Screentopia

I’m grateful to Alan for writing this post so I didn’t have to. A few additional thoughts, though. (And by “a few thoughts” I mean rant imminent.)

Let me begin by giving a term to describe, not just smartphones or social media, but the entire ecosystem of the internet, ubiquitous screens, smartphones, and social media. We could call it Technopoly or the Matrix or just Digital. I’ll call it Screentopia. A place-that-is-no-place in which just about everything in our lives—friendship, education, finance, sex, news, entertainment, work, communication, worship—is mediated by omnipresent interlinked personal and public devices as well as screens of every size and type, through which we access the “all” of the aforementioned aspects of our common life.

Screentopia is an ecosystem, a habitat, an environment; it’s not one thing, and it didn’t arrive fully formed at a single point in time. It achieved a kind of comprehensive reach and maturity sometime in the last dozen years.

Like Alan, I’m utterly mystified by people who aren’t worried about this new social reality. Or who need the rest of us to calm down. Or who think the kids are all right. Or who think the kids aren’t all right, but nevertheless insist that the kids’ dis-ease has little to nothing to do with being born and raised in Screentopia. Or who must needs concern-troll those of us who are alarmed for being too alarmed; for ascribing monocausal agency to screens and smartphones when what we’re dealing with is complex, multicausal, inscrutable, and therefore impossible to fix. (The speed with which the writer adverts to “can’t roll back the clock” or “the toothpaste ain’t going back in the tube” is inversely proportional to how seriously you have to take him.)

After all, our concern troll asks insouciantly, aren’t we—shouldn’t we be—worried about other things, too? About low birth rates? And low marriage rates? And kids not playing outside? And kids presided over by low-flying helicopter parents? And kids not reading? And kids not dating or driving or experimenting with risky behaviors? And kids so sunk in lethargy that they can’t be bothered to do anything for themselves?

Well—yes! We should be worried about all that; we are worried about it. These aren’t independent phenomena about which we must parcel out percentages of our worry. It’s all interrelated! Nor is anyone—not one person—claiming a totality of causal explanatory power for the invention of the iPhone followed immediately by mass immiseration. Nor still is anyone denying that parents and teachers and schools and churches are the problem here. It’s not a “gotcha” to counter that kids don’t have an issue with phones, parents do. Yes! Duh! Exactly! We all do! Bonnie Kristian is absolutely right: parents want their elementary and middle school–aged kids to have smartphones; it’s them you have to convince, not the kids. We are the problem. We have to change. That’s literally what Haidt et al are saying. No one’s “blaming the kids.” We’re blaming what should have been the adults in the room—whether the board room, the PTA meeting, the faculty lounge, or the household. Having made a mistake in imposing this dystopia of screens on an unsuspecting generation, we would like, kindly and thank you please, to fix the problem we ourselves made (or, at least, woke up to, some of us, having not been given a vote at the time).

Here’s what I want to ask the tech concern trolls.

How many hours per day of private scrolling on a small glowing rectangle would concern you? How many hours per day indoors? How many hours per day on social media? How many hours per day on video games? How many pills to get to sleep? How many hours per night not sleeping? How many books per year not read? How many friends not made, how many driver’s licenses not acquired, how many dates and hangouts not held in person would finally raise a red flag?

Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “The North Korean state was born at about the same time that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father of the state, Kim Il Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he could make it work in practice.” A friend of mine says the same about our society and Brave New World. I expect people have read their Orwell. Have they read their Huxley, too? (And their Bradbury? And Walter M. Miller Jr.? And…?) Drugs and mindless entertainment to numb the emotions, babies engineered and produced in factories, sex and procreation absolutely severed, male and female locked in perpetual sedated combat, books either censored or an anachronistic bore, screens on every wall of one’s home featuring a kind of continuous interactive reality TV (as if Real Housewives, TikTok, and Zoom were combined into a single VR platform)—it’s all there. Is that the society we want? On purpose? It seems we’re bound for it like our lives depended on it. Indeed, we’re partway there already. “Alarmists” and “Luddites” are merely the ones who see the cliff’s edge ahead and are frantically pointing at it, trying to catch everyone’s attention.

But apparently everyone else is having too much fun. Who invited these killjoys along anyway?

Algorithm writing

Too often, I read something online and have the unpleasant sensation that the piece in question could have been written by an algorithm. The tell is always the repeated use of a term or phrase or concept so beaten around by our cultural discourse that it’s long past dead; less a corpse than the decaying bones of one. The bones in question usually serve as a signal flare to fellow solders in the culture war: IT’S ME! I’M ONE OF YOU! I’M NOT THEM!

The result is writing that is simultaneously inane, vacuous, boring, and predictable. It partakes of the same vices as those so memorably diagnosed by Orwell more than 75 years ago. Everything he wrote then still applies. Here is a small sample of the most egregious instances that come to mind.

