Regarding acedia, or as I like to think of it, inertia...
20 years ago I had a baby and moved to Canada, away from all my friends and family, and the thing that saved my sanity was blogging. It was the golden age of "Mommy Blogs," before sponsorships and monetization schemes. The "Mamasphere" was (in my experience) the digital equivalent of a neighbourhood. You'd drop by your neighbours', shoot the breeze over the back fence (in the comment section), and have actual conversations with other parents going through similar things. I made real friends, who became friends in Real Life, several of whom are still friends to this day. We had an actual community.
And then we helped bring about its demise, because we found something that seemed easier, and there are only so many hours in the day. A bunch of us were early adopters of Facebook. It was similar to what we'd been doing on our blogs, but it was one-stop shopping, the Walmart of websites. You could see everyone at once, rather than having to visit individual sites, and you could post shorter stuff, which was faster than writing 2000 word essays several times a week. It was an introvert's paradise, where you could "interact" without interacting, by giving a thumbs-up or throwing pies at each other (I do miss the pies; early FB was a sillier place). Over time we let our blogs atrophy, and FB became the algorithm-driven, wholly unsatisfying thing it is today. We went because it seemed easier; we stayed because there was no place else to go.
The thing that galls me the most is that mommy-blogging was fun. People were writing long, eccentric, heartfelt, sometimes overly-personal screeds, not for clicks, not for money, but for the friends we were finding all around us. And yet the lure of "not quite as fun, but a lot easier" was difficult to resist. This happens in so many different ways. I love boeuf bourgignon, but it takes all afternoon (and you have to peel all those tiny onions), and frozen taquitos take 7 minutes in the toaster oven and only leave you feeling a little bit sick. The good stuff takes work, even when it's fun and otherwise satisfying. The body/brain at rest wants to remain at rest.
I don't like how bummed-out this sounds. I absolutely believe we can break out of any of these orbits. But it does take work.
Your taking us back to Pascal and his less modern perspective is helpful. The older I get, the more sensitive and resistant I become to our culture's default way of thinking of humans sometimes as just another species of animals, sometimes as machines built of distinct parts, to be used as efficiently as possible. My eyes have been opened to the strangeness of some of my own ideas I've had my whole life, once I question the assumption of "If a thing can be done, it should be done." Not having a societal idea of what a human being is, is a fundamental problem.
I love this, regarding why distraction comes so easily: "We might also be turning away from duties, responsibilities, and obligations we ought to be more vigorously pursuing." Yes!! My goodness, think of all the good work that might be done -- visiting one of the many lonely people, seeking out old people who need a little help around the place, remembering parents who would appreciate a phone call...
Thank you for the good reminders all around, one of which led me to think of this that Jesus said: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work."
I, too, follow Ted's substack, and I often agree with the (sometimes surprising) critiques he makes of our digital age.
That said, I also agree with our author that Ted's heuristic is problematic.
For one, I agree with the author that Ted should have used actual time frames (the Renaissance, Early Modernity, what-have-you) when attempting to trace the changes he sees from previous eras to ours. The ahistorical take leads to "mushiness" when trying to actually concretize and map the changes over time.
The difficulties and the joys of some of Ted's criticisms comes from the fact that he often confirms what I already suspect about our digital environment and how it shapes our culture. Difficulties because it's really confirmation bias that delights in finding that a smart guy like Ted agrees with me, but also joys because I know that I share with Ted some intuitions about the darker sides of our culture's digital transformation (that is to say, sometimes my confirmation bias isn't "wrong"). Again, however, the devil is in the details, and while it's easy for us to identify our intuitive notions about these issues, it's more tricky to spell things out concretely so that they actually, you know, make sense (just as our author here takes issue with the notion we derive from Ted's chart that all these cultural processes happened at the same time and at the same speed across all cultural artifacts).
On another note, even if we take Ted's chart as is, he's missing a key cultural product, and I'm not sure our author addresses it directly either: books! Print, audio, ebooks; all kinds, and all left out of Ted's chart! I messaged Ted directly and said that when I viewed the chart, one of the first things I noticed was that there was no mention of books among all those other cultural products, and as far as we can tell, reading in whatever format is alive and well! I haven't heard anything from Ted, but I guess I didn't expect to, either. What this glaring omission showed me was that Ted didn't only skimp on some of the details in favor of the "big picture"; he even left out books, perhaps because they don't fit neatly into his model. Like our author, I love charts like these, but there's a fundamental problem with a chart like this that leaves out books. I'd think that this would require reworking the chart, if necessary....
I would also say that our author is more magnanimous than I am when it comes to our author's belief that maybe he's misreading the chart. Here's why.
While Ted is an astute cultural critic, and while he has completed post-grad education at Oxford, he doesn't have a doctorate in any subject. Having been through several rounds of humanities-based graduate degrees myself, I generally buy in to the idea that it's usually the folks with the doctorates who are most "expert" in their field. And yet, even they make mistakes, glaring omissions, etc. So while I always find Ted's work interesting, and often times I agree with his assertions, I don't regard as an "expert" per se. His real forte, no pun intended, is in musical studies, and while that doesn't limit one to speaking about culture write large, it also doesn't give him the pedigree of an "expert" cultural critic. I understand that there are lots of opinions about what credentials (if any) one should have to be considered expert in any particular field, and I readily admit that my own opinions come from my own educational background and my concomitant biases. And yet, I maintain that I'm right, because again, Ted left books off of his chart, for god's sake!
