"All dialogue is psychological warfare" works, as long as you're content to characterize a mother comforting a scared child as psychological warfare (or competition to impose a particular memeplex). If that doesn't seems a little forced, then you've probably built the equation in as an axiom, rather than as a useful analogy, with "warfare" holding independent meaning. If it does seem forced and you draw a line to say some dialogue is psychological warfare and some isn't, who could disagree?
"Warfare is dialogue"; "Warfare is chess"; "Warfare is mating ritual" . . . All good punchlines, in their place.
Sure. She's acting to achieve a goal she wants (and every action can be analyzed that way, no matter how altruistically ethical--it's built into the scope of "to want"). But why is that "warfare" in any respect. If the psychology of all social action is warfare, isn't it equally diplomacy, or gaming, or compensating, or self-deception (which seems to be where Debord was headed, in a Sartre-like way)?
More basically, the idea that all intentions are selfish (one step from your description of the mother) is a common argument, as indicated above, but this involves a willful blindness to the meaning of "selfish" in natural language, while hoping that the statement will be interesting precisely because of the affective connotations entailed in that meaning.
And thanks for taking the bite. I surprised myself when I actually hit the Post button for such a picky point. I was annoyed by the review, where I felt a string of interesting ideas were each being stretched beyond validity, so I quibbled with you instead when I thought your aphorisms were headed that way too.
It's Sunday evening, Machine Interface, and I'm afraid I'm going to bloviate.
There are thousands of words we could do away with because they are not analytically useful. But we don't, because we use language principally for living, not for analysis. When we tell a kid who snatches a toy away, "Don't be so selfish!" we're teaching a lesson about social protocol in a way that can be understood. That's the word-world we live in, and there's no escaping; if there's a we (or an "I") at all, that "we" exists in a world with conventional words baked in. That's precisely the world in which the sentence, "Every act is selfish," is interesting. When you unpack it into "degrees of long- and short-term X, Y, Z" you get binders of spreadsheets no one will read outside of a paradigm-enclosed disciplinary group: the moment it expresses its findings for an audience it will have to reintroduce the unpurified words to demonstrate interest.
Nor can we identify and quantify all the components of intentions to perfect a model for describing them, because they arrive in a protean stream of complexity, without an objective observer. I think that to say that natural language presents a layer of moral obfuscation is to deny that morality is "real." It is indeed a "construct," like everything else of interest to people, but it's intrinsic to social experience. I don't think we actually have much of a clue about what's "really going on," which is just as well, since I think in principle there's no way to describe that--its reality would always be contingent, a function of the individual/species of observer who/that observes it.
As for spreading genes, while our particular dispositions do or don't favor spreading them, I think very few things exist *to* favor spreading them. My urge to bloviate must be part of a package that is the outcome of a natural selection process (I'm here, so the lottery "wanted" me!), but I'm not bloviating in order to hook up or even, when it comes to memes, to propagate the model of online bloviation. (I'm more likely to have promoted the model of the tl;dr eyeroll two paragraphs ago.) Of course, if I were marketing a new comic series, "The Bloviating Man," I'd design an ad campaign to spread the meme, but I doubt my marketers would encourage me to make personal bloviation an element of it, despite my advanced skills.)
If there is justice in the world, this rant deserves to be refuted in a sentence or two.
In the review, you seem to be completely sidestepping the whole Marx/Hegel angle, which is very prominent in the book and conceivably necessary to deeply understand its thesis. I say "conceivably" because this is where Debord lost me. To put it mildly, his writing didn't encourage me to try to understand more of Hegel (or parts of Marx that derive from Hegel, for that matter).
The problem with post capitalism is that it is worse than capitalism. No one is stopping anyone from being post capitalist right now, nor have they for quite a while i the US. But those types of organizations generally do not thrive.
To entirely remove oneself, very hard, to mostly, quite easy. Tons of structures exist to form co-ops, hell some large power companies and other utilities in the upper Midwest are co-ops. Though of course utilities are a natural monopoly so they are a bit immune to competition.
Or you can simply go live in a shack in the woods.
Mostly you can form whatever type of utopian community and organizational structure you want (particularly if going on the anarchism rather than authoritarian axis).
No one is really stopping tons for worker owned enterprises from sprouting up.
They just tend not to work well, and provide lower wages and Stan dares of living and so people don’t find them attractive.
A lot of the large housing co-ops in my state (mostly associated with universities and set up in the 60s), have slowly collapsed due to inabilities to deal with free ridership, crime, squatting etc.
What co-ops exist in competitive areas like housing are mostly supported by charity, or huge amounts of outside technical assistance.
I mean one of the main structures non capitalists argue for is member owned or worker owned co-ops. Both of which exist and are common, but generally don’t dominate the market in their sectors.
I think the counterargument implied by the review is that we can conceive of Moloch as subject to constant selection pressures such that the remaining dysfunction is increasingly well "adapted" to resist fixing. Like, sure, it's a hell of a lot better to have "constant AI Panopticon to get you to consume and submit to the will of the state" be your immediate problem rather than "starving during the dry season" or "suppurating leg wound with no effective infection treatment," but the former is an existing problem that capitalistic impulses incentivize making even worse (much like being tethered to your phone as an email or communications medium all the time) whereas the latter are ones that have pretty obvious solutions.
Think of it like using one of those antibacterial soaps that proudly advertise "kills 99.9% of bacteria!" -- whenever I see that I can't help but think to myself "....thereby guaranteeing that only the fittest, toughest, best adapted bacteria resistant to antibacterial soap remain to reproduce..."
I Guess the TL;DR version of this as a blog post headline would be something like "Moloch as Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria."
This may be something you already know and just part of the metaphor, but those soaps don't use what we would generally call antibiotics and my impression is the bacteria that survive generally do so by not being exposed, not by being marginally resistant. The analogy I've heard is that if you dump lava on a herd of cows, one or two of the cows might get missed by the lava and survive but you're not going to evolve lava-resistant cows.
I was not actually aware of that, so the antibiotic-specific metaphor sounds like it's much more relevant than the soaps one (I'd heard that triclosan-resistance didn't seem to be much of a Thing despite its ubiquitous use in antibacterial soaps but had not / have not ever looked into the mechanism of action). The fault is mine and thank you for the clarification!
"In addition, laboratory studies have raised the possibility that triclosan contributes to making bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Some data shows this resistance may have a significant impact on the effectiveness of medical treatments, such as antibiotics."
Immune systems are doing just that: killing 99.9% (or whatever) of bacteria, thereby guaranteeing that only the toughest, fittest, best adapted bacteria resistant to immune systems remain to reproduce. And yet nobody sane would suggest that this is a bad thing, or that we'd be better of without immune systems.
This is probably correct with a caveat. Some things along some measures have simply worsened. If you care about those measures over others then society will look worse.
So choose your measure.
To my mind, the preferred yardstick in these arguments, material well-being, is clearly not enough. If suicide rates have climbed in the US for several decades, should we take this as a sure fire sign that life is worse off, and things have not improved for that time period? Or is the price of a transistor the preferred measure?
2. My guess is that controlling for well-being, different cultures now and throughout history would have varying levels of suicide.
3. If well-being is held constant but suicide is made easier culturally, technically, politically, etc suicide will increase. Now, you may claim that such a culture is inherently worse...but I don't think I buy such a claim.
We can put this a different way. What is well-being in the minds of fervent modernism apologists? It is typically things like: infant mortality, crime rates, ease of access to goods, average lifespan, and other such easy to measure qualities. There is no arguing these are good things.
But it’s easy to imagine a society where all of these factors could be increased and yet you probably wouldn’t opt to live in it. Would you choose to live in a society where everyone works remotely and lives sealed in a chamber separated from everyone else? One where all of your needs are met and you receive the best care possible? I would not, and yet deaths from injuries would be low, crime rate would be low, and all measures of access to goods could be held at arbitrary levels.
If you would not choose to live like this (and many wouldn’t) then you understand these critiques implicitly. The argument is that the tradeoff of freedom and community is the same and the difference is in magnitude. The persistent problem with this discussion is that loneliness and freedom have imprecise measures. You basically must take self-reports, which makes it easy to dismiss if you are willing, and apologists are always willing.
Then you would do well to dwell upon how suspicious it is, that from all the thousands of years and hundreds of different cultural milieu and social organizations, the one you were born into (by sheer ignorant and blind chance) is that which uniquely minimizes suffering, stupidity and immorality.
Consider that there are more societies than there are gods, your chance of being born to the right society (that which is most beautiful, merciful, rational,...) is strictly less than that of being born believing in the one true god.
That’s as bad an argument against Western exceptionalism as it is against Christianity. If you have values and metrics then there must exist a society that scores best against those metrics. And there must be (or have been) someone who lives (or lived) in that society. If that’s you, just be grateful.
The question, of course, is: Do you *really* have values and metrics ? or did you craft your values and metrics, conclusion-to-premise, to suit whatever society\religion you found yourself in ?
In software engineering you are encouraged to write tests before you write the code, because if you do it vice verca then your leftover assumptions from writing the code will muddle your tests so that they are not "testy" enough. You are also told to make sure the tests fail on trivial incorrect code, because tests that cannot fail are useless.
Are you sure your values and metrics are really independent measures of your beliefs that your society just so happens, oh very happily and coincidentally, pass ? or are they tests that cannot fail ?
>If that’s you, just be grateful.
Or be skeptical, because the odds say it shouldn't happen.
To keep it simple, let’s stick with your proposed values: “minimizes suffering, stupidity, and immorality… most beautiful, merciful, rational.” There is a society somewhere in time and space that best fits your values. It can be debated, of course, and that’s half the fun. But science, knowledge at our fingertips, Western music and art (before postmodernism), lower than ever illness and mortality rates, egalitarian Christian moral intuitions, liberalism in the rule of law, Enlightenment rationality. As with any society, you can pound on the flaws, but I still don’t know how any other society can beat peak The West in the values you proposed. That said, I do think that moment is now permanently behind us. Hopefully I’m wrong.
They were saying that the current society and structures are doing better than the past, not that they are the best possible.
And regardless you can think society has plenty of room for improvement and maximization without thinking Marxist maunderings have merit.
Ok top of that, unlike gods societies are evolving and improving and changing with the conditions.
Imagine a car salesmen telling you this is the safest car ever. You might have doubts, you might even think it is instead sole other slightly different car. What it’s not going to be is a car from 40 years ago. The quality of societies is not randomly distributed through time. You would expect the best ones (especially for current conditions), to mostly be current.
"""They were saying that the current society and structures are doing better than the past, not that they are the best possible."""
Did I imply otherwise ? the past contains "thousands of years and hundreds of different cultural milieu and social organizations".
"""you can think society has plenty of room for improvement and maximization"""
"Improvement" implies you're on the right track, that you're doing worse on a measure that you should be doing better on. But what if you're not even wrong ? not even heading remotely in the same direction you should be ? You can't "improve" a ship to fly, you have to tear it down and make it again, the sheer amount of wrong assumptions its design makes is impossible to gradually rectify.
"""without thinking Marxist maunderings have merit"""
I too sometimes don't understand marxist intellectuals or have patience for their prose. But what they are saying is irrelevant, as long as it is to the effect that something is deeply and irreversibly wrong in the way people live. You don't have to set a beautiful alarm tone to wake up, just a loud one. Marxism is and have always been just a loud alarm tone.
"""Imagine a car salesmen telling you this is the safest car ever"""
Imagine you live in a universe where community and human dignity are not quantifiable goods that get better with mass production. You live in a cramped and inferior society among countless nameless millions like farm chattel. You are controlled by monstrous alien entities called States, composed of people like animal bodies are composed of cells, caring about the welfare of people exactly as much as animals care about the welfare of their cells : not at all, unless relevant to their survival.
You were not built for this perversity, for hundreds of thousands of years your ancestors lived among people whose very flesh and blood was molded out of the same language as them. Nobody needed to craft rules on how to live with each other; or rather, nobody needed to craft rigid and easily exploitable set-in-stone (or paper or computer memory) rules. You started with the willingness to live with each other, and a natural affection only life born out of itself can hold, and the rules trickled down and evolved as needed. You look upon ants and bees, they are marvellous in their numerousy and organization, but you're not like them, your place is to live among a hundred or a thousand of your kin, governing no one but your kin, and being governed by no one but them.
The society you live in is a poor imitation of ants and bees. Everytime you complain someone points to some numbers and explains how they have gone up, how it's good that they go up, how your complaints are misguided and irrational because the only thing that matter is numbers going up, and the societies you're nostalgic for are societies where those numbers have not gone up, and thus can't be worth living in.
Can you imagine that ? Some of us don't have to, because we're living it. If you're not, count yourself lucky that you adapted to the life of ants and bees, but don't dismiss or make fun of those who long for the long lost life of humans.
When/where was this time when "human dignity" and "community" were not quantifiable goods?
As for living like chattel, not the vast majority of Americans do not live like chattel, that is just wrong. There are WAY too many people, I will agree with you there. It would be easier to setup a society of human flourishing if we cut the global population down by 90%. But in the fuck are you volunteering to start with?
>You are controlled by monstrous alien entities called States,
Not really, the state has relatively impact on my day to day life. Certainly compared to medieval village, and likely very little impact compared to whatever Marxist dystopia you are imagining.
>Caring about the welfare of people exactly as much as animals care about the welfare of their cells
Ok now you sound like you are 18 years old.
As for life being the life on ants and bees. Umm no its not really. Modern life does a TREMENDOUS job of mostly allowing people a large amount of room for personal choice and for pursuing projects that are tangential, or even directly orthogonal to what society wants or is good for it. The exact opposite of ants and bees. yes there are some sacrifices required to live in a well ordered society in a world with 8 billion humans, but um, not a ton compared to what it could be, and certainly nothing like ants of bees who cannot breed, and have zero interests outside supporting the colony.
I spend pretty much 100% of my time pursuing my own projects in a way entirely directed by me. I do need to kick back ~25% of the resources I earn to the state in exchange for the services it provides, but that seems roughly fair even if I don't approve of many things it does.
I do need to agree to not steal from my neighbors, but I also get some protection from the same. What exactly is the great sacrifice I am making here that is so terrible? That I have to listen to my boss/client? You don't think hunter gathers had to listen to people ever?
You sound so filled up with hatred for modern society, but with literally nothing but platitudes as a replacement. Which is sort of par for the course for Marxists and Marxist adjacent people.
Imagine a world where everyone can do whatever you want! (So like a world where people are stealing my stuff and I need to constantly attend to my wife/chidden to ensure they are not harmed?).
Multiple responses to this subject that I've dwelt upon for many years:
1. Do you find it suspicious that current technology is more advanced than ever before? Can you articulate the difference between technology and society with regards to "betterness"?
2. A better framing of the chances of being alive where and when is just to count (or estimate) the number of people alive in western societies vs those who have ever existed in other societies. A few estimates I've seen around around 7-8% of people who have ever lived are now alive. Guesstimating based upon population of western countries now and in the past I'd say it's at least a few percent chance. However, I think this whole endeavor doesn't work because of...
3. There's basically a zero percent chance I'd live in some other time or society since I'm a product of this time and society. Another way to say the same thing is that if my genes were instantiated in ancient Rome or somewhere and then I was magically transported to today, there's no reason to expect that I'd hold the same opinion I posted in the root comment.
All this is to say that while there is a glimmer of a point to the type of argument you're putting forth here, I *have* dwelt upon such arguments, and in this case, on balance, it doesn't weigh enough to flip me into thinking other than I do.
1- On technology : depending on how you define 'technology' and 'advanced'. There are plenty of times where technology not only didn't advance with time, but actively retrograded. Technology is not a linear path.
On technology v. society : the difference is obvious off course, it's the number of dimensions in the objects you're comparing. "Better" makes no sense unless said about single-dimensional objects : is 5 better than 4 ? yes or no, because they are single-dimensional totally-ordered quantities. But is the ordered pair (40,2) better than the ordered pair (9,11) ? any way of saying yes or no must reduce the problem of comparing ordered pairs to the problem of comparing single-dimensional quantities, or possibly several such problems.
In (some) technologies, the (cherry-picked) questions are always about single dimensional quantities : Does the airplane fly faster ? does the car drive longer ?. But can you compare a cat and a dog ? can you compare a mountain and a sun ? where would you start ?
The questions that moderns devise to compare societies are made up bullshit to make themselves feel better, "I earn more 'money' [being a sort of meaningless colored paper that people who don't give a shit about me or my labor print in abundance] than the primitive man, so hoorraay me! I won the lottery of history!"...... ??? that's about as convincing as a roman bragging that they have more emperors than any other kingdom or nation.
(2) the estimated total number of 'humans' (a fuzzy category) is 117 billion, today's 8 billions are indeed about 7% of that (~6.8% to be more percise). If you generously give 1 billion to "western societies" (a fuzzy category), then your chance is 1/117, or 0.85% percent. So not "a few percent", it's less than 1%, and that's not counting all the terrible ways of being alive in a western society.
(3) Isn't this just my point, restated differently? You think that today's society is the best possible among all past competitors because you were born in it, and so does a 1940 A.D german, and so does a 1000 A.D muslim,and so does a 100 A.D roman, and so does a 70000 B.C caveman. But all of those people are wrong : There were societies before 1940s germany that were vastly 'better' (in whatever non-arbitary metric you choose to define) than it, there were societies before 1000s islamic civilizations that were vastly better than it, there were societies before 100s roman empire that were vastly better than it. Isn't it suspicious how all societies and civilizations have betters that existed before them, except yours ?
I lost my whole comment here, so this is a shortened version:
1. It all cashes out! I can say 2022 Car Model 1 is better than 2022 Car Model 2 and both are better than 1905 Car Model 3. Cars vary across many dimensions, but I can still pick one as being better because the dimensions cash out.
Of course we can compare a cat and a dog! Everyone who owns one or the other has made that comparison!
The relevant comparison between technology and society is that both, roughly, progress and build upon that which came before.
> The questions that moderns devise to compare societies are made up bullshit to make themselves feel better,
You're continuing an argument with a group of people without considering if I'm a part of that group.
2. I shouldn't have used "western societies". Most societies of the past 100 years would meet my original comment. But I won't belabor the point since as I mentioned I think the whole framing is wrong.
3. "Isn't this just my point, restated differently?" No, I don't think so.
I'm not claiming that any of those people would or would not make the same claim I do about the relative ranking of their society. Just as in today's society, many people do not agree with me, I believe each of those societies would have people who do not have the same view of their society and that the proportion of such people would vary greatly from society to society.
I more or less include a 1940 German as being part of my current society...a more loosely connected part, but a part.
My point here isn't that my preferences were shaped by the society I developed in(though they are), but that me living in some other society is a nonsensical thing. I do not exist outside of my society.
> Isn't it suspicious how all societies and civilizations have betters that existed before them, except yours ?
Yes, it's suspicious which is why I don't take it at face value. However, it would be more suspicious if societies and humans didn't evolve to better match the needs of each other.
Just because someone is a suspect doesn't mean they're guilty. We can investigate and gather evidence to determine their guilt.
The main theme here is that societies and humans (roughly) progress. I'm better able to judge older societies from my standpoint because I can examine them and I have the ability and opportunity to do so to a degree unlike people from long ago.
I also think that the further back in time you go, the more and more likely a randomly chosen society will be worse than its predecessors. Progress in society (and humans and technology and most everything) has to...build up steam and momentum.
It's also worth stating that progress in society is noisy. Society might be worse in ten years, I can make no good prediction with any confidence. I'm much more confident that it will be better than today in a few hundred years.
