Thank you, Andrew. This is a powerful conclusion: "When we let algorithms represent the world to us, we give up our unique point of view. When we let them accommodate our preferences, we give up our tolerance for complexity. When we let them write for us, we give up thinking for ourselves. When we let them mediate our relationships, we give up genuine connection."
As a species, we're delegating serendipity, chance, inspiration, rejection, and attachment to the machines. They become more while we become less.
And I am forwarding this on to my 18-year-old (who used to read incessantly). We gave him a phone later than most (age 15), delaying in hopes that he would remember all the good years pre-phone (& social media) & not fall completely into the digital suck.
Of course, that’s not what happened; I keep praying and hoping that the shine of it all will wear off to reveal the vacuous hole of shameless self-promotion & fixation, and its dark flip side, the gutter of self-contempt, constant comparison & never quite measuring up to everyone else’s best day.
Neil Postman is brilliant, and his work is more relevant than ever. Andrew discusses the cost of amusement, and I recently wrote about the other side of the equation: the opportunity costs of things we don't do while we are being amused.
What about the relief provided to the seemingly inexhaustable supply of aspiring content creators? (I'm on "both sides" for this one... and as a content creator and musician myself, I'm just seeing it all from a different angle lately...
Interesting question. I see the online world as a neutral for creative people. On the one hand, it allows us to reach a global audience, no matter how obscure we are. On the other hand, how much does it really benefit us? On every platform from YouTube to OnlyFans to Substack, the top 2% of creators make a ton of money, and everyone else basically does it as a hobby. In the meantime, the time we spend getting sucked into social media and other nonsense steals time and energy that we could otherwise use for creating our own content.
Ah, Mr. Trousdale, but you are guilty of assuming that deeply reading the written word and absorbing the thoughts of your betters is a good thing. And that societal consensus is a good thing. The same sin that Postman committed, and is embedded throughout Mr. Haidt’s writings.
Okay, sarcasm off. The essay is great. But I do note that the cultural forces that were ascendant from 1965-1975 and then came back with a vengeance in 2012-2022 (usually called “woke” but I prefer the term Cynical Theories after Pluckrose and Lindsay) were quite deliberate that all those old books just preserved systems of privilege and so weren’t worth defending. TikTok is just fine if the goal is to smash.
It backfired for them, of course, turns out all these new tools produce even worse results in the hands of the reactionary right.
Maybe after we’re done self-immolating for the next five years we can realize that we should have adults in charge again, and that social media makes it very hard for that outcome to occur, and finally do something serious about it?
“Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance”
“In our digital age the gigantic 'supply' of information/disinformation coming at you now greatly exceeds both the demand for it and one's ability to properly process it. Digitised mass media – and more especially social media - has deluged people with an 'information' overload of a scale that even the most informed struggle to intelligently parse and filter. And into this information/disinformation supply-side log jam, along came Facebook et al....a social media party-time, tailor-made for the uncurious and suggestible. The focus of most discourse about mass media is on its effects on the politically engaged....politicos, activists and pundits. But it is a salient feature of our media-soaked times that the semi-apolitical and politically apathetic (who are after all the great majority of us) nevertheless come to pick up – barely even noticing it - ‘opinions’ about all sorts of stuff that they are not even particularly interested in. In this way the ‘problems’…. of global warming; of racism, sexism, ‘homophobia’ ‘Islamophobia’ et al become insidiously axiomatic....as in “Yeh, everybody knows about that.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
I'm sympathetic to everything said here, and yet: Are we saying that Postman was right about *television*? Because TV seems relatively harmless. And if he was wrong about television -- overstating its apocalyptic effect -- are today's Postmans wrong about social media too?
I happen to think not. I happen to think that yesterday's Postmans overstated the malign influence of TV. TV's rise in the second half of the 20th century corresponds with expanded education, increased literacy, higher IQs, thriving print businesses (newspapers, magazines, literature), middlebrow respect for knowledge and education, and so on. Doesn't it?
But that doesn't mean today's Postmans are wrong about social media. Smartphones and social media seem correlated with declines in these areas in ways not clear in the case of TV.
This is what I was trying to get at in my earlier comment: I think he WAS right, but that the effects were subtler and less concentrated in the individual than they are for social media. With TV (as with social media), opportunity cost is also a major downside that's hard to quantify. How was I diminished by spending summer days in middle school watching gameshows and playing Doom instead of something more enriching/productive? I'll never know. With social media, you get society-wide diminishment AND significantly more concentrated harms in the individual.
I think, and the research supports this, we can't get a full view of the effects of a technology without thinking about what other behavior it displaces.
Attractive technologies seem to have isolated, independent dangers. But they really concern me most because they displace more nourishing ways to spend time.
Your comment reminded me of this EO Wilson quote: "The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology."
