Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Is Tech Making Us- Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid?

Episode Date: July 21, 2019

Is technology really rotting our brains, destroying our society... or is that what everyone has always worried about with every technological advance, going back to tv, or telephones, or even writing letters? The new book, Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter tries to look at this question from a historical perspective. Is it really different this time? But more importantly... to what degree has technological change impacted how we think of things, and vice-versa. My thanks to the authors, Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt. Sponsors: Gabi.com/ride Castro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Memeer at Home. I'm Brian McCullough. Well, I guess this is book recommendation Weekend, 2019, because I've got another book recommendation for you.

Is technology really rotting our brains, destroying our society? Or is that what everyone has always worried about with every technological advance? Going back to TV or telephones or even writing letters? The new book, Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid, Changing Feelings About Technology from the Telegraph to Twitter tries to look at this question from a historical perspective. Is it really different this time?

But more importantly, to what degree has technological change impacted how we think of things, and vice versa? My thanks to the authors, Luke Fernandez, and Susan J. Matt. I'm going to start, forgive me, with maybe the most cliche question imaginable, which is, you know, what was the inspiration to write this book? But the reason that I asked that is because this is kind of something that I wrestle with all the time, which is that, you know, it's like, I think everybody knows, like, with every advance of technology, people clutch their pearls and worry about what it's doing to us. Is it warping our

brains? Is it destroying the social fabric? That sort of thing. But then, like, what if this time it is different, is kind of what I wrestle with, like, in the way that a stopped clock, you know, is right twice a day? What if the sky's falling scenario actually comes to pass? Do you need to acknowledge that? I'm wondering to what degree were you guys poking at something similar? Yeah, you know, that reminds me of an interesting story. What was the New Yorker columnist who said something similar, you know, that the Romans consoled themselves that the barbarians were at the gates. many, many times, you never need to worry.

And then all of a sudden, you know, there weren't any Roman baths for 1,500 years or whatever. So just because it hasn't happened, just because it's been a progressive, you know, there's been progress in the past doesn't mean that we shouldn't always be worrying about what's going to happen next. And we also, when we were doing our research, we were wondering at first, is this just the same story that other generations wrestled with with, say, the telephone. And ultimately, we decided each of these technologies had their own particular effects. And it's not just the same story over again, but each story is a little bit different. Right. And, you know, let's go into that now.

You capture so many of those previous panics about technology so well. I mean, that's, the rhyming is beautiful. And, of course, technology. History is sort of what this show revels in. But, like, you know, just picking randomly, like, we can start with selfies. Like, when you guys described, when photography first came out, it was all about, like, you know, a professional studio, and you went and preserved your appearance almost for posterity. That's kind of why people, like, didn't smile in old photographs, aside from the fact that you had to stand perfectly still for about a minute, also because of the aperture and things like that. But then Kodak comes along.

And people have access to photography regularly, and then suddenly people are worried about the things that they're worried about now. Narcissism, vanity, egoism, all that good stuff. Right. I mean, yeah, you can call the photography sort of that there were Victorian selfies. I mean, when you look at people going into studios in the 1860s, there certainly were instances of. of people engaging a lot of affectation. You know, there were the sort of the classic account that we, we often talk about is when women would go into the studio, you know, back then people didn't like to reveal a lot of skin, but part of the skin that was revealed was your ankles.

And so people put a lot of premium on having slender ankles. If you didn't have slender ankles, then you had cause to be worried. But what the photographer would invite you to do was to keep your ankles back if you're a woman and then give you some fake ankles that would appear under the hem of the dress. And that worked all just fine as long as you remember to keep your regular ankles back. If you put them forward, then of course the photograph had, you know, four ankles instead of two. So there are plenty of accounts of affectation and people engaging in vanity. And so you can read the history as sort of a precursor to the present or this rhyming with the present. But they even had, you know, you could hire people to help you put, put a

better face on your photograph or like it give you tips for that sort of thing. Or even the idea of smiling, and this is stepping forward a bit, but like when, when, you know, Kodak comes along and everyone has cameras, then it's this notion, the notion changes where it's about being cheerful and presenting an image of yourself to the world, that's already there, like, even again, like this idea of Instagram people, like, only presenting their best selves and being influencers and things like that. That's already there even in photography in the early 20th century. Right. It's definitely on the uptick by the early 20th century. We see in the 19th century, it's a bit more mixed. People are beginning to experiment with all these poses, you know,

