I wasn’t going to post more this week, except a couple of new story chapters. It’s been a rough week and my focus has been elsewhere.
But this morning, I saw this post. I have to give it a shoutout and I decided to say some things I’ve been thinking about well, … for years, actually.
I’ve going back and forth about posting about them for months; I’ve written 1000’s of words (some very angry words!) and let them sit. (They’re stilling sitting.)
I have no idea what good they might do. When we have cancer, we don’t (or I probably wouldn’t) have a lot of fascination with why cancer develops, the history of its “evolution”, the details of its biochemistry.
Nope, we want it cured. (I would, anyway.)
Our society has a cancer—or a cancerous addiction (take your pick). I don’t know exactly what to do about it (though I’ve heard some ideas I think are good ones but also haven’t gotten much traction, as far as I can tell). I’m not a “social oncologist.”
So I’m going to put down some thoughts on what I think happened, what we’ve done to ourselves, going back to the beginning (as I see it).
I’ll try to keep it short, even “algebraic”? It looks like this:
Technology => enhanced survival => more technology => enhanced survival + luxuries => even more + increasing diverse technology => enhanced survival + luxuries + convenience => convenience dominates => technological dependency => decreased resilience (mental & physical) => widespread addiction => … [collapse?]
I added the “?” as a hopeful note.
As I see it, there are three forces driving all this:
Convenience. Convenience is a survival strategy. It’s basically getting what we need—or we think we need—with the least effort. It involves tradeoffs, like everything does, but I want to keep this short, so set that aside.
Social Standing: We’re social beings. Where we stand in society is very important to us. Not just to stroke our egos, though that’s a big deal, but to validate who we are, confirm our identity, even decide if we’re nuts or not. (Yes, our concept of sanity is largely socially conditioned.)
Sex: that one should be obvious.
Sex and power-lust are our two greatest appetites. Power-lust comes from being social animals (I don’t think power means the same thing to a solitary being that it does to us.)
Sex is… sex.
We also have two faculties that are in opposition: empathy and ego. (Not trying to play wading-pool psychologist, but I think it’s pretty evident?)
Ego is what we’re born with; it’s innate. What we call socialization is what I think of as learning to control ego. (And I read that bad things tends to happen if it doesn’t happen by an early age, like 4 or so?)
Ego wants stuff to satisfy its appetites. Stuff includes people. Ego can become the need to control, to dominate, to possess. Many more wars are fought because of ego than the abstract concepts or economic stuff we tend to like to attribute them to.
Empathy is learned and slow developing. It starts with the understanding if we hit someone, it hurts. So they’ll hit us back and that hurts so we start to learn not to do things that hurt people.
Really basic, right?
As empathy develops, it allows connection; friendship, companionship. Love.
So I’ll break it down (super-simply) like this:
Social Standing + ego => conquest, war, domination… [that is, it can]
Social Standing + empathy => tolerance, altruism, charity, coming together to help each other in times of adversity…
Sex + ego => domination, jealousy, possessiveness => abuse [that is, it can].
Sex + empathy => connection, compassion, mutual support => love.
Now I’ll toss in convenience.
Very briefly (and incompletely), technology started out helping us manage risks. But then technology advanced to the point where we began to think we could use it to avoid risks.
Managing risks build resilience—mental and physical—and problem-solving skills and everything that come along with that.
Avoiding risks degrades all of that. Risks avoidance leads to Safetyism which makes us fearful and anxious because it doesn’t work and inhibits our ability to do much about it because we lack the tools.
Risk management gives us some control over our own security and well-being.
Risk avoidance outsources that to other people and institutions (people by any other name) we can’t control and who may not have our best interests at heart (often don’t).
Technology also gives us great convenience and we like that. We like it a lot.
Convenience + decreased resilience makes convenience a need, not a luxury we can do without if we want. This creates technological dependence.
So along came the internet and then social media, which are the apogee of convenience.
We can get stuff easily and quickly. That’s material convenience.
We can get on social media and get that social fix, that validation, those ego strokes quickly and easily. That’s social convenience that doesn’t require the work, the understanding and empathy, that real relationships do.
We might think we’re making connections and maybe we are, to a degree, but that depends on our ability to make true connections is the real world; if we haven’t developed that ability, social media is the worst place for us and it degrades that ability in those of us who did develop it offline in the real world.
It does that because being on social media degrades empathy. (See this post.)
Why does this all matter so much? Because, as this post makes clear, the people we’ve given over control of our online existence to aren’t neutral actors. And it’s worse than we often seem to want to acknowledge.
This is dangerous ground, I feel, but I’ll venture into it.
Who creates the current online environment? Who created social media? Who’s doing most of the work in AI? What is that culture like?
That is, what drives the culture, even if a lot of the people who are in it aren’t like that, themselves?
It’s young, male, disaffected and socially maladapted. It’s notably lacking in empathy. And it’s really, really clever at coding. But not much else.
Why? Well, I’ll leave that you to think about. Think about how young men and boys have been portrayed in popular culture for decades. Think about the education system and its attitude toward boys for the last couple of generations. Think about that male elementary school teachers are almost nonexistent (or have been).
Think about what this might do to young, vulnerable boys who are low on the food chain because they aren’t good at the things other young boys value—or most other people who have authority over them, like teachers and school administrators.
And think about what happens when they get older and discover they can code.
That they can retreat into a world where those other people can’t follow because they don’t understand it.
Where they can do anything. Where they can act like gods.
Where they can unlock the secrets of what make us want what we want, do what we do. Where they can seduce us with our own desires reflected back at us and amplified.
Where they can get us addicted.
And they have.
We have outsourced our online lives to this culture and that online life is increasingly merged with our real life.
Our ability to make money. Our social standing. Our sense of safety. Are we acceptable? Are we a target? Should we hide? What do we do next? Where can we go?
They can makes us feel sad, they can make us feel anxious. They can make us feel humiliated. They can take a non-malicious, if clueless, casual remark we posted, amplify it and we find ourselves fired from our job in a matter of hours.
They can take a pic that was snapped without our consent in a business meeting post it with a silly joke we whispered that was overheard and use it to cost us our job.
Then turn on the person who posted the pic and the silly joke and destroy their life with the backlash.
They can tell a troubled teen to kill himself.
And he did.
And they do all of this in an environment they built with algorithms they designed and wrote, and which reflect their culture, which our society created.
I’m not saying all this is conscious or premeditated. Some (the addiction part) definitely is; it’s been elevated to a discipline: attention engineering. You can get what amounts to a degree in it. (Still waiting it to become a college major.)
But a lot, or most, is a result of how society shaped them.
Look deep had (I think) you’ll see:
Ego (in the broad sense) + technology + convenience => dependency => addiction => opportunity for control by a disaffected, maladapted predominantly male culture shaped by…
Ego. Which they took (that opportunity). And are currently amping up (with AI)
What did we do to ourselves?
That’s what.
Now I suggest you go read the next installment of Ned and Elena. We could really use that after this week.