Every word here is beautifully articulated. Surely there can now be no doubt that children are being drugged to death by the technologies they consume. We don’t need to keep proving that. And Jon has suggested brilliant solutions to these technologies: community, free play, and increasing individual responsibility. But still we are not addressing (1) the underlying pain in children that compels them to use technology addictively and (2) the single underlying power that energizes the solutions Jon has offered. We must not continue to talk about problems and solutions until we first understand the primary emotional and spiritual need of all children—much as we would not talk about crop management until first we understood the need of plants for nutrients, water, and sun. Every child needs to feel loved unconditionally, which means love devoid of the destructive effects of disappointment, guilt, obligation, and anger. One moment of anger from a parent communicates horrible messages to a child’s developing soul. And it is only because children feel this pain—this agony of separation caused by unloving behavior—that children turn to screens and whatnot for solace. But after teaching parents around the world for thirty years, I know that very few parents are willing to realize the emotional desolation they cause their children with anger alone, to mention just one harmful parental behavior. As parents, do we have the courage to learn how to love unconditionally? Without this unflinching commitment, our children will continue to “entertain themselves to death.” The course material for unconditionally loving parenting has already been created and tested for thirty years. Visit the free websites RealLoveParents.com and RealLove.com and learn how to find unconditional love and share it with your children.
When you mention how parents create emotional scars on their children through their anger (either deliberately or not), it reminds me that many of us inadvertently bring this to our adulthood. And so as we observe Gen Z entering adulthood, undoubtedly we will also observe a different pattern than the previous generation. Many young couples avoid marriages. Birthrate are declining out of control (see Japan or South Korea for such prime examples). These are several interesting cases I personally observe and experience as someone who grow up in the Great Rewiring. Love to hear more about this discussion from Jonathan Haidt and his team.
Yes, I would also love to hear more. And yes, most of what we do---or fail to do---as parents is inadvertent. Bless our hearts. And so it is that we parents need to be taught how to find unconditional love ourselves and then learn to share it with our children. As they feel our love, they become eager to learn the principles of responsibility and loving others, which inevitably leads to genuine peace and happiness. Not a theory. I've been teaching it around the world for 30 years.
There could be many possibly reasons why some children are more disposed to compulsive use of technology than others. You're right to bring that up! And surely children who receive unconditional love from their parents are starting form a better place.
I think we should be careful not to assume that only pathological circumstances can explain problematic uses of technology. In The Anxious Generation Jon talks about how there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart... i.e. a basic longing and incompleteness that is universal, rather than specific and pathological. He suggests that the issue of modern media is that it fills this hole with garbage rather than community, relationships, meaningful interests, good character... etc.
I believe this. And to me it implies that we don't need to be traumatized, neglected, or unloved to have problems with technology. We just need to be human with all the normal longings
I have spent the past 16-years speaking to, and more importantly, tens of thousands of young people caught in this Post-huxley-Man(ia). Postman and Huxley could not be more correct. As I have watched a similar pattern in thousands of schools, with tens of thousands of students, ultimately the only escape John – In Brave New World (and so many of our students) are finding is by ending their own lives. There is an existential crisis in meaning in our young people today. They've tried desperately to fill it, like the great Oscar Wilde, only to become morally and psychologically bankrupt. Wilde found a sliver of redemption when imprisoned, seeing the proverbial light and writing one of his greatest pieces of work, De Profundis. It took the forcible ripping away of that pleasure to understand and uncover, that he, and his self-obsequious addiction was his greatest challenge. Will our children self-realized, or will we be forced to imprison this technology to usher in and understanding of the damage it is done. Sadly, when Wilde was released, his hedonic entrapment was just too strong to escape the chilling vortex of pleasure. It was Chesterton that gave us the understanding that pleasure was the problem and not the pain or challenges that we go through that give us the greatest meaning in life - “Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.” Sadly, I want to believe that our children will awaken to this realization, but just as John tried to escape his reality, it was just too stimulating and powerful. Have we created a power that has no resistance?
Another difference between now and the age of TV is that the downside consequences of social media are much more apparent and on the surface, enough to shock many people back to a more intentional, conscious relationship with media. When I grew up in the 80s and 90s we heard that too much TV and video games were bad for your brain, but it wasn't always obvious why, and the negative consequences were more subtle. Now, the state of our politics and obvious impacts to mental health from over- consumption of algorithmic short form digital media are easy for anyone to see. I'm sure all of us here have experienced a version of it ourselves. That's how you get someone like me, who consumed an absurd amount of TV and video games as a kid (and social media as an adult) pulling way, way back to print media and a minimal presence on the Internet. And bringing my still very young children up in the same.
So good and so needed. Thank you for this! This made me shudder: "By accommodating our preferences and prejudices, algorithms distort reality and distance us from each other. In doing so, they make us fragile and righteous. They drain our interest in the world. And in the end, the personalized amusement is only a means of capturing our attention: the more we consume from algorithms, the more they consume us."
The alternative is a different way to organize ourselves, as psychological individuals, families, villages, federations, and nations. Capitalism selects for an organization of disintegrated parts of individuals, companies and nation states, and we have to get away from that. Not towards socialism or any totalitarian type organization. Global capitalism and totalitarianism are the two attractors that Daniel Schmactenberger talks about, and that Brave New World and 1984 also identified. We want a third attractor, and from what I know about emergence and multi-level selection, it should roughly follow how multicellular organisms (and our brains) organize themselves: in nested levels, where more interaction (mostly collaborative) happens between a level's parts than with higher levels. I would love to talk about this, despite the limitations that are inherent on substack (deep conversation is hard to initiate and maintain, in my experience).