I also agree with our author that there's a big difference in framing when you consider behaviors to be addictive versus considering behaviors that are compulsive or habit-forming. He's right: how we understand human agency is determined by the names we give to things, and it's best not to be sloppy with our nomenclature.
Our author is also righty concerned with human agency and the role it plays in our behaviors. I might be remiss if I characterize our author's sentiment in this regard as "libertarian", but I can see that our author clearly is concerned with the nuanced behaviors behind our actions vs. Ted's "omg, dopamine culture is so overwhelming that it totally overpowers our individual agency and capacity to make better choices". I find further evidence to support this characterization when our author then takes issue with Ted's implicit stance that these massive tech companies overpower all the "hapless individuals". Where is their room for the nuances behind human behavior and agency in Ted's chart?
(This may be going out too far on the proverbial limb, but when I consider Ted's framing of the problem as "addictive" in nature, I see a rhetorical analogue in the attempt of certain folks who would label something as "traumatic", even when it doesn't fit the clinical definition of the term. In short, sloppiness of nomenclature with the result being that humans are less capable of making choices than they actually are. Boy, I sound like a scold, but I promise I'm not! I've been doomscrolling for the past hour, it's only 9 am and I'm eating cookie dough ice cream, for god's sake!)
I am grateful to our author for bringing Blaise Pascal's thoughts on distractions to the fore. I am only vaguely familiar with Pascal, and therefore had no idea that he wrote extensively on distractions. Clearly, distraction-seeking seems to be part of the human condition, and not a criticism that can only be wielded against smartphone-bearing teens.
Things get even more interesting when our author brings in Philip Rieff's analysis of therapeutic culture (I'd heard of neither Rieff nor therapeutic culture before.). In the first 6 paragraphs of this part of the essay, we learn that Rieff believed that ultimately, culture can be defined as a system that helps direct us outside ourselves so that we can ultimately self-actualize (if I'm understanding this correctly). It reminds me of John Donne's "no man is an island"; that is to say, we cannot ultimately find self-actualization and therefore self-satisfaction if we're absolutely freed from all the constraints of society. I would agree with this proposition. And I would also agree that the culture we live is it NOT Rieff's traditional culture. What we have, courtesy of our digital devices and social media, is the ability to shrinking from our social relationships and obligations, and even sometimes our jobs (or desire to hold jobs), and instead participate in the sloth our author mentions earlier in the essay. That is to say, living mostly in our own virtual worlds where the best we might hope for is "connection" with "Internet people", as my grandma calls them. What we are creating in today's society, then, is young people who are increasingly used to spending more and more time alone in their virtual pursuits, and this includes the infinite cycle of social media drama, outrage, etc., and simultaneously many young people (and older people, too), are spending less time focused on those external drivers Rieff mentions. We're creating, then, a generation that is detached in a way from time and place; a generation whose only cultural references relate to their devices, pop culture, and social media, and one that knows less and less about their own place in American history and culture, their place in their community, etc. And if this is true, we can extend the argument even farther by stating that if these folks are left mainly to their own "selfish" digital worlds, they actually won't find self-satisfaction and contentment precisely because they are not participating in any form of traditional culture, as understood by Rieff. Instead, they are participating in the ephemera of social media and pop culture, which means more and more people will be "ahistorical" in their orientation. What this also means is that for those of us who aren't fully engrossed in that milieu, communication will be harder between people like us and people like them, as we will share fewer and fewer cultural/community norms/ideals. I'm getting sloppy with my words, I know, but I'm only coming to these realizations as I type this response. Interestingly, I see Jonathan Haidt is coming out with yet another book, and it centers on anxious teens and the reasons behind their anxiety. And from a review I'm reading, Haidt addresses this precise concern i.e. young people indulging almost exclusively in impersonal, virtual worlds and therefore not having the same cultural referents many of the rest of us have.
And yes, I agree with this idea that many of us are left with less ability to say "no" to the superabundance of information, media, etc. We DO want to know and be known, and when given the systems and devices that enable this pursuit 24/7, it becomes extremely hard to set rules. I think it was Heidegger who said that "To give yourself a code of laws is the highest form of freedom". I think he's right; self-imposed restraints are some of the hardest for humans to manage, and I would include myself in that group.
My sincere thanks to our author for this piece. Like all of his pieces, I need to really sit down and read them carefully; then reread them, take notes, and respond (roughly) as I have. I can't think of a better way to spend a Saturday morning.
I think Ted Gioia's post aptly described how many of us feel about what’s going on and in particular the fear we have for young people caught up in the “addictive” world of social media. This post adds a level of depth to the conversation that I appreciate. I'll have to reread both several times now. I didn’t know about the concept of the anti-culture but I agree that’s where we are and it’s not going well yet.
