In Search of a Reason

This is a very opinionated piece, and the reasons for writing this were originally some justification about how mindful writing is a beneficial activity to do, but I’ve since then acknowledged that the reasons are mostly personal, and I’ve started to do this again because in some sense because I have always thought I had a fair bit to say, and put out there; but mainly it’s because of a wanting to write.

Remember to take all of this with a grain of salt, and always reason if my arguments are actually convincing, or just merely deceptive. Have fun(?) reading.

The Death of Thought

You wake up to an influx of notifications. You spend an hour browsing through social media. You listen to a podcast, read an opinionated article or two. You watch some more YouTube videos. Your day is spent consuming.

It might be said that this is quite ironic, for I say this in an opinionated piece, but I don’t think consuming is inherently bad. Learning is the opposite of what I would ever consider bad. What is bad, however, is the death of thought.

Social media is a barrage of thoughts and opinions. Everyone has something to say, but so difficult is the race to be heard in this mess of shouting voices that a lot of these “opinions” are just echoes of what has already been said, controversial “baits” engineered to engage people and other similar tactics that would ensure visibility. Whatever good was there is more often than not, just drowned in a barrage of socially engineered posts.

Sure, you might find something worthwhile sometimes, but is it really worth consuming and consuming an endless heap of essentially nothing? I find most of the more general social media hideous, an idea originally conceived to connect people that has since then become one of the biggest byproducts of corporate and individual greed.

You now get updates about every little thing though, isn’t that wonderful? And how else, than by staying in such a place, would you be able to keep up with the world? You read and scroll, and scroll. The information isn’t ever felt, it is very rare to stop in such a moment of “doom scroll” and appreciate something truly. You never get the time to process and think about great things. The thought inside you is now dead. All that’s left, is the foreign virus of the other.

When you’re bored, you don’t stop to think, conceive an idea, introspect about the world around you. You scroll. You consume something completely bland, something you don’t even care about, but something that would stop you from thinking. Something that will help you escape that fear of thinking.

What are you so afraid of?

It is much harder to actively seek out something to do than just allow an algorithm to take over, where your only involvement is a simple swipe of a finger. Short form content allows you to consume so much more that it makes you forget how to mull over something for an extended period of time. In some ways I think it is related to the human fear of ignorance— we are afraid of not knowing. This is particularly apparent in the digital age marred with the rise of social media, where ignorance can lead to being left out.

Humanities

The death of thought has much to do with the fall of humanities. In the 21st century, STEM is the center of everything; the endless pursuit of knowledge has made us forget.

We live busy lives, and therefore it becomes much more important to decide our priorities. And knowing that, it becomes quite apparent why humanities has seen a loss of interest– STEM is what we need, while humanities is seemingly only something available to those with the luxury of time. In some sense this also reflects the chase of productivity, time is trickling down— what should you do?

The answer is quite tricky. Sometimes you really have to do things that you don’t really want to. Sometimes you can’t just take some time out and pursue a hobby. Most times, that isn’t the case and its just easier not to do it.

But what’s the problem? What harm occurs if we don’t purse the humanities? The answer is that they help us become human. Sure STEM helps us model the world, but humanities are a way for us to model human experiences. To think about our moments as humans. Literature, art, philosophy, history— they help us see the struggles and triumphs of humanity, they show us the suffering and happiness of others, they teach us the dilemmas that have plagued humans for eons.

Sure you might hate Shakespeare because that was forced upon you, and you think your English teachers are foolish when they talk about symbolism, but don’t let that ruin literature for you. And sometimes yes, they will be wrong, but other times, try to swim a little.

Photography

I don’t dislike photography as an art form. I am actually a hobbyist, and will probably go down the rabbit hole a lot more in the future. But photography, and specifically smartphone photography, has changed the world in various, a lot of them negative, ways.

