Winding the Clocks of Windsor

This morning I started to write a longish Talking Tuesday post about something else, but lost steam the longer I worked on it.  I sense we are all rather fatigued by the season we are in, and perhaps I don't need to add my voice to the fray.  (There are so many other people writing extremely articulate things I am a bit surplus to the requirements).  

Some of my ennui is my reading stack at the moment.  After reading three intellectually-stimulating-but-dense books in quick succession (but in tandem with some lighter reading), I need to read something else for a while.  I plodded through Anthony Esolen's latest book last week with ill humor, as it was rather like force-feeding turnips rather than a feast of delightful things.  Full of vitamins maybe, but lacking in taste.  

I confess I was disappointed, as I expected better from the brief tome.  Esolen strikes me as an erudite and learned man who could add a lot to a conversation about the pursuit of Truth, goodness, and beauty, but instead, he chooses to spend more than 2/3rds of the book sounding like a cranky old man.  I suppose I am tired of reading about the reasons why a deep understanding of the human condition is important and more interested in simply pursuing that knowledge for myself.

I have a long list of people to whom I owe letters, and it seems that there are never enough hours in the day to write them.  (If you are one of those people: I'm sorry!  I will get to it, I promise!)  My pre-quarantine stamina has not returned as I'd hoped, so I find I must carefully pace my days in order to get through them and remain present with my children and their ever-changing needs.

So, with that in mind, I present something charming and interesting, with the added bonus of a bit of history: the clocks of Windsor Castle, which will all be wound by a single conservator this week in preparation of the time change this weekend.  

photo by Antonio Olmos

Several of the clocks featured were given to Queen Victoria, which interests me because I am currently obsessed with the Masterpiece show about her.  

And thus was the white wedding dress born.

I couldn't get past the pilot when it first aired (I forget why exactly, as it is the sort of show that is right up my alley), but have loved all three seasons and am eager for the fourth.  I bought a book of Albert and Victoria's correspondence because I am so interested in their relationship, brilliantly brought to life by Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes:

The show reminded me how much the world changed between the beginning of Victoria's life and the end.  She was born in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, and died at the turn of the 20th century.  Wars, revolutions, social and cultural change, the Industrial Revolution: the 19th century is so full!  

In any case, it is a highly diverting rabbit hole to fall into at the moment, and I am grateful for it.

RIP: Mac Davis

I saw over the weekend that Mac Davis had died and felt a pang of regret over his passing. Davis' Burning Thing album formed part of the soundtrack of my childhood, and Honeysuckle Magic remains a particular favorite of mine. 

 

Mac Davis was better known for other songs, such as In the Ghetto, Don't Cry Daddy, and Memories,
all covered by Elvis in his late 1960s comeback, but Burning Thing is a work of beauty.  Every song tells a story, and in finest folk tradition, you have to listen to the end, just to find how it all turns out.  

 

My dad had the album on an 8-track and played it in the car quite a bit when I was growing up.  The family vehicle had an 8-track player for most of the 1980s.  I bought the LP of Burning Thing in college and thankfully made a cassette recording of it, but all my records were lost in one of the numerous moves of my early 20s.

 

I sort of miss the tactile solidity of an 8-track.  We had Seals and Croft and Gordon Lightfoot on 8-tracks and I still enjoy listening to those albums, albeit in CD form these days.  I know, I know, I'm a Luddite.  But at least I'm peaceful?

Talking Tuesday: Sanctuary

 I finished Shoshana Zuboff's book The Age of Survelliance Capitalism a week ago, and while I stand by my initial thoughts about it, there were some interesting things she brought up in the final few chapters that I wish she had parsed further.  This is my main criticism of books like this: too much diagnosis, not enough prescription.  As I wrote previously, David Brooks' recent Atlantic article is a elegantly written piece that better articulates much of what Zuboff is arguing, using social science as the dive point.

That said, here are some additional thoughts I have about both Zuboff and Brooks.  Technology (used here to refer the Internet) is embedded in our lives, and short of some wide-scale catastrophe, screens will be part of our lives and our children's lives, and with it, the social media services that form the scaffolding for Internet use.  Social media encourages a kind of Narcissus-like fixation on the self that prevents users from both being able to self-differentiate from tribe, but also to see the other side of an issue.  By allowing ourselves to be lured into spending much of our lives online, we lose the ability to formulate things for ourselves as our attention spans and capacity for deep thought erode, our vocabulary narrows and with it the range of possible thought, and the small predetermined menu of options given us by the tech industry begins to feel like an inevitability, and indeed, the small parameters of our lives (Zuboff, 467). 

