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.

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.

Talking Tuesday: Crawford and Why We Drive

If you've been hanging around here for a while, you will know my long-standing admiration for Matthew B. Crawford's excellent work.  (I have a whole tag dedicated to my ramblings about it!)  So it should come as no surprise that his latest book, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, is just as excellent as his previous work. 

The title may seem like a strange one, particularly if you are like me, and you don't especially love to drive or tinker with old cars.  Crawford owns a custom motorcycle shop and has spent a lot of non-academic time messing around with engines.  His book is about the joy of driving and tinkering (what he calls "folk engineering"), but it is also about the dangers of automation on human flourishing. 

It is this last bit where the book really has my interest.  I'm not a gearhead by any stretch of the imagination, and to be perfectly honest, a lot of the technical stuff he writes about engines sails right past my head.  (Although, it must be said, I am mechanically-minded, and do a lot of the heavy-duty fixing around the house, so I'm not completely without interest in the inner workings of an internal combustion engine). 

Crawford uses the real experience of driving (and pushing the limits of a car's capabilities through driving skill acquired through time and testing) to illuminate how handing over our brains to automated processes actually takes something away from us.  When we complete mechanical tasks, the ideal is a task that requires enough skill to engage the brain, but not so much that it drains the energy for sustained work. 

As our cars have been taken over by computers, flashing screens and alerts, our brains have less to do, which mean that most people have a difficult time resisting the dopamine glow of their smartphones while driving.  With the predictable consequences we've all experienced on the road.  Crawford notes that as long as many of us drive as if our cars were already self-driving, it makes sense to push self-driving cars (5).  On the other hand, if driving required more skill (skills that humans already had), then self-driving cars would be unnecessary. 

Our cultural creative energies would be better served in making skilled demands of people, rather than cultivating some consumer experience.  "Manufactured experiences are offered as a substitute for direct confrontation with the world, and this evidently has some appeal for us.  We are relieved of the burden of grappling with real things--that is--things that resist our will, and thereby reveal our limited understanding and skill.  Experiences that have been deisnged around us offer escape from the frustrations of dealing with other people and with material reality.  They allow us to remain cocooned in a fantasy of competence and empowerment that is safe from the kind of refutation that routinely happens when you...ride a skateboard, for example" (114).

Why does it matter?  Some people are enamored of the idea that big cities could be free of traffic jams and congestion; commutes could be productive work times instead of frustrating time lost behind the wheel.  But Crawford warns that such thinking is dangerous.  The time behind the wheel can be a great time of mental freedom--to let the mind wander and think.  It is in that sort of quiet thinking time that solutions present themselves, or we can rejuvenate our souls. I personally find I get a lot of good thinking done while driving. 

But it is more than for just the freedom to quiet the mind that Crawford advocates retaining skilled driving.  He is not anti-technology; he freely acknowledges the improvements in automotive technology that have made cars safer, but those changes largely occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, invisible to the average driver.  Whereas the automation changes occurring now actually impede safety to a degree by disengaging the driver's mind, and invite further incursion on the driver's autonomy in the name of safety. 

But embodied skill is important, and contributes heavily to human happiness and flourishing.  "The new skills that we add to our repertoire when we learn to use tools and prosthetics become indistinguishable from those of the natural human body, in terms of how they are treated by the brain that organizes our actions and perceptions.  The crucial fact that makes this integration possible is that there is a closed loop between action and perception: what you perceive is determined by what you do, just as it is when we make use of our own hands.  Or a 1963 Volkswagon" (111).

There is a growing body of research that finds physical effort gives psychological rewards that lead to greater human resilience. The basic tasks of securing our bodily needs, long a labor-intensive process involving the whole body, has largely been outsourced to automated processes.  Crawford speculates that the concomitant rise in rates of anxiety and depression may be a partly a result of this disengagement with the physical world, particularly the work of our hands (64).  As our work has gone online and turned to computing and knowledge skills, the loss of skilled embodied work has been a disaster, both economically and culturally.  We were not meant to live in the world of the Jetsons, however attractive the wiz-bang technology of that landscape seems.  Our brains crave agency over our environment and ourselves, and when denied it through effortless-driven rewards, turn to maladaptive practices instead.  The same body of research also finds that when we inhabit the natural world, with the resistance to our will and real-consequences problems to solve, we thrive on solving those problems with far less stress (64).

It is also true that our management of the road requires a certain level of social cohesion that our culture is rapidly losing.  Writes Crawford, "...our ability to share the road together smoothly and safely is based on our capacity for mutual prediction.  This is a form of intelligence that is socially realized, and depends on the existence of robust social norms that can anchor sound expectations of others' behavior.  Automation may become attractive, then, as a response to declining social cohesion: it is an attempt to replace trust and cooperation with machine-generated certainty....this is an approach that is likely to cause the further atrophy of our skills.  Among these are the skills of collective self-government, rooted in shared habits of cooperation.  A science of behavior management becomes necessary" (121). 

The basic point is that if you never learn to share your toys, to negotiate the complexities of social interaction in the real world, and let things get messy, as life is wont to do, you will have no idea how to react when there is no algorithm to guide you through a menu of predetermined options.  Crawford repeatedly cites the humans in the Pixar film Wall-E, who have so forgotten the basic embodied skills of humanity that they must be hauled around on automated flying saucers, talking only to screens instead of face-to-face.  He also notes the level of social control the humans allow themselves to be subject to, and cautions his readers against it, for this way lies madness. 

