The Thing That Changed Us All

I f you follow the news very closely, you might have seen the titans of Silicon Valley in the Senate this week getting absolutely humiliated. Senator Josh Hawley made Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sheepishly get up and apologize to “the victims” — people whose children had pornographic photos distributed across his site and then took their own lives. Other senators reviewed the baleful studies showing that social-media apps on smartphones have been the primary cause of a spike in depression, anxiety, and other mental-health issues, especially among teenaged girls. It’s becoming more and more obvious that politicians want to regulate social media, and perhaps restrict it to people 16 years of age or older.

I always thought new technology was good, that whatever we would discover would mostly improve human life. Even the frightening stuff like nuclear weapons. You could at least make a case that the advent of such destructive weapons is tamping down the mechanized violence that flourished in the first half of the 20th century. This was a naïve view, but it’s the one that made optimism about “tech” at least plausible.

It’s easy to see why people got so invested in the future of tech. In just 66 years, humanity went from an eleven-second flight over Kitty Hawk to landing on the Moon. Investor Peter Thiel has been trying to remind us that we once dreamed of flying cars, space colonization, and maybe even defeating death itself, yet we’ve settled for Twitter. Of course, it’s worse than that. Instead of robot maids and flying cars, our phones render us visible to advertisers, just visible enough that they keep advertising baby products to women in the days after a miscarriage.

Investor Marc Andreessen tried to revive our techno-optimism with an essay last year, arguing — almost screaming — that technology and civilization are basically two words for the same thing. Here’s a little bit of it to get the tone:

We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution.

We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electric lighting.

We had a problem of cold, so we invented indoor heating.

We had a problem of heat, so we invented air conditioning.

We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.

We had a problem of pandemics, so we invented vaccines.

We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.

Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.

There are some technologies about which I will never stop being grateful. I love central air conditioning. I don’t long for days sweltering by an underpowered fan. Modern plumbing joined to good civic engineering still ranks right at the top. No outhouses or chamber pots. Thank you.

So why do so many of us sometimes wish we didn’t have the internet connected to a smartphone? Obviously this technology is useful. I was born when part of my family lived across the Atlantic Ocean. There were extremely tight technological and financial constraints on how much we could communicate with them. Long-distance bills could stalk even a family with steady jobs. I love that I can text a joke, or a funny picture, or arrange a birthday FaceTime session with a few simple taps that reach our loved ones instantly.

But there is a way this technology flattens the world. In Andreessen’s essay for techno-optimists, he says:

We believe in local knowledge, the people with actual information making decisions, not in playing God.

We believe in embracing variance, in increasing interestingness.

We believe in risk, in leaps into the unknown.

We believe in agency, in individualism.

We believe in radical competence.

But my smartphone robs me of precisely those things, or at least the sensation of them. My phone helps me navigate a road trip in the car, where once I would have used road maps or handwritten directions that I would have partly memorized before driving. Now instead of feeling like I’m competently navigating the world, I take instructions from a machine. Any honest observer would say that the phone is driving me!

The same robbery happens in all kinds of travel. In the rare times of life I go somewhere exotic, instead of the satisfaction of fending for myself, it tempts me to look up the nearest Starbucks, or a top-ten list of restaurants, whereas before I might have asked the doorman at my hotel. Or I might have just taken a chance without feeling regret that I didn’t look up the local ratings.

The smartphone makes me feel like less of an agent, and like less of an individual. By giving me access to nearly infinite information at all times of day, it robs more and more of the finitudes that shape and form individual lives. My reading choices after a certain hour aren’t constrained to the books and magazines and newspapers that are actually in my home at any given time. I no longer have to hunt for that movie I want to watch. When I want to watch a new movie, I’m not shepherded to try something really new; the phone recommends things it can already predict I’ll like. I’m under dramatically less pressure to entertain myself, to stretch myself.

The phone gives us so much security — the background sense that we can always easily contact our home, even if it’s across the oceans — or be navigated to the next place that it robs us of our sense of mastering ourselves when out on an adventure. At least in its current state, it tends to atrophy the very virtues that techno-optimists want to foster. The truth is that we can “hack” ourselves with technology, enabling us to do new things, but at the cost of making the original source code buggier and more dysfunctional.