The techno-miserabilists and their Pollyanna-ish opponents are fighting again. The unstoppable rise of the internet, according to Ross Douthat, is threatening an extinction event. And AI is making everything even worse. Tyler Cowen disagrees: he thinks the wraith-like textual presences on his phone screen are “the perfect people for me”. He’s thoroughly delighted to have found his soulmates.
Douthat believes that the virtual versions of friendship, education, art, love, and politics are degraded substitutes for the real thing. But still, we cannot easily resist the lure of online life, and not just because we are too busy typing emojis under pictures of comically solemn babies. It is also because few are prepared to speak up for embodiment over digitality, traditional experiences over what seem like shiny new ones — or the local over the global. To do so, liberals unaccustomed to standing up for anything concrete would have to weather uncomfortable accusations of “chauvinism and fanaticism and reaction” from their fellow travellers. Critics of liberalism, meanwhile, would have to eschew the lord-of-misrule attractions of the internet, control their anarchic tendencies, and (I would add) get serious about conserving what is genuinely valuable about social life. Friendships don’t easily happen in a vacuum; they need cafes, pubs, clubs, games, parties, and a modicum of social ability to keep them going.
In his reply, Cowen essentially proves the point about liberals, absurdly objecting that Douthat’s critique of online life reveals a questionable defeatism with respect to his fellow human beings. If you are horrified by the cumulative effects of slack-jawed scrolling en masse, this must mean you have “a very low opinion of current humanity”, finding people “incapable of creating meaningful, autonomous lives, centered around some notion of the good”. As so often with the libs, alongside a defence of the status quo there is a barely-concealed slur upon the opponent, throwing passive-aggressive shade instead of argument: are you, heaven forfend, a cynic about human nature?
But even worse, Cowen’s complaint completely misses the mark. The whole point of Douthat’s piece is that humans are indeed capable of meaningful, autonomous lives (etc.), but that present technological circumstances are leading most of us to focus on ultimately unsatisfying meanings and impoverished ends. And indeed, over at The New Yorker there is further proof: a Princeton academic enthuses that AI now means we don’t have to read books, since we can reach the good stuff in them by other routes. Historian D. Graham Burnett complains — at least, I assume it was him, but who knows — that “[books] are so oddly inefficient, so quirky in the paths they take through their material”. Meanwhile, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg was on a podcast this week, arguing that “the average American has fewer than three friends… but has demand for 15 friends” and that bots can fill the gap. “The personalisation loop kicks in and the AI starts to get to know you better and better”, Zuck says, describing the experience as “really compelling”.
Fundamentally, this kind of dispute marks a divide between the sort of people who habitually approach activities in terms of optimising them for some further end; and the rest of us. If you relate to life as a series of video-game tasks, with the thought of some more distant prize permanently hovering in the background, then you are bound to start looking for cheat codes. So, for instance, if you think of having friendships as a useful way to learn more from clever people, as Cowen seems to, then all that time-consuming blah blah in coffee shops and bars is going to seem beside the point. Or, if you approach reading books only as a means of synthesising the basic points into an easily digestible format, it won’t be surprising if you end up treating the literary canon like it’s Married at First Sight Australia and you’re looking for a quick recap.
But the logic of optimisation has to stop somewhere. In the modern age, the chain of reasons justifying a particular action frequently seems to end at some supposedly unquestionable benefit to the self — after which, it is assumed, there are no more “why?” questions to be posed. According to this instrumentalised way of thinking, you should have friends, ultimately, for roughly the same reasons you should have pets; because having them is commonly supposed good for staving off cognitive decline, emotional wellbeing, increased longevity, or whatever it is. So if a chatbot or online therapist can do roughly the same job more quickly or cheaply, get one of those instead. And even if the virtual versions are inadequate in some ways, they are still better than nothing.
“The logic of optimisation has to stop somewhere.”
There is an alternative way of looking at things, though. You could just be pursuing particular friendships with other people (say) because you want friendships, and let the chain of reasons stop there. You could say that friendships are intrinsically valuable, which is just a fancy way of saying there is nothing else to explain here about why you like them. And I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get the relationships I have because I deliberately decided it would be good for my emotional well-being. They just happened as I wandered about the world, and met people with whom I clicked. I recognised such friendships were good for me afterwards, but that’s not the same thing.
Likewise with books: I just started to read them, and one book led to another — albeit punctuated by a lot of pointless scrolling over the last two decades. The fact you can truthfully describe lots of useful things about books, or indeed about friendships, doesn’t mean that pursuit of those potentially detachable ends is “really” what you were after all along, speaking in terms of the structure of your background motivation. And in fact, we might even reverse the habitual slide towards the self as the final point of explanation: maybe you are only trying to be cognitively healthy and emotionally well-balanced because ultimately, it puts you in a better position to have more friendships and to read more books.
For the real things we love to survive, we need to dispel the myth that virtual simulacra are remotely substitutable for them. Rather, their value is irreplaceable. It is not that internet life is doing the same thing imperfectly in a way we might finesse later via technological improvements; it is not even in the same ballpark. I’m online an awful lot, and I have many virtual acquaintances with whom I interact; but I just spent a weekend away with three old friends and there is literally no comparison. Chatbots are not friends; AI summaries of other people’s thoughts are not books; we are only squandering our wild and precious lives pretending otherwise.
As Douthat intimates, all of this is particularly hard for liberals to acknowledge. Officially, anyway, they are not supposed to ask why other people choose the things they do: each to his own, and all that. Standing up for values brings you in conflict with others who don’t share yours, and no true liberal enjoys much of that. But it’s also because liberalism evolved alongside rationalism, and bequeathed us with a mania for means-end reasoning. The value of what you are doing at any given time has to be articulable in terms other people can also understand, or else it doesn’t exist. Saying “friendships are fabulous” is not enough; you also have to say why. And so you end up with boring platitudes about having friends for the sake of your mental ‘elf, at which point everybody else sagely nods, finally satisfied, and heads towards their screens.
Douthat thinks that, given the way internet life hoovers up our attention, the only way we will save what we love is by displaying “intentionality and intensity”: deliberately and consciously choosing the real, and limiting the role of the virtual in our lives. I completely agree; but we should avoid collapsing back into means-end reasoning here too. We should not pursue real relationships with people, or enjoy real works of literature, because doing these things “helps stave off cultural destruction” or some other such lofty motive. That way lies the madness of pro-natalists having children “because it is good for humanity”, or people espousing Christianity “to save Western values”. We should do it because we love having friends and we love reading books. Ultimately, we are trying to save the old ways in order to carry on having friends and reading books, and not the other way around.
