in this short note that since I posted “Notes from the Metaverse” last week, Facebook and Ray-Ban announced the release of a set of smart-glasses. They don’t do much, at least they appear to have disappointed some. The camera might appear to be their main feature, but, in fact, I’d argue that their main feature is that they manage to look pretty normal and perhaps even stylish depending on your tastes. This, it seems to me, is the point at this juncture. Smart glasses, especially their camera, need to be normalized before they can become critical metaverse infrastructure. In that light, it’s worth noting, too, that the glasses bear absolutely no Facebook branding. We’ll see if they fare any better with the pubic than Google Glass did several years ago. Needless to say, much of the same criticism about the way that a camera enables surreptitious recording, thus more completely objectifying others as fodder for the digital spectacle, applies here as well.

Cheers,

Michael

Welcome to The Convivial Society. In this installment, you’ll find some thoughts on the cultural consequences of digital media. A big chunk of new readers means that I’m being a bit more careful not to presume familiarity with themes that I’ve written about before, so some of what follows may be old news for some of you. Either way, you can file this installment under my ongoing effort to think about the social and political fallout of digital media. And it really is an effort to think out loud. Your feedback and even pushback are welcome.

“I can’t express how useless these old school Sunday shows are,” Sean Illing recently tweeted, “and it blows my mind that a single human person still watches any of them.” Illing is here referring to the gamut of Sunday morning political talk shows—This Week, Meet the Press, etc.—and I can’t imagine that many people would step up to bat for the value of these shows. But their waning status may be worth a moment’s reflection as an entry point into a discussion about the ongoing digitization of our media ecosystem. And, to be clear, I’m not thinking here of “the media,” as in journalists, newspapers, and cable talk shows. What I have in mind is media as the plural of a medium of communication such as writing, print, telephony, radio, television, etc. Sometimes the advent of a new medium of communication can have striking social and psychic consequences. Here’s how Neil Postman once put it:

A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television, America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry, and so on.

So, with this approach in mind, here was my initial response to Illing’s tweet. Regarding the Sunday morning shows, I suggested that “their use, such as it is, is as content or fodder for the newer medium, rather than as an important medium of information in their own right. The assumptions and values of their form are irrelevant compared to the assumptions and values of the new form into which they are absorbed.”

This is basically just media ecology 101. For those of you still getting your bearings around here, I’ll mention that along with channelling the strain of old tech criticism that includes Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and the like, I also occasionally slip into media ecology mode. Marshall McLuhan, the aforementioned Neil Postman, Walter Ong, and Harold Innis are some of the leading lights, and you can read more about media ecology on the website of the Media Ecology Association. The few lines above from Postman give you a good sense of the approach. The general idea is that a medium of communication matters as much as, if not sometimes more than, the content that is being communicated through it. McLuhan, in another memorable formulation, put it this way: “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”

This can be a counter-intuitive claim if we’re used to thinking about a medium of communication (and technology in general) as an essentially neutral form. Spoiler alert: It’s not. As McLuhan famously put it, “The medium is the message,” which, as he went on to explain, means, for example, that “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” A change, I want to stress, that is largely irrespective of the nature of the content that the medium is used to communicate.

Media ecology, then, offers a helpful set of critical tools we can apply to questions about digital media and the public sphere. So, for example, in saying that the Sunday talk shows are fodder for the new medium, I’m recalling McLuhan’s observation that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.” In this case, digital forms of communication constitute the newer medium. And the point applies not only to the Sunday shows, but really to all pre-digital media. Television, film, radio, print — all are taken up and absorbed by digital media either because they themselves become digital artifacts (digital files rather than, say, rolls of film) or because they become the content of our digital media feeds.

This means, for example, that a movie is not only something to be taken whole and enjoyed on its own terms, it is also going to be dissected and turned into free-floating clips and memes and gifs. What’s more, the meaning and effect of these clips, memes, and gifs may very well depend more on their own formal structure and their use in our feeds than on their relation to the film that is their source. It means, too, that both the nature of the television show changes when it is made for digital contexts and that we watch Ted Lasso, in part, so that we can post about it. And, it means that every other Sunday morning or so, Chuck Todd is trending on Twitter not because he is an authoritative and influential media figure, but because he is not. It means the more savvy guests know the point of their appearance is not to inform or debate, but to generate a potentially viral clip, or, alternatively, to assiduously avoid doing so. It means, ultimately, that the habits, standards, and norms of the older medium are displaced by the habits, standards, and norms of the newer medium. However seriously the Sunday morning hosts take their job, it just doesn’t matter in the way they think it does. It all starts to feel a bit like a modern version of Don Quixote. The ostensible protagonists have not realized that the world has moved on, and they unwittingly strike a tragicomic note. Woe to those who fail to grasp this point, and woe to all of us when the point is best grasped by the most unscrupulous, as is too often the case.

In other words, as a good friend of mine is fond of asking, “what frames what?” It’s a good diagnostic question, and it applies nicely here. So we might ask, “What frames what, the televisual medium or the digital?” I’d argue that the answer is pretty straightforward: increasingly, digital media frames all older forms, and it is the habits, assumptions, and total effect of the digital medium that matters most. I won’t pretend to know all of what this will mean, of course. Digital media is a complex, multi-faceted, ever-shifting phenomenon, and we’re still sorting out the “symbolic fallout.” But I can tell you that many of the disorders of our moment, particularly with regard to what we sometimes quaintly call the public sphere, will make more sense if we see them, at least in part, as a function of this ongoing transition into a digital media ecosystem.

Let me take another angle on this theme by commenting on an observation Ari Schulman, the editor of the The New Atlantis, recently made when he tweeted that he was “struck by the odd sense that America is post-pseudo-event. If the same disastrous scenes of Afghanistan pullout happen ten years ago, you can practically feel them preparing the reels for a Newseum exhibit. Now events are events, yet it doesn't feel like a relief.”