Additionally, over time and geography, the edges of society are fuzzy. Just like I consider the 1940 German to be part of my society, I consider someone from modern China to be so as well and I'd likely consider someone from 2060 Brazil to be also. As such, society might have been better in 1980 USA or will be in 2035 Thailand. I'd still consider that to be my society.
But, just like the stock market, past returns are no guarantee of future performance.
There seems to be an extremely common failure mode where someone thinks they're saying, "Life sucks these days because of Capitalism/technology/whatever," when what they're actually saying is, "My life sucks these days because I'm depressed/have chosen to care about stupid shit."
Maybe I'm the weird one but most of this kind of stuff just seems like whining about non-issues.
Can you elaborate? Personally I find it pretty trivial to a) not be narcissistic on social media myself, and b) not pay too much attention to people who do.
I'm pretty confident that if I bothered to make that search I'd just turn up a bunch of people making the same mistake I was complaining about in my original comment.
Then we disagree on the corrosive impact of narcissism in today's world (except for you). and it's obvious amplification by the internet. The book title, "The Society of the Spectacle", and your comment prompted my thoughts.
I mean I'm not sure people writing silly things on the internet (or elsewhere) is the kind of thing that necessitates a "big plan" in response but to the extent that it does my strategy includes:
Narcissism has always been with us. There's no obvious reason to believe that there's more of it in some sense than ever before. Yes, there are twits who obsess over their number of followers. And those same twits used to obsess over what they were wearing, or whether they got enough of an awed reception when they entered the club.
The fact that you see the most narcissistic individuals in the media (because by definition they are the ones who try very hard to be noticed) doesn't prove your claim.
Asserting "narcissism is being amplified" and that this is "being caused by social media", and that both of these are "obvious" is not a proof, it's simply a reflection of the fact that you go along with conventional wisdom. And yes, conventional wisdom is often correct. But it's ALSO often incorrect. The primary reason the social sciences have made so little progress compared to the physical sciences is that the social sciences continue to prioritize folk beliefs and conventional wisdom, something the real sciences abandoned somewhere around Galileo.
Word. I got nothing out of this. I like the *reviewer's* style more than most or all of the others, but the work itself is so uninteresting and pointless — at least, to me — that I just couldn't enjoy the review. None of the societal criticisms or examples resonated or seemed essential (rather than, say, merely a problem with what someone on an individual level has chosen to value or how they've decided to view things).
"Or you used to, at least. Before the spectacle, your models, mentors, and rivals were real people you knew in real life. Now we have an acronym for that - IRL - because reality is everywhere in retreat."
Reflects a real change. We spend more of our time on things like electronic media rather than things and people in our immediate environment. In other terms this is a _very_ old complaint:
"In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates calls into question the propriety and impropriety of writing. Throughout his discussion with a colleague, Socrates insists that writing destroys memory and weakens the mind"
Literacy is also a technology, and allows us to read words from times and places distant from our immediate experience.
There is always a tradeoff in where we direct our attention. Communications and storage technologies let us pick and choose from words and images from a vast range of times, places, writers, and artists, selecting those of the most interest to us - but when our attention is on them, it is not on our immediate surroundings and companions. C'est la vie.
But "real" people are boring. Whenever I happen to overhear some gossip about somebody's personal life or their children I always feel that I couldn't care less. Whereas the better stories are crafted in such way as to abstract away the boring parts and focus on interesting action. Of course, one might say that this is superstimulus and bad, but so what? I like what I like, superstimulus or not, and saying that I should like something else instead won't change my preferences.
Perhaps you only find them boring because you've become so desensitized.
People in the past got more fulfilment of having a real *community* around them than people do today from hearing from the "most interesting" people on TV/the internet they can find.
People got more fulfilment from cooking the same style of food every day with their extended family/village/community than people today feel from getting a cuisine from a different part of the world delivered every night.
People got more fulfilment by listening to (or actively participating in themselves) music performed by their community in relatively simple styles and without much variety than people today get by listening to the "best" music in the world.
You like things? Great. But by and large Americans today are not happy, and the loss of having a genuine, "IRL" community to living atomistic, hedonistic and materialistic lifestyles is almost assuredly a big factor.
But did they really find fulfillment in those things, or simply were doing them because they had no other choice? It's easy to romanticize the past, but I can't help but notice that revealed preferences of people seem imply that they aren't eager to live in it. As for being unhappy, well, humans simply aren't designed for happiness, hedonic treadmill is always there to ensure that no matter how much better our lives are now by any objective measure, we're always unsatisfied.
"It's easy to romanticize the past, but I can't help but notice that revealed preferences of people seem imply that they aren't eager to live in it."
Good point! Yup, people have the option to turn off the phone or TV and talk with their neighbors - and that is not the direction average behavior has been changing. "revealed preferences" are a powerful clue!
>Perhaps you only find them boring because you've become so desensitized.
Even if that's the case, they must actually be relatively more boring anyway — and what's wrong with preferring the less boring thing to the more boring one?
I'm not so sure that we can make all these claims about who got more fulfillment, either. Is there any good evidence for "more fulfillment" -- especially corrected for the ability to notice and express unfulfillment? (That is: would a medieval peasant have had time to worry about such a thing as self-actualization and personal fulfillment, or any expectation that it should be an option for everyone?)
You can see that even in the past, when e.g. people could *stop* eating the same limited diet every day, they did. When they obtained the power or wealth to go listen to different and fancier music, they did. Conversely, I am unaware of many writings about how fulfilled someone was with having no choice but to eat the same few foods or listen to the same simple music, or many examples of people with both options choosing the latter (relative, at least, to the examples of people choosing the former).
It's possible for other forces to have caused a sub-optimal equilibrium, but ordinarily we'd not expect to see people abandon more fulfilling things for lesser ones.
"You can see that even in the past, when e.g. people could *stop* eating the same limited diet every day, they did. When they obtained the power or wealth to go listen to different and fancier music, they did. Conversely, I am unaware of many writings about how fulfilled someone was with having no choice but to eat the same few foods or listen to the same simple music, or many examples of people with both options choosing the latter (relative, at least, to the examples of people choosing the former)."
I'm mostly on your side on this issue, but in this case I don't think the facts prove what you'd like them to prove. That people of the past also abandoned simpler music as soon as they could go listen to fancier music, etc., only proves that they were also susceptible to superstimulus in the same way we are, which is exactly what you'd expect from heredity being real. Also, there are plenty of writings from at least the 18th century in Europe about how rich/powerful/upper-class people's lives tend to end up weird, alienated and somehow empty in spite (because?) of their abundance, and indeed some architectural evidence – the Little Trianon's "Hamlet of the Queen" for example, a place where the queen who remains a watchword for rococo opulence went to pretend to be a peasant. So, it seems reasonable on that basis for someone to suspect that this is at least a known problem or tradeoff of abundance, one which has simply spread as abundance increased.
The oldest text about someone deliberately choosing rustic simplicity and a lack of choice and abundance due to its salutary mental-health effects is probably the Tao Te Ching.
"People in the past got more fulfilment of having a real *community* around them than people do today from hearing from the "most interesting" people on TV/the internet they can find. "
I don't think there's been a single society where the average person was "happy", depending on where you set the slider for that word.
Could you produce some statistical evidence that Americans are significantly less happy now than they are in whatever halcyon era you'd like us to return to?
Surveys appear to suggest that Americans are less happy than usual.
Let's even stipulate that that is correct (as opposed to something like people having a changing idea of what 'very happy' should mean).
We don't get from that to the cause you claim.
I can give dozens of alternative explanations:
- people are lonelier than ever before. Blame theory: rules that made people increasingly frightened to approach others to ask for a date in any circumstances because "harassment".
- people are all experiencing anomie (ie deep connections to their culture). Blame theory: technology has created so many choices that none of us can find much in common with anyone else; we watch different movies, listen to different music, read different books; we don't live in the same culture.
- people are all experiencing anomie (ie deep connections to their culture). Blame theory: identity politics has destroyed the idea of, and attempts to maintain, a common American culture, and the inevitable result in a country as large as this is that there is no longer any common culture, certainly not one that one can take pride in and feel strengthened by.
- people feel no agency in their lives.
Blame theory: it used to be possible (even as a teenager) to simply leave a bad situation, move somewhere, start a new life. The law and child support services have rendered this ever more impossible; credentialization has rendered it ever more difficult to move from a career track you hate to something different; something (social norms? government welfare tied to a known address and suspicious of random moves?) has made people a lot less willing to move from a dead-end situation to something different the way they were still doing in the 60s.
- people feel no agency in their lives.
Blame theory: Life has become so complicated (so many forms, so many things that have to be dealt with, even for what used to be private matters like eg renovating a house) that everyone feels they can be hit with some sort of random government penalty at any time. Didn't fill in your tax form correctly; Didn't fill in some paperwork related to your kids and school; You have one month to get your backflow preventer tested and submit the report on this form; ...
- people don't have enough religion and ritual in their lives.
Good point — there *is* a real difference there, and of course it isn't an unalloyed good. Like you say: there's always a trade-off. I personally feel like "boy I sure am glad I get to make this trade-off", but it seems some feel differently.
The quote re: Socrates and writing is pretty interesting as well. That's something I sort of had in mind when reading the review / writing the comment (though I didn't have such an apt reference!) — such a complaint seems hardly worth considering, now; which makes me think similar complaints, about the Internet or smartphones or whatever, are... well, similar: rather than incisive and iconoclastic critiques of modern life, they're merely a manifestation of *every* society's vague and eternal discontent.
This is true, but I don’t think it’s important. The question is do more people share your values and views or Debord’s? A lot of people find society shitty. They are not wrong. They value or desire something else from life.
Xpym and Himaldr-2 had excellent points about revealed preferences. The simple fact that a vast number of people choose to spend a lot of time online rather than talking with their neighbors implies that the former is, in practice, more attractive to them. This doesn't apply to _everyone_, but it seems to be common.
The notion of revealed preferences is a stupid one. Alcoholics have “revealed preferences” smokers have “revealed preferences”. It’s true in a simplistic sense, but we can probably recognize that people have different preferences for short term and long term action, that they can be in conflict, and that a society which makes it easier to satisfy short term over long term preferences can lead to some dismay, even if self-inflicted.
Yes, I know what a revealed preference is, but I’m not as fascinated with what people claim it to reveal. Again, take the addict as an example. It is puerile to say to an addict’s face that they have a revealed preference for abuse. It is correct in a shallow sense, but not useful. The same goes for most claims of revealed preferences. True, but not insightful or useful, certainly not in the way that people who use the term consistently want it to be.
We can only take one action in a given moment, and always take an action, and so there is some sense in which preferences must be well-ordered. So in what way is this level of analysis useless? Because we have multiple, different desires to satisfy, and the relative importance of those desires differs depending on scope of time used in decision making. For example, satisfying my sex drive or hunger are things I think of impulsively on a day to day basis, and will plan for on a weekly basis perhaps, but for my long term goals plays a small role. Ten years down the line I have career goals which I am strongly drawn towards, and yet on a day to day basis feel no “impulse” to satisfy and require discipline instead.
Succinctly: the notion of revealed preferences is factually accurate but useless for analysis because it ignores the modular nature of our desire, and the varied ways in which that desire drives our decision making at different temporal scopes.
And once they grasped that, they would desire something else, and upon attaining that they would desire something else, and so on ad infinatum. Want and longing is the engine of the human soul and the devil driving us on with the lash, and anyone who promises "your wants will be satisfied" as the path to happiness instead of "you shall master Tyrant Want and break his scepter" is either naïve or a charlatan.
Re: "Want and longing is the engine of the human soul and the devil driving us on with the lash", I would have said something like "the incentive of all action" rather than "the engine of the human soul". I'm reading what you wrote as ambivalent about wants. Is that correct or incorrect?
Re: "you shall master Tyrant Want and break his scepter"
Wants range from the trivially satisfied to the physically impossible. The former are something more like a mild itch than a tyrant, and I see it as generally rational to satisfy those wants that are trivially satisfied - but always bearing in mind that for sufficiently difficult wants "The game is not worth the candle".
I am a Buddhist. My fundamental belief is that life is characterized by the discomfort and pain caused by our ceaseless longing and attachment and that peace and serenity can only be attained by breaking the cycle of longing and attachment, instead cultivating compassion, benevolence, and a harmonious existence with our environment. So yes, I do in fact think of Want as a bad thing.
In my view, some longings and attachments are either unattainable or not worth the effort they require, and for them, modifying one's psychology to try to break the attachment is indeed sensible. On the other hand, some wants are trivially satisfied, and I don't believe there is a reason to leave them unsatisfied.
edit: For clarity, let me give an example of what I mean by a trivially satisfied want. For a typical person in a 1st world nation, getting a glass of water is a matter of getting a glass, turning on the kitchen tap, filling the glass, and drinking the water. Satisfying the want of thirst (in that context, barring unusual circumstances like imminent surgery) seems perfectly sensible to me. It doesn't even trigger a hedonic treadmill. It is driven by a specific homeostatic drive to avoid dehydration, and slaking it doesn't create a new desire for something else.
The bit about history and the notion of time needing a broader scope than just the passing of the seasons needing to be invented was interesting. Obvious in hindsight (like all good ideas) but still interesting.
<i>There seems to be an extremely common failure mode where someone thinks they're saying, "Life sucks these days because of Capitalism/technology/whatever," when what they're actually saying is, "My life sucks these days because I'm depressed/have chosen to care about stupid shit."</i>
People's mental health, and the things that they value, are both influenced by the society they live in, which in turn is influenced by its economic structures and available technology. Choosing not to care about what society tells you to do may help, but it may not -- e.g., if it's impossible to form deep friendships because everybody's been atomised by social media and economic forces force people to move every few years for the sake of finding work, then giving up social media and staying in one place isn't going to help you deepen your friendships unless other people do the same.
That may be true, but I think the Neil Gaiman quote the review links to in a footnote is relevant here. It seems to me that a lot of these people end up with a very broad sense of malaise and dissatisfaction and I'm not confident that they're doing a good job tracing it back to the actual root causes. I suspect the truth is that in every era some people have felt like this, and often blamed it on their particular society when in fact it's much broader.
That would be one example where you could directly link depression/malaise to capitalism as it is practiced. It's quite hard to give such examples because the language is broad and there's an information maelstrom to navigate.
[I'm assuming you're broadly referring to younger people, because they're more likely to my mind to say things like "Life sucks because of capitalism".]
Again, my contention is that the causation mostly runs the opposite way. That is, there's a certain kind of person who just innately feels that everything is terrible and the world is doomed, and looks around for something in the world to justify that feeling. In today's world climate change is a prime candidate.
But if you actually look at the science, climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world, especially not from the perspective of a reasonably well off person in a first world country. This is a bit tricky to talk about because I don't want to sound like I'm saying the actual likely outcomes won't be bad- hundreds of millions of deaths in poorer countries isn't out of the question- but I do think that the kind of people I'm complaining about tend to overstate the magnitude in a way that is neither accurate nor productive.
(As an aside I'd push back on exactly how tight the connection is between capitalism and climate change- the USSR's record on environmental issues was also pretty abysmal.)
And I'm not trying to say there's no legitimate criticism of capitalism, our society, etc. There's plenty of concrete issues that are certainly very bad, including climate change as I mentioned above. I'm just saying this specific kind of overly broad and emotion driven critique doesn't seem to me to have much useful content.
[I don't think it's just young people- this book was written in the 60s, for example. But as I've alluded to, I think this is a common impulse that people will manifest differently depending on their context and the worldview they're working with. Those on the right might talk about "degeneracy" or "decadence" and so on.]
I agree. Especially the old Frankfurt School texts read like depression diaries. There is an urge to judge negatively, a search for surprising twists to the worse and even a feeling moral righteousness when breaking rules of logic is necessary to reach new depths of misery. The vagueness of this prose - all quantification is absent - allows the reader to apply it to anything around, making him feel 'understood'.
> Again, my contention is that the causation mostly runs the opposite way. That is, there's a certain kind of person who just innately feels that everything is terrible and the world is doomed, and looks around for something in the world to justify that feeling. In today's world climate change is a prime candidate.
Yeah, this is a fair point. But how would we know? It's possible that these people start depressed, and look for a cause to be more depressed. It's possible that these people are pretty positive but then they spend their formative years being barraged by negative news about the world, and their actions seem small and unimpactful by comparison, and it leads to depression. On a subjective level, I have friends who work in climate emission policy, who don't believe we can avert the more catastrophic levels of temperature rise and who live perfectly happy lives. People are strange. I just don't think it's fair to say that anyone who feels depressed about the climate was depressed anyway and simply latched onto the climate. Might be true for some people, will definitely not hold true for everyone. The actual quantities of each group are difficult to ascertain, particularly as being anxious reinforces your tendencies to look for negative stimuli.
> This is a bit tricky to talk about because I don't want to sound like I'm saying the actual likely outcomes won't be bad- hundreds of millions of deaths in poorer countries isn't out of the question- but I do think that the kind of people I'm complaining about tend to overstate the magnitude in a way that is neither accurate nor productive.
Yes, I think I understand this position, I've heard it before from friends. For instance, the case of the missing soils, where a bunch of news journals reported that the UK had sixty harvests left, which turned out to be based on... not very much. I'd be interested to see what sort of sources you looked at when reaching this conclusion ("climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world"). I don't think I broadly disagree, but I find the projected losses very difficult to stomach.
> I'm just saying this specific kind of overly broad and emotion driven critique doesn't seem to me to have much useful content.
Is this critique from newspapers? Or from writers? Or from general sentiment? Trying to determine what critique you're talking about.
> [I don't think it's just young people- this book was written in the 60s, for example. But as I've alluded to, I think this is a common impulse that people will manifest differently depending on their context and the worldview they're working with. Those on the right might talk about "degeneracy" or "decadence" and so on.]
Yes, fair enough. I was just responding to the specific quote you cited!
> It's possible that these people start depressed, and look for a cause to be more depressed. It's possible that these people are pretty positive but then they spend their formative years being barraged by negative news about the world, and their actions seem small and unimpactful by comparison, and it leads to depression.
Yeah that's certainly worth considering. But to the extent that it's true I think the kind of overly broad, poorly evidenced inchoate doomerism is probably actively making things worse, and encouraging people to take it less seriously is still the right move.
> Is this critique from newspapers? Or from writers? Or from general sentiment? Trying to determine what critique you're talking about.
Not sure I get what's being asked here. You see different forms of it in different places, mostly in essays and books like the OP but also sometimes on social media.
"climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world, especially not from the perspective of a reasonably well off person in a first world country."
I see this kind of commentary a lot on SSC and rationalist-adjacent spaces and I can't ever help but feel that it always carries a very strong implication of "well, whatever, fuck nature, who cares about the puffins or the coral anyway?" And the answer is: I do. Beyond physical trips to see such stuff, I don't watch anthropological documentaries for enjoyments but I do watch nature documentaries. This weird anthropocentric parochialism where people seem to want to live in megacities and just spend their time surrounded by nothing but concrete and other humans makes me feel like I'm sharing a planet with people who are nominally my species but with whom I have nothing other than base physiology in common.
I agree completely. I think one valid point raised by such people is that due to the way the news cycle works, some damage from climate change is overexaggerated - see my sixty harvests point above. But the baseline rate of extinctions being 100-1000x times higher than it should be (https://ourworldindata.org/extinctions#are-we-heading-for-a-sixth-mass-extinction) cannot justify a 'so what' response.