I appreciate that your comment introduces me to the complex system in society. Thank you.
I am a casual sociology-psychology reader, so I used ChatGPT to understand your comment because I've never read Daniel Schmactenberger's works.
From what I read, Global Capitalism drives people's behavior through pleasure, distraction, and psychological conditioning. Totalitarian is signified by oppressive control through fear and surveillance. The Third Attractor would be to focus on cooperation in smaller communities with the expectation to produce a stable larger community. From my observation, both Global Capitalism and Totalitarian are driven by the incentive to maintain power through money and ruling power respectively. While the Third Attractor focused on creating systemic change in smaller communities. The memory comes to my mind of a small rural village in Japan where elder people sell local produce and maintain close relationship with their neighbors. You can observe this pattern all over the world although becoming more scarce. Here the incentive is the Ikigai.
I received other alternatives, from ChatGPT which I would describe here.
1. Have decentralized organizations that enable self-governance while maintaining accountability with each other. We did see that historically transcendent ideals from religions shaped different nations under one umbrella. Each countries might have differing opinions and conducts, but they were accountable to keep the spirit of the Faith. The incentive is to preserve the transcendent ideals.
2. Regenerative Economics focuses on restoring the world rather than depleting resources. ChatGPT mentioned Doughnut Economics. The incentive is to group up and promote one side against the differing practice.
3. Funny enough ChatGPT suggested an AI and Human collaboration where AI has the role to mediate our decision-making. This is outrageous in a sense because this is a Technopoly scenario and the dystopia scene in Wall-E becoming real. The incentive is to have a fair "Judge" to define the boundary because our own is considered unreliable.
Our discussion is about escaping the negative feedback where one company copies a bad practice to avoid "losing the advantage." I believe every individuals and companies must have a clear Ikigai. And I believe we also need to add the Spiritual dimension (the transcendent ideals) on what does it mean to be human. Many religions and spiritualism taught this which could be a strong foundation to begin with. Ikigai alone is not enough because every person believes they are a good person. Although this personal "good" could be distorted unless we have a clear model to discern what benefits us and other people (win-win) from what harms people (win-lose) or outright harming both sides (lose-lose).
1. Decentralization is OK in the sense that communities have some agency and subsidiarity. But if there is no higher level they will have conflict and competition, and then it's survival of the fittest, either through carnal war, of economic war. If the higher level is not totalitarian, there can't be too many communities in it, because then we get the chaos attractor/Mollochian dymamics characteristic of global capitalism (and other such systems). So we are back to proper nesting, where we need not one but several higher levels, all the way to the whole earth (and beyond if we ever find extraterrestrials that can interact with us materially). Religions are also fine as stories to incentivize our species, but they are not sufficient as an antidote to capitalism.
2. Regenerative economics is fine too, but I think it is insufficient also without proper nesting, due to the costs of managing cheaters/free riders/non-regenerative people if there are too many of them in a level.
3. An AI-human collaboration (and also more human-like AI, and cyborg-augmentation of humans) does not have to lead to WALL-E, if we do it in accordance with human nature, which is not to be passive and put comfort/hedonic pleasure above all other values. We also like challenge and eudamonic values. What boundary were you speaking of? I didn't understand that part... Just because a machine (or AI) can do certain things better than us, does not mean we should not do them for the pleasure and character building and connection they afford us. Only in certain systems like capitalism are we forced to let the machines do these things, for fear of being outcompeted if we don't.
Spiritual and moral principles (meaning how we are relative to other beings) are important, I agree. But they are also insufficient, and we must have systems that prevent cheaters from getting an advantage and growing exponentially. Also, I am not sure if they are necessary, because in a properly nested system, they will evolve. But I could be wrong about this.
In capitalism, feudalism or in our proper nesting model, Emergence undoubtedly will occur. Like you said capitalism come with incentives which for me is positive because people doesn't have to be the lucky sperm born in royal family to live with freedom and wealth like kings and queens do. We can create our own opportunities. Although sadly you did mention about the fear that arises which further fuels our amusement to pleasure. Pleasure and wealth seemingly become the utopia we must strive for. Funny enough the word utopia was coined by Thomas More which is a satire that means "no such place." And this is true in a sense because we cannot control the exact outcome of a complex system, unexpected patterns will emerge despite our goodwill. One model in game theory tells us about altruism as the path to long-lasting cooperation. But one catch to altruism is to have the same players within the same rules playing the game repeatedly so each side can learn that the best solution is to cooperate and be altruistic. This is a milestone where we can build our smaller communities. Even in our family and company we can observe practices that encourages against altruism. Comparing siblings, grading system in schools, wrong KPIs to measure performances. We can begin this exciting systemic change starting from our smallest community we currently live in. This is my share of thoughts. Thank you.
Yes, there are positive aspects to capitalism, like wealth creation and opportunity. However we have to decide whether the negatives (the ones that are mentioned in After Babel) are worth it. And also, perhaps there are ways of lessening the negatives, such as with proper nesting, which might keep certain aspects of capitalism, but avoid the Molochian ones.
