Digital (r)evolution
We are a brilliant and capable species. We do everything in our power to shape the world as we need. But the truth is, even using the most advanced tools and technologies, what we can achieve is abysmal compared to what the universe can create — and destroy. The downside, from humanity’s perspective, is time.
We are an infinitely impatient species and on a cosmic timescale, we live in an unimaginably small fraction of a millisecond compared to the rest of the known universe. And it means that whatever we want, we want it NOW.
One of my favorite sayings is the one about a drop of water hollowing out a rock, metaphorically conveying the idea of consistency being the way to achieve a goal. Waiting thousands of years to drill a hole in a stone is way beyond our patience (not to mention our lifespan). But we call ourselves the most advanced species on this planet. For millennia, we have done everything to make our lives safer, simpler, and less tiring. Recently, we’re focused on allowing us to get almost everything instantly. We have reached the point in our development where we can expect our wants (not even needs) to be met the moment we experience them, and in quantities we cannot digest.
The excess is the new minimalism.
This thirst for fulfillment is one of the main reasons why our phones enjoy so much attention and love. Thanks to the applications we install on them, we get injections of artificially created dopamine, fusing us even further to our devices. Addiction to the internet was already a problem at the beginning of this century, yet it’s still not treated as a sickness. With the introduction of the smartphone, we pushed the envelope to the next level, making it that much harder to escape. We hid the issue behind widely desired, accepted, and preferred behaviors.
We have become addicted to digitally generated dopamine (and, thus, considered “free”), and it seems to be getting increasingly harder to deal with this issue. We have built a society that thrives on external validation and rewards us with more and increasingly easier ways to achieve that validation.
And because many of our modern products are based around those same mechanisms, it seems we’re in a losing position. The business is too good to pass. Besides, if we don’t do it, then somebody else will, so why not do it? Better us than others.
Instead of finding long-term, sustainable solutions, we choose the escapism of the world of online celebrities, post likes and shares, and a myriad of apps and services that give us a false sense of satisfaction. We catalyze ourselves with constantly increasing numbers of cues from the outside world to feel seen.
To feel we exist.
To feel we matter.
To feel that somebody (or something) cares about us.
With fractions of attention from more and more people that we know less and less about, we constantly widen the gap with every day we spend in more engaging and appealing virtual worlds. We allow strangers to build our identity for us. Brands, celebrities, and so-called influencers tell us what to wear, eat, drink, watch, listen to, and read. And to do it way, way more often than we can possibly need, or even afford to. The constant barrage of “shopping hauls” is the only way we can be “accepted”, “understood”, and “ourselves”. An excess of choice has become a marker of our well-being. We are the civilization of consumerism. We seem to be floating way above Maslow’s pyramid of needs — and we still want more.
Similar to the corporate joke about nine women giving birth in a month,
we’ve turned a water drop into a waterfall and we expect an immediate result of a hollowed out rock.
By investing in digital worlds, we’ve created whole ecosystems and begun building tools that allow us to do almost everything without moving from our asses. It’s no coincidence that in 2009 Apple began using the slogan (which it later registered as a trademark) “There’s an app for that” in its iPhone ads: For every problem, real or imagined, we can find at least one digital solution that (potentially) alleviates that problem.
Looks like “Wall-E” was not so far off from reality.
Having daily contact with the virtual world, we tend to favor the digital over real-world experiences, it would seem. I feel this is the idea behind the need to build Metaverses, AR/VR, to move to online offices and fully remote work. In a search for efficiency and productivity, we focus on new possibilities for creating digital services, methods of discovering new entertainment, and ways of cooperating. The physical world started to happen as if next to our everyday lives, passing us by, getting more unnoticed with each passing day (unless it’s a pandemic, war, natural disaster, or a shitstorm called “the global economy”). We invest so much time and resources in building “digital everything”, the carbon footprint of the internet is starting to surpass global airline travel and is predicted to double that in the upcoming years.
To be fair, I do see the inclusivity potential in remote access to everything; I do see the chance to experience almost anything you can imagine (to some extent at least) for many people unable to do so right now.
And I also think we are missing something along the way.
In the process, we forgot nothing digital exists without physical.
In a fascinating turn of events, though, something is happening beyond the digital realm. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we turned the digital world up to 11, while simultaneously making handcrafts have their renaissance. Everything related to creating with our hands enjoyed a rise in popularity during that time: knitting, home, and apartment repair or renovation, carpentry, journaling, and painting. Baking bread rose almost to a symbol of the fight against the fear of death, illness, loneliness, and the boredom of confinement. Good craftsmen, builders, and makers were always in high demand — now even more so than ever.
I’m putting forward a thesis here, that after the initial enthusiasm for the wonders of the digital world and its seemingly endless possibilities, the moment of mankind’s reflection on its condition is approaching (or has already come). Initiatives focusing on our spiritual development were always popular. Now though, self-awareness, the rise in understanding of the importance of mental health, and our search for what makes us happy are on the rise not yet seen in humanity’s time. These ideas usually flowed in a stream alongside the capitalist culture; they were the “hippy”, “Eastern” answer to the materialistic lives advertised in the West. Lately, however, this self-reflection movement seems to have grown quite a bit and is becoming increasingly popular, fusing itself more into our everyday lives. Meditation, contact with nature, caring for the environment, building local communities, yoga, seeking silence, reflecting on ourselves, and calming the inner noise. The scale of these movements and whether they will be adapted more broadly is an entirely separate question. Will they be able to provide the critical mass capable of turning into a revolution in the way we think about our existence, while there is still room for such a revolution? I certainly hope so — before we push ourselves over the edge of the abyss.