Which brings me to the next point, that of embodied life.  Humans were not meant to serve an algorithmic life, mediated by screens and whatever our Tech Overlords want us to think and see and do.  We were not meant for "cultivated consumer experiences" or the inscrutable wisps of whatever exists in the cloud. 

We were meant to fully inhabit our bodies and our world, in all the messiness that entails.  We were meant to stick our hands into actual dirt to grow things.  To care for actual animals to rear for food and clothing.  To raise our children, with all the bodily fluids that entails.  To stand on the shoulders of giants to move and progress.  "But tradition can itself be an engine of progress.  It organizes the transmission of knowledge.  It also provides an idiom for some shared endeavor, and a set of historical benchmarks, such that one can imagine oneself outdoing particular human beings who came before, and who worked within the same basic limitations.  Tradition thus provides a venue for rivalry in excellence, the kind that sometimes bring a whole community to new and unexpected places" (136).  There is a thingness in embodied space, physical habitation, and real things that simply cannot be replicated online without some loss of ontological self. 

There is a role for technology and the Internet in our world, but we must never lose sight of the fact that it is a tool, and we the wielders of it, rather than the other way around.  When automation becomes a way to deskill humans and rob them of the flourishing that comes with skilled, meaningful work, it has overstepped its purpose.  A tool can become an extension of our bodies through long use and acquired fluency, but it can also get in the way.  Does technology allow us to remain in touch with far-flung family members and to maintain relationships that would otherwise wither?  Yes, undoubtedly.  Does it also get in the way of in-person interaction by inserting itself loudly into intimate conversations?  Absolutely.  Does it allow us access to an unimaginable wealth of knowledge and information?  Of course. But it also provides platforms that debase our common humanity, and reduces the quality of our interactions by increasing the noise in our heads. 

I suppose the (long, rambling) point to all this can be boiled down to the following: Do stuff with your hands in the real world.  Learn to fix things that are broken, how to mend that which has ripped, develop new skills beyond a keyboard, and get your hands dirty while doing so.

There is much more to say about this book, and I hope to revisit it in a future post.

 

Talking Tuesday: The Paradox of Technology

This week I read Andy Crouch's slim volume called The Tech-Wise Family, which is a kind of primer to thinking through the proper place of technology in the home.  While his approach deals most specifically with internet-connected technology, he makes the point that his approach can be applied to all technology in the home.  It is well worth the read and I highly recommend the book.  My only complaint is that the book is padded out with Barna research that is interesting, but is presented twice throughout the book (once in info-graphic form, and then in dense paragraph form; I found the double presentation distracting).  But Crouch's book is extremely important as we navigate the new landscape dominated by technology, and increasingly, screen-based technology.

I wanted to share a short passage from the book that is near the beginning that I thought was a great statement about what technology is.

"Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world.  But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who can create and cultivate as we were meant to.

Technology is good at serving human beings.  It even--as in medical or communication technology--saves human lives.  It does almost nothing to actually form human beings in the things that make them worth serving and saving.

Technology is a brilliant expression of human capacity.  But anything that offers easy everywhere does nothing (well, almost nothing) to actually form human capacities.

Since forming our capacity to be human is what family is all about, technology is at is best a neutral factor in what is most important in our families.  But it is very often not at is best, because we are very often not at our best, maybe especially in our daily lives with those closest to us.  In the most intimate setting of the household, where the deepest human work of our lives is meant to take place, technology distracts and displaces us far too often, undermining the real work of becoming persons of wisdom and courage."

~Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family.  Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2017, 66.  Emphasis in original.

The book goes on to detail ten commitments a tech-wise family can make to put technology in its proper place.  We already do a lot of the things he talks about, but I still have some food for thought about further steps we can take to make our home a peaceful place that cultivates human beings of wisdom, courage and deep character.

Talking Tuesday: The World Beyond Your Head

At last we come to a discussion of Matthew B. Crawford's excellent book, The World Beyond Your Head.  I've talked previously about the broad strokes of the book, so I'll just dive into the nitty gritty and hope for the best.  I keep poking away at this, and I think I just need to post it and move on--I'm reading so much these days that dovetails with Crawford, that I'm never going to be able to incorporate it all.

Let us begin then, with the shape of things.  The premodern Western world thought about time and space as intertwined three-dimensional space.  I wrote my master's thesis on these ideas, and you can find an abstract of them here.  Basically, the idea is that all time is contained within a sphere, and everything that was, that is, or that will be is contained within that sphere.  We do experience time in a more or less linear (but not progressive) fashion, with one event following another, from birth to death, but the linear experience is still encapsulated in the larger sphere.  God exists outside that sphere in what best be termed the Eternal NOW.  For God, all time is happening all at once.  He is Eternally Present for all of humanity's existence.

If we start from this premise, and proceed to the idea that man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever whilst pursuing theosis (or complete communion with God by purifying oneself of passions and coming back to a Christ-like mindset and habitation), then the world is an objective, knowable truth.  It is something to be discovered outside one's self, as part of the salvation journey.  In the premodern world, everyone was a pilgrim on a journey to a concrete destination.  We learn from those who walked the Way before us, gain solace from their struggles, joy in their triumphs as we work through our own within the larger community.

