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How are you listening to this podcast? Most of you are probably using a phone. Some of you might be using a computer or tablet or even a tv. Is this the first time you've touched a device today? I'm betting it's not. Maybe you used the alarm on your phone to wake up. Maybe you listened to another podcast while you brushed your teeth. Maybe you used an app to check the bus schedule or find a parking spot to have a work meeting, to shop, to text your family, to watch that viral video. And then another and another. And then to set your alarm so you can wake up tomorrow and do it all over again. You get the point. Our lives have become increasingly, perhaps irreversibly mediated. This is a monumental change in the human condition, and it's hard to appreciate just how significant it is when we're all living through it. And whether we want or should want any of this to happen is almost irrelevant at this point. But are the trade offs with these technologies really worth it? What are they adding to our our lives? And more importantly, what are they taking away? I'm Sean Illing and this is the Gray area. Today's guest is Christine Rosen. She's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a new book called called the Extinction of Being Human in a Disembodied World. Rosen's book is a meditation on what it means to be a fulfilled human being in a world defined by technology. And what it does quite well is draw our attention to the experiences we're losing and make the case that we should resist these losses. Christine Rosen, welcome to the show.
- [02:53]
A
Hi. Thanks for having me.
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B
Being human is in the subtitle of the book and I want to start there because I, I wonder what you think being human means or what it's supposed to mean. And I swear I'm not coming out of the gate asking you to define Humankind, but thank goodness, that's a little much. But you know, you are making the case that there's something fundamental about our humanity that's being erased or undermined, something that makes us us. So what is that?
- [03:30]
A
Well, in fact, having to ask the question is a sign of where we are right now. And by that I mean we are in a world that we have created with these brilliant, powerful tools at our disposal that have allowed us to forget sometimes that we are physically embodied people with natural lifespans and limits, physical limitations. Whether that limitation is imposed by time or by physical space. The online world, Internet enabled technologies allow us constantly to remove ourselves mentally, emotionally from that physical world. So when I was thinking about first writing this book, I did wrestle with this idea, well, what does it mean to be human? Humans created these tools, so it's not like they're inhuman. But what I settled on is an understanding of those physical realities and limitations and the genuine importance of our embodied physical nature as human beings. And so we now are having to actively defend some of those experiences, ones that are unmediated by those technologies.
- [04:39]
B
That's a word that comes up a lot in your book and on the show mediated. What does that mean?
- [04:45]
A
What I mean is any technology, whether that's a computer, a smartphone, a wearable sensor, your Apple watch, any of the things and devices that are giving information via the Internet about our physical bodies or our activities, both cognitive and physical.
- [05:05]
B
So my love for Nietzsche is sort of like a long running joke on the show. One of his things was constantly reminding people that all living things are always in the process of becoming, whether we're aware of that or not. And we never seem to have a conversation as a society about the direction we're going. And I guess that's what I've always found so scary about technology and you know, air quotes. Progress, that we're constantly revolutionizing how we live and think without knowing what it will do to us in the long term. We just keep trying new stuff and hoping we'll adapt.
- [05:44]
A
Yes, this is the conundrum, isn't it? Because we are American. Society in particular has long been very techno optimistic. And that has fueled a great deal of progress. Productivity, opportunity, entrepreneurship, all these words that people learn in business school that are all very important and really prosperity for many, many people. The question becomes, when are we compromising things that aren't quite so easily quantifiable, but that are qualitatively impacting our daily lives? And on that score, I think we don't ask the right questions. At the beginning, when we embrace these new technologies now in some cases we just speed and we figure it out afterwards. We did that with social media platforms. There were some of us at the very beginning going, you know, I've studied history or I've studied human nature, or I've studied psychology. And the way these things are built, the architecture of these platforms is gonna reward some bad behavior. All of us were told that we were moral, in a moral panic, that we were scolds, that we should just be quiet, sit down and we'll figure it all out. Now we are having that debate that we probably should have had 10, 12 years ago about social media platforms, particularly their impact on K. So as we think about new technologies, we should remember some of those humbling lessons, which is we don't know the unintended consequences of our use of these. Does that mean we shouldn't adopt them at all? I would argue in some cases, yes. I don't think that when you're thinking about the most vulnerable groups in society, young children, old people, I don't think it's a great idea to assume that it's going to be an improvement for everyone and for society to outsource their care to robots, for example, or to some sort of mediated chatbot if someone's in a mental health crisis. I think humans owe each other more than that. So in those cases, I would say no, technology isn't the solution. But when we do choose the technology, we need to start from the point of thinking about the unintended consequences, thinking about the disruptive impact, particularly on our private relationships inside the home, inside the family, among our peers, our friends, our communities. The, those are the things that we tend to think are easily adaptable, but that we now know aren't always adaptable to some of these very powerful new tools.