I admit I care more about the humans than the animals but I agree that both are very bad. Regardless I don't think the relative weighting of humans vs animals (and other wildlife) matters that much to the main point. Either way it will most likely be very bad but not to the point of the world being "doomed."
Do you think that if the Amazon rainforest was 1% of its current size, you would ever finish exploring it? Do you even have any intention of beginning? If 99% of the species on Earth went extinct, would you ever see or learn about any significant fraction of the 1% that remained?
I love nature, but I don't live there. The city surrounded by concrete and humans is my home. It's why I haven't died of hunger, disease, bear attack, or the hundred other ways people used to die before modernity. As such, I'm a proud anthropocentric parochialist. If we need to cut down forests and drive animals to extinction so that billions of people are raised out of poverty and given a dignified life, then cut down the forests and kill the animals.
How many hundreds of millions are you willing to starve to save the puffins? How many billions should be relegated to extreme poverty so that you can enjoy your nature walks?
I think there is a lot of merit in your comment. I'll just add that the period of 1989–2001 was unusually optimistic and lacking a great enemy. People coming of age during this time might have unnaturally high expectations of how well the world should be run.
I didn't mention any of those examples. You can criticise the systems that capitalist market structures produce without thinking that a feudal or agrarian economy is better. I think you'd be better off steelmanning my argument rather than injecting noise into the conversation. Seeing a critique of capitalism and quickly googling the USSR's record on the same thing feels a bit reductive, no?
Those aren’t frivolous examples, they are the ONLY specific real world examples we have of non
-capitalist attempts to run a large economy. And they were no better for the environment at all.
You didn’t really present any arguments. Your main problems seem to be with markets and human nature more than capitalism. And markets are so powerful we definitely don’t want to ditch those even if they are not always best totally unfettered.
What is you suggestion for how to allocate capital and ownership in a way that magically stops climate change and still provides people with a lifestyle people will accept?
"You can criticise the systems that capitalist market structures produce without thinking that a feudal or agrarian economy is better."
I don't agree. "Obvious root causes that can be traced back pretty straightforwardly to capitalism/capitalistic tendencies" only has any meaning if all or most non-capitalistic alternatives would not trigger the root causes. If all or most non-capitalistic alternatives also create climate change, then climate change cannot be traced back to capitalistic tendencies.
> To be clear, it's not climate change causing this, its concern over climate change causing this. Subtle but different.
Sure, a good point. If you wanted to you could say in response that the current western media ecology is capitalist, and that drives the concern. I don't think we're going to get anywhere on this line of argument.
The reason I said that the 'language was broad' is because I don't think 'capitalism' is a very useful term beyond a surface analysis. I mentioned it because Paul Goodman referred to it, and I should have phrased my comment differently because various people have now turned up to do the 'capitalist versus state-capitalist versus communist' arguments and I'm not interested.
Exactly. I made a book club with some of my close friends. All for of us live in different cities, and yet most weeks we all get together and talk for an hour or more. Other friends and family I play online video games with and it lets us stay in touch and spend quality time together regularly even though we can't meet in person more than once or twice a year at most.
Critics would say that your "friendships" are not real friendships- those can only be formed in real life and organically. By seeking out deliberate companionship and becoming someone's friend for the sake of being their friend, via digital channels, you are merely performing a hideous mockery of friendship, like a changeling trying to ape the actions of real humans. You have no genuine attachment to your friends, but merely fear being alone, and thus cannot and will never be able to form a genuine connection with someone.
If this sounds cruel and sneering, let that reflect my opinion on this kind of pseudointellectual exercise.
Not sure I follow what your point is. Do you in fact believe that our friendships are fake? Or is the "pseudointellectual exercise" you're criticizing the same thing I'm complaining about in the book and the review?
My point is the kind of people who make these arguments tend to be obsessed with procedure and the RIGHT way to do something, often so that they can sneer at all the people who are living incorrectly and feel better about themselves. For some reason, this pathology is overwhelmingly present in French intellectual culture.
Because the French developed a massive inferiority complex after being the center of Europe for hundreds of years and then seeing modernism and science cause the UK, Germany, and later the US blow by them.
The data I have seen, admittedly only from Scandinavia, show that the percentage claiming to have at least one good friend has increased somewhat during the last decades. (same question across time, national surveys (level of living surveys), same sampling method).
That's cute, but we know for a fact that people have less friends than they used to. And when something affects a whole country, it's silly to act like this is an individual issue. People didn't spontaneously decide to start acting different. Something bigger is going on.
"We know for a fact that people have less friends than they used to"
That sure sounds like a normative claim on the world, so in the place of Himaldr-2 I'll be the one to ask: do you have data that reflects your claim, and can I see it?
I mean that he is claiming something about the world where we can look at the thing he's talking about as best as we can and see how close his words match reality.
<i>Is it impossible to form deep friendships, or is it easier than ever thanks to many more ways to interact with people and stay in touch?</i>
The former.
"According to a survey published online January 23, 2020 by the health insurer Cigna, more than three in five Americans are lonely, with more and more people reporting feelings of being left out, being poorly understood and lacking companionship. Since 2018 when the survey was first conducted, there has been a nearly 13% rise in loneliness...
The Cigna report found loneliness to be more common among men and heavy users of social media were more lonely as compared with light users. Feelings of isolation were prevalent across generations, with Gen Z (18–22 years old) having the highest average loneliness score while Baby Boomers (55–73 years old) had the lowest."
Oof, this is tough, but I want to play Devil's advocate on this one.
What if an online social life, while lacking in some necessary areas, is overall more attractive due to the being able to interact with those who are interested in the same things as you are?
I think it's attractive in the same way that, e.g., on-demand, high-fat and -sugar fast food is attractive -- nice in the short term, but in the long term tending to reduce your wellbeing.
As for being able to interact with those who are interested in the same things as you are, that's a real benefit, and for some people -- e.g., those with quite niche interests, or who have social anxiety, or live in isolated areas without many other people around -- having access to the internet and social media probably does improve their social life. For most people, however, I think the gain in breadth (how many people they can interact with) is outweighed by the loss in depth.
I wish I'd checked back here sooner! I might have suggested that this could reflect, rather, the culture of the U.S., rather than anything intrinsic to modern life: over the same time period, the Nordic countries and Germany showed a decrease in reported loneliness among the younger generations; the UK, no change.
These are just the examples I decided to Google real quick, not cherry-picked ones! There may indeed be an overall trend, or may be one if we look over a longer time period. Probably the latter is true, if I had to guess; but I, personally, wonder how that can be...
...though I'm unusually solitary and unusually fond of textual interaction, I admit. (As a kid, I fantasized about being alone on an isolated space station... ...I was a weird kid. But even now — as much as I love my mother and my girl, as much as I like my friends — I mostly prefer texting to speaking, even with such as they. I can organize my thoughts better; and I suppose I feel that, in a way, through text you connect with someone more purely than in person: the accidents recede into irrelevance, and only the substance — mind — remains.
But others, uh, might not share this fondness for deep, isolated silence, broken only by the clickety-clack of keypresses...)
"over the same time period, the Nordic countries and Germany showed a decrease in reported loneliness among the younger generations; the UK, no change. "
so it can't be a toxic effect of exposure to crystalline elemental silicon :-)
Broadly agree. You can live an amazing life away from the spectacle. Truly unparalleled freedom, safety, and creativity in modern times. But if 99% of society is chained to their preferred flavor of Spectacle, you can't really connect with them. We could all walk into a sports bar right now and start cheering for Tom Brady and connect with other people who think he's the GOAT. But when try to peel back what's really going on with these people, it's either empty or ugly.
I find myself wishing other people would just do some introspection and figure out what they want and who they are. But they all seem to be on autopilot stuck in a loop of working a pointless job, paying the mortgage/rent, watching the latest thing on netflix, and just generally being checked out. I know there is something human inside, but it is just so buried.
If 99% of society is chained to their preferred flavor of Spectacle, then if you are e.g. a Bay Area resident that *still* leaves you living in a metropolis larger and more diverse than Elizabethan London or Colonial New York City, in a civilization as vast and interesting as Rome at its height. But, with lots more drones to run the technologically advanced infrastructure and markets to provide enormously greater opportunities and comforts for you and all your interesting friends. Do you really need to make a deep, personal connection with everyone you meet?
Yeah, "no introspection" is a good way to put it — or a large chunk of it; I think there may also be another thing (or other things) missing.
It is hard to put into words exactly, but I truly believe — and I say this in full awareness of how I will come off — that a large portion of the population can't really think; can't reflect; can't self-motivate; can't — doesn't even feel the need to — come to an independent conclusion on any question bigger than "what do I want to eat?".
The process, I swear, goes something like "thing is trendy = thing is good" *and it really feels like just the latter part to them*.
...Yeah, yeah, I'm like the guy in the comic Scott posted recently: "pfft, they have no idea, they're all sheeple..."
Sure, it's true: sometimes we do fail to credit others with attributes we'd find they do in truth possess, if only we saw a little deeper and more clearly; sometimes we do have blind spots where our own relative strengths and skills are concerned; sometimes we *are* all more similar than we think!
...but sometimes, you really are smarter than the average bear.
Sometimes, what appears to be a duck is, in fact, a duck. Sometimes, in other words, what appears to be someone with a barren wasteland of an internal life that is empty of wonder and filled only by vague, unexamined wants and tribal urges inculcated by their surroundings, the In-Group, and stuff they saw those cool celebrities do...
...well, you know where I'm going with this (he said, cleverly avoiding having to find a way to compose a pleasing end to a sentence that really should not have been constructed in the way it was). I think some people *really don't* ever look up from their shoes, so to speak — or even know why they don't, or that it's something that might be desirable.
(And I base this off asking people about, or overhearing conversations on, topics like our place in the universe, the nature of consciousness, why we do the things we do, what is right and how do we know, etc. "Huh? I dunno, it's just normal I guess? Anyway let's take a shot!")
And hey, it doesn't mean they're *bad* or anything. If you've a good heart, I'm pleased to share a species with you whether or not you have attempted to find your place in the universe or based your values on as firm a foundation as your thought can manage.
------------
I'll share a story about the sort of "cognitive normie" that does worry me a bit.
I once said to a Christian fellow, as we prepared a response to a drug deal gone bad: "hey, don't you think Jesus would frown upon what we're about to do?"
He replied, "Do I look like Jesus to you?"
So... you believe that God Himself, an infinite being of infinite might, has — out of a love and kindness so vast He would sacrifice a part of Himself just for us, for we who are less than ants to Him — has, I say, given you a direct and untainted glimpse of the Truth and the Right, a sacred instruction such that men would have died for just a glimpse of such righteousness and surety...
...and you don't even want to, like, wonder? Don't want to maybe ponder a little bit about what it would mean for such a thing to be true? Don't want to try to imagine, for a second, what the universe would look like and what your place in it would be, if the thing you profess to believe were indeed reality?
Huh. Okay then.
-------------
I could (and will, for I am only human, and my hatred of the Out-Group cannot be stayed) draw a parallel to certain modern phenomena — of the "I never thought leopards would eat MY face!" variety; you (that is, you the normie, not you the intellectual ACX reader) want to censor things you don't like, say. Fair enough. But... this is not from any *principle*. It is not a rule you came up with and are following. It is not reasoned from a cold-blooded EV calculation, either. It is not even based on an intuition you have mapped out for yourself.
No, it is purely emotive; you are parroting the current groupthinkery. You don't think about what your angry judgment and virtuous performance are really *based* on; you don't really *try* for reality, the way you do when your life depends on it (well, sometimes not even then, really).
It isn't *principle*... even if you know that *saying* it is is the password for certain challenges that may be met. In a time where the password was "faith", well, then *that* would be what you're basing it all on, like the *good, cool* people.
I swear it can't be thought like you (now you as in VolumeWarrior, or other ACX chads) or I understand it. There is no consideration of "what if everyone thought like this? what if someone who disagreed with me wanted to censor *me?*" — because they are wrong and probably know it, see, and *I'm* right, so it's *different.*
And *even then* they do not wonder at the circumstances — how either they totally would come up with all that stuff on their own and (luckily!) ended up born into the one place and time that *just so happens* to match up perfectly with their (independent!) reasoning... or else they'd have been one of the people they now hate so much, waving a torch at the bound witches and kicking the natives, were they born 400 years earlier.
The seems like the epitome of "anecdata" which rationalists should be opposing. That some people do well under "problem of the day" doesn't mean it isn't a problem and says nothing about the broader impacts of "problem of the day". Pretty sure plenty of people were saying the same thing you are saying during monarchy, too.
There's plenty of room for concrete, specific complaints about the current state of society that I take seriously.
The thing I'm arguing against is particular these extremely broad and diffuse critiques of some general trend towards fakeness or alienation, generally itself not backed up by any hard data. In fact they seem to amount to saying, "all the data says things are great but I still feel bad about it for some reason," and then trying to explain or invent what that reason is.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this kind of take tends to be really wordy and use a lot of dense language that's jargony or otherwise highly abstract.
There's some broader stuff here, but I'll admit they lost me at the "Society is collapsing because it used to be more fun to play video games" bit. I think it's much more likely that adult responsibility has made me more aware of problems than it is that the world got worse.
Right? I'm not saying there aren't valid complaints about modern society, or even that socialist thought is wrong, necessarily (I think it is, but not arguing about it here).
But so many of the arguments are like "nobody should have to work just to have a roof over their head" and... homes aren't naturally occurring? If you think we can collectively do a better job taking care of each other, advocate for that. But never forget that life is a constant struggle against entropy we're all destined to ultimately lose. No economic reform will change that.
Yeah, I agree with this. At the same time, I do think that the spectacle idea has one interesting point: that we now have lots of close "relationships" with fictional characters. That includes fictions like James Bond, and fictional personas that people present on Instagram.
This isn't exactly new. It's exactly what religion did. But I do think it's interesting to look at how these different fictions shape our conceptual worlds.
My naive first guess is that it's better to have an amazing variety of different fictions to relate to and learn from, and in particular to have fewer fictions pretending to be reality, like religion did. So I'd lean towards thinking that this development makes the world better. But I'd like to see people trying to research this.
I completely agree that the reflexive "X has happened therefore society is doomed" just seems like a dumb way to write a book.
Hmmm. My life is awesome, I'm not depressed, I have lots of deep relationships, and do tons of cool shit. And yet, nearly everything in this essay resonated with me.
Are you under the impression that people are generally happy these days?
And if millions of people are depressed and this is a product of "caring about stupid shit", why are so many people making these mistakes? Did they all spontaneously and individually choose to care about the wrong things?
If students one year start struggling on a test, and then this worsens for years and years on end, should we assume that the students all individually decided to be lazy and stop studying enough? Or should this make us look for the existence of a broader trend driving this underperformance?
This comment gets to the heart of a problem when we discuss these kinds of issues:
"the students all individually decided to be lazy"
This sentence suggests that you're looking at this as a question of *where to assign blame*. I'm guessing you assume that if I (I kinda agree with the commenter you responded to, so I'm putting myself in that place - sorry if I'm treading on any toes!) can assign blame to the students, then I will think there is no need to further examine the problem, and no need for anyone else to do anything about it. This is the kind of dick move that people like Ben Shapiro make: If I can use figures to "prove" that X is causing their own problems (where X is almost always African Americans) then that's the end of the conversation.
But I think that there are a bunch of other possibilities that can be explored without either embracing the "secular decline" catastrophism of Debord, or the "I'm an asshole" blame mongering of right-wing microcelebs.
For example: the question are people generally happy - this is open to a lot of interpretation, and I'm not convinced the answer is no. People used to commit suicide *a lot* in the not-very-distant past. (I live in China, which was much poorer much more recently than the USA, so these contrasts are starker. Suicide by rural women in this country was sky-high as recently as 30 years ago.) I don't know how suicide stats are collected, but I wonder what proportion of the people who died in agricultural "accidents" and in war are people who kinda sorta almost deliberately fell into the woodchipper or the machine gun. I have no evidence if this is true, but it could be.
For example: the question of "caring about stupid shit" - I don't know about you, but I'm a pretty hardcore atheist, so I'm committed to the belief that for thousands of years, people have built identities, institutions, artistic sensibilities, and entire cultures on "caring about made-up shit." If sudden changes in material culture and the invention of some radical new technologies do indeed make people "care about stupid shit," I won't be surprised. And I'll be very pleased if it only takes humanity a few centuries to work through the problems caused by the invention of Twitter, because the last time something similar happened (invention of writing), we went down some weird paths for millennia.
For example: "should we assume that the students all individually decided to be lazy and stop studying enough? Or should this make us look for the existence of a broader trend driving this underperformance?" - we shouldn't assume anything, but there several different questions here. (1) Is this really a problem? Is changing scores on a made-up test a problem? Are changing happiness statistics a problem? Personally, I have worries about the ability of any government or institution to make me happy. I would like my government and institutions to keep me safe: protect my physical person, maintain an environment in which I can earn my living. Past that, I don't want much from them, and I really don't want the Chinese, British (I'm British), or American government worrying its head about my happiness. I regard that as my responsibility. (2) If the test scores (or happiness statistics) changed, what might the cause be? Does that cause imply a problem, or might it be that the test has become less suitable? and (2) Is there anything anyone can do about it? Even when you know the cause of a "problem"/phenomenon, whether or not an institution can fix it, and whether you want an institution to fix it, is a completely separate problem.
Sorry if you know all this stuff! You only made a short comment. But your comment seemed to include some assumptions and conflation of things that often pop up in media I see, so I wanted to try to write them out and disentangle them a bit.
Are you under the impression there was ever a time when people were generally happy? The world is full of perfectly valid, concrete things to be miserable over and always has been. It's the arguments that things are getting *worse* that tend to seem incoherent and driven more by the author's subjective feelings than any hard evidence. But mostly it looks like Phil H covered most of the stuff I would have.
I think there's some degree to which technology makes it *extremely* difficult to disconnect from all the stupid bullshit. Smartphones have taken over everyone's life but while they've improved mine in several discrete ways (basically Google Maps, Spotify, Audible and Facetime), being reachable (and expected to be reachable) in my pocket at any hour of the night and having lazy resort to the Internet a click away has, on net, made it much harder for myself and those around to me to be "present" and almost *impossible* to just fucking disconnect completely and do my own thing without having to worry that an important work email came in.
Concentrated, diffuse, and integrated modes of spectacle sounds remarkably like Moldbug’s two stroke and four stroke societies. Wonder if he read Debord.
I was surprised how little space you gave to the point that mass media was one-way (Lawrence Lessig called it "read-only culture", citing Sousa on gramophones displacing human singing), whereas modern social media is two-way (even if there is still a skewed distribution of the producers vs consumers that wouldn't surprise Pareto).
Boy, I hated this. Not that the review was badly written -- I like the authorial voice here just fine, perhaps even most out of all reviews so far, and the reviewer's comments were often cogent and amusing or interesting -- but the *book's* complaints make very little sense to me; the entire thing seems to me much ado about nothing. Paraphrasing an early passage in the review: "But I don't think [he was just railing against change out of some personal emotional difficulty]. Life is *different* now. You want to use your phone even when the TV is on, and don't want to lose GPS signal when in a strange place." Uh, yeah, those both seem fine to me. Where's the part that's supposed to explain why life is so bad now and we're less "real" and stuff?
There are some parts I liked a bit more, later on, but overall I feel like this sort of thing is a waste of time: pseudo-profundity through overwrought, foggy prose, for those who are unhappy and want something to blame it on.
