At the end of my reflections a few years back, I suggested that a humanist critique of technology entails a preference for technology that (1) operates at a human scale, (2) works toward human ends, (3) allows for the fullest possible flourishing of a person’s capabilities, (4) does not obfuscate moral responsibility, and (5) acknowledges and respects certain limits inherent to the human condition.

There are two ranges in the growth of tools: the range within which machines are used to extend human capability and the range in which they are used to contract, eliminate, or replace human functions. In the first, man as an individual can exercise authority on his own behalf and therefore assume responsibility. In the second, the machine takes over—first reducing the range of choice and motivation in both the operator and the client, and second imposing its own logic and demand on both.

When a system becomes sufficiently complex, the human element more often than not becomes a problem to be solved. The solution is to either remove the human element or otherwise re-train the person to conform and recalibrate their behavior to the specifications of the machine. Alternatively, society develops a variety of therapies to sustain the person who must now live within a techno-economic milieu that is hostile to human flourishing.

Yet even with all its excesses of content, our era of algorithmic feeds might herald the actual death of the collector, because the algorithm itself is the collector, curator, and arbiter of culture. Not only does that represent a loss of agency and control, it’s also a loss of feeling.

While we have the advantage of freedom of choice, the endless array of options often instills a sense of meaninglessness: I could be listening to anything, so why should any one thing be important to me?

As I’ve used Spotify longer and the interface has changed shape, I’ve found myself becoming a more passive user, saving fewer albums; thinking less about the specifics of the albums or artists I’m hearing; and losing track of my library.

Algorithmic feeds are by their nature impersonal, though they promise personalized recommendations. The more automated a feed is, the less we users feel the need to gather a collection, to preserve what’s important to us. If we can always rely on Instagram’s Discover page or the TikTok For You feed to show us something that we’re interested in, then we have less impetus to decide for ourselves what to look for, follow, and save. The responsibility of collecting has been removed, but that means we offload it to the black box of the automatic recommendation system. Over the past two decades, the collecting of culture — like maintaining a personal library — has moved from being a necessity to a seemingly indulgent luxury.

For Benjamin, the importance of collecting stemmed from its endurance and persistence, a longterm commitment that the collector makes to the collection. “A collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property,” he wrote in his library essay. Benjamin would have detested the era of algorithmic platforms not because they’re so all-encompassing and overwhelming — Benjamin had no problem with infinite copies — but because they’re so ephemeral. It’s very difficult to be responsible for what we collect on the internet; we can’t be stewards of the culture we appreciate in the same way. We very literally don’t own it.

“Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects,” Benjamin wrote. “Not that they have come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” In other words, we often discover ourselves in what we keep around us.

For Benjamin, the very possession of these books formed his identity as a reader, writer, and human being — even if he hadn’t read all of them. They sat proudly on his shelves as symbols, representing the knowledge that he still aspired to gain or the cities he had traveled, where he encountered a book in a previously unknown shop. Collecting books was his way of interacting with the world, of building a worldview.

In the digital era, when everything seems to be a single click away, it’s easy to forget that we have long had physical relationships with the pieces of culture we consume. We store books on bookshelves, mount art on our living-room walls, and keep stacks of vinyl records. When we want to experience something, we seek it out, finding a book by its spine, pulling an album from its case, or opening an app. The way we interact with something — where we store it — also changes the way we consume it, as Spotify’s update made me realize. Where we store something can even outweigh the way we consume it.

In the opposing corner, we have the "hot mess" info slop bucket that is the contemporary internet. As a point of comparison, let's say a social media post (or "message") is the equivalent of a book in this brave new world and a social media platform, let's say Facebook, is the equivalent of a library (an archive where our externalized memories are stored and organized). How are Facebook posts organized? Who's organizing them? And, to return to your essay, how does that impact how humans conceptualize knowledge and understand our sense of self?

I’ve found it helpful to think about this development by recalling how Katherine Hayles phrased one of the themes of How We Became Posthuman. She sought to show, in her words, “how information lost its body.” Illich is here doing something very similar. The text is information that has lost its body, i.e. the book. According to Illich, until these textual innovations took hold in the 12th century, it was very hard to imagine a text apart from its particular embodiment in a book, a book that would’ve born the marks of its long history—in the form, for example, of marginalia accruing around the main text.

If we imagine the book as an information storage technology (something we can do only on the other side of this revolution) then what these new tools do is solve the problems of sorting and access. They help organize the information in such a way that readers can now dip in and out of what now can be imagined as a text independent of the book.

So, perhaps it is the case that the metaphor has simply broken down in the way so many other metaphors do over time when the experiences upon which they depended are lost due to changes in material culture.

