The Anxiety of a Child of the Digital Century
A confession.
There are so many things I want to do with my life. I realise I will not be able to do them all, but why not start with one?
When I was growing up in the 2000s, the Internet was only in its infancy. Every other day, I would listen to its squeaky, creaky dial-up tone on my family’s sole computer, sitting in front of the chunky monitor while waiting to be welcomed into the World Wide Web. As the green connection blocks gradually appeared, inching slowly from the left to the right of the computer screen, it was as if the gates of the online world were literally sliding open. Once I was allowed inside however, staring into the digital void, there was not much there; a search engine, a news site, a patched-up blog, a not-very-addictive game — the Internet was at most only an amusing time-waster.
Fast-forward to 2021 and depressing questions have infected the public consciousness.
The more we depend on the Internet, the more we wonder: who are we outside the great walls of the Internet? If not for our frequently-updated social media profiles, job titles stamped onto us by companies or academic degrees we chased for prestige, what is our identity? Without the Internet, what are we worth?
As everything we do becomes digital — taxes, TV, schools, signatures — have we wished for too much digitalisation too soon, and in turn unknowingly caused our own crisis of self?
Take the story of The Monkey’s Paw for example: hold the fossilised paw in your hand, make three wishes, and receive what you ask for. But with each granting of a wish, unintended consequences ensue, and we are eventually left with less than what we had before. Simply, The Monkey’s Paw shows us the enormous price we suffer for interfering with fate. We can never recuperate the cost, or return to our original state, ever again.
The Iron Cage
Once, as a curious child I took hold of a dear relative’s digital camera and proceeded to wander around in the Settings menu. Randomly, I stumbled onto the Format option and, curious as I was, selected it with my tiny thumb. I was asked by that digital device: “Do you want to format this device?” Curious as to what would happen, I pushed one button and — “The memory card is empty.”
Besides the guilty silence I have carried with me over the past decade or longer, this “digital fragility” exists everywhere. People accidentally erase their online chat history when they upgrade to a new smartphone and they immediately worry, then they get angry, before they regret. If it’s so easy to make digital property disappear, why are national governments adamant about pushing their populations headfirst into a digital existence?
I like to think that Max Weber can help provide some insight. The 20th-century German sociologist and economist is famous for his metaphor of the iron cage: bureaucracy, paperwork, and the inevitable rationalisation of every single process in a citizen’s existence is a natural phase of human evolution, he says. Ultimately, the metaphor of the iron cage is a simple concept to describe Weber’s pessimistic view of modern society; the more we develop, the more we need a cage to keep ourselves from falling out of society. Without the iron cage, instead of living as a civilised human being, we would end up only a wild animal.
Salvation at a Price
I admit that I am one of those nerds who admire and look up to modern technology companies because they are inventing the future of humanity. What these giant corporations are building help many people live better lives and it can be very hard to argue against their missions. However, the belief that the Internet will be our salvation in the face of health, social, and economic crises is dangerous and disheartening. The Internet will not save us.
Email, social media, cloud storage, video calls, QR codes — yes, these are all incredibly helpful inventions that have saved us in terms of efficiency and ease of use. But none of these “things” physically exist. We cannot taste them. We cannot touch them. Nor can we smell them. So although technology is becoming smarter and our ability to connect with people in virtual worlds is becoming greater, societies exposed to digital technology have been suffering — collectively and unconsciously — from what psychologist Peter Kahn calls “environmental generational amnesia.”
Kahn’s theory is based on his interviews with children about their environmental views and values. Despite these children living in one of the most polluted cities in the USA, Kahn found that they did not believe that their city had a pollution problem. They understood the idea of air pollution perfectly, but because of their upbringing, most of the children had never left their city. Simply put, they had already “constructed their baseline for what they thought was a normal environment, which included that existing level of pollution.”
Environmental generational amnesia is why we don’t think it’s too much of a problem if we don’t sort our garbage into three separate bins. The environment we grow up in our childhood becomes our baseline of “what is environmentally normal” for the rest of our lives. In Kahn’s words, “with each ensuing generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation tends to take that degraded condition as the normal experience.”
Now I ask myself, if we are spending more — not less — time carrying out our daily tasks through a digital environment, be they necessary or unnecessary, who is to say that we will remember what a good physical environment feels like?
How will we judge what to do with Earth if every individual’s experience of the physical world is unlike any other’s?
Put Me Somewhere
To be rational has lost all meaning. We currently live in a generation of choice. Video games, pornography, the growing metaverse of apps and livestreamed events — the opportunities to feel something are mindblowingly abundant thanks to the Internet. At the same time, people are getting left behind in the digital gold rush — not by choice, but by sheer circumstance. For example, families in need may have trouble receiving the necessary aid because they don’t have internet access or computers. And when a pandemic means you have to fill out a Google form and book an online appointment prior to arrival at a social service agency, “if you don’t have an internet or data plan on your phone, [getting help] becomes nearly impossible.”
