It’s less a question of what is happening to people than what is happening to the world.
I’m mad. We’re all raving, but I’m angry. We’re off our rockers; I want to stew and seethe and throw things against the wall. We’ve got a little collective twitch in the eye, a signal that something is wrong with the wiring, something is overheating deep in the mesh, and I want to yell.
I’ve been thinking about reading. Often, I’ve been thinking about it instead of doing it. I have not read as many books this year as usual, or as I would like, and that makes me mad — because I love reading. It’s the best thing, the most enriching thing I’ve ever done. It transmogrifies your brain for the better. I would be a less complete person for lack of it, a person with less of an ability to hook myself out of myself, a person without deliberation or appreciation for inconsistency and contradiction. I know that. I know how much reading gratifies my mind and my life. I still do it, and still love it, and still with nearly my whole brain I can reach my way into a page of words and exist there — nearly the whole brain. But these days there is a flaw. Where is the easy slippage all the way in, where is the fall I used to have? There’s something eating at my capacity for this kind of thing. It didn’t used to be this way. Don’t you feel it? Aren’t you aware of the worm gnawing at your cranium, don’t you notice that animal bit of your mind that’s flickering on and on to the next screen the next headline the next image, item, video, cataclysm, isn’t it running ahead of you too? Aren’t we all in this, together and completely alone? Is your head about to explode?
The CEO of Spotify is rumored to have once said, more or less: “The enemy is not other platforms; the enemy is silence.” I do a lot of podcast-listening these days, or music or occasional audiobooks or what have you as I traipse across Boston to see Anna or feed Mabel, but that’s not the point. “The enemy is silence.” What does that mean as a way of looking at the world? It means the enemy is sitting in a moment, sitting in it and being alive; the enemy is a free mind, one that’s not bleeding and twitching on the operating table. Why are we taking aim at the best things? Minds and their silence. Awareness, reflection, self-consciousness, attention, sure, but what really happens in silence is that you just are. You exist. Why are we taking huge heavy catastrophic sledgehammer blows to our very best things?
These days, I think people cannot handle real silence. But it’s not their fault.
A guy named Ted Gioia has a framework to help understand this. He’s a jazz critic and a music historian, and he explains this essential idea better than I will, with diagrams and drawings and everything. I will do my best. Here we go.
First there is art, which has some kind of intent or inspiration, though by its own alchemy it exceeds that intent. It means something in addition to being something; it’s an idea and an execution and inside that crux is something that matters both to and beyond its time. But art is swallowed up. In its place is entertainment, which pulls you forward easily, without complication, which gives you bait enough to follow along and then hooks you like a riff and carries you with it, a current. But entertainment is swallowed too — by distraction. Distraction starts to remove you from your life: it’s the social media site you check during a movie, the intuitive reach for your phone in a spare moment, the way when I type the letter “n” into my browser it autofills the rest of the New York Times website and I scroll without really seeing and only because I deleted Instagram a year ago to try to get a handle on all this carnivorous matter in my brain and in the world. But even distraction is being devoured. And in its place is the endgame, the demon, big and toothy: addiction. Addiction to the infinite scroll or the background podcast or playlist or video or what have you, addiction to the endless media that is endlessly available to us at all times, and not only that but to bad media, the florid noisy hellscape of it, of online life, of AI slop and non-AI slop and the mindless practice of consuming content. Addiction to a motion, a non-experience, a repeat gratification, a death loop. Addiction to nonexistence.
That is what I think it is. I’ve said it before. People are not addicted to the media they consume: they are addicted to not being inside of their lives. They are addicted to being elsewhere, to entering the warp and vortex of not being there, of not being real. They are addicted to deactivating their brains. A new kind of silence.
I hate that false silence. It’s buzzy there in the void, the static of thoughtlessness, and when I feel it I want to crawl out of my skin. It’s a chasm where you’re afraid to encounter yourself. You’re in so deep you don’t want out, don’t want to confront the other version of you, the one with your head screwed on straight, with judgement and time management skills and ambition and all the rest of it. I don’t think this silence has existed before. I don’t think the written word or the printing press or the camera or the cinema produced anything quite like this. We are deleting people from existence! And then they blip back in. But for a while, to themselves more than anyone, they are utterly gone. They are devoid of identity, a set of chemical reactions. They have left this world.
So here is what I want to know, seething and sitting and itching to put on a podcast or something. Why have we done this? Why are we ruining the best things?
Maybe I am wrong. From afar the anger is so certain and intense, the umbrella wide and the scrutiny total and the sentiment full-flowing and unbroken. And then the closer I get to the tangle, the more the caveats raise their heads. It is stunning to have so much information readily available. It is a wonder to know the news in an instant, and to at least have democratic potential hovering around the creation of content and opinion. Texting, calling, this kind of connection at everybody’s fingertips, these things are involved in the production of joy. And there are ways of making due with the state of things, keeping clear of the vortex, accepting it as a thing to be managed like all the other regular perils, even of not considering it a peril in the first place. So I hear. Jack, for instance, sitting there each morning with his flappy print newspaper and his diligence, has eluded this whole trap entirely. Meanwhile I’m complaining about checking the New York Times too much. There are worse things.
And yet I’m livid, I’m apoplectic, I feel the deep-down life-affecting aggravation of something cumulative being off, the scales weighed wrong here in the end times, an accounted-for value tricked away in the smoke. To me, it’s a question of capacity. The danger is the practice and impulse of typing that “n” and feeling my thumb twitch, the way that compulsion eats away at something central to how I want to live my life. But to the world, it’s a groundswell. This is changing the fundamentals. The cultural and social ramifications are already clear; now we’re diagnosing the economics and prophesying the politics. Try to envision it for a moment, the large-scale fabric, all these people flashing in and out of existence, all that absence, and what a lubricant it is for sly and frightening tectonic shifts in how the world operates. I don’t think we are ready. Just imagine what it is like to be a kid, your mind still fumbling around in the early brilliance of being alive: you’re exposed, you’re under construction, and you are surrounded by portals to nonbeing. Why have we done this to the world?
Think of a favorite piece of media: the first time you read the end of Mrs. Dalloway, the first time you saw Interstellar, even the first time you, I don’t know, watched that Seinfeld finale and felt all conflicted. The best part is the silence. The Hans Zimmer cuts off, the screen goes black, you turn the last page, and you reel, you shiver, you’re overtaken, there is no purer or more joyful intensity. Great art is the production of great silence. Silence is not the enemy. The enemy is this new thing, this creepy staticky mind-quiet — and I want my time back. I want my brain back. I am angry. I think you are too. I think we all are, everyone, all the people knocking in rage at the looming lid of addiction, eyes glazed, thumbs scrolling, in there somewhere I think there is a furious consciousness in protest, in protest, for this is not the way we were meant to live. Life is not there, life is not inside that glowing box. We all know it. I want you to listen. I want us to look up.