- [08:03]
B
Let's talk about some of those consequences. I mean, the, the book is about the disappearance of experience. Obviously experience as such isn't disappearing, but the kinds of experiences we're having are changing. So let's talk about some of these specific things you think we're losing. You know, what are the activities, what are the interactions, what are the behaviors, what are the skills that are disappearing?
- [08:28]
A
So the one that I think is the most important, and I think everyone who can hear my voice has, has experienced this at some level, is face to face interaction. We, we are now living in a world where we can actively choose not to look each other in the eye on a regular basis, not communicate with each other physically in person, in the same Physical space. We, when we are forced into physical space, say waiting for the bus or walking around your neighborhood or town, you can tune everyone out by having earbuds in and paying attention to the screen that's in your hand. You can actively dissociate from social physical spaces. And we all do it all the time. We do it in interstitial moments of time when we should maybe just let our minds wander. We do it when we interact in a consumer setting. So if you think about someone who works behind a cash register, I interviewed and talked to a lot of these people, they will say people aren't very nice to each other anymore. The pleasantries that we think are expendable, inefficient, meaningless. They actually grease the wheels of our social interaction in a way that makes us able to all get along even with strangers in public space. And many of us are starting to develop habits of mind and behaviors that cultivate a preference for not being face to face in each other's presence. And that has serious long term consequences for how we interact.
- [09:49]
B
Well, tell me about some of those. I mean, what else do we lose by not being face to face?
- [09:54]
A
We are hardwired evolutionarily to understand each other by reading each other's physical cues, facial expressions first and foremost, but also hand gestures, tone of voice, even just the way you position your body in space in relation to other people sends signals, I am not a threat. I am a threat. I want to belong. I want to connect. Or I want to be left alone, or I'm perplexed versus I'm angry. So from a very young age, children learn this by staring at human faces. So what happens when instead of reading, for example, in the case of kids, instead of spending, you know, eight waking hours looking at their family members faces and learning from expression and tone of voice and just trying to figure all this out before they're even. When they're preverbal, they're looking at an iPad with lots of very stimulating cartoons and images in bright colors. Well, they learn something from the iPad. We're not always exactly sure what yet that's being studied. But they don't learn how to read people's facial expressions. So there's. If you go into kindergartens and classrooms now, you'll see these charts which are the facial smiley faces, frowny faces, perplexed faces. And it's trying to teach kids to identify emotional expressions on other people's faces. That exists in part because we're not teaching that organically, because we're putting these mediating Devices between kids and their natural curiosity and eagerness to watch other people. And there have been fascinating studies. If you sit a kid in front of A even a FaceTime conversation is gonna be qualitatively different than an in person conversation. Does that mean if your grandparents live on the other side of the world, you shouldn't FaceTime? Of course not. But it does mean we have to be very careful about replacing too much of the in person interactions where kids for adults. Sociologists have long studied what it means when you refuse to respect the existence of another person in public space, when you deliberately ignore them, when you look through them. For example, when there have been studies of looking through people versus acknowledging them. These tiny social rules again seem inefficient, seem unnecessary in such a fast paced high tech world. But they are crucial for social capital building. And by that I mean it allows us to to live comfortably with other people whom we might not know and might not trust, but have to live with in our communities. But these rules have developed over many, many millennia to help us get along together as people. And a lot of them now are in a state of deterioration or near extinction.
- [12:31]
B
You quote a psychologist in the book who says that human interaction is learned skill. And if you're someone who's just been out in the world much in the last several years, it is very difficult to not notice that more and more people are more and more uncomfortable with something as simple as eye contact.