Ceding so much power to a handful of tech companies in the form of limitless data collection (the so-called shadow text of any online interaction) means we all live in glass houses with no exit.  Aside from being a guaranteed path to madness, it throws aside centuries of hard-won dignity, individual responsibilities and obligations, and the ability to make a life of one's own (Zuboff 185, 469).  Zuboff proposes that humans have the right to sanctuary, a place where private life can occur and flourish, where the spirit can fly and be at rest (Zuboff, 5, 477).  Such opacity is a basic human dignity, and should be protected against incursions by an increasingly aggressive capitalist mien. 

Matthew B. Crawford makes a similar argument when he writes about the attentional commons in The World Beyond Your Head: that the right to occupy public space free from noise and advertising is increasingly available only to those who can afford it.  Taking that point a step further in Why We Drive, he notes that the attentional commons has even colonized your car, so that now even your driving experience, formerly one of individual agency and freedom from the relentless demands of commercial life, is peppered with data mining and advertising opportunities, further degrading our attention and increasing distractability (Crawford, Why We Drive, 307-308).  "Do we want to make the basic animal freedom of moving your body through space contingent on the competence of large organizations?' (Crawford, Why We Drive, 298, emphasis in original).  Moreover, as Zuboff notes, "In this new product regime the simple product functions that we seek are now hopelessly enmeshed in a tangled mixture of software, services, and networks.  The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product or service as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying" (237).  It's no longer enough to make a useful thing.  The thing must be "smart" and provide goods back to its maker in the form of data.  Consumers do not want or need "smart" things, but Big Tech's survival depends on convincing large swathes of the population that such things are better than their "dumb" alternatives.  Because: advertising and legibility produce huge profits for a handful of powerful people.

The public sphere is now given over to making humanity as legible as possible to both the tech companies and the governments that have climbed in bed with them, gobbling up data about our habits, preferences, private thoughts and letters, political leanings, religious faith, purchases, health history, and much more.  When was the last time you were in a public place that did not have a screen in it, or loud music playing?  Even if the music is inoffensive, it is still an intrusion into the private space of your mind, and the ability to think deeply without distraction or commercialization.  

There is a small restaurant in my neighborhood that is in a converted row house.  The dining area is in what was the living room portion of the house, and was formerly cozy and intimate, with small tables, a roaring fire, and dark wood.  The food was a bit pricey, but very good and fresh.  It felt like a quintessential English pub.  A few years ago, the owners decided to install three 60" television screens in the 200 square foot dining room, making it difficult to maintain eye contact with a dining companion and conversation of any sort impossible.  (I don't care how intentional you are about resisting screen distraction, when three 60" televisions are on and blaring in a 200 square foot room, you cannot ignore them).  The best one can do in this new and "improved" space is to hope that whatever is on the screen something inoffensive like a ball game and your food comes quickly so you can get the meal over with.  It does not inspire me to eat there.  Even outdoor spaces have been colonized for advertising and data collection, as cities install sidewalk chargers for mobile devices that also hoover up any data in the vicinity.

Zuboff points out many other troubling aspects of social media and Big Data, including the ability of Facebook or Google to quietly engineer elections or subvert democratic process, without people ever being aware of such machinations (298-303).  It turns out that democracy is an existential threat to the economic model of Big Tech.  The big firms of Silicon Valley are not regulated by or overseen by the government but have enormous power over how things actually work out legally and otherwise in society, all done beneath a shroud of secrecy.  Ironic really.  Silicon Valley puts everyone in a glass cage, but expects to be able to live in peace and quiet in an iron fortress with no more than a "trust me" assurance that no stones will be lobbed our way.  "The commodification of behavior under the conditions of surveillance capitalism pivots us toward a societal future in which an exclusive division of learning is protected by secrecy, indecipherability, and expertise....These markets do not depend upon you except first as a source of raw material from which surplus is derived, and then as a target for guaranteed outcomes" (Zuboff, 327). 

