I can’t stop thinking about that article. Because I have essentially been living without a smartphone for the past five/six years.
It has changed me. But let’s analyze what happened with time recently (in terms of human history):
The original promise of acceleration was always more free time. Washing machines would give us more leisure, email would cut our labour, automation would give us a 4 day work week, and so on. None of this really happened; a rising floor of expected output swallowed the gains, and so we signed up for more, and we ended up running faster to stay in the same damn place.
And somewhere in the early 2000’s, this crossed a cursed threshold. Before that point, tech was mostly compressing the time between events – the telegram, and the fax, and the email and the IM each shortened the gap between when you sent something and when it arrived; the gap was the thing getting smaller and smaller.
After the smartphone, the gap just…vanished. The feed became real-time, and the notifications constant. Information stopped arriving as discrete, gapped packets and started arriving as a continuous drip, and then a steady flow, and then a firehose, timed by the network’s ambient activity and no longer by anything you happened to be doing. And suddenly, you weren’t receiving mail anymore. You were drowning in a raging river of information.
People are drowning in digital seas. People are not in the now anymore. Eye contact is rare, no matter how many people around. The social now is almost gone.
I’m in a city surrounded by folks and none know what is going on around them at instant t. They don’t. It used to be very dangerous to not know what’s going on around you. Way back, it meant death. Now it means you might bump into someone with your noise-cancelling headphones and your eyes addicted to 60Hz motion over a shiny rectangle.
I have fought against every single notification system since they started to show up. Blackberry blinking light was the first one. I would bury that phone into some pillows so that I wouldn’t be distracted. I killed them all. I don’t know why, outside of a very strong gut feeling, but I couldn’t get over being distracted by a red dot of FOMO. I never gave up to it. It is a Pavlovian reflex for everyone else to stop everything and check a notification. I don’t do that. I probably never will, I cured myself.
I am alone. The article continues:
And ironically – we consented to this. We signed up for it without thinking twice. The telegram was imposed on us by commerce, the factory clock by management, but we installed and embraced the push notifications ourselves, app by app, in exchange for convenience – in exchange for acceleration – in exchange for collapse.
This is the number one reason all the social media CEOs keep abusing us and don’t think much about us. We complain, we threaten, but we also do this to ourselves, and keep doing it, like dumb fucks. Everyone born after 1995 has absolutely zero digital hygiene. They are never here. The here and now doesn’t really exist to them.
If it doesn’t, you can’t practice or learn because those behaviors demand you to be in the now. Young folks just try some hacking to get over something (grades, dating) instead of having long-term, holistic views. That makes them very easy target for manipulation, which is off the hook these days (from politics to betting apps). Which leads to massive mental gymnastics to make it all make sense, and now you are depressed beyond repair.
That is social regression. For the first time of my life, I see it, truly.