Early in my senior year of college I came upon a friend in a dim corner of The Hungarian Pastry Shop, where he was occupied with a croissant, a coffee, and a translation of “The Futurist Manifesto.” He’d been tasked with drafting a declaration of purpose for the club of Nietzscheans to which he belonged, and he’d gone searching for inspiration from a classic of the genre.
The leader of these aspiring revolutionaries was a grad student with the incandescent charisma of a groundhog just roused from hibernation, a characterization I make based on the single time I heard him speak, at the group’s first and last public event. Called The Breaking, it consisted of the groundhog and another much more convincing fellow — he was tall and cadaverous, with thick black-framed glasses and a vaguely European accent — standing on opposite sides of a stage, while a series of words was projected on a screen between them.
So ‘IRRADIATION’ would appear in blocky black letters, and the groundhog would cough, shuffle his papers, and then say, “We affirm irradiation, the cleansing, the sterilization of contaminating life,” while a soundtrack of discordant clanging and groaning played in the background. Then ‘CONTAMINATION’ would pop up and the cadaver would take a crack at it.
As far as I know my friend never completed his own manifesto, and the group itself soon disintegrated, presumably as everyone involved realized they were being a bunch of asses.
I relate this story first because I laugh every time I think about it, and second because it hopefully makes clear that I have a powerful distrust of revolutions, radical social movements, and the sort of totalizing worldviews that generally underpin them.
This makes writing a manifesto a bit uncomfortable for me, but the form is well suited to clearly and concisely laying out a project and the concerns that motivate it. I soften the edges by calling my arguments ‘propositions’ rather than ‘tenets,’ because I don’t really expect you to agree with me on everything. But if you think I’m entirely off base, if you believe the way we individually and collectively interact with our digital and physical worlds is just fantastic, what I have to say might not interest you.
Alright, enough throat clearing. Here’s what I think.
Proposition One: Our shared environment has some issues
There are a variety of aspects of the modern environment that are detrimental. Electronic devices broadly and smartphones in particular, in collaboration with social media and other distracting software, seek to monopolize our attention; the way food is processed, marketed, and distributed makes maintaining a reasonably healthy diet challenging; the shifting structure of both the economy and the built landscape make human relationships, increasingly difficult to cultivate.
Proposition Two: Luddism isn’t an option
The material and digital are now so enmeshed that work, friendships, and things like arranging a young child’s social life are impossible, or impossibly impractical, without a phone. Opting out of the modern food system is even more difficult, and joining the Amish in search of real community is harder than both, though I suppose doing so would take care of the electronics and some of the food stuff.
Proposition Three: No systemic change is coming
In theory all of these could be most effectively addressed through legislation, but both valid concerns about the unintended consequences of strictly regulating tech companies or trying to shape the average diet by taxing unhealthy food and obvious political realities mean they will not be. We should not wait for an external fix. We need to navigate these problems first as individuals, and second, hopefully, with other like-minded people.
Proposition Four: We need to build some uncomfortable boundaries
The default position most of us adopt is to accept the status quo when it comes to things like technology, food, and the way we live in the physical world, then perhaps to push back a little when we realize some aspect of life has become untenable. Whether this resistance takes the form of a digital sabbath or an hour at the gym or Meatless Mondays, it amounts to a minute of silence in an hour of noise. For most of us it’s not working too well. A better approach is to make the default far quieter.
Should you listen to me?
This is a troubling state of affairs, and I think it is largely caused by the fact that we are living through a period of unprecedented change. If you want to understand what I mean, check out this extremely sophisticated chart:
My neighbor Don, who passed away about ten years ago, remembered the first tractor his father bought, prior to which their farm exclusively used horses for field work. My parents grew up watching black and white television. I was nine when we got our first home computer. The smartphone was invented in 2007. AI image and text programs were laughably awful just a couple years ago.
Things are changing, and they’re changing rapidly, particularly as we spend more of our lives online, since digital worlds advance in faster and stranger ways than the cars and raincoats and cups of coffee that make up our material lives. I don’t claim to know where this will lead, but neither does anyone else, not the digital prophets or effective altruists or tech CEOs. We’re all ignorant.
But the past few year don’t give me much hope that going along for the ride will work out well. So my aim is to think through reasonable, human-scaled responses to our predicament, something I’ll be much better able to with remarkably intelligent, attractive, and vivacious people like you as interlocutors.