The food chain exists to turn everything into money
Money metaphysically is a manifestation of non-being. So in the end, by treating money (nothing) as something- all it touches is reduced to its nothingness
From Andy Crouch ("The Life We're Looking For"), a couple years ago:
" What technology wants is really what Mammon wants: a world of context-free, responsibility-free, dependence-free power measured out in fungible, storable units of value. And ultimately what Mammon wants is to turn a world made for and stewarded by persons into a world made of and reduced to things….
God wishes to put all things into the service of persons and ultimately to bring forth the flourishing of creation through the flourishing of persons. Mammon wants to put all persons into the service of things and ultimately to bring about the exploitation of all of creation."
But I think I'm putting what you wrote here on the back of my "Bicycle Mechanic, Apprentice" business card.
Thanks for this. The second paragraph of the Crouch quote is particularly pertinent and well put. Profound echoes also of Iain McGilchrist’s Master/Emissary thesis
You're welcome, and I think Crouch and McGilchrist rhyme, too. I'm about to start my second reading of the Master and his Emissary. Both feed my wish to just slow the heck down.
"So, I got hold of a little money, and I thought 'I could save it up and maybe get off the street', but then I'd probably get robbed; or, I could get high. I'm homeless, so I think I'll just get high.", said the guy on his court-mandated mental health status check to a social worker I know.
When I graduated high school in northern Illinois in 1970, I knew that the warehouse job I had would let me purchase a modest house, keep a compact car and have a little money to go camping for a couple weeks in summer, and get married, and be more or less self-sufficient. So, now fifty years later, going around by bicycle in the humble Midwestern MSA where I live , I see over half my fellow citizens connected to their little screens while they're driving, walking and even biking on our pretty riverfront pedestrian trail. And also, year by year, I see more un-housed people seeking their 'community' on the steps of the library or at aid agencies. Stats bear out the difficulty in just getting in to a middle-class existence, high and rising levels of consumer debt, unreliable cars, unreliable community systems and services, unreliable partners, unreliable employment. So, why not just get distracted; why not engage with the little screen, since even if you got a little money ahead, it wouldn't be enough, anyway.
Bill W's "Big Book", from nearly 100 years ago, does speak to 'distraction' as an avoidance of humility and serenity, and a dis-acknowledgement of our own limitations. And, when the folks who've mastered marketing to us both 'at scale' and in very, very targeted ways get into our faces, it does seem to me to be very much the same temptation as 'just one more drink' or 'one more hit', or a very attractive Japanese gardening tool that goes with the book on Japanese gardening you just looked at online that all feels pretty addictive. And I know some things about this.
You are most definitely, in my more stoic and weary observations, on to something of the cleverness of the machinery of modernist financialisms here. They have managed a corruption of the question, "What are people for?" with the machinery of modern 'marketing'. Satisfaction at a tap or a swipe. Your differentiation between a dopamine-driven addiction, and marketing's methodically-altered behavior patterns of all of us consumers did provoke some additional soul-searching here.
Iain McGilchrist has recently been writing and speaking of the recent shift in the manner in which our brains think, and in 400 pages, with another hundred in supporting endnotes ("The Master & His Emissary", 2009), measures and observes the manner in which people in cultures nearing their apogee of supremacy (such as the Renaissance, or the modernist's 'End of History') become acclimated or expectant of instant gratification (the individually forged Japanese garden tool that could be in my hands in a week...), and of diminished ability to wait, or consider, or reflect, or just make do with the one I'd picked up at a yard sale, in an exchange with an actual neighbor. I think that this tendency to get immediate gratification, and there's so much of so many kinds of 'gratification' to be found instantaneously, and intentionally directed to our most vulnerable places, that I'm coming to think that so long as we keep looking for the way we've always done things to save us, we're just screwed.
For me, maybe like Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, I've decided that I just "..prefer not to", and continue to disengage with The Machine in little and big ways where possible. I appreciate very much having access to these conversations and your insights, understanding that the Internet IS an evil thing, in which there is some good. But, just now, I need to clean and re-pack the front wheel bearings for my '69 Raleigh Tourist 3-speed. I have places to go, slowly. Why arrive early and spoil the day, after all?
Thank you for plunging far more deeply into these important concepts. Our world needs more deep thinking. And would it be helpful to see written artifacts, such as books, on Ted's chart?
I’m getting to this essay very late, distracted as I am by all the sights and sounds, and i imagine the moment for engagement may have passed. But I’m wondering: did you actually receive any pushback on this essay? I have to admit I’d be amazed if you did. It’s such a thoughtful, respectful, deep, and serious engagement with Gioia’s argument that I have trouble imagining him or anyone else taking issue with it. My reaction may not be worth much, but I’ll just say that I found it penetrating and insightful as your essays always are. More so, even. Your work sets a higher standard for all of us, and I’m very grateful to be given the opportunity to learn from it!
