To your point: It’s not taboo at all to film a concert on your phone. Even if you are blocking the view of someone behind you. But when an artist calls you to sing along - it seems increasingly, that people start to glance awkwardly at one another. The thought of “me” filming a concert on my phone is perfectly natural, the thought of “us” singing together increasingly uncomfortable.
That alone serves as a demonstration that there is an allure (comfort?) with the atomization of self that is not there with ritual practice with “significant others.”
I attended a Jason Isbell show two months ago and before he even came out to the stage, a recording played telling us that the artist kindly requested us to not take photo or video. People cheered and applauded.
The fever of the modern malaise might be breaking.
I was also thinking about the phone example, and I think there is something to the idea that the phone pulls you away from paying attention to or thinking about the people you are with in the room and directs your attention only to yourself, the artist and whoever the audience may be on the other end of your phone. Presumably the mass, generic popular audience discussed in You And Your Profile.
But this to me also begs another critical queston I think we need to ask, which is WHY are people filming the concert in the first place? What are they trying to get out of it that simply watching the concert doesn't provide?
And if we perhaps think in the terms of Moeller and D'Ambrosio about the idea that we have shifted from an economy that is monetary towards one in which attention is itself a form of capital in a way, then I think the why can be generally understood as those with phones detaching themselves from the ritual and seeing it purely in instrumental economic terms. (Nguyen kind of also addresses this with the concept of addiction to goals for their own sake divorced from the process of achieving them). How many people are filming a concert so that they can personally return to it as an artistic experience? I would argue based on my understanding of it and my own impulse to do it (that I don't give in to) that it is very few. The filming of a concert is, instead, done to commodify it: to use it as proof we were there for others, as a form on influence online, or as a keepsake we think somehow will be worth something someday. The mere act of pulling out one's phone to do that is a sort of instrumental reasoning that financializes the moment if attention = currency, that puts it fully into the category for us of something instrumentally to be used for later rather than enjoyed for its own sake.
This is my issue with Moeller and D'Ambrosio's argument about second order observation just being an objective marker of progress and their statements about leaving the first order world behind as a kind of intellectual maturity. A world in which every observation or experience is filtered through second order understandings or instrumental use cases or rationalizations is, to me, not only an impoverished world but an unsustainable one. Once everything is only perceived in that way, nothing productive or new would seem to be possible or conceivable that could originate spontaneously or independently in its own right. It is an end of history argument that disconnects us from things that are going on directly in front of us or all around us and closes off our capacity for imagination.
In that kind of world, no wonder it leads people to feel a kind of Marxist alienation from the things we engage with and like nothing is real. Even the experiences we have outside of our employment become simply another form of capitalist labour extracted from us, one social media post and one uploaded photo or video at a time, generating data that others then consume or control.
I do think you’re onto something with thinking about what comforts you about being on your phone and how it’s somehow opposite of directly being with other people.
There was a good example I read once, of going on your phone at dinner with your spouse being like this thing that lets you take small breaks constantly from the fact that you actually have to be someone for someone else. You just sink into the phone where you don’t have to be anything before some question or comment pulls you back into the world around you.
Relations make demands and come with expectations as much as they provide us with things. How much of me today is because of what other people were for me? My Dad being my Dad for me?
If you’re just filming the concert, then what’s real to you is the post you’re going to make and the people who will see you mediating this experience to them. The people around you drop away. At least, that’s how it seems.
Great stuff. So many interesting directions to bounce off of, I'm feeling...fragmented in assessing where I want to leap in. But my first impression was this idea of the recording of an experience. We could go deep into the ethics and rituals of constantly recording everything and feeling the impulse to share that with everyone, but at the same time to add some nuance and complexity to the discussion, I'd like to point out also that I'm really grateful for the existence of SOME things we record. Thinking of two examples: (1) photos in general. As one who isn't inclined to photograph my experiences, when I'm with friends who do, or joining with family members who want to mark occasions, I'm glad to have the visual representation to aid my memory bc so much detail is quickly forgotten and passing. (2) It's astonishing that like every single Grateful Dead show for some thirty years was recorded and that they're now archived and systematized and you can access the exact one you were at and re-experience the experience, etc. And those folks recording and distributing the recording weren't necessarily not apart from the experience itself.
I agree that our collective project of recording everything is worth leaping into—even if it might be an abyss. What is fascinating to me is that I much of what I have been reading about that topic has come from explicit writings on technology (or specific piece of technology). To get at it from a kind of acute direction, assisted by Jared’s remarks and yours, shows me why learning isn’t a singular, head on (or even intentional) endeavor. The connections emerge from unlikely sources and voices. The other night I went to a semi-pro soccer match with my family and and some friends. Local, low-key, an absolute blast. Probably only a couple hundred people in a mostly empty stadium; my kids screaming and yelling for these guys they have never met and only know their numbers. I took out my phone at the end to get some pictures of my kids with the players and them autographing the over sized shirt my daughter caught at halftime. Only once we got home did I realize that the game had been streamed live on YouTube and I could go back and watch it. There I was, at 90+3 minutes, applauding for and cheering for the guy who made a busting run, pushed the wingback aside, dipped a shoulder and slotted it past the keeper. He yipped with joy; the other team crumbled to the turf with exhaustion. But the feeling of watching it again was…odd. I mean, I picked up on small moments I hadn’t noticed (I guess that tackle was a yellow card) and others wanted to see again (the almost fist fight right down in front of us and the explosion of expletives that my kids giggled and gawped at). But it wasn’t the same as being there. It wasn’t the same as being the embodied agent who felt what it was like to sit in a plastic seat, with the cool evening and setting sun enclosing him, able to smell the sweat and deodorant (my daughter thought they smelled great! Lol) feet away from me. It was cool to watch again, but not as cool as actually being there.
I don’t want this to be a shaming or holier-than-thou rant, but if continue to allow technology to push our communal experiences inward, towards atomistic spaces of mediated experience, we will be left as “fragmented,” removed from “universal benevolence,” and lacking in “the bonds of sympathy” as Taylor worries we are.
A thought on the Grateful Dead recordings - any soundboard recordings probably only required plugging a USB or similar into an output, since the digitised sound was 'there' anyway to be transmitted to the speakers. Soundboard recordings are archives of (roughly) what the crowd would have heard, rather than the atomised individual's private phone recording. Don't know enough details about the recordings to comment any further, but an interest point to think through.
Yeah, the band supported the recordings of their shows and this meant that individuals actually were freed from having to consider recording them individually!
So now imagine a world where a performer actually discouraged phone usage by negating the power of the recording to create clout by just providing a recording of the show afterwards to everyone who bought a ticket if they wanted one.
