Oh golly. That friend.com thing. Incredible. A tool to further degrade human resilience. Engaging with real humans is important for all the reasons you mention and allows us to practice exposing ourselves to uncertainty, rudeness, miscommunication, criticism, home truths, pettiness, brusqueness and so on - the gritty bits of life with other humans - which (ideally) force us to develop: patience, an ability to explain ourselves, humility, a thicker skin, courage in the face of animosity or disagreement, perseverance, diplomacy, openness, tolerance, and so on. I foresee real problems for society's ability to problem-solve if tools and apps like that take off.
I love the title of your post. In calling what is actually the paradigm human relationship "sub-optimal," you're calling upon the framework you're criticizing in order to praise the relationship that very framework disparages. (Apologies for explaining the joke.)
It does reveal a particular difficulty though, among those of us who think of the body as an expression of, and not a prison for, a soul, those of us who see as possibility conditions those things technologists and anti-humanists call obstacles. The tech priesthood looks upon speech and sees something getting in the way of thought; I see that which brings thought into existence. They look upon fleshly embodiment and see friction and thus sub-optimality; I see the anchor and sine qua non for love and knowledge of another personality. (Besides Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein and Cavell are good on this theme.)
The picture according to which disembodiment and disembodied "connection" is ideal is a tenacious picture, and so much of our vocabulary betokens it. Is it possible to re-appropriate "sub-optimal embodiment" and its kin? Or in praising sub-optimality, even in jest, are we implicitly and inevitably promulgating a misleading picture?
One of the several unsavory patterns of technology, as Borgmann pointed out long ago, is that once the possibility of some technologically mediated experience is introduced, we can't avoid seeing "the old way of doing it" in light of that possibility.
For example, having only a landline never seemed like a burden until the invention of the mobile phone introduced the possibility of taking calls outside your house — the possibility of "freedom."
But something else happens upon the introduction of such technology. Now, even if you reject the mobile phone, your only taking phone calls in your house has a different ontological-cultural status, not to mention a different phenomenological character, precisely because you're rejecting a cultural possibility. Before the introduction of the mobile phone, there was no possibility to reject. But now, you're a new cultural type.
Before the mobile phone there was one thing: taking calls in your house. After its introduction, the one thing vanishes and two new things take its place: rejecting the mobile phone by having a landline and accepting the mobile phone. (There really is no going back.)
Here's why that's disconcerting: digital technology is now inextricably embedded within capitalism, and capital loves niches to exploit for profit and loves to sell lifestyles to consumers who aspire to be this or that cultural type.
With the introduction of the friend pendant (like its earlier versions, and like online "friendship" generally), you can no longer simply have friendships. What's possible now are offline friendships and online, digital ones — two cultural types, two types of consumer to sell stuff to. "Looking for a genuine offline friendship, complete with all the charming obstacles of embodiment? Have we got the product for you! Just hit 'subscribe'!"
This is why I'm somewhat — not entirely, but somewhat — pessimistic about simple calls to "go offline," leaving it up to individuals or their families to fend off the encroachments and predations of capitalistically embedded technology. It's better than nothing, of course. But we might need to re-embed the market in the state, in K. Polanyi's sense: instead of exhausting our agency fending off the multiplication of corporate-invented possibilities, we might put our energies toward re-estabilishing a democratic say in what tech corporations may or may not unleash upon us.
Sincerely, thanks for this Mr. Walker. Your observation here, "..capital loves niches to exploit for profits and loves to sell 'lifestyles' to consumers who aspire to be this or that cultural type.", was like clearing a couple days' film from my glasses and finishing my coffee. I hadn't considered the manner in which we, as 'consumers' could be continually sliced and diced to ever further extract 'value' from us.
And, thanks for the teaser to Karl Polanyi - I've been running across cites to him for the past couple years, but now, since I've got some weeks of very, very quiet recovery time coming, I've gone looking for his books in the used bookstores. The Sociology Group noted this about his work:
"..but during the 19th century, across the West, the structuring principle of the society changed to the price mechanism and profit motive rather than deliberation and dialogues of diverse social interest and concerns as land, labor and money gradually became commodities."
Indeed, I think We have become the final commodity to be mined, smelted and just turned into money.
