Lightspeed In A Hamster Wheel

Myth, Misinformation, and the Mass Effect of Digital Technology

My brother, sister, and niece visited New York City for the first time. Luckily for me, they are extremely gracious guests with enough emotional intelligence to know how much hand-wringing I had done in the weeks leading up to their arrival. It’s silly, but I desperately wanted the city to put its best foot forward. Manhattan, after all, is a place where anything can happen — and it often does. So on the first night, when Conan O’Brien walked into the small Upper West Side pizza shop near Cynthia and mine’s apartment, then proceeded to sit a few tables away, I saw it as a sign that my prayers had been answered. Thanks, Conan.

Later that week, the five of us spent a day marveling at the MET’s gallery of European artists and various medieval weaponry. While perusing the halls, a small sculpture of Antaeus wrestling with Hercules caught my attention. If you don’t know the story (and honestly why would you), I’d like to do a quick refresher.

The Myth

According to Greek mythology, Antaeus was the son of the earth goddess Gaea. Gaea provided her son with supernatural strength as long as he stayed in contact with the ground. Endowed with unmatchable might, Antaeus would stand by the road and challenge unassuming passersby to a wrestling match; until one day he had the misfortune of challenging Hercules. 

While locked in combat, Hercules was able to discern the source of Anteaus’ power. Rather than grapple Antaeus to the floor — which only restored his faculties — Hercules chose to lift him off the ground and towards the sky. Arrested in midair, Antaeus’ strength began to drain and he eventually became weak enough for Hercules to crush.

The Meaning

I’ve written before about how fiction can illuminate truths that are hidden to the purely analytical mind. The myth of Antaeus does exactly this. It teaches us that we are only as resilient as we are connected to solid ground — which is symbolic for being connected to reality. Antaeus reminds us that congruence and contact with the real world is our life source. If we become disconnected, we become weak, fragile, and lifeless. 

In my mind, the loneliness, uncertainty, and anxiety which has become ostensibly normative for the modern Westerner stems, in part, from such a condition. This isn’t just conjecture, but an increasingly well-documented circumstance. Two weeks ago I attended a talk at NYU by Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation and

After Babel

. His work documents the precipitous rise in depression and anxiety amongst my generation that began in 2010. He largely links this to digital existence, screen culture, and lack of play-based childhoods. 

The veracity of Haidt’s research is still being assessed and assimilated by the broader culture, but it certainly feels like a correct diagnosis from a phenomenological perspective. Ask most people under the age of 30 why their friends are existentially challenged and I proffer that they will respond similarly to

Magdalene J. Taylor

‘s aptly titled Dirt article: It’s Obviously The Phones. The following newsletter is my attempt to think this through from an ecology of media perspective, using the myth of Antaeus as an anchoring metaphor. I am confident you’ll enjoy.

Misinformation

Ray Bradbury in his book Fahrenheit 451 uses the myth of Antaeus to describe a dystopian society. The book depicts an impoverished civilization, where the ground of reality has been replaced with pseudo-truth and alternative facts. Speaking about the pervasive abundance of censorship and misinformation, one character remarks:

“If there isn’t something in that legend for us today, in this city, in our time, then I am completely insane.” 

Between two major wars, multiple major elections, and artificial intelligence reaching the Peak of Inflated Expectations, there is no shortage of conversation about the dangers of misinformation. The narrative I hear most frequently (at least in the United States) is that the increased polarization in politics has so biased our media and social platforms that any mainstream communication is inherently corrupted. As a result, faith in institutions has plummeted and now people don’t know what to believe because every major news source is pursuing its own agenda. If you feel like this makes Bradbury’s vision (or Orwell’s or Huxley’s) eerily prescient, you’re not alone. 

With the recent protests taking place at college campuses (including my own), I have never been more aware of the disparity between media reports and physical reality. I am deeply concerned with the havoc that deceptive stories, viral deep fakes, or AI generated misinformation campaigns can wreak. However, by itself, I am not convinced that misinformation is enough to make so many people feel uncertain and dislocated in the world. Here’s why.

Bespoke Realities

Firstly, it seems to me that news has always had some sort of slant. Misinformation, fable, slander, and just plain old misunderstanding has always polluted the “purity” of public discourse. Yet, that bias has rarely stopped people from believing what they want to. Just think — how often do you meet someone who refuses to stake an opinion because they are waiting for more data? Rarely, if ever. Our propensity for confirmation bias and suppressing doubt are ingrained too deeply for this to be commonplace.

Instead, I offer that the influx of misinformation doesn’t contribute to the average person’s feeling of uncertainty as much as it contributes to the inverse. Namely, it fuels the obstinance of groups that refuse to doubt anything. It enables them to seek and find an endless supply of evidence to corroborate their prejudices. Rather than shake their worldviews, it entrenches them further.