Wouldn't that maybe be a gentler way of both helping people feel less of an itch to have them out AND puncturing people's ability to later use it instrumentally? Vs. just taking phones away from people? But nobody is going to consider that option probably because it then means actively giving some of the artists own clout up for the sake of their fans and making something they could otherwise monetize freely available. That is why the Grateful Dead were one of the few bands to encourage concert recording in the first place - their relationship with capitalism and their fans was already coming from a unique place.
I should have written: "I agree that *discussing* our collective project of recording everything is worth leaping into—even if it might be an abyss.” I certainly don’t think we should be leaping to recording everything…yikes lol
Haha, yeah, I think I'm tracking. I guess I felt like your main takeaway kept us on the main target of the importance of experience in real time. I was just trying to add some nuance, but for sure the main focus of our collective trending right now is toward the thing that Taylor suggests.
“The smartphone isn’t just the great atomizer, then; it might also be the great de-ritualizer”
Or maybe the smartphone, as it turns concerts into symbols of concerts that represent fun, is its own ritual. I’m not at the concert for the experience of the concert, I’m there to film it for later.
But it’s just a bad, soul-emptying ritual. And it might be bad because it’s not the literal concert (or the sermon or the hike) that matters, it’s the positive externalities that tend to attach themselves to such experiences. Experiences like being forced to interact physically with people, to get physical cues that they are sharing in an experience with you. Technology, or at least the way we use it, mistakes the cart for the horse and gives an illusion of community, but the community is vapid.
We could even push back more against the relativizing impulse to question who can say what’s different or better in this example.
One person is at a concert to experience that concert. Another is at the concert to experience mediating that experience to other people who weren’t there. These are two discrete and different things and I think we can actually insist on this.
One person wants to achieve an object of desire, the other person wants to be desired.
Yeah, I think people get a little too relativistic when it comes to judging others "enjoyment" of things. But once you ask the question of the actual ends they are seeking through that enjoyment, I do feel like a real argument can be made for some of those ends being against the point of the endeavour and/or toxic to it or the others who enjoy it. And in that case, people can make that argument on fair grounds and I think it is reasonable to make assessments of the kinds of behaviours worth condemning.
Yeah. I guess I was less interested in passing judgement on how people enjoy themselves. I don’t doubt the concert recorders are having fun. The question is whether or not certain types of immediate enjoyment miss out something or certain activities have likely downstream negative effects. People who drink a lot definitely enjoy themselves, but I’d feel ok saying excessive drinking is bad.
Definitely. I think whatever values we want to assign, it’s important to say where we think we can make informed differentiations. Instead of a flattening idea of sameness we can recognize that blackout drunk people are having a qualitatively different experience from sober people at the same event. But extending this to the way phones are used in situations where they once were not a factor.
And to use your example and take it further, we absolutely should have conversations about whether or not the kinds of bars we build should be those that cater to and encourage the blackout drunks vs. cater to and encourage moderate alcohol consumption.
You'd have to imagine that one kind of patron might drive the other out depending on which kind of space you design, and which kind of space you design preferences or embodies a particular value system that you as a society have decided to have. So there's really no way to even be relativistic or neutral in making those choices. They do ultimately have to be made, whether you like it or not.
Recording “is its own ritual”— I think that might be right. That reminds me of the photo from early in “You and Your Profile” of the people watching everything through their phones. Consciously or not, intentionally or not, that scene—that ritual—as become normalized. At least for many. Again, as I said elsewhere, I don’t want to shame and finger-wag. As a Millennial, maybe I’m just nostalgic for the pre-smartphone days of yore. Maybe this is just where things are headed, just as it was with tv and mobile telephones and the internet and chat rooms and and and. I just don’t know. All I do know is that it FEELS different. It feels soul-emptying and vapid (to use your excellent descriptors).
Yeah, that, sadly. I think we can, in fact, consider that without it turning into moralizing necessarily. What does the ritual actually do in terms of its function? Is it a ritual that makes those who participate in it more or less likely to feel connected vs. atomised, active vs. passively compliant, joyful vs. bored, etc.? We can absolutely consider what any given ritual's effects are or whether we should desire it or not as a society.
Similar story: Recently, I went to a newer science fiction/fantasy convention in my area. And as someone who actually helped organize previous generations of fan-run conventions that were very community oriented? I was disheartened to see that so much of what fans these days are drawn to in the convention experience is actually about what the convention can help them project vs. actually enjoying the weekend. There were dozens and dozens of opportunities provided to everyone to create cool photos of their cosplays, to pose for others or pose against backdrops, to post on social media about the fun they were having. But then there was far less attention paid to the kinds of events that would actually GENERATE the kinds of fun that they were supposed to be presenting themselves as having in a real way. Appearing to have fun seemed to be the priority over actually experiencing it.
Great thoughts, and I hope you and the family recover quickly.
I definitely think that technology is the cause for the atomisation. Once entertainment became a passive, at home thing, community was bound to fracture. This is the premise of *Bowling Alone*, which unfortunately we will not be reading with this reading group. In it, he argues that the death of community really stems from television (though I'd even maybe push it a bit further to radio); this has certainly accelerated with smartphones.
It reminds me of a comic I once saw, actually. An old Irish man is sitting on his stool telling the start of a story, in Gaelic, while kids are watching the TV. It has the ellipses then, in English, "Will you not turn that off and listen?" I think this sums it all up entirely.
One last aside, I do think smartphones are more of a de-ritualiser than television is (though I'd add streaming with them) as before you'd have to at least be present at the same time to watch something, but now it's all on-demand whenever you want. Meaning you don't even have to be together to watch anymore.
It feels funny to say this but at least I could talk to strangers about Game of Thrones. I remember meeting people in town and having those kinds of conversations and it enabled me to make an initial connection with people and actually make new friends to spend time with.
We lost the big tent television show and instead we say stuff like “I’m on Portuguese leather crafting AMV brain rot tiktok” and the other person goes “uhh, what?”.
So for context here because I think that the younger someone is the less they realize actually how severe the collapse of mass culture has been, I give everyone this to contemplate...
The highest ratings estimate that I could find for Game of Thrones at any point in its run was one that indicated roughly 38.5 million Americans watched it during season 7 at its height of popularity going into season 8. Which are HUGE numbers for television currently, because Stranger Things so far this hear posted 30 million viewers and Marshalls (AKA that thing everyone's grandparent seems to watch) posted 26 million. And those are the highest rated things of the year so far outside of sports.
Keep in mind that those numbers track who watched on streaming or elsewhere within 30 full days of it airing.
The Friends finale in the early 00's was estimated to have been watched by 52 million or so Americans. That made it the FOURTH highest rated TV finale of all time behind Seinfeld, Cheers, and MASH. Those numbers are for who watched it during its initial broadcast. And in a feat that most people now agree just will never be bested? Over 100 million Americans watched the finale of MASH in 1983, which was two and half hours long.