In the premodern mind, the world is corporeal; Christ was resurrected bodily, not just in spirit.  The Resurrection is an historical event, anchored in a particular place in time, but is also continuing its work in the world, as part of the Eternal NOW.  The worship of the premodern Church was physical, involving prostrations, crossing oneself, smelling the incense, seeing the icons (and in the westernmost part of Europe, the statuary), all while dealing with the weaknesses and passions of the physical body.  There was a whole-hearted belief in the spiritual dimension--in the world we cannot necessarily see with our eyes or feel with our senses, but inhabits our world, and has a direct effect on it.  God made the world and everything in it, and remains actively at work in His ongoing Creation.

(If this sounds a lot like Orthodox Christianity, it is!  The Orthodox Church was largely unaffected by Enlightenment thought).

The ideal of the premodern world is sanctity through intimate knowledge of God, obtained through fasting, prayer, and the sacraments of the Church.  Sanctity is something to actively pursue because heaven and hell are real places, and one's place in the afterlife is of utmost importance.  This life is built on the foundation of centuries of lived experience, custom, and corporate wisdom (what some call Tradition)

The art of the premodern world invites one in, to discover the truth of what is out there; it is what Charles Taylor calls "memesis" (A Secular Age).  Icons in particular are called windows to the soul, as they depict reality beyond themselves, and invite the worshipper to enter into them.

Writes Crawford: "We live in a world that has already been named by our predecessors, and was saturated with meaning before we arrived.  We find ourselves "thrown" into this world midstream, and for the most part take over from others the meanings that things already have." (The World Beyond Your Head [hereafter referred to as WBYH], pg 145)

The premodern world, with its objective truth, layered reality, involved Creator, and rich historical foundation, produced robust people who created some of the most stunning architecture, discovered and developed new technology (cf. Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel, by Joseph and Frances Gies) and created art that remains unsurpassed.  Status derived from acquiring the skills and knowledge of the elders instead of from one's own "gumptions and mental capabilities" (WBYH, 162). They were able to attend to the world around them with sensitivity and purpose that was unhampered "by radical personal responsibility and instead rested secure in a knowledge and trust in the processes/wisdom that had come before.  There was no need for perform for the world" (WBYH, 162).  They were untroubled by questions of individual sovereignty or existential crisis.  Meaning and truth were all around them, waiting to be discovered.

We can now contrast the pre-modern world with the modern world--shaped by the so-called "Enlightenment."  I would rather call it The Great Flattening.  The round, multi-layered cosmos inhabited by premodern man has been made flat and one-dimensional in our modern age.

Let us move on to Decartes.  "Decartes began his inquiries by putting aside all supposed knowledge received from "example or custom" in order to "reform my own thoughts and to build upon a foundation which is completely my own." (WBYH, 130).  Basically, this is the sort of tabula rasa mentality that is so pervasive in education and modern culture today.  Rather than discovering the cosmos outside oneself, and to find the objective truth of God working in Creation, we moderns think of ourselves as existing in the vacuum of our minds, born blank and pure, with no connection to what has gone before or will come after, no sense of the fallen condition of mankind.  The ideal then becomes the proverbial brain in a jar.  As such, the modern self has no interest in learning about or from the outside world.  Indeed, the outside world becomes a threat to one's own autonomy.  We've become obsessed with "authenticity" as Charles Taylor notes in A Secular Age.  "To live authentically, Norman Mailer would write a century later, one has to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self" (WBYH, 130).

The ideal life that is presented to us by a pre-packaged medium is the solitary person, standing on a vista somewhere, existing without ties or bonds to keep him in place.  Any threat against individual autonomy ("identity" would perhaps be an appropriate stand-in for autonomy) must be rooted out and destroyed.  Anything that takes our attention outside ourselves and joins it to the physical world must be regarded with suspicion (WBYH, 131).

In short, the thinkers of the Great Flattening have given us our intellectual inheritance and cultural mandate:

• "We are enjoined to be free from authority--both the kind that is nakedly coercive and the kind that operates through claims of knowledge.  If we are to get free of the latter, we cannot rely on the testimony of others.

• The positive idea that emerges, by subtraction, is that freedom amounts to radical self-responsibility.  This is both a political principle and an epistemic one.  

• We achieve this, ultimately by relocating the standards for truth from outside to inside ourselves.  Reality is no self-revealing; we can know it only by constructing representations of it.