Sequestered and fortified into bespoke realities, these groups do not suffer from a lack of confidence, but an excess. They are utterly and abnormally convinced of their own correctness. As G.K. Chesterton put it so elegantly in his classic book Orthodoxy:

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but free also to believe in them.

True, these radicalized groups still suffer a type of disconnect from reality. Theirs is a stubborn and pathological unwillingness to doubt their gods and cede false ground. But this is not the same disconnect and sense of uncertainty that I believe the more common individual experiences. To explore this, we have to evaluate the medium, not the message.

The Medium Is The Message

Marshall Mcluhan, who I’ve written about previously, explained that every technology was an extension of some part of the individual. The hammer is an extension of the fist, just like binoculars are extensions of the eyes. He predicted that the internet would be an extension of our nervous system because it exponentially multiplied the distance and volume of information-gathering. 

Bringing this back to media, consider how just a thousand years ago a message from the closest town might take days to transport. The message itself was a testament to your particular place, separated from the rest of the world. A message was therefore an artifact consisting of at least three properties: communication, time, and distance. Yet, in modern media, time and distance are not only non-existent but are anathema. This is especially true about news. News has to be now —  and nowness is achieved by leveraging technology to make every available data point for every event equally accessible, no matter the time of day.

(Note: I am fairly certain that

L. M. Sacasas

wrote about this in

The Convivial Society

but I can’t recall which post. Apologies!)

Once stripped of the properties of time and distance, global news takes on the same psychological significance and existential weightiness that local news used to have. It is as if the entire world is perpetually at your doorstep begging to be let in every minute of the day. This is what Mcluhan termed “the global village.” 

The Global Village

In the global village, the ratio of “true” information to “misinformation” is practically immaterial, because all information has been magnified, or perhaps reduced, to the same level of monotonous urgency. This is a condition completely foreign to human development and the consequence is that our experience of both time and place becomes immensely distorted. Focused and embodied attention is drowned in an unending deluge of fragmented digital input. Perhaps this is the truth revealed by the peculiar phrase: “breaking” news.

But this extension of your nervous system is not limited to just the traditional conception of news. It also collects the splinters, splices, and jump clips of entertainment, amusement, and miscellaneous tidbits of knowledge spread across the entire social media and digital landscape.

This endless assault of incomplete symbolically-mediated information puts the human at the center of a paradox: uninterrupted discontinuity. Uninterrupted discontinuity gives the individual constant info to consume without the opportunity to truly understand or integrate it. It simultaneously lacks completion and prevents wholeness. Uninterrupted discontinuity is the psychological equivalent of hitting lightspeed in a hamster wheel. 

Lightspeed In A Hamster Wheel

German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, in his book “Social Acceleration” calls this feeling frenetic standstill: “where everything is constantly moving and yet nothing ever ‘really’ changes.” Before him, Alvin Toffler talked about Future Shock: “the sense that, while everything seems to change faster and faster, real or structural social change is no longer possible.”

Max Read

, in a recent newsletter critiquing Haidt’s work uses the idea of the machine zone: “where ordinary reality is suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process.” Max argues that people surrender to this process because:

“For many [screen time] addicts, the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing.”

When this feeling becomes ubiquitous, we see a society become disillusioned, dis-impassioned, and disengaged. We act as though the speed of progress is too fast and that the trajectory of history is too set for us to participate. So we surrender our ability to influence the world and simply go with the flow. We become Antaeus — divorced from the ground and suspended in an eternal freefall.

Guy Debord’s classic book Society of the Spectacle was immensely helpful in understanding this. Debord warned that a culture overly reliant on representations and images (a la life via iPhone screen) would eventually devolve into a “passive identification” with life rather than one of “genuine activity.” This is when we begin to outsource our wholehearted and full-bodied participation with life to mere digital engagement and superficial involvement. You don’t have to look far in order to find proof that this is happening — and I don’t just mean the startling statistics on how digital life is biting into everything from first dates, to activism, to sports, and more. I mean that, empirically speaking, it’s sometimes easier to find a rat to talk with than an offline commuter in the subway. 

Although my language is obviously critical, I want to clarify that digital technology and online existence are not inherently wrong in a moral sense. As historian and professor Melvin Kranzenberg used to say: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” It is not a moral judgment to assert that any technology introduced into an environment changes that environment. It is just fact. I feel strongly that a baseline level of literacy in these dynamics must be taught if we want to live in a healthy, flourishing world.

Antaeus & Mamma

With this in mind, it is worth mentioning the most straightforward interpretation of the story of Antaeus, as it may hold a vital key in our battle to stay grounded.

Antaeus was not a regular man but was the son of the earth — an offshoot from Mother Nature. His story might be a warning regarding the danger of harming our planet and the perils of straying too far from the simple, austere, and non-commodified delights of life. A return to a more “natural” life could mean many things, but it certainly entails rediscovering the beauty of our planet, submitting to the reliable rhythms of existence, and remembering the wisdom of past traditions. I would like to briefly expand on these three things before concluding.