In some cases, finales of television shows in the past were correlated to plumbing disruptions when commercial breaks got everyone going to the bathroom at once. The finale of Seinfeld is rumored to have played a role in Frank Sinatra's death because of the fact that he had a heart attack on the same night and ambulances were slower because so many EMTs had ditched work to watch it where he lived. Such was once the power of television to unite people and dominate culture.
These days only sports seems to have that level of power.
Yeah, I think sadly that we are a far cry from McLuhan's promised world of new media evolving and creating a global village. Quite the opposite.
I love television as a medium with all my heart. Genuinely, I tear up thinking about the best usages of it like Sesame Street or Star Trek or the sitcoms of Norman Lear. But also, I now reluctantly the more I read find myself having to admit that its net impact on society has probably been to make it worse and trended towards that "vast wasteland" that Postman was so prescient about.
However, the above examples I gave? Do demonstrate that technologies are not themselves inevitable in the way McLuhan imagined. Yes, they each speak their own languages to us and have ways they perhaps can shape us that are their own. But ultimately, we choose how to regulate them, how to use them and what we want them to be for. When treated as a public good in the common interest? Television could be an enormously uniting force that brought the entire world into people's homes and could be used to confront them with images of injustice, to teach impoverished children how to love reading, to mediate and model the kind of public democratic debate we might be having, etc.
But oof... You can point a very direct line and find a clear demarcation point between the societal values of the post-war socialist-oriented sense of public commons and them the nastily competitive and cutthroat values of the society that fully deregulated and unleashed the 1980's/1990's. What happened on television actually illustrates its impacts maybe the most clearly, from the rise of cable television as a class separator that let some people buy their way out of broadcast commercials and standards as both producers and viewers to the crass rise of infotainment programming with dubious standards of truth that followed the loosening of fairness doctrines and then into the childrens television designed to be toy commercials and rise of scam infomercials and televangelist money-hustles.
None of that was inevitable. All of those horror were very directly created by and initiated by specific deregulatory actions or environmental conditions aimed at media that allowed them or encouraged them.
And if you don't believe me, just cross-compare the United States in that era which drove the shift with every other nation's approach to media and television around that time. (And then maybe bitch a little less about your national public broadcaster when you realize what they protected you from if you aren't American.)
So the entire conversation about atomization occurring in tandem with the embedding of instrumental reasoning as the default mode of thought for people - and the example of people using their phones at concerts - brings me back to some thinking that I did after reading the article someone linked last week on authenticity and music written by Ted Gioia over at The Honest Broker. This also connected me back to an important conversation that came up in the Zoom meeting related to whether the pursuit of authenticity carries with it inherent classist assumptions about who gets to be "authentic" or how we frame what it means.
My thoughts on these things became so long as I worked out my disparate thoughts on them that I ended up with an actual whole essay that was too long to post here. So I will link to where I have posted it on Substack if anyone is interested.
Excellent discussion, thanks. I found the perspectives on instrumental values, technology, the state and rituals very interesting.
The modern malaise and fragmentation themes seem to directly tie into the concept of trust you have begun exploring around.
What I mean is that the fragmentation and malaise could also be considered as symptoms of low trust. Trust is founded on shared values, habits, interests, as well as competence and mutual benevolence. Taylor himself mentioned the loss of mutual sympathy, or benevolence in trust parlance. The alienation, disconnection and powerlessness are thus symptoms of a society where shared values, habits, interests, competence or mutual good will etc. - the antecedents of trust - are in increasingly short supply. Without a shared basis of trust, it becomes that much harder to operate effectively in a society. The result is alienation and powerlessness.
I'd also say it is not a stretch to claim that rituals embody and thereby strengthen the factors of trust. The loss of rituals might then imply and explain in part the declining trust.
I agree a lot with this thrust of this thinking. As Alastair MacIntyre I think successfully argues, the Athenian democracy has been estimated to be in the tens of thousands. How did they successfully democratically govern the polis? Because they formed groups of friends, in the Aristotelian sense. People who not only shared an idea of the good but also shared specific and concrete projects in society. The Romans had patronage which defined an entire sub-state structure of social relations which bound people to each other.
If your social world doesn’t begin nearest to you with a significant amount of people you trust and rely on, what is your connection to your broader local community and then nation? For the last year of my life I have mainly gone from my apartment to my job and back home again. When I go to the grocery store I often feel like no one was socialized in the same way that I was or possesses any of the same sensibilities about what’s polite and how to conduct yourself. You begin to feel extremely abstracted from the people around you. I don’t really feel like I know what people or doing or why. It’s hard to feel any communal sense.
I am trying to find ways to make some friends again and combat that feeling, but it’s widespread and many people don’t fight it.
It is indeed interesting to note that democracies have tended to start(/be) with relatively small and homogeneous populations, whereas empires on the other end are big multiethnic places mostly held together by force. Perhaps US historically has been the big exception here.
Larger polities probably quite inevitably end up with fractures in values, interests and views which then undermine the original trust that made them successful at the beginning?
The Roman Empire itself is an interesting example in that the Emperor and the imperial bureaucracy expected the delivery of the annona and of tax revenue but this was entirely accomplished by local elites in the cities of the empire and the city was really the cell of the empire. Chris Wickham has a great description of this in his Inheritance of Rome.
When Imperial authority waned and the army couldn’t be relied on for protection local bishops and aristocrats would form mercenary armies at times. The city was a locus of local political and civil power. It was a much more tractable scale. Even if the emperor weighs in on a local issue, it’s still carried out by local authorities.
But this entire state of affairs is a very far cry from the world that Livy describes, as you point out.
I thought this book was challenging in all the best ways. I struggled with it at times and the nuance of the argument it was trying to surface. Ultimately, I feel like my views have been expanded. I particularly responded to the arguments around instrumental reason and appreciated Taylor's measured response.
Ultimately, it seems like he's arguing that this isn't an all or nothing battle. It is a continual struggle to redefine the right balance as we move forward.
Are “runaway instrumental reason” and technology really the source of anything? It is on this point that I wish we were given a less crass idealist picture of society and more Thucydides. Assigning the causality to the movement of ideas doesn’t leave us with much of a road map toward any kind of action.
During Covid me and a friend started a podcast called ex.haust which ran for several years. The guiding question was “Why does nothing feel possible?” That question naturally took us into the history of America in the 20th century, particularly how the idea of the republic was intentionally refashioned by successive generations of intellectuals and politicians into the Cold War state. Early contributions were from emigre thinkers from the Soviet Union who outlined the need for the state for abrogate much of the freedom and self-determination that the US was thought to stand for in order to protect those things from the existential threat of the Soviets. Walter Lippmann also famously comes up in these discussions.
The ideology of realpolitik above any political ideal and the growth of state secrecy combined with the increased reach of the state in everyone’s lives create the world that I grew up in, the world of being afraid of the unknown lurking at the edge, the world of the X Files and Neuromancer. The state is not a representation of a general political will but of a rule of guys smoking cigarettes in dark rooms who have inscrutable motivations.
