Missives from a Luddite
An introduction...
I believe we are living in the dark ages of too much information, and it is making us all dumber and sadder. We desperately need to acquire and teach different skills to find good information and engage our brains to sort, analyze, and process the flood of information that comes at us minute to minute. Our need for a healthier discourse and way of mental operating is imperative. We need to understand these problems, how technology commodifies our attention for profit, and how our current information consumption habits lead us astray. In an age when we have access to all the information in the world, the result has been a narrowing of the mind and an atrophying of the brain.
I am coming at this problem from the intersection of education, media, American studies, and parenting. For over a decade, I taught journalism at an affluent and prestigious public high school in an equally affluent and prestigious inner-ring suburb in the Midwest. My students were the children of doctors, lawyers, and professors. They went on to matriculate to Harvard, Yale, Princeton – and the other various equivalents of these institutions. As bright as these young people were, many were also deeply troubled, and their ability to resist the pull of the wildly addictive substance that is the iPhone, and the social media applications it contained, was becoming increasingly limited. I could tell that the addiction to their devices limited their ability to think as they spent their days marinating in a curated stream of content designed just for them.
As a graduate student in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, I was simultaneously considering how these phenomena broadly affect the nation's culture. The same ills that seemed to be facing this young generation of students were symptoms of the same sickness that was rotting the rest of our institutions. Our politics, our collective belief in expertise, research, science, discourse, and our ability to see the common humanity in others – all of the structures that hold society together, felt like they were coming apart.
I could see myself in the grips of these disruptive tools. My attention was fractured. I felt anxious. It disturbed me as a person who is not, at baseline, very anxious. The anxiety rose in me every time there was a bing of distraction. A notification, a text, a nudge. Each one pulled me away from the task at hand and limited my ability to do my best work. I didn’t know how to escape. I tried to hide. Could I hide under my desk to do focused work? I increasingly had to structure my environment to avoid distraction, yet I would feel anxious anticipating the potential distraction.
If I felt this way, as a person abstaining from social media and consciously trying to limit my relationship with my phone, Gen Z would have even fewer tools to fight these disruptions and certainly less insight into the shift in their lived experience. Their lived experience was to exist only in an environment of distraction. Very few of them knew any different.
I can tell our collective attention spans are also diminishing. And I know that as our attention spans diminish, so does our ability to solve big problems. A commitment to scholarship, our educational institutions' essential foundation, is under threat. We are losing our ability to focus, which is necessary to do profound work.
The same forces undermining our educational institutions were doing so not just by manipulating the most base forces of our biology. They were also undermining the experiences that make us most human. As we replace our human interactions with machines, we take the most fundamental institutions of life – education, work, culture – and flatten them. The same results happen in our relationships — friendship, family, and partnerships.
I started this substack because I want something different for the future.
Former Google executive James Williams put it this way; the ax existed for 1.4 million years before anybody thought to put a handle on it. The web, by contrast, is “less than ten thousand days old.”
We need a handle for the ax.
Keep looking for connection,