Nature

One needs not be an ESG activist nor an avid hiker to find solace in the shelter of the outdoors. There’s a reason that teens tell their peers to “go and touch some grass” when showing signs of mild delusion. I think

Austin Kleon

puts it pithily when he says that “demons hate fresh air.” 

I am by no means suggesting that hippie life or nature walks are the golden bullet for the epidemic of anxiety and clinical depression, but I am suggesting that a phone-free walk in the park can often do wonders for a crappy day. 

Rhythms

Spring is a wonderful time to refresh the memory that everything is beautiful, but only in its time. If there is one principle that the ever-expanding influence of digital technologies rage against, it is the notion that we are finite, bounded beings. The cyclical and subdued nature of our seasons, and the way they play together in a dance of deference and temporality, accomplishes the type of wholeness which our digital environments fail to achieve through permanence and overwhelm. Modern technology pledges to make us happy by making us omnipotent. The seasons say that joy is available in spite of limitation and remind us that every ending contains the promise of a new beginning. 

Tradition

Freud would have a lot to say about Gaia’s and Antaeus' relationship, but I see it as a metaphor for honoring one’s heritage and a warning against shunning their wisdom. The social consolidation that digital technology brought to an already globalized economy has not provided ample opportunity for older generations to pass along their cultural traditions to the next generation. This is not the staunch conservative view that “everything was better in the past” nor is it an attempt to expunge the heinous crimes and deplorable ideologies people have historically held to. I am a full-throated advocate for progress — but I also believe in the first law of intelligent tinkering (callback to this newsletter). Appreciation for our ancestors, and a curiosity regarding how society came to be, is a quick way to enrich one’s perspective. Finding your place in the universe is less frightening when you first find your place in history.

Willpower vs Design Power

Haidt proposes four things we can do to protect children from the excesses of screen culture.

Rosa talks about the idea of “resonance” as an antidote to frenetic standstill.

French mystic Simone Weil uses the language of “roots” when discussing what enables individuals to feel at home in society.

There are, and has been, many intelligent people wrestling with the challenge of how to remain planted when the ground feels shaky. If you’re interested, I recommend any of the authors mentioned in this newsletter for further reading.

However, I want to acknowledge an often forgotten nuance to this conversation. Personal responsibility can easily become the smokescreen used by BigTech to avoid their own culpability in the ongoing crisis. I’m a Kierkegaardian at heart, so the inscrutable agency of individuals will always be sacred to me. Yet, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more sensitive to the influence that context and macro-factors have on shaping societal outcomes. I commend and champion the critics who focus on setting better boundaries in relationship to our devices, but I also think that we can safely push this further.

Efforts to mobilize individuals against the status quo should also be accompanied by an adamant insistence that companies stop shipping products that exploit our vulnerabilities. The average citizen does not consider that most of the internet and stock market is frighteningly dependent on the so-called Magnificent 7: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla. (Tesla, obviously, is not quite the same story) Neither are citizens fully cognizant of how these companies are spending billions of dollars and employ thousands of the brightest minds on the planet to ensure that consumers stay perpetually glued to their devices. This is what makes iPhone features like Screentime or Grayscale so intellectually dishonest. They are jazz hands from Apple to give the impression that they’re empowering you, when they are actually placating. Like an engineer installing a handbrake on a rocket ship, these additions are not made in good faith. When it comes to these devices and platforms — addiction is a feature, not a bug.

Conclusion

As a student of business, I am sympathetic towards the competitive nature of the market, the goals of a business, and the slippery slope that putting a cap on a company’s innovation can be. However, when considering companies at this scale, with this level of influence, operating at an order of magnitude that far exceeds anything previously possible in human history, I think concerns are valid. Choices to yield short term profits in the digital world are having disastrous consequences for real people in the long-term. True innovation is not the invention of new gimmicks to squeeze customers for every last ounce of attention. It is finding ways to create things that benefit both the makers and the customers — products and services that ground us in reality, rather than uproot. 

While pockets of true creativity and goodwill exist in certain corners of these companies, most have stopped solving real problems and are now working tirelessly to eliminate inconveniences as opposed to authentic issues or inequalities. The LLM arms race is a perfect example. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Bard (the list goes on) are at best mildly useful tools being treated as revolutionary ones. Yet, they are fed billions of dollars of resource (and sometimes trained through very unethical means) in order to expand their context windows to an obscene size or shave fractions of a second off their inference speeds. These are features that, outside of AI enthusiasts or other giant corporations, no one is asking for. It feels as though the average modern technocrat is trying to solve the age-old debate of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

But if you took a walk through the Bronx on any given day, I guarantee that you would observe a dozen better uses of the awesome intellect and capacity of these companies. That is… unless you took your phone on the walk. Then what would you really see?

I hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter. I will write again soon!