Water fluoridation is actually a perfect example of these new dynamics interacting with the old. When Grand Rapids was going to roll out fluoridating the water, there was a large public backlash with local doctors and scientists participating in the urge for caution alongside non experts. It invited the question: should the people of a city be able to democratically decide what they will do with their water? Or should experts who don’t live there decide? America has largely decided in favor of the latter, despite how much we might posture that it is otherwise. One need only look to the large sacrifice zones that constitute mining areas and the health problems in the surrounding community, who has no control except to move if they can afford to do so.
So, the exceedingly neutral language of technology and “instrumental reason” are serving to cover a hundred years of specific political and economic action by people who never felt like things weren’t possible anymore. The average citizen was intentionally cut out of being able to apply political pressure to any aspect of governance that was deemed to be significant to the effort against the Soviets, and a lot of things were significant. And it increasingly appeared that things like the law and morality were not significant factors in deciding what we would do both at home and abroad.
The television entering every home was happening at the same time as this development was entering a full maturity in the 1970s. The internet becomes generally available in the 1990s, right as the bloc falls and a general elation of markets and freedom rings. But we didn’t end the Cold War with the American government of 1850. We did so with the one of 1991, the inheritance of the Cold War. We live under the conditions which formed then still today.
So when Taylor says that protests are a sign of democratic agency, just a fragmented one focused on identity issues which can’t form a majority, I even have to wonder if he sufficiently problematizes this. In Neuromancer, Case and friends hire a group call the Panther Moderns to stage a politically motivated attack as a cover for their own activities. So the public watches the news and sees that some kind of extremists have attacked some place, and will never know what was actually going on. Gibson perfectly captures the epistemological gap that actually exists between us and any event when all we have to go on is what media mediates to us. Can protests not be astroturfed to serve ends that we are not aware of? Do we have any actual warrant for simply assuming that they are always natural expressions of the general will of some group? I wouldn’t claim that they are always one thing or another, but we need to stop assuming we just understand things like this to really grasp our situation.
This goes double for claiming that polling is a sign that political leaders fear public opinion. Polling is a technology to create public opinion. By its very constitution is exactly defines what you’re allowed to think, the entire question and debate is framed for you and you will let them in exchange for feeling heard. When we talk about the erasure of subtle values, they don’t even form, not there in the first place. In order for that to happen you would have to spend time thinking about things in depth and political participation was transformed into slotting yourself into a consumer category and then vehemently expressing your allegiance to it online and at the polls. But you can’t form questions outside of the provided scope available in media.
The iPhone and Harold Bloom and Jerry Springer and Enron all need to be understood as part of a history connected to things that happened before 1990. They are the result and we are the result of them. Perhaps of forces beyond our direct control, but also of us, of all of the vectors that make up this country all getting multiplied together. This is what makes Culture of Narcissism more interesting in its analysis of the general situation: institutional changes and individual psychologies always exist together and change together.
So will we be able to simply enframe technology in a new way and reclaim the moral basis for “instrumental reason”? I will use computers as an example of what I think the issue is.
We have lots of books about how the internet was stolen from us, how the collection of unique and interesting affinity groups based on Usenet groups and forums and IRC servers and websites was stolen by Big Tech and replaced by Facebook and Instagram and so on.
In reality, the old internet was a very small portion of the population of the US which actually spent the time to figure out how you could do things on a computer. You needed to learn things to write a website, login to an IRC server, etc. So the people who did this were the kind of people who were interested in learning those things and using them to create what they wanted to see.
The internet of Facebook became possible because all of the rest of the country got online and they don’t want to learn about computers or spend time creating stuff. They want to post stuff and see posts. Facebook succeeded because the majority of people were got online to be on it. The iPhone was perfectly timed to usher these people into this world. The iPhone itself is designed like other Apple products to remove barriers to use.
The democratic computer future people postulated back in the day, the world of free speech expression and creativity, required everyone who used a computer to become a programmer. Not a professional, but someone who could instruct a computer how to do what they wanted it to do. Then you are free when you use the computer. Make it do whatever you want. The only barrier is literally your own knowledge and expertise.
People complain about network effects being the reason you can’t compete with social media but I think the real problem is that you don’t want to compete with social media because you are trying to hopefully articulate something different and better. But by its nature, it won’t appeal to all of the people who want Instagram and TikTok.
You can enframe Instagram however you want but at the end of the day it’s still being used by the people who don’t want to stop using it for exactly the reasons you think it’s bad. These companies can only monopolize your attention if you choose to use the services and we all chose to use them. These were binary decisions made under conditions but at the end of the day they were still decisions and we decided.
So what do we do?
If you think you have some kind of angle on something, some sort of handle, you need to try and do it. The Catherine Project is a good example. That happened because actual specific people made it possible through their own efforts. And now, because of them, some amount of people can put down Pornhub and pick up some Dante for at least some of the time, and even make a few friends.
Casey Muratori started streaming himself programming a video game from scratch with no libraries, and ran the stream for many years. An unfathomable amount of people from around the world have expressed over and over again how he taught them how to actually understand computers and program and gave them an education they could not have received at a university and made so many things possible in their lives. Casey never expected or intended this but he saw something he could do and he did it and now entire communities and ideologies have sprung from that early community in the world of computing.
We are all hanging out and talking because Jared decided to start this Substack and his YouTube channel. None of this is changing the entire political and cultural landscape but I think that that barometer for success only exists to discourage action in the specific ways and contexts that we can actually see through. Who said you needed to either change everything or do nothing? That sounds like a dichotomy made up to make sure you don’t have to do anything.
If you care about these things, which I assume you do because you’re here, then there will be some point at which you can find an entry for yourself into a generative activity that improvea others’ lives. Like Taylor says in a different way, there’s no prescription. The positive and constructive contribution you can make to life all depends on your own personality and creativity. You have to figure out what it is you can offer, as an expression of your authenticity.
So I have a rec for you if you aren't already aware of him that you may love: the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. He began as Marxist writing in the mid-20th century but evolved with time and pulled away from orthodoxy more and more and became one of the major sociological minds of the late 20th/early 21st century, writing and responding furiously to the world up past Trump's election and to his passing in 2017.
His books all work to elucidate a concept he calls "Liquid Modernity" that does trace back the atomization and growth of instrumental reasoning over time and try to then coherently understand that long evolution alongside neoliberalism into today. His early work was very focused actually on the relationship between modernity and the Holocaust and is also quite provocative and interesting. I found him a revelation when I discovered him.
To your point: It’s not taboo at all to film a concert on your phone. Even if you are blocking the view of someone behind you. But when an artist calls you to sing along - it seems increasingly, that people start to glance awkwardly at one another. The thought of “me” filming a concert on my phone is perfectly natural, the thought of “us” singing together increasingly uncomfortable.