I think I understand what Schulman is getting at here. It’s the sense, especially pronounced the more online one happens to be, that events can’t sustain the kind of attention that was once lavished on them in an older televisual media environment. Or, to put it another way, I might say that it’s the sense that nothing seems to get any durable traction in our collective imagination. I’ll provisionally suggest that this is yet another example of the medium being the message. In this case, I would argue that the relevant medium is the social media timeline. The timeline now tends to be the…

“What is fundamental to a convivial society is not the total absence of manipulative institutions and addictive goods and services, but the balance between those tools which create the specific demands they are specialized to satisfy and those complementary, enabling tools which foster self-realization. The first set of tools produces according to abstract plans for men in general; the other set enhances the ability of people to pursue their own goals in their unique way.”

— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

Welcome to the Convivial Society, especially the many of you for whom this is the first actual installment to hit your inbox. If you signed up in the last week or so, you may want to check out the brief orientation to the newsletter I sent out recently to new readers. Below you’ll find a full installment of the newsletter, which contains an essay followed by links to a variety of items, some of them with a bit of additional commentary from me, and a closing note. Read on. Share promiscuously.

In lines he composed for a play in the mid-1930s, T. S. Eliot wrote of those who

“constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”

That last line has always struck me as a rather apt characterization of a certain technocratic impulse, which presumes that techno-bureaucratic structures and processes can eliminate the necessity of virtue, or maybe even human involvement altogether. We might just as easily speak of systems so perfect that no one will need to be wise or temperate or just. Just adhere to the code or the technique with unbending consistency and all will be well.

This dream, as Eliot put it, remains explicitly compelling in many quarters. It is also tacitly embedded in the practices fostered by many of our devices, tools, and institutions. So it’s worth thinking about how this dream manifests itself today and why it can so easily take on a nightmarish quality.

In Eliot’s age, increasingly elaborate and Byzantine bureaucracies automated human decision making in the pursuit of efficiency, speed, and scale, thus outsourcing human judgment and, consequently, responsibility. One did not require virtue or good judgment, only a sufficiently well-articulated system of rules. Of course, under these circumstances, bureaucratic functionaries might become “papier-mâché Mephistopheles,” in Conrad’s memorable phrase, and they may abet forms of what Arendt later called banal evil. But the scale and scope of modern societies also seem to require such structures in order to operate reasonably well, although this is certainly debatable. Whether strictly necessary or not, these systems introduce a paradox: in order to ostensibly serve human society, they must eliminate or displace elements of human experience. Of course, what becomes evident eventually is that the systems are not, in fact, serving human ends, at least not necessarily so.

To take a different class of example, we might also think of the modern fixation with technological fixes to what may often be irreducibly social and political problems. In a prescient 2020 essay about the pandemic, Ed Yong observed that “instead of solving social problems, the U.S. uses techno-fixes to bypass them, plastering the wounds instead of removing the source of injury—and that’s if people even accept the solution on offer.” No need for good judgment, responsible governance, self-sacrifice, or mutual care if there’s an easy technological fix to ostensibly solve the problem. No need, in other words, to be good, so long as the right technological solution can be found.

Likewise, there’s no shortage of examples involving algorithmic tools intended to outsource human judgment. Most recently, I encountered the case of NarxCare reported in Wired. NarxCare is “an ‘analytics tool and care management platform’ that purports to instantly and automatically identify a patient’s risk of misusing opioids.” The article details the case of a 32-year-old woman suffering from endometriosis, whose pain medications were cut off, without explanation or recourse, because she triggered a high-risk score from the proprietary algorithm. You can read the article for further details, which are both fascinating and disturbing, but here’s the pertinent part for my purposes:

“Appriss is adamant that a NarxCare score is not meant to supplant a doctor’s diagnosis. But physicians ignore these numbers at their peril. Nearly every state now uses Appriss software to manage its prescription drug monitoring programs, and most legally require physicians and pharmacists to consult them when prescribing controlled substances, on penalty of losing their license.”

This is an obviously complex and sensitive issue, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the use of these algorithmic systems exacerbates the same demoralizing opaqueness, evasion of responsibility, and CYA dynamics that have characterized analog bureaucracies. It becomes difficult to assume responsibility for a particular decision made in a particular case. Or, to put it otherwise, it becomes too easy to claim the algorithm made me do it, and it becomes so, in part, because the existing bureaucratic dynamics all but require it.

This technocratic impulse is alive and well and we’ll come back to it in a moment, but it occurs to me that we might also profitably invert Eliot’s claim and apply it to our digital media environment in which we experience systems so imperfect that it turns out everyone will need to be really, really good. Let me explain what I mean by this. The thought occurred to me when I read yet another tweet advocating for the cultivation of digital media literacy. You should know that, at one level, I think this is fine and possibly helpful under certain circumstances. However, I also think it underestimates or altogether ignores the non-intellectual elements of the problem. It seems unrealistic, for example, to expect that someone, who is likely already swamped by the demands of living in a complex, fast-paced, and precarious social milieu, will have the leisure and resources to thoroughly “do their own research” about every dubious or contested claim they encounter online, or to adjudicate the competing claims made by those who are supposed to know what they are talking about. There’s a lot more to be said about this dynamic, of course. It raises questions about truth, certainty, trust, authority, expertise, and more, but here I simply want to highlight the moral demands, because searching for the truth, or a sufficient approximation, is more than a merely intellectual activity. It involves, for example, humility, courage, and patience. It presumes a willingness to break with one’s tribe or social network with all the risks that may entail. In short, you need to be not just clever but virtuous, and, depending on the degree to which you lived online, you would need to do this persistently over time, and, recently, of course, during a health crisis that has generated an exhausting amount of uncertainty and a host of contentious debates about private and public actions.