So, to summarize this point, as the text detaches from the book, or the image from the photograph, so the self detaches from the community.

What Illich is picking up on here is the estrangement of the self from the community that was analogous in his view to the estrangement of the text from the book. “What I want to stress here,” Illich claims at one point, “is a special correspondence between the emergence of selfhood understood as a person and the emergence of ‘the’ text from the page.” Illich goes on at length about how Hugh of St. Victor likened the work of the monk to a kind of intellectual or spiritual pilgrimage through the pages of the book. Notice the metaphor. One did not search a text, but rather walked deliberately through a book. At one point Illich writes, “Modern reading, especially of the academic and professional type, is an activity performed by commuters or tourists; it is no longer that of pedestrians and pilgrims.”

There comes a point when our capacity to store information outpaces our ability to actively organize it, no matter how prodigious our effort to do so.

What do we imagine we are doing when we are reading? How have our digital tools—the ubiquity of the search function, for example—changed the way we relate to the written word? Is there a relationship between our digital databases and the experience of the world as a hot mess? How has the digital environment transformed not only how we encounter the word, but our experience of the world itself?

To be honest, I delight in this kind of encounter with the past for its own sake. But I also find that these encounters illuminate the present by giving us a point of contrast. The meaning and significance of contemporary technologies become clearer, or so it seems to me, when I have some older form of human experience I can hold it up against. This is not to say that one form is necessarily better than the other, of course. Only that the nature of each becomes more evident.

The reader’s order is not imposed on the story, but the story puts the reader into its order.

“The book has now ceased to be the root-metaphor of the age; the screen has taken its place. The alphabetic text has become but one of many modes of encoding something, now called ‘the message.’”

As a result, the book was no longer the window onto nature or god; it was no longer the transparent optical device through which a reader gains access to creatures or the transcendent.

This [technical] breakthrough consisted in the combination of more than a dozen technical inventions and arrangements through which the page was transformed from score to text.  Not printing, as is frequently assumed, but this bundle of innovations, twelve generations earlier, is the necessary foundation for all stages through which bookish culture has gone since. This collection of techniques and habits made it possible to imagine the ‘text’ as something detached from the physical reality of a page. It both reflected and in turn conditioned a revolution in what learned people did when they read — and what they experienced reading to mean.”

Some of these innovations also made it easier to read the book silently—something that was unusual in the scriptoriums of early medieval monasteries, which could be rather noisy places.3 And, of course, this reminds us that the transition from orality to literacy was not accomplished by the flipping of a switch. As Illich puts it, the monkish book was still understood as recorded sound rather than as a record of thought. Just as we thought of the web in terms of older textual technologies and spoke of web pages and scrolling, readers long experienced the act of reading by reference to oral forms of communication.

The text is information that has lost its body, i.e. the book. According to Illich, until these textual innovations took hold in the 12th century, it was very hard to imagine a text apart from its particular embodiment in a book

What might not be as well known is that many features that we take for granted when we read a book had not yet been invented. These include, for example, page numbers, chapter headings, paragraph breaks, and alphabetical indexes. These are some of the dozen or so textual innovations that Illich had in mind when he talks about the transformation of the experience of reading in the 12th century. What they provide are multiple paths into a book. If we imagine the book as an information storage technology (something we can do only on the other side of this revolution) then what these new tools do is solve the problems of sorting and access. They help organize the information in such a way that readers can now dip in and out of what now can be imagined as a text independent of the book.

It’s commonly known that the invention of printing in the 15th century was a momentous development in the history of European culture. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s work, especially, made the case that the emergence of printing revolutionized European society. Without it, it seems unlikely that we get the Protestant Reformation, modern science, or the modern liberal order. Illich was not interested in challenging this thesis, but he did believe that the print revolution had an important antecedent: the differentiation of the text from the book.

In the Vineyard of the Text, which is itself a careful analysis of a medieval guide to the art of reading written by Hugh of St. Victor, sets out to make one principle argument that goes something like this: In the 12th century, a set of textual innovations transformed how reading was experienced by the intellectual class. Illich describes it as a shift from monkish reading focused on the book as a material artifact to scholastic reading focused on the text as a mental construct that floats above its material anchorage in a book. (I’m tempted to say manuscript or codex to emphasize the difference between the artifact we call a book and what Hugh of St. Victor would’ve handled.) A secondary point Illich makes throughout this fascinating book is that this profound shift in the culture of the book that shaped Western societies for the rest of the millennium was also entangled with the emergence of a new experience of the self.