• Attention is thus demoted.  Attention is the faculty through which we encounter the world directly.  If such an encounter isn't possible, then attention has no role to play." (WBYH, 116)

Consider how these principles inform our sense of things: man's chief end is no longer to glorify God and to pursue theosis, which is something that naturally must occur in the embodied world, that is, in God's creation.  Man's chief end in modern terms is to glorify himself and seek knowledge and understanding only within himself, a disembodied being, apart from the corporeal world.  Worship becomes less corporeal and more of a spectator event, "mediated by representations" (WBYH, 170)

Crawford gives a  number of examples of how our attention and ability to attend to things in the embodied world has fractured and been given over to abstractions.  Modern cars are built to be incomprehensible to all but a computer expert; machines provide manufactured experiences, somethings to the point that we perceive them as "better" than the real thing.  (Taking a photograph of a magnificent sunrise, and adding a filter to "enhance" the image is a good example of this).  Images themselves become a kind of mediated reality--we're all quite familiar with the phenomenon of the social media constructed self.  (The recent Pokemon GO mania is another good example of mediated or constructed reality).  Crawford points out that we've ceded a lot of power and agency to the corporations who manufacture these experiences for us, and that the subsequent feelings of alienation and loneliness that are the hallmarks of our modern age are natural results of this loss of agency.  "For such a self-choosing from a menu of options replaces the kind of adult agency that grapples with things in an unfiltered way" (WBYH, 117).  

The irony of all this radical atomization and mediated reality is that individuality is actually in decline.  We are unable to attend to things that are less engaging than the menu of options presented to us, and "[w]hen we inhabit a highly engineered environment, the natural world begins to seem bland and tasteless,  like broccoli compared to Cheetos.  Stimulation begets a need for more stimulation; without it, one feels antsy, unsettled, hungry almost" (WBYH, 17).

Crawford notes that it takes Herculean effort to resist the cultural pressure to conform, to become the late modern consumer self, presented through layers of filters, abstract from the real world.  Who wants to eat broccoli when piles of cake are sitting there, calling your name?  "What sort of outlier would you have to be, what sort of freak of self-control, to resist those well-engineered cultural marshmallows?" (WBYH, 17)

So where does that leave us?  We can't very well shove Pandora back into her box and return to a premodern world.  Our world is thoroughly disenchanted, as Jamie K. Smith notes in How (Not) to be Secular.  In order to reclaim our attention and agency, Crawford suggests submission to authority, two words that seem antithetical to the whole Western ideal of the fully autonomous individual (WBYH, 24).  If, in our modern Western mindset, autonomy (self-rule) is good, and heteronomy (rule outside the self) is bad, because is threatens the autonomous self (WBYH, 24), then we have to consider that autonomy might be antithetical to true human flourishing.  "To emphasize this (heteronomy) is to put oneself at odds with some pervasive cultural reflexes.  Any quick perusal of this self-help section of a bookstore teaches that the central character in our contemporary drama is a being who must choose what he is to be, and bring about his transformation through an effort of will.  It is a heroic project of open-ended, ultimately groundless self-making.  If the attentive self is in a relation of fit to a world it has apprehended, the autonomous self is in a relation of a creative mastery to a world it has projected" (WBYH).  This is very much in keeping with the idea of liquid modernity.  We are no longer pilgrims on The Way, but rather tourists, flitting about from one place to another, no particular destination in mind.

How do we reclaim our ability to attend to the embodied world, to submit to authority outside ourselves, to seek God in Creation as the chief end of our lives, and seek heaven as the destination of our embodied souls?

We must first resist the temptation to mechanize human behavior--to understand people in purely mechanical or technological terms.  Humans are not machines.  People are often unpredictable and react in ways that can't be reduced to an algorithm or steam engine metaphor.  The ways we talks about ourselves and our minds must be informed by this fact.  We need to stop deferring to machines and bowing down to the anonymous masters who made them.  Yes, machines make our lives easier and more convenient in many ways, but once a machine starts constructing reality for large numbers of people, it is a problem.

Let us train our minds to attend.  This means reading real books, putting aside screens for a specific period of time--the mind will resist such mental exercise, but it is ultimately good to retrain the mind to attend to longer-form reading and to be able to ruminate on it in a quiet environment.  We will need to prepare for discomfort during this process, as we retrain ourselves away from constant stimulation and entertainment toward quiet contemplation in order to attend to the state of our souls and our journey of theosis.  This will be hard, as we live in a highly processed post modern environment that goes to great lengths to prevent silence and stillness without mediated reality.

Let us celebrate art that explores the object truth in reality--art that looks to reveal that which might not be obvious by inviting the viewer in.  Let us gravitate toward art as memesis--what Taylor describes as reflecting what is already out there rather than fetishizing art as creation: originality with whatever subjective connection the mind projects.  

Let us inhabit our bodies, with their frailties and strengths, in order to learn to tame the passions of body and mind.  Let us not be disgusted by the work of the Creator in making us, and instead embrace physical reality, from birth to death.  It will be messy, unsanitary, and real.  Let us be present at the deathbed, and relearn the ways of preparing the body for death.  Let us stop running from and fearing death.

Let us leave our atomized selves behind and become familiar with our history, the physical landscape, and our place in it.  Let us work with our hands, learning within a longer tradition of making.  Let us be humble and acknowledge the wisdom of our elders.  Let us be prepared for the general messiness of real human interaction, and be willing to walk with people through trials and triumphs, despite whatever personal discomfort or inconvenience that may bring.  

While we may not inhabit an enchanted world, we can work to re-enchant ourselves, our communities by acknowledging the ongoing work of the Creator in the world, of training the spiritual eye of our hearts to see what the eye does not see, to be sensitive to the spiritual dimension.  

Let us journey on as pilgrims, together.

References:

Juliana Bibas, "The Orthodox Clock and the Map of the World." Road to Emmaus Journal, Vol XII, No. 1 (#44).

Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2015.

Rod Dreher, "Pilgrims Vs. Tourists", American Conservative Blog, September 8, 2016

Jamie K. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor.  Michigan: Eerdmans, 2014.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Talking Tuesday: Crawford and the Attentional Commons

I'm still working through my notes on Matthew B. Crawford's excellent book, The World Beyond Your Head, but how's about I leave you with a little appetizer to whet your whistle?

A great deal of the book is focused on how our attention is constantly being diverted by external forces, and how those externals have a negative impact on our well being as humans.  Crawford works through a lot of examples of how this plays out, sometimes to devastating consequences.

Writes Crawford:

"Yet, it does not occur to use to make a claim for our attentional resources on our own behalf.  Nor do we yet have a political economy corresponding to this resource, one that would take into account the peculiar violations of the modern cognitive environment.  Toward this end, I would like to offer the concept of an attentional commons.

There are some resources we hold in common, such as the air we breathe, and the water we drink.  We take them for granted, but their widespread availability makes everything else we do possible.  I think the absence of noise is a resource of just this sort.  More precisely, the valuable thing that we take for granted is the condition of not being addressed."

Crawford notes that the right to not be addressed is being constantly trampled upon by global corporations eager for eyeballs on advertisements; every blank space, every quiet moment is slowly being monetized.  That monetization has a tremendous affect on our ability to attend and self-regulate.  Crawford goes on to say:

"Self-regulation, like attention, is a resource of which we have a finite amount.  Further, the two resources are intimately related.  Thus, if someone is tasked with controlling her impulses for some extended period of time, her performance shortly thereafter on some task requiring attention is degraded.

Without the ability to direct our attention where we will, we become more receptive to those who would direct our attention where they will--to omnipresent purveyors or marshmallows [referring to the famous "marshmallow experiment" of the 1960s]"

~Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, pp 11, 16

Stay tuned--I'm hoping to strategize some ways to reclaim attentional commons, even if only in the home, or in small ways, plus I have a lot more I'd like to write about the book.

Talking Tuesday: Piketty's Crumbs

Economist Tim Kane critiques so-called "inequality economists" like Thomas Picketty who argue that we are no better off than our forebearers of a century ago. Kane points out that this sort of neo-progressive thinking is ignorant at best, and willfully misleading at worst. 

“Three years ago, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) made its author the most famous economist in the world. The book caused a sensation by highlighting rising income and wealth inequality in the United States and Europe, especially in its jarring claim that inequality is just as bad today as it was a hundred years ago. Piketty writes: ‘The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910. Basically, all the middle class managed to get its hands on was a few crumbs.’

“These two sentences sum up a profound irony—the central contradiction of modern progressives. They do not believe in progress. A century ago, America’s first progressives believed very much in the power of their reforms. Theodore Roosevelt was proud to protect the environment. John Dewey was busy promoting universal education. Alice Paul was busy fighting for a woman’s right to vote. They succeeded. Today, neo-progressives would have us forget all that, and maybe it’s because economic hindsight is anything but clear.

“As a professional economist, I find myself haunted by Piketty’s book. After reflecting on the issue many, many times, attending conferences, and reading dozens of scholarly papers, I keep coming back to his disturbing comparison of our time to the year 1910. Why 1910? He could have picked 1960 or 1800, I suppose, but the year 1910 seemed to float in the back of the mind like a silent paradox. Have we nothing but crumbs to show for a century of capitalism?

“One way to value the progress enjoyed by everyday people is to imagine having to do without all of the material things we have that our ancestors lacked. How much money would you be willing to accept to give up indoor plumbing for a year? Having water on tap in every home in 2010 offers us no point of comparison to 1910. The current crisis of toxic tap water in Flint, Michigan has caused an uproar, but it’s in part a story that shows how much we take clean tap water for granted. Most homes have five or more taps between the kitchen, bathroom sinks, shower, and washing machine. The cost of tap water across the United States is roughly half a penny per gallon, which is surely far less than the actual value we get from it. But few homes in 1910 had any taps. Treating water with chlorine to cleanse it of toxins was first done in 1908.

“How much money would you demand to give up modern public goods such as highways or emergency fire and ambulance services? How much is air conditioning worth to you? What about penicillin? Entertainment of any kind that is not live? The ability to travel to Australia from Minneapolis in a day’s time for the price of five men’s suits? Recorded music, movies, and cable television? How much would you have to be paid to surrender the Internet for a month? No Facebook. No Netflix. No email. No Google searches. No Google Maps.

“These are Piketty's crumbs."

~Tim Kane, Piketty's Crumbs, Commentary Magazine, April 14, 2016

Read the whole thing.

The very fact that many of us sit in temperature controlled environments, sleeping in comfortable beds, with the leisure to read such things on tiny screens with vast computing power that we can carry around in our pockets proves Piketty wrong.  I'm not an apologist for capitalism--I think unfettered capitalism has very serious issues--but it does unquestionably bring about economic progress and a better quality of life overall.  Let us remember the past, and be wary of the tunnel logic and ahistoricism of our age.  We forget at our peril.