This is but one case, the one which initially led me to invert Eliot’s line. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to conjure up other similar examples of the kind of virtue our digital devices and networks tacitly demand of us. Consider the discipline required to responsibly direct one’s attention from moment to moment rather than responding with Pavlovian alacrity when our devices beckon us. Or the degree of restraint necessary to avoid the casual voyeurism that powers so much of our social media feeds. Or, how those same platforms can be justly described as machines for the inducement of petty vindictiveness and less-than-righteous indignation. Or, alternatively, as carefully calibrated engines of sloth, greed, envy, despair, and self-loathing. The point is not that our digital media environment necessarily generates vice, rather …

I sent out an installment titled “Ill With Want” a couple of days ago, but was unable at the time to include the audio version. I know that many of you find the audio useful, so, now that I’ve been able to record it, I wanted to get that to you.

Nothing new here if you have already read the text version.

I will, however, take the opportunity to pass along a link to a podcast I recorded (not the one referenced in the essay) with Justin Murphy and Nina Power on the life and work of Ivan Illich. You can listen to it here. The occasion for the conversation was an upcoming 8-week course on Illich, which Power will be teaching in a couple of weeks. You can learn more about that course here. My thanks to both Justin and Nina for delightful conversation.

As per usual, my thanks for reading. If you find the newsletter valuable, consider becoming a subscriber or sharing the Convivial Society with others who may also find it helpful.

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture, broadly speaking. This post began as part of a recent feature I’ve titled “Is this anything?”: one idea for your consideration in less than 500 words. It spilled over 500 words, however, so just consider it a relatively brief dispatch. My writing is an exercise in thinking out loud, so I’m never quite sure where it will lead. Of course, I do hope my thinking out loud is helpful to more than just myself. Finally, the newsletter is public by design, but the support of those who are able to give it is encouraged and appreciated.

In ordinary conversation, I’d say that the word artificial tends to be used pejoratively. To call something artificial is usually to suggest its inferiority to some ostensibly natural alternative. For example, the boast “No artificial sweeteners!” come to mind. And when applied to people, the word suggests a lack of authenticity or sincerity. But if we recall the word’s semantic relation to artifice or art, then we might come to see artificiality in a different light. In one sense, artificiality is just another way of speaking about what historian Thomas Hughes simply called the “human-built world.”

So, for example, in Orality and Literacy Walter Ong wrote, “To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it.” A bit further on he added, “Technologies are artificial, but – paradox again – artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it.”

I’d phrase that last line a bit differently. It would be better to say, “Certain technologies, properly interiorized, do not degrade human life but on the contrary enhance it.” In other words, technology is not one thing, and we should take care to discriminate. There are various forms of artificiality, and they are not all equal. Listening to a trained human voice, a musical instrument, a recording of a musical instrument, a recording of AI-generated sounds—these are all distinct activities. Alternatively, human artifice can work with humble regard for the non-human world or it can operate with what Albert Borgmann has called “regardless power,” that is power that takes no thought of how it disrupts the non-human or, for that matter, the human world. Historically, there have been (and will be) a variety of techno-social configurations.

I often cite writers such Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich, who are often (poorly) read as reactionary romantics pining for some lost pre-technological idyll. Ellul, it is true, was rather explicit about the eclipse of nature in modern technological societies. But neither of them are opposed to human artifice or technology per se. Indeed, Illich, especially, sought to encourage the development of what he called convivial tools. Illich also supplied us with the eminently useful concept of thresholds or limits beyond which practices, technologies, or institutions become counterproductive and even destructive. This seems like a useful concept to apply to the question of artificiality. 

So I find myself wondering if there is a threshold of artificiality beyond which human artifice becomes counterproductive and destructive. I’m not thinking principally of particular technologies, which might be turned toward destructive ends. I’m thinking, rather, of an aggregate degree of artificiality distancing us from the non-human world to such an extent that — paradox again (!) — our capacity to flourish as human beings is diminished. What are the consequences of so structuring our necessarily artificial environment that we find ourselves largely indifferent to the rhythms, patterns, and textures of the non-human world? What are the physical consequences? What are the emotional or psychological consequences? At what cost to the earth is our artificial world purchased?

I found myself also reflecting on the Prologue to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. “The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition,” Arendt observed in the mid-20th century,

“and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice. The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms.”

“For some time now,” Arendt went on to say, “a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also ‘artificial,’ toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature.” 

She was not sanguine about the prospects. “This future man” she observed, “[…] seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.”

Arendt’s reflections were spurred by the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. She noted that scientists on both sides of the Cold War had already speculated about humanity’s destiny being extra-terrestrial (anticipating more recent pronouncements by notable tech moguls). She also speculated about the impact of automation for human labor and the consequences of biological engineering. In other words, her concerns have aged well. 

I think, for example, of the recent announcement about the first human-monkey chimeras, a rather striking example of what Bruno Latour described as the modern constitution. Latour argued that modernity consisted of a double movement of purification and hybridization. On the surface, the modern world is constructed through a series of differentiations, which Latour calls purifications. Science is purified of faith, politics of religion. We might also add the separations of body and mind, nature and the human. Of course, Latour’s point was that we have never been modern in this sense. All the while, under the cover of this project of purification, all manner of hybridizations were underway. Human beings must first be distinguished from nature in order to then have their way with nature.

Now, while these hybridizations continue apace and the artificiality Arendt feared is alive and well, digital culture presents us with novel forms of artificiality that pose a different set of challenges. Consider, for example, Marc Andreessen’s recent response to a question about the possibly detrimental consequences of “constant, instantaneous contact” enabled by digital technology. 

