David Foster Wallace, talking about TV and the dawn of the internet in his 1996(!) during his book tour for Infinite Jest:
At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.
My gosh: how good and prescient is that?
Wallace admitted he hadn’t made the machinery to defend himself against the pull of passivity:
We’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourselves about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being? And if we don’t do that, then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt.
…Very soon there’s gonna be an economic niche opening up for gatekeepers…And we will beg for those things to be there. Because otherwise we’re gonna spend 95 percent of our time body-surfing through shit.
Dating even further back to his 1992 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace described America as increasingly an “atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers” organized into “networks of strangers connected by self-interest and contest and image.” Wallace captured the hyperpolarized tribal era of social media decades before it occurred, like a sociopolitical prophet, much the way Neal Stephenson captured technology (e.g. Snow Crash). Wallace was writing about the growing epidemic of loneliness and depression and eventually committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. (This was also years before it became a popular cause, as exemplified by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s Together, published in 2020.)
We could make it easier to make good choices, sure. We could let our better natures define the guardrails for personal behavior and technology use to circumvent the algorithms. Maybe we’ll even have personal agents to fight against corporate agents in curating a meaningful life in the age of AI. The desire for gatekeepers is real.
But it seems to me that Wallace is probably still right: the hoped for machinery still ultimately has to be in the cultivation of self: not necessarily in the meditation/mindfulness mode or some other self-help flavor du jour, but rather in how Wallace describes freedom in his famous essay/commencement speech, “This is Water”:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.