What happens when there is a device available to the masses, that allows anyone to capture whatever they are seeing, at any given point of time? A lot, people start capturing visuals that make them feel something, photography as an art form emerges, you can finally store memories of odd moments— with family, friends, even strangers. And now, make this device drastically more convenient, so much so that you’re unlikely to leave it anywhere, what happens?

Well that’s not exactly the way things unfolded, smartphones aren’t just cameras but more accessible, but the point still stands. You’re going to have them everywhere, even more so because they’re not just a pocket camera. When social media involved around this get added to the mix (Instagram), you see the advent of performativity¹. It’s not really about posing for a photo, that’s perfectly fine, but rather it seems like in this desire to store memories, the act of living in them is cast aside. People spend thousands of dollars going on vacations, visiting famous tourist spots, and yet so much of that time is spent clicking photographs of that experience rather than experiencing it itself.

What use is a good photograph of you, if it holds no memory?

So much of the experience is lost here, and much as I try I can’t covey that well enough, so I’ll quote my friend here who really put it best²:

The photo has more “meaning” to it than simply the pixels on the screen: it doesn’t capture the struggle of getting to that spot— of smelling the air or feeling the dirt below my feet or the humidity of the Japanese summer. It is only a crude approximation. I hope if nothing, this urges you to be more mindful. Nothing matters more than that.

Of course, as most things are, doing it in moderation is usually fine. I’d say doing it in a low amount³ is even better. Of course, if that’s what your career is, there’s not too much one can do about it. I am not in any way trying to put photography down (it is one of my hobbies), but the point is mostly about smartphone (more precisely unmindful) photography. Even in that case, though, it is easy sometimes to not see the forest for the trees, so take that as you will.

There is also a memory aspect of this, but it’s not exactly perfectly clear. For example, in Sally Mann’s memoir, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs, she writes:

“I am convinced that the reason I can remember him so clearly and in such detail is because I have so few pictures of him. […] Because of the many pictures I have of my father, he eludes me completely. […] I don’t have a memory of the man; I have a memory of a photograph.” And yet, if you check out the forum I have linked, you’ll find people saying the opposite is true for them. Studies mostly show that photography tends to help visual memory, especially when recalling, but impairs other sensory (auditory) memories. Some others instead show that photography actually impairs even visual memory.

It doesn’t matter which one is exactly correct, you get the picture. The quote from Mann’s memoir, “I don’t have a memory of the man; I have a memory of a photograph.”, explains why visual but not say, auditory memory is improved by photography. Perhaps you’re not really remembering a memory of what happened, but that of a photograph.

What art thou, but a dystopia?

“There was once an empire where lived a mad cartographer. One day, he decided to make a map of the important so detailed that none could rival it. It was an exact replica, if the mountains in the empire were a thousand feet tall, so were they on the map. The map was indistinguishable from the empire. But then the cartographer thought of an idea. He could make the map better.

And so he did. Flowers that bloomed once a year now bloomed every day. Deserts that ran dry became lush plains. It was a utopia, and everyone praised him for it. But beneath it now lay the rotting empire, who everyone had forgotten for the map. The map was no longer a replica. It was the empire.”

This is a paraphrased version of a tale expanded from the Borges fable in Baudrillard’s book, Simulacra and Simulation. It is absurd, an impossible dystopian fantasy— and yet it seems that we are very much headed towards it. So much of our lives are spent in front of a computer, a screen, digitally. With the advent of technologies like virtual reality, an AI, is this the state we are headed to? Even if we may not have a grand map right now, we already have technologies that are becoming indistinguishable from what is real. Certainly not now, but that future is not too far off.

One day, when virtual reality becomes widely adopted, we’ll have a map of our own. And if it is really so much better, then will you, at that time, care about what is real?

We live in a digital age. It is simply not possible for most people to live without a smartphone or computer. These devices have become much more than just tools. People have lives on the internet. They can become fantasies of themselves. Influencers share exaggerated, glamorous photos, all brightened up and perfect, because that is what their digital life is. They become fantasies, not real, something that cannot be found in real life. The world portrayed there is so much better.