“Your question is a great example of what I call Reality Privilege,” Andreessen claimed. He went on to elaborate as follows: 

This is a paraphrase of a concept articulated by Beau Cronin: "Consider the possibility that a visceral defense of the physical, and an accompanying dismissal of the virtual as inferior or escapist, is a result of superuser privileges." A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also *all* of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.

The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don't think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build -- and we are building -- online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, …

A few days ago, a handful of similar stories or anecdotes about technology came to my attention. While they came from different sectors and were of varying degrees of seriousness, they shared a common characteristic. In each case, there was either an expressed bewilderment or admission of obliviousness about the possibility that a given technology would be put to destructive or nefarious purposes. Naturally, I tweeted about it … like one does.

I subsequently clarified that I was not subtweeting anyone in particular just everything in general. Of course, naiveté, hubris, and recklessness don’t quite cover all the possibilities—nor are they mutually exclusive.

In response, someone noted that “people find it hard to ‘think like an *-hole’, in @mathbabedotorg's phrase, because most aren’t.” That handle belongs to Cathy O’Neil, best known for her 2016 book, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality And Threatens Democracy.

There’s something to this, of course, and, as I mentioned in my reply, I truly do appreciate the generosity of this sentiment. I suggested that the witness of history is helpful on this score, correcting and informing our own limited perspectives. But I was also reminded of a set of questions that I had put together back in 2016 in a moment of similar frustration.

The occasion then was the following observation from Om Malik:

“I can safely say that we in tech don’t understand the emotional aspect of our work, just as we don’t understand the moral imperative of what we do. It is not that all players are bad; it is just not part of the thinking process the way, say, ‘minimum viable product’ or ‘growth hacking’ are.”

Malik went on to write that “it is time to add an emotional and moral dimension to products,” by which he seems to have meant that tech companies should use data responsibly and make their terms of service more transparent. In my response at the time, I took the opportunity to suggest that we needn’t add an emotional and moral dimension to tech, it was already there. The only question was as to its nature. As Langdon Winner had famously inquired “Do artifacts have politics?” and answered in the affirmative, I likewise argued that artifacts have ethics. I then went on to produce a set of 41 questions that I drafted with a view to helping us draw out the moral or ethical implications of our tools. The post proved popular at the time and I received a few notes from developers and programmers who had found the questions useful enough to print out post in their workspaces.

This was all before the subsequent boom in “tech ethics,” and, frankly, while my concerns obviously overlap to some degree with the most vocal and popular representatives of that movement, I’ve generally come at the matter from a different place and have expressed my own reservations with the shape more recent tech ethics advocacy has taken. Nonetheless, I have defended the need to think about the moral dimensions of technology against the notion that all that matters are the underlying dynamics of political economy (e.g., here and here).

I won’t cover that ground again, but I did think it might be worthwhile to repost the questions I drafted then. It’s been more than six years since I first posted them, and, while some you reading this have been following along since then, most of you picked up on my work in just the last couple of years. And, recalling where we began, trying to think like a malevolent actor might yield some useful insights, but I’d say that we probably need a better way to prompt our thinking about technology’s moral dimensions. Besides, worst case malevolent uses are not the only kinds of morally significant aspects of our technology worth our consideration, as I hope some of these questions will make clear.

This is not, of course, an exhaustive set of questions, nor do I claim any unique profundity for them. I do hope, however, that they are useful, wherever we happen to find ourselves in relation to technological artifacts and systems. At one point, I had considered doing something a bit more with these, possibly expanding on each briefly to explain the underlying logic and providing some concrete illustrative examples or cases. Who knows, may be that would be a good occasional series for the newsletter. Feel free to let me know what you think about that.

Anyway, without further ado, here they are:

* What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?

* What habits will the use of this technology instill?

* How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?

* How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?

* How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?

* How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?

* What practices will the use of this technology cultivate?

* What practices will the use of this technology displace?

* What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?

* What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?

* What was required of other human beings so that I might be able to use this technology?

* What was required of other creatures so that I might be able to use this technology?

* What was required of the earth so that I might be able to use this technology?

* Does the use of this technology bring me joy? [N.B. This was years before I even heard of Marie Kondo!]

* Does the use of this technology arouse anxiety?

* How does this technology empower me? At whose expense?

* What feelings does the use of this technology generate in me toward others?

* Can I imagine living without this technology? Why, or why not?

* How does this technology encourage me to allocate my time?

* Could the resources used to acquire and use this technology be better deployed?

* Does this technology automate or outsource labor or responsibilities that are morally essential?

* What desires does the use of this technology generate?

* What desires does the use of this technology dissipate?

* What possibilities for action does this technology present? Is it good that these actions are now possible?

* What possibilities for action does this technology foreclose? Is it good that these actions are no longer possible?

* How does the use of this technology shape my vision of a good life?

* What limits does the use of this technology impose upon me?

* What limits does my use of this technology impose upon others?

* What does my use of this technology require of others who would (or must) interact with me?

* What assumptions about the world does the use of this technology tacitly encourage?

* What knowledge has the use of this technology disclosed to me about myself?

* What knowledge has the use of this technology disclosed to me about others? Is it good to have this knowledge?

* What are the potential harms to myself, others, or the world that might result from my use of this technology?

* Upon what systems, technical or human, does my use of this technology depend? Are these systems just?

* Does my use of this technology encourage me to view others as a means to an end?

* Does using this technology require me to think more or less?

* What would the world be like if everyone used this technology exactly as I use it?

* What risks will my use of this technology entail for others? Have they consented?

* Can the consequences of my use of this technology be undone? Can I live with those consequences?

* Does my use of this technology make it easier to live as if I had no responsibilities toward my neighbor?

