if you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it
Lately I’ve been making more of a concerted effort to look at my phone less. This is in part because I think it would be good for my brain and soul, and in part because I’m having a baby at the end of year. This baby will eventually (I am told) become a toddler, and then a child, and then an adult human being. And I just don’t want to show this new mind through my example, particularly while it is young and malleable, that Phone is the most interesting thing in the world.
Every time I’ve picked up the phone recently, reaching out by muscle memory to receive the first available form of distraction it offers, I’ve thought back to a family I saw on vacation in France earlier this year. It was two parents and their young son, probably seven or eight years old, sitting near us at a restaurant. The entire time they were there, except for the moments when they were actively eating, the parents stared quietly at their phones, hunched over the table, eyes transfixed by little pools of isolated backlight. The boy, meanwhile, alternated between gazing around the restaurant and prodding each parent in turn for attention. The image that imprinted itself on my retinas was of a family sitting at a table together, eating dinner alone. Incoming child notwithstanding, I don’t want the most important relationship in my life to be the one I have with the dopamine rectangle. So I am training myself to pick it up less.
I began pursuing this goal in earnest when a close friend invited me to participate in a little newsletter series from The Guardian with her. It’s a good read and has given me some demonstrably helpful tips, so if you’re also considering checking yourself into low-stakes smartphone rehab, you can sign up here.
• • •
Lately I’ve also been dwelling on imagination. Imagining things has always been a big part of my interior life: I’ve loved reading since I learned how to do it, I’m an aggressive daydreamer, a frequent imaginary-conversation-in-the-shower haver, and am in the middle of writing a novel, which is just the imagination expressing itself in the most grandiose way possible.
Imagination is easy to think of as this limitless sandbox where your inner child comes to build castles unconstrained by physics or common sense — a realm untethered to real life. But it is very much shaped and guided by the material conditions of our lives, especially when it comes to imagining the future.
For a long time, for many people of my general age bracket and political persuasion, it has been hard to imagine that the future will be very nice. There’s a tweet I read ages ago that went something like, “You must understand that most people under 40 simply don’t believe that anything good is going to happen ever again.” I think about this tweet every election season, and on days when the news is bad (which is most days), and when I walk past a long line of idling cars waiting to pick up children at a school, farting their fumes directly into those children’s lungs. When the present is a certain way, when your day is ordered by certain routines and expectations, it is difficult to imagine a future that is radically different. It is even more difficult when the rich and the powerful use their significant resources to implant an image of the future into your brain that suits their needs.
At this point I think we’re all familiar with the idea of the attention economy — this stupid, frenetic system where companies wring profit from our focus, our interest, rather than just the labor our bodies can produce. But I think the long game for these companies, particularly the biggest and evilest ones, is not just our attention but our imaginations. Many years ago, Jeff Bezos asked us to imagine a world where anything we wanted to buy could be ours with just the click of a button, conveyed directly to our doors, bypassing brick-and-mortar stores entirely. We imagined, and then we desired, and then we received. Now we’re hooked on this dystopia of his making, underpaid workers scrambling in warehouses and racing around in delivery vehicles to meet our whims, cardboard boxes piling up in our recycling bins.
Mark Zuckerberg really wanted us to imagine a world lived entirely from behind a VR headset. He thought this was gonna be so cool and so profitable. Fortunately, he had a hard time harvesting our collective imagination on that one, and the Metaverse seems (for now) to be a failed idea.
Ross Barkan wrote very well about this:
It’s notable Zuckerberg’s Metaverse quietly failed, that no one talks anymore about the namesake technology that was supposed to resuscitate the billionaire’s brand and usher us all into a Valhalla of glorious VR headsets and pixelated villages. Zuckerberg might want to pretend there never was a Metaverse, just as Apple might want to memory-wipe anyone who remembers the Vision Pro. These are catastrophic, embarrassing failures, and the AI mania has mostly relegated them to historical curiosities. But we should remember what the richest men in the world wanted to do, and what they wanted from us: to disappear out of our reality and into theirs.
