For Those Who’d Prefer Not To

On Democracy, Technology, and the False Promises of Universal Participation

1. Pilgrimage

Now I know full well that if a piece of mine is read by 12,000 people, only 34 or so will click on any given link I provide. This is extremely frustrating to me. I provide the links for a reason. Following them through is, from my point of view, part of “doing the reading”. So please make an exception this time, and, before going any further, click here and watch, and listen, as Merle Travis performs his version of “I’m a Pilgrim”. For one thing, he is my Maestro, from whom I learned the Kentucky thumb-picking technique by staring for hundreds of hours at the work of his right hand (you’ll also catch a sweet glimpse of a young Dolly Parton). But what I want you to focus on, this time, is the lyrical content, which will serve as our leitmotif in all that follows. You may get the same lyrical message from countless other versions of this great gospel standard. Here, for example, is a lovely version by Bowling Green John Cephas, audio only, whose fingers, clearly unadorned by any plectra, I would also love to be able to observe.

What does it mean to be a “pilgrim” in this world? Is such a role, such a comportment to one’s finitude, even permissible any more?

2. You Need a Computer

Regular readers will have learned already of my long resistance to the repeated demands of the French state that I go online, enter a one-time password, and fill out a sixty-question survey concerning my general assessment, as a resident of France, of my “safety and well-being”. The questionnaire, I have been told, was to take around 25 minutes of my time. After several unsuccessful attempts to extract a response from me, the notifications began to escalate the intensity of their adjectives, from important to essentiel, to, finally, as I had feared, obligatoire.

So I admitted defeat and went online and did the damned thing, and managed to finish it in under four minutes. How did I do that? I simply clicked on the “Je ne veux pas répondre” option for each question, sixty times in total, without allowing myself so much as to learn what the questions were that I was declining to answer. I did my duty, as I see it, and told the truth: I did not, in fact, want to reply. Refusal, too, is a data-point, as it tells us at least something about the presence of refuseniks in our social midst. So then, dear benevolent state, stick those sixty acts of refusal in your data-crunching engine, and crunch ‘em.

Now, I am aware that many readers will find this attitude mystifying. They will point out that the survey was “for my own good”, that it was just part of living in a civil society with a government that has the best interests of citizens and of tolerated guests at heart. And in any case by now I have spent far more than 25 minutes dwelling on this matter, writing about it, “ranting” about it, as the internet will no doubt declare with its ever-shrinking vocabulary.

Maybe that’s all true. I don’t know. What I know is that the modern world increasingly seems to me to be one in which the arc of every practice, of every value, of every recognized form of life, bends towards universal participation. Democracy, I fear sometimes, is where everyone does the same thing, and the pathways for opting out grow ever narrower.

For a long time, perhaps, it was difficult to make out even the faintest hint of a dark side to modernity’s universalizing motion. What rational person could possibly protest universal suffrage, for example, or universal literacy, or, as it once seemed we were on our way to achieving in some parts of the developed world, universal home-ownership? But rights have a way of corrupting into duties, and once they’ve become duties seem quickly to lose the raison d’être that had made them seem, back when they were still conceptualized as rights, worth fighting for. Especially when mediated by technology, these duties can easily come to serve as the justification for new forms of coercion. And it is coercion, I insist, that is happening every time I am forced “for my own good” to keep track of yet another username and password that have been assigned to me by the state.

Somehow this complaint of mine is most familiar when it is made in the rhetorical mode of comical Boomer cluelessness, when it comes down to the thumb-tacked slogan you might have seen in some office cubicle circa 1993 —perhaps next to a kitty-kat hanging by a paw from a branch and declaring “Oh Sh**!”— that reads: “To err is human, to really screw up you need a computer!” (Thanks to Willy Staley for bringing this gem back to life.) David Brooks recently gave us an exemplary contribution to this genre, in an April 4 piece entitled “Why Is Technology Mean to Me?” I pictured him after its publication making a pilgrimage to Miami, and bowing before the throne of the Dark Lord himself, Dave Barry.
“I have done thy bidding, Master,” our Times columnist says.
“Then you have written of the greatest existential threat to humanity, and of the profound feelings of alienation it has wrought, but all in a spirit of lighthearted confession of your own silly Boomer foibles?”
“Aye, Master.”
“You have done well. The ghost of Mike Royko will be most pleased.”

But I’m not a Boomer, and I’m not joking around. If I’ve managed to make you laugh so far, that’s only because I’m trying to trick you into appreciating the more serious point I want to make, which is that technology is killing us. It’s killing teenagers who no longer know how to make any sense out of the fact that, for all of the dematerialization of our social selves, we remain just as anchored to flesh-and-blood bodies as we ever were. It’s killing elderly people who become so overwhelmed by the screen-mediated steps standing between themselves and proper medical care that they simply give up seeking it. It’s certainly chipping away at my own thriving, already, and pushing me, in countless small ways, ever further beyond the virtual walls of our digital polis, which can sometimes feel liberating, but which probably will not turn out to be good for my longevity.

Recently I argued in this space that we have been thinking about the culture wars all wrong, and in particular that the insufferable cliché-mongers who rose up over the past decade or so and came to be described under the label of “woke” were in fact only the “fetal phase” of a regime that is now well visible on the horizon, and that shares little of the pretense of progressivism one might previously have taken to be intrinsic to the values of these new Young Turks. I still think, to some extent, that wokeism is, or was, a sort of Late Imperial WASPism, that is, that it was only the most recent iteration of America’s several successive Protestant “Great Awakenings” stretching all the way back to the Colonial era and the first glimmers of hope for a modest and righteous republic to come, but now adapted to an era in which no one with a fully developed brain could any longer coherently maintain that Americanness is anchored in any particular ethnoreligious identity. It is also plainly “imperial”, at this point, in that it shapes daily reality even in a borderline-counter-hegemonic place such as France (counter-hegemony plus tourist dollars, basically), while remaining truly foreign and unassimilable only in the high-gear zones of counter-hegemony, notably Russia and China — which nonetheless are arriving at the same destination, the fully automated surveillance regime, by different means.

But if 2015-2020 was the period of this most recent Awakening’s greatest effervescence, when it still worked directly on the passions of individuals, by 2024 it seems to have hardened almost entirely into an administrative apparatus, one that is maintained in part by individual human beings, of course, but no longer quickened by them into anything that feels at all connected to the spiritual life. A decade ago it worked on our souls; now it mostly just coerces our bodies to go through the prescribed motions. And in this new phase, it is just as likely to be enforced by machines, and oiled and maintained by right-leaning libertarian tech-solutionists, as it is to be propped up by progressive-left “PMCs”.

Of course many of these latter are still invested in the regime they helped build, which lands them in a most peculiar polycule, as it were, with Silicon Valley bedfellows who set out from a very different starting-point. This point struck me with particular force recently when I was reading some of the mulishly stubborn reactions to Jonathan Haidt’s new work on the catastrophic consequences of the introduction of smartphones into the lives of adolescents since 2012. I’ve never been a great fan of Haidt. I have written in this space before that I regret very much our society’s inability to do much better, in producing intellectuals, than to scan the ranks of professors of “Ethical Leadership” (🥱) at the Stern School of Business. But when you’re right you’re right, and Haidt is right that mobile connectivity and social-media have profoundly stunted human development, especially among those humans who had no chance even to begin to develop before these technologies came along.