The Parade to the Future
Reasons for Hope in a Time of Distraction
I recently came across a fascinating podcast called Techtonic, hosted on a New Jersey radio station called WFMU. The episode I listened to that really got my attention, “The Protest Against Smartphones,” was mostly a report about a recent protest event in New York City organized by the Luddite Club NYC.1
The Luddite Club, which has made the news a few times over the last couple years, was founded by a group of high school students who were fed up with the way social media and digital technology was overwhelming their lives and wrecking their minds. Borrowing their name from the nineteenth-century workers whose activism against the introduction of machines was organized under the fictional leadership of General Ned Ludd, the Luddite Club members are characterized by their use of dumbphones, their emphasis on in-person meetings and real-life experiences, and — in this recording — a mischievous sense of fun and hope. The goal is not to fill its members with rage, but to spark a revolution driven by an imagined future in which Silicon Valley is not setting the standard for the good life.
The episode is well worth a listen. The host of the show, Mark Hurst, whose deep passion perfectly complements his professional delivery, interviews attendees about their views on technology and reads some of the chalk statements that have been traced across the sidewalk. My favourite part is his recording of the march of the Luddites to the Apple Store. With the sounds of happy murmuring and city traffic rumbling in the background, the voice of one of the leaders rises above the din:
We don’t care if we get rabies!
We will save those iPad babies!
The chant continues as the growing crowd moves down the street. When they arrive at the Apple Store, there are some speeches, more chants, and then the main event: a mock trial at which three digital technologies — a smartphone, an iPad, and a laptop — are summarily tried, condemned, and sentenced to an encounter with a figure calling himself Death and “his old friend,” Rock.
Apparently, Tim Cook was at the Apple Store that day too.2
Answering the “So What?”
Tech criticism is seductive. Pessimism often is. The appeal of it has to do, I think, with the way these critics (people like Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, Albert Borgmann, and others) name the dis-ease we all feel. Yet, as Alan Jacobs comments in an essay that helped me immensely (“From Tech Critique to Ways of Living”), even if the tech critics were right, “So what?” Jacobs’s suggestion in that essay is that, instead of dwelling on pessimism, we can turn to more constructive thinkers like Yuk Hui and others, who are attempting to frame the technological conversation in new ways entirely. I think this is both brilliant and the right way forward.3 L.M. Sacasas has been very helpful in this regard as well, with his recovery of critical thinkers like Ivan Illich and introduction of new thinkers like Byun-Chul Han and Hartmut Rosa.
The other side of the “so what” question, though, remains: What should we do with our tech in light of the fact that the tech critics were right?
This lingering question is why I find the story of the Luddite Club so inspiring. It reminded me that, even if it’s hard to see how individual action can change the world, it’s easy to see how individual action can change my own world. It reminded me that the apparent unavoidability of experiencing a different future than the one envisioned for me by Big Tech can actually be trumped by the simple choice — in the words of Wendell Berry — to “do something that won’t compute.”
For me, this choice involves looking for ways to avoid using my phone and the computer. This is definitely not something that everyone will “get” or agree with, but it does feel like a small movement in the direction of freedom.
Wisdom in an $8 Pamphlet
Freedom isn’t something we typically associate with austerity and refusal. Yet, according to one writer, this principle must underlie our culture’s wider reaction to the age of hyperconsumption if it is to be successful. August Lamm is an artist and writer currently living in New York City. Recently, Lamm published a 32-page pamphlet called You Don’t Need a Smartphone: A Practical Guide to Downgrading & Reclaiming Your Life. It is succinct, witty, and, above all, helpful — I also really just enjoyed reading it.4 Lamm’s pamphlet explores some of the challenges of not having a smartphone, solutions to those problems, and especially the promise on the other side: “the absence of distraction, the ease of presence, the resulting depth of connection.” The pamphlet was released last year, after Lamm had spent several years living smartphone-free.
More recently, Lamm upped the ante on her radical experiment and gave up her computer. Her article about the first couple of months of this experience is inspiring. She still does use a computer — after all, she is a writer and also, like all of us, she lives in a world that has over the last twenty-five years reinvented itself to be essentially inhospitable to those who would seek to be tech-free. Instead of keeping her computer at home where it would be a constant source of temptation, Lamm uses the computers at her local public library. I have told a few friends about this (actually, who am I kidding? I talk about this with basically everyone I meet!) and one of the reactions has been a strange defensiveness. Someone heard that Lamm was using library computers and retorted, “Oh! So she’s using public resources…” which struck me as an odd complaint, given that the resources are public. That’s what (and who) they’re for, in fact!
