The Convivial Society, No. 17

Arduous Interfaces

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"Hospitality was a condition consequent on a good society in politics, politaea, and by now might be the starting point of politaea, of politics. But this is difficult because hospitality requires a threshold over which I can lead you — and TV, internet, newspaper, the idea of communication, abolished the walls and therefore also the friendship, the possibility of leading somebody over the door. Hospitality requires a table around which you can sit and if people get tired they can sleep. You have to belong to a subculture to say, we have a few mattresses here. It's still considered highly improper to conceive of this as the ideal moments in a day or a year. Hospitality is deeply threatened by the idea of personality, of scholastic status. I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality— recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand — on the other hand radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community." 

— Ivan Illich, interview with Jerry Brown

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I read a couple of reviews recently that got me thinking about the internet even though the books under review had nothing to do with the internet. The first was a review of Robert Caro's Working, a memoir of sorts detailing how he approaches the work of researching and writing. Caro is best known for his unfinished, multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, although, as the reviewer notes, Caro's real subject is the nature of political power. In any case, there's a discussion loneliness, which became a recurrent theme in Caro's work on Johnson. For example, from the review,

"Johnson grew up on the Johnson Ranch, 14 miles outside of Johnson City, which then had just 323 inhabitants. Caro described how Johnson and his younger brother, Sam, would sit for hours on a fence alongside the Austin-Fredricksburg Road, or 'graded, rutted path,' hoping that 'a rider or carriage would come by so they'd have a new person to talk to.'" 

Or this, from Caro, about Johnson's mother, "who was often alone with her children in that empty country beyond the reach of electricity: 

"No matter in what direction Rebekah looked, not a light was visible. The gentle, dreamy, bookish woman would be alone, alone in the dark—sometimes, when the clouds covered the moon, in pitch dark—alone in the dark when she went out on the porch to pump water, or out to the barn to feed the horses, alone with the rustlings in the trees and the sudden splashes in the river which could be a fish jumping, or a small animal drinking—or someone coming."

It's striking to be reminded that there are people you can talk to today—children of the 1920s, 30s and 40s—who would remember what it was like to live in a world without readily available electricity. But that's just a passing observation. It was rather the condition of isolation and loneliness Johnson experienced, a condition that I presume was not at all rare, which led me to think about how the promise of "connection" which has always been a part of the mythos of the internet speaks to a real and profound human need, the need to know that you are not alone.

I was reminded of a Kickstarter campaign I came across not too long ago for a book that will be titled Better Than IRL. IRL for "in real life," of course. It will be a chronicle of the early internet, one that "collects true stories about finding your people on the untamed internet." C. S. Lewis wrote that friendship begins in that moment when we say, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." This is something of what it must mean to find your people, to know that you are not the only one, that however odd your interest, however idiosyncratic your passion someone else, many others perhaps, felt the same way—you were understood.  And along with this realization that you are not alone, there is, too, the experience of belonging. Belonging seems to be implicit in the idea of "your people." It's hardly possible to overestimate this need, or, conversely, the depredations of loneliness. Arendt went so far as to find in pervasive loneliness the seedbed of totalitarianism. 

So, on the one hand, this is all very familiar for those who recall the utopian rhetoric that accompanied the advent of the commercial internet. Indeed, there something familiar about this to anyone who has attended the rhetoric that has accompanied the advent of most forms of modern communication, going back at least to the telegraph as historian Carolyn Marvin has noted.

But there is something intriguing about this "finding your people" framing. It appears to run against the grain of at least one strand of early internet hopes and hype:  that the internet would somehow bring about a harmonious global village, that we would not "find our people," exactly, but that we would discover that we were all one people, one great human tribe, and that all differences would melt away if only we were connected.

I feel compelled to say that this version of the "global village" was not exactly what Marshall McLuhan had in mind when he coined the phrase. When one interviewer begins to say to McLuhan, "But, I had some idea as we got global and tribal we were going to try to -" McLuhan interjects, "The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There is no evidence of that in any situation that we have ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage and impatient with each other." He added a few moments later, "Village people are not that much in love with each other. The global village is a place of a very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations."

The idea that through the internet we would "find our people," then, seems closer to the truth, in theory and in practice, than the idea that we would simply become one people. And in finding our people we would find a measure of solace and comfort, especially in the face of the isolating and anonymizing tendencies of mass society. Again, it's hard to exaggerate how powerful this experience of finding your people can be. But ...

Finding your people implies, quite strongly, that there are those who are not your people. And, I suspect, the more powerfully (and more narrowly) we identify with our people, the more powerfully we are tempted to distance ourselves from those who are not our people. Differentiation and boundary work, both within and without the group, become the order of the day. If I may extend the territorial analogy, we find ourselves constantly involved in a war of unremitting skirmishes, which is how I would characterize life online in the more recent past. 