That alone serves as a demonstration that there is an allure (comfort?) with the atomization of self that is not there with ritual practice with “significant others.”
I attended a Jason Isbell show two months ago and before he even came out to the stage, a recording played telling us that the artist kindly requested us to not take photo or video. People cheered and applauded.
The fever of the modern malaise might be breaking.
I was also thinking about the phone example, and I think there is something to the idea that the phone pulls you away from paying attention to or thinking about the people you are with in the room and directs your attention only to yourself, the artist and whoever the audience may be on the other end of your phone. Presumably the mass, generic popular audience discussed in You And Your Profile.
But this to me also begs another critical queston I think we need to ask, which is WHY are people filming the concert in the first place? What are they trying to get out of it that simply watching the concert doesn't provide?
And if we perhaps think in the terms of Moeller and D'Ambrosio about the idea that we have shifted from an economy that is monetary towards one in which attention is itself a form of capital in a way, then I think the why can be generally understood as those with phones detaching themselves from the ritual and seeing it purely in instrumental economic terms. (Nguyen kind of also addresses this with the concept of addiction to goals for their own sake divorced from the process of achieving them). How many people are filming a concert so that they can personally return to it as an artistic experience? I would argue based on my understanding of it and my own impulse to do it (that I don't give in to) that it is very few. The filming of a concert is, instead, done to commodify it: to use it as proof we were there for others, as a form on influence online, or as a keepsake we think somehow will be worth something someday. The mere act of pulling out one's phone to do that is a sort of instrumental reasoning that financializes the moment if attention = currency, that puts it fully into the category for us of something instrumentally to be used for later rather than enjoyed for its own sake.
This is my issue with Moeller and D'Ambrosio's argument about second order observation just being an objective marker of progress and their statements about leaving the first order world behind as a kind of intellectual maturity. A world in which every observation or experience is filtered through second order understandings or instrumental use cases or rationalizations is, to me, not only an impoverished world but an unsustainable one. Once everything is only perceived in that way, nothing productive or new would seem to be possible or conceivable that could originate spontaneously or independently in its own right. It is an end of history argument that disconnects us from things that are going on directly in front of us or all around us and closes off our capacity for imagination.
In that kind of world, no wonder it leads people to feel a kind of Marxist alienation from the things we engage with and like nothing is real. Even the experiences we have outside of our employment become simply another form of capitalist labour extracted from us, one social media post and one uploaded photo or video at a time, generating data that others then consume or control.
I do think you’re onto something with thinking about what comforts you about being on your phone and how it’s somehow opposite of directly being with other people.
There was a good example I read once, of going on your phone at dinner with your spouse being like this thing that lets you take small breaks constantly from the fact that you actually have to be someone for someone else. You just sink into the phone where you don’t have to be anything before some question or comment pulls you back into the world around you.
Relations make demands and come with expectations as much as they provide us with things. How much of me today is because of what other people were for me? My Dad being my Dad for me?
If you’re just filming the concert, then what’s real to you is the post you’re going to make and the people who will see you mediating this experience to them. The people around you drop away. At least, that’s how it seems.
Great stuff. So many interesting directions to bounce off of, I'm feeling...fragmented in assessing where I want to leap in. But my first impression was this idea of the recording of an experience. We could go deep into the ethics and rituals of constantly recording everything and feeling the impulse to share that with everyone, but at the same time to add some nuance and complexity to the discussion, I'd like to point out also that I'm really grateful for the existence of SOME things we record. Thinking of two examples: (1) photos in general. As one who isn't inclined to photograph my experiences, when I'm with friends who do, or joining with family members who want to mark occasions, I'm glad to have the visual representation to aid my memory bc so much detail is quickly forgotten and passing. (2) It's astonishing that like every single Grateful Dead show for some thirty years was recorded and that they're now archived and systematized and you can access the exact one you were at and re-experience the experience, etc. And those folks recording and distributing the recording weren't necessarily not apart from the experience itself.
I agree that our collective project of recording everything is worth leaping into—even if it might be an abyss. What is fascinating to me is that I much of what I have been reading about that topic has come from explicit writings on technology (or specific piece of technology). To get at it from a kind of acute direction, assisted by Jared’s remarks and yours, shows me why learning isn’t a singular, head on (or even intentional) endeavor. The connections emerge from unlikely sources and voices. The other night I went to a semi-pro soccer match with my family and and some friends. Local, low-key, an absolute blast. Probably only a couple hundred people in a mostly empty stadium; my kids screaming and yelling for these guys they have never met and only know their numbers. I took out my phone at the end to get some pictures of my kids with the players and them autographing the over sized shirt my daughter caught at halftime. Only once we got home did I realize that the game had been streamed live on YouTube and I could go back and watch it. There I was, at 90+3 minutes, applauding for and cheering for the guy who made a busting run, pushed the wingback aside, dipped a shoulder and slotted it past the keeper. He yipped with joy; the other team crumbled to the turf with exhaustion. But the feeling of watching it again was…odd. I mean, I picked up on small moments I hadn’t noticed (I guess that tackle was a yellow card) and others wanted to see again (the almost fist fight right down in front of us and the explosion of expletives that my kids giggled and gawped at). But it wasn’t the same as being there. It wasn’t the same as being the embodied agent who felt what it was like to sit in a plastic seat, with the cool evening and setting sun enclosing him, able to smell the sweat and deodorant (my daughter thought they smelled great! Lol) feet away from me. It was cool to watch again, but not as cool as actually being there.
I don’t want this to be a shaming or holier-than-thou rant, but if continue to allow technology to push our communal experiences inward, towards atomistic spaces of mediated experience, we will be left as “fragmented,” removed from “universal benevolence,” and lacking in “the bonds of sympathy” as Taylor worries we are.
A thought on the Grateful Dead recordings - any soundboard recordings probably only required plugging a USB or similar into an output, since the digitised sound was 'there' anyway to be transmitted to the speakers. Soundboard recordings are archives of (roughly) what the crowd would have heard, rather than the atomised individual's private phone recording. Don't know enough details about the recordings to comment any further, but an interest point to think through.
Yeah, the band supported the recordings of their shows and this meant that individuals actually were freed from having to consider recording them individually!
So now imagine a world where a performer actually discouraged phone usage by negating the power of the recording to create clout by just providing a recording of the show afterwards to everyone who bought a ticket if they wanted one.
Wouldn't that maybe be a gentler way of both helping people feel less of an itch to have them out AND puncturing people's ability to later use it instrumentally? Vs. just taking phones away from people? But nobody is going to consider that option probably because it then means actively giving some of the artists own clout up for the sake of their fans and making something they could otherwise monetize freely available. That is why the Grateful Dead were one of the few bands to encourage concert recording in the first place - their relationship with capitalism and their fans was already coming from a unique place.