Ong, who is best remembered today for his work on orality and literacy, cut his teeth on Ramus, his research focusing on how Ramus, in conjunction with the advent of printing, pushed the culture of Western learning further away from the world of the ear (think of the place of dialog in the Platonic tradition) toward the world of the eye. His search for a universal method and logic, which preceded and may have prepared the way for Descartes, yielded a decidedly visual method and logic, complete with charts and schemas. Perhaps a case could be made, and maybe has been made, that this reorientation of human learning and knowing around sight finds its last iteration in the directory structure of early personal computers, whose logic is fundamentally visual. Your own naming of files and folders may presume another kind of logic, but there is no logic to the structure itself other than the one you visualize, which may be why it was so difficult for these professors to articulate the logic to students. In any case, the informational milieu the student’s describe is one that is not ordered at all. It is a hot mess navigated exclusively by the search function.

Not the media, of course, but media of human communication, from language itself to the alphabet and the whole array of technologies built upon the alphabet. Media do just that: they mediate. A medium of communication mediates our experience of the world and the self at a level that is so foundational to our thinking it is easy to lose sight of it altogether. Thus technologies of communication shape how we come to understand both the world and the self. They shape our perception, they supply root metaphors and symbols, they alter the way we experience our senses, they generate social hierarchies of value, and they structure how we remember. I could go on, but you get the point.

“Today’s virtual world is largely a searchable one; people in many modern professions have little need to interact with nested hierarchies.”Similar arguments have been made to explain how some people think about their inboxes. While some are quite adept at using labels, tags, and folders to manage their emails, others will claim that there’s no need to do because you can easily search for whatever you happen to need. Save it all and search for what you want to find. This is, roughly speaking, the hot mess approach to information management. And it appears to arise both because search makes it a good-enough approach to take and because the scale of information we’re trying to manage makes it feel impossible to do otherwise. Who’s got the time or patience?

Mental categories tend to be grounded in embodied experiences in a material world. Tactile facility with files, folders, and filing cabinets grounded the whole array of desktop metaphors that appeared in the 1980s to organize the user’s experience of a computer. And I think we ought to take this as a case in point of a more general pattern: technological change operates on the shared material basis of our mental categories and, yes, the “metaphors we live by.”1 Consequently, technological change not only transforms the texture of everyday life, it also alters the architecture and furniture of our mental spaces.

This suggests, of course, the reality that metaphors make sense of things by explaining the unknown (tenor) by comparison to the known (vehicle), but, when the known element itself becomes unknown, then the meaning-making function is lost. Which is to say, that files and folders are metaphors that help users navigate computers by reference to older physical artifacts that would’ve been already familiar to users. But, then, what happens when those older artifacts themselves become unfamiliar?

One of the more compelling bits of evidence Illich marshals in his historical investigations involves the shrinking diversity of words to designate varieties of sense experience. Summarizing the work of a variety of scholars, Illich noted,Dozens of words for shades of perception have disappeared from usage. For what the nose does, someone has counted the victims: Of 158 German words that indicate variations of smell, which Dürer's contemporaries used, only thirty-two are still in use. Equally, the linguistic register for touch has shriveled. The see-words fare no better.Sadly, this accords with my own experience, and I wonder whether it rings true for you. Upon reflection, I have a paucity of words at my disposal with which to name the remarkable variety of experiences and sensations that the world offers. 

Further on in the paper Illich writes, “I argue that ‘show’ stands for the transducer or program that enables the interface between systems, while ‘image’ has been used for an entity brought forth by the imagination. Show stands for the momentary state of a cybernetic program, while image always implies poiesis. Used in this way, image and show are the labels for two heterogeneous categories of mediation.”My sense, deriving from the passing reference to cybernetics, is that the distinction between the image and the show tracks with the distinction, critical to Illich’s later work, which he drew between the age of instruments and the age of systems. While I don’t think that Illich rigorously developed this distinction anywhere in writing, one key element involved the manner in which the system, as opposed to the mere instrument, enveloped the user. It was possible to stand apart from the instrument and thus to attain a level of mastery over it. It was not possible to likewise stand apart from the system. Which may explain why Illich, as we’ll see shortly, concluded, “There can be rules for exposure to visually appropriating pictures; exposure to show may demand a reasoned stance of resistance.” 

He goes on to explain how “until quite recently, the guard of the eyes was not looked upon as a fad, nor written off as internalized repression. Our taste was trained to judge all forms of gazing on the other. Today, things have changed. The shameless gaze is in.” Illich was quick to add that he was not speaking of gazing at pornographic images. He was interested in recovering the idea that seeing was an action and not merely a passive activity on the model of a lens receiving visual data. And, as an action, it had an ethical dimension (Illich was very much indebted to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas on these matters).

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. 