* Can I be held responsible for the actions which this technology empowers? Would I feel better if I couldn’t?

“It appears to me that we cannot neglect the disciplined recovery, an asceticism, of a sensual praxis in a society of technogenic mirages. This reclaiming of the senses, this promptitude to obey experience, the chaste look that the Rule of St. Benedict opposes to the cupiditas oculorum (lust of the eyes), seems to me to be the fundamental condition for renouncing that technique which sets up a definitive obstacle to friendship.”— Ivan Illich, “To Honor Jacques Ellul,” (1993)

I don’t usually write multi-part posts, but I did conclude an earlier installment with the promise of addressing one more development in the way I’ve come to think about attention. The essay here will (finally) pick up that thread. This post is a long one, so here’s the executive summary. Attending to the world is an embodied practice involving our senses, and how we experience our senses has a history. The upshot is that we might be able to meet the some of the challenges of the age by cultivating an askesis of perception.

As I explained last time around, I’ve been rethinking some aspects of how I talk about attention, a topic that has generated a great deal of interest in the age of digital media. I argued that we ought to reconsider the way the problem of attention tends to be framed by the logic of scarcity, which naturally lends itself to economic categories, and I suggested, too, that we proceed on the assumption that we have all the attention we need so long as that attention is properly ordered. What I have to say in this installment doesn’t exactly depend on those earlier reflections, but it’s probably worth mentioning that what follows picks up where I had left off in that essay. 

The additional line of thought, which I want to pursue here, involves the relationship between attention and the body. The reflections that led me down this path began with the realization that attention discourse tends to abstract attention away from the body. When we talk about attention, in other words, we tend to talk as if this faculty had no particular relationship to the activities of the body. 

This is not altogether surprising if we think about attention as the capacity to focus our thinking on a particular object. In this mode, attention is a strictly mental activity. We might even close our eyes in order to do it well. In this sense, attention becomes nearly synonymous with the activity of thinking itself. Or, alternatively, with prayer. It was Simone Weil, for example, who claimed that “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” 

But this is not the only mode of attention, of course. More often than not, when we talk about attention in relation to digital media we are talking about our capacity to attend to something or someone out there in the world. What we are doing in such cases is somewhat different than what we do when we attempt to think deliberately about a problem, say, or when we are concentrating on a memory of the past. When we attend to the world beyond our head, to borrow the title of Matthew Crawford’s book from a few years back, we are doing so through the mediation of our perceptual apparatus: we are looking with our eyes, smelling with our noses, listening with our ears, feeling with our fingertips, or tasting with our mouths. In other words, attention discourse tends to make a mental abstraction out of an ordinarily embodied practice. (And, I’ll mention in passing that it’s probably worth reflecting on the fact that attention, if we link it to the senses at all, is almost always linked to either seeing or hearing.) 

Consider, for example, this rather well-known paragraph from the American philosopher William James’s Principles of Psychology published in 1890: 

“Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”

This is all fine and good, of course. It accords with how most of us think about attention. I’m not suggesting that attention is anything less than this, only that we might improve our understanding of what is happening when we attend to the world if we also attend to what our senses are up to when we do so. A determination to see may only get us so far if we do not also think about how we see or, and this will be a critical point, recognize that our seeing can be trained. Moreover, James’s definition of attention leaves little room for the role that beauty or desire or ethics might play in the dance between our consciousness and the world. Attention is reduced to the exercise of raw mental will-power. 

As with my earlier discussion of the rhetoric of scarcity that treats attention as a resource, I don’t want to overstate my point here. I’m not suggesting that one should never speak about “attention” per se or that connecting attention more closely to our bodily senses will resolve our issues with attention. But, I do think there may be something to be gained in both cases. And here again I’m going to proceed with a little help from Ivan Illich, who, in the last phase of his intellectual journey, devoted a great deal of attention to the cultural history of the body and, specifically, sense experience. 

I’ll start with a proposal Illich wrote for David Ramage, who was then president of McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. What I’m calling a proposal, Illich titled “ASCESIS. Introduction, etymology and bibliography.” The short seven-page document details a plan for a five-year sequence of lectures that Illich wanted to give on the role ascetic disciplines might play in higher education. The proposed courses would each take up a focal point of bodily sense experience. To my knowledge, these lectures were never delivered. Nonetheless, the proposal and some of Illich’s other work around this time remains instructive. 

To be clear at the outset, Illich was not calling for a return to the old ascetic disciplines we might associate with earlier monastic traditions, for example. “The asceticism which can be practiced at the end of the 20th century,” Illich explained, “is something profoundly different from any previously known.” Nor is it a specifically religious mode of asceticism that Illich has in mind. In his view the tradition he is reviving and re-working includes pagan philosophers as well as monastic scholars. 

Illich thought that a rupture in this tradition had occurred sometime around the 12th century. This rupture had regrettably obscured the importance to learning of the body, including the affections. 

“Learning presupposes both critical and ascetical habits; habits of the right and habits of the left,” Illich claimed. He added: “I consider the cultivation of learning as a dissymmetrical but complementary growth of both these sets of habits.” It wasn’t immediately obvious to me what Illich meant by habits of the right and the left, but in the same paragraph he goes on to mention “habits of the mind,” or the critical habits celebrated and cultivated in the humanist tradition of learning, and the consequent neglect of the “heart’s formation.” Interestingly, the latter task, in his estimation, had been lately relegated to “the media.” 

“I want to explore the demise of intellectual asceticism as a characteristic of western learning since the time it became academic,” Illich went on to explain. “In this historical perspective,” he continued, 

I want to argue for the possibility of a new complementarity between critical and ascetical learning. I want to reclaim for ascetical theory, method and discipline a status equal to that the University now assigns to critical and technical disciplines. 

