This Machine Kills Experience

There now exists a professional cuddling industry in which snuggling is a purchasable service. Some assisted living facilities now use robot companions to combat the loneliness endemic in their facilities. Between 2014 and 2019, the time Americans reported spending with friends declined by thirty-seven percent. One wonders, not whether, but how much this number has continued to fall since 2019.

I apologize for this little laundry list of bad news. But this, in condensed form, is the experience I had reading Christine Rosen’s recent book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.

Don’t get me wrong: the book is more than readable, as Rosen is an engaging writer. But this accurately titled book is exactly what it says on the tin: an examination of all the ways that our society’s automatic adoption of the latest technological advancements is fundamentally changing what it’s like—and what it means—to live in the world.

Such changes are never neutral, and by my lights, seldom good. So for me, and for most Porchers, it is necessarily a frightening read.

The book is well organized, with each of its seven chapters addressing one of the ways our experience is being transformed, and usually impoverished, by the rapid incursion of “the digital world.” Chapter 1 documents the falling out of use of a not-so-old saying: “you had to be there.” Apparently this phrase isn’t used as often as it was in the times before the phones, and you can see why: in today’s world, you usually didn’t have to be there. So much of what we now experience is mediated through screens, and all such experiences are shareable and replicable. You could watch the video and be as there as I was. And it’s not just that we are spending more time with our devices. We now approach our “offline” experiences as things we can post online. Increasingly, our online lives are the end, and the “real world” is merely a means to it.

Rosen dedicates a chapter to the implications of the loss of face-to-face interaction and another to the decline in handwriting, drawing, and other such manual skills. She brings in a variety of studies that show the significance of these trends, deftly jumping from neuroscience to sociology and weaving in insights from art, architecture, and literature. She devotes a lengthy and improbably fascinating chapter to waiting, and the fact that we are no longer capable of it (at least as long as our phones are charged). Stapled to this is the fact that we don’t daydream or let our minds wander anymore. The loss of waiting and daydreaming, it turns out, weakens our minds in more ways than even the most luddite among us would guess. Rosen presents the psychological research compellingly, but I do wish she had more to say about the ways that smartphone software is consistently and intentionally built to be habit-forming, hacking our limbic systems and beckoning us at the slightest hint of boredom or even downtime. In this chapter and elsewhere, the book paints a vivid and detailed picture of the crime scene but doesn’t provide much in the way of a motive or a profile of the suspects.

In what is perhaps the most disturbing chapter of all, Rosen describes how phones and online culture have reshaped our emotional habits. Multiple studies point to an erosion of empathy, and many others connect this directly with the rise of online experience. Insurance companies are funding research into sensors in cars that monitor the emotions and alertness of drivers. Some tech visionaries are working toward a not-so-distant future where technology can do all the work of reading other people’s emotions for us. Many companies are already monitoring their employees via wearable devices, tracking things like social media activity, location, and even biometrics, all for the sake of “productivity.”

Not only our emotional habits, but various pleasures of life—travel, sex, food—are increasingly mediated and “optimized” through technology. The theme here is summed up nicely in Michael Benedikt’s words: “a life not really lived anywhere but arranged for the viewing” (p. 178). At the same time, place is eroded, and serendipity is eliminated. But don’t worry, MIT’s Ben Waber is confident that technologies will be able to “engineer serendipity” (p. 203) in the future.

It’s like a little shop of Porcher horrors. I had to read the book in small doses for this reason, and by the time I finished, I was overwhelmed with the scale of the problem. The raw number of ways our lives have already been transformed by these ubiquitous little machines—experience may not be dead yet, but it already has sustained at least a thousand cuts.

And here’s the thing: the effects of all this can be tracked with statistics and research, but only indirectly. Such findings simply can’t express the true significance of what is happening. The real impact of the digital revolution hits us directly in the place that matters most: our very experience of life, which is being thinned out and warped in a panoply of ways: from the social to the private, from work to home, in waking and sleeping, and in our desires, actions, thoughts, and feelings. Even someone who is in the habit of scrutinizing and reflecting on his own use of such technologies will find in this book many unexplored nooks and crannies of the transformation of his own world that he had not yet thought about.