He goes on to explain how “until quite recently, the guard of the eyes was not looked upon as a fad, nor written off as internalized repression. Our taste was trained to judge all forms of gazing on the other. Today, things have changed. The shameless gaze is in.” Illich was quick to add that he was not speaking of gazing at pornographic images. He was interested in recovering the idea that seeing was an action and not merely a passive activity on the model of a lens receiving visual data. And, as an action, it had an ethical dimension (Illich was very much indebted to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas on these matters).

As I thought about this and how digital media seems to encourage the myth of immateriality and disembodiment, it occurred to me that this might be an interesting clue as to the source of the worst elements of our digital public spacesTo forget the body is to forget our dependence, our frailty, our limitations.

We never leave our bodies when we are immersed in digitally mediated experiences, but we might be tempted to disregard our flesh and its significance.

Digital media seems to suggest immateriality, as does the language we use to talk about it: virtual reality, cyberspace, the cloud. Likewise, we are tempted to imagine that our use of digital media puts us in a state of disembodiment. There’s something to this, but the language of disembodiment is not the best way to describe what’s going on. After all, we never actually leave our bodies when we use digital media. Perhaps it’s best to think of it as a different mode of embodiment—one characterized by telepresence, a condition in which our immediate experience is not confined to the physical location of our bodies.

When the Timeline Becomes Our Sidewalk

“For Hugh, who uses Latin, the act of reading with the eyes implies an activity not unlike a search for firewood:  his eyes must pick up the letters of the alphabet and bundle these into syllables.  The eyes are at the service of the lungs, the throat, the tongue, and the lips that do not usually utter single letters but words.”  (58)

In a tradition of one and a half millennia, the sounding pages are echoed by the resonance  of the moving lips and tongue.  The reader’s ears pay attention, and strain to catch what the reader’s mouth gives forth.  In this manner the sequence of letters translates directly into body movements and patterns nerve impulses.  the lines are a sound track picked up by the mouth and voiced by the reader for his own ear.  By reading, the page is literally embodied, incorporated.

With data collection, facial-recognition technology, and questions of bias in mind, consider this artifact discussed in a handout produced by Jim Strickland of the Computer History Museum. It is a rail ticket with a primitive facial recognition feature: “punched photographs,” generic faces to be punched by the conductor according to their similarity to the ticket holder. These inspired the Hollerith machine, which was used to tabulate census data from 1890 to the mid-20th century.

The philosopher Charles Taylor has called this tendency in modern liberal societies “code fetishism,” and it ought to be judiciously resisted. According to Taylor, code fetishism “tends to forget the background which makes sense of any code—the variety of goods which rules and norms are meant to realize—as well as the vertical dimension which arises above all of these.” Code fetishism in this sense is not unlike what Jacques Ellul called technique, a relentless drive toward efficiency that eventually became an end in itself having lost sight of the goods for the sake of which efficiency was pursued in the first place.

The scale and speed of communication on social media platforms generate infamously vexing issues related to speech and expression, which are especially evident during a volatile election season or a global pandemic. These issues do not, in my view, admit of obvious solutions beyond shutting down the platforms altogether. That not being a presently viable option, companies and law makers are increasingly pressured to apply ever more vigilant and stringent forms of moderation, often with counterproductive results

Perhaps this explains the recent interest in stoicism, although, we do well to remember Pascal’s pointed criticism of the stoics: “They conclude that we can always do what we can sometimes do.

The point is not that our digital media environment necessarily generates vice, rather it’s that it constitutes an ever-present field of temptation, which can require, in turn, monastic degrees of self-discipline to manage.

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.

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.

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.

Melissa Gregg who observed that “personal productivity is an epistemology without an ontology, a framework for knowing what to do in the absence of a guiding principle for doing it.”

As Ellul saw it, technique colonized realms of life to which it did not properly belong. The key, then, is to recognize where and when it is appropriate to allow technique (or quantification or optimization) a place and where and when it would be good to circumscribe its scope. In order to do so we must have before us a clear sense of the good we seek. But, as Ellul warned, technique becomes a problem precisely when it becomes and end in itself.

To me, this contrast illustrates the paradox of civilization: its charms are due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it, although this does not absolve us of the obligation to purify the stream. By being doubly in the right, we are admitting our mistake. We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep manufacturing costs down. But we are also right to cherish those very imperfections we are endeavouring to eliminate. Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savour.

On an earlier occasion, Jacobs’s analysis also recalled a distinction drawn by one philosopher between what is correct and what is true. What is correct may fall short of truth because it is partial or inadequate, and may for that reason be, in fact, misleading. It seemed to me that we might, in similar fashion, draw a distinction between what is right and what is good. It was right for the Baltimore Orioles in the 70s and the A’s in the early 2000’s to optimize their team strategies and tactics as they did. Moreover, it is right (meaning rational and in keeping with the competitive nature of the sport) for all other teams to do so. It is not, however, good for baseball that they do so, or so Jacobs and others who take his view of things would argue.