The main point of proper nesting is that negative aspects of complexity (such as cheaters/free riders) stays manageable due to parts at each level mostly interacting between themselves (a small number). This has nothing to do with Utopia, it is a game theoretic concept of network topology. Trust is also easier to build in such a network at the lowest levels (families and small communities), not only because of the repeated rounds of interactions according to agreed-upon rules, but because the rules are easier to enforce (harder for cheaters to hide) and because one gets to know one's family and community members well. This was also true in feudal cultures, but the problem there was that they were mostly totalitarian. In a properly nested, non-totalitarian system, the needs of parts are aligned with the needs of the levels that they belong to, so there is no need for altruism (where one sacrifices one's needs for the needs of the whole).
OK, you're welcome and thank you for discussing this. I will respond to your many points below:
All those psychological incentives for controlling behavior are true, but capitalism also selects for certain behaviors through punishments, not just incentives. Fear is also used by capitalism, not just totalitarian systems: fear of losing or not having a job, fear of one's company being outcompeted, fear of not being to afford the rent or mortgage, etc. And none of this is intentional, it is instead evolutionary.
The third attractor is not known yet in its details. As you (and ChatGPT) say, there might be several paths to get there, and several destinations that all fulfill the criteria of keeping much agency at the individual level, while avoiding the "Mollochian dynamics" of capitalism, that produce unfavorable long-term game theoretic outcomes for most people.
Small communities are part of "proper nesting", not the whole story. Confucius talked about this a while back: integrated (virtuous) individuals, within families, within villages (small communities), within federations, within states, within a UN (OK, Confucius didn't know about the UN ;-). Each has a proper number of parts, a level-dependent Dunbar number, if you will. If you are Japanese, I hope you are not prejudiced against Confucius ;-)
I agree Ikigai and local trading for essential goods and services is becoming more scarce all over the world, I think due to capitalism. Though there are still quite a few people who enjoy their work as producers within capitalism, and it has also made some work possible that has not existed before, or only rarely (some types of engineering and academics, and anything to do with global trade and communication for example).
As far as the other options to meet the criteria of the third attractor, I will respond in a separate comment, in case the substack algorithm has a word limit.
"...screens naturally favor what’s catchy in 30 seconds, what’s pleasing to the eye, and what flatters our prejudices. These are the demands of show business..."
I have a degree in design and visual communication, and the one mantra we were taught was "to make people feels good." It have never crossed my mind but this is the reality of the modern entertainment, to make people feels good every possible ways (pervasive), every time (permanent), with the least effort required from them (low barrier of entry) until they press/do the call to action.
Yet as explained in Anxious Generation, both individuals and companies have no way to circumvent this principle but to play along, lest they fall behind because other companies use this "advantage."
If anyone has an alternative world view (both individual or systemic scale) to address this problem, I would love to hear from you. Thank you.
I tried replying to you, but a glitch made it a global reply. Here is what I said:The alternative is a different way to organize ourselves, as psychological individuals, families, villages, federations, and nations. Capitalism selects for an organization of disintegrated parts of individuals, companies and nation states, and we have to get away from that. Not towards socialism or any totalitarian type organization. Global capitalism and totalitarianism are the two attractors that Daniel Schmactenberger talks about, and that Brave New World and 1984 also identified. We want a third attractor, and from what I know about emergence and multi-level selection, it should roughly follow how multicellular organisms (and our brains) organize themselves: in nested levels, where more interaction (mostly collaborative) happens between a level's parts than with higher levels. I would love to talk about this, despite the limitations that are inherent on substack (deep conversation is hard to initiate and maintain, in my experience).
Great essay! I have to point out that while prescient on many points, Postman was susceptible to the academic error of considering print as inherently superior to television.
That may have been because academics had very little toe-hold in the television world, and were resentful of its reach and resources. By contrast, typical academic publishing has very few readers and is poorly paid, if it is paid at all.
Academics also divide cinema into 'art house' and 'showbusiness' depending on whether people actually enjoy watching it. Their ire for television doesn't extend to government or foundation-subsidised film and theatre, which they generally support.
Mein Kampf was in print before the Third Reich deployed film production as propaganda, and television in time for the 1936 Olympics. Therefore it doesn't follow that print is morally superior, or the text carefully considered by either author or reader.
The German-speaking world produced many bad books, which led directly to the deaths of millions, since Gutenberg built his press. Works by Luther, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, for example. Television and social media have a far lower death toll so far.
Thank you, Andrew. This is a powerful conclusion: "When we let algorithms represent the world to us, we give up our unique point of view. When we let them accommodate our preferences, we give up our tolerance for complexity. When we let them write for us, we give up thinking for ourselves. When we let them mediate our relationships, we give up genuine connection."
As a species, we're delegating serendipity, chance, inspiration, rejection, and attachment to the machines. They become more while we become less.
I was literally expressing this sentiment last evening to my 14 year old in significantly less eloquent terms.
"They become more while we become less" is such a powerful statement.
And I am forwarding this on to my 18-year-old (who used to read incessantly). We gave him a phone later than most (age 15), delaying in hopes that he would remember all the good years pre-phone (& social media) & not fall completely into the digital suck.
