Timothy Leary wanted you to take psychedelic drugs in the 1960s and “turn on, tune in, drop out” so you could reconnect with some deeper essence of being... or something. It was a counter-cultural moment that lingered and had a sort of resurgence in the early 1990s with the rave scene in the UK that brought young minds and mood-altering illegal drugs together for a more industrial, less hippie-dippy, counter-cultural experience that was eventually rejected. Dropping out was simply never going to be a feasible alternative to the reality of Earthly existence. Those days are over mainly because people, especially young people, know that drugs are bad for your health and that every ill-conceived counter-cultural moment is rapidly crushed by the indomitable status quo. So, why bother going up against the current state of affairs?
Confusingly, the counter-culture has become the status quo. Allow me to explain my thinking:
We have, one and all, become addicted to some extent to the counter-culture that doesn’t require the ingestion of chemicals to work—the fake one peddled to us by the ruling Nerdocracy hailing from Silicon Valley who have us in their vicelike grip thanks to the internet. We’ve been told, basically, that we can do anything and be anyone if we really want. There’s only one catch: it has to be in the digital realm. The real world is not your playground; it’s not a safe space, they’ve made us believe, unless you have the resources to protect yourself. Only the rich have that luxury, but fear not for you can don your goggles and swim in the binary oceans of tech as a substitute for the real thing.
The deal is that if you are not rich in the real world then you can nevertheless be a winner in the digital one. You too, with minimal costs, can start a podcast, become a celebrity, and rake in plenty of cash by creating content for others to mindlessly consume via the jealously guarded outlets of the neo-feudal lords of the techno sphere (not the musical kind of techno, unfortunately). Allow them to scoop up your data (that includes your creative data, musicians, artists and writers!) and let them spray you with their hoses of convenience with no financial burden on you beyond your paying a service provider for the data pipe. Well, until the shareholders want their investments rewarded and then everything gets priced and slowly, like the proverbial boiling frog, they jack up those prices over time and hope for the best.
For example, podcasts (thanks, Steve) have become so tediously enshrined in the hellscape of content slop that when I realised I retained nothing from them, I switched back to Radio 4 FM to lull me to sleep instead of cueing up the podcasts on the old smartphone. I am getting a bit sick of increasingly smug individuals in love with the sound of their own voices blathering on to fill the gaps between ads and incessant appeals for one to subscribe to their brand of instantly forgettable info-shovelling. Much has become sub-optimal in the arena of the smartphone. Look at how dependent we have become on the little buggers and you will understand the danger of their apparent benefits of ease and comfort:
Banking. It is heinously difficult to do any banking without one. Even if you work on a computer you’ll need the phone for a security code. That’s too much reliance on a device that you can also use to pay for things. If you lose the device or it gets stolen and you need money, you can of course walk twenty miles to your nearest ATM or bank branch, if there is one at all on the high street. When options narrow and backup systems are quietly retired, I begin to worry…
Communications. Email, Whatsapp, and the plethora of other utilities like texting (mostly for receiving security codes) are central to getting anything done and the one utility we use least is the actual telephone portion of the offering. Landlines have been ditched and we are beholden to The Network if we want to reach anyone. There are no alternatives either: what are you going to do—hotfoot it to the nearest payphone to make an emergency call? Good luck with that.
Security. As mentioned, the inconvenient security code has become indispensable for not falling foul to the rampant scourge of scammers and fraudsters created by the very conveniences we have come to rely on. In addition to two-step verification for the important stuff you need to do, there are also security codes and biometrics that allow access to core services like government gateways and the like. Safer maybe but egregious.
Shopping. Alright, this one is good. So far and for the most part. But what happens when supermarkets are gone altogether and there isn’t a local shop left on the parade anymore because Bezos and his ilk have squeezed the life out of their businesses (see bookstores)? The dwindling options for physical shopping is a massive pain as a competitive market is slowly strangled by blitz-scaling apps that promise much and deliver less and less over time while charging you more and more because you are beholden to them by that point.
Entertainment. Subscribe to this and that—forget physical media. You can consume faster and less mindfully online. All you need is that sweet data pipeline for everything. When there are no books, DVDs, CDs, magazines or newspapers available, we’ll see how convenient that strategy becomes. Not to mention how gamers are psychically locked in to their bedrooms, guzzling energy drinks and going a bit mad (hello, manosphere).