Yarn Along: Sweater Progress and Crawford

I'm making slow but steady progress on the Saucy Librarian sweater.  (I know I've said it before, but the title of the pattern really is most unfortunate).  I've tried it on a few times, and I'm just not sure about it.  The yarn feels better against my skin than the Sapphire sweater (it is also Wool of the Andes, but in DK weight, and the Aurora Heather colorway), and I like the collar and fit a bit better, but it was very difficult to accurately measure the length of the body and sleeves while on the needles, so both have come out slightly shorter than ideal.  I'm also not sure that such a dark green is the best color for my complexion--it reads almost black against my skin, and black definitely does not do me any favors.  If nothing else, it will be a good learning experience.

I returned some knitpicks yarn that I bought during their sale, as I ended up not liking any of the colors (my monitor must really be off right now).  I did buy some yarn from Webs yesterday that I think might work better.  I just found out that my beloved Stockbridge yarn is being discontinued, so I'm trying to decide whether to stock up on that or not.  I did buy the red-purple colorway to make another pullover sweater at some point, but I'm considering one of the lighter blues as well.

I picked up Matthew B. Crawford's second book again this morning, and am riveted.  I had started it last fall, and then set it aside in favor of other things, but am now getting back to it.  My husband said it was easily the best book he read last year.  I read Crawford's first book, Shop Class as Soul Craft, last summer and got a lot out of it.

I continue to plug away at War and Peace--I'm nearly half way now!  I'm about 40 pages from the end of Volume 2.  Natasha has just encountered Anatole Kuragin for the first time, so I'm sure the going is going to be gritty for the rest of this section.  And yes, that is an empty bias tape card holding my place in the book--they make excellent bookmarks!

(As a side note, I thought the recent BBC production of the same was very well done overall, and so far tracks very well with the novel, but I thought the actor playing Kuragin was miscast.  He is supposed to be extremely good-looking, and I didn't really think he was that appealing.

That aside, Episode Seven was stunning: breathtaking beauty in its emotional and spiritual scope. I won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it, but both times I watched it, I had to take a few days to process the episode before moving on to the final one.  I'm so eager to see how those scenes were written in the novel!  I feel certain there is even more depth and beauty to be found in the written words.)

And finally: the ductless AC on the back of the house is finished!  It took 2 and a half days, starting Bright Wednesday.  I forgot how disruptive it is to have workmen in the house all day long, but I'm hoping that these units will help us have a better summer.  After nine AC-less years in the Swamp, I'm ready for some help with the humidity!  Because we have a row house, it wasn't possible to put units on the front half of the house, but we do have two small floor units for the second and third floor front rooms, and the living room generally stays pleasant during the summer anyway.  We have ceiling fans in every room of the house, so that helps too.  

It's funny, though because the weather is still feeling very late winter/early spring like, rather than late spring/early summer-like, as usually the case by the second week in May.  I'm still in tights and long sleeves, and sometimes heavy wool sweaters, and I'm wearing lots of layers at night.  It's been very damp, so it just gets into my bones and makes me feel cold, even though the highs are getting into the low 60s some days.  I'm not complaining--I'm not really a fan of the hot weather, but it just feels weird.  I also planned my spring rotation badly, because I assumed a more normal weather pattern for this time of year. Oh well.  It goes that way sometimes.  I guess my spring rotation is just going to be the Rotation of a Thousand Swaps.

I still have that last skirt to sew for my summer rotation, but I've just not had the time or energy to get out my sewing machine since Holy Week.  I'm hoping to get it done before the end of next week.  It's really a two-hour project, but skirt fitting takes a certain type of concentration that I'm a bit short on at the moment.  

I'm kind of in clean-out mode, so I'd like to tackle the bathroom cabinets later this week as well.  I somehow ended up with a lot of appointments stacked up this week as well, so it seems like all my free time is taken up with those.  It's okay--they have to get done as well!  I keep telling myself that All The Things will get finished in their own time.  My focus at the moment is making sure I don't exhaust myself, and to make time and space for reading and thinking.  And Russian.

I've got three loads of clean laundry calling my name, so I'd better put on my hiking boots and scale Washmore once again.  I've gone back to the beginning of The Americans, because it has been a while since I started the series; I am finding new things to like in the first season, since I understand the plot trajectory better now.  Plus, I'm really crushing on Keri Russell's clothes in the series.  I feel some late 1970s/early 1980s fall fashions coming into my rotation later this year.  Bring on the cowl neck sweaters, midi skirts, and tall boots!

Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along!

Talking Tuesday: Alan Jacobs and the Internet Commons

Alan Jacobs weighs in on the role of technology in day-to-day life.  He's spent the last year easing away from smart phones, social media platforms, and generally going old-school in his intellectual life.  And enjoying the fruits, I think.  

Writes Jacobs: 

"But often when I go out I don’t bring my backpack. I head for the coffee shop with my dumb phone, my notebook, and a pen. I sip coffee and think and write. If my mind wanders and I wonder what’s in my RSS feed, I can’t check, so I have to go back to writing. Sometimes I bring a book too, and read it. If I get tired of it, I don’t have anything else to read, so I either keep going anyway or get the notebook back out. Or just sit there and drink my coffee and watch the unphotographed world go by."