It’s worth pausing to consider wherein the purported rationality lies. It is the logic of competition. Within the sporting world, of course, the point is to win, and to do so in a way that can be clearly determined quantitatively. There are no grounds for anyone to ask a manager or a player to pursue a strategy that will diminish their competitive edge. Most of life, however, is not a game with quantifiable outcomes, and probably shouldn’t be treated as such. However, the triumph of technique in Ellul’s sense encourages the competitive mode of experience. Indeed, quantification itself invites it. This dynamic can be put to beneficial use, and, in clearly delineated circumstances, is perfectly appropriate. But applied uncritically and indiscriminately or even nefariously (see e.g. social media metrics) it can introduce destructive tendencies and eclipse qualitative or otherwise unquantifiable values. Generally speaking, quantification and the logic of optimization which it encourages tend to transform our field of experience into points of aggression, as the sociologist Hartmut Rosa has aptly put it. Data-driven optimization is, in this sense, a way of perceiving the world. And what may matter most about this is not necessarily what it allows us to see, but it keeps us from perceiving: in short, all that cannot be quantified or measured.

The tendency remains, and, as Ellul predicted, it has only intensified. The power of digital computation—still nascent when Ellul published his best known work, The Technological Society—radically widened the scope of technique, understood as the drive toward efficiency in all realms of human experience.

Technique became the defining force, the ultimate value, of a new social order in which efficiency was no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity. Technique became universally totalitarian in modern society as rationalistic proceduralism imposed an artificial value system of measuring and organizing everything quantitatively rather than qualitatively.

Ellul’s issue was not with technological machines but with a society necessarily caught up in efficient methodological techniques. Technology, then, is but an expression and by-product of the underlying reliance on technique, on the proceduralization whereby everything is organized and managed to function most efficiently, and directed toward the most expedient end of the highest productivity. Ellul’s own comprehensive definition is found in the preface of The Technological Society: “Technique is the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”

What Illich and Ellul would have us consider is that the human-built world is not, in fact, built for humans. And, of course, this is to say nothing of what the human-built world has meant for the non-human world. What’s more, it may be paradoxically the case that the human-built world will prove finally inhospitable to human beings precisely to the degree that it was built for humans without regard for humanity’s continuity with the other animals and the world we inhabit together.

I find that my vision tends to be too narrowly focused on surface-level symptoms. And it is too easy to take refuge in the thought that a few tweaks here and a little regulation there will make all things well, or at least significantly better. Meanwhile, nothing quite changes. Then along comes someone like Illich or Ellul claiming that maybe the whole modern techno-social order, whatever its relative merits, is broken and malignant. That the roots of our problems run much deeper than we had assumed. That we are, in truth, doing it all wrong and should revisit some of our most fundamental assumptions.

Modern citizens who want to pursue a successful career face a situation that is without clear boundaries or limits, and this prevents them from recognizing an alternative to their self-directed ‘lifelong learning and decision-making.’ Their comings and goings, their progress and well-being, their flourishing and ruination depend on their adaptation to diverse systems. In particular, they have to learn to function and compete in symbiosis with current economic conditions. A tolerant acceptance of these conditions is no longer enough. One has to learn to identify with them. In the mills of the new economy, where positioning is all, the grit is supposed to grind itself so fine that it becomes grease for the gears.

Each time I’ve read something about how we will all have to wear sensors to survive the envisioned future transportation environment, a particular paragraph from Illich’s Deschooling Society has come to mind: “Contemporary man,” Illich wrote, “attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.”

We know that our words often fail us and prove inadequate in the face of the most profound human experiences, whether tragic, ecstatic, or sublime. And yet it is in those moments, perhaps especially in those moments, that we feel the need to exist (for lack of a better word), either to comfort or to share or to participate. But the medium best suited for doing so is the body, and it is the body that is, of necessity, abstracted from so much of our digital interaction with the world. With our bodies we may communicate without speaking. It is a communication by being and perhaps also doing, rather than by speaking.

But, and here again is the point I’ve been driving at throughout this post, such silences can take shape only when we are in the presence of another, although even then, of course, they may fail to materialize. They seem to me to be the kind of silences that are mutually felt and acknowledged, that are a function not merely of the ceasing of sound but of a body at ease or eyes that remain fixed. These are silences which assure the other they are being heard not ignored. Silences that, if attended to closely and with care disclose rather than veil, clarify rather than obfuscate. They gather rather than alienate.