Yes! Like, I'm open to be convinced that life is worse now because of any of the discussed stuff, but the whole thing just seems to mostly stand on asserting that it is bad or worse than before and moving on.
Rates of mental illness are higher now than they were in previous decades. It seems that, on a subjective level, a lot of people are worse off than in the past.
I don't know! Given the changing state of the art and stigmatisms around mental health over the decades it seems like something I'd definitely want to investigate before making the claim that it is or isn't worse.
Yes, we have lots of reasons to think that! It's a very well-known result with regard to physical ailments, for example: many more breast cancers were caught with increased focus on breast cancer and better diagnostic tools... but the actual rate does not appear to have much increased.
With a *lot* more focus on mental illness, mental illness being much less stigmatized (and indeed becoming perhaps the opposite of stigmatized among a certain demographic), relaxed diagnostic criteria, more (and more thinly-sliced) categories of mental illness, and more access to mental-health-care, it should be our default assumption.
Scott has written an interesting article about this (or, rather, a closely-related phenomenon, more accurately).
But also, Jonathan Haidt always makes the point that hospital admissions for self harm among teen girls are way up since the early 2010s, as are suicides. That part, at least, isn't due to relaxed diagnostic criteria.
We have reasons to believe otherwise. Suicides are also up as are certain causes of it (loneliness, for example). If causes and effects of depression are up, then it would stand to reason that the observed increase in depression is not because “we are so good at detecting it.” As an aside, one should double check conclusions that so handily lets society pat itself on the back for something negative.
I'm impressed by your openness to being convinced -- always a good sign. Interestingly, however, the reviewer was right to link Scott's piece on epistemic learned helplessness. You being convinced wouldn't really prove anything, any more than you already having been convinced that things are better now proves anything. I certainly wouldn't argue with you either way.
If anyone reading this wonders "how could anyone think that things are worse now?" and finds the line of questioning introspectively engaging, I suggest checking for the following biases:
1) Am I a kind of person who would have had poor outcomes in the version of the past I believe happened? For instance due to being physically small or weak, sickly as a child, in need of corrective lenses, midly disabled in some other way, or a member of a racial, ethnic, sexual, or gender group that is reported to have had a hard time previously?
2) Am I addicted to comfort, ease, entertainment, snack food, intoxicants, central heating/cooling, the automobile, pornography, or something else that would have been hard to obtain in times past?
I think that the two examples you've pulled out have to do with not being able to do things, with focusing on the TV or navigating on one's own as examples; the broader point is like, living in the society of the spectacle means having your thoughts controlled by e.g. what cable news is covering today, and your knowledge potentially controlled by the same. I think that people would like to possess the ability to focus and navigate and think about what they wish in order to be able to act according to their advantage more often. For example, in my experience, focusing on one form of media at a time causes me to think about it more clearly and, let's say, see the main character's flaws in myself and set out to live my life differently. The urge to resist mind control is expected to be automatically understood by a lot of people because they feel it strongly instinctively. Also, if someone is unhappy, there is probably a reason, they might as well look for it. But I agree that this is a very thought-provoking question, I think that more of us who identify with this book's complaints should try to answer it
Yeah. I also think some of the stock examples require a lot of projecting.
> It takes an act of will to put down your phone so you can focus on the TV. Low battery is an emergency. Losing signal is bereavement. Navigating without GPS is an anxiety attack.
None of these are relatable. I get some people have a problem with them, but I don’t think that these are core parts of the modern experience or whatever. I think most people are able to just take these in stride most of the time.
Could be the humor got past me because it's hard for me to find humor in alcoholism, despair or suicide. Seems making a joke of Debord's or anyone's suicide is just making a spectacle of the situation.
Not trying to be too down on humor/attempts at humor when more humor is needed. Not sure if that means less suicide/alcoholism/despair humor or just *better* suicide/alcoholism/despair humor.
It sounds to me you simply do not enjoy dark humor, and that is all fine and dandy. But as I have to remind people again and again these days, it seems: just because something does not fit your aesthetic does not make it a bad, wrong thing to enjoy.
I'm all for better suicide/alcoholism/despair (SAD) humor. And I admit I might be a suicide/alcoholism/despair (SAD) humor snob. But I have no problem with someone else enjoying something that's not top shelf.
Maybe a little for humor related to suicide and alcoholism. Dude was plenty funny all through the rest of his/her/their enlightening book review, so I was able to catch some of that.
This response is interesting to me. When I get rickrolled my response is something along the lines of "goshdarnit you got me, you silly rascal. take your upvote".
I'm quite familiar with Critical Theory and Marxism, so I'm not biased against it and I have been influenced by many authors in this area.
Yet I can't help but thinking "so what? so what? so what?" all the time while reading this review. I guess that's the difference between lower-c and capital-C critical theory.
I just never got lower-c.
Is it a bad thing that episteme > metis, that we spend more time with on-screen than IRL memes? Why or how? These basic things are just never explained.
"We hope for the best, but 2122 is shaping up to be some unholy amalgam of Gattaca, The Matrix, and Minority Report."
Is it? How do you know? The author is just assuming you agree with hyperbolic assertions all the time, without looking at the analytical content or meaning of basic terms.
What specifically about all the poems describing the modern world is bad? What is the harm done? How would you quantify it?
Oh, am I an epigone of the commodification ideology?
Or is it possible that the doom-and-gloom scenarios are really jumping out of the head of the author and make for a pleasurable experience for readers high in neuroticism and anxiety?
Peak-commodification if you will.
And then this groundless hyperbole: "If you want to actually seize power, you will need to conduct a coup - which, so I’ve heard, is top-down. It’s the only strategy that has ever really worked,"
Uhm, what?
Maybe that has helped in seizing power but what followed was almost always worse. The bourgeoisie revolution, "the only true revolution", was not a top-down coup.
So much for ... just assuming big hyperbolic things, but I am repeating myself.
> Whither Kazakhstan? Afghanistan? Who knows and who cares?
I know and I care. I know about Turkey and Syria (which no one seems to be paying attention to) and the conflicts in Mexico and Myanmar and about grain prices in East Africa. It baffles me so many people don't. It's not even like this doesn't affect them. It does! The prices you pay for gas, for bread, for electricity are all affected by it. Whether you are safe or not is affected by it.
This is my issue with all this. The "too cool for school, nothing really matters, it's all showmanship" is the kind of pose you can only take in a society that's extremely safe and free of significant material need. Where having wrong beliefs about the way the world works is buffered by externalizing costs. Material reality exists and ignoring it will ultimately doom you. The a dialectic of rocks hitting your head can't actually stop the rocks.
It reminds me of the old Buddhist story where a student says, "Master, I have become enlightened! Everything is an illusion!" The master nods sagely and says, "Then I have one more lesson for you." The student eagerly nods his head. And the master cracks him over the head with his staff so hard the student screams in pain. "Why do you cry?" The master asks. "Because it hurts!" The student wails. "Ah, but pain is an illusion. My staff is an illusion. The blow is an illusion! So why do you cry?"
The theological point (I think) is that even if the world is an illusion we still experience it. But I take it as point of the supremacy of the physical over the spiritual (at least until you become a Buddha, I guess.) Even if you come to realize you do not exist and think you exist as some kind of Hume-ian pure sensor then you are still sensing the things you sense and those are not entirely within your control or even human control. Likewise, the idea these events are ultimately meaningless epiphenomena ignores the actual cause and effect. (Which, I know, he would argue is just another spectacle/illusion/whatever.)
PS: Russian disinformation has a grand, ancient history, predating even the Soviets.
Well, the story you give is a koan, but the common interpretation is that it is one thing to intellectually grasp the concept of Śūnyatā (the idea that "material" reality is inherently vacuous) and another to actually achieve enlightenment.
Applied to this concept: Maitre Debord spoke of how all relations and events and occurrences in the modern era were vacuous and relationships were impossible, and yet he married two women and had affairs with several others. While he intellectually grasped his concepts, he did not act on them- and well he was to do so, for much like an arhat or bodhisattva, to truly live the truth of the doctrine is deepest insanity to those who live in the illusion.
Thank you for the further detail. I know my interpretation isn't the standard one. I suppose this goes back to the cattle thieves and madmen distinction.
I always thought the point of that Buddhist story was that the truly enlightened have a staff and when they use it, it's just an illusion. Others just think they are enlightened and suffer the consequences. And finally, there are those (conspicuously absent in this story) who are enlightened just enough to realize they need to stay out of range of that illusionary staff.
But why should people care about all that, when they can realistically do nothing about any of it? It seems like a recipe for permanent misery, not unlike one which the author of this book seemed to suffer from.
If you want to live in blissful ignorance that is certainly your choice. But that's not what we're talking about here. Because most people do not. The idea that people who know about these things care about them as an illusion or entertainment is false, is my point.
I feel this so much! All these "woe is the world, it sucks and it's too bad we can't do much about it—oh but please continue to still make these token efforts". Effective Altruism improves on this slightly but is fundamentally unwilling to go beyond treating symptoms.
A good example is every time I read about how the cobalt for electric vehicles is tainted by conflict and child labour. "Oh, see, the solution to burning oil is little better than the current mess. What a shame." Some of the more pro-active types then go and develop batteries that don't use cobalt, which is fair enough I suppose.
But the whole time no-one brings of the obvious solution of just trying to break up the Congo, a stupidly large country with stupid legacy borders, into something that would actually work and produce stable, responsive governments! Rwanda's Kagame, a friend of the West, is now engaged in his third (or is it fourth?) war in the Congo. It would not be difficult to stop him.
But, yes, many of us care. And many of us are frustrated that obvious solutions aren't discussed by politicians or media, in preference of more "what a shame" stories.
What is worse - those who throw up their hands and say it's all too hard, or those who say the solutions are 'obvious' and 'not difficult'? Not difficult to stop Kagame in the same way as Saddam Hussain? Ho Chi Minh? The Taliban? Any of countless examples of leaders who were 'friends' of the West at various convenient times but who also had considerable support that did not rely on the West?
1. The former, those who give up without ever trying, are far worse.
2. Because it worked the last time. From Wikipedia:
> A United Nations report found that Rwanda created and commanded the M23 rebel group.[10] Rwanda ceased its support following international pressure as well as the military defeat by the DRC and the UN in 2013.[11]
You're equating applying diplomatic pressure on covert support for a rebel group with "break[ing] up the Congo ... into something that would actually work"?
Seems to me that actively breaking up sovereign nations which don't want to be broken up is rarely 'not difficult'. Can't think of too many recent examples where external forces directly did such a thing with undisputable positive results.
The only recent example I can think of where external forces actively tried to do that was Yugoslavia and that did have indisputable positive results. Well, except for the Serbians, I'm sure they would dispute it and therein lies the problem with setting unrealistically high expectations that the sovereign country must agree to be broken up. If you do that of course it's never going to work. Military force must be an option.
My counterpoint would be all the external forces that sent military forces into countries and then *didn't* try to break them up: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan (arguably). All would benefit from not being forced to use their colonial borders.
I'm sure that Kosovars are thrilled to have germans own their mines and banks and US keep their peace, while Bosniaks can't control their currency. How convenient that the break-up benefited the major powers that funded and supported it, and I am sure that if US intervened in Afghanistan for example to break it up into smaller pieces the result would be great for the locals, and not at all predatory. [/s]
I didn't mean to equate those two things by the way, I probably should have put them in separate paragraphs. The Kagame/M23 thing was in the news lately so I wanted to mention it and get it some attention.
<i>True, our incomprehension is somewhat different in kind. In the past, it was nature itself that served as obstacle and enigma. Our knowledge amassed, and we gained hope - all the mysteries of the universe were only puzzles, certain to be solved in time. However, as the scope and scale of human endeavor expanded, our ignorance was returned to us by the very means we sought to eliminate it. Technology colonized our lives and our minds, reintroducing unfathomable complexity into realms we once had mastered. Our world becomes increasingly manmade, and as a consequence is more susceptible to human iniquities never found in the natural world. </i>
This reminds me a bit of The Abolition Of Man:
"The real picture is that of one dominant age—let us suppose the hundredth century A.D.—which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car."
"Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car."
Lewis overstates his case, perhaps drastically. Consider electric lights. Yeah, to run them I need the power company, but it is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. The choice of which lights to use and when to use them is mine and my wife's, *NOT* "of a few hundreds of men". Not all choices enabled by technologies are centrally controlled. Some technologies really do broaden the range of choices of ordinary people.
Until the power company decides to cut off your electricity, of course, in which case you'll quickly realise that your ability to turn the lights on does in fact depend on other people's good graces.
As I said, it (the power company) is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. Sure, it _could_ arbitrarily turn the power off, but it actually doesn't. More crucially, _prior_ to the advances Lewis so cavalierly disparages, the average person had all sorts of vulnerabilities to other people too. A nobleman might arbitrarily extort labor or crops from the peasantry. A pope might start an idiotic crusade and get thousands of people killed.
What matters is whether the live options the typical person has the bulk of the time are widened or narrowed by a technical advance. In point of fact, electrification widened them. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Electricity was a win.
<i>As I said, it (the power company) is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. Sure, it _could_ arbitrarily turn the power off, but it actually doesn't.</i>
So the people who hold power over you wield it in a reliable and predictable way. That's nice, but it doesn't mean they don't actually hold power.
<i>More crucially, _prior_ to the advances Lewis so cavalierly disparages, the average person had all sorts of vulnerabilities to other people too. A nobleman might arbitrarily extort labor or crops from the peasantry. A pope might start an idiotic crusade and get thousands of people killed.</i>
Oppressive governments and wars are still around. In fact, they're potentially even worse, because modern technology has given governments many more means of controlling their people, and made weapons far more destructive.
"So the people who hold power over you wield it in a reliable and predictable way. That's nice, but it doesn't mean they don't actually hold power."
Look, it is theoretically possible for e.g. a politician to use the concentrated control that the electric power company has over its customers to cut off electric current to his opponents. I've never heard of that happening. I've never heard of them threatening to use that particular option. Have you heard of such a case? Politicians have lots of power, but, as far as I know, they have always used other means, from murders and prisons to financial levers, to apply political power.
"Oppressive governments and wars are still around. In fact, they're potentially even worse, because modern technology has given governments many more means of controlling their people, and made weapons far more destructive."
That is true, but it is irrelevant to the point that I'm making. The fact that nerve gas makes governments more destructive does not detract from the fact that electrification lets ordinary people control the electric lights in their homes. I never claimed that _all_ technical advances widened the options for ordinary people. I claim that Lewis is badly wrong in neglecting that _some_ technical advances _do_ widen the options for ordinary people. Lewis denigrates "_Each_ advance", "_every_ victory" [emphasis added]. This is simply wrong.
I have a question for people who have read both the book and the review.
Does this review underemphasize the Marxist portions of the book? I tried reading Society of the Spectacle almost a decade ago, and vaguely remember giving up because I ran into too many concepts that I had to google separately. I don't remember Marx being name-dropped constantly, more like the author assumed you should already be well-read in Marxist economic thought to grasp the Spectacle.
Am I misremembering? And also, should I give the book another shot?
I really appreciate the way this review takes a text that sounds *dreadful* to read, and translates it so I can get some of the nifty ideas without having to fight my way through the prose. A valuable service.
This was actually my problem with the review. I would read one of the excerpts, spend a few moments trying to interpret what I think Dubord must have meant, and then read on to find that me and reviewer had come to sometimes wildly different conclusions.
That's not the reviewers fault ofcourse but it does signpost to me that this book is obtuse, "artisitc" garbage. What's the point of language if not to transmit your thoughts as clearly as you can into other people's minds.
Well, philosophy is the field I'm mostly familiar with, and some philosophers write impenetrable prose to disguise the fact that they're full of shit, but some philosophers have valuable things to say and are just bad at expressing themselves clearly, or had writing-style preferences I decidedly do not share. Our current intellectual society seems to me to put a much higher priority on clarity of writing, and to have much higher standards for what it takes for writing to count as clear, than previous generations. I view that as a good thing, but it's also the case that we've simply become less skilled readers in certain respects than our predecessors. So I try not to assume that an obtuse writing style necessarily indicates that the content is garbage.
And some philosophers have ideas that are genuinely novel. Communicating information that fits into existing categories is much easier than rearranging categories.
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow is a good example of a working, post-capitalist society. The basic idea is that advances in 3D printing (along with disregard for copyright) allow people to simply leave society and subsist on renewable power and raw materials.
"All dialogue is psychological warfare" works, as long as you're content to characterize a mother comforting a scared child as psychological warfare (or competition to impose a particular memeplex). If that doesn't seems a little forced, then you've probably built the equation in as an axiom, rather than as a useful analogy, with "warfare" holding independent meaning. If it does seem forced and you draw a line to say some dialogue is psychological warfare and some isn't, who could disagree?
"Warfare is dialogue"; "Warfare is chess"; "Warfare is mating ritual" . . . All good punchlines, in their place.
Sure. She's acting to achieve a goal she wants (and every action can be analyzed that way, no matter how altruistically ethical--it's built into the scope of "to want"). But why is that "warfare" in any respect. If the psychology of all social action is warfare, isn't it equally diplomacy, or gaming, or compensating, or self-deception (which seems to be where Debord was headed, in a Sartre-like way)?
More basically, the idea that all intentions are selfish (one step from your description of the mother) is a common argument, as indicated above, but this involves a willful blindness to the meaning of "selfish" in natural language, while hoping that the statement will be interesting precisely because of the affective connotations entailed in that meaning.
And thanks for taking the bite. I surprised myself when I actually hit the Post button for such a picky point. I was annoyed by the review, where I felt a string of interesting ideas were each being stretched beyond validity, so I quibbled with you instead when I thought your aphorisms were headed that way too.
It's Sunday evening, Machine Interface, and I'm afraid I'm going to bloviate.
There are thousands of words we could do away with because they are not analytically useful. But we don't, because we use language principally for living, not for analysis. When we tell a kid who snatches a toy away, "Don't be so selfish!" we're teaching a lesson about social protocol in a way that can be understood. That's the word-world we live in, and there's no escaping; if there's a we (or an "I") at all, that "we" exists in a world with conventional words baked in. That's precisely the world in which the sentence, "Every act is selfish," is interesting. When you unpack it into "degrees of long- and short-term X, Y, Z" you get binders of spreadsheets no one will read outside of a paradigm-enclosed disciplinary group: the moment it expresses its findings for an audience it will have to reintroduce the unpurified words to demonstrate interest.
Nor can we identify and quantify all the components of intentions to perfect a model for describing them, because they arrive in a protean stream of complexity, without an objective observer. I think that to say that natural language presents a layer of moral obfuscation is to deny that morality is "real." It is indeed a "construct," like everything else of interest to people, but it's intrinsic to social experience. I don't think we actually have much of a clue about what's "really going on," which is just as well, since I think in principle there's no way to describe that--its reality would always be contingent, a function of the individual/species of observer who/that observes it.
As for spreading genes, while our particular dispositions do or don't favor spreading them, I think very few things exist *to* favor spreading them. My urge to bloviate must be part of a package that is the outcome of a natural selection process (I'm here, so the lottery "wanted" me!), but I'm not bloviating in order to hook up or even, when it comes to memes, to propagate the model of online bloviation. (I'm more likely to have promoted the model of the tl;dr eyeroll two paragraphs ago.) Of course, if I were marketing a new comic series, "The Bloviating Man," I'd design an ad campaign to spread the meme, but I doubt my marketers would encourage me to make personal bloviation an element of it, despite my advanced skills.)
If there is justice in the world, this rant deserves to be refuted in a sentence or two.
There’s no justice in the world.
