Exercises in Thought: Technology

Sweeney: Bytes and Bonds: Crafting Meaning in a Tech-Driven World*

You might be convinced to speak for yourself when you hear Ralph Waldo Emerson speak of alienated majesty. The idea is that you have all these secret spontaneous impressions bumbling around in your psyche for which you have never dared expression because they are so out of keeping with all the world’s cry of commonsense and opinion or, more simply, of what is relevant and meaningful to say. Then someone stands up with the fine phrase that sounds out the belief which is most profoundly your own — there it is, the very thing, returned to you with alienated majesty — and because you did not have the courage to say it in so many words you must now accept it from another and as another’s. Therefore, the argument goes, we are compelled always to speak for ourselves in order to avoid the set of dire straits: subdued, by the other who was better at being ourselves than we, into awe and shame.

So you might be convinced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and his words to speak for yourself. Then you’ll go on Fizz or Instagram or TikTok and forget that you’ve ever had a thought to speak of, which is fun.

But then something remarkable will happen. You’ll be on Fizz or Instagram or TikTok forgetting that you’ve ever thought anything and then suddenly you’ll see: something relatable. An experience to which you relate. And you will have a thought, which will be: That has happened to me. I just never thought to put it.

Alienated majesty. You go to the comments section to admit your awe and shame. The idea is to comment something like, “We all be living the same life, huh.”

But then something even more remarkable will happen. You’ll open the comments section and you’ll see the top-liked comment: “We all be living the same life but in a different font huh.”

Unbelievable! Even more alienated majesty! (At this point you’ve kind of forgotten what alienated majesty is exactly and that’s okay.)

And the idea is that you scroll through the comment section until you forget that you meant to comment anything, and that you then scroll through some other videos until you forget that you forgot, and that you then might end up realizing that being shown up in perpetual marginal alienated majesty is way more fun than thinking and saying anything at all.

And here’s where we get to the really most remarkable thing, the thing that Ralph Waldo Emerson never thought to think. It’s possible that someone might speak your own thoughts and that you might then have to accept them from another in shame. But what might happen instead, and what would be a lot be cooler, is if, at the very moment that you were going to feel the shame, the someone that spoke your thoughts was already feeling your shame for you, better than you ever could, which is to say in hypersaturated colors, in six- to 30-second increments, in lurid endless motion.

And you might realize this is what’s happening and you might not, which is fun.

*

There’s a guy in a book called “The Tin Drum” named Oskar. There’s a prank Oskar likes to play on people. In the evening the streets thin of traffic and snow comes down in fine shaking shapes. Ice covers the sidewalks and street lamps reach through the nearby shop windows. Someone walks by and keeps walking. Someone else pisses in an alleyway and watches the steam rise. Someone else walks by and looking into a shop window fixes their eye on some ornament or platinum watch or rocking horse — it doesn’t matter what, what matters is that their eye is fixed and they have stopped and they believe they are alone.

Then from somewhere close and unseen Oskar sings. To the very spot which the passerby’s eye is fixed appears a perfect hole in the glass. The passerby jumps in fright, shamed by the sudden force of desire meant to be fleeting and secret, anonymous and dark. They hurry away. Of course the joke is that the hole is only the reflection of Oskar’s open vibrating mouth.

What I’m trying to recommend is that you take the time one day to go on TikTok and turn the volume all the way down and just watch as the people open and close and open their mouths. It’s remarkable — no matter how long you watch, your screen will never even crack. From this we might be able to conclude that you really are alone.

*

If you don’t know me, you don’t know that reading books is what my life is. No matter what anyone, including myself, has ever tried to tell me about life and what it’s all for and how to best live it, the simple truth is that I have never once seen anyone enjoy anything as much as I enjoy reading a book. If I’m honest with myself, I know that’s the truth.

The other simple truth is that I have spent most of my life looking at a screen and that it has altered my brain radically. I have no grounds for this latter claim except for an intuition, which is that I would not enjoy the novels of George Eliot or Toni Morrison or Carson McCullers half so much had I not spent most of my life looking at a screen. I’m still working out for myself why this is true. Sometimes I try to work it out for myself by imagining the new art that I would be capable of.

It wouldn’t be something painted or drawn or played or written. It might involve screens but it might not. What it would really be about at the end of the day is me smiling. I would go around and I would smile at people. And then I would go somewhere really far away, like Kentucky or somewhere like that. I would go there and I would see a child with sad blue eyes and with my brown eyes I would smile and smile and smile and they would smile. And it would be art insofar as there would be nothing bad or wrong about this.