I'm endeavoring to find a phrase that captures the life-draining quality of un-trammeled capital accumulation, an 'activity' as if it were some societal 'good' (or "God') that might at least plant a seed of doubt for my acquaintances, without having them go off all Marjorie Taylor Greene, with her apocalyptic vision of the Four Horsemen of the Bolshevik Apocalypse coming if one dares even question 'The Free Market', or mention, say the gospel at Matthew 19:24 (easier for a camel...).
I hesitated to use Polanyi's vocabulary, because it's a little awkward for our era: to speak of the re-embedding of the market in the state assumes that it has been dis-embedded.
But the economic arrangements characterizing the neoliberal era are firmly embedded in the state. The de-regulation of the market, the commodification of the sacred, the privatization of the public, the de-politicization of questions about common goods and values, the insulation of economic arrangements from democratic contestation — all are sustained by an elaborate governmental apparatus that, like technology, also functions to foster the illusion that all of this was inevitable, beyond discussion, beyond choice. In brief, the political activity of our representatives makes it the case that we don't enlist our representatives to undertake political activity.
By invoking Karl Polanyi, I just want to make clear, I'm not plumping for socialism. (Not that I think you were interpreting me this way.) I was implicitly invoking his main difference from his brother, Michael. Both Polanyis sought a diagnosis of the spiritual alienation of the times. Michael thought the main cause was an impoverished and misleading conception of knowledge, a conception that denigrated spiritual and moral reality; Karl thought the main cause was an alienating political-economic dispensation.
The point of my invoking Karl, then, was to suggest that addressing the existential, spiritual ills wrought by digital tech might require more than carving out a bunker to repel the unaccountable overtures of an extractive, profit-seeking, government-enabled tech sector. The "more," in my view, should not be centralized government control over the economy, except to the extent that legislative, administrative, or judicial action is required to dissolve undue concentrations of economic power and disperse it to local communities where more of a community's way of life is thereby susceptible of democratic deliberation. I'm Jeffersonian and Brandeisian in this respect, and guided by a taste for subsidiarity and the pull of the old republican ideal of freedom as sharing in self-government.
Oh, gosh, Eric- I think we're singing from the same hymnal here. I really appreciate your following thoughts. You're describing what, for almost 30 years, I strived for as an administrator of small Midwestern towns. Community. I'd look forward to further conversation. Many thanks.
Love it! I imagine your experience gives you insight into matters of community-building that a mere philosopher like me could never acquire. Looking forward to learning from you as well.
Well, although during my entire time as administrator, there was exactly one (1) occasion where a Council interview included "Describe your philosophy of representative democracy"; more often it was "how successful would you be at obtaining grants (free money) for our city" (you're probably too well-off to be eligible); or, "Tell us how you can put our bargaining units in their place" (that's not what I do - I build coalitions and teams), and so forth.
However, from my learning-up: If I wasn't grounded in some greater, impermeable truths and in being responsible to self-governance and the ideals of republican democracy, there'd be some opportunist eager to bind me (and the community served) into some deal that was selfishly advantageous to the opportunist, and just turned land into mere money (and THAT borrowed against some future hope and on future shoulders) Ie;
Without studies and discussions and consideration of solid philosophy, we are all just run ragged making deals, and exhausting our agency, as you well put it. And, way back as a newby, I can assure you I let my agency get exhausted a couple of times trying to 'satisfy' the desire for 'growth'. Hence, my interest in Polanyis' alternative. To share with my former peers at luncheons. Until some success-minded striver brings up a discussion of new house building permits.
I'll be in recovery and out of circulation for a week or two; look forward to following up thereafter.
Hi from Seattle. I was reading Devin Kelly's latest thoughtful post and your page pops up to subscribe, so I thought you'd like to know the substack referral algo has you in good company.
My wife and I read parts of Wendell Berry's "In the Country of Marriage" to each other for wedding vows 34 years ago.
So much has changed since then, but we are still married, still friends.
I think Berry's Mad Farmer poem is prescient for the moment, right?
The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence…
Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way even after one half of the bond has passed on.
But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the self nor of the other, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone."
This idea Whyte gets at of friendship as "witness" is something I meditate on when I listen to someone who let's me walk with them.
How does technology scratch the itch for friendship (at the moment friendship to your phone as portal to human friends and family, but you can see Elon ducking with humans in plain sight chipping all of us in a hostile takeover) and where do we draw the line for the endless fracking of our attention?
I'm not sure.