Great timing on publishing this…I enjoyed watching Jordan Peele’s new movie “Nope” last night, and this book was a clear influence.
Best one yet. Doesn't make the book sounds like a particularly enjoyable read though.
Does the sheer amount of linkage you threw in mean this review is peak "spectacle"?
According to Wikipedia, Debord had nothing to do with the choice of the book's cover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle#Translations_and_editions
In the review, you seem to be completely sidestepping the whole Marx/Hegel angle, which is very prominent in the book and conceivably necessary to deeply understand its thesis. I say "conceivably" because this is where Debord lost me. To put it mildly, his writing didn't encourage me to try to understand more of Hegel (or parts of Marx that derive from Hegel, for that matter).
I really do like the term post-capitalist, I find it oddly “fun”? I don’t know how to describe how I feel about it per se but that’s ok.
The problem with post capitalism is that it is worse than capitalism. No one is stopping anyone from being post capitalist right now, nor have they for quite a while i the US. But those types of organizations generally do not thrive.
What would it take (in the USA) to entirely remove oneself from the capitalist system?
To entirely remove oneself, very hard, to mostly, quite easy. Tons of structures exist to form co-ops, hell some large power companies and other utilities in the upper Midwest are co-ops. Though of course utilities are a natural monopoly so they are a bit immune to competition.
Or you can simply go live in a shack in the woods.
Mostly you can form whatever type of utopian community and organizational structure you want (particularly if going on the anarchism rather than authoritarian axis).
No one is really stopping tons for worker owned enterprises from sprouting up.
They just tend not to work well, and provide lower wages and Stan dares of living and so people don’t find them attractive.
A lot of the large housing co-ops in my state (mostly associated with universities and set up in the 60s), have slowly collapsed due to inabilities to deal with free ridership, crime, squatting etc.
What co-ops exist in competitive areas like housing are mostly supported by charity, or huge amounts of outside technical assistance.
Do co-ops count as non-capitalist?
I mean one of the main structures non capitalists argue for is member owned or worker owned co-ops. Both of which exist and are common, but generally don’t dominate the market in their sectors.
Ah yes, I see. Well you would expect them to be a bit less efficient at making money, but humans are not motivated only by the desire to be efficient.
I prefer the term pre-capitalist. True capitalism has never been tried!
LMFAO
BTW, my impression was always that Debord is basically like Baudrillard but less flashy and more opaque. Does your reading support this view?
What if I think there are things that are fundamentally wrong with contemporary society, but less so than ever before?
Then you are an adult with a good grasp on the world?
Seconded
I think the counterargument implied by the review is that we can conceive of Moloch as subject to constant selection pressures such that the remaining dysfunction is increasingly well "adapted" to resist fixing. Like, sure, it's a hell of a lot better to have "constant AI Panopticon to get you to consume and submit to the will of the state" be your immediate problem rather than "starving during the dry season" or "suppurating leg wound with no effective infection treatment," but the former is an existing problem that capitalistic impulses incentivize making even worse (much like being tethered to your phone as an email or communications medium all the time) whereas the latter are ones that have pretty obvious solutions.
Think of it like using one of those antibacterial soaps that proudly advertise "kills 99.9% of bacteria!" -- whenever I see that I can't help but think to myself "....thereby guaranteeing that only the fittest, toughest, best adapted bacteria resistant to antibacterial soap remain to reproduce..."
I Guess the TL;DR version of this as a blog post headline would be something like "Moloch as Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria."
This may be something you already know and just part of the metaphor, but those soaps don't use what we would generally call antibiotics and my impression is the bacteria that survive generally do so by not being exposed, not by being marginally resistant. The analogy I've heard is that if you dump lava on a herd of cows, one or two of the cows might get missed by the lava and survive but you're not going to evolve lava-resistant cows.
I was not actually aware of that, so the antibiotic-specific metaphor sounds like it's much more relevant than the soaps one (I'd heard that triclosan-resistance didn't seem to be much of a Thing despite its ubiquitous use in antibacterial soaps but had not / have not ever looked into the mechanism of action). The fault is mine and thank you for the clarification!
"In addition, laboratory studies have raised the possibility that triclosan contributes to making bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Some data shows this resistance may have a significant impact on the effectiveness of medical treatments, such as antibiotics."
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/antibacterial-soap-you-can-skip-it-use-plain-soap-and-water#:~:text=In%20addition%2C%20laboratory%20studies%20have,medical%20treatments%2C%20such%20as%20antibiotics.
Immune systems are doing just that: killing 99.9% (or whatever) of bacteria, thereby guaranteeing that only the toughest, fittest, best adapted bacteria resistant to immune systems remain to reproduce. And yet nobody sane would suggest that this is a bad thing, or that we'd be better of without immune systems.
This is probably correct with a caveat. Some things along some measures have simply worsened. If you care about those measures over others then society will look worse.
So choose your measure.
To my mind, the preferred yardstick in these arguments, material well-being, is clearly not enough. If suicide rates have climbed in the US for several decades, should we take this as a sure fire sign that life is worse off, and things have not improved for that time period? Or is the price of a transistor the preferred measure?
1. There is evidence that suicide is contagious.
2. My guess is that controlling for well-being, different cultures now and throughout history would have varying levels of suicide.
3. If well-being is held constant but suicide is made easier culturally, technically, politically, etc suicide will increase. Now, you may claim that such a culture is inherently worse...but I don't think I buy such a claim.
We can put this a different way. What is well-being in the minds of fervent modernism apologists? It is typically things like: infant mortality, crime rates, ease of access to goods, average lifespan, and other such easy to measure qualities. There is no arguing these are good things.
But it’s easy to imagine a society where all of these factors could be increased and yet you probably wouldn’t opt to live in it. Would you choose to live in a society where everyone works remotely and lives sealed in a chamber separated from everyone else? One where all of your needs are met and you receive the best care possible? I would not, and yet deaths from injuries would be low, crime rate would be low, and all measures of access to goods could be held at arbitrary levels.
If you would not choose to live like this (and many wouldn’t) then you understand these critiques implicitly. The argument is that the tradeoff of freedom and community is the same and the difference is in magnitude. The persistent problem with this discussion is that loneliness and freedom have imprecise measures. You basically must take self-reports, which makes it easy to dismiss if you are willing, and apologists are always willing.
I feel like you're having an argument with someone who isn't here.
Then you would do well to dwell upon how suspicious it is, that from all the thousands of years and hundreds of different cultural milieu and social organizations, the one you were born into (by sheer ignorant and blind chance) is that which uniquely minimizes suffering, stupidity and immorality.
Consider that there are more societies than there are gods, your chance of being born to the right society (that which is most beautiful, merciful, rational,...) is strictly less than that of being born believing in the one true god.
That’s as bad an argument against Western exceptionalism as it is against Christianity. If you have values and metrics then there must exist a society that scores best against those metrics. And there must be (or have been) someone who lives (or lived) in that society. If that’s you, just be grateful.
The question, of course, is: Do you *really* have values and metrics ? or did you craft your values and metrics, conclusion-to-premise, to suit whatever society\religion you found yourself in ?
In software engineering you are encouraged to write tests before you write the code, because if you do it vice verca then your leftover assumptions from writing the code will muddle your tests so that they are not "testy" enough. You are also told to make sure the tests fail on trivial incorrect code, because tests that cannot fail are useless.
Are you sure your values and metrics are really independent measures of your beliefs that your society just so happens, oh very happily and coincidentally, pass ? or are they tests that cannot fail ?
>If that’s you, just be grateful.
Or be skeptical, because the odds say it shouldn't happen.
To keep it simple, let’s stick with your proposed values: “minimizes suffering, stupidity, and immorality… most beautiful, merciful, rational.” There is a society somewhere in time and space that best fits your values. It can be debated, of course, and that’s half the fun. But science, knowledge at our fingertips, Western music and art (before postmodernism), lower than ever illness and mortality rates, egalitarian Christian moral intuitions, liberalism in the rule of law, Enlightenment rationality. As with any society, you can pound on the flaws, but I still don’t know how any other society can beat peak The West in the values you proposed. That said, I do think that moment is now permanently behind us. Hopefully I’m wrong.
They were saying that the current society and structures are doing better than the past, not that they are the best possible.
And regardless you can think society has plenty of room for improvement and maximization without thinking Marxist maunderings have merit.
Ok top of that, unlike gods societies are evolving and improving and changing with the conditions.
Imagine a car salesmen telling you this is the safest car ever. You might have doubts, you might even think it is instead sole other slightly different car. What it’s not going to be is a car from 40 years ago. The quality of societies is not randomly distributed through time. You would expect the best ones (especially for current conditions), to mostly be current.
"""They were saying that the current society and structures are doing better than the past, not that they are the best possible."""
Did I imply otherwise ? the past contains "thousands of years and hundreds of different cultural milieu and social organizations".
"""you can think society has plenty of room for improvement and maximization"""
"Improvement" implies you're on the right track, that you're doing worse on a measure that you should be doing better on. But what if you're not even wrong ? not even heading remotely in the same direction you should be ? You can't "improve" a ship to fly, you have to tear it down and make it again, the sheer amount of wrong assumptions its design makes is impossible to gradually rectify.
"""without thinking Marxist maunderings have merit"""
I too sometimes don't understand marxist intellectuals or have patience for their prose. But what they are saying is irrelevant, as long as it is to the effect that something is deeply and irreversibly wrong in the way people live. You don't have to set a beautiful alarm tone to wake up, just a loud one. Marxism is and have always been just a loud alarm tone.
"""Imagine a car salesmen telling you this is the safest car ever"""
Imagine you live in a universe where community and human dignity are not quantifiable goods that get better with mass production. You live in a cramped and inferior society among countless nameless millions like farm chattel. You are controlled by monstrous alien entities called States, composed of people like animal bodies are composed of cells, caring about the welfare of people exactly as much as animals care about the welfare of their cells : not at all, unless relevant to their survival.
You were not built for this perversity, for hundreds of thousands of years your ancestors lived among people whose very flesh and blood was molded out of the same language as them. Nobody needed to craft rules on how to live with each other; or rather, nobody needed to craft rigid and easily exploitable set-in-stone (or paper or computer memory) rules. You started with the willingness to live with each other, and a natural affection only life born out of itself can hold, and the rules trickled down and evolved as needed. You look upon ants and bees, they are marvellous in their numerousy and organization, but you're not like them, your place is to live among a hundred or a thousand of your kin, governing no one but your kin, and being governed by no one but them.
The society you live in is a poor imitation of ants and bees. Everytime you complain someone points to some numbers and explains how they have gone up, how it's good that they go up, how your complaints are misguided and irrational because the only thing that matter is numbers going up, and the societies you're nostalgic for are societies where those numbers have not gone up, and thus can't be worth living in.
Can you imagine that ? Some of us don't have to, because we're living it. If you're not, count yourself lucky that you adapted to the life of ants and bees, but don't dismiss or make fun of those who long for the long lost life of humans.
When/where was this time when "human dignity" and "community" were not quantifiable goods?
As for living like chattel, not the vast majority of Americans do not live like chattel, that is just wrong. There are WAY too many people, I will agree with you there. It would be easier to setup a society of human flourishing if we cut the global population down by 90%. But in the fuck are you volunteering to start with?
>You are controlled by monstrous alien entities called States,
Not really, the state has relatively impact on my day to day life. Certainly compared to medieval village, and likely very little impact compared to whatever Marxist dystopia you are imagining.
>Caring about the welfare of people exactly as much as animals care about the welfare of their cells
Ok now you sound like you are 18 years old.
As for life being the life on ants and bees. Umm no its not really. Modern life does a TREMENDOUS job of mostly allowing people a large amount of room for personal choice and for pursuing projects that are tangential, or even directly orthogonal to what society wants or is good for it. The exact opposite of ants and bees. yes there are some sacrifices required to live in a well ordered society in a world with 8 billion humans, but um, not a ton compared to what it could be, and certainly nothing like ants of bees who cannot breed, and have zero interests outside supporting the colony.
I spend pretty much 100% of my time pursuing my own projects in a way entirely directed by me. I do need to kick back ~25% of the resources I earn to the state in exchange for the services it provides, but that seems roughly fair even if I don't approve of many things it does.
I do need to agree to not steal from my neighbors, but I also get some protection from the same. What exactly is the great sacrifice I am making here that is so terrible? That I have to listen to my boss/client? You don't think hunter gathers had to listen to people ever?
You sound so filled up with hatred for modern society, but with literally nothing but platitudes as a replacement. Which is sort of par for the course for Marxists and Marxist adjacent people.
Imagine a world where everyone can do whatever you want! (So like a world where people are stealing my stuff and I need to constantly attend to my wife/chidden to ensure they are not harmed?).
Multiple responses to this subject that I've dwelt upon for many years:
1. Do you find it suspicious that current technology is more advanced than ever before? Can you articulate the difference between technology and society with regards to "betterness"?
2. A better framing of the chances of being alive where and when is just to count (or estimate) the number of people alive in western societies vs those who have ever existed in other societies. A few estimates I've seen around around 7-8% of people who have ever lived are now alive. Guesstimating based upon population of western countries now and in the past I'd say it's at least a few percent chance. However, I think this whole endeavor doesn't work because of...
3. There's basically a zero percent chance I'd live in some other time or society since I'm a product of this time and society. Another way to say the same thing is that if my genes were instantiated in ancient Rome or somewhere and then I was magically transported to today, there's no reason to expect that I'd hold the same opinion I posted in the root comment.
All this is to say that while there is a glimmer of a point to the type of argument you're putting forth here, I *have* dwelt upon such arguments, and in this case, on balance, it doesn't weigh enough to flip me into thinking other than I do.
1- On technology : depending on how you define 'technology' and 'advanced'. There are plenty of times where technology not only didn't advance with time, but actively retrograded. Technology is not a linear path.
On technology v. society : the difference is obvious off course, it's the number of dimensions in the objects you're comparing. "Better" makes no sense unless said about single-dimensional objects : is 5 better than 4 ? yes or no, because they are single-dimensional totally-ordered quantities. But is the ordered pair (40,2) better than the ordered pair (9,11) ? any way of saying yes or no must reduce the problem of comparing ordered pairs to the problem of comparing single-dimensional quantities, or possibly several such problems.
In (some) technologies, the (cherry-picked) questions are always about single dimensional quantities : Does the airplane fly faster ? does the car drive longer ?. But can you compare a cat and a dog ? can you compare a mountain and a sun ? where would you start ?
The questions that moderns devise to compare societies are made up bullshit to make themselves feel better, "I earn more 'money' [being a sort of meaningless colored paper that people who don't give a shit about me or my labor print in abundance] than the primitive man, so hoorraay me! I won the lottery of history!"...... ??? that's about as convincing as a roman bragging that they have more emperors than any other kingdom or nation.
(2) the estimated total number of 'humans' (a fuzzy category) is 117 billion, today's 8 billions are indeed about 7% of that (~6.8% to be more percise). If you generously give 1 billion to "western societies" (a fuzzy category), then your chance is 1/117, or 0.85% percent. So not "a few percent", it's less than 1%, and that's not counting all the terrible ways of being alive in a western society.
(3) Isn't this just my point, restated differently? You think that today's society is the best possible among all past competitors because you were born in it, and so does a 1940 A.D german, and so does a 1000 A.D muslim,and so does a 100 A.D roman, and so does a 70000 B.C caveman. But all of those people are wrong : There were societies before 1940s germany that were vastly 'better' (in whatever non-arbitary metric you choose to define) than it, there were societies before 1000s islamic civilizations that were vastly better than it, there were societies before 100s roman empire that were vastly better than it. Isn't it suspicious how all societies and civilizations have betters that existed before them, except yours ?
I lost my whole comment here, so this is a shortened version:
1. It all cashes out! I can say 2022 Car Model 1 is better than 2022 Car Model 2 and both are better than 1905 Car Model 3. Cars vary across many dimensions, but I can still pick one as being better because the dimensions cash out.
Of course we can compare a cat and a dog! Everyone who owns one or the other has made that comparison!
The relevant comparison between technology and society is that both, roughly, progress and build upon that which came before.
> The questions that moderns devise to compare societies are made up bullshit to make themselves feel better,
You're continuing an argument with a group of people without considering if I'm a part of that group.
2. I shouldn't have used "western societies". Most societies of the past 100 years would meet my original comment. But I won't belabor the point since as I mentioned I think the whole framing is wrong.
3. "Isn't this just my point, restated differently?" No, I don't think so.
I'm not claiming that any of those people would or would not make the same claim I do about the relative ranking of their society. Just as in today's society, many people do not agree with me, I believe each of those societies would have people who do not have the same view of their society and that the proportion of such people would vary greatly from society to society.
I more or less include a 1940 German as being part of my current society...a more loosely connected part, but a part.
My point here isn't that my preferences were shaped by the society I developed in(though they are), but that me living in some other society is a nonsensical thing. I do not exist outside of my society.
> Isn't it suspicious how all societies and civilizations have betters that existed before them, except yours ?
Yes, it's suspicious which is why I don't take it at face value. However, it would be more suspicious if societies and humans didn't evolve to better match the needs of each other.
Just because someone is a suspect doesn't mean they're guilty. We can investigate and gather evidence to determine their guilt.
The main theme here is that societies and humans (roughly) progress. I'm better able to judge older societies from my standpoint because I can examine them and I have the ability and opportunity to do so to a degree unlike people from long ago.
I also think that the further back in time you go, the more and more likely a randomly chosen society will be worse than its predecessors. Progress in society (and humans and technology and most everything) has to...build up steam and momentum.
It's also worth stating that progress in society is noisy. Society might be worse in ten years, I can make no good prediction with any confidence. I'm much more confident that it will be better than today in a few hundred years.
Additionally, over time and geography, the edges of society are fuzzy. Just like I consider the 1940 German to be part of my society, I consider someone from modern China to be so as well and I'd likely consider someone from 2060 Brazil to be also. As such, society might have been better in 1980 USA or will be in 2035 Thailand. I'd still consider that to be my society.
But, just like the stock market, past returns are no guarantee of future performance.
There seems to be an extremely common failure mode where someone thinks they're saying, "Life sucks these days because of Capitalism/technology/whatever," when what they're actually saying is, "My life sucks these days because I'm depressed/have chosen to care about stupid shit."
Maybe I'm the weird one but most of this kind of stuff just seems like whining about non-issues.
I think the amplification of narcissism by social media qualifies.
Can you elaborate? Personally I find it pretty trivial to a) not be narcissistic on social media myself, and b) not pay too much attention to people who do.
A google search "social media narcissism" (scholar or otherwise) reveals much done in this area. Best, B.
I'm pretty confident that if I bothered to make that search I'd just turn up a bunch of people making the same mistake I was complaining about in my original comment.
Then we disagree on the corrosive impact of narcissism in today's world (except for you). and it's obvious amplification by the internet. The book title, "The Society of the Spectacle", and your comment prompted my thoughts.
Okay, they're making a mistake. Why? What's your big plan for stopping this? Telling them all to stop making the mistake?
I mean I'm not sure people writing silly things on the internet (or elsewhere) is the kind of thing that necessitates a "big plan" in response but to the extent that it does my strategy includes:
-Announce publicly that I think it's a mistake.
-Mostly ignore them.
-Encourage other people to ignore them as well.
Narcissism has always been with us. There's no obvious reason to believe that there's more of it in some sense than ever before. Yes, there are twits who obsess over their number of followers. And those same twits used to obsess over what they were wearing, or whether they got enough of an awed reception when they entered the club.