I should have written: "I agree that *discussing* our collective project of recording everything is worth leaping into—even if it might be an abyss.” I certainly don’t think we should be leaping to recording everything…yikes lol
Haha, yeah, I think I'm tracking. I guess I felt like your main takeaway kept us on the main target of the importance of experience in real time. I was just trying to add some nuance, but for sure the main focus of our collective trending right now is toward the thing that Taylor suggests.
“The smartphone isn’t just the great atomizer, then; it might also be the great de-ritualizer”
Or maybe the smartphone, as it turns concerts into symbols of concerts that represent fun, is its own ritual. I’m not at the concert for the experience of the concert, I’m there to film it for later.
But it’s just a bad, soul-emptying ritual. And it might be bad because it’s not the literal concert (or the sermon or the hike) that matters, it’s the positive externalities that tend to attach themselves to such experiences. Experiences like being forced to interact physically with people, to get physical cues that they are sharing in an experience with you. Technology, or at least the way we use it, mistakes the cart for the horse and gives an illusion of community, but the community is vapid.
Or not. Who knows? Great write-up— I enjoyed it.
We could even push back more against the relativizing impulse to question who can say what’s different or better in this example.
One person is at a concert to experience that concert. Another is at the concert to experience mediating that experience to other people who weren’t there. These are two discrete and different things and I think we can actually insist on this.
One person wants to achieve an object of desire, the other person wants to be desired.
Yeah, I think people get a little too relativistic when it comes to judging others "enjoyment" of things. But once you ask the question of the actual ends they are seeking through that enjoyment, I do feel like a real argument can be made for some of those ends being against the point of the endeavour and/or toxic to it or the others who enjoy it. And in that case, people can make that argument on fair grounds and I think it is reasonable to make assessments of the kinds of behaviours worth condemning.
Yeah. I guess I was less interested in passing judgement on how people enjoy themselves. I don’t doubt the concert recorders are having fun. The question is whether or not certain types of immediate enjoyment miss out something or certain activities have likely downstream negative effects. People who drink a lot definitely enjoy themselves, but I’d feel ok saying excessive drinking is bad.
Definitely. I think whatever values we want to assign, it’s important to say where we think we can make informed differentiations. Instead of a flattening idea of sameness we can recognize that blackout drunk people are having a qualitatively different experience from sober people at the same event. But extending this to the way phones are used in situations where they once were not a factor.
Well, exactly!
And to use your example and take it further, we absolutely should have conversations about whether or not the kinds of bars we build should be those that cater to and encourage the blackout drunks vs. cater to and encourage moderate alcohol consumption.
You'd have to imagine that one kind of patron might drive the other out depending on which kind of space you design, and which kind of space you design preferences or embodies a particular value system that you as a society have decided to have. So there's really no way to even be relativistic or neutral in making those choices. They do ultimately have to be made, whether you like it or not.
Recording “is its own ritual”— I think that might be right. That reminds me of the photo from early in “You and Your Profile” of the people watching everything through their phones. Consciously or not, intentionally or not, that scene—that ritual—as become normalized. At least for many. Again, as I said elsewhere, I don’t want to shame and finger-wag. As a Millennial, maybe I’m just nostalgic for the pre-smartphone days of yore. Maybe this is just where things are headed, just as it was with tv and mobile telephones and the internet and chat rooms and and and. I just don’t know. All I do know is that it FEELS different. It feels soul-emptying and vapid (to use your excellent descriptors).
"it’s just a bad, soul-emptying ritual."
Yeah, that, sadly. I think we can, in fact, consider that without it turning into moralizing necessarily. What does the ritual actually do in terms of its function? Is it a ritual that makes those who participate in it more or less likely to feel connected vs. atomised, active vs. passively compliant, joyful vs. bored, etc.? We can absolutely consider what any given ritual's effects are or whether we should desire it or not as a society.
Similar story: Recently, I went to a newer science fiction/fantasy convention in my area. And as someone who actually helped organize previous generations of fan-run conventions that were very community oriented? I was disheartened to see that so much of what fans these days are drawn to in the convention experience is actually about what the convention can help them project vs. actually enjoying the weekend. There were dozens and dozens of opportunities provided to everyone to create cool photos of their cosplays, to pose for others or pose against backdrops, to post on social media about the fun they were having. But then there was far less attention paid to the kinds of events that would actually GENERATE the kinds of fun that they were supposed to be presenting themselves as having in a real way. Appearing to have fun seemed to be the priority over actually experiencing it.
Great thoughts, and I hope you and the family recover quickly.
I definitely think that technology is the cause for the atomisation. Once entertainment became a passive, at home thing, community was bound to fracture. This is the premise of *Bowling Alone*, which unfortunately we will not be reading with this reading group. In it, he argues that the death of community really stems from television (though I'd even maybe push it a bit further to radio); this has certainly accelerated with smartphones.
It reminds me of a comic I once saw, actually. An old Irish man is sitting on his stool telling the start of a story, in Gaelic, while kids are watching the TV. It has the ellipses then, in English, "Will you not turn that off and listen?" I think this sums it all up entirely.
One last aside, I do think smartphones are more of a de-ritualiser than television is (though I'd add streaming with them) as before you'd have to at least be present at the same time to watch something, but now it's all on-demand whenever you want. Meaning you don't even have to be together to watch anymore.
It feels funny to say this but at least I could talk to strangers about Game of Thrones. I remember meeting people in town and having those kinds of conversations and it enabled me to make an initial connection with people and actually make new friends to spend time with.
We lost the big tent television show and instead we say stuff like “I’m on Portuguese leather crafting AMV brain rot tiktok” and the other person goes “uhh, what?”.
So for context here because I think that the younger someone is the less they realize actually how severe the collapse of mass culture has been, I give everyone this to contemplate...
The highest ratings estimate that I could find for Game of Thrones at any point in its run was one that indicated roughly 38.5 million Americans watched it during season 7 at its height of popularity going into season 8. Which are HUGE numbers for television currently, because Stranger Things so far this hear posted 30 million viewers and Marshalls (AKA that thing everyone's grandparent seems to watch) posted 26 million. And those are the highest rated things of the year so far outside of sports.
Keep in mind that those numbers track who watched on streaming or elsewhere within 30 full days of it airing.
The Friends finale in the early 00's was estimated to have been watched by 52 million or so Americans. That made it the FOURTH highest rated TV finale of all time behind Seinfeld, Cheers, and MASH. Those numbers are for who watched it during its initial broadcast. And in a feat that most people now agree just will never be bested? Over 100 million Americans watched the finale of MASH in 1983, which was two and half hours long.
