Weekend Reads: July 22, 2022
Experience Machine, Doing the Devil's Work, Stagnation, plus practical career advice!
Hello all,
In this set of weekend reads we have an emergent order of crypto-luddism by the looks of it (with some practical workplace stuff mixed in for good measure).
The way I put food on the table is technically as a technology investor, so I am not by any means inherently opposed to technology.
I am, however, increasingly convinced that the technological march we’ve been in since the last century has had over-stated benefits for well-being, outside of a few specific areas (would you rather go to an ER for a stab-wound in collapsing urban core in 2022, 1982, 1962, or 1922? I know my answer.).
But before you take axes to the servers of iniquity at Twitter and Google HQs know that this likely has more to do with our relationship to technology and the values and incentive structure of the economy in which this technology is developed than it does with technology itself. And these deleterious elements have likely accelerated since March 2020 (see my commentary at the end of the section on The Experience Machine for more on this).
Reads
“The Experience Machine,” Robert Nozick, excerpted from Anarchy, State & Utopia
This is Robert Nozick’s classic thought experiment against ethical hedonism (i.e., the idea that people optimize for “good feeling” or “utils” in philosopher-speak).
The thought experiment roughly goes like this:
Imagine you’re given the choice to plug yourself into a machine. Once plugged into this machine, you will experience via simulation (or whatever synthetic creation) all the good feelings and pleasure you could conceive of experiencing. You know you are going to plug into a machine (so this isn’t necessarily asking if you’d like good feelings, but rather if you’d like to choose synthetic good feelings). Would you opt to plug into the machine and unplug from the real world?
Nozick assumes most people would say of course not — and thus uses the thought experiment as part of an argument against ethical hedonism and in favor of theories that hold something like a basket of experiences that on-net might hold lower pleasure may actually be preferable for a life-well-lived.
One of the more worrisome beliefs I occasionally entertain is that Nozick is wrong in thinking that the obvious choice is to not plug in. There’s probably a larger-than-expected and growing contingent of people who would choose to plug into the Experience Machine. In my few conversations with professors who teach theories of well-being, I’ve heard that an increasing number of students volunteer to opt into the machine.
We do this to a large extent already and the last couple of years flirting with lockdown-dystopia were arguable a light trial run of launching normal people into an experience machine thought experiment. One need not look much beyond troubling increases in addiction statistics — across the board, not just for opiums but also for screen time addiction and pornography addiction — to get fodder for this concern. I think most people know these activities are bad for you and still choose to opt-in repeatedly. While most people wouldn’t happily raise their hands saying they’d love to sign up for a fentanyl addiction, relatively few would be as skeptical about getting off addictive social media sites or making easy access to pornography totally socially unacceptable.
Thaddeus’ piece over at American Mind touches on some potential arguments against plugging in. He points to some research that shows that continual dopamine stimulation increases our perception of time. Synthetic relationships are largely based on repeated and continual dopamine stimulation maintained via social media and Internet companies. These companies spend significant sums of money on building tools that keep you hooked. As you keep coming back to get the (albeit small) good feeling of seeing a new notification, you want your next hit — and time speeds along subjectively faster. This is why it’s felt like time has gone by so quickly since March 2020 — we’ve all gone from not-very or somewhat online to primarily online. For a while there, we got our (quasi-Apocalyptic) news entirely online, we got our groceries online, we did our jobs online, we even go our friendships online. And being primarily online is like being in a very crummy early version of the Experience Machine.
Any death throes your local mall, entertainment venue, dine-in restaurant, or sports venue were in were promptly accelerated under competition from not-just incredibly well-funded competition from California but the sheer power of a forced Experience Machine bearing down on them. You don’t quite get the same level of dopaminergic buzz from placing an order seated at your local Main Moon Chinese like you do in scrolling and ordering on Uber Eats.
While the Experience Machine would likely be a more…colorful…experience than seeing a new notification on Twitter or ordering lunch on Uber Eats, it’s fundamental experience would be quite similar: continual dopamine hits and a life that speeds by. While that life might be net-utility higher than a life outside of the machine, that is an experience for which I don’t think most people would sign up. I hope the crashing earnings of tech-first companies are indicators of that.
“Doing the Devil’s Work,” Marc Barnes @ New Polity
A critique of social media, Barnes’ “Doing the Devil’s Work” describes in detail three ways in which social media draws us nearer to Hell:
There are three ways in which social media, and its owners, ministers to the devil. The first, we have said: it does his work of tempting. The second has been implied: of these temptations, a great portion of them do not merely work to provide the Tempter with his immediate goal of knowledge, but his ultimate goal of human sin. We are tempted to particular acts of vanity, gossip, lust, and wrath, to name but an obvious few of sins to which regular logging in is a near occasion. And the third way is structural. The centralization of constant, temptation-induced, human self-revelation into a regularized, organized, codified, and recorded database simply must make it easier for demons to survey the results of these temptations, easier to know the unfathomable thoughts and dispositions such temptations reveal, even as social media makes such knowledge more easily available for those who act as the devil’s ministers. As argued, the angelic power is awesome, but it is not omnipresent, and it is no more a stretch to argue that the mechanized collection of our prattle would allow them to discern our vicious dispositions with greater ease than it is to argue that this collection provides the same service to human advertisers—which it does.
Barnes’ piece takes a good look at social media through the lens of demonology and sociology.
I’ve held for a while that social media, at least in its current form, is Satanic in the Girardian sense: it is a cauldron of mimetic contagion that amplifies all the negative aspects of rivalry, mimetic contagion, and, eventually, scapegoating.