posing with props and having beautiful ankles, even if they're fake ones. But they're still hearing from their ministers, don't be vain, don't promote yourself, don't worry about how you look too much. Remember, you're going to die soon. It's all futile. By the early 20th century, those warnings are heard less and less. And the imperative to look your best is something even ministers will celebrate and say that pride in oneself is a good. good thing. And then not only are you supposed to have pride in yourself, you're supposed to have pride in your family, in your house, and your vacation. And you're right, the Kodak camera definitely begins to educate people and how to present themselves with their own camera as

having a perfect and enviable life. I'm going to run down a couple other of these because I just, I love the rhyming. Like, this is one that I had never occurred to me. When we talk about the digital divide today, like going back to letter writing, there was like a postal divide. Because, you know, letter writing is this great noble pursuit that we think of today as like area diet. And like, if only we could go back to the times when people took the time to write a letter and put it in the mail. But it was largely for rich people at the beginning, the literate people, the educated, people. And then even then, people were worrying about things like, are you narcissistic? Are you just

sharing the mundane details of your life? It's almost like, again, clutching pearls about sharing and blogging about what you had for lunch today and things like that. Yeah, and you can call it rhyming, but I think what we're really trying to say here is that it really took these technologies of the 19th century, the mirror, the photograph, the postal service, or letter writing, sort of to accustomed Americans to the idea or the virtue of self-expression and taking pride in oneself, because the older moralists were counseling that, you know, that pride and vanity were sins and that you shouldn't indulge them. But of course, these new technologies when they emerged we're certainly encouraging that type of behavior and it's and it forced Americans to sort of

reconsider their attitudes towards the messages of the older moralists. So yeah, we, I mean, from the present, we look back and we see these as, you know, we look at the photography of the age and call it the Victorian selfie and it looks like the same thing. And it is to some extent. But of course, it's really a benchmark of sort of an evolving American psyche. American psyche that once took, you know, was very skeptical of pride and vanity and self-esteem and the merges of a new American self that indulges more in narcissism and is much more receptive to the virtue of self-expression. And of course the term narcissism, right? We can say that people were narcissistic in the 1850s, but that's an anachronism because people never

used that word back then and only emerges. Yeah. You know what? I want to come back to that in a second because a lot of this book is almost looking at the history of these ideas of ourselves and our societies and how they've evolved over time. A couple more. Real quick. The idea that people are too distracted, that they can't concentrate, that attention spans are shrinking. I feel like that's one of those things that is always been trotted out with everything from TV to even magazines, you know, because it's like a digest to music videos, to video games, all that stuff. That's kind of always felt like a strawman

argument to me, like the weakest thing that you can trot out with every new technology that, like, it's, you can't focus, it's distracting, that sort of thing. I'm curious how you ended up coming down about that. Well, you know, that was actually where we started. started, what gave us the impetus to start the book. Luke applied for a grant to study distraction in the classroom and got the grant. And that led to us teaching a class on how people have responded to distraction in the past and present. So that was really the genesis of the whole project. You know, what we end up finding was that our obsession with being able to focus today is a fairly modern.

obsession. People in the 19th century began to feel increased pressure to concentrate as their world got more complex, and that began to occur in the late 19th century. Before that, people were more content being generalists, and you could see that in higher education, where people didn't have things like majors, right? You could just kind of learn stuff. You didn't have to have a focus, narrow body of attention, body of knowledge to attend to. And then all these pressures, as the world becomes more complex, there's this idea that you have to focus more and more. What people in the 19th century are worried about, particularly doctors and some educators, is that all this focus may not be good for people. It may not be natural to people. And they

began to fear that our brains were finite and there was only so much attention we could take in and that you might overwhelm your brain. wear yourself out if you try to absorb all the information coming over the telegraph, being carried by the Transcontinental Railroad, coming in on the telephone. So whereas today we kind of think our brains can do anything and absorb anything and multitask, that was certainly not a 19th century belief. Yeah, that's kind of one of the things that reading this made me think about, too, is that it's almost like the tyranny of like self-help, self-improvement. Like, as a society, are we a little too nervous about ourselves?