Of course, that’s not what happened; I keep praying and hoping that the shine of it all will wear off to reveal the vacuous hole of shameless self-promotion & fixation, and its dark flip side, the gutter of self-contempt, constant comparison & never quite measuring up to everyone else’s best day.
I hope it's helpful and he will see the value of balance and human connection!
Neil Postman is brilliant, and his work is more relevant than ever. Andrew discusses the cost of amusement, and I recently wrote about the other side of the equation: the opportunity costs of things we don't do while we are being amused.
https://open.substack.com/pub/technoskeptical/p/things-undone
What about the relief provided to the seemingly inexhaustable supply of aspiring content creators? (I'm on "both sides" for this one... and as a content creator and musician myself, I'm just seeing it all from a different angle lately...
Interesting question. I see the online world as a neutral for creative people. On the one hand, it allows us to reach a global audience, no matter how obscure we are. On the other hand, how much does it really benefit us? On every platform from YouTube to OnlyFans to Substack, the top 2% of creators make a ton of money, and everyone else basically does it as a hobby. In the meantime, the time we spend getting sucked into social media and other nonsense steals time and energy that we could otherwise use for creating our own content.
Ah, Mr. Trousdale, but you are guilty of assuming that deeply reading the written word and absorbing the thoughts of your betters is a good thing. And that societal consensus is a good thing. The same sin that Postman committed, and is embedded throughout Mr. Haidt’s writings.
Okay, sarcasm off. The essay is great. But I do note that the cultural forces that were ascendant from 1965-1975 and then came back with a vengeance in 2012-2022 (usually called “woke” but I prefer the term Cynical Theories after Pluckrose and Lindsay) were quite deliberate that all those old books just preserved systems of privilege and so weren’t worth defending. TikTok is just fine if the goal is to smash.
It backfired for them, of course, turns out all these new tools produce even worse results in the hands of the reactionary right.
Maybe after we’re done self-immolating for the next five years we can realize that we should have adults in charge again, and that social media makes it very hard for that outcome to occur, and finally do something serious about it?
“Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance”
“In our digital age the gigantic 'supply' of information/disinformation coming at you now greatly exceeds both the demand for it and one's ability to properly process it. Digitised mass media – and more especially social media - has deluged people with an 'information' overload of a scale that even the most informed struggle to intelligently parse and filter. And into this information/disinformation supply-side log jam, along came Facebook et al....a social media party-time, tailor-made for the uncurious and suggestible. The focus of most discourse about mass media is on its effects on the politically engaged....politicos, activists and pundits. But it is a salient feature of our media-soaked times that the semi-apolitical and politically apathetic (who are after all the great majority of us) nevertheless come to pick up – barely even noticing it - ‘opinions’ about all sorts of stuff that they are not even particularly interested in. In this way the ‘problems’…. of global warming; of racism, sexism, ‘homophobia’ ‘Islamophobia’ et al become insidiously axiomatic....as in “Yeh, everybody knows about that.” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
I'm sympathetic to everything said here, and yet: Are we saying that Postman was right about *television*? Because TV seems relatively harmless. And if he was wrong about television -- overstating its apocalyptic effect -- are today's Postmans wrong about social media too?
I happen to think not. I happen to think that yesterday's Postmans overstated the malign influence of TV. TV's rise in the second half of the 20th century corresponds with expanded education, increased literacy, higher IQs, thriving print businesses (newspapers, magazines, literature), middlebrow respect for knowledge and education, and so on. Doesn't it?
But that doesn't mean today's Postmans are wrong about social media. Smartphones and social media seem correlated with declines in these areas in ways not clear in the case of TV.
This is what I was trying to get at in my earlier comment: I think he WAS right, but that the effects were subtler and less concentrated in the individual than they are for social media. With TV (as with social media), opportunity cost is also a major downside that's hard to quantify. How was I diminished by spending summer days in middle school watching gameshows and playing Doom instead of something more enriching/productive? I'll never know. With social media, you get society-wide diminishment AND significantly more concentrated harms in the individual.
I think, and the research supports this, we can't get a full view of the effects of a technology without thinking about what other behavior it displaces.
Attractive technologies seem to have isolated, independent dangers. But they really concern me most because they displace more nourishing ways to spend time.
Great point!
Thanks Andrew, very insightful.
5 minutes ago we were cavemen , now if someone sneezes in China we get caught in the draft a millisecond later.
Technology has left our brains behind, call me a luddite and you'd be right.
TV, the Internet, social media we are all pawns on the chessboard of life.
We are controlled easily by unseen cabals who know our every movement and location.
I leave my mobile turned off when not using it, always use a VPN and never accept what "the elites" tell me or ask of me.
Technology should be our servant not our master.
Your comment reminded me of this EO Wilson quote: "The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology."