Reading Illich’s proposal from 1989, it strikes me as all the more relevant thirty years later. Confronted with the challenges of information superabundance, a plague of misinformation and digital soph…

Some have argued that one benefit of the new newsletter ecosystem is a return to the older conventions of blogging in its halcyon days. I don’t know about that. I doubt you or I really want two or three dispatches from every newsletter we’ve subscribed to arriving in our inbox every day. That said, I do occasionally feel the attraction of that older form. I won’t say that this installment is blog-ish in that way, but I sat down to compose it in that old, familiar frame of mind: aiming at something relatively brief and discursive, suggestive rather than fully developed. As always, I hope you find it useful.

There is a genre of tweet that begins thus: “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but …” Well, it’s in that spirit, and un-ironically, that I write what follows.

Yesterday, I listened to a radio program with two thoughtful scholars and mental health practitioners on the subject of doom scrolling, the habit of thoughtlessly and compulsively scrolling through our infinite feeds with no clear sense of direction or purpose, often late at night when we ought to be sleeping, and with the result of inducing greater degrees of anxiety and unease.

One of the guests explained doom scrolling as an effect of having to navigate unfamiliar and potentially threatening situations with inadequate information and little clarity about what one ought to do. Understood this way, doom scrolling is just a function of our need for decent maps of the world.

This is an entirely plausible account of doom scrolling, even if it does not account for every dimension of the practice. For example, I’d say that what we’re often after is not information per se but an affective fix. Nonetheless, the term did explode onto the lexical scene last year as the pandemic wildly reconfigured the way most of us live, transforming everyday decisions we used to make rather carelessly into matters of complex actuarial decision making: when to go out, whom to see, at what distance, for how long, with what precautions. Etc., etc. Some handled these conditions better than others, but it’s easy to see how under such circumstances one would cast about for any bit of news or information that would help clarify matters and relieve the acute uncertainty, anxiety, and fear we might have been experiencing.

Of course, in this case, as in so many others, the pandemic merely revealed and heightened an already existing pattern. While the term was popularized under pandemic conditions, it pre-dates the public health crisis by at least two years and certainly describes a phenomenon that was common long before then. And, I would add, whatever its precise relationship to the pandemic, the practice of doom scrolling will persist independently of the uncertainties and anxieties generated by the pandemic. Previously, I’ve characterized the activity we call doom scrolling as structurally induced acedia, and the conditions that thus tempt us aren’t going anywhere.

What struck me about the characterization of doom scrolling in the interview, however, was the implicit assumption embedded into the terms of the analysis, an assumption which acts as the mechanism linking the experience of uncertainty to the practice of doom scrolling.

That assumption, simply put, is that what we need in order to better navigate uncertainty is more information.

I grant that this is obviously true to some extent. Good information can helpfully inform our choices. And in the total absence of good information, we would rightly feel altogether adrift and at the mercy of forces beyond our ken.

Yet, it is also the case that our problem with information is not that we have too little of it but rather that we have too much. Granted that, in saying this, I am assuming a distinction between information and knowledge, which is to say that an abundance of information does not necessarily imply an abundance of knowledge.

My point turns out to be relatively straightforward: maybe you and I don’t need more information. And, if we think that the key to navigating uncertainty and mitigating anxiety is simply more information, then we may very well make matters worse for ourselves.

Believing that everything will be better if only we gather more information commits us to endless searching and casting about, to one more swipe of the screen in the hope that the elusive bit of data, which will make everything clear, will suddenly present itself. From one angle, this is just another symptom of reducing our experience of the world to the mode of consumption. In this mode, all that can be done is to consume more, in this case more information, and what we need seems always to lie just beyond the realm of the actual, hidden beyond the horizon of the possible.

And, once again, this mode of being, with regards to navigating uncertainty, has the paradoxical effect of sinking us ever deeper into indecision and anxiety because the abundance of information, especially if it is encountered as discrete bits of under-interpreted data, will only generate more uncertainty and frustration.

One alternative to this state of affairs is to ditch the idea, should we be under its sway, that what we need to make our way in the world is simply more information. For one thing, there are practical difficulties: even in cases where more information might be genuinely helpful, it may not be forthcoming when we need it. But, more importantly, some matters cannot be adequately decided simply by gathering more information and plugging it into some sort of value-neutral formula. Indeed, we might even say that what we need to make is not a merely a decision but more like a commitment with all the risk, responsibility, and promise that this entails.

What we might truly need, then, is not information but something else altogether: courage, patience, practical wisdom, and, perhaps most importantly, friendship. Of course, these can be harder to come by than mere information, however valuable it may be.

I trust that there is no need to further clarify why what we might really need in the face of uncertainty might be courage, patience, and wisdom. Lacking these, I might add, it is easy to see how we might take refuge in the idea that we lack sufficient information. The claim that I’m holding out for more information can neatly mask my lack of courage to do what I know needs to be done.

But it’s worth reflecting for just a moment on the the last of these: friendship. I was thinking here of how isolation and loneliness, which I would sharply distinguish from solitude, can warp and disfigure our cognitive faculties. The more isolated we find ourselves, the more harrowing and disorienting the experience of uncertainty.

Moreover, if we do proceed, as we often must, without the benefit of certainty, venturing forth and assuming the real risks that must accompany our action in this world—especially once we renounce the imperative to control, manage, and master—then it would be a far better thing to do so in the affectionate and heartening company of friends who will sustain us in our failures and celebrate our triumphs. After all, it is easier by far to take a step into the unknown with another walking alongside of us than it is to do so alone. If I must bear the consequences of my choices alone, if there is no one whose counsel I trust, then it becomes especially tempting to seek both perfect knowledge and certainty before acting, and find myself paralyzed in their absence.