Like, too angsty, always, are we too lonely? Are we too bored? Are we too distracted? It's like, bored, lonely, distracted, angry. Like, it's always a bogeyman maybe of our own invention. And then the new kind of always rises up to be the scapegoat for us. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but that's kind of what I kept coming back to when I was reading the whole history of all these things. Yeah, I mean, the underlying motivation of the book was what we were reading.

They're all familiar probably with that famous article by Nicholas Carr on Atlanta called, Is Google Making a Stupid? And there's so many other articles like it worrying about how the modern psyche is being changed by the Internet. And so we were interested in going back, you know, another century or two to see whether the anxieties in the past were the same. And, of course, there's stuff in the past that reminds us of our present-day anxieties. But what we're also saying is that the anxieties have changed over time as well. So when Susan was saying that, you know, or, you know, yes, of course, even William Wordsworth, I think, said, you know, that the world is too much with us, his famous poem, to that effect. So people were worrying about information overload from the beginning of the industrial age. But our anxieties do shift subtly over time, and that's really what we're trying to sort of trace in this book.

Yeah, and a large part of the book is that. As much as the book is a history of the various technologies and how they plug into society and how they either shape society or, vice versa. One of the things you do very well is chart the historical record of these concepts, like concepts of loneliness, concepts of boredom. If you're, as you describe, if you're a pioneer out on the, you know, wherever, out on the planes and you're in a log cabin or whatever, like concepts of boredom or any of these things were different and have changed over time, especially for Americans. And some of them, some of them that we're grappling with, are modern. Like these are not things that people wrestled with back in the day.

Yeah, that's very true. Bortem's a great example. It only really came into being as a word in the 1850s. Before that, people didn't love having dull, monotonous or tedious times, as they called them, but they weren't surprised for them. It wasn't a whole feeling state unto itself. And it's sort of by the creation of that category that we know that there's a mental shift going on, right? That people are beginning to think, huh, this is an issue and maybe I should look for ways to solve it. And maybe it shows that the tolerance for monotony is going away. And what we find is that while people expect monotony in the 19th century, by the 20th century, they're kind of coming to expect that diversion, variety, entertainment are there due?

human nature requires constant stimulation. And certainly our own age and our own technologies of the 21st century play upon this perceived need to keep us constantly engaged with online games or new apps. So what 19th century people expected out of life and what we expect out of life is somewhat different. Let me come back again to two more of the major themes that you poke at in the chapters especially. I was really fascinated by your questioning as to whether or not, or to what degree technology has taken awe and wonder out of modern life. What made you start to poke at that? Yeah, well, and to that concern, you know, there's some clever psychologists have called

the concern ADD, and by that they don't mean attention deficit. deficit disorder, but awe deficit disorder that perhaps we're not capable of experiencing awe as much as our forefathers. That chapter really complements our chapter on narcissism. One doesn't usually think of awe and narcissism together, right? But awe has been sometimes conceived, like the awe that our forefathers that Jefferson had when he looked at sort of the landscapes of his own day. of nature, provoked a sense of humility in him when he contemplated.

Right, exactly. A awe is the idea that there's something bigger than me, greater than me. I'm tiny in the face of this larger thing. Right. And so if you don't have much awe in your life, then perhaps those moments in which you can experience that sort of humility vis-a-vis the greatness of the universe are diminished. So as narcissism goes up, and if awe is going down, those sort of narratives complement each other. And another reason why, so why has perhaps all gone down?

I mean, it's partly speculative, but it's much harder to see the Milky Way than it once was. In China, with all the pollution, it's even hard to see the sunrise. I mean, I was looking at a, they're even putting up screens that will sort of simulate a sunrise in public squares in China. to try to simulate that sort of awe. So when you don't have those sort of encounters with nature, then perhaps you won't have as much humility as you once had. We do say that the awe of nature sort of transforms itself towards technology.

