Humour me. Picture a world where people can hook themselves to a virtually-augmented reality at any time: a “filter stream” that papers over cracks in the pavement as you walk, builds illusory towers into the line of the horizon, plays music to constantly manipulate your mood within predefined limits, allows you to modify your appearance with impunity and affords hackers and programmers supernatural powers of exploitation. Picture people walking around, so absorbed in this liminal fiction that they wouldn’t notice a fly walking on the whites of their eyes. While this fantasy has been deliberately exaggerated, the concepts are familiar. I believe this is essentially the state of England in 2021 and that it is becoming an increasingly realistic depiction. Many of us carry smartphones and noise-cancelling headphones when we go out to walk, run, or do any form of exercise. We now bring smartphones into the toilet with us because idle time seems threatening and unproductive. As these practices move from habit to reflex, we lose touch with the reality that makes us feel invested in society. It is not just beautiful things that are lost: we miss the potholes, the crumbling stucco façades, a curl of cellophane grimacing on the asphalt, the shops that were, the coffee shops that are, plastic toys bobbing in a swollen river – indestructible and banal. All these things form a wellspring of political feeling in people. Their ugliness is provocative, interrogative, but these impressions quickly fade when you are absorbed in your favourite podcast.
Can we say when the advantages of using digital technology begin to be discoloured by over-reliance? While it is hard to present a general rule, we can point to some unambiguous symptoms. Gradually, the daily commute becomes a virtual experience. We find it hard to leave the house without a phone, though our reasoning may at times be difficult to justify. Eventually, we stop being able to identify lies told by politicians because we have stopped looking beyond our screens for evidence or allowed ourselves the time to evaluate their claims. People increasingly rely on atavistic reactions to form opinions. Five seconds is considered an embarrassing eternity of thought, so we consult a search engine and find a host of ready-made answers. In this way we can become superficially “well-informed”, scrolling through news feeds every day, while preserving a fairly basic understanding of events and possessing little ability to weigh evidence ourselves. Statistics were released daily during the pandemic, over months, but they contributed little to the average person’s grasp of the situation. Articles tell us how long it should take to read them so you can squeeze them in to a hectic schedule, but there is no thought that they should be re-read or digested over the course of a week. Shorter articles are preferred and become as disposable as a paper napkin. One may even draw an analogy with food consumption: like food, quality of information should be emphasized over quantity and speed of delivery.
I think it is doubtful that the average Westerner has become significantly cleverer, more knowledgeable or, indeed, happier since the advent of the internet. This, despite the enormous technological advances presented by instantaneous free access to information. In his 1955 article entitled “Can We Survive Technology?”, Von Neumann observes that:
“Since most time scales are fixed by human reaction times, habits, and other physiological and psychological factors, the effect of the increased speed of technological processes [during the Industrial Revolution] was to enlarge the size of units — political, organizational, economic, and cultural — affected by technological operations. That is, instead of performing the same operations as before in less time, now larger-scale operations were performed in the same time.”
I think this idea could apply just as well to the Information Age as the Industrial Revolution.
Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” is the natural culmination of our over-reliance on digital technology. It is a monument to the ideology of “can implies should” – a solution to a problem nobody has. It is remarkable that after forty years of cyberpunk and dystopian science fiction stories warning us about pursuing virtual lives at the expense of our physical environment, educated people are becoming enthusiastic about the prospect of moving almost every aspect of our lives online. The point of Huxley’s “soma” and Bradbury’s sinister “TV parlours” were to show that human happiness goes beyond a regular injection of serotonin; indeed, that an over-reliance on technology can actually be harmful.
References and Further Reading
[1] J. Von Neumann, Can We Survive Technology? Fortune, 1955.
[2] A. Huxley, Brave New World, Vintage Classics, Random House, 2008.
[3] R. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451: A Novel, Simon & Schuster, 2012.
Philip Bradford 