- [12:54]
A
Yes, that sort of mass deskilling it is bad because if we don't practice those skills, we lose them. And they are skills that require practice. If you talk to people who train new employees, for example, any sort of public facing profession, be that serving food at a restaurant or acting as a new diplomat in a new posting overseas, all of these jobs require these. They're called, I think they're called soft skills, but they're actually quite important. I think of them as very crucial skills. They're human skills. They can't be easily mimicked by technology or robots or algorithms. They are things that we know how to do as humans without always understanding why we know how to do them. But we must practice them. The challenge of connecting to people is part of what allows us to be flourishing human beings. We actually should have to work at it. The effort is part of the reward. And that's I think, what we've lost in some of these mediated relationships.
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B
This line in the book was interesting to me and I think it's relevant here you write behind the power we wield with our Technologies is a timidity and aversion to risk. What is that timidity? What are the risks you think we're avoiding? And what the hell are we so afraid of?
- [14:13]
A
Look, it's really difficult to connect with another person whom you don't know. It can even be difficult to connect with people you do know at certain levels, right? We have work friends, we have our family, we have our trusted, very closest friendships and relationships and our most intimate relationships with our partners. Going out into the world is a constant adventure. It used to be how I think we saw it because we didn't have a choice. Now I think there's a sort of threat assessment risk people make when they go out into the world of like, I don't want to deal with people. People are difficult. And this is a true statement. People can be very challenging to deal with. But when we start to train ourselves in habits of mind where our expectations, because most of our time is spent avoiding things, making things seamless, efficient, conven which is what our technologies give us and promise us, then when we deal with other human beings who are inefficient, inconvenient, sometimes difficult, we have fewer skills for meeting them where they are. And so in that sense, the timidity, it's both timidity, it can be fear, but it's generally a sense of that's too much work. It's just too hard to do that. But the reason it's hard is because it also makes us better people. It allows us to flourish in new ways. It allows us to develop, because by meeting people where they are and actually dealing with their sometimes difficult behavior and understanding our own behavior, we are better at being humans. And again, it might sound sort of simplistic to say this, but we have to make the argument for why that's important now, because it's the easier path is just not to do it at all.
- [15:55]
B
There's a good passage in there about Walter Benjamin, the famous Frankfurt scholar, and what he called a poverty of experience in the modern world, which is this idea that as life gets more divorced from physical experience, things get more mediated. There's that word again. They get more on demand. We, in his words, seek relief in an existence where everything is solved in the simplest and most comfortable way. Did he have much of a theory about why that is? What is it about modern technology that makes us yearn for more simplicity and comfort?
- [16:32]
A
How I read much of what Benjamin's critique was saying is that because we are adaptable creatures, we think the adaptability will only Go one way, which is that we'll adapt to the new thing and then we'll all be better. But it also remember we adapt to the machine itself and we can end up risking becoming more machine like in the way we behave. That is not an improvement if you're a human being. We don't want our relationships to be more machine like. But everything about how we're living our daily lives does reward more machine like behavior.
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B
Do you think we're becoming more machine like? And if we are, at what point do we cease to be machine like and just become machines?
- [17:14]
A
Well, I do think we've become more machine like. And I think the exhibit A for that is the way that people's sex lives have been transformed by pornography. Now, pornography has always existed. Humans have always created it, sought it out, enjoyed it. I'm not judging pornography per se, but if you think about how young people, for example, talk about their sex lives these days, sex lives where far, far fewer of them are having sex than older generations, and where they talk about it in machine like terms, performative terms, in ways that actually have shaped their understanding of what an intimate sexual relationship even should be, what it should look like, what it should feel like. So that concerns me the way we date people now, everybody finds everybody else online, and I know lots of very happy couples who did meet online. But when you're just generally assuming that you'll know someone by a menu of options, just like you would know the menu for your seamless order, again, think about how that makes us understand another human being who can be complicated, contradictory, self delusional, as we ourselves all are. So it tries to make very smooth what we should understand as being quite rough and interesting. I think that the technological relationship that is ideal for a lot of people these days is one where they don't have to see each other much in person. You talk to young people, they will tell you this because again, that's the timidity, that's the lack of risk taking. It is really risky to try to connect to another human being. It is one of life's great risks, but it also brings one of life's greatest rewards.