I just wanted to share Whyte's prose poem on friendship with you and then wonder if you have found your way to The Great Simplification podcast? https://youtu.be/JaboF3vAsZs?si=ITcfoXiQGcno8Bxo
I suspect we are splitting into a few different species. A few variations of us marry technology and live inside all the time. A few of us will stay outside and work to recreate the millions of years of rituals listening to and talking with trees, singing to bees, all the plants and animals of the world.
Thanks for your posts and finding your way to substack.
I instantly remembered a film scene in which Robin Williams, playing the grown-up Peter Pan (who'd become a successful London financialist attached always to his phone), has his re-awakening as a human being, and upon arriving back in the present, getting another call from his assistant and says, "Brad! Have you ever experienced the sense of flying free?", and then flings his phone out the window and attends to a real human interaction. As Mr. Shields notes here: "YIKES"!
The real church to which I've attended the past ten years is like a place one might interact with others in a real way, about real things. However, as numbers have declined, some of the remaining folks have expressed more expectation that 'church' should be conducted in exactly the manner in which they think it should be, reaching for a 'Way we never were-ness', and with their entitled expectation, are alienating others from being around them, or attending. As I'd noted to a fellow parishioner who is NOT sympathetic to The way we never were folks: "I dunno. Maybe 'we' won't 'get it' until the lifeboats hit the water".
Are our individual expectations so readily 'fulfilled' nowadays that our ability and willingness to humanly relate continues to slip? Like the flat spin of a light aircraft that isn't likely to self-correct?
Un-enabled flip-phone for me. Pull the power cell out of Friend and recycle it. I think I've seen that in a film, too.
Thanks for this discussion. Thanks for the Wendell Berry.
You've struck a nerve with today's post L.M. I've long embraced what you classify as 'sub-optimal relationships' so your commentary is most welcome in that it gives me an understanding about what I've long felt to be a rather more personal affliction.
Apparently it's not!
Oh, and I side with Tim Long about the Wendell Berry bit!
Oh golly. That friend.com thing. Incredible. A tool to further degrade human resilience. Engaging with real humans is important for all the reasons you mention and allows us to practice exposing ourselves to uncertainty, rudeness, miscommunication, criticism, home truths, pettiness, brusqueness and so on - the gritty bits of life with other humans - which (ideally) force us to develop: patience, an ability to explain ourselves, humility, a thicker skin, courage in the face of animosity or disagreement, perseverance, diplomacy, openness, tolerance, and so on. I foresee real problems for society's ability to problem-solve if tools and apps like that take off.
One other observation.
I love the title of your post. In calling what is actually the paradigm human relationship "sub-optimal," you're calling upon the framework you're criticizing in order to praise the relationship that very framework disparages. (Apologies for explaining the joke.)
It does reveal a particular difficulty though, among those of us who think of the body as an expression of, and not a prison for, a soul, those of us who see as possibility conditions those things technologists and anti-humanists call obstacles. The tech priesthood looks upon speech and sees something getting in the way of thought; I see that which brings thought into existence. They look upon fleshly embodiment and see friction and thus sub-optimality; I see the anchor and sine qua non for love and knowledge of another personality. (Besides Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein and Cavell are good on this theme.)
The picture according to which disembodiment and disembodied "connection" is ideal is a tenacious picture, and so much of our vocabulary betokens it. Is it possible to re-appropriate "sub-optimal embodiment" and its kin? Or in praising sub-optimality, even in jest, are we implicitly and inevitably promulgating a misleading picture?
One of the several unsavory patterns of technology, as Borgmann pointed out long ago, is that once the possibility of some technologically mediated experience is introduced, we can't avoid seeing "the old way of doing it" in light of that possibility.
For example, having only a landline never seemed like a burden until the invention of the mobile phone introduced the possibility of taking calls outside your house — the possibility of "freedom."
But something else happens upon the introduction of such technology. Now, even if you reject the mobile phone, your only taking phone calls in your house has a different ontological-cultural status, not to mention a different phenomenological character, precisely because you're rejecting a cultural possibility. Before the introduction of the mobile phone, there was no possibility to reject. But now, you're a new cultural type.
Before the mobile phone there was one thing: taking calls in your house. After its introduction, the one thing vanishes and two new things take its place: rejecting the mobile phone by having a landline and accepting the mobile phone. (There really is no going back.)