At least anecdotally, it appears that the whirlwinds of outrage, drama, and cancellations that used to occur a few times a year in a pop culture once driven by MTV, talk radio, and tabloids now occurs nearly weekly on Twitter. And my own analysis says little about the viciousness of social media — i.e., it’s propensity to foster vices in people under a well-structured process of dopamine hacking and advertising-driven incentives.
“Professionalism & Workplace Savvy,” James Stenson
I’ve previously recommended work by James Stenson in this newsletter. These bullet points are included in his book Father, Family Protector as advice to give maturing children about the workplace. While some of the tips are dated and some may seem anodyne, I’m perennially surprised by how much needs to be said to new, young workers, whether they be working during high school or recent college graduates in their first jobs. Here’s an excerpt:
14. Personal integrity is crucially important in business. Tell nothing but the truth and always keep your word. Bosses and clients can forgive isolated, well-intentioned mistakes and even blunders -- but if you lie, you're through.
15. Mind your own business. The top of someone's desk isn't a bulletin board, so don't read what's on other people's desks or computer monitors. If bosses or co-workers find you snooping, they won't trust you.
16. Similarly, don't make critical comments about matters that lie outside your areas of responsibility. Stick to your own business. Don't get a reputation as a busybody. Every responsible professional knows that loose-talking meddlers are also either slackers or control freaks. In either case, nobody trusts them.
17. Don't talk negatively about people behind their backs. If you gossip, people won't confide in you. Besides, office gossip has a way, mysteriously, of making its way to the gossipee. Here, as in so many other areas, keep your mouth shut and you'll stay out of trouble.
18. If there's a lot of badmouth gossip in your office, especially about management, then start looking for another job. Poor morale nearly always arises from crummy management, and a company rife with gossip is on the verge of business collapse.
Listens
My interview with Neil Soni on Outside the System
I joined Neil Soni on his new podcast to discuss what we’re up to at 1517 and the types of founders we back — and how we do it. One of my favorite parts of this conversation was discussing the basket of traits that makes for a strong founder in a highly technical field and the anti-credentialism arbitrage opportunity in those fields.
“We Have Stopped Inventing New Technology” by Gladden Pappin at New Polity
Somewhat in the vein of the Thiel-ian “We wanted flying cars and got 140 characters,” this talk by Gladden Pappin is an interesting one on stagnation contra modernity and “technology.”
Like the Thiel and Progress Studies crowd, Pappin is skeptical of the bits-first innovation we’ve had over the past couple of decades (unless I missed him, it sounded like the most recent true innovations he cited would be either the 737 or Walmart’s distribution model, both of which are decades old). Thiel’s crowd tends to ascribe the cause of this faux-progress to financialization and a shift from definite optimism (“The future will be better and we’ll make it that way in these specific ways!”) to indefinite optimism (“Somebody, somewhere will make the future better.”). Thiel & co. have made policy prescriptions, although they’ve tended to be within specific verticals like AI and defense.
Pappin seems to attack the problem more from the cultural and political angle, framing it in terms of “preserving the good” rather than “encouraging innovation,” as he proposes that most “innovation” for the last few decades has hardly been innovative at all. Some of his suggestions are taxing online retail heavily and busting the social media companies by revoking Section 230 protections.
“Does Amazon improve communities and help preserve them? Amazon is just about convenience. All the grandeur of modern science, all the technology, all the innovation. And what do we end up with? Porn and free shipping. That’s what we have. …way to go modernity.”
I don’t expect somebody with libertarian inclinations to be particularly persuaded by these appeals. First, it’s unclear what the unintended consequences of trust busting are in most cases. Second, it’s hard to look at the last couple of years (or at least the first of the last couple of years) and say that we’d have been better off without Amazon delivery. Somebody sympathetic to the common good (CG) position proposed by Pappin, though, would likely say one or two things: 1) if Amazon et. al. weren’t available we’d have been much less likely to have strict lockdown measures as you’d have no other real option but to go out and interact with your fellow humans; and 2) it’s not obvious in retrospect that that access to Prime delivery has been good for us all, especially now that the tech mania is unraveling, companies are slashing jobs (startup layoffs here), canceling distribution centers, as the “creative” part of “creative destruction” pulls back. And, the CG advocate response, to go back to the fundamental question proposed by Nozick above, maybe well-being isn’t measured in the same metrics the market measures easily.
Truth probably sits somewhere between what’s presented here and the issues the Thiel crowd identifies. Globalization and financialization drive short termer-ism. Short time horizons leads to Taylorist margin maximization over costly and risky innovation. When people see they can be rewarded by short termer-ism they become less definite in their visions. When you’re less definite in your vision for the future, you’re less moored to a foundation that moves you and your community in a specific direction and you put yourself at the mercy of the winds of change and global market forces.
At the same time, a civilization unmoored from any sense of permanent things and eternal values is more susceptible to financialization run amok and is less likely to push back against the policy and cultural machinations that make that financialization possible in the first place.
The financial writer Ben Hunt has a series of posts about “Bitcoin” vs. “Bitcoin!(tm).” Bitcoin!(tm) represents the promises of bitcoin while Bitcoin represents the practiced reality.
Similarly, there’s a place for “innovation” vs. “innovation!(tm).” Innovation!(tm) is what’s trotted out by chambers of commerce, financial analysis publications, hedge funds moving trillions in “growth” ETFs and index funds, and think tanks heavily funded by social media companies. It drives movement in the flows of capital and in easily and quickly quantified metrics.
Innovation, on the other hand, is hard, expensive, time consuming, and not easily rewarded by high time preferences, short time horizons, and a culture increasingly unmoored from the imperative to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue & rule the earth.