Recall what Zeynep Tufekci wrote about online discourse several months ago: 

"the problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one. In sociology terms, we strengthen our feeling of 'in-group' belonging by increasing our distance from and tension with the 'out-group'—us versus them."

It is tempting to blame social media companies for this state of affairs, or even the design of the platforms (if Jack would only ban the Nazis, etc., etc.). Neither, to be sure, is blameless, far from it. However, such a move seems to imply the utopian view that you can bring people into close virtual proximity and have everyone simply get along splendidly. McLuhan was closer to the truth:  we will face arduous interfaces and abrasive situation regardless of how benign the companies and how ethical the design. May be this is overly pessimistic on my part. Needless to say, I would be glad to be wrong. 

So we get our groups of affinity, our sense of belonging, and perhaps even a measure of relief from our loneliness (although far from ideally). But there's a cost incurred. 

One final thought: I've been interested in the way we are formed by our participation in groups of affinity as compared with our participation in groups of necessity. Naturally, we gravitate toward groups of affinity. We want to be around people that are like us, people who get us, people around whom we are simply more comfortable. But, in reality, we have ordinarily also belonged to groups of necessity, groups of people we would not choose to associate with but with whom, as a matter of necessity, we must. Think, perhaps, of the difference between family thanksgiving dinners and the more recent practice of friendsgiving, or that Facebook ad about virtually escaping the family dinner table from a few years back.

We could say that one of the apparent boons of the internet, especially early on, has been to increasingly grant us access to groups of affinity, to help us find our people. As a consequence of our membership in such groups, I'd suggest that we develop a certain set of habits and expectations about how our interactions will go and what is required of us as members of such a group. We are more vulnerable and expressive, we are less apt to abide deeply conflicting opinions, we expect greater degrees of affirmation, etc.

By contrast, membership in groups of necessity cultivate a rather different set of habits and expectations, certain virtues are inculcated because the group of necessity requires them to function. We put up with more, we negotiate more readily, we guard ourselves to a greater degree, we value patience and forbearance, etc. We know, in other words that we need to live with people we do not necessarily like and that requires something of us. Clearly groups of necessity can be oppressive, suffocating, etc. 

Perhaps I'm making to much of that distinction or I've oversimplified it, but there's something to it, I think. The thing, of course, is that while we might have gained greater access to groups of affinity, we have not ceased to belong to groups of necessity. Political life remains a matter of membership in groups of necessity, the town, the city, the state, the nation. And the habits and virtues formed in often digitally mediated groups of affinity seem not to serve us well when we inhabit groups of necessity (some of which may also be digitally mediated). We are, in other words, in the midst of a painful recalibration of the delicate balance between self, our people, and those who are not.

Not sure how all of this plays out of course, except that I am certain the world will never become our group of affinity. We may take our proper joy in finding our people, but we will need to figure out again how to live, so far as we are able, with those who are not. 

There was a second thought from a second review as I mentioned at the outset, but this, I think, has gone on long enough. Perhaps we'll pick that one up next time. 

Sources
Review of Working
On Marvin's work: here and here. 
On Arendt and loneliness: here and here. 
Listen to McLuhan on violence and identity  here. 
Tufekci on social media discourse. 
 

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News and Resources​

• Shannon Mattern, drawing on Lewis Mumford, reminds us that a city is not a computer. 
   

• Philosopher Evan Selinger has been addressing technology issues that affect middle schoolers by co-authoring essays with his middle-school-aged daughter, Rory. The first explored how Instagram's emoji slider tool has been put to unfortunate use, and the second focused on online conspiracy videos. 
   

• Nobody does a very good job at predicting the future. Highly specialized experts are especially bad at it, it seems, but generalists fare somewhat better. 
   

• S. A. Applin on the creeping threat of facial recognition. 
   

• A short review of Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, which I look forward to reading soon. Here is an nicely illustrated talk Odell gave in Minnesota, which was adapted and included in her book. 
   

• "Who’s Afraid of Technological Determinism? Another Look at Medium Theory": "My basic contention in this essay has been that many analysts, especially from the critical theory perspective, have been reluctant to embrace the ‘intractable properties in the things themselves’, in the words of Langdon Winner ..."
   

• Codex Atlanticus, a 12-volume collection of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, has been digitized. 
   

• On a new documentary examining the downfall of the early 90s tech company, General Magic: "Many things we take for granted about our phones today — immediate access to email and the internet, built-in work and productivity tools, games, emoji, apps designed in a grid-like system — were General Magic’s prototype software ideas."

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Re-framings 

The quotation from Illich above was drawn from a radio interview Illich gave alongside the philosopher of technology Carl Mitchum on Jerry Brown's mid-90s radio talk show, We the People. Yes, that Jerry Brown. Here is the transcript. Illich, I realize, may be something of an acquired taste. He pushes us to think again or think for the first time about fundamental assumptions and values. But frankly, it seems to me that we need to be shoved in this way just to get a decent perspective on our situation. The interview is from March 22, 1996. Here is another selection:  

Brown: So the objects, like a car or even like a school, change who we are.