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B
When you do the sex thing is directly related to these points about the convenience and the easiness of all of these technologies. It is easier to consume porn than it is to go out in the world and face rejection and go through all the challenges of meeting people and dating and doing all of that, which is well worth it. But it is hard. It is hard. And the more and more people are faced with the opportunity to just circumnavigate all that they will. And ultimately I don't think that redounds to our benefit.
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A
I'm Gen X, so I'm a transitional generation that did not grow up with this stuff and then had to adapt to it as an adult. So I, I see and remember both worlds, the before times and the and the current times. Younger generations only know the world that we've created for them and we are giving them messages constantly about these technologies that, that don't offer them alternatives. Now the promising thing about a lot of gen zers in particular is that they are seeking out the more analog alternatives, both with relationships, with how they interact, because they sense they intuit from their own experience and by watching the experience of older generations that this might not be the way we've been told. It's the way by a lot of technology companies that stand to make even more money off of our preferences, our emotional experiences, our anger, our fear, our anxiety and our desire to have everything on demand. They've seen that, they've experienced it themselves in their life since birth and they are still unhappy, they are still a little more anxious. They are not experiencing this as ideal. So that is telling them something. And the plea of my book is to say listen to that intuition and do something about it. Change something about how we're living.
- [21:05]
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So how do we know this isn't an old people yelling at clouds situation? And to be clear, I count myself among the olds here. I'm an old millennial. I mean I think I missed the Gen X cut off by three years.
- [23:22]
A
We sometimes we adopt you in.
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B
Yeah, I feel, I feel more affinity with Gen X really in lots of ways. But I too remember the world before all of this. I didn't grow up with, with Twitter and social media and smartphones. I had a beeper for God's sake when I was in junior high. But look, you know, there's a long tradition of people fretting about new technologies and how they're going to ruin everything. I mean, hell, Socrates hated the technology of writing because he thought it would destroy oral culture. How do we know this is any different? How do we know this isn't a good old fashioned panic?
- [24:04]
A
Sometimes we do have moral panics, that's true. But to counter that, I would say we lack, particularly in the United States, we have lacked an ability to distinguish between the new and the improved. You hear new and improve. That's how every new thing is marketing, right? But quite frankly, if you study history, what you understand is not every new thing is an improvement. Sometimes important things are destroyed by the new thing. And reckoning with that is something we haven't as a culture been very good at. So in the context of our technology use. Look, we were having this debate right now with AI. Is AI a powerful tool that will bring a lot of good. For example, it can, working with a radiologist, read a radiological scan quicker and find things that the human eye can't. That's all for the good, right? That's a good thing. But if that same AI is being deployed by an insurance company that thinks it shouldn't have to provide human therapists for its for patients who actually need one on one therapy for their mental health challenges, but instead can just give them an AI chatbot, I don't think that is an improvement. That is a degradation. So we have this tool and it's being deployed in a way that actually doesn't help a person, it makes their life more challenging while they're still being told it's an improvement because it's the new thing. So that's where we need to start making. And these are moral choices in many ways. These are ethical choices in many ways that we often are hesitant to speak of in those terms because we don't want to be seen as Luddites, as oldsters. I joke that I'm a neo Victorian at this point, but a lot of this is about values and virtues and ethics and morals, things that we. Words that we're kind of uncomfortable even using in modern parlance, but are in some ways speak to these intuitions that speak to the unease that a lot of people feel right now about how we live our lives.
- [25:59]
B
I think one of the major shifts has been in the ways we learn about and relate to the world, and not just our immediate local communities, but the wider world. And you distill it nicely, you write more and more we relate to our world through information about it rather than direct experience with it. What are the ways in which this is not good for us?