Living in a glass house is psychologically paralyzing.  Everyone has the right to have secrets and anonymity, or at least they should.  We need places of refuge, places of quiet sanctuary to keep ourselves together and grow strong and resilient.  "Those who would eviscerate sanctuary are keen to take the offensive, putting us off guard with the guilt-inducing question "What have you got to hide?"  But as we have seen, the crucial developmental challenges of the self-other balance cannot be negotiated adequately without the sanctity of 'disconnected' time and space for the ripening of inward awareness and the possibility of reflexivity: reflection on and by oneself.  The real psychological truth is this: If you've got nothing to hide, you are nothing" (Zuboff, 479, emphasis in the original).  

We need opacity for the sake of our souls, and true human flourishing is found in the protection of private spaces for the individual and family.  The health of our minds and bodies rests in qualities of "contemplation, autonomy, rejuvenation, confiding, freedom, creativity, recovery, catharsis, and concealment.  These are experiences without which we can neither flourish nor usefully contribute to our families, communities, and society" (Zuboff, 479).  Life involves a great deal of uncertainty and insecurity, and we stand to lose a good deal if we blindly hand over our privacy in pursuit of safety and security.  There is mystery in the unknown, deep intimate knowledge that can only be gained in an unrestrained milieu.

Unfortunately, as a societal measure, individual privacy entails a great deal of social trust, which is in great decay in the present time.  David Brooks notes the many ways we do not trust each other or our institutions, and how much that has changed in the last 50 years or so.  It is also true that the decay of trust is somewhat cyclical in societies, and share common features.  Brooks writes: "People feel disgusted by the state of society.  Trust in institutions plummets. Moral indignation is widespread.  Contempt for established power is intense.  A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene.  It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation.  Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system.  These are moments of agitation, excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion" (Brooks, The Atlantic, October 5, 2020, hereafter Brooks, Oct 2020).  While Brooks does not explicitly say so, I would also argue that these moments follow what Yuri Slezkine details as apocalyptic millenarianism, in which a disenfranchised minority group seizes control of power and culture to try to achieve a utopia, usually through violent means.

The current drive to utopia is in reaction to the individualism and liberation of the Baby Boomer generation, whose drive to pursue their own happiness placed much of society in a precarious and insecure position.  Boomers had the benefit of an older generation that provided foundation security, but that foundation is now long gone.  Families are rarely intact these days, and the economy is a disaster of unfettered raw capitalism, undigested through the laws of democracy.  Many younger people have been excluded from financial and personal security, and now seek it in any form possible, even if that means social credit systems, government and Big Data surveillance, and the general loss of privacy as a norm and right.  

Writes Brooks,

"Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.  Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice" (Brooks, Oct 2020).

Attachment theory says that several dichotomies or dyads exist within all of us, that either bind or alienate us from our circumstances.  Either we feel safe or at risk, lost or at home, broken or whole.  Capitalism is heavily invested in making our attachments insecure--feeling unsafe, lost, and broken--so that we will be more likely to buy the products and services that promise to alleviate those feelings, or at the least, surrender our data so that we can be aggressively marketed to about our attachments.

Social trust is part of the larger picture of attachment, and the collective experience of the past 40 years or so has betrayed trust again and again, as institutional leaders are shown to be morally or financially corrupt (or both), institutions seek to shore up corrupt leaders rather than root it out, and the economic system fails to serve a large percentage of people.  The reason why institutional health is important is that institutions are supposed provide the basis for personal formation as well as a place to belong.  Instead they become performative and sterile, unable to do any of the hard work of transformation.  "The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  And that's at the macro level.  

On a personal level, our close social interactions are fraught with instability and moral liquidity. "The evidence suggests that trust is an imprint left by experience, not a distorted perception" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  The instability of the economy means shallow roots in physical communities, as people pull up stakes to go where the jobs are, rather than staying close to family and friends who provide the thick bonds of social trust.  While we don't need to be intimately attached to society at large, we do need to be securely attached to one another to flourish, and when we attach securely to one another, that thriving ripples out into larger society.  This bonds are frayed and worn, notes Brooks. "In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away.  Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home that leaves young people incapable of handling real-world stress [or conversely, absentee parents who leave children to fend for themselves]" (Brooks, Oct 2020).  

In short, we live in a time of chaotic instability and distrust, where finding a secure place to belong and flourish is increasingly rare.  When we cannot trust those around us, we try to make ourselves invulnerable, impermeable to the hurts and disappointments that could be shared in trustworthy relationships.  We look for external ways to measure trustworthiness, and Big Tech is all too happy to oblige, for the price of your private self in the form of data mining.  True intimacy declines in the face of such external measurements (Zuboff, 206-207), and is replaced by entertainment and abstraction.  We seek security in rigidity, ideology, and tribe (Brooks, Oct 2020).  It follows that we are in the midst of a grave existential crisis.  The job of culture is to respond to common problems, but when the problems change, the common response must shift as well, which is almost always fraught.

