Why We Disconnect Matters

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 9 Comments

A little over two weeks ago, The New Republic ran a piece by Evgeny Morozov titled “The Mindfulness Racket.” Comments that accompanied links to the article on social media suggested that Morozov had torn into the advocates of mindfulness and critics of digital distraction with the sort of eviscerating rhetoric that we’ve come to expect from him. The title reinforced the expectation.

When I finally got around to reading the article, however, I found that this was not exactly the whole story. Morozov does take issue with the “digital detox crowd,” but not because of their desire to disconnect or their uneasiness with the new “attention economy.” Rather, he takes aim at their motives and their strategies. For instance, Morozov points out that many advocates of mindfulness urge us “to unplug—for an hour, a day, a week—so that we can resume our usual activities with even more vigor upon returning to the land of distraction.” Unplugging and the pursuit of mindfulness, if it is only practiced in order to re-immerse oneself in the same regime of distraction and technocratic productivity, if it does nothing to change the conditions that gave rise to the need to disconnect in the first place–such practices simply do not go far enough.

Approached in this way, disconnection functions analogously, although inversely so, to the place of carnival in medieval society. Carnivals playfully overturned the expectations and assumptions ordering society. They inverted political, religious, and social expectations. They were temporary eruptions of disorder that ultimately functioned to preserve the order of society. They did so by operating as safety valves releasing the tensions, frustrations, and desires that were ordinarily repressed by the existing moral order. Extraordinary moments of controlled disorder, in other words, served to preserve the ordinarily existing order. On Morozov’s reading, disconnection as practiced by many of its advocates functions similarly. Disconnection is a moment of order that functions to sustain the ordinarily disordered status quo.

Morozov also alludes to Nathan Jurgenson’s critical essay, “The Disconnectionists,” and Alexis Madrigal’s similarly suspicious piece, “‘Camp Grounded,’ ‘Digital Detox,’ and the Age of Techno-Anxiety.” But Morozov’s brief discussion of these pieces is a hinge in his argument. After citing Jurgenson and Madrigal, both of whom raise important considerations, Morozov adds,

“Note that it’s the act of disconnection—the unplugging—that becomes the target of criticism, as if there are no good reasons to be suspicious of the always-on mode championed by Silicon Valley, what is called ‘real-time.’”

A little further on he warns, “critics like Madrigal risk absolving the very exploitative strategies of Twitter and Facebook.” From there Morozov suggests that the problematic aspects of social media should not be viewed as a natural price to pay for the enjoyment and benefits we derive from it. Rather, he thinks we should scrutinize social media as we would slot machines: “With social media—much like with gambling machines or fast food—our addiction is manufactured, not natural.”

Finally, Morozov is right to stress the fact that “why we disconnect matters.” “We can continue in today’s mode of treating disconnection as a way to recharge and regain productivity,” Morozov suggests, “or we can view it as a way to sabotage the addiction tactics of the acceleration-distraction complex that is Silicon Valley.” Of course, it is the latter option that Morozov urges us to adopt.

I trust that this has been a faithful summary of Morozov’s argument, but I encourage you to read the whole piece. Critics like Jurgenson, whose essay from last year I’ve long meant to write about, and Madrigal raise important concerns, but it has always seemed to me that the net, perhaps unintended, effect of their criticism was to suggest that there is no real problem with the way that our digital lives are ordered. In my view, Jurgenson and Madrigal are most useful when they are pointing out the self-serving and self-righteous tendencies in some of the digital cultures critics. Morozov does the same, but in doing so he does not suggest that the problem itself is illusory. In fact, the most serious failure of the disconnectionists in his view is their failure to fully understand the scope of the problem. Consequently, they have not been serious enough in their efforts to redress it.

The Furies Within

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 6 Comments

“By refusing to claim moral or personal authority, Auden placed himself firmly on one side of an argument that pervades the modern intellectual climate but is seldom explicitly stated, an argument about the nature of evil and those who commit it.