Thanks agree with the first two, not sure about god-like technology maybe intrusive technology is more how I see it
Every word here is beautifully articulated. Surely there can now be no doubt that children are being drugged to death by the technologies they consume. We don’t need to keep proving that. And Jon has suggested brilliant solutions to these technologies: community, free play, and increasing individual responsibility. But still we are not addressing (1) the underlying pain in children that compels them to use technology addictively and (2) the single underlying power that energizes the solutions Jon has offered. We must not continue to talk about problems and solutions until we first understand the primary emotional and spiritual need of all children—much as we would not talk about crop management until first we understood the need of plants for nutrients, water, and sun. Every child needs to feel loved unconditionally, which means love devoid of the destructive effects of disappointment, guilt, obligation, and anger. One moment of anger from a parent communicates horrible messages to a child’s developing soul. And it is only because children feel this pain—this agony of separation caused by unloving behavior—that children turn to screens and whatnot for solace. But after teaching parents around the world for thirty years, I know that very few parents are willing to realize the emotional desolation they cause their children with anger alone, to mention just one harmful parental behavior. As parents, do we have the courage to learn how to love unconditionally? Without this unflinching commitment, our children will continue to “entertain themselves to death.” The course material for unconditionally loving parenting has already been created and tested for thirty years. Visit the free websites RealLoveParents.com and RealLove.com and learn how to find unconditional love and share it with your children.
When you mention how parents create emotional scars on their children through their anger (either deliberately or not), it reminds me that many of us inadvertently bring this to our adulthood. And so as we observe Gen Z entering adulthood, undoubtedly we will also observe a different pattern than the previous generation. Many young couples avoid marriages. Birthrate are declining out of control (see Japan or South Korea for such prime examples). These are several interesting cases I personally observe and experience as someone who grow up in the Great Rewiring. Love to hear more about this discussion from Jonathan Haidt and his team.
Yes, I would also love to hear more. And yes, most of what we do---or fail to do---as parents is inadvertent. Bless our hearts. And so it is that we parents need to be taught how to find unconditional love ourselves and then learn to share it with our children. As they feel our love, they become eager to learn the principles of responsibility and loving others, which inevitably leads to genuine peace and happiness. Not a theory. I've been teaching it around the world for 30 years.
There could be many possibly reasons why some children are more disposed to compulsive use of technology than others. You're right to bring that up! And surely children who receive unconditional love from their parents are starting form a better place.
I think we should be careful not to assume that only pathological circumstances can explain problematic uses of technology. In The Anxious Generation Jon talks about how there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart... i.e. a basic longing and incompleteness that is universal, rather than specific and pathological. He suggests that the issue of modern media is that it fills this hole with garbage rather than community, relationships, meaningful interests, good character... etc.
I believe this. And to me it implies that we don't need to be traumatized, neglected, or unloved to have problems with technology. We just need to be human with all the normal longings
I have spent the past 16-years speaking to, and more importantly, tens of thousands of young people caught in this Post-huxley-Man(ia). Postman and Huxley could not be more correct. As I have watched a similar pattern in thousands of schools, with tens of thousands of students, ultimately the only escape John – In Brave New World (and so many of our students) are finding is by ending their own lives. There is an existential crisis in meaning in our young people today. They've tried desperately to fill it, like the great Oscar Wilde, only to become morally and psychologically bankrupt. Wilde found a sliver of redemption when imprisoned, seeing the proverbial light and writing one of his greatest pieces of work, De Profundis. It took the forcible ripping away of that pleasure to understand and uncover, that he, and his self-obsequious addiction was his greatest challenge. Will our children self-realized, or will we be forced to imprison this technology to usher in and understanding of the damage it is done. Sadly, when Wilde was released, his hedonic entrapment was just too strong to escape the chilling vortex of pleasure. It was Chesterton that gave us the understanding that pleasure was the problem and not the pain or challenges that we go through that give us the greatest meaning in life - “Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.” Sadly, I want to believe that our children will awaken to this realization, but just as John tried to escape his reality, it was just too stimulating and powerful. Have we created a power that has no resistance?
Another difference between now and the age of TV is that the downside consequences of social media are much more apparent and on the surface, enough to shock many people back to a more intentional, conscious relationship with media. When I grew up in the 80s and 90s we heard that too much TV and video games were bad for your brain, but it wasn't always obvious why, and the negative consequences were more subtle. Now, the state of our politics and obvious impacts to mental health from over- consumption of algorithmic short form digital media are easy for anyone to see. I'm sure all of us here have experienced a version of it ourselves. That's how you get someone like me, who consumed an absurd amount of TV and video games as a kid (and social media as an adult) pulling way, way back to print media and a minimal presence on the Internet. And bringing my still very young children up in the same.
So good and so needed. Thank you for this! This made me shudder: "By accommodating our preferences and prejudices, algorithms distort reality and distance us from each other. In doing so, they make us fragile and righteous. They drain our interest in the world. And in the end, the personalized amusement is only a means of capturing our attention: the more we consume from algorithms, the more they consume us."
The alternative is a different way to organize ourselves, as psychological individuals, families, villages, federations, and nations. Capitalism selects for an organization of disintegrated parts of individuals, companies and nation states, and we have to get away from that. Not towards socialism or any totalitarian type organization. Global capitalism and totalitarianism are the two attractors that Daniel Schmactenberger talks about, and that Brave New World and 1984 also identified. We want a third attractor, and from what I know about emergence and multi-level selection, it should roughly follow how multicellular organisms (and our brains) organize themselves: in nested levels, where more interaction (mostly collaborative) happens between a level's parts than with higher levels. I would love to talk about this, despite the limitations that are inherent on substack (deep conversation is hard to initiate and maintain, in my experience).