~Alan Jacobs, My Year in Tech, Snakes and Ladders Blog, December 23, 2015

 I really appreciate his blog post (as well as the referring post).  He articulates a lot of what I'm often trying to say about technology and how our public and private discourse is negatively affected by it.  For all that I think social media or smart phones can be a useful tool to stay in touch with friends and family far and wide, I think it cannot be substitute for in-person fellowship, and we mustn't allow the noise of the internet to take over the quiet space in our heads.  We don't need to speak in public about everything.

  

Jacobs goes on to suggest a modus operandi for communication over the internet:

"I want to suggest some alternative ways of thinking about these matters, and related ones:

I don’t have to say something just because everyone around me is.

I don’t have to speak about things I know little or nothing about.

I don’t have to speak about issues that will be totally forgotten in a few weeks or months by the people who at this moment are most strenuously demanding a response.

I don’t have to spend my time in environments that press me to speak without knowledge.

If I can bring to an issue heat, but no light, it is probably best that I remain silent.

Private communication can be more valuable than public.

Delayed communication, made when people have had time to think and to calm their emotions, is almost always more valuable than immediate reaction.

Some conversations are be more meaningful and effective in living rooms, or at dinner tables, than in the middle of Main Street."

~Alan Jacobs, I'm Thinking it Over, American Conservative Blog, January 4, 2016

I'm an introvert, so taking the slow road, the quieter road is always going to be what I seek, but I think it is good for all of us to cultivate a rich inner life, to articulate parts of that inner life well, even if only to ourselves.  It is how we grow and move forward in the spiritual life.

Talking Tuesday: Facebook is broken

Found on Google images ages ago.

Donna is my friend and fellow academic (and a frequent commentator on this blog).   She and I have long discussed the intersection of technology and humanity as well as a diverse range of topics unrelated to academia.  

She is professionally interested in social media, and I've long followed her thoughts on Facebook in particular.  Coincidentally, we both changed the way we used Facebook in the past year, and while she has taken a full hiatus this summer, I've really tried to change the way I use it.  I disliked the heavy feeling I had almost every time I was on it, and sadness was a monkey on my back.  I didn't like the schizophrenic feeling I had of trying to keep all my past and present selves together.

Donna recently posted a long Facebook update that she later turned into a blog post, detailing her experience being off Facebook, and also how much she has soured on Facebook-as-platform.  Despite that, she chooses to stay active, but will be more deliberate in how she uses it.  

She writes:

"So, I just can't do it anymore, where 'it' means trying to get this tool I've studied as both a researcher and a user, since 2009 and 2005 respectively, to work the way I wish it did.

I've decided not to leave Facebook entirely though, because the other thing I realized during my Facebook hiatus this summer is that I do still wish to share things about my home life, my family, and some things about work (though FYI: most of my work-related sharing is on Twitter these days), with the people I've chosen to connect with on here.

I also use this account as a network node where I connect with those persons I want a way to be in contact with, whether they be new professional colleague-friends or other types of cool folks I meet and get to know through and in my days. I plan to continue to utilize the site in this manner.

But, I'm giving myself permission to do something I've never done on here before: I am going to share what I want to share, with no plans to view everyone else's posts *in aggregate* (that is, via any feed-type options this site offers users--because, as I said, they are all broken for me, for one reason or another).

Instead, I'll be keeping up with folks individually, deliberately, and mindfully, by visiting your profiles directly.

Basically, I'm stepping out of the stream, but still want to camp out on the bank and do my own thing at my own camp, so to speak, and visit your camps directly from now on (house calls!), versus trying to have a meaningful meeting while caught up in the current."

~Donna Witek, "Facebook is Broken," August 21, 2015, Information Constellation blog.

For me, Facebook started out as a way to stay in touch with my college chums--I was part of a close group, and we stayed in touch long after graduation, mostly through round robin style e-mails and Christmas letters.  The first person to invite me to Facebook in 2008 was one of those people.  I was eager for the chance to have a more meaningful interaction with the group of people who had meant a lot to me in college and the intervening years.  I was also stuck at home with a very colicky baby in a new city and lonely.  It felt like a lifeline.  Some of those older friendships have deepened over time, and I've made some new friends in the meantime, and I'm grateful to Facebook for standing as the platform for that.  

Over time, however, my experience of Facebook has grown less positive, particularly as the algorithms have changed, and the privacy settings more ephemeral.  I've developed a like-dislike relationship with it, as I feel it is a convenient way to keep up with a lot of people, and I've had some hugely positive interactions there, as well as support during times of trial, but I dislike the daily emotional toll it takes on me.

Now, I make a point of logging out of Facebook every time I go in to respond to a post or group.  It helps me not to mindlessly use it throughout the day--I have to be quite intentional to type in the login and password every time.  I don't read my newsfeed very often and I've mostly stopped posting status updates, although I do occasionally post photos, ask a question, or respond to something someone else posts on my wall.  I cannot give up Facebook entirely--there are too many members of my extended family as well as a few friends who rarely use e-mail to communicate any more, and it is a convenient way to stay in touch with a few people from way back.  

I do think that we aren't meant to hold all of our past and present selves together, and that we aren't meant to hold on to every relationship throughout our lives.  Some friendships are seasonal, and I think it is important to acknowledge that.  When Piglet was very tiny, there was a group of women who were very important to me--we were all learning the motherhood thing together and needed a lot of support from one another.  We've mostly lost touch with one another as our kids have grown and gone in different directions, but that is okay.  I think it is way of things.  Some friendships grow with time and attention--I think Facebook can be a useful tool in those instances as well.