The fact that you see the most narcissistic individuals in the media (because by definition they are the ones who try very hard to be noticed) doesn't prove your claim.
Asserting "narcissism is being amplified" and that this is "being caused by social media", and that both of these are "obvious" is not a proof, it's simply a reflection of the fact that you go along with conventional wisdom. And yes, conventional wisdom is often correct. But it's ALSO often incorrect. The primary reason the social sciences have made so little progress compared to the physical sciences is that the social sciences continue to prioritize folk beliefs and conventional wisdom, something the real sciences abandoned somewhere around Galileo.
Word. I got nothing out of this. I like the *reviewer's* style more than most or all of the others, but the work itself is so uninteresting and pointless — at least, to me — that I just couldn't enjoy the review. None of the societal criticisms or examples resonated or seemed essential (rather than, say, merely a problem with what someone on an individual level has chosen to value or how they've decided to view things).
I don't think it is _totally_ pointless:
"Or you used to, at least. Before the spectacle, your models, mentors, and rivals were real people you knew in real life. Now we have an acronym for that - IRL - because reality is everywhere in retreat."
Reflects a real change. We spend more of our time on things like electronic media rather than things and people in our immediate environment. In other terms this is a _very_ old complaint:
"In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates calls into question the propriety and impropriety of writing. Throughout his discussion with a colleague, Socrates insists that writing destroys memory and weakens the mind"
Literacy is also a technology, and allows us to read words from times and places distant from our immediate experience.
There is always a tradeoff in where we direct our attention. Communications and storage technologies let us pick and choose from words and images from a vast range of times, places, writers, and artists, selecting those of the most interest to us - but when our attention is on them, it is not on our immediate surroundings and companions. C'est la vie.
But "real" people are boring. Whenever I happen to overhear some gossip about somebody's personal life or their children I always feel that I couldn't care less. Whereas the better stories are crafted in such way as to abstract away the boring parts and focus on interesting action. Of course, one might say that this is superstimulus and bad, but so what? I like what I like, superstimulus or not, and saying that I should like something else instead won't change my preferences.
Perhaps you only find them boring because you've become so desensitized.
People in the past got more fulfilment of having a real *community* around them than people do today from hearing from the "most interesting" people on TV/the internet they can find.
People got more fulfilment from cooking the same style of food every day with their extended family/village/community than people today feel from getting a cuisine from a different part of the world delivered every night.
People got more fulfilment by listening to (or actively participating in themselves) music performed by their community in relatively simple styles and without much variety than people today get by listening to the "best" music in the world.
You like things? Great. But by and large Americans today are not happy, and the loss of having a genuine, "IRL" community to living atomistic, hedonistic and materialistic lifestyles is almost assuredly a big factor.
But did they really find fulfillment in those things, or simply were doing them because they had no other choice? It's easy to romanticize the past, but I can't help but notice that revealed preferences of people seem imply that they aren't eager to live in it. As for being unhappy, well, humans simply aren't designed for happiness, hedonic treadmill is always there to ensure that no matter how much better our lives are now by any objective measure, we're always unsatisfied.
"It's easy to romanticize the past, but I can't help but notice that revealed preferences of people seem imply that they aren't eager to live in it."
Good point! Yup, people have the option to turn off the phone or TV and talk with their neighbors - and that is not the direction average behavior has been changing. "revealed preferences" are a powerful clue!
>Perhaps you only find them boring because you've become so desensitized.
Even if that's the case, they must actually be relatively more boring anyway — and what's wrong with preferring the less boring thing to the more boring one?
I'm not so sure that we can make all these claims about who got more fulfillment, either. Is there any good evidence for "more fulfillment" -- especially corrected for the ability to notice and express unfulfillment? (That is: would a medieval peasant have had time to worry about such a thing as self-actualization and personal fulfillment, or any expectation that it should be an option for everyone?)
You can see that even in the past, when e.g. people could *stop* eating the same limited diet every day, they did. When they obtained the power or wealth to go listen to different and fancier music, they did. Conversely, I am unaware of many writings about how fulfilled someone was with having no choice but to eat the same few foods or listen to the same simple music, or many examples of people with both options choosing the latter (relative, at least, to the examples of people choosing the former).
It's possible for other forces to have caused a sub-optimal equilibrium, but ordinarily we'd not expect to see people abandon more fulfilling things for lesser ones.
All good points, Many Thanks!
"You can see that even in the past, when e.g. people could *stop* eating the same limited diet every day, they did. When they obtained the power or wealth to go listen to different and fancier music, they did. Conversely, I am unaware of many writings about how fulfilled someone was with having no choice but to eat the same few foods or listen to the same simple music, or many examples of people with both options choosing the latter (relative, at least, to the examples of people choosing the former)."
I'm mostly on your side on this issue, but in this case I don't think the facts prove what you'd like them to prove. That people of the past also abandoned simpler music as soon as they could go listen to fancier music, etc., only proves that they were also susceptible to superstimulus in the same way we are, which is exactly what you'd expect from heredity being real. Also, there are plenty of writings from at least the 18th century in Europe about how rich/powerful/upper-class people's lives tend to end up weird, alienated and somehow empty in spite (because?) of their abundance, and indeed some architectural evidence – the Little Trianon's "Hamlet of the Queen" for example, a place where the queen who remains a watchword for rococo opulence went to pretend to be a peasant. So, it seems reasonable on that basis for someone to suspect that this is at least a known problem or tradeoff of abundance, one which has simply spread as abundance increased.
The oldest text about someone deliberately choosing rustic simplicity and a lack of choice and abundance due to its salutary mental-health effects is probably the Tao Te Ching.
"People in the past got more fulfilment of having a real *community* around them than people do today from hearing from the "most interesting" people on TV/the internet they can find. "
Do you have any evidence for this claim?
"by and large Americans today are not happy"
I don't think there's been a single society where the average person was "happy", depending on where you set the slider for that word.
Could you produce some statistical evidence that Americans are significantly less happy now than they are in whatever halcyon era you'd like us to return to?
I have a snippet of evidence _against_ that conclusion, at least for very recent changes. The CDC has a web page on depression https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db303.htm which showed that
"From 2007–2008 to 2015–2016, the percentage of American adults with depression did not change significantly over time."
Surveys appear to suggest that Americans are less happy than usual.
Let's even stipulate that that is correct (as opposed to something like people having a changing idea of what 'very happy' should mean).
We don't get from that to the cause you claim.
I can give dozens of alternative explanations:
- people are lonelier than ever before. Blame theory: rules that made people increasingly frightened to approach others to ask for a date in any circumstances because "harassment".
- people are all experiencing anomie (ie deep connections to their culture). Blame theory: technology has created so many choices that none of us can find much in common with anyone else; we watch different movies, listen to different music, read different books; we don't live in the same culture.
- people are all experiencing anomie (ie deep connections to their culture). Blame theory: identity politics has destroyed the idea of, and attempts to maintain, a common American culture, and the inevitable result in a country as large as this is that there is no longer any common culture, certainly not one that one can take pride in and feel strengthened by.
- people feel no agency in their lives.
Blame theory: it used to be possible (even as a teenager) to simply leave a bad situation, move somewhere, start a new life. The law and child support services have rendered this ever more impossible; credentialization has rendered it ever more difficult to move from a career track you hate to something different; something (social norms? government welfare tied to a known address and suspicious of random moves?) has made people a lot less willing to move from a dead-end situation to something different the way they were still doing in the 60s.
- people feel no agency in their lives.
Blame theory: Life has become so complicated (so many forms, so many things that have to be dealt with, even for what used to be private matters like eg renovating a house) that everyone feels they can be hit with some sort of random government penalty at any time. Didn't fill in your tax form correctly; Didn't fill in some paperwork related to your kids and school; You have one month to get your backflow preventer tested and submit the report on this form; ...
- people don't have enough religion and ritual in their lives.
Blame theory: you can fill this one in yourself.
etc etc etc
"But "real" people are boring."
Exactly. Shakespeare is more eloquent than my next door neighbor.
"Whenever I happen to overhear some gossip about somebody's personal life or their children I always feel that I couldn't care less."
Perhaps typical local news rises to the level of a poorly written soap opera? :-)
Good point — there *is* a real difference there, and of course it isn't an unalloyed good. Like you say: there's always a trade-off. I personally feel like "boy I sure am glad I get to make this trade-off", but it seems some feel differently.
The quote re: Socrates and writing is pretty interesting as well. That's something I sort of had in mind when reading the review / writing the comment (though I didn't have such an apt reference!) — such a complaint seems hardly worth considering, now; which makes me think similar complaints, about the Internet or smartphones or whatever, are... well, similar: rather than incisive and iconoclastic critiques of modern life, they're merely a manifestation of *every* society's vague and eternal discontent.
Many Thanks! Very much agreed on all points.
This is true, but I don’t think it’s important. The question is do more people share your values and views or Debord’s? A lot of people find society shitty. They are not wrong. They value or desire something else from life.
Xpym and Himaldr-2 had excellent points about revealed preferences. The simple fact that a vast number of people choose to spend a lot of time online rather than talking with their neighbors implies that the former is, in practice, more attractive to them. This doesn't apply to _everyone_, but it seems to be common.
The notion of revealed preferences is a stupid one. Alcoholics have “revealed preferences” smokers have “revealed preferences”. It’s true in a simplistic sense, but we can probably recognize that people have different preferences for short term and long term action, that they can be in conflict, and that a society which makes it easier to satisfy short term over long term preferences can lead to some dismay, even if self-inflicted.
"The notion of revealed preferences is a stupid one."
Bullshit. They are what people _actually_ choose.
Verbally declared preferences are often lies, "politically correct", status seeking, and/or self-deception.
Yes, I know what a revealed preference is, but I’m not as fascinated with what people claim it to reveal. Again, take the addict as an example. It is puerile to say to an addict’s face that they have a revealed preference for abuse. It is correct in a shallow sense, but not useful. The same goes for most claims of revealed preferences. True, but not insightful or useful, certainly not in the way that people who use the term consistently want it to be.
We can only take one action in a given moment, and always take an action, and so there is some sense in which preferences must be well-ordered. So in what way is this level of analysis useless? Because we have multiple, different desires to satisfy, and the relative importance of those desires differs depending on scope of time used in decision making. For example, satisfying my sex drive or hunger are things I think of impulsively on a day to day basis, and will plan for on a weekly basis perhaps, but for my long term goals plays a small role. Ten years down the line I have career goals which I am strongly drawn towards, and yet on a day to day basis feel no “impulse” to satisfy and require discipline instead.
Succinctly: the notion of revealed preferences is factually accurate but useless for analysis because it ignores the modular nature of our desire, and the varied ways in which that desire drives our decision making at different temporal scopes.
And once they grasped that, they would desire something else, and upon attaining that they would desire something else, and so on ad infinatum. Want and longing is the engine of the human soul and the devil driving us on with the lash, and anyone who promises "your wants will be satisfied" as the path to happiness instead of "you shall master Tyrant Want and break his scepter" is either naïve or a charlatan.
Hmm... Yeah, the hedonic treadmill is real.
Re: "Want and longing is the engine of the human soul and the devil driving us on with the lash", I would have said something like "the incentive of all action" rather than "the engine of the human soul". I'm reading what you wrote as ambivalent about wants. Is that correct or incorrect?
Re: "you shall master Tyrant Want and break his scepter"
Wants range from the trivially satisfied to the physically impossible. The former are something more like a mild itch than a tyrant, and I see it as generally rational to satisfy those wants that are trivially satisfied - but always bearing in mind that for sufficiently difficult wants "The game is not worth the candle".
"Is that correct or incorrect?"
I am a Buddhist. My fundamental belief is that life is characterized by the discomfort and pain caused by our ceaseless longing and attachment and that peace and serenity can only be attained by breaking the cycle of longing and attachment, instead cultivating compassion, benevolence, and a harmonious existence with our environment. So yes, I do in fact think of Want as a bad thing.
Thanks for the clarification!
In my view, some longings and attachments are either unattainable or not worth the effort they require, and for them, modifying one's psychology to try to break the attachment is indeed sensible. On the other hand, some wants are trivially satisfied, and I don't believe there is a reason to leave them unsatisfied.
edit: For clarity, let me give an example of what I mean by a trivially satisfied want. For a typical person in a 1st world nation, getting a glass of water is a matter of getting a glass, turning on the kitchen tap, filling the glass, and drinking the water. Satisfying the want of thirst (in that context, barring unusual circumstances like imminent surgery) seems perfectly sensible to me. It doesn't even trigger a hedonic treadmill. It is driven by a specific homeostatic drive to avoid dehydration, and slaking it doesn't create a new desire for something else.
The bit about history and the notion of time needing a broader scope than just the passing of the seasons needing to be invented was interesting. Obvious in hindsight (like all good ideas) but still interesting.
Agreed.
A more succinct way to put it than my comment above ...
<i>There seems to be an extremely common failure mode where someone thinks they're saying, "Life sucks these days because of Capitalism/technology/whatever," when what they're actually saying is, "My life sucks these days because I'm depressed/have chosen to care about stupid shit."</i>
People's mental health, and the things that they value, are both influenced by the society they live in, which in turn is influenced by its economic structures and available technology. Choosing not to care about what society tells you to do may help, but it may not -- e.g., if it's impossible to form deep friendships because everybody's been atomised by social media and economic forces force people to move every few years for the sake of finding work, then giving up social media and staying in one place isn't going to help you deepen your friendships unless other people do the same.
That may be true, but I think the Neil Gaiman quote the review links to in a footnote is relevant here. It seems to me that a lot of these people end up with a very broad sense of malaise and dissatisfaction and I'm not confident that they're doing a good job tracing it back to the actual root causes. I suspect the truth is that in every era some people have felt like this, and often blamed it on their particular society when in fact it's much broader.
At the same time, there are some obvious root causes that can be traced back pretty straightforwardly to capitalism/capitalistic tendencies. For instance, climate change, which clearly affects the mental health of young people - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(17)30045-1/fulltext - is pretty difficult to extricate from capitalist systems. Every so often we get a reminder of that when some new story breaks about Exxon lying deliberately to stall climate change progress (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/30/exxonmobil-lobbyists-oil-giant-carbon-tax-pr-ploy) or Shell continuing to drill/plan new drilling aggressively despite the recommendations of the IPCC (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/shell-climate-change.html).
That would be one example where you could directly link depression/malaise to capitalism as it is practiced. It's quite hard to give such examples because the language is broad and there's an information maelstrom to navigate.
[I'm assuming you're broadly referring to younger people, because they're more likely to my mind to say things like "Life sucks because of capitalism".]
Again, my contention is that the causation mostly runs the opposite way. That is, there's a certain kind of person who just innately feels that everything is terrible and the world is doomed, and looks around for something in the world to justify that feeling. In today's world climate change is a prime candidate.
But if you actually look at the science, climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world, especially not from the perspective of a reasonably well off person in a first world country. This is a bit tricky to talk about because I don't want to sound like I'm saying the actual likely outcomes won't be bad- hundreds of millions of deaths in poorer countries isn't out of the question- but I do think that the kind of people I'm complaining about tend to overstate the magnitude in a way that is neither accurate nor productive.
(As an aside I'd push back on exactly how tight the connection is between capitalism and climate change- the USSR's record on environmental issues was also pretty abysmal.)
And I'm not trying to say there's no legitimate criticism of capitalism, our society, etc. There's plenty of concrete issues that are certainly very bad, including climate change as I mentioned above. I'm just saying this specific kind of overly broad and emotion driven critique doesn't seem to me to have much useful content.
[I don't think it's just young people- this book was written in the 60s, for example. But as I've alluded to, I think this is a common impulse that people will manifest differently depending on their context and the worldview they're working with. Those on the right might talk about "degeneracy" or "decadence" and so on.]
I agree. Especially the old Frankfurt School texts read like depression diaries. There is an urge to judge negatively, a search for surprising twists to the worse and even a feeling moral righteousness when breaking rules of logic is necessary to reach new depths of misery. The vagueness of this prose - all quantification is absent - allows the reader to apply it to anything around, making him feel 'understood'.
> Again, my contention is that the causation mostly runs the opposite way. That is, there's a certain kind of person who just innately feels that everything is terrible and the world is doomed, and looks around for something in the world to justify that feeling. In today's world climate change is a prime candidate.
Yeah, this is a fair point. But how would we know? It's possible that these people start depressed, and look for a cause to be more depressed. It's possible that these people are pretty positive but then they spend their formative years being barraged by negative news about the world, and their actions seem small and unimpactful by comparison, and it leads to depression. On a subjective level, I have friends who work in climate emission policy, who don't believe we can avert the more catastrophic levels of temperature rise and who live perfectly happy lives. People are strange. I just don't think it's fair to say that anyone who feels depressed about the climate was depressed anyway and simply latched onto the climate. Might be true for some people, will definitely not hold true for everyone. The actual quantities of each group are difficult to ascertain, particularly as being anxious reinforces your tendencies to look for negative stimuli.
> This is a bit tricky to talk about because I don't want to sound like I'm saying the actual likely outcomes won't be bad- hundreds of millions of deaths in poorer countries isn't out of the question- but I do think that the kind of people I'm complaining about tend to overstate the magnitude in a way that is neither accurate nor productive.
Yes, I think I understand this position, I've heard it before from friends. For instance, the case of the missing soils, where a bunch of news journals reported that the UK had sixty harvests left, which turned out to be based on... not very much. I'd be interested to see what sort of sources you looked at when reaching this conclusion ("climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world"). I don't think I broadly disagree, but I find the projected losses very difficult to stomach.
> I'm just saying this specific kind of overly broad and emotion driven critique doesn't seem to me to have much useful content.
Is this critique from newspapers? Or from writers? Or from general sentiment? Trying to determine what critique you're talking about.
> [I don't think it's just young people- this book was written in the 60s, for example. But as I've alluded to, I think this is a common impulse that people will manifest differently depending on their context and the worldview they're working with. Those on the right might talk about "degeneracy" or "decadence" and so on.]
Yes, fair enough. I was just responding to the specific quote you cited!
> It's possible that these people start depressed, and look for a cause to be more depressed. It's possible that these people are pretty positive but then they spend their formative years being barraged by negative news about the world, and their actions seem small and unimpactful by comparison, and it leads to depression.
Yeah that's certainly worth considering. But to the extent that it's true I think the kind of overly broad, poorly evidenced inchoate doomerism is probably actively making things worse, and encouraging people to take it less seriously is still the right move.
> Is this critique from newspapers? Or from writers? Or from general sentiment? Trying to determine what critique you're talking about.
Not sure I get what's being asked here. You see different forms of it in different places, mostly in essays and books like the OP but also sometimes on social media.
"climate change almost certainly won't actually doom the world, especially not from the perspective of a reasonably well off person in a first world country."
I see this kind of commentary a lot on SSC and rationalist-adjacent spaces and I can't ever help but feel that it always carries a very strong implication of "well, whatever, fuck nature, who cares about the puffins or the coral anyway?" And the answer is: I do. Beyond physical trips to see such stuff, I don't watch anthropological documentaries for enjoyments but I do watch nature documentaries. This weird anthropocentric parochialism where people seem to want to live in megacities and just spend their time surrounded by nothing but concrete and other humans makes me feel like I'm sharing a planet with people who are nominally my species but with whom I have nothing other than base physiology in common.
I agree completely. I think one valid point raised by such people is that due to the way the news cycle works, some damage from climate change is overexaggerated - see my sixty harvests point above. But the baseline rate of extinctions being 100-1000x times higher than it should be (https://ourworldindata.org/extinctions#are-we-heading-for-a-sixth-mass-extinction) cannot justify a 'so what' response.