Given the gravity of the situation, Rosen keeps a surprisingly moderate tone throughout, seeming to undersell the importance of her topic. When she does step out of her role as chronicler to make her own judgments, they often come in the form of gentle rhetorical questions rather than the trenchant declarations that would seem to be called for by such outrages. “Should governments, insurers, and other corporations have access to information about your vulnerability to specific emotional appeals?” she asks politely (p. 135). The answer seems infuriatingly obvious to me, but perhaps it is not so clear to everyone. In most instances, such questions are left to sit unanswered rather than decisively resolved. My guess is that this is a persuasive strategy on Rosen’s part. Rather than preach to the anti-tech choir and be criticized for inciting a moral panic about the kids these days, she subtly nudges others in the direction of asking the right questions.

Still, it’s hard to reconcile this temperate Socratic method with the reality that human experience is being warped at warp speed. Or perhaps even being driven extinct. The “extinction” proclaimed by the book’s title is hyperbole in one sense, but at the same time it minimizes the fact that this is all being done quite intentionally and even strategically by tech companies and advertisers, just to keep us on our phones. Furthermore, they are often in the business of selling us solutions to the problems developed by their own technologies. A title like The Theft of Experience would have driven this point home, but this would of course have sent a more pointed political message. Rosen seems to stop short of criticism of any tech entrepreneurs, often choosing to jump to the next example rather than interrogate too deeply the questionable ethics of any particular business venture.

I have to applaud Rosen for providing a vocabulary that helps to better conceptualize and remember all the intertwined problems she discusses. Her distinction between databased and undatabased experiences is intuitive and evocative: it is the difference between visiting a restaurant with or without looking up online reviews, or between leaving a minor factual dispute unsettled or settling it by looking up the correct answer. “Databased experiences” are becoming the norm, and this fundamentally changes how we experience these experiences.

Another zinger is the idea of a “fallow moment.” One’s mind is likened to a field, which is regenerated when it lies still for a time. When our minds are constantly being cultivated (a generous metaphor for how we use our cell phones when bored), we no longer experience those fallow moments which give rise to reflection, insight, and creativity. So our minds become subject to topsoil degradation. Another novel concept finally created a mental shelf on which I can stack all my complaints about so many students in class, those whose laptops are open but whose minds are, as a result, shut. They are there in flesh but elsewhere in spirit. Their “absent presence” is symptomatic of our age.

I’ll close with one final entry in the parade of horribles—mainly to provide some comic relief. There is a company that makes a food-replacement drink that supposedly maximizes nutrition while minimizing the hassle of shopping, meal planning, and cooking. It seems the aim here is to take away one of life’s most reliable pleasures and replace it with something marketed as more “efficient” (and yes, “sustainable”). It’s a perfect illustration of the technologist’s ideology: the organic stuff of life must be replaced so that our measures of productivity and utility can be maximized. But of course, the shakes taste terrible, and few can sustain the diet for long, often due to abdominal distress. It’s almost as though we were meant to eat food and not science.

But now for the punchline. The name of the company is “Soylent.” It originates from a 1970s science fiction movie called Soylent Green, where Charlton Heston navigates an overpopulated society in which living people are occasionally cleared off the streets with giant scoop loaders. In the film, Soylent is the company that supplies nutrition to the burgeoning masses, and Soylent Green is their latest product.

I have to imagine that the creators of Soylent watched this movie. And I’m sure they knew it was about a Malthusian dystopia where the population has exploded beyond the capacity of society to feed its members. Setting aside the consistently demonstrated errors of Malthus’s predictions, the film’s themes connect directly to the marketing strategy of Soylent as the sustainable food of the future.

But did they somehow miss the film’s most famous line? At the climax of the movie, after Heston learns the ugly truth about the Soylent company’s practices, he resists arrest as he frantically shouts to the crowds in his inimitable manner, “Soylent Green is people!” The company had been using all those excess human bodies to make its latest food-like product.

Maybe the real-world Soylent’s creators knew all of this, and just decided that notoriety was better than obscurity for their company’s name. But that doesn’t alleviate the irony. Soylent markets its powders and shakes by convincing its consumers that purchasing food, preparing food, and eating food is all a waste of time. With Soylent, you don’t even need to spend any time chewing. Imagine all the time that frees up to do something productive!

Rosen doesn’t connect Soylent to its 1970s cinematic namesake. But the two are more alike than the company’s founders realized. Instead of cannibalizing human bodies, Soylent cannibalizes human experience—in particular the very human experience of eating. Soylent chews it up, spits it out, and calls the end product progress. But as Rosen concludes, with typical understatement, “Despite what Silicon Valley marketing messages insist, history is not always a steady march toward progress, and not every new thing is an improvement on the old” (p. 218).

Image Credit: Rick Dallago, “Mona Lisa Smiley”