We have created a very technology-oriented society, and more things that rely on technology are getting embedded even deeper into our lives. I would argue it’s necessary to maintain a counterbalance to this phenomenon. All things AI are a perfect example here. Self-reflection on our existence, finding its meaning and purposefulness, cannot and should not remain purely in the mental, let alone digital, space: We need to experience our world with the full spectrum of our senses. By relegating one of them to the margins, humanity runs a risk of becoming a rather dark scenario of reducing itself to symbols, existential memes, and mental shortcuts. And from what we all can observe daily, we are already on that path by limiting our sense of touch to contact mainly with the smooth, cool surface of the screens of our devices.
I’d say that
the more we go digital, the more we’ll need the physical.
There are multiple studies on how touch is critical for animals’ development and well-being. One of the most famous ones is Harry Harlow’s, who studied how depriving baby monkeys of their mother’s touch impacts their development and behavior (I’m putting aside here the ethical aspects of that experiment). We need the touch to live. We need a physical connection with our surroundings. That’s why toys for newborns and infants are made to be as tactile as possible — to get the new brain to understand there’s a multitude of textures in the real world. Some of those are clean, smooth, and soft, but some are dirty, rough, and coarse.
And then we give them phones.
Note here: I am not criticizing anyone’s choice — I’m as guilty as anybody else. We should just know better. Yet, we are all humans.
And as I wrote at the beginning — being the dominant species in this world* we continue to create new tools that allow us to live in ways that are easier, lighter, faster, more efficient, and more ergonomic than any generation before.
The silver lining here might be the fact that we can do all of this using fewer and fewer natural resources. That shouldn’t push us into a social stupor, though.
But above all, we live in ways that require less and less mental effort from us and this is a growing problem.
Our need for a simpler, more comfortable life has accelerated technological development at a previously unimaginable rate. I dare say that over the millennia, we have not made as many changes to our lifestyles as we now can make in a single decade. More than 2.5 million years ago, we stood on our two feet and freed our hands from having to support us in our movement. We have created and used our first tools. Our lives were seemingly the same for thousands of years — gather food, eat, procreate, sleep, repeat. Our nervous system had time to adapt to the gradual changes over thousands of generations, rather than years or even months, as is the case today. The industrial revolution, which has lasted virtually uninterrupted since the late 18th century, is putting enormous pressure on our species — pressure that is growing at an increasing pace — to keep up with the newest discoveries; to adapt to new requirements of a new job offer; to adjust to a new trend in lifestyle — all for the feeling of being “current” without having “FOMO.”
At the same time, we put glass screens under our noses as a solution to everyday problems. We are depriving ourselves of a key human trait, simplest in its atavistic nature — physical contact with matter, including other people. It is still difficult to conclude what the Covid-19 pandemic has changed in the perception and functioning of people and communities. Based on our current knowledge, we can’t be certain how limiting children’s daily physical contact with peers affected the development of their abilities to cope with conflict situations in adult life. What we do know is that something will change.
The global business faces the dilemma of the way people continue to collaborate. Do we push for the return to the previous state of affairs and office-based work, develop a hybrid approach, or work from our homes forever? Each of these solutions has implications that will change the social construct for decades to come. How do we develop a sense of connection and attachment to the workplace or the employer in the age of remote communication? Is this approach already outdated and an entirely different definition of the professional community should be created? Do we keep pushing for work in an office with a hanging threat of yet another global pandemic? What about the priceless knowledge and industry experience, often built up over many years? How do we transfer it through screens and the increasingly limited attention span of the recipients? Can we use only virtual forms of contact with others to build similar bonds, which mankind has created for thousands of generations, through physical contact and presence?
To grow and live our lives to the fullest, to enjoy our passions and pleasures, we need more than just another app on our phones. We need to feel that we are more than a statistical entry and a point on a graph. We need to feel more than is experienced by our fingers gliding across a smooth glass. We require challenges and problems to solve beyond shopping online or ordering food. We need to be more selective in the signals we receive, we require a broader spectrum of experiences than just bombarding us with information, causing our minds to overload and our attention to crash and burn.
We need to give our brains a rest by providing them with fewer sensations, of a much better quality.
For every problem, there is a way, tool, method, skill, knowledge, or experience to solve it — and it’s not always a downloadable one.
In every situation in life, we are faced with the choice of which path we can take to achieve our goals.
We can wait for water drops to bore a hole in the rock for the next few generations, or we can use a hammer, chisel, or drill.
We can wait until nature asks us to pay back the debt we have accumulated over hundreds of years, or we can start to counteract the effects of global warming by limiting our consumption and changing our lifestyles right now.
We can further build the wealth of the 1%, or we can redefine democracy and capitalism to help the other 99%.
We can build financial bubbles and infrastructures, give incentives that make the same groups of people get rich, or we can finally get closer to the problem of global poverty, minimize the disparity in living standards, introduce some form of a universal income, and fund other ideas on a large scale.
We can create new digital worlds and lock our minds in them, feeding them with an artificial sense of accomplishment, or we can support the senses we have had since the beginning of life on earth and re-redefine what makes us human.
We live in a world of instant gratification, overloaded with stimuli that our brains still can’t handle because their evolution hasn’t kept up with our technological advances — we’re still cavemen, only now we have air conditioning and atomic bombs. Without manipulating genes, we won’t be able to speed up the changes in our nervous systems (and I wouldn’t want that). What we can do is use the tools and resources we already have and slow down with the craziness of our time.
We can say ”we are enough and we have enough”.
We can stop and touch the grass, grab a hand of a friend, or hug a loved one — while we still have time (and limbs) to do so.
*That is a questionable statement, to say the least.
This essay was originally written in Polish in April 2021. I started working on the English translation a couple of months later only to discover I have a lot more thoughts and things I wanted to say and share.