- [26:27]
A
We have allowed the encroachment of all of this mediation to undermine the things that we know as human beings work best for human beings. That's face to face interaction. That's doing stuff with our physical bodies. The whole science of embodied cognition teaches us that our minds and our bodies work in concert. And when we try to just use our minds and go on, when we live largely in virtual space, there's the obvious physical decline that can happen because we're sitting all day. Sitting is the new smoking. We're constantly being told. But there's also. There's a kind of knowledge and a kind of skill that deteriorates when we're not in concert with mind and body, when we're not. And I have a chapter in the book that goes on at length about handwriting, which everybody, I think, rolls their eyes when they first start reading. I rolled my eyes when I first started thinking about does handwriting matter? Why would handwriting matter? We all use keyboards and touchscreens. But it turns out it does matter because it affects memory, it affects the way we understand and read the written word and our ability to have a more advanced form of literacy because our bodies are doing something in concert with our minds. So all of those things are important markers of humanity that I think we set aside at our peril, and I do mean peril, because the kinds of skills that are deteriorating rapidly now, particularly in younger generations, are precisely the kinds of skills that we need to heal a polarized political culture, for example, to enact some more long term thinking about some of the very complicated problems our society faces. And without those human skills, it becomes difficult because what we're rewarding now are the kinds of behaviors that the virtual platforms we've built reward. Fear, anger, anxiety, performative behavior rather than the subtle negotiation. So these are the sorts of things that I think will have long term consequences for humanity, I guess, to bring.
- [28:29]
B
This back to the personal a little bit. I mean, do you think a meaningful and fulfilling life is possible if a lot of it, or if most of it is lived virtually? I mean, is the answer for you just a resounding nope?
- [28:46]
A
Big nope. Big nope for me. And it's important to understand that that vision of a life is precisely the one that a lot of people in Silicon Valley are promoting, selling, trying to enact. And their understanding of what a flourishing human life looks like is interesting in this respect. What they promote for most people is not the way they choose themselves to live. They don't let their kids use the technology and the social media platforms that they sell to the rest of us that we know. We've known that for a while. They do not get high on their own supply, nor do their children. Human interaction is rapidly becoming a luxury good for the wealthy, where they get concierge medicine with lots of human beings attending to their needs. They get a lot of one on one therapy. They get tutors for their kids who sit down with them for hours at a time. That is not what the people who can't afford that get. They are getting the therapy chatbot, they are getting the online YouTube video to help the kid get through a struggling class because the public school can't afford human tutors for them. Some of that's about wealth, but it's also about worldview. Who gets to set the standards for what a flourishing human life looks like? And at what point do people who want to live in the real world and have the sort of flourishing human relationships that we know to be important for a good life, when do they start to feel like their ability to choose that for themselves is disappearing?
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B
Let me try and do the devil's advocate thing. You quote the techno utopian Marc Andreessen in the book, and he has this idiotic phrase, reality privilege. Okay, look, there I go. I'm trying to play devil's advocate, but I can't hide my content.
- [30:34]
A
He's gonna fire you as his advocate if you keep.
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B
All right, okay, let me. All right, let me Try this again. So Andreessen's response to this complaint that we're blurring the line between reality and unreality is that, hey, look, reality is overrated for most people. Reality sucks actually, and their online world is much better. So people like you and me should check our reality privilege and I guess embrace the revolution. What is your response to that?
- [31:07]
A
So this. There's a lot that Marc Andreessen says and does that I admire. I think he's a really interesting man of our time, as they say. But this enraged me to the point that I still get mad when I think about this argument. Because. Because reality is not a privilege. Reality is what each of us should be able to have the freedom and the opportunity to shape for ourselves. And when someone who will profit enormously from creating virtual realities that we can then enter, but about which we have very little control over not only how they're structured, but the kind of information we'll give to the people who've created these worlds for us, I become very upset because I don't think that's something that the people who create and who want to create these spaces, spaces would ever want to live in themselves. So the ultimate privilege is telling everyone else to check theirs while they get to live in a reality they can afford to live in and telling everyone else they should just suck it up in the virtual world. Because isn't the virtual world great? There's also this really stubborn thing which is that we still live in physical bodies. And despite the efforts of the Ray Kurzweil's of the world to assume we'll be able to upload or download our consciousness at some point, your physical body has a time limit and for each of us it's different. We don't always know what it is, but we are fallible, frail creatures. Reckoning with that is part of what makes us human beings. I think the sort of reality privilege of saying you can live a really full life online completely overlooks the physical embodied existence that we all, for now share. And it is a dystopian vision of a future for humanity. A very, very class based vision, I would add, but one that really limits human freedom. Because if your reality is limited to what you can find in the virtual world and your choices in the physical world narrow with each passing year, that's not freedom, that's not opportunity, that's not human flourishing. It is a very narrow minded and elitist technocratic view of a human future. And I soundly reject it.
