Rebecca Solnit’s recent essay In the Shadow of Silicon Valley, she describes the way San Francisco has changed due to the infiltration of technology and the intrusion of these technology companies into the civic life of San Francisco. She begins with a strange and stark image:
Seeing cars with no human inside move through San Francisco’s streets is eerie enough as a pedestrian, but when I’m on my bicycle I often find myself riding alongside them, and from that vantage point you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand.
She goes on to describe the empty shops, the skyrises built and then standing empty because of the whimsy of boom and bust in the tech sphere, with companies valued in the billions barely lasting through half a decade. And then those that remain, like Apple and Microsoft and Alphabet and Meta and Amazon whose combined value is in the multi-trillions of dollars, that work tirelessly to destroy our embodied lives in the here and now.
And they will not stop until they own everything. Rule everyone. As Yanis Varoufakis puts it, we are entering or possibly have already entered a state of Tech Feudalism.
We have moved past capitalism, with workers and people removed ever further from the means of production, alienated by work, by politics, by our very lives. Our economies rely on information in the cloud, stored in massive server farms sucking up entire countries’ worth of electricity, belching mountains of carbon into the atmosphere, poisoning the skies.
And we all sit inside our homes and apartments living digitally while the physical world around us drowns and dies.
For an economy is like an ecosystem.
The global ecosystem is being torn apart not only at the global scale but at the dissolution of millions of smaller ecosystems linked together.
The same is true for our global economy. While wealth continues to be extracted and concentrated in fewer and fewer hands through the strange nonsense of the global stock trade, our local economies are decaying and dying. Many of them died already. Long ago.
Entire cities and regions hollowed out and emptied of industry, of jobs, of opportunities. Replaced by diseases of despair accelerated by pharmaceutical companies filling the lack of opportunity with opioid addiction.
I remember days not so long ago when streets were lined with stores where you could walk inside, talk to people, buy whatever you wanted. You could wander into a restaurant or bar or coffeeshop and idle away the time talking to other patrons, to the people who worked there.
My dream job growing up was to work at Blockbuster. To be surrounded by movies. To live inside that chapel of cinema.
When I was seventeen or eighteen, it did become my job. It was all right. Like any job where you wear a nametag, it was full of hilarity, humiliation, and horror. But looking back at it half my life later, I think it’s still my dream job.
If I had to spend 40 hours of my week standing in a Blockbuster, I don’t think I’d mind so much. I mean, it could be worse. I could be doing whatever my real job is for 40 hours a week.
Of course, all good things are dead and so now we just have our little screens that stream everything and we waste our lives staring at lit glass.
It was walking through Blockbuster in probably 2003 or 2004 that I first stumbled across so many movies that would make me who I now still am. From Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return to Pen Ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe to Park Chan Wook’s Sympathy for Mr Revenge to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Bright Future and Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, among so many others.
When I close my eyes, I still see those corridors made of displays packed with empty DVD cases in that popcorn stinking cathedral to celluloid dreams. I had already been through them all. Had a membership to Blockbuster that I used almost all the time, renting everything I could from the decades of history hidden away behind those ugly Blockbuster logos.
The outer wall was lined with new releases. These I mostly ignored. I had probably seen them in theatre anyway. But after scouring most aisles over the months and years, I found myself always returning to the foreign language section.
I felt eyes I didn’t know I had opening up. Felt my whole life changing with every new movie from Italy or Japan or Russia or Germany but especially from China.
Give me just a lifetime of Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige.
Let it soak into me. Smother me.
Let it define the shape of my heart and the rhythm of my heart.
My jaw unhinged. Teeth retracting to make even more space. And I gorged. Spent the paychecks I made serving icecream for $5.15 for rentals that cost $5 per movie.
And I wonder, now, if this could be replicated for teenagers living now.
In 2004, you could drive to a store and browse movies and games and books, letting the cover art and the promises on the back covers lead you to new worlds.
Now, Netflix and Amazon and Instagram and TikTok use an algorithm to deliver you advertisements. Before we dive deeper into the technology of all this, how it’s changed the shape of daily life, I must explain how it once was and how my life was changed by my experiences in stores full of living breathing people and mountains of displays.
And I wonder often what I would have lost without these experiences. I wonder if I would have discovered the movies I loved. The movies that shaped me. Would I have developed my own tastes through constant experimentation, through the ease of browsing the store I spent half my waking life inside, or would I have blithely googled around my laptop or thumbed along at my phone until the algorithm spat out something intriguing enough for me to set my phone down and stare at a different screen for two hours?
Would I have become haunted by these words, these worlds, these visions of beauty, these dreams of all of you?
The stores are still there. Some of them, anyway. But no one shops in stores if they can help it. And often even when we’re in stores or restaurants, we stare at the slab of plastic and glass in our hands waiting for the time to pass before we can return home and sit on our couch and stare at that same slab of plastic and glass meant to connect us to everyone and everything over the world wide web.
And while the convenience of ordering dinner or books or movies with a few thumb swipes cannot be paralleled, it also causes us to sit inside by ourselves, tethered to glass designed to consume as much of our time as possible.
We have never been so lonely. We have never been more disconnected from one another.
