So You’ve Decided To Carry Your Brain Around

If the worry during the Enlightenment, as mathematician Isaac Milner wrote in 1794, was that ‘the great and high’ have ‘forgotten that they have souls,’ then today the worry is that many of us have forgotten that we have bodies.” So writes Christine Rosen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior editor of this journal, in her new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.

A sharp articulation of the problem, attributed to Thomas Edison, is that “the chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.” Today, the “brain” can be cast virtually into text or voice communication with just about anyone on Earth, and information and entertainment can be delivered almost immediately to wherever a brain happens to be carried around. But we forget how recently this became possible.

Can it really be less than two decades ago that life started to be revolutionized by the smartphone, the technology that made it possible for people of Edison’s persuasion to render the body seemingly redundant? The iPhone was released in 2007. But even by 2009, according to Pew Research, only a third of American adults “had at some point used the internet on their mobile device.” It wasn’t until 2012 that half did so at least occasionally. And then there is that other technology that took off over the same time period: Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and the rest of the social networks that allow us to e-commune and that induce us to see everything we do in light of how it might look to others online.

For such a drastic and recent change, it is one we have largely accepted as just a fact. All the public hand-wringing about it has arguably not made a dent in our actual habits. And maybe that’s because we have underestimated the problem with how it has changed us.

Technological change of the sort we have experienced in the last twenty years has not ushered in either greater social stability or moral evolution,” Rosen ventures. “In fact, many of our sophisticated technological inventions and platforms have been engineered to bring out the worst of human nature.”

Our phones and tablets and computers no doubt provide useful things, which Rosen does not seek to ignore or diminish. I read this book on a laptop so I could read it in a room with a sleeping baby without turning on a light. That baby probably would not have survived her own birth without the technical marvels available in today’s hospitals, from CPAP machines to broad-spectrum antibiotics, an example of why overall infant mortality in America is a fraction of what it was a hundred years ago. I write this review in a house kept at a very comfortable 71 degrees by ingeniously engineered heat pumps and thermal probes and computers. My state generates the power to do that using a combination of light-water nuclear reactors, natural-gas-fired plants, solar, wind, and more. I am helped as I look through my notes by the Ctrl+F function, whose innovative programmer has in my opinion been overlooked for a Nobel.

But, Rosen argues, it is worth separating out some technologies and reconsidering how they have changed us. In particular, we should cast a suspicious eye on the most important tech that has been recently introduced to our everyday (and every-minute) lives: screen-based mobile digital devices and the social media and video apps for which we mainly use them. Rosen does this by offering variations on a theme, giving us six chapters of loosely organized but compelling examples of various parts of pre-smartphone life that are dying off because of digital technology, and explaining how that happened and why we should notice and care more than we generally do.

Rosen’s overall argument is that the real is better than the digital, because the digital is fake, though entrancing. She makes a convincing case that digital technology improves our lives in measurable ways but harms our lives in immeasurable ways.

Much of what passes for authentic experience today is vicarious and virtual,” Rosen writes. It seems trivial to observe that screen-based technologies are an awful lot more purely visual than the experience that actual presence gives you, notwithstanding the abortive 1960 immersive cinema technology of “Smell-O-Vision.”

But it is one of the great virtues of this book that it challenges the digital-native attitude about just what is trivial, anyway. At one point in the book, Rosen reminds readers that actual presence can only be badly replicated. “We are physical animals, and we express our emotions in physical ways. We sweat, flinch, and grin.” She spotlights research, ranging from Charles Darwin’s to contemporary science, to show something that anybody subjected to “remote learning” or endless Zoom meetings has learned the hard way: there is no substitute for real, in-the-room, embodied interaction.

In a chapter that covers the way that handwriting is dying off thanks to word processing and typing, Rosen marshals both academic research demonstrating that the older, slower form of writing is better for retaining information, and common sense to urge that we are much too blithely relinquishing a connection to the way our ancestors have put down words for hundreds of years. And do note, this is not just a book inveighing against the perils of smartphones; not every technology Rosen decries is a screen-based virtual one. In one funny section, she considers Soylent, a sort of Silicon Valley adult baby formula that is a technical solution to the problem of human nutrition with no consideration for the pleasures of cooking and eating around which so much of society has been formed.