In regard to Rosa's dynamic must-keep-growing society, and the idea of perpetual consumers with digital media as an "everlasting commodity" I am reminded of Alexander Beiner's recent observation: "Today, we consume not only things themselves but also the emotions that are bound up with things. You cannot consume things endlessly, but emotions you can. Thus, emotions open up a new field of infinite consumption." ("Myth and Metrics" 9.28.2023)
Paul Kingsnorth: "What happens, then, if you feast without fasting? What happens if your culture encourages you to feast every day, because your economy is predicated on endless, consumer-driven growth? ("Atheists in Space" 12.24.2023)
endless consumption and endless growth - as my daughter says, "hmm"
I was recently in a conversation with students where we considered the antidote to FOMO to be JOMO, the Joy Of Missing Out, i.e. the recognition of the great good of accepting certain limits in the way we live our lives and enjoying the fruits of the choices that impose those limits with gratitude and contentment as we learn to be fully present to them. My colleague who was leading the discussion used the analogy of his marriage: by marrying his wife he missed out on pursuing intimate relationships with millions of other women, but the joy of establishing a household of love with the one he chose provided the necessary limit that enabled so much other joy, and without which none of that joy would be possible. Again, this rests on a certain understanding of the nature of the human that this post so wonderfully articulates.
Yes! We have only begun to confront the reality of digital desire. This article builds from a foundation of complexity to offer real insight. Thank you.
To tweak this slightly, I would go even deeper into the human condition. Our desires are not entirely mimetic, our desires are also projections into the core of the human condition. As you quote Jacobs: into the "affirmation of our very being".
But these projections are like staring into the sun—we can only do so with the briefest of glances. So we mediate these desires to dull the intensity. We unknowingly project them onto symbols that evade conscious reflection. Or worse, we submit to Pascal's diversion and cede our desires to memesis, what Emerson calls "suicide through imitation".
At its best, digital would offer new ways of exploring these desires of transcendence. The proper constraints would allow us to explore these with less of the existential dread that binds them, and thus with more freedom. We could play with them more consciously, to reveal new depth and possibility.
Is such enabling constraint possible? The digital hijacks this by removing the finitude that real transcendence requires. Its promise is pure transcendence, zero finitude.
> Indeed, I’m tempted to say that the whole of the human condition could be summed up this way: we desire to know and to be known.
Love it. I would add the finitude that grounds the transcendence: "yet we will never know fully nor can we ever be fully known."
I take some issue with the idea of an “anti-culture” being at the center of the issue, although it is close. While it is true that there has been a strong deconstructionist movement (which has often been insightful) nature abhors a vacuum and “anti-culture” is unstable (which is the fatal blind spot of some deconstructionists). I think there is a cultural default focused on success and pleasure, well-suited to the economic order, as you pointed out. But this culture has its own order and precepts; it asserts itself as presenting a positive view of the good life, and fighting against it is fighting something more than mere “anti-culture” I think. Also, even the sub-cultures that have surfaced in the wake of the therapeutic and deconstructionist moment have their own sense of community and positive culture. The trick is that we now must actively choose the culture or cultures we wish to engage with, and that is inextricable from engaging with community (as an aside, I doubt many people with a therapeutic focus would deny the importance of community and culture).
I agree that our digital technology has created barriers to doing that work, and maybe only now has it become possible to stay in the anti-cultural limbo, but I’m not sure.
Finding your writing nuanced, patient, and thoughtful - I print, read, and ponder. Tending to do my reading of your posts on Saturday mornings, a time when I reserve several early, quiet hours to "silence, solitude, attention, disciplined engagement, well-considered restraint, vulnerability, and risk." (My "well-considered restraint" being no electronic devices before 6am, thus the prior printing of your posts.) All in an effort to hone "the necessary skills and requisite virtues for the pursuit of [my] well being and that of [my] neighbor." Thank you for your good work.
I am sympathetic to seeing the idea of a "dopamine culture" as being a bit shallow. A particularly easy hook on which to hang one's hat at the expense of diminishing our agency and excusing our failure to execute that agency in a deliberate and purposeful way.
Yesterday afternoon I attended a Zoom call hosted by Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch. It was a gathering of those actively supporting Haidt's Anxious Generation project and his associated Substack. It is a worthy project seeking to free our youth and ourselves from the toxic tyranny of social media, restoring childhood and healthy minds. The call was an excellent rallying of the troops for the cause; a sort of exhortation to "We few, we happy few," to go "once more unto the breach," and recover what has been lost.
Alas, unless we can rally to our cultural Agincourt and restore our culture to be, ala Rieff, sustained "by the power of [moral] institutions to bind and to loose...," and "...directing the self outward toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied," efforts such as Haidt's - as important and purposeful as they are - become distractions, mere border skirmishes, benign in their cultural effect. It seems that a cultural restoration, akin to Rieff's description, is only possible if it is built upon the "permanent things" championed by Eliot and Kirk. A restoration fueled by the moral imagination and an understanding of rights linked with duties, responsibilities, and obligations.
Regarding acedia, or as I like to think of it, inertia...
