As I was nearing the end of Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience and starting to think about the focus of this review, I woke up one morning having strained the trapezius muscle in my upper back. It was probably some combination of weightlifting, toddler-transporting, and hunching over my devices that did it. (Being an old man in a young man’s body is a contradiction with a shelf life.) Whatever the cause, I was thrust into a state of heightened consciousness of my own embodiment. Turning my head suddenly became a whole production. Typing these words on my laptop is fraught with regrettable awareness of the discomfort in my neck.
There is nothing quite like feeling persistent pain as you scroll on your iPhone at night to remind you that no matter how much of our lives occur in the digital realm, we are, at the end of the day, living in bodies, not in cyberspace but in "meatspace," as one dyspeptic podcaster has put it. We are, as Rosen brilliantly provokes her readers to recognize and dilate on, embodied creatures. If we are going to thrive as a species living through a digital revolution—rather than only learning from inevitable injuries that come from diving into novelty headfirst—we will have to think carefully about what it means to be irreducibly embodied.
Rosen, a trained historian and prolific writer with affiliations at the American Enterprise Institute and Commentary magazine, among others, is a phenomenal guide to such deep thinking. Each chapter is something of a seminar on different elements of the grand challenge digital technologies present to our humanity. Rosen offers some conclusions throughout, rooted in social scientific evidence (to the extent possible, which is minimal) but mostly through clear, accessible logic. But most of all she simply prods her readers to ask themselves difficult questions and probes our mundane uses of technology for warning signs about how we might be changing imperceptibly as individuals, communities, and indeed as a species. If neoconservatives (including those associated with Rosen’s employers) traditionally rely on arguments about tangibly bad outcomes to critique social trends, and paleoconservatives once tended to argue from philosophical principle, Rosen has taken up the perspective of the conservative third way: thinking freely, if not systematically, about our unfolding anthropology, drawing wisdom from wherever it is on offer.
Wisdom-seekers should drink deeply of the result. Rosen is principally concerned with the ways digital technologies alter human experiences—a capacious category comprising pleasure, pain, appreciation of beauty, friendship, and so much else—and what that means for the human experience. There is no more pertinent analysis for a society that is progressing at warp speed, yet growing simultaneously more anxious, addicted, and alienated.
Becoming accustomed to instant gratification, to name one oft-criticized element of modernity traceable to technological advances, does not merely cause us to lash out with road rage. Those are merely bad outcomes. Our learned impatience makes us less patient. That seems like a tautology (and perhaps it is) but it is insightful merely for finding expression. Our habits become our personalities, as the aphorism goes. And our habit of checking our phones if a webpage takes four seconds to load—all the more if we have to wait two minutes for our coffee—represents a fundamental change to who we are. Technologists may celebrate this alteration to our inborn humanity as a manifestation of our hunger to learn more, produce more, and make life better for more people. But Rosen effectively pumps the brakes, reminding us that shifts in mass psychology are liable to produce unintended consequences. Perhaps it is responsible for the widespread trend "in the realm of public discourse" that "we value reaction more than deliberation. … In a culture habituated to immediate, brief responses … expertise is often drowned in a chorus of louder, less informed voices. By contrast, a culture that knows how to wait might have an easier time cooperating to solve social problems."
Patience remains a virtue, if sometimes an inconvenience. Becoming an impatient person, inversely, is a harm in and of itself. It does not merely have tangible ill effects, but corrodes us as individuals, degrading us and making us more animalistic. The conclusion of Rosen’s brilliant chapter on the disappearance of waiting (in favor of scrolling, bypassing, or otherwise distracting) seems to be "two cheers for impatience," to paraphrase another great neoconservative. Zero cheers for the loss of a virtue we will need as long as we pursue flourishing from within the confines of flesh and blood. Such a loss only alienates us from our own humanity.
Rosen’s seminar on the mediation of feeling—pleasure and pain and everything in between—is similarly insightful. It has become cliché to note how many people, young and old, record great moments on their iPhones rather than soak it in while it’s live. There is something inherently troubling about our collective rejection of living in the moment, of privileging the real and unfolding over the virtual and canned. Rosen provides nuanced articulations of what we intuit is disturbing—even if we have a hard time explaining what makes unmediated experience superior to reliving. Great experiences, like marinating in "great works of art," are "a powerful form of time unmoored from the demands of the immediate present." They are "the opposite of the efficiency and instant review common to our digital age … they leave the viewer and listener with a sense that time has been ever so briefly suspended." Is there any way to achieve the full range of human sense without giving ourselves over to such experiences? Rosen is skeptical, and I agree. Just as one cannot fully understand love without becoming a parent—a notion that cannot be proven but for which there is a consensus of billions—one cannot fully understand the profundity of being a human being without fully giving oneself over to the greatness of nature, art, collective effervescence, and the like.
At a slightly more mundane level, one cannot appreciate the extent of human achievement possible without immersing in such inspiration. Even the biggest-dreaming technologist, then, should recognize that digital technologies are not categorical enhancements, even when they are used not as escapes but as magnifiers or capturing devices. Because we are embodied—limited in memory and in our capacity to be fully present while preserving the moment, with neurons that react differently to seeing a Renoir in person versus on our phones (even if we instinctively prefer the digital version at first)—we should presumptively distrust the barriers that claim to mediate our experiences, but actually alter or even extinguish them.
This mode of thinking faces an uphill battle, especially among those disinclined toward Rosen’s cultural conservatism, rejection of scientistic faux-conclusions about tech’s ill effects, or anything suggesting that we have a looming technology crisis. To them, the best I can say is, to fully experience the power of Rosen’s observations, you have to experience them yourself—even to give yourself over, for a time, to her perspective.
The second-best I can say is this: By the time I had written most of this review, I had arrived in San Francisco, where self-driving cars now breeze past men and women strung out on debilitating drugs while thousands of tech workers—graduates of our finest educational institutions (where they would have benefited from being forced into a seminar room with a teacher like Rosen), inured to the dissonance they helped cultivate—stroll by it all. They are either reconciled to the status quo, too distracted to comprehend it, or lack the language to describe why it is wrong. Even with limited neck mobility, the contradictions of our hurtle into the digital abyss were easy to see all around.
Yet at some level there was no contradiction at all. Human beings, transcending their crumbling bodies and deteriorating minds, stagger around, oblivious to their detachment from reality, enmeshed in an experience only they know. Passersby, refusing to pass judgment, insist against instinct that there is nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as the staggering and suffering mind their own business.
Ignoring the echoes of Rosen’s voice became impossible: Are we really that different?
The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World
by Christine Rosen
W.W. Norton, 272 pp., $29.99
Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.