Unfortunately, the patterns of our techno-social order tend toward the fracturing of community and the isolation of the person. We are offered an array of tools that promise to assuage the resulting economic and psychic precarity, but, more often than not, their real aim implicit in their design is to perpetuate and accelerate social fragmentation and cultivate deeper degrees of dependency from users. They tend to inhibit the enduring satisfaction of our genuine needs in order to perpetuate our dependence on their services. They dis…

“Attention discourse” is how I usually refer to the proliferation of essays, articles, talks, and books around the problem of attention (or, alternatively, distraction) in the age of digital media. While there have been important precursors to digital age attention discourse dating back to the 19th century, I’d say the present iteration probably kicked off around 2008 with Nick Carr’s essay in the Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” And while disinformation discourse has supplanted its place in the public imagination over the past few years, attention discourse is alive and well.

I don’t intend for the label “attention discourse” to come off pejoratively or dismissively. In fact, I’ve made my own minor contributions to the genre. It was a recurring theme on the old blog (e.g.), and it was the subject of an installment of this newsletter just last summer. And I still think that the fate of attention in digital culture is a topic worthy of our considered reflection. More recently, however, I’ve been reconsidering the approach I’ve taken in the past to the question of attention. You can think of what follows as a report on the fruits this reconsideration as it now stands.

As a point of departure, let’s begin with a recent column in the Times by Charlie Warzel, who, I should note, comments frequently on the dynamics of the attention economy. In this particular piece from February, Warzel profiles Michael Goldhaber, whom he calls “the internet prophet you’ve never heard of,” which, I confess, was certainly true for me. As Warzel recounts the story, Goldhaber was a physicist who sometime in the 1980s had an epiphany about the nature of attention in an age of information glut (and do note that this epiphany predates the rise of the commercial internet).

The epiphany, simply put, was that we live in an attention economy, a term Goldhaber did not coin but which he seems to have done a great deal to popularize, chiefly with a 1997 essay that appeared in Wired. Here is a key paragraph from that essay:

Yet, ours is not truly an information economy. By definition, economics is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce - especially on the Net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in information, yet constantly increasing our generation of it. So a key question arises: Is there something else that flows through cyberspace, something that is scarce and desirable? There is. No one would put anything on the Internet without the hope of obtaining some. It's called attention. And the economy of attention - not information - is the natural economy of cyberspace.

A bit further on, Goldhaber notes that “the attention economy is a star system, where Elvis has an advantage. The relationship between stars and fans is central.” But the average person is not altogether cut out of the attention economy, far from it. “Cyberspace,” Goldhaber explains, “offers a much more effective means of continuing and completing attention transactions, as well as opening up more possibilities to almost everyone. Whoever you are, however you express yourself, you can now have a crack at the global audience.”

Goldhaber goes on to argue that attention will, quite literally as I read him, become the real currency of the internet age, by which he means that it will eventually displace money. This portion of his argument seems to have missed the mark, although the entanglement of money and attention has certainly been borne out. Others will be better qualified to judge the financial aspects of Goldhaber’s vision of attention as currency.

Needless to say, developments in the NFT markets suggest some interesting lines of inquiry, something Warzel explored in his most recent column. There, Warzel walks us through some of the most recent trends among those who are, in fact, earning their livelihood by transforming attention into money. At the frontiers of attention monetization we find, for example, “a platform called NewNew, which wants to build a ‘human stock market,’ where fans can vote to control mundane decisions in a creator’s day-to-day life.” As I was composing this piece, a story about an artist who sold a portion of their skin as an NFT also crossed my feed [correction: it was a tennis player].

Clearly, there is a profoundly dark side to this vision of unfettered monetization. Frankly, it’s hard to read this as anything more than a form of voluntary indentured servitude. Beyond that, as Anil Dash explained to Warzel, “The gig economy is coming for absolutely everyone and everything […] The end game of that is the GoFundMe link posted beneath a viral tweet so they can pay for their health care. Being an influencer sounds fun until it’s ‘keep producing viral content to literally stay alive.’ That’s the machine we’re headed toward.”

In his 1997 essay, Goldhaber had anticipated some of these disturbing dynamics. “Already today,” he observed at the time, “no matter what you do, the money you receive is more and more likely to track the recognition that comes to you for doing what you do. If there is nothing very special about your work, no matter how hard you apply yourself you won't get noticed, and that increasingly means you won't get paid much either.”

Coming back to the piece with which we started, Warzel summarized Goldhaber’s thinking about the attention economy this way:

Every single action we take — calling our grandparents, cleaning up the kitchen or, today, scrolling through our phones — is a transaction. We are taking what precious little attention we have and diverting it toward something. This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else.

And, as we noted at the outset, Goldhaber was especially keen to point out that the value of attention is defined by its scarcity.

Not that long ago, I would’ve pretty much assented to this whole line of thought. Indeed, I know that I have also spoken and written about attention as a scarce resource that we ought to take great care in how we allocate it. I would have had no problem at all with Howard Rheingold’s principle, cited by Goldhaber, that attention is a limited resource, so we should pay attention to where we pay attention.

While I remain quite sympathetic to the spirit of this line of thought, it now seems to me that the framing of the problem is itself part of the problem. To begin with, we might do well to stop thinking about attention as a scarce resource.