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- [35:21]
A
So this is a challenge, right? Because so I'm trained as a historian, not a self help advice person. So you know, anytime you write a book about something like technology, everyone wants the solution. So how do we fix it? Now look, that's actually there are some very precise fixes we can do with very precise things and I think a lot of the efforts, you know, wonderful social science researcher John Haidt is trying to do this about smartphones for teens and social media platforms. I'm a big fan of age limits for a lot of these places. These are spaces designed for adults, not children. I think there's very productive policy discussion going on in that arena and we should continue that debate. For individuals though, everyone's life looks different. So say you have a physical disability where the Internet is the way you can do your work and you're socializing and it has opened up opportunities for you. My advice to say, oh, get out, touch grass, hang out with Your friends. I mean, that's not going to mean anything to you. In the same way that I think, you know, if you're a working family where there are young children and ideally you want to spend a lot of one on one face to face time with your young kids. But at the end of a day where, you know, you come back from work, somebody's got to get the kids dinner, you gotta. There's all kinds of stuff going on. You know what, you might have to plop a kid in front of a screen for 10 or 20 minutes while you're cooking dinner to just catch the time to be able to reconvene. That's again, I'm not gonna judge that. What I would judge is if it starts to become so easy to do that that you forget that you actually should do the more challenging thing of interacting. So when I see families all out to dinner and every single person has their face on a screen, the kids are looking at iPad, the very young children are looking at iPads, the parents are on their phones. No one's talking, no one's even looking at each other. It is more common than it used to be. I have been watching and it is becoming the norm in some places. That is not good. I would judge that. And I think we should be more self critical about our own use as adults in those situations. We are modeling behavior that we then condemn when the effects of it on our children are shown to us. But for my overarching thing, and I say it cheekily but with some seriousness, be more Amish. And I get a lot of flack for saying that. What I mean by that is don't give up zippers. But I mean, think, think before you embrace a new technology, particularly in your private world, think through all the worst case scenarios. Be a little bit hyperbolic as you ask questions like will this destroy my relationship with my husband or wife? What will this do to my kids? And then from there it helps you realize what it is you value about your relationships and how technology might undermine those values. Those values are not going to be the same for every family and not for every person. But you have to ask the question. And we have spent years not asking the question.
- [38:11]
B
I agree with what you're saying, but I don't even know what it means at this point to say that we should have a collective cultural conversation about what we want and who we are and where we're going. Because we're not one giant community. We are pretty atomized for all the reasons we've already Discussed. Our social media feeds and our Netflix pages are curated for us and keep us plenty busy. So how are we even supposed to hit pause as a society and deliberate over anything?
- [38:44]
A
Okay, I have a good exercise for people to try. And this is one of the few things that it really helped me when I was working on this book, and I still do this. Spend 24 hours doing two things. One, do not go to bed with your phone. Do not have your phone in your.
- [39:02]
B
The horror. Come on.
- [39:03]
A
Yeah. Cause for many people, it's the first thing they touch when they wake up and the last thing they touch before they go to sleep. Get a real old school alarm clock. Get your phone out of your bedroom. Do that. And the other thing you should do is throughout the course of your day when you have interstitial moments of time, which we think of as a waste, but actually. And we should start thinking of as opportunities for fallow brain time. Let your mind wander. Daydream. Look around you. Instead of picking up your phone, do not pick up the phone to entertain yourself during those moments of interstitial time. Do that for a day or two and see if you notice a difference, any sort of difference. Because when I made that challenge for myself, I was astonished. I am very aware. I am not a heavy phone user. I'm not on social media. I really am, you know, kind of quasi Luddite compared to a lot of my peers. But when I put that restriction on myself for one day, I was shocked by how often I reach for that phone and then said, wait. What? I'm in a waiting room for 10 minutes. Like, read a book, look around at the people in the waiting room. Do anything other than pick up the phone. So try that and see if you're. If you're. If there's any shift at all in your mood and what you notice and how you feel. Maybe there won't be, but I. Everyone I've given that challenge to, who I know has been. It's revealed something to them about themselves.
- [40:23]
B
It is so hard. It's very hard to do.
- [40:26]
A
It is.