20 years ago I had a baby and moved to Canada, away from all my friends and family, and the thing that saved my sanity was blogging. It was the golden age of "Mommy Blogs," before sponsorships and monetization schemes. The "Mamasphere" was (in my experience) the digital equivalent of a neighbourhood. You'd drop by your neighbours', shoot the breeze over the back fence (in the comment section), and have actual conversations with other parents going through similar things. I made real friends, who became friends in Real Life, several of whom are still friends to this day. We had an actual community.
And then we helped bring about its demise, because we found something that seemed easier, and there are only so many hours in the day. A bunch of us were early adopters of Facebook. It was similar to what we'd been doing on our blogs, but it was one-stop shopping, the Walmart of websites. You could see everyone at once, rather than having to visit individual sites, and you could post shorter stuff, which was faster than writing 2000 word essays several times a week. It was an introvert's paradise, where you could "interact" without interacting, by giving a thumbs-up or throwing pies at each other (I do miss the pies; early FB was a sillier place). Over time we let our blogs atrophy, and FB became the algorithm-driven, wholly unsatisfying thing it is today. We went because it seemed easier; we stayed because there was no place else to go.
The thing that galls me the most is that mommy-blogging was fun. People were writing long, eccentric, heartfelt, sometimes overly-personal screeds, not for clicks, not for money, but for the friends we were finding all around us. And yet the lure of "not quite as fun, but a lot easier" was difficult to resist. This happens in so many different ways. I love boeuf bourgignon, but it takes all afternoon (and you have to peel all those tiny onions), and frozen taquitos take 7 minutes in the toaster oven and only leave you feeling a little bit sick. The good stuff takes work, even when it's fun and otherwise satisfying. The body/brain at rest wants to remain at rest.
I don't like how bummed-out this sounds. I absolutely believe we can break out of any of these orbits. But it does take work.
Your taking us back to Pascal and his less modern perspective is helpful. The older I get, the more sensitive and resistant I become to our culture's default way of thinking of humans sometimes as just another species of animals, sometimes as machines built of distinct parts, to be used as efficiently as possible. My eyes have been opened to the strangeness of some of my own ideas I've had my whole life, once I question the assumption of "If a thing can be done, it should be done." Not having a societal idea of what a human being is, is a fundamental problem.
I love this, regarding why distraction comes so easily: "We might also be turning away from duties, responsibilities, and obligations we ought to be more vigorously pursuing." Yes!! My goodness, think of all the good work that might be done -- visiting one of the many lonely people, seeking out old people who need a little help around the place, remembering parents who would appreciate a phone call...
Thank you for the good reminders all around, one of which led me to think of this that Jesus said: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work."
Unless we know what a human being is, we should be silent before its mystery
I, too, follow Ted's substack, and I often agree with the (sometimes surprising) critiques he makes of our digital age.
That said, I also agree with our author that Ted's heuristic is problematic.
For one, I agree with the author that Ted should have used actual time frames (the Renaissance, Early Modernity, what-have-you) when attempting to trace the changes he sees from previous eras to ours. The ahistorical take leads to "mushiness" when trying to actually concretize and map the changes over time.
The difficulties and the joys of some of Ted's criticisms comes from the fact that he often confirms what I already suspect about our digital environment and how it shapes our culture. Difficulties because it's really confirmation bias that delights in finding that a smart guy like Ted agrees with me, but also joys because I know that I share with Ted some intuitions about the darker sides of our culture's digital transformation (that is to say, sometimes my confirmation bias isn't "wrong"). Again, however, the devil is in the details, and while it's easy for us to identify our intuitive notions about these issues, it's more tricky to spell things out concretely so that they actually, you know, make sense (just as our author here takes issue with the notion we derive from Ted's chart that all these cultural processes happened at the same time and at the same speed across all cultural artifacts).
On another note, even if we take Ted's chart as is, he's missing a key cultural product, and I'm not sure our author addresses it directly either: books! Print, audio, ebooks; all kinds, and all left out of Ted's chart! I messaged Ted directly and said that when I viewed the chart, one of the first things I noticed was that there was no mention of books among all those other cultural products, and as far as we can tell, reading in whatever format is alive and well! I haven't heard anything from Ted, but I guess I didn't expect to, either. What this glaring omission showed me was that Ted didn't only skimp on some of the details in favor of the "big picture"; he even left out books, perhaps because they don't fit neatly into his model. Like our author, I love charts like these, but there's a fundamental problem with a chart like this that leaves out books. I'd think that this would require reworking the chart, if necessary....
I would also say that our author is more magnanimous than I am when it comes to our author's belief that maybe he's misreading the chart. Here's why.
While Ted is an astute cultural critic, and while he has completed post-grad education at Oxford, he doesn't have a doctorate in any subject. Having been through several rounds of humanities-based graduate degrees myself, I generally buy in to the idea that it's usually the folks with the doctorates who are most "expert" in their field. And yet, even they make mistakes, glaring omissions, etc. So while I always find Ted's work interesting, and often times I agree with his assertions, I don't regard as an "expert" per se. His real forte, no pun intended, is in musical studies, and while that doesn't limit one to speaking about culture write large, it also doesn't give him the pedigree of an "expert" cultural critic. I understand that there are lots of opinions about what credentials (if any) one should have to be considered expert in any particular field, and I readily admit that my own opinions come from my own educational background and my concomitant biases. And yet, I maintain that I'm right, because again, Ted left books off of his chart, for god's sake!