Illich: Who you are and even more deeply they change the way your senses work. Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia [?], my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us which is this relationship, and this relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo at the time of Kepler, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. Even if I gaze at you. Even if I enjoy your face. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery [...]

Brown: Carl, were you going to jump in here?

Mitchum: I think that when Ivan talks about the importance of artifacts, or objects, and how they influence the way we experience ourselves and relate to others that's the thing in Ivan's work that has been continually most challenging to me because as I've tried to reflect and think about the world in which I live, a world in which a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, when I was growing up there was a predominance of natural objects around. Rocks, trees, animals, chickens. Even in the city there was a predominance of natural vegetation and that's all changed. We live in a world in which the artifice of our environment overwhelms the natural foundation or context of the past. As Ivan has pointed out, that artifice is undergoing a fundamental transformation in what he referred to as context sensitive help screens. We spend more time now in front of a screen of one kind or another than we used to spend face to face with other humans beings--either the screen of the television set, the screen of the computer, the screen of my little digital clock right here in front of me.

Brown: And then even the city that we see is some kind of a screen with the billboards, the buildings. It's a mirror of the technological change and manipulation of nature. We're seeing this—what is this thing that we're seeing?

Mitchum: And we begin to experience the world, like when we're driving in a car the windshield becomes a kind of screen. The world becomes flattened to that screen. What was the term that Barbara used, Ivan?

Illich: The windshield gaze, but I found at the Penn State Library a report on the Texas meeting of windshield technicians. Last year we had three volumes with some 870 contributions about how to engineer the windshield view which always makes you be where you're not yet.

Brown: So you're looking ahead.

Illich: You're looking at what lies ahead, where we are not yet, which of course makes us with terrible feeling like when you are with somebody and he always wants to know where we will be next week, where we will be the next hour, instead of being right here. It makes facing each other increasingly more difficult because people can't detach themselves anymore from the idea that what we look at has been manipulated and programmed by somebody.

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I'm a fan of the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (d.1569), as I think I've mentioned here once before. In connection with the 450th anniversary of his death, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, hosted an unprecedented exhibit of the master's work. The exhibit was reviewed by Joseph Leo Koerner for The New York Times Review of Books. Koerner is also the author of Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life.: 

"Along the entire left edge of Christ Carrying the Cross, a framing tree curves in and out of the unpainted edge of the panel, its bark roughly the color of that naked wood. Bruegel has so much to say that presses up against this narrow strip: in details that only the closest inspection brings to light, he has squeezed in a little gallery of everyday life, including a poor young couple dragging a basket with newborn calves toward town, in reverse of the great counterclockwise parade. He captures the quiet resistance of the ordinary—what W.H. Auden celebrated in 'Musée des Beaux Arts,' his poem about Bruegel: the 'untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.'”

The whole of "Musée des Beaux Arts" by Auden: 

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The lines quoted by Koerner refer to Bruegel's "The Massacre of the Innocents," below.

 
Here, too, is Bruegel's "Landscape With the Fall of Icarus": 

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Recently Published

Just a reminder that The New Atlantis's symposium on social media and public discourse, "The Ruin of the Digital Town Square" is now live on their website. I contributed a piece titled "The Inescapable Town Square." 

On the blog, I recently wrote about Thomas Tierney’s The Value of Convenience:  A Genealogy of Technical Culture. Tierney undertook a genealogy of the value of convenience, framing it as the construal of the body's demands as limits to be overcome. 

Not something I've written, but I'll mention it here anyway. CSET is hosting a teleconference talk by Evan Selinger, whose work I suspect many of you will know. If you're in the vicinity of Pittsburgh feel free to join us next Friday, May 24th at 7PM. We'll meet at 505 Chestnut Street, Coraopolis, PA 15108. There's a virtual option for those who can't attend the gathering. There's no cost, you can find further details and register here.

On a separate note, my talk in D.C. is likely postponed till September. I'll keep you posted.
 

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I'm subscribed to a handful of newsletters as I've mentioned in the past. The more compelling ones are written in a lively, vulnerable, and urgent style, which I admire. They often take aspects of private life as a point of departure and reflection. You certainly feel that you come to know the writers in some non-trivial way. Dear reader, I'm afraid this is not such a newsletter. Perhaps one day I'll think about why I find it so challenging to write that way. A few years ago, I came across an unpublished paper by Zeynep Tufekci in which she discusses what she called cyberasociality, “the inability or unwillingness of some people to relate to others via social media as they do when physically-present.” I don't know, maybe I'm cyberasocial. In any case, more of you keep signing up for these missives, and I'm glad for it. Thanks for reading. 

Cheers,

Michael

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