Still, the way the smartphone affects our ability to experience the world is Rosen’s top concern, because it is the most omnipresent personal technology of our era. In a chapter on the way that constant access to microbursts of entertainment and social engagement affect our capacity to tolerate (or even savor) boredom, she considers the loss of our ability to stand in line or sit at a red light or simply walk around without constant entertainment and social media check-ins. “Now that we have so many ways to fill even the smallest increments of time,” Rosen notices, “a subtle shift in our psychology of expectation follows. We are more likely to experience waiting as delay than anticipation.”

Waiting has become a problem to be solved, rather than a normal human experience. “When we are accustomed to easily filling time, opportunities for anticipation, like opportunities for daydreaming, disappear,” Rosen says. To find out what this is really doing to us, she makes a guinea pig of herself, conducting one of several reporting trips that inform the book (a visit to a Karaoke club in Japan is later used to vividly elucidate why communities and norms can’t form robustly without physical places). She writes about a weeklong visit to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky to examine how modern people living a very different, more boredom-embracing daily routine differ from the rest of us, with long bouts of silence and prayer. The lifestyle of the monks there, she finds, “fosters a completely different experience of time, and a different understanding of what it means to wait.” Patience comes from exercising the waiting muscle, which necessarily involves boredom. And the mind does some of its best stuff when it is allowed to wander. But this is only possible when we cultivate the ability to experience a lack of stimulation as something tolerable or even joyful — emphasis on “cultivate.”

The problem with virtual reality is not that the technology provides, as of now, an insufficiently advanced simulacrum of the real world; it is that it is virtual. The problem with living a digital “Second Life” is that there is in fact only one. No matter how good the graphics get, the best escape we can find from our real lives is still only a particularly charming illusion. Life lived on social media, or Zoomed into, or in constant telecom contact, or in the awareness that we must document ourselves, is fake.

To argue this point, Rosen considers the famous “experience machine” thought experiment from philosopher Robert Nozick, which, much like Plato — or, for that matter, The Matrix — asks us to consider whether it is better to be pleasantly deluded, hooked up to a machine that fakes experience, or to live in the real world. The ethos of Silicon Valley is to produce updated versions of the experience machine, ones that feel successively less and less fake, though never actually arrive at reality.

Rosen suggests instead simply unplugging and heading outside:

The very things that many of our technologies want to make seamless and “frictionless,” as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is so fond of saying, such as the awkwardness of face-to-face conversations and the quirks of our physical bodies, are precisely the “ill-fitting pieces of experience” that, taken together, make us human.

The value of the experiences that are being killed by recent technological change is realness. This is at once an abstract thing to defend and the least abstract thing of all: the physical world and the bodies we use to exist in it. It is valiant of Rosen to make this argument, given how much harder it is to put into words the values she invokes — materiality, mediation, patience, embodiedness, sense of place, serendipity — than the quantifiable technical efficiency our gadgets afford us. But she does a remarkably effective job here.

By the end, though, readers will no doubt find themselves at least a little depressed. The conscientious modern reader will, in one way or another, have already reflected on the paradox that technological change can be a great thing that, taken to extremes by a utopianism on autopilot, can harm society in subtle but profound ways. And anyway, it is not something that we can really stop or even opt out of without damaging costs. Rosen closes the book with a sketch of ideas for how to deal with the problem she has just described — taking phones out of schools and committing to delay smartphone ownership until children have reached an appropriate age seem like especially good ones. But the march of the iPhone and Instagram and Netflix autoplay seems relentless.

It would not be an original observation to say that when we talk about our children, we are really sublimating our concerns about ourselves. My wife and I, considering our parenting philosophy for the toddler and child and teenager our infant will soon turn into, have been joking about raising her “Noughtmish.” The idea is that, much as the Amish don’t eschew all technology but rather default to roughly what was available in the late 1800s, so we will raise our kid with the technology and culture available in the Noughties, say in 2004. She’ll have a Nokia brick cell phone loaded with Snake, and DVDs of South Park and MTV’s Cribs available for playing on her rear-projection TV.

We love making this joke, because it gets at something we really believe about the destructive effects of the last twenty years of technological change, something Christine Rosen just wrote an excellent book about. And then something dings or buzzes on our iPhones to grab our attention, and we go back to scrolling.