Here's why that's disconcerting: digital technology is now inextricably embedded within capitalism, and capital loves niches to exploit for profit and loves to sell lifestyles to consumers who aspire to be this or that cultural type.
With the introduction of the friend pendant (like its earlier versions, and like online "friendship" generally), you can no longer simply have friendships. What's possible now are offline friendships and online, digital ones — two cultural types, two types of consumer to sell stuff to. "Looking for a genuine offline friendship, complete with all the charming obstacles of embodiment? Have we got the product for you! Just hit 'subscribe'!"
This is why I'm somewhat — not entirely, but somewhat — pessimistic about simple calls to "go offline," leaving it up to individuals or their families to fend off the encroachments and predations of capitalistically embedded technology. It's better than nothing, of course. But we might need to re-embed the market in the state, in K. Polanyi's sense: instead of exhausting our agency fending off the multiplication of corporate-invented possibilities, we might put our energies toward re-estabilishing a democratic say in what tech corporations may or may not unleash upon us.
Sincerely, thanks for this Mr. Walker. Your observation here, "..capital loves niches to exploit for profits and loves to sell 'lifestyles' to consumers who aspire to be this or that cultural type.", was like clearing a couple days' film from my glasses and finishing my coffee. I hadn't considered the manner in which we, as 'consumers' could be continually sliced and diced to ever further extract 'value' from us.
And, thanks for the teaser to Karl Polanyi - I've been running across cites to him for the past couple years, but now, since I've got some weeks of very, very quiet recovery time coming, I've gone looking for his books in the used bookstores. The Sociology Group noted this about his work:
"..but during the 19th century, across the West, the structuring principle of the society changed to the price mechanism and profit motive rather than deliberation and dialogues of diverse social interest and concerns as land, labor and money gradually became commodities."
Indeed, I think We have become the final commodity to be mined, smelted and just turned into money.
I'm endeavoring to find a phrase that captures the life-draining quality of un-trammeled capital accumulation, an 'activity' as if it were some societal 'good' (or "God') that might at least plant a seed of doubt for my acquaintances, without having them go off all Marjorie Taylor Greene, with her apocalyptic vision of the Four Horsemen of the Bolshevik Apocalypse coming if one dares even question 'The Free Market', or mention, say the gospel at Matthew 19:24 (easier for a camel...).
Again, thank you.
Thank you for the kind words.
I hesitated to use Polanyi's vocabulary, because it's a little awkward for our era: to speak of the re-embedding of the market in the state assumes that it has been dis-embedded.
But the economic arrangements characterizing the neoliberal era are firmly embedded in the state. The de-regulation of the market, the commodification of the sacred, the privatization of the public, the de-politicization of questions about common goods and values, the insulation of economic arrangements from democratic contestation — all are sustained by an elaborate governmental apparatus that, like technology, also functions to foster the illusion that all of this was inevitable, beyond discussion, beyond choice. In brief, the political activity of our representatives makes it the case that we don't enlist our representatives to undertake political activity.
By invoking Karl Polanyi, I just want to make clear, I'm not plumping for socialism. (Not that I think you were interpreting me this way.) I was implicitly invoking his main difference from his brother, Michael. Both Polanyis sought a diagnosis of the spiritual alienation of the times. Michael thought the main cause was an impoverished and misleading conception of knowledge, a conception that denigrated spiritual and moral reality; Karl thought the main cause was an alienating political-economic dispensation.
The point of my invoking Karl, then, was to suggest that addressing the existential, spiritual ills wrought by digital tech might require more than carving out a bunker to repel the unaccountable overtures of an extractive, profit-seeking, government-enabled tech sector. The "more," in my view, should not be centralized government control over the economy, except to the extent that legislative, administrative, or judicial action is required to dissolve undue concentrations of economic power and disperse it to local communities where more of a community's way of life is thereby susceptible of democratic deliberation. I'm Jeffersonian and Brandeisian in this respect, and guided by a taste for subsidiarity and the pull of the old republican ideal of freedom as sharing in self-government.
Oh, gosh, Eric- I think we're singing from the same hymnal here. I really appreciate your following thoughts. You're describing what, for almost 30 years, I strived for as an administrator of small Midwestern towns. Community. I'd look forward to further conversation. Many thanks.
Love it! I imagine your experience gives you insight into matters of community-building that a mere philosopher like me could never acquire. Looking forward to learning from you as well.