Perhaps at some point the future, I will go back to using Facebook as I once did, but for now, this is the best approach for my own mental health and sanity.

By the Work of My Hands

My friend Willfulmina (her blog handle, not her real name!) writes a wonderful blog about her doing and making.  She spins and knits, bakes, cooks, and sews, and generally works hard to surround herself with handmade or craftily re-purposed things.  One thing I really admire about her approach to crafting is that it is in service of the life she has made with her family, rather than something outside of it.  It is very much an older approach to making and doing; one that seeks to serve the needs of the household and to enhance what is already there, rather than simply add to the "stuff" in the household (not that there isn't a place for this sort of making, but sometimes, the means don't serve the ends).  

She writes:

"The life I have cobbled together is full—of delicious babies wearing handmade clothing, of creating—every which way, all day long, of a husband who is proud to wear the things I make him out in public— then texts me when people compliment them.  I really love my life and I am proud of it.  I want to share more of it here.  So to the man who said I had my hands full—yes!  They really are.  And I like them that way."

I really love thinking about creating in this way--as a service to the family, as a way to support the life you lead.  I always struggle to find the balance between creating for the sake of having busy hands or closet variety, and creating in the service of adding something to the world or learning something new. 

I recently finished reading Matthew B. Crawford's first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft.  I have his next book in my stack, and am eager to read it, especially after finishing this one.  He writes about the ways in which trade work is undervalued in our current economic system, and how (the vastly more popular) knowledge work is so devoid of human agency and meaning.  

"What follows [this introduction] is an attempt to map the overlapping territories intimated by the phrases "meaningful work" and "self reliance."  Both ideals are tied to a struggle for individual agency, which I find to be at the very center of modern life....Both as workers and as consumers, we feel we move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces.  We worry that we are becoming stupider, and begin to wonder if getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on getting a handle on it in some literal and active sense." (7, emphasis in original text).

I think there is goodness in conquering a craft, in taking the time and attention to learn and learn, and learn some more, and to continually plumb the depths you do not know and still want to learn.

Writes Crawford:

"This seems to capture the kind of iterated self-criticism, in light of some ideal that is never quite attained, whereby the craftsman advances in his art.  You give it your best, learn from your mistakes, and the next time get a little closer to the image you started with in your head....Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right" (13, 20).

He writes about how trade craft is something that is visceral, creative, and integrative, as well as being soul-satisfying at the end of the day:

"We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so that we can be responsible for it.  This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home.  Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy" (8).

Another point he makes is that tools are something integral to the human experience, and that to remove agency from tools (and the wielder of said tools) is to remove meaning, creativity, and to objectify or monetize everything.  He notes that so much of what we think of as "creativity" is really just "choosing", and that those choices are largely dictated to us by a bevy of marketing executives whose purpose is not to foster the creative self, but rather to make money (68).  He notes that as our society has become monetized, so too our wants and needs become disordered and chaotic, and we lose our ability to create, to have agency not only over our stuff, but over the doing in our lives.  He takes his argument a step further in his discussion of tools and technology:

"Countercultural people on the Left and Right alike complain about "the problem of technology."  The complaint usually centers on our alleged obsession with control, as though the problem were the objectification of everything by a subject who is intoxicated with power, leading to a triumph of "instrumental rationality."  But what if we are inherently instrumental, or pragmatically oriented, all the way down, and the use of tools is really fundamental to the way human being inhabit the world....If [Anaxagoras and Heidegger] are right, then the problem of technology is almost the opposite of how it is usually posed: the problem is not "instrumental rationality," it is rather that we have come to live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumentality, the embodied kind that is original to us.  We have too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar" (68-69, emphasis in original text).

There is so much good in this book, I can't say enough about it.  I think his cosmology dovetails very nicely with my friend's way of making and doing.  It is what I aspire to--that the work of my hands would be in service to the life of our family, of our ethos, of our household, and that, at the end of the day, I would find it all very satisfying and soul-feeding. 

Sometimes I get in my own way, overthinking, over-analyzing everything.  And sometimes the reality is that I can't do all the things I want to do when I want to do them because the reality of modern life is one lived largely in isolation.  I think what is hard is the sense I have that what I make is optional, or just a hobby to do when the household tasks are complete.  I want to really take in this mindset that what I make is part of the tasks of the household, and that it is all integrated somehow.  There is also a kind of internal tension for me, in that I primarily make things for myself (although I am constantly fixing or repairing things for others in my family), and the making feeds me, but when I make for others, it doesn't; energy goes out rather than coming in. I do occasionally make things for others, as a favor, or the odd commission, but I can't make a habit of it because of how much it takes out of me.  I can't explain it, and wish I could.  

It is true that my children are still at an age where they demand a ton from me, at all hours of the day and night, and there are the health issues and so forth, so there isn't much going into me outside of my own (admittedly selfish) creating.  I do hope that as we all get a bit older that I will be able to better integrate my making into the needs of the household. 

All book quotes from:
Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft. New York: Penguin, 2009.