After he published a burst of spirited and prophetic works of social criticism in the early and mid-70s, Ivan Illich decided that it was time to re-evaluate his own critical approach. Despite their obvious faults, the industrial age institutions Illich targeted in his scathing critiques proved to be more resilient than he anticipated, and not necessarily because they were, in fact, useful, just, and sustainable enterprises. Rather, Illich came to the conclusion that we remained locked into these inevitably self-destructive institutional structures because they were, as David Cayley explained, “anchored at a depth that ‘rabble-rousing’ could not reach, even if it were as lucid and rhetorically refined as Illich’s critiques had been.” Illich began referring to the “certainties” upon which modern institutions rested. These certainties were assumptions of which we are barely aware, assumptions which lend current institutional structures a patina of inevitability. These certainties generated the sense that people couldn’t possibly do without such tools or institutions, even if they were, in fact, relatively modern innovations. And in this next phase of his career, Illich set out to trace the origins of these certainties, which, in his view, were anything but.

Chief among these certainties was the presumption of scarcity. In fact, in 1980, Illich announced his intention to write a history of scarcity. That history never materialized, but a number of pieces of that lar…

Over the years, I’ve thought on and off about silence in the context of digital media. Mostly, this has taken the form of commending what came to be called strategic silence. The idea being that, given the dynamics of the attention economy, it is sometimes better to pass over certain developments in calculated silence than it is to comment on them or even to speak out against them. At other times I’ve commented on how the structure of social media generates an imperative to speak, and how in times of crisis and tragedy this imperative to speak feels especially disordered.

More recently, however, I’ve come to think that it is impossible to be silent online.

I don’t mean that it’s really hard and that we lack to will power to be silent. I mean that it is, quite literally, impossible.

“No, it’s not,” you may be thinking just now, “I do it all the time. It even has a name: it’s called lurking.”

I would propose, however, that we distinguish between the mere absence of speech and what might properly be called silence. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that it is impossible to enter into silence online.

Saying nothing, in other words, is not the same thing as silence. Silence is felt. It is meaningful. It is not mere negation. In fact, it can be, as we shall see, eloquent. But, and here I suppose is the crux of the matter, this kind of silence presupposes bodily presence. Silence, in the way that I’m encouraging us to think of it, emanates from the body taken whole.

Consider, for example, how even this word we’ve landed on for describing the practice of being online but saying/posting nothing, the word lurking, ordinarily suggests something rather untoward, even sinister precisely because in non-digitized settings it conveys the sense of watching without being seen, that is of a presence that hides itself, that fails to materialize in the sight of others.

To be clear, my interest here is not to police how the word silence gets used. You are perfectly within your rights to go on using the word silence however you please. Rather, I’m taking the opportunity presented by digital media to reconsider an aspect of analog experience that might not have been fully appreciated—a generally fruitful exercise, in my view, the point of which I should add, is simply to see both digital and analog forms of communication more clearly for what they are or for what they can and cannot be.

I have lately been helped in this direction by a couple of short, less well-known pieces by Ivan Illich, a couple of deep cuts, if you will. In the first, “Silence is a Commons,” Illich reflects upon the moment he was brought, within weeks of being born, to his grandfather’s estate off the coast of Dalmatia. He noted that little had changed on the estate since its establishment in the late middle ages. Then, however, something did change. “On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926,” Illich explained,

the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete. Language itself was transformed thereby from a local commons into a national resource for communication. As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.

Illich would retain a lifelong aversion to using a microphone. And, before proceeding any further, let me say that I don’t think Illich is suggesting that there had never been other, more heavy-handed ways of silencing people before the advent of loudspeakers.

The idea of silence as a commons, as Illich described it here, suggests to a me shared space into which you and I might enter and have just as much of a chance of being heard as anyone else. Technologies that augment the human voice empower those who possess them at the expense of those who do not, setting off the escalatory dynamics that eventually generate counterproductivity. To put it that way, as long-suffering readers know by now, is to use standard Illichian terminology. Put otherwise, we might say that tools that augment speech trigger an arms race for ever more powerful tools that do the same until finally everyone is thus provisioned with the result being that human speech itself begins to break down. To give everyone a loud speaker is to assure that no one can be heard.

Illich’s anecdote is, of course, a provocative reversal of the usual way that new media tend to be presented as a necessarily democratizing and empowering force, and it seems closer to mark as the events of the last decade or so have illustrated. The ostensible promise of social media was that anyone’s voice could now be heard. Whether anyone would be listening has turned out to be another matter altogether, as would be the society-wide consequences. Naturally, this is not to deny that in some cases social media can serve the interest of marginalized communities. It is only to suggest the rather obvious point that, taken as a whole, its consequences are more complicated, to put it mildly.

“Just as the commons of space are vulnerable and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic,” Illich went on to argue, “so the commons of speech are vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modern means of communication.” Illich was presenting these comments in 1982, and he had emerging electronic and computerized modes of communication chiefly in mind.

The issue he proposed to his audience for discussion was this:

how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads - commons that are at least as valuable as silence.

“Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike,” he went on to add,

is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.

There seem to be two distinct concerns for Illich. The first is that we lose the commons of which silence is an integral part and thus a measure of freedom and agency. The second, concurrent with the first, is that you and I may find it increasingly hard to be heard even as we are given more and more tools with which to speak. Alternatively, we might also distinguish between silence as a space of possibility and silence as itself a good to be defended, something we need for its own sake. Illich is reminding us yet again that what we may need is not more of something, in this case words, but less.

I would say, too, that the temptation to be resisted, if I may put it that way, is that of reducing human interaction to a matter of information transfer, something that can be readily transacted without remainder through technological mean. This is the message of the medium, in McLuhanist terms: that, becoming accustomed to electronic or digitized forms of communication, I forget all that is involved in being understood by another and which cannot be encoded in symbolic form.

A second early essay by Illich helped me to think about silence from yet another perspective: silence as an indispensable element of human conversation. In the 1960s, Illich was involved in leading intensive language courses in Mexico, mainly for clergy interested in learning Spanish. Illich prepared brief talks for participants, and one such talk has been published as “The Eloquence of Silence.”

The title itself tells you much of what Illi…