The above is excerpted from a nonfiction book I’ve written and am trying to find a publisher for, but I post it here because of some recent discussions I’ve seen about loneliness. You can read a different excerpt that actually comes right after this one here:
the dead internet
I recently read The Myth of the Loneliness Epidemic over at Asterisk Magazine, which is an interesting read. In essence, the author tries to put all of this into a historical context while also using survey data to show that nothing has really changed with regard to friendship in the last few decades.
However, I do think that this is a case of missing the point, somewhat massively.
If you’re sitting on the otherside of this screen reading this now with an overwhelming or even mild feeling of loneliness, does it comfort you to know that people have always worried about loneliness? Do you feel better knowing that your great-grandparents also felt lonely?
I mean, maybe it does. Maybe knowing you’re part of the rich tapestry of human experience and history is enough to assuage the feeling.
But if this doesn’t comfort you or make you feel better, I think that’s pretty normal. After all, we’re alive now. This is our time to live. That people believed there was an epidemic of loneliness in the past doesn’t change the seeming fact that we are still living in an epidemic of loneliness.
I also think this may describe a moving target, if you will.
If people in the 20s were worried about increasing isolation and loneliness and people in the 70s and 90s were also worried about that, is it not entirely possible that people in the 90s would have looked at the lives of people in the 20s and wondered how they could consider that isolation?
Because, to me, it sounds like this may be a problem that has not gone away but has continually gotten worse, with the main difference being one of perspective.
Let’s say that people in the 1920s perceived their loneliness as an 5 out of 10. People of the 1990s may see that 5 out of 10 as a baseline normal, and so when they begin to report a similar feeling of 5 out of 10 loneliness, that would potentially be an 8 or 10 out of 10 for people of the 1920s. And then that 5 out of 10 loneliness again becomes the baseline for people of the 2020s who now report a 5 out of 10 loneliness which would have been off the 1920 chart.
Someone can check my math, but I do think that the world has become a lonelier place. And even if it hasn’t, in some kind of Platonic, objective way, does it change the fact that you and seemingly everyone you know feels lonely almost all the time?
The author focuses a lot on friendship and how this began to be a substitute for kinship bonds. Does it not make sense, though, that as families shrink in size over the decades that there wouldn’t be enough friendship to fill the gap? I know many people without children. I know many people who only have one or two kids. They themselves are often one of two kids that their parents had.
And so it’s very common now for kids to only have one to six cousins, whereas that number in the past would likely have been in the double digits. My sister happens to have seven kids, which gives my own kids a whole mess of cousins, and I can see how that enriches their lives. To have so many kids around, so many kids to consider family, really creates a powerful social web for them to lean upon.
My hope, of course, is that those bonds persist through life.
It seems inarguable that we live in a lonely epoch of civilization. So much of our lives are spent alone or inside our homes and apartments. We do most of our communication through screens and the little daemon in our pocket has become as much a security blanket as a device connecting us, in theory, to the rest of the world.
But I think much is lost in the simple fact that we don’t go out to the market, to the stores, that we aren’t forced to interact with or at least look at hundreds of human faces a day.
While those things add friction and tedium to our days, they also give us this ambient sense of belonging. There is value in being near people, even if you’re alone in that great bubble of humanity. The small, seemingly insignificant interactions that punctuate life in the real life world we real lifely live in are enormously important to us psychologically.
There’s a pleasantness even in being recognized by the people who work at a restaurant or the deli or the coffeeshop or the hardware store or the library. They connect us. Yes, these are very small and long ago I would have called them meaningless connections, but in this age of glowing screens and rubbing thumbs on glass rectangles, the loss of these minor connections has been a terrifying blow to our sense of self, to the bonds of community.
Yes, there’s nothing easier than ordering food online and having it delivered to your door without ever having to look at or speak to someone. It’s nice and convenient that I can get videogames or books or clothes delivered to my house at a few thumb taps. It’s a marvel that I can watch nearly any movie or TV show in existence with just a moment’s effort.
But for this lack of friction, I believe we pay a much heavier toll. One that’s difficult to quantify or even qualify, because we don’t feel it day to day. Rather, it accretes and piles up over months or years.
And it is a great loss when your phone shows you pictures of the last time you saw one of your friends and you realize that happened four years ago. Sure, you text or message one another over one of the many ways to message people, but you have not stood in the same room in years. You haven’t even heard their voice in years.
And you look around and consider that the only people you see are the faces of your coworkers on mandatory Teams meetings and the weight of this isolation, of this loneliness collapses down upon you.
But before you can sit with this crushing weight, you thumb open your phone and find a way to numb the feeling.
Free books:
Interesting. You've given me a slightly different way to think about our current state of loneliness. Like maybe the reason it feels more acute than perhaps it really is, is because of the illusion of connectedness. In olden times, people would look around, realize they felt lonely, and think to themselves, "Well, t'aint naught to be done about it. Back to work in the fields." And they'd carry on. But thanks to our glass rectangles, we are constantly fooling ourselves into thinking we're less lonely than we really are. Or we see other people being genuinely connected with one another, and FOMO ourselves to death. It feels like help is juuust out of reach, whereas in bygone eras, loneliness was only something to embrace.