So we are still experiencing awe today. But that kind of awe perhaps is different than the kind of awe that we have towards nature, right? If you have awe towards technology, you can sort of take pride in the power of humanity. It might be a little less humbling than the type of awe that we experience when we're contemplating God or nature. Well, I wonder, actually, Susan, that what Luke just said made me think of, like, there's that, we remember, you know, our first going on the internet and connecting with communities that we couldn't get locally, or the first time you had a smartphone, you're like,

I can do this with a phone. Like, there's a sense of awe there. I wonder to what degree... Well, actually, there's two things. I wonder to what degree, like, that's... When we think about, like, oh, technology is not as exciting as it once was, like, if that awe has gone away for a lot of people, or to what degree, like, that...

that sort of technology makes things simple. The fact that you don't have to walk out on the street and wonder where a cab is, it's like you order the cab first. How much making everything simple takes away that all? And that's what technology is supposed to do, right? So some people we spoke to when we interviewed them talked about feeling almost entitled to the new technologies of their day. They were so accustomed to getting the latest updates, the newest iPhone with enhanced powers, that it became kind of an expectation. And part of what they believed it was to be a human was to constantly have the new and more powerful device in your hands. That stands in pretty marked contrast to people who are contemplating new technologies, whether it's the telegraph or the railroad or even things like the lightning rod, people. were amazed by these devices, and often they appreciated them, but often they were also fearful of them

and wondered if they should even have these powers that seemed like the possession of divinity, that God controlled lightning, and he used it to strike down people he thought were sinners. So should you really have a lightning rod on your house? God controls electricity. Should you really be able to appropriate it to, you know, send a banal method? halfway across the continent. There were questions about, were we as human beings entitled to these powers or were we becoming like Prometheus? You don't see that much skepticism after the late 19th, early 20th century. More and more people incorporate the powers of

technology as part of what it means to be human. And we had folks we interviewed who told us that, that they think the smartphone is now part of the definition of the definition of humanness. So our sense of our own powers has grown and our sense that these powers belong to forces outside of ourselves has definitely diminished. One other thing that led us to write the odd chapter was that when we were reading about these 19th century inventions, it was so clear that people felt a sense of wonder. And when we did interviews across the country, we asked people, do you feel odd by your phone? Do you feel like it's an amazing thing? And sometimes people would say, indeed they did. But a lot of times people would kind of giggle, particularly when they heard that

folks were odd by the telegraph, which to them was this antique weird thing they didn't even understand. Like, how could you be awed by that? So just kind of the difference in emotional register made us think there might be a big and important transformation there. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, this is not original to us. The scholar David and I wrote a book called The Technological Sublime, and he's argued that the half-life of awe, he doesn't use the term awe, but effectively its awe has declined with every sort of, with the acceleration of innovation. So people were awed by the train, you know, from its inception up until pretty much the beginning of the 20th. century. But nowadays, the half-life of awe is much, much shorter and much shorter time span.

Coming back to one more thing, going down the list of things that you're investigating or interrogating, I feel like this is super, super relevant, and we don't have to necessarily get political about it. But the idea of modern media and modern technology making us more angry, riling us up. What did you find about that? That was certainly a big question that emerged more and more of the course of writing this book. At first, we didn't even think a chapter on anger would be that interesting. And as we got farther along in the writing process, it became clear that it was something we needed to deal with because so many people were talking about anger.

It's clear that other technologies in the past allowed people to communicate anger, newspapers, the radio. But there were a lot more restrictions, too. Generally in the 19th century, the people who were most empowered to be angry were white men, and there were real social costs and sometimes physical perils people faced if they were women, if they were African-American enslaved people trying to express anger, if they were emancipated slaves after reconstruction, free people expressing anger, the racial line was fixed, and people who were not white males were really kind of prohibited from being angry. And so one thing we think online media has done is that it's offered a new forum for people from all backgrounds to express emotions that once were only the province of white men.

