Programming Note: You may have noticed that my own self-imposed schedule for this newsletter has not been followed recently. Ignore this and mind your own business. Thanks!
As Merritt Tierce recently wrote for Slate, about how the internet reads our minds, “I am no different from every other playable bundle of synapses holding a phone.” Throughout her long, windy essay, Tierce reflects on data collection, targeted advertising, phones listening to us, and other modern phenomena that trade on the intimacy which we engage daily with our technologies. The internet is always listening, “with almost no boundaries,” and this knowledge, with the advent of artificial intelligence and large language models, “may someday make the internet the writer I am.”
What the essay is really about, I think, is how we increasingly feel like there is no difference between ourselves and the internet. As she writes, “I am in a relationship with the internet. It is in my mind, and my mind is in it, and it causes feelings in my body. Good feelings and crazy-making feelings.” There is something both banal and profound about this. We’ve been living with the internet for decades, and we have all read endless essays about the difference between reality and the online world, if there is one. Put aside virtual realities, metaverses, all that — the internet itself has come to be fully enmeshed with our lived experience of the world.
The philosopher David Chalmers, author of the book Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, wrote last year that, “Our experiences in digital reality can be just as authentic as our experiences in physical reality.” Taking a philosophical overview of reality, Chalmers argues that “something is real if it’s meaningful,” and “virtual worlds will build meaning of their own over time — meaning that comes from us.”
This perspective requires subscribing to a particular understanding of human consciousness, and Chalmers has a provocative history on the subject. While there is merit to the idea of the authenticity and meaning within virtual and online worlds, Chalmers ends up over-extending his analysis. In an interview with the Financial Times last year, he highlighted his work on the “extended mind,” the outsourcing of cognition to computers which results in an “exo-cortex,” which he describes as “an external device-driven brain that is increasingly controlled by the giant tech companies.”
As you might guess, I am sympathetic to the argument that giant tech companies seek to control our lives and behaviours in malicious profit-driven ways. What Chalmers gets wrong, though, reminds me of what Shoshana Zuboff gets wrong with her concept of surveillance capitalism — namely, they both conflate the seeking of control with its success in biological transformation. The evidence is flimsy at best, and must ignore the materiality of our lives in important ways, to say nothing of any, like, scientific analysis.
This isn’t a highfalutin distraction. If, as Tierce compellingly suggests in her Slate essay, we are intertwined with the internet, perhaps irreparably, there is a fundamental material dimension to it that belies attempts by thinkers like Chalmers and Zuboff to explain it away as a rogue corruption of otherwise-proper structures and functions, as a successful project by nefarious tech companies to rewire our brain chemistry to suit their desires. What is the point of granting them a success they have not earned?
Our behaviour may be influenced by these online systems and their corporate control, but when Chalmers argues to the FT that Apple controls about 20% of his brain while Facebook has 10%, it rings hollow because it doesn’t capture anyone’s actual lived experience of a world that is both physical and virtual. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s a difference between saying that you bought something because Instagram successfully targeted you with an ad, and saying that your brain has been successfully rewritten so that Instagram has a 20% stake in its future development. Again, that may be their ultimate perverted dream, but we gain nothing by accepting their terms as given.
Let’s think about it a bit differently. I went to see the new movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline yesterday, which features a ragtag group of ecoterrorists who come together for a variety of meaningful reasons for their political action of targeted destruction. One, for instance, is concerned with eminent domain and property rights, not environmental advocacy. But one, Shawn, is perhaps most recognizable to people more like me in the audience: doomscrolling on Twitter, feeling helpless, powerless, and in dumbstruck awe at the machinations of power and cruelty in the world, as mediated by posts and content online. So, he decides to do something about it in the physical world, causing physical transformation and pain for actual people, but an action that will likewise have virtual consequences as people around the world watch the footage, as oil executives monitor their portfolios, as other doomscrollers find a shred of hope.
I’m not saying that I have the answers about human consciousness and virtuality. I know that I, too, “am no different from every other playable bundle of synapses holding a phone.” And I know that it’s not helpful to accept that we’ve already lost in this fight for control from the companies that shape our online worlds. That fight continues.
Ephemera
At The Baffler, David Turner writes about TikTok’s role in reshaping the social media platform ecosystem. “Bytedance and its competitors are nothing more than the latest merchants of distraction, biding their time before boredom settles in and the crowd moves on.” The article is a decent overview of TikTok’s current status, but it’s also a rather simplistic understanding of its cultural and economic position, even if it’s always useful to emphasize the temporary nature of platforms.
I’m always on board for another aggressive takedown on longtermism (mine is here), so add Alice Crary’s for Radical Philosophy to the list. “The longtermist enterprise has been publicly thrashed for its ties to FTX, but it remains well-funded and well-positioned to repair its reputation and go on enlisting earnest individuals to energetically support and spread it. There is a pressing need to criticise its theoretical weaknesses and forcefully bring out its material harms, exposing it as the toxic ideology it is.”
Great episode of Citations Needed about the ongoing book bans in the US and the longer history of the fight to keep public libraries alive, especially as they become some of the only true public spaces we have left.
Movie Recommendation: I will just plug once more How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which I have minor reservations about, but in general it is a thrilling film and it’s an exciting thing for it to have a wide release right now. Go see it if you can.
Song Recommendation: I’d embarrassingly never listened to Ahmad Jamal before I learned of his passing on Sunday, but have been greatly enjoying his work this week.
“Poinciana — Live At The Pershing, Chicago, 1958” — Ahmad Jamal Trio