A second kind of silence is the silence that precedes words, a silence that is a preparation for speech. It involves a patience that deeply considers what ought to be said and how, one that troubles itself over the meaning of the words to be used and proceeds with great care. This silence is opposed, according to Illich, by all that would have us rush to speak.

Here Illich is encouraging a silence grounded in humility, a silence that arises not from a desire to be heard but from a desire to hear and to understand.

“First among the classification of silences,” Illich tells his students, “is the silence of the pure listener … the silence through which the message of the other becomes ‘he in us,’ the silence of deep interest.”

“The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.”

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.

We Fray Into the Future

Laughter In Dark Times

So why spill all these words, then? I suppose it is because I want to read Chalmers against the grain, which is to say as the unwitting emissary of a fantastical cautionary tale, which invites us not to fear some uncertain future but to reflect more critically on existing trends and patterns. For example, I wonder for how many of us the experience of the world is already so attenuated or impoverished that we might be tempted to believe that a virtual simulation could prove richer and more enticing? And how many of us already live as if this were in fact the case? How much of my time do I already devote to digitally mediated images and experiences? How often am I lured away from the world before my eyes by the one present through the screen?

the race to take flight from the earth as the material habitat of the human being now takes at least two forms: a literal flight from the planet and a virtual flight into digital realms.

But even if we grant, for arguments sake, that the experience of virtual reality will be indistinguishable from the experience of non-virtual reality and that it may even be somehow richer and more pleasant, as with certain dreams, it will still be the case that the experience will cease. The VR equipment will come off, you will disconnect from the virtual world and come back to the non-virtual world. Unless, of course, you posit an even more disturbing Matrix-like scenario in which human beings can choose to remain hooked up to virtual worlds indefinitely with their biological needs somehow serviced artificially. And this I would offer as the reductio ad absurdum of Chalmers’ argument. I don’t see what grounds he would have to object to such a development given his premises.

The good life is envisioned merely as artificially triggered neuronal activity.

Interestingly, and suggestively with virtual reality in mind, I think most of us can attest to the fact that a dream can sometimes linger in our imagination, for good or for ill. It may haunt us with its sweetness or with its strangeness. We may wake relieved or disappointed, and through the day we remember it with longing that wrecks our heart or an uneasiness that disquiets our mind. So, while a dream is a different sort of reality from that which I experience outside of the dream state, it can nonetheless permeate the waking world.

In other words, I’m suggesting that we take Chalmers’s dubious claims about the future of VR as an unintentional critique of contemporary society.2 We should take his argument, then, not quite at face value, but rather as a symptom of present disorders that we ought to diagnose. Now allow me to proceed in a rather roundabout way.

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.

In the middle of the turbulent 1930s, with Nazism, Fascism, and Stalinism flourishing, T. S. Eliot wrote of men who dreamed “of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”11 The ideology of technology tempts us in a similar manner. In the end we always find that such dreams yield nightmares that are all too real. If America’s ongoing experiment in democracy and economic freedom is to endure, we will need to think again about cultivating the necessary habits of the heart and resisting the allure of the ideology of technology.

Progress came to be understood as the advance of technology for technology’s sake.

Beyond this, however, there is also the matter of habits and assumptions and how these in turn shape individuals who together comprise the political and economic culture of the nation. What sorts of habits, then, are inculcated by a technological environment ordered around this general tendency? Certainly not the kind of habits that sit well with the venerable notion of delayed gratification. Nor, it would seem, would these habits leave one well suited for the demands of citizenship. The framers of our political order knew that its success would hang on what they understood as classical republican virtues—thrift, hard work, a measure of austerity, moderation, self-sufficiency, and self-government. It is easy to imagine how different our current political and economic circumstance might be if these virtues were in greater supply—perhaps too easy and facile as well.

To be precise, Tocqueville titled the tenth chapter of volume two, “Why The Americans Are More Addicted To Practical Than To Theoretical Science.” In Tocqueville’s day, the word technology did not yet carry the expansive and inclusive sense it does today. Instead, quaint sounding phrases like “the mechanical arts,” “the useful arts,” or sometimes merely “invention” did together the semantic work that we assign to the single word technology.1 “Practical science” was one more such phrase available to writers, and, as in Tocqueville’s case, “practical science” was often opposed to “theoretical science.” The two phrases captured the distinction we have in mind when we speak separately of science and technology.

It is possible that the Promethean aspirations that characterized the modern self and modern society may now yield to a more sober assessment of the limits within which genuine human flourishing might occur. It is possible, too, that we may learn once again the necessity of virtues, public and private — that we will no longer, as T. S. Eliot put it, be “dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” Topics Disenchantment Social Media History of Technology Link copied to clipboard! Subscriber Only Sign in or Subscribe Now for access to PDF downloads

The machine-like behavior of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.