I also agree with our author that there's a big difference in framing when you consider behaviors to be addictive versus considering behaviors that are compulsive or habit-forming. He's right: how we understand human agency is determined by the names we give to things, and it's best not to be sloppy with our nomenclature.
Our author is also righty concerned with human agency and the role it plays in our behaviors. I might be remiss if I characterize our author's sentiment in this regard as "libertarian", but I can see that our author clearly is concerned with the nuanced behaviors behind our actions vs. Ted's "omg, dopamine culture is so overwhelming that it totally overpowers our individual agency and capacity to make better choices". I find further evidence to support this characterization when our author then takes issue with Ted's implicit stance that these massive tech companies overpower all the "hapless individuals". Where is their room for the nuances behind human behavior and agency in Ted's chart?
(This may be going out too far on the proverbial limb, but when I consider Ted's framing of the problem as "addictive" in nature, I see a rhetorical analogue in the attempt of certain folks who would label something as "traumatic", even when it doesn't fit the clinical definition of the term. In short, sloppiness of nomenclature with the result being that humans are less capable of making choices than they actually are. Boy, I sound like a scold, but I promise I'm not! I've been doomscrolling for the past hour, it's only 9 am and I'm eating cookie dough ice cream, for god's sake!)
I am grateful to our author for bringing Blaise Pascal's thoughts on distractions to the fore. I am only vaguely familiar with Pascal, and therefore had no idea that he wrote extensively on distractions. Clearly, distraction-seeking seems to be part of the human condition, and not a criticism that can only be wielded against smartphone-bearing teens.
Things get even more interesting when our author brings in Philip Rieff's analysis of therapeutic culture (I'd heard of neither Rieff nor therapeutic culture before.). In the first 6 paragraphs of this part of the essay, we learn that Rieff believed that ultimately, culture can be defined as a system that helps direct us outside ourselves so that we can ultimately self-actualize (if I'm understanding this correctly). It reminds me of John Donne's "no man is an island"; that is to say, we cannot ultimately find self-actualization and therefore self-satisfaction if we're absolutely freed from all the constraints of society. I would agree with this proposition. And I would also agree that the culture we live is it NOT Rieff's traditional culture. What we have, courtesy of our digital devices and social media, is the ability to shrinking from our social relationships and obligations, and even sometimes our jobs (or desire to hold jobs), and instead participate in the sloth our author mentions earlier in the essay. That is to say, living mostly in our own virtual worlds where the best we might hope for is "connection" with "Internet people", as my grandma calls them. What we are creating in today's society, then, is young people who are increasingly used to spending more and more time alone in their virtual pursuits, and this includes the infinite cycle of social media drama, outrage, etc., and simultaneously many young people (and older people, too), are spending less time focused on those external drivers Rieff mentions. We're creating, then, a generation that is detached in a way from time and place; a generation whose only cultural references relate to their devices, pop culture, and social media, and one that knows less and less about their own place in American history and culture, their place in their community, etc. And if this is true, we can extend the argument even farther by stating that if these folks are left mainly to their own "selfish" digital worlds, they actually won't find self-satisfaction and contentment precisely because they are not participating in any form of traditional culture, as understood by Rieff. Instead, they are participating in the ephemera of social media and pop culture, which means more and more people will be "ahistorical" in their orientation. What this also means is that for those of us who aren't fully engrossed in that milieu, communication will be harder between people like us and people like them, as we will share fewer and fewer cultural/community norms/ideals. I'm getting sloppy with my words, I know, but I'm only coming to these realizations as I type this response. Interestingly, I see Jonathan Haidt is coming out with yet another book, and it centers on anxious teens and the reasons behind their anxiety. And from a review I'm reading, Haidt addresses this precise concern i.e. young people indulging almost exclusively in impersonal, virtual worlds and therefore not having the same cultural referents many of the rest of us have.
And yes, I agree with this idea that many of us are left with less ability to say "no" to the superabundance of information, media, etc. We DO want to know and be known, and when given the systems and devices that enable this pursuit 24/7, it becomes extremely hard to set rules. I think it was Heidegger who said that "To give yourself a code of laws is the highest form of freedom". I think he's right; self-imposed restraints are some of the hardest for humans to manage, and I would include myself in that group.
My sincere thanks to our author for this piece. Like all of his pieces, I need to really sit down and read them carefully; then reread them, take notes, and respond (roughly) as I have. I can't think of a better way to spend a Saturday morning.
I think Ted Gioia's post aptly described how many of us feel about what’s going on and in particular the fear we have for young people caught up in the “addictive” world of social media. This post adds a level of depth to the conversation that I appreciate. I'll have to reread both several times now. I didn’t know about the concept of the anti-culture but I agree that’s where we are and it’s not going well yet.
