Tethered / Seduced: Immersion and Idealism's Roots
On how and why smartphones make bad idealists
Last time I wrote about depression and compared it, freewheelingly, to spending time on Twitter. Being depressed and trawling through Elon Musk’s ‘hellsite’ are both, I suggested, experiences of ‘poverty in world’: of feeling detached from your material surroundings, lacking a place among them. At the same time, Twitter and depression are similarly characterised by a deathly, ersatz realism. When people spew themselves online, they often do so in a tone of adult world-weariness, as if the person they’re abusing is too innocent or childlike to have grasped the truth. That world-weary tone is an equivalent, I said, to the voice of realism in which depression delivers its most damning assessments of the future.
If it’s at all persuasive, I think this analysis extends beyond its initial objects. Perhaps depression and Twitter are extreme examples of the state of thin and hopeless realism I described – a ‘groundless world’, as I called it. This state isn’t confined to depression and Twitter; it’s widespread, and characteristic of our time. We’re not all depressed, but we all regularly fall prey to that mildly despairing voice of pseudo-realism. And we are not all on Twitter, thank goodness, but we’re all susceptible to the groundlessness of the current digital regime under which we live, the capacity of the virtual realm to pass itself off as just as real as the world of grass.
Tethers and Seductions
Having a smartphone means that you’re never far from the world – from a stream of disembodied updates, that is, masquerading as the world. Your existence in your own materially bounded place is perforated by a mad assortment of current affairs: the assassination attempt on a presidential candidate in another country; your friend in Sydney, just waking up as you go to sleep; a near-miss in the north London derby. As we all know, this makes it fiendishly difficult to focus our attention wholly on what’s in front of us, the material here and now. I’m in the Royal Academy, at the exhibition of Ukrainian modernism: as soon as I pick up my phone, I’ll be in three other places at once.
What’s more, the aspects of digital technology that can in theory deepen single experiences, or allow us to preserve them, are devilishly twisted together with the aspects that make us lose focus. I’m looking at a Ukrainian landscape reimagined as a pattern of semi-abstract colours and forms; I want to write down the name of the artist, so as to remember her, and deepen my enjoyment of her work, but if I reach for my phone it’ll take extreme amounts of willpower to write the note and close the phone without flicking to the messages – and as the designers of products like my phone know, I can’t always summon extreme amounts of willpower.
The Silicon Valley bros promised to connect us to one another. What they’ve foisted on us frequently feels less like meaningful connection between specific persons than a general dragging tether to (a thin version of) the world. But the phone doesn’t just act as a tether. It also seduces us with hypnotic otherworlds: rival realms to which, through the brightness of artificial colour and deliberately calculated appeals to our most primal neurological reflexes, it can instantly spirit us away. I’m on the Overground at the end of the day, tired and desperate to be home. I open Candy Crush, and its lurid moving shapes and the hunt for the next hit instantly obliterate my surroundings. The phone mires me in reality, then distracts me with other places; it tethers, and then it seduces.
Into the Thickets
This isn’t bad in itself (if you say something about digital technology other than that you absolutely love it, the ‘it’s not all bad’ concession feels weirdly obligatory, still). There are aspects of the phone’s compressed version of reality to which it’s often good to be tethered: nice to be able to call your parents; nice to know the score. And sometimes there’s thanks to be given for the Candy Crushes, for the temporary but instant abductions from the real world that they perform. But the phone’s alternation of binary states, its jerking oscillation between tethering and abducting, becomes malign when it blocks us from the ability to access and cultivate other modes of attention. In an economy of attention structured along the hardest possible capitalist lines, other modes of attention are competitors, and the phone wants – that is, the shareholder-beholden bros need – to set about destroying them.
It's very difficult to read a long novel now, and this observation has absolutely nothing to do with claims for the edifying capacities of great literature or the cultural status of high art. It’s simply that the phone doesn’t want you to focus for long enough to be able to immerse yourself in the novel, to enter its world, stride into the thickets of its plot, to keep piecing together the characters until they come to life in the mind’s eye, start moving about, so that following them to their story’s end feels less like work than it did at first, and the novel feels like a private realm you have helped to construct. Clever and well-meaning designers in California are paid large sums of money to work out how to stop people experiencing this process of immersion. There is a ‘deep misalignment’, says James Williams in Stand Out of Our Light (2017), ‘between the goals we have for ourselves and the goals our technologies have for us’.
Of course, reading long novels is not everyone’s goal. But everyone needs to know, or remember, how to be equivalently immersed. It’s popular when making this kind of argument to reach for Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi’s notion of flow, a state of highly productive but non-vigilant concentration in which everything, including the ego, falls away. But there’s a tendency to focus too much on the state and not enough on the places it can take you, the other worlds both real and imaginary to which the immersed mind can travel.
Escape and Idealism
Why is it good to spend time in other worlds? Why is it bad if people who grow up with smartphones lose the ability to read long novels? Often the answer to these questions imagines immersion as a form of pleasurable escape. The first techno-sceptical book I read was Michael Harris’s End of Absence (published in 2014, when Facebook was still cool and the left was earnestly genuflecting to the silicon zombies). It starts with Harris remembering a walking trip in the Hebrides, a time of true solitude before the internet. What we have been denied, Harris suggests, is the ability truly to go on holiday, to escape temporarily from the world.
I think this is true, but that the loss is much greater than the ability to escape. If the phone deconditions us from immersing ourselves, I’d argue that it therefore also strips us of the ability to be idealistic. The immersive process takes many forms – you can lose yourself in a novel, a film or a play, a game or a long evening walk – but it has some core characteristics. It’s always gradual: you enter slowly, step by step, into the alternative realm; unlike the world of Candy Crush it can’t be summoned instantly. And it’s active: you, the reader or watcher, collaborate with the absent presence of the author or designer, co-creating the other realm in your imagination. To cultivate the ability to gradually collaborate in your own immersion is to learn, at least in principle, how to be idealistic. Idealism has many guises, some of them monstrous, but underneath them is an intuition not just that things could be otherwise than their present state, but also that there is a path to that alternative existence. To live in the groundless world of the phone is to be pushed and pulled between the world to which you are tethered, and the instant and lurid otherworlds which appear and disappear with the abruptness of magic. It’s to accept that reality and the ideal, the material and the imaginary, are walled off from one another. Let’s keep the kids off the phones to protect them, certainly; but we also need them to be able to imagine the future otherwise.