"The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society.  People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.  The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust.  There's no avoiding the core problem.  Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function" (Brooks, Oct 2020).

So how do we rebuild trust and provide refuge for ourselves and others?  Mostly in the small invisible ways that will not show up on a news feed, or help us economically or socially climb a ladder of success.  It is in cultivating virtues of reliability and dependability in ourselves.  Providing a soft place to land for those we love.  In challenging ourselves to make promises--being open and vulnerable in a radical way-- and hold fast to those promises, we extend a fragile branch of trust to others around us.  If they are able to return it to us, then trust builds.  Trust breeds truth, and vice versa.  So the path to trust is a long one, and will not happen overnight.  

Vulnerability in relationships is hard, because we don't want to be hurt, particularly if we have been hurt badly in the past.  But I think we humans hunger for vulnerability.  I see it in the stories we tell ourselves--the books that are lodestones of culture.  We want to be in intimate relationships, but not all of us know how to achieve that sort of radical vulnerability.  It means handing the inner most parts of yourself over to someone else and trusting that they will hold them and not use them as a weapon against you.  It means having faith that the people you love and trust can hold not just the air-brushed public self, but the flawed inner self--your worst self on your worst day.  We can't begin to trust people with our worst selves if we are forced to live in glass houses with no exit.  

We need places of sanctuary--places free from prying eyes and listening ears and glowing screens.  It is not enough to pursue invisibility within the glass house.  We need fortresses of refuge, behind thick solid walls, curtained windows, and manned defenses.  Keep secrets--yours and others.  Get to know the landscape of your place in the world through real, lived experience.  The future is likely to be digital in many ways.  That does not mean we have to sacrifice our humanity on the altar of inevitability or cede our private lives to the glass-housed public square.  

Build a fortress, and guard it with your life, even if only in your mind.

Sources:

Brooks, David. "Collapsing Levels of Trust are Devastating America," The Atlantic, October 5, 2020.

Crawford, Matthew B. Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.  New York: Public Affairs, 2019.

Yarn Along: Life in Squares

 ~knitting~

Another finished object!  I've been working steadily away on my Beamer (more on that below) but took a brief break to knit up this quick little project.  

 

I had bought two skeins of cotton yarn in the spring, after I discovered how much I like having a lighter knitted layer around my neck in the "shoulder" seasons, and knitted it up quick-like one week. 

It is slightly smaller than I had originally envisioned, but it works well enough with a pin and some creative draping.  I used the Casapinka pattern as a stitch guide again, and I like the look of it on a larger gauge very much.

The Beamer is going okay.  I've probably knit every lace line twice by now, since I keep making mistakes and having to tink back to figure out where I went wrong, but I'm enjoying the process more than I thought I would.  

It's not exactly the sort of knitting I can do while watching something I have to pay attention to, but I'm still eager to work on it most days.  It will be a lighter wool layer that I'm excited to work into my wardrobe.

 

~reading~

 

Well, I wrote about Shoshana Zuboff yesterday, and it is still a slog--rather like eating raw vegetables before getting to dessert, as opposed to nice lovely roasted vegetables.  In my case, I ate the dessert first in the form of my re-reading of the All Souls Triology and am midway through a second read of Time's Convert (still think it could have used some editing, but enjoy visiting that world despite it).  I also finished Slezkine, and wrote about that earlier in the month.

But I'm more than half-way through the Zuboff and am looking forward to cracking Anthony Esolen next. Rod Dreher's latest, Live Not By Lies, also showed up this week, but my husband is having first crack at that one.  We're trading the Zuboff back and forth, both frustrated by the lack of serious editing and overly flowery writing.  Vegetables, vegetables.  

~sewing~

 Kinder Chinners!  I made a big batch of these in February at the request of our school's violin teacher.  They are used on the end of a violin to cushion the chin, and are helpful especially for younger violin students.  The teacher approached me again in September to ask for 20 more for the current kindergarten class, and I was happy to make them for him.  I set up an assembly line, and while I wasn't able to knock all 20 out in one session, I did get them done over several days time, working in small increments.  