I think this is something I’m capable of.

*

It’s hard to say, in a fine phrase, what is so disconcerting about technology. In any case, I don’t think there’s anything bad or wrong in trying to feel a little ashamed.

*The title of this article was generated by LJST-AI (Legitimate Joe Sweeney Thought Artificial Intelligence). I also bounced some ideas off LJST-AI for the rest of the article. I never before realized how bouncy my ideas were.

Carroll: Doing Something About Nothing

Perhaps the most embarrassing moment during orientation for the class of 2028 occurred during the Demott Lecture when one student was asking a question to the speaker Jenny Odell and, upon hearing raucous side chatter building in Johnson Chapel, President Michael Elliot exclaimed, “Could you please pay attention to your classmate?”

Hats off to President Elliot for the witty quip referencing the central topic of the lecture. But how profoundly sad it is that during a lecture on this very topic, building off a bestselling book that examines this very topic, such a comment was required in the first place! You think the first-years would have learned, right? If not from the summer reading, then from the lecture they all sat through and … paid attention to, right?

It turns out that thinking through this question resurfaces the classic aporia of liberal orders: How do you reason with someone who doesn’t listen to reason? Perhaps you can’t, and the only remaining option is force. Here, the question is: How can you make an argument about a listener’s attention when the listener won’t pay attention to your argument? Perhaps you can’t, but in a struggle to get your listeners to pay attention, you conjure up the vestiges of your oedipal authority and make a witty quip.

But sincerely, hats off to Jenny Odell for an outstanding book, and to whichever group or people were integral to inviting Odell to deliver a captivating and relevant DeMott Lecture. Readers may be familiar with how much I appreciate a reflective, intentional life. I look forward to reading her book.

I could spend time rehearsing the same arguments about the negative cognitive effects of certain technology use, the attention economy, and such; how we distract ourselves in so many of our waking hours, drowning out our productive boredom and reflective silences with content; how we fracture our attention and lose the ability to engage in all kinds of long-form content, etc. But great authors, from Odell to Newport, have rehearsed these arguments in beautiful prose with academic rigor. And although my target audience might unfortunately be unable to pay attention — maybe they have already clicked off this article — I will attempt to paint a portrait of how my life has changed ever since I became more mindful about my technology use, or, to put it bluntly, ever since I unplugged. Maybe these images can circulate and touch someone who can’t bring themselves to pay attention to another argument about how they should pay attention.

1. As Newport said, unplugging my life from the shallow distractions of technology and social media feels like I was living my life in grayscale and have just switched to technicolor. Our screens are not reality. There is something ineffable about real, three dimensional space, light, movement, air, sound, and touch that high-resolution glass does not capture.

When you have so much more attention to spare, and can focus it on your surroundings, you notice how beautiful the world is. And how blessed we are to be on such a beautiful campus at Amherst, and on such a beautiful planet with beautiful creatures. Ever since hearing Odell’s lecture, I have been even more attentive to the birdsong around Amherst. It is really wonderful.

You can literally turn your phone display to black and white. Live with it for a week, then switch it back to color, and notice how captivating and vibrant it is. Then, turn it back to grayscale, and then notice instead the blue of the sky above you, the fiery reds and oranges as the leaves turn during the fall semester. You can also try noticing the clothes people wear, or their hobbies, or how they seem to really feel when you ask how their day is going, or the whites of their eyes.

2. Unplugging also made me feel different about our social space and the people around us in a quasi-spiritual way. A couple years ago I was taking the Peter Pan from Boston to Amherst, and I decided to take an hour and sit in silence, staring ahead. I’ll admit that the first five minutes were extremely painful. I really wanted to put on some music, to listen to a podcast, or to distract myself in any way possible. But then, at about fifteen minutes, it felt like something unlocked. I was swimming around my own thoughts — and I discovered what a spacious and interesting place it can be! I looked around me. The air in the bus was vibrating. I saw my fellow Americans, all sitting in the same seats on the bus, all hurtling through this metal box on the highway, equally vulnerable, no one inherently superior to anyone else.

3. But at the same time I felt distraught at how many people on that bus seemed so distracted; I could spot no other contrarian liberal arts undergrads choosing to stew in their own thoughts and surroundings for an hour during a commute. Instead, all around me there was rhythmic swiping, necks craned down to screens, and headphones cresting ears.