I admit I care more about the humans than the animals but I agree that both are very bad. Regardless I don't think the relative weighting of humans vs animals (and other wildlife) matters that much to the main point. Either way it will most likely be very bad but not to the point of the world being "doomed."
Do you think that if the Amazon rainforest was 1% of its current size, you would ever finish exploring it? Do you even have any intention of beginning? If 99% of the species on Earth went extinct, would you ever see or learn about any significant fraction of the 1% that remained?
I love nature, but I don't live there. The city surrounded by concrete and humans is my home. It's why I haven't died of hunger, disease, bear attack, or the hundred other ways people used to die before modernity. As such, I'm a proud anthropocentric parochialist. If we need to cut down forests and drive animals to extinction so that billions of people are raised out of poverty and given a dignified life, then cut down the forests and kill the animals.
How many hundreds of millions are you willing to starve to save the puffins? How many billions should be relegated to extreme poverty so that you can enjoy your nature walks?
I think there is a lot of merit in your comment. I'll just add that the period of 1989–2001 was unusually optimistic and lacking a great enemy. People coming of age during this time might have unnaturally high expectations of how well the world should be run.
Oh for sure a pre capitalist economy with our technology definitely wouldn’t have problems with climate change….
Or say a non capitalist one like 1960s China or the USSR, I am sure they were all about environmental stewardship…no wait…
Hmmm.
I didn't mention any of those examples. You can criticise the systems that capitalist market structures produce without thinking that a feudal or agrarian economy is better. I think you'd be better off steelmanning my argument rather than injecting noise into the conversation. Seeing a critique of capitalism and quickly googling the USSR's record on the same thing feels a bit reductive, no?
Those aren’t frivolous examples, they are the ONLY specific real world examples we have of non
-capitalist attempts to run a large economy. And they were no better for the environment at all.
You didn’t really present any arguments. Your main problems seem to be with markets and human nature more than capitalism. And markets are so powerful we definitely don’t want to ditch those even if they are not always best totally unfettered.
What is you suggestion for how to allocate capital and ownership in a way that magically stops climate change and still provides people with a lifestyle people will accept?
"You can criticise the systems that capitalist market structures produce without thinking that a feudal or agrarian economy is better."
I don't agree. "Obvious root causes that can be traced back pretty straightforwardly to capitalism/capitalistic tendencies" only has any meaning if all or most non-capitalistic alternatives would not trigger the root causes. If all or most non-capitalistic alternatives also create climate change, then climate change cannot be traced back to capitalistic tendencies.
>For instance, climate change, which clearly affects the mental health of young people
To be clear, it's not climate change causing this, its concern over climate change causing this. Subtle but different.
And please, let us know. Is China capitalist as you view things?
> To be clear, it's not climate change causing this, its concern over climate change causing this. Subtle but different.
Sure, a good point. If you wanted to you could say in response that the current western media ecology is capitalist, and that drives the concern. I don't think we're going to get anywhere on this line of argument.
The reason I said that the 'language was broad' is because I don't think 'capitalism' is a very useful term beyond a surface analysis. I mentioned it because Paul Goodman referred to it, and I should have phrased my comment differently because various people have now turned up to do the 'capitalist versus state-capitalist versus communist' arguments and I'm not interested.
Is it impossible to form deep friendships, or is it easier than ever thanks to many more ways to interact with people and stay in touch?
I would have had no friends at all, growing up, if not for exactly the things you say make it impossible to form friendships!
Exactly. I made a book club with some of my close friends. All for of us live in different cities, and yet most weeks we all get together and talk for an hour or more. Other friends and family I play online video games with and it lets us stay in touch and spend quality time together regularly even though we can't meet in person more than once or twice a year at most.
Critics would say that your "friendships" are not real friendships- those can only be formed in real life and organically. By seeking out deliberate companionship and becoming someone's friend for the sake of being their friend, via digital channels, you are merely performing a hideous mockery of friendship, like a changeling trying to ape the actions of real humans. You have no genuine attachment to your friends, but merely fear being alone, and thus cannot and will never be able to form a genuine connection with someone.
If this sounds cruel and sneering, let that reflect my opinion on this kind of pseudointellectual exercise.
Not sure I follow what your point is. Do you in fact believe that our friendships are fake? Or is the "pseudointellectual exercise" you're criticizing the same thing I'm complaining about in the book and the review?
My point is the kind of people who make these arguments tend to be obsessed with procedure and the RIGHT way to do something, often so that they can sneer at all the people who are living incorrectly and feel better about themselves. For some reason, this pathology is overwhelmingly present in French intellectual culture.
Because the French developed a massive inferiority complex after being the center of Europe for hundreds of years and then seeing modernism and science cause the UK, Germany, and later the US blow by them.
Been creating nonsense philosophy ever since.
If you cannot be a winner, change the game!
The data I have seen, admittedly only from Scandinavia, show that the percentage claiming to have at least one good friend has increased somewhat during the last decades. (same question across time, national surveys (level of living surveys), same sampling method).
I absolutely believe this.
To be clear, I think people who talk like the critic I described are raging assholes with degrees.
Yep. I intended to reply to Jason M's (empirical) statement, but mixed up the comments-to-whom.
That's cute, but we know for a fact that people have less friends than they used to. And when something affects a whole country, it's silly to act like this is an individual issue. People didn't spontaneously decide to start acting different. Something bigger is going on.
"We know for a fact that people have less friends than they used to"
That sure sounds like a normative claim on the world, so in the place of Himaldr-2 I'll be the one to ask: do you have data that reflects your claim, and can I see it?
I think you mean descriptive, not normative.
I mean that he is claiming something about the world where we can look at the thing he's talking about as best as we can and see how close his words match reality.
<i>Is it impossible to form deep friendships, or is it easier than ever thanks to many more ways to interact with people and stay in touch?</i>
The former.
"According to a survey published online January 23, 2020 by the health insurer Cigna, more than three in five Americans are lonely, with more and more people reporting feelings of being left out, being poorly understood and lacking companionship. Since 2018 when the survey was first conducted, there has been a nearly 13% rise in loneliness...
The Cigna report found loneliness to be more common among men and heavy users of social media were more lonely as compared with light users. Feelings of isolation were prevalent across generations, with Gen Z (18–22 years old) having the highest average loneliness score while Baby Boomers (55–73 years old) had the lowest."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7321652/
Oof, this is tough, but I want to play Devil's advocate on this one.
What if an online social life, while lacking in some necessary areas, is overall more attractive due to the being able to interact with those who are interested in the same things as you are?
I think it's attractive in the same way that, e.g., on-demand, high-fat and -sugar fast food is attractive -- nice in the short term, but in the long term tending to reduce your wellbeing.
As for being able to interact with those who are interested in the same things as you are, that's a real benefit, and for some people -- e.g., those with quite niche interests, or who have social anxiety, or live in isolated areas without many other people around -- having access to the internet and social media probably does improve their social life. For most people, however, I think the gain in breadth (how many people they can interact with) is outweighed by the loss in depth.
Many Thanks for the actual data!
I wish I'd checked back here sooner! I might have suggested that this could reflect, rather, the culture of the U.S., rather than anything intrinsic to modern life: over the same time period, the Nordic countries and Germany showed a decrease in reported loneliness among the younger generations; the UK, no change.
These are just the examples I decided to Google real quick, not cherry-picked ones! There may indeed be an overall trend, or may be one if we look over a longer time period. Probably the latter is true, if I had to guess; but I, personally, wonder how that can be...
...though I'm unusually solitary and unusually fond of textual interaction, I admit. (As a kid, I fantasized about being alone on an isolated space station... ...I was a weird kid. But even now — as much as I love my mother and my girl, as much as I like my friends — I mostly prefer texting to speaking, even with such as they. I can organize my thoughts better; and I suppose I feel that, in a way, through text you connect with someone more purely than in person: the accidents recede into irrelevance, and only the substance — mind — remains.
But others, uh, might not share this fondness for deep, isolated silence, broken only by the clickety-clack of keypresses...)
Many Thanks!
"over the same time period, the Nordic countries and Germany showed a decrease in reported loneliness among the younger generations; the UK, no change. "
so it can't be a toxic effect of exposure to crystalline elemental silicon :-)
Broadly agree. You can live an amazing life away from the spectacle. Truly unparalleled freedom, safety, and creativity in modern times. But if 99% of society is chained to their preferred flavor of Spectacle, you can't really connect with them. We could all walk into a sports bar right now and start cheering for Tom Brady and connect with other people who think he's the GOAT. But when try to peel back what's really going on with these people, it's either empty or ugly.
I find myself wishing other people would just do some introspection and figure out what they want and who they are. But they all seem to be on autopilot stuck in a loop of working a pointless job, paying the mortgage/rent, watching the latest thing on netflix, and just generally being checked out. I know there is something human inside, but it is just so buried.
If 99% of society is chained to their preferred flavor of Spectacle, then if you are e.g. a Bay Area resident that *still* leaves you living in a metropolis larger and more diverse than Elizabethan London or Colonial New York City, in a civilization as vast and interesting as Rome at its height. But, with lots more drones to run the technologically advanced infrastructure and markets to provide enormously greater opportunities and comforts for you and all your interesting friends. Do you really need to make a deep, personal connection with everyone you meet?
Oh, thank God, it's not just me!
Yeah, "no introspection" is a good way to put it — or a large chunk of it; I think there may also be another thing (or other things) missing.
It is hard to put into words exactly, but I truly believe — and I say this in full awareness of how I will come off — that a large portion of the population can't really think; can't reflect; can't self-motivate; can't — doesn't even feel the need to — come to an independent conclusion on any question bigger than "what do I want to eat?".
The process, I swear, goes something like "thing is trendy = thing is good" *and it really feels like just the latter part to them*.
...Yeah, yeah, I'm like the guy in the comic Scott posted recently: "pfft, they have no idea, they're all sheeple..."
Sure, it's true: sometimes we do fail to credit others with attributes we'd find they do in truth possess, if only we saw a little deeper and more clearly; sometimes we do have blind spots where our own relative strengths and skills are concerned; sometimes we *are* all more similar than we think!
...but sometimes, you really are smarter than the average bear.
Sometimes, what appears to be a duck is, in fact, a duck. Sometimes, in other words, what appears to be someone with a barren wasteland of an internal life that is empty of wonder and filled only by vague, unexamined wants and tribal urges inculcated by their surroundings, the In-Group, and stuff they saw those cool celebrities do...
...well, you know where I'm going with this (he said, cleverly avoiding having to find a way to compose a pleasing end to a sentence that really should not have been constructed in the way it was). I think some people *really don't* ever look up from their shoes, so to speak — or even know why they don't, or that it's something that might be desirable.
(And I base this off asking people about, or overhearing conversations on, topics like our place in the universe, the nature of consciousness, why we do the things we do, what is right and how do we know, etc. "Huh? I dunno, it's just normal I guess? Anyway let's take a shot!")
And hey, it doesn't mean they're *bad* or anything. If you've a good heart, I'm pleased to share a species with you whether or not you have attempted to find your place in the universe or based your values on as firm a foundation as your thought can manage.
------------
I'll share a story about the sort of "cognitive normie" that does worry me a bit.
I once said to a Christian fellow, as we prepared a response to a drug deal gone bad: "hey, don't you think Jesus would frown upon what we're about to do?"
He replied, "Do I look like Jesus to you?"
So... you believe that God Himself, an infinite being of infinite might, has — out of a love and kindness so vast He would sacrifice a part of Himself just for us, for we who are less than ants to Him — has, I say, given you a direct and untainted glimpse of the Truth and the Right, a sacred instruction such that men would have died for just a glimpse of such righteousness and surety...
...and you don't even want to, like, wonder? Don't want to maybe ponder a little bit about what it would mean for such a thing to be true? Don't want to try to imagine, for a second, what the universe would look like and what your place in it would be, if the thing you profess to believe were indeed reality?
Huh. Okay then.
-------------
I could (and will, for I am only human, and my hatred of the Out-Group cannot be stayed) draw a parallel to certain modern phenomena — of the "I never thought leopards would eat MY face!" variety; you (that is, you the normie, not you the intellectual ACX reader) want to censor things you don't like, say. Fair enough. But... this is not from any *principle*. It is not a rule you came up with and are following. It is not reasoned from a cold-blooded EV calculation, either. It is not even based on an intuition you have mapped out for yourself.
No, it is purely emotive; you are parroting the current groupthinkery. You don't think about what your angry judgment and virtuous performance are really *based* on; you don't really *try* for reality, the way you do when your life depends on it (well, sometimes not even then, really).
It isn't *principle*... even if you know that *saying* it is is the password for certain challenges that may be met. In a time where the password was "faith", well, then *that* would be what you're basing it all on, like the *good, cool* people.
I swear it can't be thought like you (now you as in VolumeWarrior, or other ACX chads) or I understand it. There is no consideration of "what if everyone thought like this? what if someone who disagreed with me wanted to censor *me?*" — because they are wrong and probably know it, see, and *I'm* right, so it's *different.*
And *even then* they do not wonder at the circumstances — how either they totally would come up with all that stuff on their own and (luckily!) ended up born into the one place and time that *just so happens* to match up perfectly with their (independent!) reasoning... or else they'd have been one of the people they now hate so much, waving a torch at the bound witches and kicking the natives, were they born 400 years earlier.
The seems like the epitome of "anecdata" which rationalists should be opposing. That some people do well under "problem of the day" doesn't mean it isn't a problem and says nothing about the broader impacts of "problem of the day". Pretty sure plenty of people were saying the same thing you are saying during monarchy, too.
There's plenty of room for concrete, specific complaints about the current state of society that I take seriously.
The thing I'm arguing against is particular these extremely broad and diffuse critiques of some general trend towards fakeness or alienation, generally itself not backed up by any hard data. In fact they seem to amount to saying, "all the data says things are great but I still feel bad about it for some reason," and then trying to explain or invent what that reason is.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this kind of take tends to be really wordy and use a lot of dense language that's jargony or otherwise highly abstract.
Both data analytics and abstraction/philosophy can be useful tools. Unfortunately, both are easily manipulated.
The (fictional) empire in Asimov's Foundation claimed that "all the data" was looking better every day.
You can have flow dynamics data on a stream, but I would recommend some abstract modeling in case there's a waterfall ahead.
It seems more like the epitome of anecdata to say "I'm kind of upset and stuff, therefore society is moving in a bad direction."
There's some broader stuff here, but I'll admit they lost me at the "Society is collapsing because it used to be more fun to play video games" bit. I think it's much more likely that adult responsibility has made me more aware of problems than it is that the world got worse.
I agree.
It was also really weird reading this after Criticism of Criticism of Criticism. This book seems to be doing what CCC criticizes.
In my experience, 95% of the complaints about capitalism are actually complaints about thermodynamics.
Wait, what? So it's those thermodynamic b*st*ds been secretly screwing us all along?
Right? I'm not saying there aren't valid complaints about modern society, or even that socialist thought is wrong, necessarily (I think it is, but not arguing about it here).
But so many of the arguments are like "nobody should have to work just to have a roof over their head" and... homes aren't naturally occurring? If you think we can collectively do a better job taking care of each other, advocate for that. But never forget that life is a constant struggle against entropy we're all destined to ultimately lose. No economic reform will change that.
Yeah, I agree with this. At the same time, I do think that the spectacle idea has one interesting point: that we now have lots of close "relationships" with fictional characters. That includes fictions like James Bond, and fictional personas that people present on Instagram.
This isn't exactly new. It's exactly what religion did. But I do think it's interesting to look at how these different fictions shape our conceptual worlds.
My naive first guess is that it's better to have an amazing variety of different fictions to relate to and learn from, and in particular to have fewer fictions pretending to be reality, like religion did. So I'd lean towards thinking that this development makes the world better. But I'd like to see people trying to research this.
I completely agree that the reflexive "X has happened therefore society is doomed" just seems like a dumb way to write a book.
Hmmm. My life is awesome, I'm not depressed, I have lots of deep relationships, and do tons of cool shit. And yet, nearly everything in this essay resonated with me.
Welcome to the boundary of the illusion/spectacle. This is the place where the conditioned self is discovered.
Are you under the impression that people are generally happy these days?
And if millions of people are depressed and this is a product of "caring about stupid shit", why are so many people making these mistakes? Did they all spontaneously and individually choose to care about the wrong things?
If students one year start struggling on a test, and then this worsens for years and years on end, should we assume that the students all individually decided to be lazy and stop studying enough? Or should this make us look for the existence of a broader trend driving this underperformance?
This comment gets to the heart of a problem when we discuss these kinds of issues:
"the students all individually decided to be lazy"
This sentence suggests that you're looking at this as a question of *where to assign blame*. I'm guessing you assume that if I (I kinda agree with the commenter you responded to, so I'm putting myself in that place - sorry if I'm treading on any toes!) can assign blame to the students, then I will think there is no need to further examine the problem, and no need for anyone else to do anything about it. This is the kind of dick move that people like Ben Shapiro make: If I can use figures to "prove" that X is causing their own problems (where X is almost always African Americans) then that's the end of the conversation.
But I think that there are a bunch of other possibilities that can be explored without either embracing the "secular decline" catastrophism of Debord, or the "I'm an asshole" blame mongering of right-wing microcelebs.
For example: the question are people generally happy - this is open to a lot of interpretation, and I'm not convinced the answer is no. People used to commit suicide *a lot* in the not-very-distant past. (I live in China, which was much poorer much more recently than the USA, so these contrasts are starker. Suicide by rural women in this country was sky-high as recently as 30 years ago.) I don't know how suicide stats are collected, but I wonder what proportion of the people who died in agricultural "accidents" and in war are people who kinda sorta almost deliberately fell into the woodchipper or the machine gun. I have no evidence if this is true, but it could be.
For example: the question of "caring about stupid shit" - I don't know about you, but I'm a pretty hardcore atheist, so I'm committed to the belief that for thousands of years, people have built identities, institutions, artistic sensibilities, and entire cultures on "caring about made-up shit." If sudden changes in material culture and the invention of some radical new technologies do indeed make people "care about stupid shit," I won't be surprised. And I'll be very pleased if it only takes humanity a few centuries to work through the problems caused by the invention of Twitter, because the last time something similar happened (invention of writing), we went down some weird paths for millennia.
For example: "should we assume that the students all individually decided to be lazy and stop studying enough? Or should this make us look for the existence of a broader trend driving this underperformance?" - we shouldn't assume anything, but there several different questions here. (1) Is this really a problem? Is changing scores on a made-up test a problem? Are changing happiness statistics a problem? Personally, I have worries about the ability of any government or institution to make me happy. I would like my government and institutions to keep me safe: protect my physical person, maintain an environment in which I can earn my living. Past that, I don't want much from them, and I really don't want the Chinese, British (I'm British), or American government worrying its head about my happiness. I regard that as my responsibility. (2) If the test scores (or happiness statistics) changed, what might the cause be? Does that cause imply a problem, or might it be that the test has become less suitable? and (2) Is there anything anyone can do about it? Even when you know the cause of a "problem"/phenomenon, whether or not an institution can fix it, and whether you want an institution to fix it, is a completely separate problem.
Sorry if you know all this stuff! You only made a short comment. But your comment seemed to include some assumptions and conflation of things that often pop up in media I see, so I wanted to try to write them out and disentangle them a bit.