In some cases, finales of television shows in the past were correlated to plumbing disruptions when commercial breaks got everyone going to the bathroom at once. The finale of Seinfeld is rumored to have played a role in Frank Sinatra's death because of the fact that he had a heart attack on the same night and ambulances were slower because so many EMTs had ditched work to watch it where he lived. Such was once the power of television to unite people and dominate culture.
These days only sports seems to have that level of power.
Yeah, I think sadly that we are a far cry from McLuhan's promised world of new media evolving and creating a global village. Quite the opposite.
I love television as a medium with all my heart. Genuinely, I tear up thinking about the best usages of it like Sesame Street or Star Trek or the sitcoms of Norman Lear. But also, I now reluctantly the more I read find myself having to admit that its net impact on society has probably been to make it worse and trended towards that "vast wasteland" that Postman was so prescient about.
However, the above examples I gave? Do demonstrate that technologies are not themselves inevitable in the way McLuhan imagined. Yes, they each speak their own languages to us and have ways they perhaps can shape us that are their own. But ultimately, we choose how to regulate them, how to use them and what we want them to be for. When treated as a public good in the common interest? Television could be an enormously uniting force that brought the entire world into people's homes and could be used to confront them with images of injustice, to teach impoverished children how to love reading, to mediate and model the kind of public democratic debate we might be having, etc.
But oof... You can point a very direct line and find a clear demarcation point between the societal values of the post-war socialist-oriented sense of public commons and them the nastily competitive and cutthroat values of the society that fully deregulated and unleashed the 1980's/1990's. What happened on television actually illustrates its impacts maybe the most clearly, from the rise of cable television as a class separator that let some people buy their way out of broadcast commercials and standards as both producers and viewers to the crass rise of infotainment programming with dubious standards of truth that followed the loosening of fairness doctrines and then into the childrens television designed to be toy commercials and rise of scam infomercials and televangelist money-hustles.
None of that was inevitable. All of those horror were very directly created by and initiated by specific deregulatory actions or environmental conditions aimed at media that allowed them or encouraged them.
And if you don't believe me, just cross-compare the United States in that era which drove the shift with every other nation's approach to media and television around that time. (And then maybe bitch a little less about your national public broadcaster when you realize what they protected you from if you aren't American.)
So the entire conversation about atomization occurring in tandem with the embedding of instrumental reasoning as the default mode of thought for people - and the example of people using their phones at concerts - brings me back to some thinking that I did after reading the article someone linked last week on authenticity and music written by Ted Gioia over at The Honest Broker. This also connected me back to an important conversation that came up in the Zoom meeting related to whether the pursuit of authenticity carries with it inherent classist assumptions about who gets to be "authentic" or how we frame what it means.
My thoughts on these things became so long as I worked out my disparate thoughts on them that I ended up with an actual whole essay that was too long to post here. So I will link to where I have posted it on Substack if anyone is interested.
https://enthusiasmgirl.substack.com/p/on-music-and-authenticity
Excellent discussion, thanks. I found the perspectives on instrumental values, technology, the state and rituals very interesting.
The modern malaise and fragmentation themes seem to directly tie into the concept of trust you have begun exploring around.
What I mean is that the fragmentation and malaise could also be considered as symptoms of low trust. Trust is founded on shared values, habits, interests, as well as competence and mutual benevolence. Taylor himself mentioned the loss of mutual sympathy, or benevolence in trust parlance. The alienation, disconnection and powerlessness are thus symptoms of a society where shared values, habits, interests, competence or mutual good will etc. - the antecedents of trust - are in increasingly short supply. Without a shared basis of trust, it becomes that much harder to operate effectively in a society. The result is alienation and powerlessness.
I'd also say it is not a stretch to claim that rituals embody and thereby strengthen the factors of trust. The loss of rituals might then imply and explain in part the declining trust.
I agree a lot with this thrust of this thinking. As Alastair MacIntyre I think successfully argues, the Athenian democracy has been estimated to be in the tens of thousands. How did they successfully democratically govern the polis? Because they formed groups of friends, in the Aristotelian sense. People who not only shared an idea of the good but also shared specific and concrete projects in society. The Romans had patronage which defined an entire sub-state structure of social relations which bound people to each other.
If your social world doesn’t begin nearest to you with a significant amount of people you trust and rely on, what is your connection to your broader local community and then nation? For the last year of my life I have mainly gone from my apartment to my job and back home again. When I go to the grocery store I often feel like no one was socialized in the same way that I was or possesses any of the same sensibilities about what’s polite and how to conduct yourself. You begin to feel extremely abstracted from the people around you. I don’t really feel like I know what people or doing or why. It’s hard to feel any communal sense.
I am trying to find ways to make some friends again and combat that feeling, but it’s widespread and many people don’t fight it.
It is indeed interesting to note that democracies have tended to start(/be) with relatively small and homogeneous populations, whereas empires on the other end are big multiethnic places mostly held together by force. Perhaps US historically has been the big exception here.
Larger polities probably quite inevitably end up with fractures in values, interests and views which then undermine the original trust that made them successful at the beginning?
The Roman Empire itself is an interesting example in that the Emperor and the imperial bureaucracy expected the delivery of the annona and of tax revenue but this was entirely accomplished by local elites in the cities of the empire and the city was really the cell of the empire. Chris Wickham has a great description of this in his Inheritance of Rome.
When Imperial authority waned and the army couldn’t be relied on for protection local bishops and aristocrats would form mercenary armies at times. The city was a locus of local political and civil power. It was a much more tractable scale. Even if the emperor weighs in on a local issue, it’s still carried out by local authorities.
But this entire state of affairs is a very far cry from the world that Livy describes, as you point out.
I thought this book was challenging in all the best ways. I struggled with it at times and the nuance of the argument it was trying to surface. Ultimately, I feel like my views have been expanded. I particularly responded to the arguments around instrumental reason and appreciated Taylor's measured response.
Ultimately, it seems like he's arguing that this isn't an all or nothing battle. It is a continual struggle to redefine the right balance as we move forward.
Are “runaway instrumental reason” and technology really the source of anything? It is on this point that I wish we were given a less crass idealist picture of society and more Thucydides. Assigning the causality to the movement of ideas doesn’t leave us with much of a road map toward any kind of action.
During Covid me and a friend started a podcast called ex.haust which ran for several years. The guiding question was “Why does nothing feel possible?” That question naturally took us into the history of America in the 20th century, particularly how the idea of the republic was intentionally refashioned by successive generations of intellectuals and politicians into the Cold War state. Early contributions were from emigre thinkers from the Soviet Union who outlined the need for the state for abrogate much of the freedom and self-determination that the US was thought to stand for in order to protect those things from the existential threat of the Soviets. Walter Lippmann also famously comes up in these discussions.
The ideology of realpolitik above any political ideal and the growth of state secrecy combined with the increased reach of the state in everyone’s lives create the world that I grew up in, the world of being afraid of the unknown lurking at the edge, the world of the X Files and Neuromancer. The state is not a representation of a general political will but of a rule of guys smoking cigarettes in dark rooms who have inscrutable motivations.