I appreciate that your comment introduces me to the complex system in society. Thank you.
I am a casual sociology-psychology reader, so I used ChatGPT to understand your comment because I've never read Daniel Schmactenberger's works.
From what I read, Global Capitalism drives people's behavior through pleasure, distraction, and psychological conditioning. Totalitarian is signified by oppressive control through fear and surveillance. The Third Attractor would be to focus on cooperation in smaller communities with the expectation to produce a stable larger community. From my observation, both Global Capitalism and Totalitarian are driven by the incentive to maintain power through money and ruling power respectively. While the Third Attractor focused on creating systemic change in smaller communities. The memory comes to my mind of a small rural village in Japan where elder people sell local produce and maintain close relationship with their neighbors. You can observe this pattern all over the world although becoming more scarce. Here the incentive is the Ikigai.
I received other alternatives, from ChatGPT which I would describe here.
1. Have decentralized organizations that enable self-governance while maintaining accountability with each other. We did see that historically transcendent ideals from religions shaped different nations under one umbrella. Each countries might have differing opinions and conducts, but they were accountable to keep the spirit of the Faith. The incentive is to preserve the transcendent ideals.
2. Regenerative Economics focuses on restoring the world rather than depleting resources. ChatGPT mentioned Doughnut Economics. The incentive is to group up and promote one side against the differing practice.
3. Funny enough ChatGPT suggested an AI and Human collaboration where AI has the role to mediate our decision-making. This is outrageous in a sense because this is a Technopoly scenario and the dystopia scene in Wall-E becoming real. The incentive is to have a fair "Judge" to define the boundary because our own is considered unreliable.
Our discussion is about escaping the negative feedback where one company copies a bad practice to avoid "losing the advantage." I believe every individuals and companies must have a clear Ikigai. And I believe we also need to add the Spiritual dimension (the transcendent ideals) on what does it mean to be human. Many religions and spiritualism taught this which could be a strong foundation to begin with. Ikigai alone is not enough because every person believes they are a good person. Although this personal "good" could be distorted unless we have a clear model to discern what benefits us and other people (win-win) from what harms people (win-lose) or outright harming both sides (lose-lose).
Second part: alternatives to "proper nesting":
1. Decentralization is OK in the sense that communities have some agency and subsidiarity. But if there is no higher level they will have conflict and competition, and then it's survival of the fittest, either through carnal war, of economic war. If the higher level is not totalitarian, there can't be too many communities in it, because then we get the chaos attractor/Mollochian dymamics characteristic of global capitalism (and other such systems). So we are back to proper nesting, where we need not one but several higher levels, all the way to the whole earth (and beyond if we ever find extraterrestrials that can interact with us materially). Religions are also fine as stories to incentivize our species, but they are not sufficient as an antidote to capitalism.
2. Regenerative economics is fine too, but I think it is insufficient also without proper nesting, due to the costs of managing cheaters/free riders/non-regenerative people if there are too many of them in a level.
3. An AI-human collaboration (and also more human-like AI, and cyborg-augmentation of humans) does not have to lead to WALL-E, if we do it in accordance with human nature, which is not to be passive and put comfort/hedonic pleasure above all other values. We also like challenge and eudamonic values. What boundary were you speaking of? I didn't understand that part... Just because a machine (or AI) can do certain things better than us, does not mean we should not do them for the pleasure and character building and connection they afford us. Only in certain systems like capitalism are we forced to let the machines do these things, for fear of being outcompeted if we don't.
Spiritual and moral principles (meaning how we are relative to other beings) are important, I agree. But they are also insufficient, and we must have systems that prevent cheaters from getting an advantage and growing exponentially. Also, I am not sure if they are necessary, because in a properly nested system, they will evolve. But I could be wrong about this.
Looking forward to your response.
In capitalism, feudalism or in our proper nesting model, Emergence undoubtedly will occur. Like you said capitalism come with incentives which for me is positive because people doesn't have to be the lucky sperm born in royal family to live with freedom and wealth like kings and queens do. We can create our own opportunities. Although sadly you did mention about the fear that arises which further fuels our amusement to pleasure. Pleasure and wealth seemingly become the utopia we must strive for. Funny enough the word utopia was coined by Thomas More which is a satire that means "no such place." And this is true in a sense because we cannot control the exact outcome of a complex system, unexpected patterns will emerge despite our goodwill. One model in game theory tells us about altruism as the path to long-lasting cooperation. But one catch to altruism is to have the same players within the same rules playing the game repeatedly so each side can learn that the best solution is to cooperate and be altruistic. This is a milestone where we can build our smaller communities. Even in our family and company we can observe practices that encourages against altruism. Comparing siblings, grading system in schools, wrong KPIs to measure performances. We can begin this exciting systemic change starting from our smallest community we currently live in. This is my share of thoughts. Thank you.