The food chain exists to turn everything into money
Money metaphysically is a manifestation of non-being. So in the end, by treating money (nothing) as something- all it touches is reduced to its nothingness
In the end, everything disappears
I think I saw this in a fortune cookie ;)
From Andy Crouch ("The Life We're Looking For"), a couple years ago:
" What technology wants is really what Mammon wants: a world of context-free, responsibility-free, dependence-free power measured out in fungible, storable units of value. And ultimately what Mammon wants is to turn a world made for and stewarded by persons into a world made of and reduced to things….
God wishes to put all things into the service of persons and ultimately to bring forth the flourishing of creation through the flourishing of persons. Mammon wants to put all persons into the service of things and ultimately to bring about the exploitation of all of creation."
But I think I'm putting what you wrote here on the back of my "Bicycle Mechanic, Apprentice" business card.
Thanks for this. The second paragraph of the Crouch quote is particularly pertinent and well put. Profound echoes also of Iain McGilchrist’s Master/Emissary thesis
You're welcome, and I think Crouch and McGilchrist rhyme, too. I'm about to start my second reading of the Master and his Emissary. Both feed my wish to just slow the heck down.
"So, I got hold of a little money, and I thought 'I could save it up and maybe get off the street', but then I'd probably get robbed; or, I could get high. I'm homeless, so I think I'll just get high.", said the guy on his court-mandated mental health status check to a social worker I know.
When I graduated high school in northern Illinois in 1970, I knew that the warehouse job I had would let me purchase a modest house, keep a compact car and have a little money to go camping for a couple weeks in summer, and get married, and be more or less self-sufficient. So, now fifty years later, going around by bicycle in the humble Midwestern MSA where I live , I see over half my fellow citizens connected to their little screens while they're driving, walking and even biking on our pretty riverfront pedestrian trail. And also, year by year, I see more un-housed people seeking their 'community' on the steps of the library or at aid agencies. Stats bear out the difficulty in just getting in to a middle-class existence, high and rising levels of consumer debt, unreliable cars, unreliable community systems and services, unreliable partners, unreliable employment. So, why not just get distracted; why not engage with the little screen, since even if you got a little money ahead, it wouldn't be enough, anyway.
Bill W's "Big Book", from nearly 100 years ago, does speak to 'distraction' as an avoidance of humility and serenity, and a dis-acknowledgement of our own limitations. And, when the folks who've mastered marketing to us both 'at scale' and in very, very targeted ways get into our faces, it does seem to me to be very much the same temptation as 'just one more drink' or 'one more hit', or a very attractive Japanese gardening tool that goes with the book on Japanese gardening you just looked at online that all feels pretty addictive. And I know some things about this.
You are most definitely, in my more stoic and weary observations, on to something of the cleverness of the machinery of modernist financialisms here. They have managed a corruption of the question, "What are people for?" with the machinery of modern 'marketing'. Satisfaction at a tap or a swipe. Your differentiation between a dopamine-driven addiction, and marketing's methodically-altered behavior patterns of all of us consumers did provoke some additional soul-searching here.
Iain McGilchrist has recently been writing and speaking of the recent shift in the manner in which our brains think, and in 400 pages, with another hundred in supporting endnotes ("The Master & His Emissary", 2009), measures and observes the manner in which people in cultures nearing their apogee of supremacy (such as the Renaissance, or the modernist's 'End of History') become acclimated or expectant of instant gratification (the individually forged Japanese garden tool that could be in my hands in a week...), and of diminished ability to wait, or consider, or reflect, or just make do with the one I'd picked up at a yard sale, in an exchange with an actual neighbor. I think that this tendency to get immediate gratification, and there's so much of so many kinds of 'gratification' to be found instantaneously, and intentionally directed to our most vulnerable places, that I'm coming to think that so long as we keep looking for the way we've always done things to save us, we're just screwed.
For me, maybe like Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, I've decided that I just "..prefer not to", and continue to disengage with The Machine in little and big ways where possible. I appreciate very much having access to these conversations and your insights, understanding that the Internet IS an evil thing, in which there is some good. But, just now, I need to clean and re-pack the front wheel bearings for my '69 Raleigh Tourist 3-speed. I have places to go, slowly. Why arrive early and spoil the day, after all?
Thank you for plunging far more deeply into these important concepts. Our world needs more deep thinking. And would it be helpful to see written artifacts, such as books, on Ted's chart?
I’m getting to this essay very late, distracted as I am by all the sights and sounds, and i imagine the moment for engagement may have passed. But I’m wondering: did you actually receive any pushback on this essay? I have to admit I’d be amazed if you did. It’s such a thoughtful, respectful, deep, and serious engagement with Gioia’s argument that I have trouble imagining him or anyone else taking issue with it. My reaction may not be worth much, but I’ll just say that I found it penetrating and insightful as your essays always are. More so, even. Your work sets a higher standard for all of us, and I’m very grateful to be given the opportunity to learn from it!