Consider, too, how we present ourselves online. As sociologist Erving Goffman observed in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), we have always managed our impressions in keeping with the nature of our social settings. An attentive observer who followed me around from one such setting to another might be able to identify these often subtle modulations of my self-presentation, modulations to which I myself might have become oblivious. But now that social life has been digitized, I become keenly aware of myself engaging in the work of impression management, and I know, or at least I suspect, that everyone else is involved in the same activity. As a result, we experience the digital self as an artificial construct or, worse, as a self-interested manipulation of social relations.

Just as what is uncovered by film was unknown but always there, so, too, does digital media reveal aspects of our social experience that were always there but not always perceived. But what digital media reveals about the character and quality of social life, it also transforms.

in the age of digital reproducibility, the self no longer appears unique; the romantic idea of some ineffable essence that is me loses its power. The self that is rendered computable, and thus legible to the tools of computation, is an impoverished self, one whose aura has dissipated.

But although digital media appears to sustain memory, it is more like oral communication in its evanescence. The feed of our tweets and status updates recedes not as quickly and decisively as the spoken word, but with a similar effect. Under the guise of pervasive documentation, the architecture of digital platforms sanctions forgetting, while preoccupying us with instantaneity. It is not currently this era or this year, but rather this day or even this hour. To live on social media is to be sucked into a hyper-extended present, upon which the past only occasionally impinges.

We have ever more access to the past, but we are unable to bring it meaningfully to bear on the present.

Not only can written knowledge outlive a particular individual, it can outlive a whole culture. By outsourcing the task of remembrance to written texts, literate societies are relieved of the conservative and traditionalist pressures of orality. Thus, whereas premodern societies tended to look back to a distant and glorious past, many modern societies, with their imaginations liberated, were utopian in their expectations, assuming the best was still to come.

Language itself, especially in what we would think of as its more poetic manifestations, was focused on mnemonic efficiency: proverbs, parables, vivid images, rhythmic utterances, rituals, formulaic expressions, repetitions — much of what became unpalatable to the literate sensibility.

The triumph of shared time and the demise of shared place in the Digital City changes the experience of social belonging. While the modern state is not going anywhere anytime soon, the relationship of citizens to the nation is evolving. Loyalty to the community that is the nation state, already detached to some degree from local communities, yields to the shifting loyalties of digital attachments.

It is not only our experience of the present that digital media refashions but also our relationship, through memory, to the past. “What anthropologists distinguish as ‘cultures,’” Ivan Illich wrote, “the historian of mental spaces might distinguish as different ‘memories.’ The way to recall, to remember, has a history which is, to some degree, distinct from the history of the substance that is remembered.” We are, at least in part, what we remember, both as individuals and as a society, and what we remember is a function of how we remember, of our tools for remembering — texts, images, monuments, social media feeds. A change in tools is also a change of the self and its relation to society. There are few more important effects of digital technologies than their propensity to reorder how and what we remember.

The modern Analog City, particularly its print-based ecosystem of knowledge and the growing success of the techno-scientific project of mastery over nature, engendered the ideals of robust, confident, self-sufficient individualism. The Digital City disabuses its citizens of such notions. They know they are dependent and vulnerable, enmeshed in systems beyond their capacity to master.

The buffered self is sealed off from the world; its boundaries are less fuzzy; meaning resides neatly within its own mind; and it occupies a world of inert matter. It is autonomous and self-possessed, the ideal type of the modern individual.

in the enchanted world things and spirits have the “power of exogenously inducing or imposing meaning,” a meaning that is independent of the perceiver and that we may be forced to reckon with whether we would like to or not. Objects in the enchanted world can also have a causal power. These “charged” objects, Taylor explains, “have what we usually call ‘magic’ powers,” and they can be either benevolent or malevolent. They may bring blessing or trouble, cure or disease, rescue or danger.

Nothing external to the human mind bears any meaning in itself.

In his account of the nature of secular society, Charles Taylor argues that an important part of the emergence of the modern age was the disenchantment of the world and the rise of what he describes as the “buffered self.” Unlike the old “porous self,” the new buffered self no longer perceives and believes in sources of meaning outside the human mind. This new self feels unperturbed by powers beyond its control. We might say that in the Digital City the self becomes in some ways “porous” once again. It is subject to powers that we perceive as impinging on us, powers now algorithmic rather than spiritual.

In the Digital City the word is reanimated, recovering from the written much of the vitality of the spoken word. Digital media reintegrates the word into a dynamic situation. The digital audience is not always visible, but it can be present with a degree of immediacy that is more like a face-to-face encounter than are print writing and reading. Discourse on digital media platforms, from comment boxes to social media, is infamously combative. Words are active, and any negative effects are not easily contained.