So in that way, there's been a bit of a democratizing force with these technologies. and some people have used social media platforms to fight for social justice. Other times we see a lot of trolling going on, so it kind of depends what purpose it's put to. But what about just putting it simply, the raising of the temperature? Again, this is one of those things where I feel like, yes, I feel like this is settled, historical consensus that when radio came around, demagogues and populists and whatever, it's seized on this new media and made their message, you know, achieve, as Silicon Valley would say, scale that they couldn't have achieved before. I'm wondering how you guys came down

on the idea of that, of like, maybe it's not just anger. Maybe it's just the raising of the temperature, like the increasing fervency and things like that? Yeah, well, I mean, here's an angle on it anyway. I mean, the transition from the awe chapter is, you know, that perhaps if we can sort of recover awe or if we can just remember that there's still a lot of awe towards technology, and that that can act as a social glue, then perhaps we can sort of become a more harmonious society. And the problem is, of course, is that awe is not used.

evenly, I think I'm stealing a term from, I'm forgetting the tech guru who said this first, right, with regard to... Not evenly distributed, yes. Yeah, right. Who is that? I can't remember. I think it's a science fiction writer or somebody like that. The future is not evenly distributed, yes. Yeah, and so awe is not evenly distributed either, right? And so when it's not evenly distributed, the power of awe isn't really going to temper in civility as much as it could, were it more evenly distributed. And so the sort of the sanguine and sort of positive and optimism that we have in the in the in the awe chapter, we sort of backped a little bit on that in the anger chapter

because, you know, we wrote this, the book from almost for the last decade. Yeah. And so things change pretty radically. I think you've used this term as well, right? The worm is turn. And, you know. Well, and I've said that, you know, when I started working on my book, it was like, oh, you're going to explain to me how the Internet happened. And then two or three years ago was like, oh, you're going to explain how the Internet ruined our lives? Like, I feel like actually your book is almost more of the moment because it's like trying to figure out, like, is the worm turned? Are things getting rotten? And to what degree has it always been thus?

or like is this just always what happens when new technology comes? Yeah, and I think, you know, we would argue that certainly the Internet didn't invent anger, but it's given it freer license for good and for ill. And, you know, some of the people we interviewed kind of recognized intuitively, even if they weren't coders themselves, that there's something in those algorithms that, you know, drives more business to angry tweets, right? That there seemed to be a way that anger was used to maximize traffic and advertising opportunities and redirect people to other sites. And while they couldn't explain the back end of it, they could observe it themselves. And so definitely there's a

feeling that anger is being manipulated and monetized today, at least in some of its forms online, which may be polarizing us more. Yeah, and, you know, it was the last chapter we wrote. And as Susan said, you know, we turned in the manuscript and our editor came back to us a couple of months later and we thought we were done. He said, hey, you need to write a chapter on anger. And of course, this was all post-2016. It's no accident, perhaps, that we were writing that chapter.

It was the last chapter we wrote. and it is an opportunity there to sort of reflect back on, you know, where have these technologies taken us? Are they really being distributed in ways that benefit everyone in society? So, yeah, it's anger is important. And when we had to include it at the behest of our editor, but also just because it's in important of itself, given what's happened. No, 100%. 100%.

As you've been mentioning, a good portion of this book is devoted to interviews with contemporary people of all walks of life talking about these issues, even on a personal level, right? And what struck me was how much it feels like we're all still groping around in the dark about this stuff?

just like, we almost still don't have the language to describe our feelings and experiences about this stuff. So I've had this thought before, too. Like, it's, we're still so in the moment that, like, we don't even know, whatever transformation, whether it is profound or whatever our society is going through, it's hard for us to grok it and, like, describe it when you're in it. What did you think about the experiences of posing these sorts of questions to normal, everyday people, and how it actually impacts their lives? One thing we noticed was that people were extremely eager to talk. And, you know, we were talking between ourselves every day about it. So after a while, I was like, well, of course these are issues we should be thinking about. And it seemed like people on their own, in their own heads, had been posing some of these questions to themselves, but hadn't had...