*

“Right-wing/left-wing.” If you encounter this term once in an essay or op-ed, prepare yourself for an onslaught. Writers who advert to “right-/left-wing” are propagandists to a person. The term is not meant to describe. It is meant to be decoded by the right kind of readers, who will see that it means “evil.” This is why it is repeated so often in such brief spans. The evil people lately did X; having done evil action X, they are now planning further evil deeds; remember, they’re evil, and the evil is spreading. It’s gibberish, an open and happy willingness to substitute sloganeering for thinking.

“Socialist/communist.” These terms should be used exclusively in historical and economic discursive contexts, with precisely stated referents, except in those cases where a person, entity, idea, or policy claims the moniker or, substantive analysis and argument provided, is shown to be. Otherwise, again, it’s just slander, guilt by ideological association.

“Nationalist.” I don’t know that I’ve ever read a piece of punditry featuring this word that could define it consistently and coherently, not to mention in continuity with its history of usage. One thing it doesn’t mean, past or present, is “hazy thing I disapprove of.” Given its malleability, the term has characterized, or been appropriated by, persons, policies, and movements all along the political spectrum. The work of historian John Lukacs is a good place to start for anyone genuinely curious about the term’s history and ranges of meaning. (The misuses and abuses of “nationalist” increase exponentially when the word is tied to religion. It may be that “Christian nationalist” not only has an extratextual referent out there in the world but also means something concrete, definable, and historical—which, further, the author would consistently repudiate in all epochs and circumstances and not only some. As yet, though, I’ve not come across an instance of it.)

“Extreme.” This is not solely a term of disapprobation, though you wouldn’t know it by political and cultural discourse. John is extremely attractive; Jane is extremely intelligent; Jamal is extreme in his commitment to justice; Jalen’s love for public education is extreme. The only relevant question is what one is extreme with respect to, and how that extremity is manifested. A man willing to lay down his life for his friends is extreme—but then, that is to be expected, since there is no greater love than this. That is just what it means to be extreme.

“Radical.” Likewise, but conversely, this is not solely a term of approbation. “Radical” does not mean “good” or “praiseworthy” or “admirably totally committed.” Its etymology concerns the root of things. In plain English someone might use it neutrally, approvingly, or disparagingly. But by itself it means none of these things; not only its intended meaning but the justification for its use as a modifier must come from the speaker or writer who deploys it. Standing alone, it means less than nothing. (In writing on the Left “radical” tends to be synonymous with “Leftist.” This habit isn’t helpful, though, since it piles up words that appear to be different but mean the same thing while rhetorically glossing neutrally-described Left policies or persons as “radical” and thus, in some sense, “excellently intense.” It’s a crutch and a cheat, in other words.)

“Fringe.” Writers who revert to this word as though it bore free-standing significance are being especially lazy. Abolitionists in 1775 were on the fringe. That’s just to say that they were on the very edge of permissible public opinion. The description speaks not at all to the truth or quality of their beliefs. As it turns out, their beliefs were right, and won the day. Abolition is no longer on the fringe. The same goes for atheism. A thousand years ago atheism wasn’t even on the fringe; it more or less didn’t exist, certainly not in the West, in the form we’re familiar with. It was absolutely on the fringe even a hundred years ago in America. Do secular writers believe this means that atheists once were or remain “crazy”—the implied meaning of pundit-usage of “fringe” today? No, they don’t. Which means we ought to strike through this word whenever we see it. It doesn’t mean a damn thing except, per usual, “thing I, a reasonable person, find disreputable, and by rhetorical influence hope you, dear reader, will too.”

“Moderate/centrist.” Except for self-identified moderates who can tell you in detail what they mean by their position (I’m thinking of Damon Linker—who may be the only intellectually serious moderate around), neither “moderate” nor “centrist” means anything in popular writing except, perhaps, “whatever can pass in a polarized Congress.” It also, by the transitive property, ends up applying to pragmatic, non-ideological, or deal-making politicians. But this is no reason to stuff the empty suit of this term with false virtue. Just as “fringe” depends on context, so does “centrist.” Sometimes the most vicious person or proposal in a room is the most moderate or balanced of two opposing sides. It is, as Jesus himself says, lukewarm; and being “neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

*

There are many more where these came from. These are just the ones that have been bugging me lately. I may make this a running post with many ongoing updates. We’ll see.

The other thing to say is that of all sinners I am chief. I’ve no doubt I’ve used most of these words in my own writing from time to time. I try not to. Consider this post a redoubled commitment to resisting the temptation. We all succumb, however. This is a reminder, then, first of all to myself, to write like a human being and not an algorithm. It’s hard work but it’s worth it.