Among the several works of classical literature I have read recently, Henry James’s 1886 novel, The Bostonians, is particularly instructive as to the inanity of this modern imperative to stay informed and to adopt public positions on issues. The story unfolds around the beautiful young Verena Tarrant, whose parents have launched her onto the speaking circuit as a gifted orator in defense of the feminist cause. Her father is a mesmeric healer, and early in Verena’s career the public performance begins by his laying hands upon her, which induces a sort of hypnosis in which the girl is better able to traduce her arguments in favour of the cause of women. A patrician by the name of Olive Chancellor, understood by James and all but the most clueless of readers to be a lesbian, attends one of Verena’s performances, falls in love, and pays off the Tarrants in exchange for bringing Verena into her home, in an arrangement known as a “Boston marriage”. But Olive also makes the mistake of bringing along her distant cousin from Mississippi, the smooth lawyer Basil Ransom. Ransom cares not at all for the feminist cause – he finds it ridiculous – but also falls in love with Verena. From the moment they lay eyes on her, Olive and Basil are both “zoomin’” the same girl, and the rest of the story tells of the gripping battle between cousins over their shared love object. As to the substantive issues, James takes the only position worthy of a novelist: chivalry, feminism, the life of the salons, are all just so much human comedy, and the players in this comedy are to be lightly mocked, but also loved. They are human and this is the best they can do.
Social media allows users no opportunity to cultivate a Jamesian disposition to humanity, instead presenting to us the teams captained respectively by Olive and Basil, and acting as if we have all already signed up for the game, and affirmed all of its rules. One compelling reason to decline to play, however, to log off, may be learned from the novel itself: the US cultural wars are best thought of as trench wars, and the trenches have not budged since 1886. Olive and Basil are familiar types, with thousands, perhaps millions, of lesser instances tweeting out their team affiliation each day, except that, in the absence of James’s humane narration, we are given no reason to love them.
It may sound arrogant to say, but Smith’s point, his experience, is one of those things about reading (anything, but especially fiction) that you either get or you don’t. Either way, reading and writing were meant for this kind of strange but wonderful insight. Each of us needs to work on our “humane narration,” to hold out the “possibility of adoration” where we may feel least likely to find it, and to thereby “decline to play the game.” The corollary imperative: Find what prevents you from humanly loving and tolerating the people you don’t love or tolerate, and do something about it.
One of the most fascinating books I’ve read in the last year is Lauren F. Winner’s The Dangers of Christian Practice. Winner quotes Miri Rubin, speaking of what
social pathologies teach us loud and clear: that any attempt to categorize people, to place them in exclusive groups is a lie, and it requires an enormous effort of mendacity and persuasion to keep such lies believable. So much so that no claim can be coherent, that it cracks, and its cracks can become visible to us.
It seems correct to add that any system or technology that works to convince us otherwise — that works to hide the cracks in our sure understanding of others — is equally a lie. There have been a number of articles lately that make it sound like people are finally figuring this out in a significant way.
Speaking of “the mass exodus from Twitter in late 2022,” Smith says that it simply and finally dawned on people that “they deserved better.”
To say that they deserved better is to say that they deserved virtual connections that complemented their human connections rather than warped them. It says that monetised social interaction is not social interaction in any proper sense of the term, and it says that we already have the technologies to build social networks that are not based on data-extraction and profit-driven algorithms.
First of all, that last sentence is hilarious at face value. “You mean there’s a way to build social networks without the web of data and ads and algorithms? Fascinating!” It reminds me of the ad for Apple’s Vision Pro virtual reality living room ski goggles. They’re great, we’re told, because “when someone else is in the room, you can see them, and they can see you.” How nice of technology to deliver such an experience for us.
