A good deal of what I read on the internet, a good deal of what resonates with me, is about social and spiritual dislocation. I like work that recognizes that there is some kind of void in our collective lives, one that we’ve all been subconsciously trying to stuff with various somethings: meritocratic competition, a drive to acquisition, or empty political footballing. I like to read things that make me feel seen, when a writer is able to put brackets around something deep and nebulous, maybe because it helps me wrap my head around stuff, and maybe just because it’s interesting. Ideas are fun, and its fun to read something that feels truer than my own experience, like someone else has finally found the right words in the right order to describe reality. It’s like peeking through a little window into the world.
Much of the writing which has occupied me recently has revolved around The Machine, a concept that is at least as old as modernity, maybe as old as humanity, but is everywhere I look now, like once I learned about it, it began surfacing everywhere in my life. An incomplete working definition of the Machine is that force which agglomerates our human powers into institutional and large-scale power, trading on our humanity, our tendencies to want and to strive, and through that bargain desiccates us. A proper starting point can be found here.
The work of Paul Kingsnorth has brought my mind’s eye to focus, or at least given language to a structure I couldn’t describe before. I’m noticing the Machine everywhere, yes, due to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but also as a reflection of my experience. The Machine is as real as we could want it to be, it shapes the architecture of our lives on the internet (as its most palpable and persistent environ) but also in ways less novel. Critiques of the life of work, of our chaotic competition and sense of being harried, in the impossible standards we feel we have to meet, these things are all reactions the Machine. The sense that we’ve lost something human about ourselves, that we’re subject to forces beyond our control, spinning in stygian obscurity, that comes from the Machine.
The problem with simply recognizing this, however, is that it can make one want to retreat. Recognizing the dangerous promise of technology, that great atomizing force, is an important starting place. And critique is always more interesting and fun than offering solutions, because building is hard and tearing down is easy. I won’t say the fantastic writing about this problem isn’t offering solutions – some great examples here and here - but just that they’re much harder to grasp and reconcile and integrate into our lives, for the same reasons that acting is always harder than thinking. One problem this leads to, though, is that once we identify a negative force, the tendency is to recoil from its expansive reach and hide ourselves away. Tendency to extremes makes sense, if only because simplicity reigns supreme when we’re overwhelmed by complexity. But ducking from technological promise, outright rejecting the Machine, can often feel more like quietism and senseless sacrifice than a bonafide vision of the future. I tried to argue for as much in Silicon Valley and the Machine.
I say sacrifice because the things technology offers us are, in many if not most cases, worthy and legitimate benefits. Yes, the Machine creates wants for us and preys on them to exploit our vulnerability as consumers and as imperfect social creatures. But it also solves actual problems for us – that’s why its so prevalent and so deeply ingrained. There are a million problems I’ll never have to solve thanks to its deep power – how to connect with a friend across the world, how to treat a simple illness, how to navigate the roads of a new town I’m visiting. And while we lose a bit of our agency through outsourcing this problem solving, it makes our world more tractable, and gives us a modicum of control and power in an otherwise indifferent universe.
Many of these skills - the skills of an unspecialized, generalist, hardy human – we gladly leave undeveloped. Russ Roberts said on a recent podcast, he has no interest in maintaining geographical or navigational skills – he’d rather think about other things. The success and ubiquity of mapping apps clearly show almost all of us agree. And many undergraduate students are probably perfectly happy to forgo basic writing assignments and hand them over to Chat GPT. I myself am glad not to have to learn how to stitch up minor wounds, or maintain an encyclopedic knowledge of what human foods my dog can eat. The important thing, though, is that we actually make these decisions.
As Roberts suggests, many would rather think about other things than focus on counting the 1.6 miles until the next right turn. The critical fact here is that we recognize the loss of something fundamental, our very ability to move throughout the world at our own direction. Through this recognition, we are able to identify the trade we make with the Machine. It frees up the mind, and in turn we give up a tiny piece of our selves. Mapping software is a good example of making a trade while maintaining agency. Maps can help us get where we want to go, but they won’t pick a destination for us.
My point is that this trade is often worth making. Our error is to fail to notice that a trade is happening at all.
Kingsnorth refers to this as the devil’s bargain of the technium. I don’t want to quibble with that characterization, but merely acknowledge that many of us, much of the time, are going to make that bargain. We aren’t going to escape it.
Failing to notice that we’re encountering the Machine, then, can be our biggest mistake. At least I feel like it’s often mine. This happens everywhere, like I said above: at work when we identify too strongly with our output, when we throw on another podcast in the car while we drive to wash out our own thoughts, or when we endlessly scroll rather than sleep, looking for nothing in particular, never satisfied by the next article or Tweet or link. This numb unawareness is for me the greatest danger of the Machine to us as individuals.
All of this leads me to Erik Hoel’s high-tech pastoral. He’s offering in this piece an optimistic, if bridled by critical distance, take on the future of our relationship with technology. One in which the benefits of technology – of trades offered up by the Machine – are defined not by their persistence in recreating social and spiritual pathology, but rather by what they can offer humanity. He’s addressing the sprawling tentacles of the Machine directly when he writes that we might seek to be simultaneously “mentally connected to the online frenzy but physically unrushed, almost indolent.” Rather than starting from nowhere, high-tech pastoral feels immediately available. It recognizes where we are now. I like his description and aesthetic notion because of the question he explicitly asks: “What is the purpose of technology, if not to make life easier and more beautiful?”
This is the question to keep in mind as we bargain with the promises of technology. Actively answering it can give us back some agency. While I wouldn’t argue that we should search for ease and beauty in all things, we also don’t need to bear every burden of the world.
Unfortunately, this route is not without dangerous pitfalls either. The Machine is all too willing to sell our agency back to us for a bit more attention. There is an endless flow of what I think of as optimization content, a latent excretion of hustle culture, which will tell us exactly how to be, what to want, and how to get it. Take ice baths to achieve greater performance. Read Marcus Aurelius. Eat only red meat. Et cetera, et cetera. These suggestions, tips, and tricks turn our search for agency and freedom in the world and throw it back in our faces, taking advantage of our drive to authorship by treating our lives and goals as given, mutually agreed upon ends. This optimization content can’t be tailored to or reflective of our individuality: as it tries to apply to everyone, it successfully applies to no one.
It is demanding to constantly interrogate our own behavior. It is exhausting at times to examine my own revealed preferences. My only goal is to reflect regularly on them to rediscover if they are my preferences after all - to be deliberate about my own engagement with the Machine, to be sure that the bargain, like all bargains should be, is mutually beneficial.