Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships

The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 10

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. Basically, I think out loud here about the meaning of technology for anyone who wants to read along. In this post, I’m thinking about how we are starved for personal relationships yet at every point sold impersonal substitutes. I tried to keep this one brief, which means a bit of nuance and background got left behind (although I did tuck some of it into the footnotes). I hope you’ll find it helpful nonetheless.

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By many measures, it would seem that we are not okay, and, more specifically, that the kids are not, in fact, alright.¹ These measures include rates of isolation, loneliness, unhappiness, self-harm, burnout, anxiety, depression, etc. I am not a social scientist, but, as best as I can judge, the findings are well-attested, and they are certainly corroborated by my own limited window on world. You may have other measures worth considering, or simply your personal experience to go on. There is, after all, much more to our uneasiness than what the official metrics capture.

While there appears to be a consensus about the validity of the situation indexed by these measures, there is less agreement about the causes. I suspect there are many relevant factors rather than one singular cause, although not all factors are equally significant. What follows, then, is just one perspective on our situation that revolves around a single fundamental observation: we are starved for personal relationships but we are simultaneously discouraged from nurturing them, de-skilled in the relevant habits, and sold inadequate substitutes in their place.²

The slightly longer version of that claim goes something like this: It is good to be able to relate to the world in a manner that evokes and engages the various dimensions of our human personhood—embodied, imaginative, intellectual, emotional, moral, spiritual, etc.—particularly in relationship with others. But our techno-economic environment generates an experience of the world that is hostile to this ideal. It operates at a pace, scale, and intensity that undermines our capacity to relate to the world with the fulness of our presence, thought, and care. If affection is kindled by time and attention, the default settings of our techno-economic order undermine our capacity to give either. We are instead encouraged to live as machines rather than creatures, optimizing for all the wrong metrics.³

And these same techno-economic structures instill in us a manufactured neediness so that we might be all the more beholden to the goods and services marketed with the promise of alleviating our plight and addressing the very neediness they cultivate. Social robots, AI assistants, VR, generative AI—each of these, as they are often marketed, can be usefully analyzed from this perspective. They are the system’s answers to the problems the system created and they serve the system not the person.

In his most recent post, “Companionship without companions,”

Rob Horning

addresses a similar set of concerns regarding chatbots. “Many anticipated AI applications,” Horning observes, “seem predicated on the idea that our experience of the world should require less thought and have better interfaces, that we want to consume the shape and form of conversation, consume simulations of speaking and listening without having to risk direct engagement with other people.”

Back in February of 2023, I put it this way: “I’m stuck on the incongruity of populating the world with non-human agents and interfaces that will mediate human experience in an age of mounting loneliness and isolation.” But, of course, the incongruity is only apparent. Considered from a slightly more cynical perspective, we can see that there is a certain unfortunate logic at work: manufactured neediness prepares the ground for new commodities. The goal is not to alleviate loneliness or isolation by fostering vernacular human relationships, which, of course, cannot be readily monetized, but to insinuate, pejoratively, that such relationships are inefficient and full of friction. As Horning noted, “Chatbots are often marketed as though other people represent the main impediment to solving loneliness, and if you remove the threat of judgment and exclusion and rejection that other people represent, then no one will ever feel lonely again.”

Consider, as an almost farcical example of this, the recent launch of friend. Friend is an always-listening pendant that periodically interacts with you via text message or with which you can enjoy on-demand interactions by pressing the pendant and speaking directly to it. Take a minute and a half to watch the product launch video below, if you’re so inclined.

You can also take a look at the interaction arounds the founder’s post on Twitter announcing the new device. Honestly, I feel a certain reticence in using this example, given that it seems almost to be a parody. In fact, more than a few of the initial responses expressed a measure of incredulity along these lines. Honestly, such incredulity is a testament to good sense and charity of those expressing it. “Surely not, no one would actually …” they would seem to be saying. But it is not a parody, unless those involved with the company are keeping the act up with admirable sustained discipline. More dispiriting are the seemingly earnest and enthusiastic replies.

My reticence also stems from the sense that this product must surely be an outlier that will almost certainly fall flat or command a very small number of sincere users. Nonetheless, we can perhaps take it as an ideal type, a distinctly clear example of a trend that does not ordinarily manifest itself quite so starkly, and make use of it as such.

What better example, then, of the pattern we have been analyzing. Demoralized in the pursuit of friendship, companionship, and solidarity by the social structures that order our experience and deskilled by the same in the requisite habits and virtues, we are offered instead a technological commodity in the place of genuine human connection, a personalized device in the place of a personal relationship.

And while I’ve been rather sardonic in my assessment of this device, we should consider that the choices it symbolizes as an ideal type might be more attractive than we’re willing to grant because it holds out the promise of connection without commitment, companionship without responsibility, a facsimile of friendship without the attendant demands and challenges.

And I don’t even mean to suggest that we’re tempted by those choices because we are selfish, although each of us should soberly consider such things. We’re tempted by these choices because we are, to varying degrees, exhausted by the demands of a world ordered by the imperative to optimize for measurable outcomes, and in such a context we end up cutting out the things that don’t compute.⁴ The tragedy, however, is that it is in such inefficient yet supremely human things that we find renewal, strength, rest, consolation, and even joy.

Allow me, then, to close with a simple exhortation: we need people in our lives, not the simulation of people.

I think we all know this, but our societies are increasingly designed so as to induce a certain forgetfulness about this fundamental truth. We should resist such forgetfulness, and, to whatever degree possible, we should refuse the temptation to eliminate human interactions from our experience like so many inefficiencies in a system optimized for machine-like functionality.

In his 1961 novel, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s protagonist, Binx Bolling, makes the following observation: “I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen.” Percy is writing as the first movement of depersonalization I mentioned above was reaching its apex. But Bolling goes on to say that “when it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.”

What there is to see is the look of someone remembering a profound truth about themselves, a vital truth without which we cannot hope to live in full. I suspect, or at least I hope, that we have all been on both ends of such encounters, and we should be intent on making such encounters more, rather than less frequent.

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1. “We” is a tricky word to deploy. It is often lazy and implies too much. It can be rhetorical sleight of hand. I once wrote a whole post arguing that there was no “we” there. That said, it can sometimes be tedious to repeatedly specify the antecedent. When it is honest, I’ll simply say “I” and allow readers to include themselves as they see fit. In this case, I’ll simply trust you, the reader, to interpret generously. In any case, the general unwellness, as suggested by the metrics to which I alluded, does seem to make the “we” more justifiable than usual. (Robin, if you’re reading, this footnote is dedicated to you.)

2. You can classify this as a corollary of my oft repeated dictum: The human-built world is not built for humans.

3. Wendell Berry’s observation that we must decide whether we want to live as creatures or as machines might be helpful here. The personalism toward which I am gesturing might be understood as the creatureliness Berry commends. In other words, to the degree that the social order compels me to live as if I were a machine striving for efficiency, speed, optimization, and productivity, to that same degree I live in a social order that is impersonal, which is to say that it undermines my capacity for relationship.

4. A self-conscious allusion to Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer Manifesto, one stanza of which runs as follows:

“So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.”