On one side are those who, like Auden, sense the furies hidden in themselves, evils they hope never to unleash, but which, they sometimes perceive, add force to their ordinary angers and resentments, especially those angers they prefer to think are righteous. On the other side are those who can say of themselves without irony, ‘I am a good person,’ who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own. This view has dangerous consequences when a party or nation, having assured itself of its inherent goodness, assumes its actions are therefore justified, even when, in the eyes of everyone else, they seem murderous and oppressive.”

From Edward Mendelson’s recent essay, “The Secret Auden.” Read the rest for an elaboration of this point and much else worth your consideration.

In his closing paragraph, Mendelson cites a line from Montaigne which Auden once used as an epigraph. I leave you with it:

“We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.”

Troubles We Must Not Refuse

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

If you’re not paying attention to Evan Selinger’s work, you’re missing out on some of the best available commentary on the ethical implications of contemporary technology. Last week I pointed you to his recent essay, “The Outsourced Lover,” on a morally questionable app designed to automate romantic messages to your significant other. In a more recent editorial at Wired, “Today’s Apps Are Turning Us Into Sociopaths,” Selinger provides another incisive critique of an app that similarly automates aspects of interpersonal relationships.

Selinger approached his piece by interviewing the app designers in order to understand the rationale behind their product. This leads into an interesting and broad discussion about technological determinism, technology’s relationship to society, and ethics.

I was particularly intrigued by how assumptions of technological inevitability were deployed. Take the following, for example:

“Embracing this inevitability, the makers of BroApp argue that ‘The pace of technological change is past the point where it’s possible for us to reject it!’”

And:

“’If there is a niche to be filled: i.e. automated relationship helpers, then entrepreneurs will act to fill that niche. The combinatorial explosion of millions of entrepreneurs working with accessible technologies ensures this outcome. Regardless of moral ambiguity or societal push-back, if people find a technology useful, it will be developed and adopted.’”

It seems that these designers have a pretty bad case of the Borg Complex, my name for the rhetoric of technological determinism. Recourse to the language of inevitability is the defining symptom of a Borg Complex, but it is not the only one exhibited in this case.

According to Selinger, they also deploy another recurring trope: the dismissal of what are derisively called “moral panics” based on the conclusion that they amount to so many cases of Chicken Little, and the sky never falls. This is an example of another Borg Complex symptom: “Refers to historical antecedents solely to dismiss present concerns.” You can read my thoughts on that sort of reasoning here.

Do read the whole of Selinger’s essay. He’s identified an important area of concern, the increasing ease with which we may outsource ethical and emotional labor to our digital devices, and he is helping us think clearly and wisely about it.

About a year ago, Evgeny Morozov raised related concerns that prompted me to write about the inhumanity of smart technology. A touch of hyperbole, perhaps, but I do think the stakes are high. I’ll leave you with two points drawn from that older post.

The first:

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made,” Kant observed. Corollary to keep in mind: If a straight thing is made, it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it.

The second relates to a distinction Albert Borgmann drew some time ago between troubles we accept in practice and those we accept in principle. Those we accept in practice are troubles we need to cope with but which we should seek to eradicate, take cancer for instance. Troubles we accept in principle are those that we should not, even if we were able, seek to abolish. These troubles are somehow essential to the full experience of our humanity and they are an irreducible component of those practices which bring us deep joy and satisfaction.

That’s a very short summary of a very substantial theory. You can read more about it in that earlier post and in this one as well. I think Borgmann’s point is critical. It applies neatly to the apps Selinger has been analyzing. It also speaks to the temptations of smart technology highlighted by Morozov, who rightly noted,

“There are many contexts in which smart technologies are unambiguously useful and even lifesaving. Smart belts that monitor the balance of the elderly and smart carpets that detect falls seem to fall in this category. The problem with many smart technologies is that their designers, in the quest to root out the imperfections of the human condition, seldom stop to ask how much frustration, failure and regret is required for happiness and achievement to retain any meaning.”