But that’s not completely fair and I get what Smith is saying. There are much better uses of computer and internet technology than the ones that have been offered by the major platforms and the psychopaths who run them. And one description of what it looks like to “fight back” against every good thing that they by design destroy is to maximize your demonetized human interactions. I am fairly certain that this would have exponentially wonderful effects in any age, but especially in our own, partly because the effects are proportional to the effort needed to accomplish those demonetized human interactions — which is substantial. (And on that note, I will simply point you to the year of anti-inflation.)
So far, I’m not convinced that anything significant has changed. Beside the fact that most of the people Smith has in mind are just leaving one degrading social network for another, I still don’t know what good knowing all of this does for us. It seems important to note that “deserves better” should often — and certainly in this case, does — mean “deserves better than what they/we give to ourselves.” It’s not only (if even mainly) about what tech companies do. The quantity of people willing to make any major changes even by way of minor inconvenience still seems like a very small number.
Nonetheless, the fact remains, we need more face-to-face interactions, more time demonetized, unplugged from any data production or consumption. We need these in and of themselves, but as Smith points out, we also need them if our online lives are going to have anything real to reflect or project.
At its best, the online component of a social network should really only be a representation of a network that is anchored in a different sort of reality. The online component cannot be the thing itself, but only a visualisation of it, a record of a life lived elsewhere than through the screen.
Needless to say, the online component has become “the thing itself.” (Preceded, of course, by the televised and radioed component.) It’s the thing we wake up to, the thing we check more-or-less constantly, keeping us perpetually distracted, reflexively erasing every pause throughout the day and straight through the evening, to the moment before we close our eyes, sleep, and repeat. It’s amazing to think, evolutionarily or anthropologically, what humans have endured and experienced in nature, and what we’ve come to.
Toward the end of William James’s famous speech/essay “What Makes Life Significant,” he offered a summary of what he was getting at by quoting Fitz-James Stephens:
Progress and science may perhaps enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying hands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits, brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some definite view of their relations to them and to each other.
It should be clear that the very last thing that social media — and “tech” in general — has ever done or will ever do is force any of us to have some “definite view” of our relations to each other or to the real world. It’s specific purpose — once again, by design — is the exact opposite. But we don’t think of it this way. Not at all. It flies under the radar as just another necessary step of technology or another neutral medium of communication.
Of course, one can’t say the words “medium of communication” without summoning the spirit of Neil Postman. In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, he points out that almost every modern change in technology and communication has occurred with neither public conversation nor private resistance.
But what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. … It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations, among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology. This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past eighty years.
That was in 1985. We’ve had nearly 40 more years of technological change, and not an ounce more of public conversation, let alone of “public consciousness.” Only compliance.
I see no reason why online social networks should be anything more than “records of a life lived elsewhere.” And I do think it’s possible to have social networks that actually work to be online representation of reality. I think micro.blog manages something very close to this. The caveat for me is that I know no one else on micro.blog. And I mean no one. It gives me something like a quasi relationship with a few people a month who happen to comment on something I post, or vice versa. I’m not complaining. I’m not looking for much more online interaction than what I currently have. (Though I enjoy finding some folks worth “following,” and in terms of a healthier way to interact online with strangers, it is wonderful.) I’m just saying that — again, for me — even the best version of online social networking fails to achieve much of an accurate representation of reality.
Since most of the people who actually benefit from it have something to sell, maybe the reality of online life is this: For the average individual, there is no online option. When it comes to being online, everyone I know will either do the thing that everyone else is doing (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) or they will do nothing. Which means, for every single practical purpose, the focus needs to be on that “nothing.” To use William James’s phrase, online life will at best “touch only the surface of the show.” The rest — the nothing-to-do-with-the-internet — is “the great ocean on which [we] sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds.”
I can use the technology to provide a space for sharing (e.g. commonplace blog, newsletter), but I will not find online “community” and I will not share in any sort of meaningful reality there. And maybe that’s just the entire nature of reality itself telling me that there is a giant crack in our experience of each other and of the world, an obvious and actively overlooked incoherence in it all that just needs to stop being ignored.