- [40:26]
B
At this point, I'm not sure I can even go brush my teeth. Teeth without grabbing my phone and listening to another 60.
- [40:33]
A
There's a whole book to be written about phones in bathrooms. That would be a horror story. I'm just putting that out there.
- [40:38]
B
You know, I'm gonna have my. My wonderful producer Beth, just cut that one.
- [40:44]
A
So.
- [40:44]
B
But no, look, I. I think people hear me complaining about all this stuff all the time, and. And sometimes I can sound pretty cynical. About it, about the world and. And all of us. But truthfully, I. I don't think it's fair to judge any of us for surrendering to all these changes. We're complicated, but also pretty simple and vulnerable creatures. We're all prisoners of our brains and our instincts in lots of ways. And we respond to the incentives around us. We're products of our environments. And if the incentives are bad, then we're going to behave badly. Which is why it's a problem that we unleash these tools into our world without fully understanding what they'll do to us. But I don't know. That's a rant.
- [41:33]
A
I don't think it's a rant. I think it's an observation and an expression of an intuition that more and more people are feeling. And there's the push pull is that, as you say, we all do rely on these tools. They have opened up amazing possibilities in terms of what we can do. So I think that we have to be just more thoughtful about what we're giving up when we embrace the technology. And that does make me sound kind of cranky and conservative and old, and I'll embrace all those labels. But it's important because most of our culture, most of our discussion of technology is still oriented around the new is better, and the new will allow you to deny the realities of your own physical limits and the world's physical limits. And that's not true. We know that's not true, but we don't want to believe it or confront it. Confront that difficult truth. The job of cultural critics is to say, you know what? We have to confront this. And here are some reasons why.
- [42:32]
B
If someone's looking for reasons to believe that we're going through a bumpy transitional period, but we'll adapt and course correct like we have many times in the past, and life will somehow be better on the other side. What would you tell them? What would you point to?
- [42:49]
A
The skepticism about social media platform used by children is a good sign. That's a healthy thing. It's a healthy debate we're having in society right now about the impact of these platforms and how much time we're spending on them and what it does to kids and particularly to their mental health. That's a good debate. I'm glad that's happening. That's a good sign. How we'll figure it all out, I don't know. But just the fact that we're having it is important, given the power of the companies that own these platforms and what their goals are which are in direct opposition to the concerns of parents. So that's a good debate. Another thing that gives me hope is seeing younger generations skepticism about some of this stuff. So there are these things they decide to do. Like young people who go out for dinner will require that everybody put their phones face down in the middle of the table and the first person to pick up their phone throughout the course of the evening has to pay the bill. And it sounds silly, but it's actually they're lashing themselves to the mast of the to avoid the siren's call. And they're doing it knowing that the device is incredibly seductive. That's a healthy thing. That's not something that first gen adopters of this technology ever thought of doing. The final thing I'll say is the work of a great many artists, visual artists in particular, but also performance artists, who understand that the relationship between the artist and those of us who want to appreciate their work has been corrupted by in many ways by technology. So performers who make you put your phone away to attend the concert. I love that. Coffee shops that say no laptops. I love that. Again, these are just individuals saying, you know what? I want to create a different kind of space, one not colonized by technology. All of those are little glimmers of hope and pushing back on what I think is a has for too long been an accepted idea that the new is always an improvement. These are people saying, let's try something else because this isn't working. And that's a good point.
- [44:48]
B
Thing. Well, I don't know what else we agree on, but we are fellow soldiers in this battle. So happy to. Happy to fight alongside you. Okay. Once again, the book is called the Extinction of Experience. Being Human in a Disembodied World. Christine Rosen, this is great. Thanks so much for coming in.
- [45:10]
A
Thanks, Sean. I really enjoyed the conversation.
- [45:13]
B
All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode. As always. We want to know what you thought. Did you like it? Did you not like it? Like it? Do you wish we covered something that we didn't? Let us know. You can drop us a line atthegray areaox.com and please, after you do that, go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the podcast. All of that really helps us grow the show. This episode was produced by Beth Morrison, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Andrea Christensdotter. Fact checked by Anouk Dussaud and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know. Trip Planner by Expedia. You were made to outdo your holiday, your hammocking and your pooling. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia Made to travel.