This was part of a piece discussing “new Romanticism,” a nascent cultural movement (or possibly just a vibe) that rejects many parts of the imagined future Big Tech has proposed to us in favor of, you know, real life. The new Romantics of Barkan’s description recognize that the tech and social media landscape we live in is one engineered by a small number of people who profit enormously from the way it’s currently laid out.
But I found it interesting that he only touched on the current AI mania without meaningfully discussing this push from the tech industry to guide our imaginations in a certain direction. Everywhere you turn, some company is trying to shove AI down your throat, and some LinkedIn post is saying that this new wave of technological advancement is inevitable so here are five ways to use it in your workday, and the general vibe from the people I talk to about it is one of resignation. Here’s a thing that nobody really wanted or asked for, but Gmail keeps telling me it’s the goddamn future so I guess I better get on board.
With due respect, which is none at all, fuck no to that.
• • •
When I pick up a book, I temporarily vacate reality to inhabit the imagination of the person who wrote the book. Currently, that imagining is Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by the great Silvia Federici. Many parts of it are blowing my mind. Other parts are making me go “hmmm” in a more skeptical way. But all of it is entering my brain alongside a clear understanding that the ideas therein are those of a specific writer with specific views and aims.
When I pick up my phone, I enter the imaginations of thousands of strangers all at once. I gulp down the firehose of their ideas without context. More often than not, the faces presenting these ideas to me are not even the people to whom the ideas belong. Instead, those ideas are being funded and pushed by the rich, powerful entities that profit from them. (Recently, for example, I felt betrayed by the revelation that the weird but intriguing butter board trend from a few years ago was in fact an influencer marketing campaign orchestrated by Big Dairy.)
This is another reason why I am fighting the constant impulse to pick up the phone. Because most of what it offers is opportunistic, unfiltered garbage being dumped on me by someone who definitely does not pay enough taxes. By someone who doesn’t want me to imagine a better world but instead means to firmly anchor me to the version of life that makes them the most money. This includes the very makeup of the apps and services that deliver the garbage to me, the social media platforms and increasingly iffy news apps. The medium is the message, and the message is “my information firehose is good and you like it.”
More from Barkan:
What is most startling, arguably, is the stunted imagination of the tech elites, their fundamental inability to fathom utopias for the human race. They aren’t promising us wonders that will free us from the drudgery of work and they aren’t working, in concert, to eradicate poverty or dismantle the military-industrial complex. They have not produced medical marvels to end the most virulent diseases. They do not plan new cities. At best, like Musk, they long, child-like, to escape the Earth altogether, with little sense of how this would make billions of people better off. They are a reason why there is any new Romanticism at all.
The name of the newsletter series I mentioned earlier is “Reclaim Your Brain,” and that’s exactly what it feels like I’m doing when I refuse to engage with this sinister rectangle that would colonize my imagination to engineer a future in its creators’ image. This is someone else’s sandbox. I do not have to play in it.
I want to imagine something else, something different. A future built on communities of care, a city with fewer cars and more buses, a dinner table alive with conversation, a brain quiet and clear and unpolluted by the drone of nonstop advertisements. And I want to imagine all these things with other people, so that we can do the slow and good work of projecting these images onto reality.
A final closing quote from the GOAT, Ursula K. Le Guin:
The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.
Happy daydreaming~
Recommending Reading/Viewing/Listening
Most of the thoughts I have clumsily arranged here were inspired by last week’s Ann Friedman Weekly, which has some great thoughts and many wonderful links about imagination and romanticism. (This newsletter is my one and only source of the occasional TikTok video, and I really liked this one.)
Here’s a delightful future a group of women imagined into being: Eleven friends living in a tiny-home commune with their dogs, no men, and little drama.
Lindsay Ellis dropped a fantastic video on early childhood education, Gaza, and the Christian Right’s war on compassion. It is long, but it is very worth your time. (If you are also pregnant, be warned that it might make you cry.) Watch in installments like I did throughout, and then consider contributing to her fundraiser for Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
Cars are essentially metal death cages we willingly imprison our bodies in, though it may not seem that way because our car-centric culture has also imprisoned our imaginations. Anyway here’s a funny podcast about that.