Tickets. Bus tickets, train tickets, plane tickets and parking. Go online to buy and flash that QR code at the machine when you get there. Yes, it’s good for a paperless world but we all know by now that the ecological trade-off is not a positive one when you consider all the energy intensive compute and materials required for the ease of use of a single device that you must own or face a world of hurt when you wish to travel sans phone.
News. Doom-scrolling, social media and the like are narrowing our perspectives and throttling our minds to cause all sorts of ill societal effects. Reducing the options is leading to the monopolisation of crucial access to public information and endangering journalism. Without those plucky journos poking the powerful, it doesn’t take long for democracy to splutter and die.
Work. Try having a job and not having a smartphone and see what happens.
Sport. Earbuds stuffed in, device strapped to arm and music on, you go to the gymnasium or a run in the park. Even the simple pleasures of staying fit and active comes with a bunch of extraneous gizmos. You can of course turn all your notifications off and concentrate on your health goals but will you?
Mood. Do you really want that slab of plastic, glass and metal to have so much control over your feelings and thoughts? Because it does. Some are immune, I’m sure, but some people drink like fish and smoke two packs a day and live to be a hundred.
The bottom line is that a handful of people are making huge amounts of money—and gathering alarming political powers—by dominating our every waking moment with their ephemeral products and services and we are getting poorer for it; less and less free to choose our own way of doing things. Comfort and convenience will do us in as a species if we’re not careful; maundering online is an existential threat in my humble opinion. But we can have it good too—if only we could demonstrate some discipline and moderate our behaviours:
To regain some semblance of agency over your own data and destiny might be worth giving up a few conveniences for.
Going offline whenever we can is the only actual option left, a truly counter-cultural stab at staying human. But how will someone reach you when they please, or in an emergency? Will you have to have an alarm clock radio thingy on your bedside table, a widget for receiving security codes by text (a dumb phone) and purchase things with cash all the bloody time? Maybe that’s a small price to pay for regaining your sanity, to help slow down the onslaught of mostly pointless information, thoughtless opinion and mindless content that scrambles our brains and turns our attention spans into chopped liver. To regain some semblance of agency over your own data and destiny might be worth giving up a few conveniences for. After all, cocaine is a convenient way to feel good but it doesn’t last and deprives one of longterm mental and physical health.
Try it then: turn on your formidable natural senses, tune in to your immediate surroundings and other people, go offline (for a few hours a day to start with). You know what, it’s difficult and the fact that it is difficult makes me believe that it must be worth doing. I’ve been doing it for… three days. It’s a real struggle! However, your sense of space and time snaps back to human scale, not the accelerated machine scale of bots and AI, and feelings of being constantly overwhelmed ebb away.
When offline, you understand that family and friends need your quality time and not surface level interactions mediated by massive corporations like Meta. With the devilish distractions of Instagram and the like gone, I am reading more books, thinking more clearly (I think), and I even went for a run with nothing more sophisticated than a Casio watch on my person and discovered that having music pumped into my lugholes and heart-rate religiously monitored is not the best way to exercise. Whereas before I was trying to keep up with the thumping bass of my “motivational” playlist (not curated by the scumbags at Spotify, thank god) and getting prematurely knackered, now I am listening to my breathing and pacing myself correctly for a better workout, listening to the delightful natural sounds of the park (birdsong, the river…) and not feeling like an aurally sealed off sweaty ghost as I rush past other humans, insensible to my own footfalls—disconnected from everything around me.
You don’t have to be a complete Luddite about it but moderation of the digital is taking its place amongst the list of things we need to be sensible about. This is not a new idea, although I feel that the concept of Digital Moderation is about to punch through into our collective consciousness with some vigour and supply a good deal of resistance to the techno-fascists who have run away with the idea that they are masters of our universe.
Cutting those billionaires-on-paper down to size has got to be a net benefit to societies everywhere—the societies we are in right now and not the fantasy ones of interplanetary shenanigans peddled by talented dorks who have been given far too much leeway to play fast and loose with our precious—and precarious—equanimity.
Excellent points. -also replied using my little bugger...
So true! What you write is undeniable, and yet here I was, reading it on … my smartphone!