Like wrestling with it. Yeah, but welcome the opportunity to talk it out and think about what was happening. And we both had this experience teaching classes, too, where our students didn't realize you could think about these issues systematically. or, you know, in another way than just on their own, in terms of their own personal, you know, Instagram feed or something. And so one thing we found was this great eagerness and enthusiasm to discuss it. Yeah, you know, after we give presentations, you know, people come up afterwards and you expect them to be asked, you know, pointed questions or challenging questions. But oftentimes it's just them wanting to come up and talk about their own feelings about technology. technology and you sort of feel more like you're a therapist and not even offering sort

of self-help remedies, but just in a willing ear to help them work through the issues for themselves. And so in that sense, even if we don't have any clear answers to any of their questions, at least we offer them a forum in which they can voice their concerns. And we found, you know, of course it depended on who we interviewed. We interviewed some people who worked at Pixar. and we interviewed college students and we interviewed 87-year-olds and you'd find this, you know, obviously a whole range of responses and differing analytical frameworks for understanding

what was going on. But the commonality was that these were, you know, we ideally thought, well, we'll interview people for 45 minutes or an hour and sometimes these would be three or four hour conversations because that's how much people want to talk. question is, you guys quote at some point, Andrew Bosworth's Facebook's now and famous quote that I harped on last year a lot, where he says, like, the ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people is often de facto good. And again, this comes to something that I'm wrestling with all the time, which is like,

I always thought that, like, giving everyone a soapbox, giving everyone a voice is de facto. good. Connecting people around the world is de facto good. To some degree, I agree with Andrew, even though I don't agree with him on a lot of things. But implicit in all of tech, and this is a totally separate economic question about, like, well, more engagement, more usage because it helps their bottom line, they can sell more ads and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm wondering if maybe we're coming out of this sort of maximalism period. I'm sorry, I'm going to, I'm rambling, and this is a long question. But like I interviewed on the internet history podcast, Justin Hall, who a lot of people credit as being the first blogger. And he went through this period of like sharing

everything, and then he completely withdrew from the internet. And then he came back to the internet once he learned how he could live with it and not ruin his life through it. And so I'm wondering as a society, and again, I'm just a dilettant historian, I'm not an academic, but I wonder in the historical sense, how much you think that these are growing pains, these are all of us learning as a society how to deal with these new changes? And if the next generation, five, ten years from they'll look back on us and they're like, oh, oh, you got duped by that crazy guy on the radio or TV or whatever. Well, you didn't know. You were too naive about the media and that sort of thing. How do you think, to what degree do you think that these are things that will solve themselves as society just moves forward?

Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, your book, How the Internet Happened is a great, great read. And so I would not call yourself a Dilatan. I just don't appreciate it. Everyone should pick up a copy and read it if they want to learn about how the internet happen. But to your question, part of the answer is, I think we can say this about Silicon Valley, is that they're Kevin Kelly, his book, what technology wants. It's sort of the emblematic sort of manifesto of technological determinism, that technology

is an inherently good and progressive force in society. And for many years, that's how we were sort of describing the internet, that it was an inherently democratic force that Twitter would catalyze the Arab Spring, yeah? And so that all we needed to do was sort of ride the wave of innovation, and that would take us into a bright utopian future. And of course, you know, when the worm turned in 2015 or 2016, we've had an opportunity to reconsider that sort of ideology, that religion, the idea that sort of technology will determine our destiny in a positive way, and that we need, we were sort of realizing that we've got

to take the reins. And that it's important for us to play a role in our own destiny, and that we can't just count on technology taking us there of its own accord. And we think, you know, both that if, on the one hand, emotions change over time, we can collectively think about what kind of emotional culture we want our technologies to foster. And obviously, technologies are changeable. And maybe we should, and this is definitely more Luke's purview than mine, but definitely we should think about what kind of technologies we want to design and realize that they have emotional and social implications. Yeah, have a little bit of forethinking going into what we're designing and things like that, as opposed to just random throw it against the wall and see what sticks. Listen, this book is fantastic. Again, it's bored, lonely, angry, stupid, changing feelings about technology from the telegraph to Twitter.

And I think that this is a perfect example of why tech history is valuable, because it is almost like, well, it's not, it's not, it's not fighting against Luddism or like, you know, people worried about what technology is doing to us. It's putting it in a context to try to understand, like we said at the very beginning, is it different this time or is it the same old song that we've heard over and over again? And like, that's so important to our society as we go forward. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

Thank you.