In regard to Rosa's dynamic must-keep-growing society, and the idea of perpetual consumers with digital media as an "everlasting commodity" I am reminded of Alexander Beiner's recent observation: "Today, we consume not only things themselves but also the emotions that are bound up with things. You cannot consume things endlessly, but emotions you can. Thus, emotions open up a new field of infinite consumption." ("Myth and Metrics" 9.28.2023)
Paul Kingsnorth: "What happens, then, if you feast without fasting? What happens if your culture encourages you to feast every day, because your economy is predicated on endless, consumer-driven growth? ("Atheists in Space" 12.24.2023)
endless consumption and endless growth - as my daughter says, "hmm"
Fear of missing out: FOMO
Fear of opting in: FOOI
I was recently in a conversation with students where we considered the antidote to FOMO to be JOMO, the Joy Of Missing Out, i.e. the recognition of the great good of accepting certain limits in the way we live our lives and enjoying the fruits of the choices that impose those limits with gratitude and contentment as we learn to be fully present to them. My colleague who was leading the discussion used the analogy of his marriage: by marrying his wife he missed out on pursuing intimate relationships with millions of other women, but the joy of establishing a household of love with the one he chose provided the necessary limit that enabled so much other joy, and without which none of that joy would be possible. Again, this rests on a certain understanding of the nature of the human that this post so wonderfully articulates.
LOVE this. Joy not fear.
Yes! We have only begun to confront the reality of digital desire. This article builds from a foundation of complexity to offer real insight. Thank you.
To tweak this slightly, I would go even deeper into the human condition. Our desires are not entirely mimetic, our desires are also projections into the core of the human condition. As you quote Jacobs: into the "affirmation of our very being".
But these projections are like staring into the sun—we can only do so with the briefest of glances. So we mediate these desires to dull the intensity. We unknowingly project them onto symbols that evade conscious reflection. Or worse, we submit to Pascal's diversion and cede our desires to memesis, what Emerson calls "suicide through imitation".
At its best, digital would offer new ways of exploring these desires of transcendence. The proper constraints would allow us to explore these with less of the existential dread that binds them, and thus with more freedom. We could play with them more consciously, to reveal new depth and possibility.
Is such enabling constraint possible? The digital hijacks this by removing the finitude that real transcendence requires. Its promise is pure transcendence, zero finitude.
> Indeed, I’m tempted to say that the whole of the human condition could be summed up this way: we desire to know and to be known.
Love it. I would add the finitude that grounds the transcendence: "yet we will never know fully nor can we ever be fully known."
I take some issue with the idea of an “anti-culture” being at the center of the issue, although it is close. While it is true that there has been a strong deconstructionist movement (which has often been insightful) nature abhors a vacuum and “anti-culture” is unstable (which is the fatal blind spot of some deconstructionists). I think there is a cultural default focused on success and pleasure, well-suited to the economic order, as you pointed out. But this culture has its own order and precepts; it asserts itself as presenting a positive view of the good life, and fighting against it is fighting something more than mere “anti-culture” I think. Also, even the sub-cultures that have surfaced in the wake of the therapeutic and deconstructionist moment have their own sense of community and positive culture. The trick is that we now must actively choose the culture or cultures we wish to engage with, and that is inextricable from engaging with community (as an aside, I doubt many people with a therapeutic focus would deny the importance of community and culture).
I agree that our digital technology has created barriers to doing that work, and maybe only now has it become possible to stay in the anti-cultural limbo, but I’m not sure.
Finding your writing nuanced, patient, and thoughtful - I print, read, and ponder. Tending to do my reading of your posts on Saturday mornings, a time when I reserve several early, quiet hours to "silence, solitude, attention, disciplined engagement, well-considered restraint, vulnerability, and risk." (My "well-considered restraint" being no electronic devices before 6am, thus the prior printing of your posts.) All in an effort to hone "the necessary skills and requisite virtues for the pursuit of [my] well being and that of [my] neighbor." Thank you for your good work.
I am sympathetic to seeing the idea of a "dopamine culture" as being a bit shallow. A particularly easy hook on which to hang one's hat at the expense of diminishing our agency and excusing our failure to execute that agency in a deliberate and purposeful way.
Yesterday afternoon I attended a Zoom call hosted by Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch. It was a gathering of those actively supporting Haidt's Anxious Generation project and his associated Substack. It is a worthy project seeking to free our youth and ourselves from the toxic tyranny of social media, restoring childhood and healthy minds. The call was an excellent rallying of the troops for the cause; a sort of exhortation to "We few, we happy few," to go "once more unto the breach," and recover what has been lost.
Alas, unless we can rally to our cultural Agincourt and restore our culture to be, ala Rieff, sustained "by the power of [moral] institutions to bind and to loose...," and "...directing the self outward toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied," efforts such as Haidt's - as important and purposeful as they are - become distractions, mere border skirmishes, benign in their cultural effect. It seems that a cultural restoration, akin to Rieff's description, is only possible if it is built upon the "permanent things" championed by Eliot and Kirk. A restoration fueled by the moral imagination and an understanding of rights linked with duties, responsibilities, and obligations.
Absolutely fantastic.