 

For whatever reason, I've found I have to break up my working time into smaller pieces right now, or I can't finish my day with any steam at all. My entire daily rhythm is a bit different these days, as I try to front load as much as I can, since I always feel rotten by late afternoon and cannot muster much to get through the last shift of the day with the kids.  So I try to make whatever dinner bits I can do ahead in the morning, and leave an hour or two in the afternoon for sitting and staring.  

~watching~

Well.  I've hit a kind of lull with that.  I couldn't get into this season of Endeavour and gave up less than one episode in.  (I'm so sick of the labyrinthine plots that make no sense whatsoever, even at the end of the program).  I had a migraine this past weekend that laid me out flat, but it was of a piece with the way I've been dragging myself through my days since late summer.  When I'm tired and stressed, I tend to go back to old favorites.

Bloomsbury Group

 I rewatched some stuff about the Bloomsbury group, which I find weirdly fascinating.  (Fascinating in the way that you can't stop looking at a car wreck).  The first is a more recent BBC series called Life in Squares, which is mostly about painter Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia Woolfe's lives. I also revisited Carrington, a slightly older film about painter Dora Carrington and writer Lytton Strachey, both of whom feature in the cast of characters in Life in Squares but on the periphery.  

Lytton Strachey by Dora Carrington

I'm pretty sure I read Strachey's Eminent Victorians as part of my senior college thesis on T.E. Lawrence (otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia), but wouldn't have understood the Bloomsbury context as well as I do now.  Fair warning, the series/movie are not for everyone.  The Bloomsbury group was rather radical in breaking social conventions, and some will find that off-putting.  Personally, I found both quite thought-provoking.

Charleston Farmhouse by Vanessa Bell

 I did finally watch the entire first season of Poldark, after trying it several years ago and not really getting into it.  (I know!  I was surprised too!  But I just couldn't get into Aidan Turner, and the story line seemed tired to me at the time).  Aidan Turner still doesn't do it for me, but I really enjoy watching Eleanor Tomlinson (who plays Ross Poldark's kitchen maid-turned wife), and the 18th century context of Cornwall and the mining industry there are interesting to me.  I had to take a break after the intense season 1 finale, and don't really know when I'll get to season 2.  

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza on Poldark

Watching Eleanor Thompson in Poldark reminded me that she played Darcy's sister Georgiana in Death Comes to Pemberly, which I watched when it came out and really enjoyed, so I rewatched that and enjoyed it just as much the second time.  Probably more so, since I enjoy watching Matthew Goode and James Norton even more now.  Matthew Rhys' performance as Darcy is subtle and lovely.  I had forgotten a lot of the details, so it was fun to not know what was going to happen.  I rewatched Sense and Sensibility at some point this month (is there anything better than the late great, brilliant Alan Rickman as Col. Brandon?  I think not), and am planning to revisit other Austen films as I have time.

~garden~

My Mr. Stacky planter kind of went nuts with the kale and lemon balm, although the dill and thyme died pretty quickly.  The lemon balm started out as a dodgy leggy looking thing, but quickly exploded into lush greenery.  I couldn't separate the root ball, however, and so it was poking out of one small area of the Stacky planter.  Yesterday, I pulled out the lemon balm and transplanted it to a bigger area so it could spread out.  (You like my super classy plant stand?)

I am enjoying cooking with lemon balm and chives, and hope to bring the plant indoors when it gets cold.  I know there are lots of medicinal uses for it as well, and hope to experiment some with that this winter.

  I'm experimenting with seeing whether the lemon balm stems will root, so I clipped four healthy looking stems and stuck them in the empty spots left in the planter on the second tier.  I harvested some of the bigger kale leaves and made a nice sausage soup with them yesterday.

 I also took one of my bigger Boxwood basil plants (in front of the big planter box) and put it into a pot, in the hopes of bringing it indoors for the winter as well.  I prefer cooking with the Boxwood basil better than Sweet Basil (even though those did prolifically well this summer also), and hope to keep it going.

 

And in other news, the tomato plants are ridiculous.  They are taller than me now and full of ripening fruit; I'm having to get quite creative to keep them staked and vertical, hence my weird strings and wires contraptions hanging from hooks high up on the walls.

There are finally two tiny cucumbers on the vines, but they are ripening VERY slowly.  Not sure we'll beat the frost on them, but it is fun to see them there after months of nothing but male flowers.  I've harvested about a dozen pole beans, but turns out my kids don't like them, and I'm allergic to them, so my husband has been eating them raw.  I probably won't plant them next year.