The dead internet theory isn’t real right now⁴, but for how long?

We will never live in a dystopia. We’ll slow down quite a lot before we reach the dystopia of the likes of 1984. Instead, the dystopia is always in the future. The future can always get worse, and it seems that we are not very interested in ensuring it doesn’t.

There is a lot wrong with this digital age, increasing much faster than whatever is right. And the people who do have the power to do anything about this seem to love a dystopia. These are the consequences of a capitalist society, it is they who have the say. People would rather live with a little bit of inconvenience than do something about it because it is so, so much harder. There is no conspiracy, we just refuse to move.

Surveillance, Privacy, and Alternatives

There are far more consequences of being in a capitalist society than just that. The loss of digital privacy is very much tied to it. Companies want user data, as much as they would like to write about how they “care about user privacy”, or “would never sell user data”, nothing stops them from using them for their own benefit. “Personalised” ads, “targeted” content, are these really helpful for you? Are they not designed to engross you more and more into these apps, websites, spend more on products not because you need them, but because they’re designed to create a need?

But this isn’t the end, we also have seen an uprising of surveillance. Oracle’s co-founder and chairman, Larry Ellison said “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.” But will they be, really? Supervision is often the stimulant for the opposite sort of action, even ignoring the moral aspects of it. Even the EU has been planning to adopt a mass surveillance law.

There are alternatives, of course, but people simply don’t care about using them. Admittedly, the issue is far deeper rooted than this. A lot of these are examples of Path Dependence, the idea that past decisions or events, insignificant as they might be, constrain the future events. It is sort of a self-inducing path, once there has been early adoption of a service, more users will flock to it because of convenience and returns that it experiences from a larger user base. This then continues to go on, more users go there because they are harmed from not using it and the gap continues to widen.

There is no limit to examples of this, monopolies, worse but more universally used standards, etc. And companies have to tried to artificially widen the gap as well, Microsoft was found to use the phrase “embrace, extend, and exterminate”, adopting, extending and then ensuring the alternative, open standards become much harder to switch to. Apple is another famous example, with their whole closed ecosystem.

Both due to artificially created closed ecosystems, and due to the natural flow of events it is difficult for well established standards to be overthrown. Windows still survives even after it has been only getting worse, android is now going so far as to restrict installing apps outside the play store. And this leads to the defeatist mentality, “what difference would it make if I switched/did it?”

Of course, a single switch doesn’t matter. But the issue is this stops anyone from actually switching. The statement repeated enough time does make a difference, what if thousands, hundreds of thousands said the same thing. It would matter then. It is a self-inducing chain, but getting started is extremely high. You don’t immediately have to replace WhatsApp with Signal, but does it really hurt to keep two apps on your phone?

What’s the most popular is rarely good. But it is so very hard to replace it.

Even aside from that, you know, everything else copies them— ungenuine, generic tone in all of their webpages, a corporate sort of style that just sickens me, all so that they can belong in the same race. People don’t want their products to look off in a shelf filled with their competitors. You don’t stand out as much better, but you don’t stand out as much worse either, do you now?

So, are we moving towards a singularity? Where everything becomes generic and devoid of an identity? Thankfully, not entirely, the indie movement continues to live in. I’ll write my thoughts about all things indie sometime soon too, its one of the things I am quite attached to.

There are also very many issues I have not addressed here, the biggest elephant in the room being AI. Given what I’ve said about reality, and what not, you can probably extrapolate regarding it, but I’ll talk about that, rationalism and EA in a later post as well. I’ve also alluded to the effects of capitalism but have refrained from taking much about it. This is due to my inadequacy, and that I’d like to read more before actually delving into such a complicated matter.

Finally, this is a semi-rant, intended perhaps to reflect and showcase some of the issues with our current world. If this affects you, and you feel something through this, that is enough. It is none other than you who chooses to change, and whatever conclusion there is, is yours to draw.