Are you under the impression there was ever a time when people were generally happy? The world is full of perfectly valid, concrete things to be miserable over and always has been. It's the arguments that things are getting *worse* that tend to seem incoherent and driven more by the author's subjective feelings than any hard evidence. But mostly it looks like Phil H covered most of the stuff I would have.
I think there's some degree to which technology makes it *extremely* difficult to disconnect from all the stupid bullshit. Smartphones have taken over everyone's life but while they've improved mine in several discrete ways (basically Google Maps, Spotify, Audible and Facetime), being reachable (and expected to be reachable) in my pocket at any hour of the night and having lazy resort to the Internet a click away has, on net, made it much harder for myself and those around to me to be "present" and almost *impossible* to just fucking disconnect completely and do my own thing without having to worry that an important work email came in.
Concentrated, diffuse, and integrated modes of spectacle sounds remarkably like Moldbug’s two stroke and four stroke societies. Wonder if he read Debord.
"everyone is xfss"
What?
I was surprised how little space you gave to the point that mass media was one-way (Lawrence Lessig called it "read-only culture", citing Sousa on gramophones displacing human singing), whereas modern social media is two-way (even if there is still a skewed distribution of the producers vs consumers that wouldn't surprise Pareto).
Boy, I hated this. Not that the review was badly written -- I like the authorial voice here just fine, perhaps even most out of all reviews so far, and the reviewer's comments were often cogent and amusing or interesting -- but the *book's* complaints make very little sense to me; the entire thing seems to me much ado about nothing. Paraphrasing an early passage in the review: "But I don't think [he was just railing against change out of some personal emotional difficulty]. Life is *different* now. You want to use your phone even when the TV is on, and don't want to lose GPS signal when in a strange place." Uh, yeah, those both seem fine to me. Where's the part that's supposed to explain why life is so bad now and we're less "real" and stuff?
There are some parts I liked a bit more, later on, but overall I feel like this sort of thing is a waste of time: pseudo-profundity through overwrought, foggy prose, for those who are unhappy and want something to blame it on.
Yes! Like, I'm open to be convinced that life is worse now because of any of the discussed stuff, but the whole thing just seems to mostly stand on asserting that it is bad or worse than before and moving on.
Rates of mental illness are higher now than they were in previous decades. It seems that, on a subjective level, a lot of people are worse off than in the past.
How sure are we that this isn't better or different measurements?
Do we have any reason to think that it is due to better or different measurements?
I don't know! Given the changing state of the art and stigmatisms around mental health over the decades it seems like something I'd definitely want to investigate before making the claim that it is or isn't worse.
Yes, we have lots of reasons to think that! It's a very well-known result with regard to physical ailments, for example: many more breast cancers were caught with increased focus on breast cancer and better diagnostic tools... but the actual rate does not appear to have much increased.
With a *lot* more focus on mental illness, mental illness being much less stigmatized (and indeed becoming perhaps the opposite of stigmatized among a certain demographic), relaxed diagnostic criteria, more (and more thinly-sliced) categories of mental illness, and more access to mental-health-care, it should be our default assumption.
Scott has written an interesting article about this (or, rather, a closely-related phenomenon, more accurately).
But also, Jonathan Haidt always makes the point that hospital admissions for self harm among teen girls are way up since the early 2010s, as are suicides. That part, at least, isn't due to relaxed diagnostic criteria.
We have reasons to believe otherwise. Suicides are also up as are certain causes of it (loneliness, for example). If causes and effects of depression are up, then it would stand to reason that the observed increase in depression is not because “we are so good at detecting it.” As an aside, one should double check conclusions that so handily lets society pat itself on the back for something negative.
Yes, which is why I didn't draw any conclusions. There are plausible reasons to think both ways
How much higher, over what period of time?
>Rates of mental illness are higher now than they were in previous decades.
This is a verifiable quantitative statement. The review has many stylistic merits, but it didn't present such things.
People are rich enough to care about their mental health and pay others to look into it.
I'm impressed by your openness to being convinced -- always a good sign. Interestingly, however, the reviewer was right to link Scott's piece on epistemic learned helplessness. You being convinced wouldn't really prove anything, any more than you already having been convinced that things are better now proves anything. I certainly wouldn't argue with you either way.
If anyone reading this wonders "how could anyone think that things are worse now?" and finds the line of questioning introspectively engaging, I suggest checking for the following biases:
1) Am I a kind of person who would have had poor outcomes in the version of the past I believe happened? For instance due to being physically small or weak, sickly as a child, in need of corrective lenses, midly disabled in some other way, or a member of a racial, ethnic, sexual, or gender group that is reported to have had a hard time previously?
2) Am I addicted to comfort, ease, entertainment, snack food, intoxicants, central heating/cooling, the automobile, pornography, or something else that would have been hard to obtain in times past?
I think that the two examples you've pulled out have to do with not being able to do things, with focusing on the TV or navigating on one's own as examples; the broader point is like, living in the society of the spectacle means having your thoughts controlled by e.g. what cable news is covering today, and your knowledge potentially controlled by the same. I think that people would like to possess the ability to focus and navigate and think about what they wish in order to be able to act according to their advantage more often. For example, in my experience, focusing on one form of media at a time causes me to think about it more clearly and, let's say, see the main character's flaws in myself and set out to live my life differently. The urge to resist mind control is expected to be automatically understood by a lot of people because they feel it strongly instinctively. Also, if someone is unhappy, there is probably a reason, they might as well look for it. But I agree that this is a very thought-provoking question, I think that more of us who identify with this book's complaints should try to answer it
Yeah. I also think some of the stock examples require a lot of projecting.
> It takes an act of will to put down your phone so you can focus on the TV. Low battery is an emergency. Losing signal is bereavement. Navigating without GPS is an anxiety attack.
None of these are relatable. I get some people have a problem with them, but I don’t think that these are core parts of the modern experience or whatever. I think most people are able to just take these in stride most of the time.
It's an empirical fact that people's attention spans are getting shorter.
"Like all great thinkers worth their salt, he was an embittered alcoholic who took his own life in despair."
All great thinkers worth their salt are embittered alcoholics who commit suicide? All of them?
I'm fairly sure that was a joke by hyperbole, not a serious claim.
Could be the humor got past me because it's hard for me to find humor in alcoholism, despair or suicide. Seems making a joke of Debord's or anyone's suicide is just making a spectacle of the situation.
Not trying to be too down on humor/attempts at humor when more humor is needed. Not sure if that means less suicide/alcoholism/despair humor or just *better* suicide/alcoholism/despair humor.
Google dark humor?
It sounds to me you simply do not enjoy dark humor, and that is all fine and dandy. But as I have to remind people again and again these days, it seems: just because something does not fit your aesthetic does not make it a bad, wrong thing to enjoy.
I'm all for better suicide/alcoholism/despair (SAD) humor. And I admit I might be a suicide/alcoholism/despair (SAD) humor snob. But I have no problem with someone else enjoying something that's not top shelf.
Not trying to be mean here, but are you on the spectrum?
Maybe a little for humor related to suicide and alcoholism. Dude was plenty funny all through the rest of his/her/their enlightening book review, so I was able to catch some of that.
I hope you enjoyed that Rickroll anonymous reviewer, cause it cost you my vote.
This response is interesting to me. When I get rickrolled my response is something along the lines of "goshdarnit you got me, you silly rascal. take your upvote".
How can the anonymous reviewer savor his victory without knowing I shake my fist at the clouds?
:-)
I'm quite familiar with Critical Theory and Marxism, so I'm not biased against it and I have been influenced by many authors in this area.
Yet I can't help but thinking "so what? so what? so what?" all the time while reading this review. I guess that's the difference between lower-c and capital-C critical theory.
I just never got lower-c.
Is it a bad thing that episteme > metis, that we spend more time with on-screen than IRL memes? Why or how? These basic things are just never explained.
"We hope for the best, but 2122 is shaping up to be some unholy amalgam of Gattaca, The Matrix, and Minority Report."
Is it? How do you know? The author is just assuming you agree with hyperbolic assertions all the time, without looking at the analytical content or meaning of basic terms.
What specifically about all the poems describing the modern world is bad? What is the harm done? How would you quantify it?
Oh, am I an epigone of the commodification ideology?
Or is it possible that the doom-and-gloom scenarios are really jumping out of the head of the author and make for a pleasurable experience for readers high in neuroticism and anxiety?
Peak-commodification if you will.
And then this groundless hyperbole: "If you want to actually seize power, you will need to conduct a coup - which, so I’ve heard, is top-down. It’s the only strategy that has ever really worked,"
Uhm, what?
Maybe that has helped in seizing power but what followed was almost always worse. The bourgeoisie revolution, "the only true revolution", was not a top-down coup.
So much for ... just assuming big hyperbolic things, but I am repeating myself.
Yeah, this is essentially what I was trying to say in my comment, above — except stated better than I managed.
I am familiar with it so I am biased against it because it is mostly garbage.
> Whither Kazakhstan? Afghanistan? Who knows and who cares?
I know and I care. I know about Turkey and Syria (which no one seems to be paying attention to) and the conflicts in Mexico and Myanmar and about grain prices in East Africa. It baffles me so many people don't. It's not even like this doesn't affect them. It does! The prices you pay for gas, for bread, for electricity are all affected by it. Whether you are safe or not is affected by it.
This is my issue with all this. The "too cool for school, nothing really matters, it's all showmanship" is the kind of pose you can only take in a society that's extremely safe and free of significant material need. Where having wrong beliefs about the way the world works is buffered by externalizing costs. Material reality exists and ignoring it will ultimately doom you. The a dialectic of rocks hitting your head can't actually stop the rocks.
It reminds me of the old Buddhist story where a student says, "Master, I have become enlightened! Everything is an illusion!" The master nods sagely and says, "Then I have one more lesson for you." The student eagerly nods his head. And the master cracks him over the head with his staff so hard the student screams in pain. "Why do you cry?" The master asks. "Because it hurts!" The student wails. "Ah, but pain is an illusion. My staff is an illusion. The blow is an illusion! So why do you cry?"
The theological point (I think) is that even if the world is an illusion we still experience it. But I take it as point of the supremacy of the physical over the spiritual (at least until you become a Buddha, I guess.) Even if you come to realize you do not exist and think you exist as some kind of Hume-ian pure sensor then you are still sensing the things you sense and those are not entirely within your control or even human control. Likewise, the idea these events are ultimately meaningless epiphenomena ignores the actual cause and effect. (Which, I know, he would argue is just another spectacle/illusion/whatever.)
PS: Russian disinformation has a grand, ancient history, predating even the Soviets.
Well, the story you give is a koan, but the common interpretation is that it is one thing to intellectually grasp the concept of Śūnyatā (the idea that "material" reality is inherently vacuous) and another to actually achieve enlightenment.
Applied to this concept: Maitre Debord spoke of how all relations and events and occurrences in the modern era were vacuous and relationships were impossible, and yet he married two women and had affairs with several others. While he intellectually grasped his concepts, he did not act on them- and well he was to do so, for much like an arhat or bodhisattva, to truly live the truth of the doctrine is deepest insanity to those who live in the illusion.
Thank you for the further detail. I know my interpretation isn't the standard one. I suppose this goes back to the cattle thieves and madmen distinction.
I always thought the point of that Buddhist story was that the truly enlightened have a staff and when they use it, it's just an illusion. Others just think they are enlightened and suffer the consequences. And finally, there are those (conspicuously absent in this story) who are enlightened just enough to realize they need to stay out of range of that illusionary staff.
But I'm not Buddhist so this could all be off.
I have been enlightened.
But why should people care about all that, when they can realistically do nothing about any of it? It seems like a recipe for permanent misery, not unlike one which the author of this book seemed to suffer from.
If you want to live in blissful ignorance that is certainly your choice. But that's not what we're talking about here. Because most people do not. The idea that people who know about these things care about them as an illusion or entertainment is false, is my point.
I feel this so much! All these "woe is the world, it sucks and it's too bad we can't do much about it—oh but please continue to still make these token efforts". Effective Altruism improves on this slightly but is fundamentally unwilling to go beyond treating symptoms.
A good example is every time I read about how the cobalt for electric vehicles is tainted by conflict and child labour. "Oh, see, the solution to burning oil is little better than the current mess. What a shame." Some of the more pro-active types then go and develop batteries that don't use cobalt, which is fair enough I suppose.
But the whole time no-one brings of the obvious solution of just trying to break up the Congo, a stupidly large country with stupid legacy borders, into something that would actually work and produce stable, responsive governments! Rwanda's Kagame, a friend of the West, is now engaged in his third (or is it fourth?) war in the Congo. It would not be difficult to stop him.
But, yes, many of us care. And many of us are frustrated that obvious solutions aren't discussed by politicians or media, in preference of more "what a shame" stories.
What is worse - those who throw up their hands and say it's all too hard, or those who say the solutions are 'obvious' and 'not difficult'? Not difficult to stop Kagame in the same way as Saddam Hussain? Ho Chi Minh? The Taliban? Any of countless examples of leaders who were 'friends' of the West at various convenient times but who also had considerable support that did not rely on the West?
1. The former, those who give up without ever trying, are far worse.
2. Because it worked the last time. From Wikipedia:
> A United Nations report found that Rwanda created and commanded the M23 rebel group.[10] Rwanda ceased its support following international pressure as well as the military defeat by the DRC and the UN in 2013.[11]
You're equating applying diplomatic pressure on covert support for a rebel group with "break[ing] up the Congo ... into something that would actually work"?
Seems to me that actively breaking up sovereign nations which don't want to be broken up is rarely 'not difficult'. Can't think of too many recent examples where external forces directly did such a thing with undisputable positive results.
The only recent example I can think of where external forces actively tried to do that was Yugoslavia and that did have indisputable positive results. Well, except for the Serbians, I'm sure they would dispute it and therein lies the problem with setting unrealistically high expectations that the sovereign country must agree to be broken up. If you do that of course it's never going to work. Military force must be an option.
My counterpoint would be all the external forces that sent military forces into countries and then *didn't* try to break them up: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan (arguably). All would benefit from not being forced to use their colonial borders.
I'm sure that Kosovars are thrilled to have germans own their mines and banks and US keep their peace, while Bosniaks can't control their currency. How convenient that the break-up benefited the major powers that funded and supported it, and I am sure that if US intervened in Afghanistan for example to break it up into smaller pieces the result would be great for the locals, and not at all predatory. [/s]
I didn't mean to equate those two things by the way, I probably should have put them in separate paragraphs. The Kagame/M23 thing was in the news lately so I wanted to mention it and get it some attention.
<i>True, our incomprehension is somewhat different in kind. In the past, it was nature itself that served as obstacle and enigma. Our knowledge amassed, and we gained hope - all the mysteries of the universe were only puzzles, certain to be solved in time. However, as the scope and scale of human endeavor expanded, our ignorance was returned to us by the very means we sought to eliminate it. Technology colonized our lives and our minds, reintroducing unfathomable complexity into realms we once had mastered. Our world becomes increasingly manmade, and as a consequence is more susceptible to human iniquities never found in the natural world. </i>
This reminds me a bit of The Abolition Of Man:
"The real picture is that of one dominant age—let us suppose the hundredth century A.D.—which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car."
"Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car."
Lewis overstates his case, perhaps drastically. Consider electric lights. Yeah, to run them I need the power company, but it is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. The choice of which lights to use and when to use them is mine and my wife's, *NOT* "of a few hundreds of men". Not all choices enabled by technologies are centrally controlled. Some technologies really do broaden the range of choices of ordinary people.
Until the power company decides to cut off your electricity, of course, in which case you'll quickly realise that your ability to turn the lights on does in fact depend on other people's good graces.
As I said, it (the power company) is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. Sure, it _could_ arbitrarily turn the power off, but it actually doesn't. More crucially, _prior_ to the advances Lewis so cavalierly disparages, the average person had all sorts of vulnerabilities to other people too. A nobleman might arbitrarily extort labor or crops from the peasantry. A pope might start an idiotic crusade and get thousands of people killed.
What matters is whether the live options the typical person has the bulk of the time are widened or narrowed by a technical advance. In point of fact, electrification widened them. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Electricity was a win.
<i>As I said, it (the power company) is quite reliable and predictable the vast bulk of the time. Sure, it _could_ arbitrarily turn the power off, but it actually doesn't.</i>
So the people who hold power over you wield it in a reliable and predictable way. That's nice, but it doesn't mean they don't actually hold power.
<i>More crucially, _prior_ to the advances Lewis so cavalierly disparages, the average person had all sorts of vulnerabilities to other people too. A nobleman might arbitrarily extort labor or crops from the peasantry. A pope might start an idiotic crusade and get thousands of people killed.</i>
Oppressive governments and wars are still around. In fact, they're potentially even worse, because modern technology has given governments many more means of controlling their people, and made weapons far more destructive.
"So the people who hold power over you wield it in a reliable and predictable way. That's nice, but it doesn't mean they don't actually hold power."
Look, it is theoretically possible for e.g. a politician to use the concentrated control that the electric power company has over its customers to cut off electric current to his opponents. I've never heard of that happening. I've never heard of them threatening to use that particular option. Have you heard of such a case? Politicians have lots of power, but, as far as I know, they have always used other means, from murders and prisons to financial levers, to apply political power.
"Oppressive governments and wars are still around. In fact, they're potentially even worse, because modern technology has given governments many more means of controlling their people, and made weapons far more destructive."
That is true, but it is irrelevant to the point that I'm making. The fact that nerve gas makes governments more destructive does not detract from the fact that electrification lets ordinary people control the electric lights in their homes. I never claimed that _all_ technical advances widened the options for ordinary people. I claim that Lewis is badly wrong in neglecting that _some_ technical advances _do_ widen the options for ordinary people. Lewis denigrates "_Each_ advance", "_every_ victory" [emphasis added]. This is simply wrong.
I have a question for people who have read both the book and the review.
Does this review underemphasize the Marxist portions of the book? I tried reading Society of the Spectacle almost a decade ago, and vaguely remember giving up because I ran into too many concepts that I had to google separately. I don't remember Marx being name-dropped constantly, more like the author assumed you should already be well-read in Marxist economic thought to grasp the Spectacle.
Am I misremembering? And also, should I give the book another shot?
I think you need to have read Marx and Hegel to be able to properly access and assess TSS.
And understand dada movement.
I really appreciate the way this review takes a text that sounds *dreadful* to read, and translates it so I can get some of the nifty ideas without having to fight my way through the prose. A valuable service.
This was actually my problem with the review. I would read one of the excerpts, spend a few moments trying to interpret what I think Dubord must have meant, and then read on to find that me and reviewer had come to sometimes wildly different conclusions.
That's not the reviewers fault ofcourse but it does signpost to me that this book is obtuse, "artisitc" garbage. What's the point of language if not to transmit your thoughts as clearly as you can into other people's minds.
Well, philosophy is the field I'm mostly familiar with, and some philosophers write impenetrable prose to disguise the fact that they're full of shit, but some philosophers have valuable things to say and are just bad at expressing themselves clearly, or had writing-style preferences I decidedly do not share. Our current intellectual society seems to me to put a much higher priority on clarity of writing, and to have much higher standards for what it takes for writing to count as clear, than previous generations. I view that as a good thing, but it's also the case that we've simply become less skilled readers in certain respects than our predecessors. So I try not to assume that an obtuse writing style necessarily indicates that the content is garbage.
And some philosophers have ideas that are genuinely novel. Communicating information that fits into existing categories is much easier than rearranging categories.
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow is a good example of a working, post-capitalist society. The basic idea is that advances in 3D printing (along with disregard for copyright) allow people to simply leave society and subsist on renewable power and raw materials.