Situations like these have been common long before the Internet came along, especially with national governments, where overwhelmingly pointless and complex procedures are perfect examples of rationality with its own peculiar irrationality. Only this time, the iron cage is cast out of digital code.
Where does that leave those with the power of the Internet in their hands? Well, not very far from where they began. While it is becoming easier and easier to find an opportunity — or an escape — the time we spend easily and freely in the digital space is frequently leaving us in the same state as when we were born: aimless and crying out for help. Because it takes more than a tap of the finger on a sheet of glass to interact in the physical space, making choices that leave an impact on our physical existence has become difficult. Loyalty to a physical space — a home, a company, a country — has turned into the fear of choosing something different.
For if we choose, who else is to blame but ourselves?
When you’re young, when you have so many choices, how can you decide among them? Each one is a narrowing. You want someone to tell you where to go, what to do. Please take from me this responsibility for my own life, that I didn’t ask for and don’t know what to do with. Put me somewhere. I once followed a man … all the way to Tokyo, just to avoid choosing not to.
Lauren Elkin, 2016, “Flâneuse”
Absolute Knowledge Corrupts Absolutely
From the sacred tablets and scriptures of our great religions to the aluminium tablets and glass scrolls given life by our fibre optic connections today, the phenomenon of fear has been transplanted — arguably completely — from gods to online personas. In the past, the things we believed in were quantifiable only in spirit: we truly believed that the sacrifice of three well-fed goats would give us one day of good harvest. Now, we quantify views, likes, comments, and anything else that we suppose could represent our true worth.
Psychologist Carol Laurent Jarzyna brings to light the phenomenon of parasocial interaction and relationships. Coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956, parasocial interactions are psychological relationships between an audience and a performer. In the mass media, which includes television, films, cartoons, and social media, the illusion of friendship is created once someone becomes interested in a person after they learn positive information about them and are repeatedly exposed to them. Parasocial relationships progress by observing a person’s appearance, gestures, voice, etc. and they can influence the opinions, actions, purchasing habits, etc. of their audience. Unsurprisingly, the Internet has only led to more intimate, reciprocal, and frequent parasocial interactions and relationships.
Embellished presentations cause negative emotions because they are realistically unattainable … Relative deprivation can be experienced by an individual or a group and is the subjective feeling that you are not getting what you deserve, especially in light of what others like you are receiving. In relative deprivation, you are not deprived because you do not have your basic needs met, but because you are not getting what you should get in light of what is approved of in your society and what others have.
Carol Laurent Jarzyna, 2020, “Parasocial Interaction, the COVID‑19 Quarantine, and Digital Age Media”
Relativity: two distinct lightning strikes may appear to be happening at the same time to one person and can also seem to occur at different times to another.
How can we relate to others when we think we do not have what others do have? We post something on our digital wall — also popularly called a “news feed” — and we hope, we pray that someone somewhere shows to us with a couple flicks of their finger that we are worth living for. Our life has worth, regardless of anyone else’s actions, but limitless knowledge has become our curse.
Discrepancies between the life one sees and the life one lives has overwhelmed us with mental information that confuses us, as opposed to physical information, for example, muscle memory. Our real life becomes invested into digital lives beginning and ending with no remorse nor gratitude. An entire generation of children, teenagers, and young adults — myself included — has grown accustomed to staying indoors and using digital devices as safety mechanisms and as shelter from the outside world.
Instead of believing in the gods or even in ourselves, we make the easy choice: be afraid of ourselves and live for people who do not really care about us.
Peace
Once, we were all nomads. We traveled in herds, hunted wild animals, and gathered whatever was offered to us by the planet. Perhaps we are still those primitive cavemen and cavewomen. Perhaps it has always been in our nature to seek greener pastures. Regardless of all the wondrous things we can now build and construct, perhaps what we seek is not more, but less.
Characters (or rather, people) like Karen in the videogame Life is Strange 2, Fern in the film Nomadland, and the trainhoppers in the photographs of Mike Brodie represent, in my eyes, the simple essence of being human.
Seek. Discover. Imagine.
It is the essence that urges us to collect physical objects and store them in our homes. It is the essence that drives us to think (too quickly) that technology and digitalisation will solve all of our problems.
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the hourly noise of ambulance sirens not only struck fear in the minds of those unfortunate enough to have heard them, but also reminded us of our human mortality.
Our lives are terminable. Our bodies are fragile. Our science has limits. So what are we doing?
Why are we not seeking? Why are we not discovering? Why are we not imagining?
What does it mean to find peace?
Those trainhoppers, hobos, nomads, drifters, runaways, homeless people — they remind me of the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi: be here now.
All they have is their life and nothing else. They are free of societal shackles. Yes, many of them will remain vagrants rejected and left to rot by society. And yes, many of them will live unstable lives, forever in the dark. But maybe… maybe they’ve found peace.
Their peace may not be the one we’ve always dreamed about.
But if they can find it, maybe there’s hope left for the rest of us.
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”