If you unplug, or somehow alienate yourself from society for just a moment, you might be shocked by how absolutely bizarre we all look. Isn’t it weird how many people walk while using their pocket computers, pretty much un-attentive to their surroundings? Or how people will walk around wearing the equivalent of earplugs, blasting content during what is otherwise their solitary downtime? I will choose to be hyperbolic and describe that our state of affairs looks like a zombie apocalypse. Peoples’ eyes glaze over, their cone of vision is narrowed such that they swerve around you at the last minute — we have trouble literally navigating our lives.

People in our generation were at least semi-conscious children before the proliferation of smartphones and readily accessible social media. We sort of remember a time before things were like this. But I really wonder what the liberal arts college life was like before people had smartphones and bluetooth earbuds. Maybe I can get a glimpse through the stories of alumni, but I can’t experience it. And this is all only referring to the ways in which I’m aware of how technology has changed college life, our lives. We don’t know what we don’t know. I’m scared for the next generations that won’t know what childhood was like before smartphones.

Is this all just belabored hand wringing about the inevitable progress of technology? Am I the next version of the bitter elder who can’t believe that kids these days are writing in cuneiform on their stone tablets instead of talking to each other like regular people? I’d maintain, against this skepticism, that this 21st century shift feels qualitatively different. Corporations seeking to monetize our attention have interwoven themselves into the fabric of our lives. Our eyes don’t meet in crossing. Our ears are shut off from the wind and the birdsong that past humans have listened to since time immemorial.

The usual caveats apply. Social media can be a great tool to facilitate richer connections off of social media, in-person ideally, video as okay (like FaceTime or Zoom), and long-form and sustained as a bare minimum (like a good old phone call). Text me to get out of my texts, please. Maybe you need to use social media to connect over your niche hobby, or to stay in touch with loved ones during a crisis. But these are the exceptions rather than the norm. And do you really need to be wired into your phone all the time to reach these benefits?

Finally, what would an article on technology be without a reference to generative AI? Considering the hype around generative AI and the attendant forecasts about it uprooting our lives, it’s too early to know. Is using generative AI in academics a total cheat, like using fake weights in a powerlifting competition? Or is it like a performance-enhancing drug, like abusing steroids to lift real weights? Is it like the calculator, an invention which will revolutionize our output and the pursuit of knowledge? Is it just the next superior medium for human production, like what the word processor was to the typewriter? Is it only the first step in a revolution of (human?) society, like the steam engine or the transistor? We can’t say.

I do know one thing about large-language models, though. Their current use can feel soulless and lazy. See an example from our very own Association of Amherst Students:

(I then asked ChatGPT in a separate thread:)

At least we are not at the point where Generative AI is as interwoven into our lives as smartphones and social media are. If that day comes, maybe we really will be living in techno-hell. Or paradise.

I would say that I am not a techno-pessimist or a techno-optimist. I am, however, obviously concerned about how technology is impacting our lives. And I want you to be able to make the choices that are best for you, which probably means using less technology, or at least being more mindful of your technology use. Here are a few of the most effective techniques that helped me unplug and take control of my life. (Note that these suggestions are structural. I’m not suggesting that you merely will yourself into using your phone less. Your will stands no chance against immensely rich corporations and their teams of attention-engineers. Instead, you must change your environment and your life to resist.)

1. Remove all social media apps from your phone. If you want to use an app, download it, then delete it afterwards. The idea here is to increase the friction between the impulse to use an app and the actual use of the app. The increased friction helps you be more mindful of your use. You can also consider downloading apps on Fridays and deleting them on Sundays, or something.
2. Install a web extension to reduce or eliminate algorithmic content on sites which are designed to swallow up your time. Again, even if you end up turning this off, this increases the attendant friction of using the sites.
3. Keep your phone out of your pocket and in a bag. Replace your phone with a pen and a small notebook or even a folded-up piece of paper to jot down things to remember.
4. Keep your phone’s display on grayscale. For iPhones, this is a setting under ‘Accessibility.’
5. Pursue higher-quality leisure opportunities which require you to sustain your attention. Instead of scrolling, consider reading a book for pleasure, taking up a hobby, or hanging out with a friend.
6. Think about the real reasons why you use certain technologies. If you’re seeking connection with your friends, do you need to do it over Instagram? If you’re seeking entertainment, might you rather set aside a chunk of time to watch a good movie? Maybe you will conclude that certain uses of technology or social media do, in fact, essentially provide what you seek, but at least you will have your values guide your technology choices rather than the other way around.