Well, although during my entire time as administrator, there was exactly one (1) occasion where a Council interview included "Describe your philosophy of representative democracy"; more often it was "how successful would you be at obtaining grants (free money) for our city" (you're probably too well-off to be eligible); or, "Tell us how you can put our bargaining units in their place" (that's not what I do - I build coalitions and teams), and so forth.
However, from my learning-up: If I wasn't grounded in some greater, impermeable truths and in being responsible to self-governance and the ideals of republican democracy, there'd be some opportunist eager to bind me (and the community served) into some deal that was selfishly advantageous to the opportunist, and just turned land into mere money (and THAT borrowed against some future hope and on future shoulders) Ie;
Without studies and discussions and consideration of solid philosophy, we are all just run ragged making deals, and exhausting our agency, as you well put it. And, way back as a newby, I can assure you I let my agency get exhausted a couple of times trying to 'satisfy' the desire for 'growth'. Hence, my interest in Polanyis' alternative. To share with my former peers at luncheons. Until some success-minded striver brings up a discussion of new house building permits.
I'll be in recovery and out of circulation for a week or two; look forward to following up thereafter.
Friend.com - YIKES!
Hi from Seattle. I was reading Devin Kelly's latest thoughtful post and your page pops up to subscribe, so I thought you'd like to know the substack referral algo has you in good company.
My wife and I read parts of Wendell Berry's "In the Country of Marriage" to each other for wedding vows 34 years ago.
So much has changed since then, but we are still married, still friends.
I think Berry's Mad Farmer poem is prescient for the moment, right?
I like David Whyte's take on friendship https://www.goodnaturepublishing.com/post/friendship-by-david-whyte
The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence…
Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way even after one half of the bond has passed on.
But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the self nor of the other, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone."
This idea Whyte gets at of friendship as "witness" is something I meditate on when I listen to someone who let's me walk with them.
How does technology scratch the itch for friendship (at the moment friendship to your phone as portal to human friends and family, but you can see Elon ducking with humans in plain sight chipping all of us in a hostile takeover) and where do we draw the line for the endless fracking of our attention?
I'm not sure.
I just wanted to share Whyte's prose poem on friendship with you and then wonder if you have found your way to The Great Simplification podcast? https://youtu.be/JaboF3vAsZs?si=ITcfoXiQGcno8Bxo
On indigenous wisdom and orienting to a prevention principle aka 7 generations of human being considered in the world we are creating https://youtu.be/hSp4Ap0Ck-I?si=lQz6bVY2KNRooAEA
I suspect we are splitting into a few different species. A few variations of us marry technology and live inside all the time. A few of us will stay outside and work to recreate the millions of years of rituals listening to and talking with trees, singing to bees, all the plants and animals of the world.
Thanks for your posts and finding your way to substack.
Tim Colman
The machine is swift but we are swifter if we will learn how to hurry up to stand still in the face of it.
I instantly remembered a film scene in which Robin Williams, playing the grown-up Peter Pan (who'd become a successful London financialist attached always to his phone), has his re-awakening as a human being, and upon arriving back in the present, getting another call from his assistant and says, "Brad! Have you ever experienced the sense of flying free?", and then flings his phone out the window and attends to a real human interaction. As Mr. Shields notes here: "YIKES"!
The real church to which I've attended the past ten years is like a place one might interact with others in a real way, about real things. However, as numbers have declined, some of the remaining folks have expressed more expectation that 'church' should be conducted in exactly the manner in which they think it should be, reaching for a 'Way we never were-ness', and with their entitled expectation, are alienating others from being around them, or attending. As I'd noted to a fellow parishioner who is NOT sympathetic to The way we never were folks: "I dunno. Maybe 'we' won't 'get it' until the lifeboats hit the water".
Are our individual expectations so readily 'fulfilled' nowadays that our ability and willingness to humanly relate continues to slip? Like the flat spin of a light aircraft that isn't likely to self-correct?
Un-enabled flip-phone for me. Pull the power cell out of Friend and recycle it. I think I've seen that in a film, too.
Thanks for this discussion. Thanks for the Wendell Berry.
You've struck a nerve with today's post L.M. I've long embraced what you classify as 'sub-optimal relationships' so your commentary is most welcome in that it gives me an understanding about what I've long felt to be a rather more personal affliction.
Apparently it's not!
Oh, and I side with Tim Long about the Wendell Berry bit!