From another angle, we can understand the problem as a misconstrual of the relationship between means and ends. Technology, when it becomes something more than an assortment of tools, when it becomes a way of looking at the world, technique in Jacques Ellul’s sense, fixates on means at the expense of ends. Technology is about how things get done, not what ought to get done or why. Consequently, we are tempted to misconstrue means as ends in themselves, and we are also encouraged to think of means as essentially interchangeable. We simply pursue the most efficient, effective means. Period.

But means are not always interchangeable. Some means are integrally related to the ends that they aim for. Altering the means undermines the end. The apps under consideration, and many of our digital tools more generally, proceed on the assumption that means are, in fact, interchangeable. It doesn’t matter whether you took the time to write out a message to your loved one or whether it was an automated app that only presents itself as you. So long as the end of getting your loved one a message is accomplished, the means matter not.

This logic is flawed precisely because it mistakes a means for an end and sees means as interchangeable. The real end, of course, in this case anyway, is a loving relationship not simply getting a message that fosters the appearance of a loving relationship. And the means toward that end are not easily interchangeable. The labor, or, to use Borgmann’s phrasing, the trouble required by the fitting means cannot be outsources or eliminated without fatally undermining the goal of a loving relationship.

That same logic plays out across countless cases where a device promises to save us or unburden us from moral and emotional troubles. It is a dehumanizing logic.

When the Problem is Technology, the Answer is More Technology

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

In 1954, Martin Heidegger published “The Question Concerning Technology” in which he observed,

“[T]he instrumental conception of technology conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology. Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means. We will, as we say, ‘get’ technology ‘spiritually in hand’. We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from our control.”

Not sure what Heidegger meant? Josh Cohen provides a contemporary illustration:

“Wang is the co-founder of Lumo BodyTech, a company that produces pioneering devices designed to enhance a user’s posture. Their lead product is the LUMOBack Posture Sensor, which triggers warning vibrations the moment you slouch. Given that poor posture is a key symptom of compulsive absorption in our laptops and phones, this product is not merely a physical corrective, says Wang, but the harbinger of a new ‘mindfulness’, a means of awakening the self from its high-tech slumber.

So, our mortally anxious distraction by tracking devices is to be finally arrested by…a tracking device. You can only be struck at this point by Wang’s genial indifference to what he’s actually saying. Self-tracking, he declares at a conference promoting the practice, corrodes social and emotional ties, engenders helpless dependence on technology and endangers physical health. But thank goodness I’ve patented a new self-tracking device, he concludes, impervious to either the irony in his catastrophic diagnosis of collective technological alienation and his proposed remedy of a posture sensor.”

 

Utopias of Communication

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

“The more any medium triumphed over distance, time, and embodied presence, the more exciting it was, and the more it seemed to tread the path of the future … And as always, new media were thought to hail the dawning of complete cross-cultural understanding, since contact with other cultures would reveal people like those at home. Only physical barriers between cultures were acknowledged. When these were overcome, appreciation and friendliness would reign.”

That is Carolyn Marvin discussing nineteenth century assumptions about telegraphic and telephonic communication, not the similarly utopian assumptions made about the Internet. Then as now, the reality fell short of the ideal.

“Assumptions like this required their authors to position themselves at the moral center of the universe, and they did. They were convinced that it belonged to them on the strength of their technological achievements.”

More:

“The capacity to reach out to the Other seemed rarely to involve any obligation to behave as a guest in the Other’s domain, to learn or appreciate the Other’s customs, to speak his language, to share his victories and disappointments, or to change as a result of any encounter with him.”

Finally, the original electronic filter bubble:

“Predictably, the experience of contact between distant cultures met few expectations of mutual recognition. For Thomas Stevens, a British telegraph operator in Persia responsible at the most personal level for bringing the kinship of humanity closer to fruition, the telegraph was not a device to facilitate contact with a remarkably different and fascinating culture, but an intellectual and spiritual restorative in a cultural as well as physical desert. ‘How companionable it was, that bit of civilization in a barbarous country, only those who have been similarly placed know.’ … The telegraph represented ‘a narrow streak of modern civilization through all that part of Asia.’ Europeans as far apart as two thousand miles, who had never seen one another, were well acquainted.”

Quotations drawn from Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (1990).