🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

“In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”

~ Ivan Illich

---------------------------------------

Watch As Video

Are you still waiting to receive The How Did We Get Here? Reading List?

If so...my apologies! There was a glitch in the Matrix and it stopped getting sent out. If you're still waiting to receive it, please respond to this email and I will send it to you!

Greetings, dear newsletter subscribers,

Speaking of glitches in the Matrix...here is the final installment of our study of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which was supposed to have come out last week(!) The video has already been published (watch here).

Today I am also publishing a section of an interview ("What is Your Design Philosophy") I conducted awhile back with Charleston, SC-based designer Andrew Gould, who specializes in traditional buildings and liturgical art. Andrew is a friend...and a talented (and articulate) artist (watch here).

And now...without further ado...

In Chapter Eleven of Amusing Ourselves to Death, “The Huxleyan Warning,” Neil Postman concludes his book with a return to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

“America is engaged in the world's most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug. This is an experiment that began slowly and modestly in the mid-nineteenth century and has now, in the latter half of the twentieth, reached a perverse maturity in America's consuming love-affair with television. As nowhere else in the world, Americans have moved far and fast in bringing to a close the age of the slow-moving printed word, and have granted to television sovereignty over all of their institutions. By ushering in the Age of Television, America has given the world the clearest available glimpse of the Huxleyan future.” Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 156

A Great Social Experiment

Postman refers here to something I’ve referred to often, the fact that we in the modern world find ourselves in a mass social experiment that we have not opted into. Postman refers, in particular, to all of those things connected to electricity: television, radio, lights, air conditioning, computers, etc. It is not only electricity, however, that contributes to this experiment. Anything powered by an engine of any kind: the automobile, airplane, train, etc. should be included. Ultimately, one could include most inventions of the past 300 years-or-so, as well as the ecosystem that these new inventions have created.

What is it, in particular, that these inventions have accomplished? At least one thing that they have accomplished is to empower humans to have a massive effect on the world around us, an effect previously unimaginable and only possible through the use of powerful levers. The idea of the “lever” is a crucial one to understand: modern inventions make it possible for one man to do the work of ten (or more) men, for example. This kind of productivity is difficult to ignore, especially when the financial incentives for taking advantage of this productivity are so great.

Are We Asking the Right Questions?

In the modern era, it has always been the case that the incentives for new technology have been so great that no attempt to justify new technology has been necessary. When confronted with a new technology, the kinds of questions that one usually asks are: “Does it work?” “Does it make my life easier?” “Does it save me money?” These are utilitarian questions focused on the usefulness of a technology. The problem with these kinds of questions is that they are short-sighted and do not take into account the bigger picture. If we care about the world we live in, and the world that we will pass down to our children, the kinds of questions that we should be asking include: “What kind of world does this technology assume or promote?” “What human activity or capacity does this replace or diminish?” “Is the gain in efficiency worth what might be lost in the process?” And, relatedly, “What are the hidden costs?”

These are philosophical questions, but ironically they are also utilitarian questions: they simply ask us to view things with a longer timeline. One of the great problems in the modern world is that people’s attention spans have diminished substantially. What this means is that we have difficulty taking the long view, we would rather have our convenience and our shiny new objects in the short term, rather than waiting (or foregoing them completely if it’s clear that, long-term, they will have a deleterious effect on people and our society).

The Smartphone

Based on the above, I’m going to do a quick thought experiment. I’m going to offer some potential answers to one of the philosophical questions from above as related to the smartphone:

“What kind of world does this technology assume or promote?”

The smartphone promotes a world where individuals do not need other people, but are greatly dependent on technology. It promotes a world of instant gratification, of continuous surveillance, and of attention as a commodity. The world of the smartphone is one that is superficially connected. The connections that it promotes are disincarnate rather than incarnate, digital rather than analog, fleeting rather than long-term, and individualistic rather than communal. The kinds of connections that it promotes undermine incarnate, analog, long-term, and communal connections.

There is, of course, much more that could be said about the kind of world that the smartphone has created (some potentially positive, but most, I would argue, are negative), but if one were asked if they wanted a world where their connections with other people were increasingly superficial and transitory, where they didn’t need other people, were greatly dependent on technology, continuously surveilled, and where their attention was commodified, it’s hard to believe that they would answer in the affirmative. This is, of course, a conversation that most of us do not have when considering whether or not to use a smartphone (or at least how to use a smartphone), because most of us do not ask these kinds of critical questions about the technologies that we adopt.

The Myth of Progress

“To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.” Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 157-158

As one considers the important changes of the past few hundred years, one continually encounters this persistent myth: that human culture is progressing and that human progress is inevitable. As attention spans decrease, it becomes easier and easier to convince people that technological novelty necessarily results in social and human progress. If one zooms out however, this connection can be shown to be completely baseless.

To again take one example, the smartphone, while an impressive invention, does nothing to improve the actual condition of humans, on the contrary. Has anyone made a compelling argument that humans in 2025 are better off than humans were in 2005 because of the smartphone? Actual human progress should strengthen human capacities: the ability to walk rather than to crawl, for example. Another example would be the use of the human mind to navigate the world using acquired knowledge and memory of geographical location, landmarks, the sun, and any other points of reference that improve one’s navigational capacities. The GPS does the opposite: it weakens one’s innate and developed navigational capacities and instead makes one dependent on an electronic grid that can be easily compromised and that is itself completely dependent on a larger network of technologies that are themselves easily compromised. The normative view is one of tech optimism, this optimism however is predicated on a system that is out of our control and that we naively believe will always be there.

One of the many problems with the Myth of Progress is that it has never been clearly defined; it is a vague concept that our culture has come to regard as a truth in the same way that it regards the truth of gravity. Why is this? It’s likely because it is a very convenient faith system: if we blindly believe in the Myth of Progress, we can partake of the fruits of science and technology without the anxiety that asking philosophical questions about these fruits might engender. Intuitively, we all know that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, but the apple that we have been offered is too attractive to pass up. The Myth of Progress provides us with a seemingly “scientific” and “rational” cover for our anxieties.

“An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan…. In any case, the point I am trying to make is that only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium…. Thus, there are near insurmountable difficulties for anyone who has written such a book as this, and who wishes to end it with some remedies for the affliction. In the first place, not everyone believes a cure is needed, and in the second, there probably isn't any…. [I]n the end, he [Aldous Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 156-163

And just like that…we are finished with Neil Postman’s wonderful book! I hope to go through more books together (Postman, as well as others!), but for now I’m going to be taking a different direction with my writing. I’d like to move away from the more theoretical and a bit more towards the practical: What can we actually do to make things better? What are the most pressing issues that need to be addressed?

How would YOU answer these questions? Please weigh in on them in the Comments section of my Substack! I will be starting a new series of essays next week focused on one of my main concerns.

Also…as always, please share with a friend who you think might find this work of interest, have a great weekend, and we'll see you again next week!

Warmly,

Herman

PS: Do you know of someone who might be interested in these emails? If so, please forward this email on to them!