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!

Talking Tuesday: The Age of Survelliance Capitalism

 

I've been slogging through Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Survelliance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.  Her book is important, but it would greatly have benefited from a strong editorial hand, as she is very wordy in a way that is frustrating to read.  That said, there have been some real gems in the book so far.  Her main insight is that the big tech companies that run our world (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter) are all in the business of shaping human beings into something off whom they can make money.  In other words, consumers who are merely the sum total of their desires. In order to do so, these companies have decided it is better to ask forgiveness than permission to smash through existing landscapes, and often not even to ask forgiveness.

The mantra of "move fast and break things," plus the increased fear after 9/11 has meant that not only do these companies regularly get away with it, the government is colluding with them to do so.  When the government pushes back against the lawlessness, they find themselves greatly outmatched by the money and resources available to these behemoths.  I found that part particularly disheartening.  She writes that capitalism is never meant to be eaten raw, and that it should be cooked through the democratic processes of government and society, but the current system is bypassing all those things to present us with a rather raw state of affairs.  Mostly without our consent.  

Writes Zuboff: "Survelliance capitalism's ability to keep democracy at bay produced these stark facts.  Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organization and presentation of the world's information.  One man at Facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks" (127).

Furthermore, these men ask us to "trust them" when called to account for their actions.  It's a sorry state of affairs, to be sure.  Zuboff's book is important, as I said, but it could be much leaner, and it seems like so much of what she writes about is stuff commonly acknowledged at this point: namely that Big Tech wants to shape everything about us for monetary gain, including our private lives, leaving nothing beyond Big Data's reach.  We must, in the way of Seeing Like a State, be made as legible as possible as human beings, and our behavior must be channeled and corralled into acceptable (read: profitable) avenues.  Unpredictable human behavior means lost revenue opportunities.  Therefore, the more a company can guide the user into predictable behavior channels, the more reliable the profit. 

What the internet initially offered was the promise of individualized experience and greater access to information, within an interconnected human framework.  The Internet was held out as scaffolding to thicken the ties that bind us, but in truth, it has served as an acid bath, dissolving much of what holds us together.

In a more elegant rendering of this same thought David Brooks writes in The Atlantic: 

 "We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos. The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together. The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation. The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.

...

When you look back on it from the vantage of 2020, moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody. If everybody pursues their own economic self-interest, then the economy will thrive for all. If everybody chooses their own family style, then children will prosper. If each individual chooses his or her own moral code, then people will still feel solidarity with one another and be decent to one another. This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.

It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them. We didn’t predict that oligarchs would steal entire nations, or that demagogues from Turkey to the U.S. would ignite ethnic hatreds. We didn’t see that a hyper-competitive global meritocracy would effectively turn all of childhood into elite travel sports where a few privileged performers get to play and everyone else gets left behind" (Brooks, The Atlantic).

Essentially, the business model pursued by Big Tech has so completely changed our human landscape, it is almost impossible to bridge the gap between the analog and digital generations.  The analog generation has learned to work in the digital age, but still fundamentally thinks of the world in analog.  Digital natives have a hard time understanding the world before the Internet; online existence is presented with a predetermined menu of options, based on previous behavior, movement, and interests, all controlled by shadowy figures, cloaked in secrecy, who are accountable to no one; certainly not the paean users of their products.  They are not interested in gaining or retaining our trust, rather we are the product to be shaped for profit only, discarded when no longer useful.

I'm not sure what the solution is, given the reality of the world today; it is not possible for most of us to go off-grid and make shift for ourselves.  I'm not even sure it is desirable, after seeing the effects of the isolation of the pandemic, for off-grid life is necessarily isolated.  

We are meant to be in human community, bonded together by common goals and mutual affection and trust.  I suppose one solution is to live as much life off-line as is feasible, and to find some bright red lines to guide usage, while understanding that no matter what steps we take to protect our privacy, any online activity is going to be tracked in some way.  We must do what we can to curtain the prying eyes and deafen the listening ears.  

References:

Zuboff, Shoshana.  The Age of Survelliance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future At the New Frontier of Power.  New York: PublicAffairs/Hachette, 2020.

Brooks, David. "Collapsing Levels of Trust Are Devastating America," The Atlantic, October 5, 2020.