But free-speech maximalism flourishes in print culture; in the Digital City it appears less desirable, for two reasons. First, print culture sustained the belief that, given a modicum of good sense and education among people, truth would triumph in the marketplace of ideas. Writing and reading are slow and deliberate, encouraging the belief that false ideas will eventually be rejected by anyone trained to think. Second, we experience the written word as an inert reality — it is the “dead letter,” it has lost the force and immediacy of the spoken word. Because writing is less volatile than speech, it makes freedom of expression seem relatively harmless.

Online venues, whether social media platforms, messaging apps, or forums, are not simply places we go to express our political opinions; they are places where our political habits and sensibilities are formed.

But let us think more about the last of these three alterations — about how new technologies alter the nature of community. The human self, as philosophers have long noted, emerges in relation to others, or to the Other, if you like. The character of the self develops under the gaze of this Other, and is shaped by it. In the Digital City, we are under the gaze of an algorithmically constituted, collective Other. This audience, composed of friends, strangers, and non-human actors, is unlike anything we might have encountered in the Analog City. Like the gaze of God, it is a ubiquitous face looking down upon us, whose smile we dearly desire. We seek its approval, or, failing that, at least its notice, and we subtly bend our self-presentation to fit our expectations of what this audience desires of us.

Postman’s second alteration — in the things we think with — can be glossed as follows: It is one thing to think with a pamphlet, another to think with a newspaper, yet another to think with a televisual image, and still another to think with a meme. Writing encourages a heightened precision of expression and a sequential and systematic ordering of ideas and arguments. The television image does both more and less than what writing can accomplish, operating at a different emotional register. It can communicate wordlessly, directly to the heart, as it were, but it cannot easily support nor does it encourage sustained argumentation.

The first alteration — in the things we think about — can be described in terms of attention, which has so vexed our public discourse about technology in the last few years. (Although as early as 2008, Nicholas Carr had already raised lonely alarms and even warned against the dangers of micro-targeted advertising.) The structure of a medium of communication guides and directs our attention. Television, for example, directs our attention to the physical characteristics of a political figure in a way that print and radio don’t. The telegraph made it possible to bring far away events to broad public attention on a daily basis, thereby altering the topics and pace of political discourse. Digital media now makes it possible to attend to an even wider array of phenomena, near and far, and often in so-called “real time.” And, insofar as our social media feeds are shaped by opaque algorithmic processes and engineered to maximize engagement, they play an especially obvious role in altering what we think about.

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.

The invention of writing, especially the invention of the phonetic alphabet, “restructured consciousness,” in Walter Ong’s memorable phrase, and so restructured societies as well. It did so, in part, by making new forms of expression, organization, and remembering possible. Writing, for instance, made it possible to detach the act of communication from the context of the face-to-face encounter, thereby tempering what Ong called the “agonistic” tendencies of such encounters — their resemblance to combat — particularly in the political realm. Writing also “separates ‘administration’ — civil, religious, commercial, and other — from other types of social activities.” And it externalized thought and memory, engendering the novel experience of the mediated self, marked by heightened self-awareness.

The anodyne insistence on fact-checking to bridge chasms in worldview misunderstands the nature of our new media environment; it fails to see the difference between the economics of information scarcity and the economics of information abundance.

Communication technologies are the material infrastructure on which so much of the work of human society is built. One cannot radically transform that infrastructure without radically altering the character of the culture built upon it. As Neil Postman once put it, “In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.” So, likewise, we may say that in the year 2020, fifty years after the Internet was invented, we do not have old America plus the Internet. We have a different America.

We are caught between two ages, as it were, and we are experiencing all of the attendant confusion, frustration, and exhaustion that such a liminal state involves. To borrow a line from the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The challenges we are facing are not merely the bad actors, whether they be foreign agents, big tech companies, or political extremists. We are in the middle of a deep transformation of our political culture, as digital technology is reshaping the human experience at both an individual and a social level. The Internet is not simply a tool with which we do politics well or badly; it has created a new environment that yields a different set of assumptions, principles, and habits from those that ordered American politics in the pre-digital age.

As late as 2011, journalists and technologists were praising social media’s emancipatory power in light of the role of Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring revolts. But, as has been noted many times, after the U.S. presidential election in 2016, such optimism increasingly appeared naïve and misguided.

As late as 2011, journalists and technologists were praising social media’s emancipatory power in light of the role of Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring revolts. But, as has been noted many times, after the U.S. presidential election in 2016, such optimism increasingly appeared naïve and misguided.