Imagining a World
I tried to reflect on the world that is being imagined into being by activists like the kids of the Luddite Club and August Lamm. It’s a world that is both distinct from the dominant world we find ourselves in — a world characterized by overstimulation, distraction, and anxiety — and also separate from the world that came before the televisual and digital revolutions. It is separated from this older world by virtue of the fact that it has become so difficult to operate within it without a phone. But it is also separated from the pre-digital world because, even with the best of downgrading intentions, all of us have lived through the era of “a little bit of everything all of the time” and know, somewhere in the back of our minds, that this instant-gratification-fever-dream is just a click and a swipe away.
Nevertheless, this no-tech (or low tech) world is still a negation of both the old (pre-tech) and the new (pro-tech) worlds. Perched on the other side of the dialectic, this new-old world sings a unique kind of song. As Lamm puts it, it is a world in which we can “reclaim our lives.” Life is closely bound up with the things to which we devote our attention. But what does it look like when we no longer have the ability to sustain attention in any direction? And so, the premise and promise of removing those devices that have been designed to erode our attention is to create an opening.
Within that opening, the world that is being imagined is primarily one of presence, observation, and the reception of reality in its subtlety and nuance. This reception is not the kind of passive encounter with the oversaturated and capital-infused, Stanford-designed dopamine machine of screens.5 Instead, it’s a conversation. This is not unlike a conversation with another human — and possesses both the benefits and challenges of one as well. In an unmediated encounter with the world around us, both the world of time and space, we experience the many characteristics of conversation: interest, boredom, uncertainty, memories, sense-perception, and, throughout, an attempt to understand. What drives me is the hope to be able to pick up that conversation with the world that we left mid-sentence — that time we felt a buzz in our pocket or in the wake of a sudden urgent need to check who co-starred with Brad Pitt in that one movie.
The True Life
Is it necessary to ditch our phones and computers to experience this new-old world (which I realize I’ve probably radically undersold here)? Maybe not. But, for me, they represent such an enormous obstacle. Some of this is related to the addictive tendencies that these devices have activated within me over the many decades I have spent using them. Another major reason, though, is that they begin from an assumption that is fundamentally antithetical to the desire that motivates me to attend to the world in its smallness, slowness, and minute diversity.
That assumption, to borrow the opening line from Emmanuel Lévinas’s, Totality and Infinity, might be summarized as, simply:
“The true life is absent.”
Of course, this sentiment has been a motivating assumption throughout human history, whether spoken by a French philosopher, or by Plato, or by a certain kind of Christianity that kept its focus not on the world around us, but on the next one. In the technological iteration of this belief, screens articulate the idea, promising me that they are portals into reality — a reality flashier, more upsetting, more enticing, more more than any reality IRL we could possibly come up with.
Yet the phrase in Lévinas continues: “The true life is absent… BUT we are in the world” (capitalization mine).
As an embodied creature living my one life in this broken, beautiful, and fundamentally given world, I don’t want to be anywhere else. I don’t want to experience reality-plus or to have my senses constantly manipulated (intentionally or not) by the glow of a screen that draws me to it like a moth on the verge of its demise in flames.
The possibility of experiencing reality in its quietness, of learning to see “the world in a grain of sand,” or in a leafless tree on the cusp of winter, or in my neighbour or my child — it’s all so worth the price of forgoing access to reality-plus. Maybe it’s not necessary for everyone to pay this price, but I think it is for me. (And it would definitely make it easier if more people felt that way too.)6
The kids of New York City’s Luddite Club have caught a glimpse of this possibility as well. And with that unique energy that youth culture brings to its perspectives and enthusiasms, there is a kind of infectious hope that I believe might be poised to sweep across all generations. The temptation to join their parade, marching towards a future of greater freedom and a more fluent conversation with the world in its givenness, grows stronger each day.
The protest event was chock-full of creativity, not least of which was its name: Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neo-liberal Experience. It’s an acronym.
A separate Techtonic episode revealed that a documentary about the Luddite Club is currently underway. Tim Cook appears in the documentary’s footage of that event.
My friend Jon and I used to do a podcast together called Subjects in Process. Our last few episodes before we ran out of steam were focused on Jacobs’s article, Yuk Hui’s theories, and the question of technology.
In what must be a first for pamphlets, Lamm’s guide was featured in an article in The Guardian. Lamm’s pamphlet sells for $8 on her website, but I believe she is also currently adapting it into a book.
An excellent book on this topic from before the digital turn is Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
Lamm’s pamphlet has a great section on the challenges accompanying digital technology’s “foreclosure of alternatives” (a term that Lamm cites from Shoshana Zuboff).
Liked this so much I (accidentally) restacked it twice!