Water fluoridation is actually a perfect example of these new dynamics interacting with the old. When Grand Rapids was going to roll out fluoridating the water, there was a large public backlash with local doctors and scientists participating in the urge for caution alongside non experts. It invited the question: should the people of a city be able to democratically decide what they will do with their water? Or should experts who don’t live there decide? America has largely decided in favor of the latter, despite how much we might posture that it is otherwise. One need only look to the large sacrifice zones that constitute mining areas and the health problems in the surrounding community, who has no control except to move if they can afford to do so.
So, the exceedingly neutral language of technology and “instrumental reason” are serving to cover a hundred years of specific political and economic action by people who never felt like things weren’t possible anymore. The average citizen was intentionally cut out of being able to apply political pressure to any aspect of governance that was deemed to be significant to the effort against the Soviets, and a lot of things were significant. And it increasingly appeared that things like the law and morality were not significant factors in deciding what we would do both at home and abroad.
The television entering every home was happening at the same time as this development was entering a full maturity in the 1970s. The internet becomes generally available in the 1990s, right as the bloc falls and a general elation of markets and freedom rings. But we didn’t end the Cold War with the American government of 1850. We did so with the one of 1991, the inheritance of the Cold War. We live under the conditions which formed then still today.
So when Taylor says that protests are a sign of democratic agency, just a fragmented one focused on identity issues which can’t form a majority, I even have to wonder if he sufficiently problematizes this. In Neuromancer, Case and friends hire a group call the Panther Moderns to stage a politically motivated attack as a cover for their own activities. So the public watches the news and sees that some kind of extremists have attacked some place, and will never know what was actually going on. Gibson perfectly captures the epistemological gap that actually exists between us and any event when all we have to go on is what media mediates to us. Can protests not be astroturfed to serve ends that we are not aware of? Do we have any actual warrant for simply assuming that they are always natural expressions of the general will of some group? I wouldn’t claim that they are always one thing or another, but we need to stop assuming we just understand things like this to really grasp our situation.
This goes double for claiming that polling is a sign that political leaders fear public opinion. Polling is a technology to create public opinion. By its very constitution is exactly defines what you’re allowed to think, the entire question and debate is framed for you and you will let them in exchange for feeling heard. When we talk about the erasure of subtle values, they don’t even form, not there in the first place. In order for that to happen you would have to spend time thinking about things in depth and political participation was transformed into slotting yourself into a consumer category and then vehemently expressing your allegiance to it online and at the polls. But you can’t form questions outside of the provided scope available in media.
The iPhone and Harold Bloom and Jerry Springer and Enron all need to be understood as part of a history connected to things that happened before 1990. They are the result and we are the result of them. Perhaps of forces beyond our direct control, but also of us, of all of the vectors that make up this country all getting multiplied together. This is what makes Culture of Narcissism more interesting in its analysis of the general situation: institutional changes and individual psychologies always exist together and change together.
So will we be able to simply enframe technology in a new way and reclaim the moral basis for “instrumental reason”? I will use computers as an example of what I think the issue is.
We have lots of books about how the internet was stolen from us, how the collection of unique and interesting affinity groups based on Usenet groups and forums and IRC servers and websites was stolen by Big Tech and replaced by Facebook and Instagram and so on.
In reality, the old internet was a very small portion of the population of the US which actually spent the time to figure out how you could do things on a computer. You needed to learn things to write a website, login to an IRC server, etc. So the people who did this were the kind of people who were interested in learning those things and using them to create what they wanted to see.
The internet of Facebook became possible because all of the rest of the country got online and they don’t want to learn about computers or spend time creating stuff. They want to post stuff and see posts. Facebook succeeded because the majority of people were got online to be on it. The iPhone was perfectly timed to usher these people into this world. The iPhone itself is designed like other Apple products to remove barriers to use.
The democratic computer future people postulated back in the day, the world of free speech expression and creativity, required everyone who used a computer to become a programmer. Not a professional, but someone who could instruct a computer how to do what they wanted it to do. Then you are free when you use the computer. Make it do whatever you want. The only barrier is literally your own knowledge and expertise.
People complain about network effects being the reason you can’t compete with social media but I think the real problem is that you don’t want to compete with social media because you are trying to hopefully articulate something different and better. But by its nature, it won’t appeal to all of the people who want Instagram and TikTok.
You can enframe Instagram however you want but at the end of the day it’s still being used by the people who don’t want to stop using it for exactly the reasons you think it’s bad. These companies can only monopolize your attention if you choose to use the services and we all chose to use them. These were binary decisions made under conditions but at the end of the day they were still decisions and we decided.
So what do we do?
If you think you have some kind of angle on something, some sort of handle, you need to try and do it. The Catherine Project is a good example. That happened because actual specific people made it possible through their own efforts. And now, because of them, some amount of people can put down Pornhub and pick up some Dante for at least some of the time, and even make a few friends.
Casey Muratori started streaming himself programming a video game from scratch with no libraries, and ran the stream for many years. An unfathomable amount of people from around the world have expressed over and over again how he taught them how to actually understand computers and program and gave them an education they could not have received at a university and made so many things possible in their lives. Casey never expected or intended this but he saw something he could do and he did it and now entire communities and ideologies have sprung from that early community in the world of computing.
We are all hanging out and talking because Jared decided to start this Substack and his YouTube channel. None of this is changing the entire political and cultural landscape but I think that that barometer for success only exists to discourage action in the specific ways and contexts that we can actually see through. Who said you needed to either change everything or do nothing? That sounds like a dichotomy made up to make sure you don’t have to do anything.
If you care about these things, which I assume you do because you’re here, then there will be some point at which you can find an entry for yourself into a generative activity that improvea others’ lives. Like Taylor says in a different way, there’s no prescription. The positive and constructive contribution you can make to life all depends on your own personality and creativity. You have to figure out what it is you can offer, as an expression of your authenticity.
So I have a rec for you if you aren't already aware of him that you may love: the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. He began as Marxist writing in the mid-20th century but evolved with time and pulled away from orthodoxy more and more and became one of the major sociological minds of the late 20th/early 21st century, writing and responding furiously to the world up past Trump's election and to his passing in 2017.
His books all work to elucidate a concept he calls "Liquid Modernity" that does trace back the atomization and growth of instrumental reasoning over time and try to then coherently understand that long evolution alongside neoliberalism into today. His early work was very focused actually on the relationship between modernity and the Holocaust and is also quite provocative and interesting. I found him a revelation when I discovered him.
It’s a name I’ve seen cited so much but you’re right that maybe now is the time to actually read him firsthand!
A good place to start with some of the historical stuff I mentioned:
Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual by Daniel Bessner