Yes, there are positive aspects to capitalism, like wealth creation and opportunity. However we have to decide whether the negatives (the ones that are mentioned in After Babel) are worth it. And also, perhaps there are ways of lessening the negatives, such as with proper nesting, which might keep certain aspects of capitalism, but avoid the Molochian ones.
The main point of proper nesting is that negative aspects of complexity (such as cheaters/free riders) stays manageable due to parts at each level mostly interacting between themselves (a small number). This has nothing to do with Utopia, it is a game theoretic concept of network topology. Trust is also easier to build in such a network at the lowest levels (families and small communities), not only because of the repeated rounds of interactions according to agreed-upon rules, but because the rules are easier to enforce (harder for cheaters to hide) and because one gets to know one's family and community members well. This was also true in feudal cultures, but the problem there was that they were mostly totalitarian. In a properly nested, non-totalitarian system, the needs of parts are aligned with the needs of the levels that they belong to, so there is no need for altruism (where one sacrifices one's needs for the needs of the whole).
Momo Mimi, do you agree and understand? Disagreement is OK too.
Why do these conversations always end prematurely?
OK, you're welcome and thank you for discussing this. I will respond to your many points below:
All those psychological incentives for controlling behavior are true, but capitalism also selects for certain behaviors through punishments, not just incentives. Fear is also used by capitalism, not just totalitarian systems: fear of losing or not having a job, fear of one's company being outcompeted, fear of not being to afford the rent or mortgage, etc. And none of this is intentional, it is instead evolutionary.
The third attractor is not known yet in its details. As you (and ChatGPT) say, there might be several paths to get there, and several destinations that all fulfill the criteria of keeping much agency at the individual level, while avoiding the "Mollochian dynamics" of capitalism, that produce unfavorable long-term game theoretic outcomes for most people.
Small communities are part of "proper nesting", not the whole story. Confucius talked about this a while back: integrated (virtuous) individuals, within families, within villages (small communities), within federations, within states, within a UN (OK, Confucius didn't know about the UN ;-). Each has a proper number of parts, a level-dependent Dunbar number, if you will. If you are Japanese, I hope you are not prejudiced against Confucius ;-)
I agree Ikigai and local trading for essential goods and services is becoming more scarce all over the world, I think due to capitalism. Though there are still quite a few people who enjoy their work as producers within capitalism, and it has also made some work possible that has not existed before, or only rarely (some types of engineering and academics, and anything to do with global trade and communication for example).
As far as the other options to meet the criteria of the third attractor, I will respond in a separate comment, in case the substack algorithm has a word limit.
"...screens naturally favor what’s catchy in 30 seconds, what’s pleasing to the eye, and what flatters our prejudices. These are the demands of show business..."
I have a degree in design and visual communication, and the one mantra we were taught was "to make people feels good." It have never crossed my mind but this is the reality of the modern entertainment, to make people feels good every possible ways (pervasive), every time (permanent), with the least effort required from them (low barrier of entry) until they press/do the call to action.
Yet as explained in Anxious Generation, both individuals and companies have no way to circumvent this principle but to play along, lest they fall behind because other companies use this "advantage."
If anyone has an alternative world view (both individual or systemic scale) to address this problem, I would love to hear from you. Thank you.
I tried replying to you, but a glitch made it a global reply. Here is what I said:The alternative is a different way to organize ourselves, as psychological individuals, families, villages, federations, and nations. Capitalism selects for an organization of disintegrated parts of individuals, companies and nation states, and we have to get away from that. Not towards socialism or any totalitarian type organization. Global capitalism and totalitarianism are the two attractors that Daniel Schmactenberger talks about, and that Brave New World and 1984 also identified. We want a third attractor, and from what I know about emergence and multi-level selection, it should roughly follow how multicellular organisms (and our brains) organize themselves: in nested levels, where more interaction (mostly collaborative) happens between a level's parts than with higher levels. I would love to talk about this, despite the limitations that are inherent on substack (deep conversation is hard to initiate and maintain, in my experience).
YAY i found this 3 minutes fresh :> good article for meh reasearch project :D
YAY i found this 3 minutes fresh :> good article for meh reasearch project :D
Great essay! I have to point out that while prescient on many points, Postman was susceptible to the academic error of considering print as inherently superior to television.
That may have been because academics had very little toe-hold in the television world, and were resentful of its reach and resources. By contrast, typical academic publishing has very few readers and is poorly paid, if it is paid at all.
Academics also divide cinema into 'art house' and 'showbusiness' depending on whether people actually enjoy watching it. Their ire for television doesn't extend to government or foundation-subsidised film and theatre, which they generally support.
Mein Kampf was in print before the Third Reich deployed film production as propaganda, and television in time for the 1936 Olympics. Therefore it doesn't follow that print is morally superior, or the text carefully considered by either author or reader.
The German-speaking world produced many bad books, which led directly to the deaths of millions, since Gutenberg built his press. Works by Luther, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, for example. Television and social media have a far lower death toll so far.
Michael D. Hanson is writing about this topic for the rest of Lent at https://mikehanson.substack.com/p/what-are-you-prepared-to-give-up