Should we be staring at screens all day?
Is this the progress we think it is?
I was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia earlier this year, and most days I took the monorail to work.
Something I noticed is that the majority of people are on their phones and there are always at least a few people per carriage blasting tiktoks.
This isn’t unusual, everyone is on their phones these days. In less than a generation, humankind has been one-shotted by the colourful screen. Real life just cannot compete with the rollercoaster of emotions brought to you by that magic box in your hand.
We now all worship “the neon god they made”.
More prescient than ever, Simon Paul’s words from The Sound of Silence are our reality.
The release of ai-this-AI-that-the-hyper-real-multimodal-content-by-algorithms-powered-by-generative-diffusion-LLMs-that-transform-dreams-at-scale-for-human-storytelling is the new layer on top.
Sora marked the beginning - where fake creations inspired by the fake simulation become the new thing our eyes are glued to.
Experience Through The Screen
About half a year ago I was at my co-working space in Thailand and heading to the bathroom when I heard loud cries of an animal nearby. Once I located the sound I saw a tiny kitten up on a pipe. It had obviously gone exploring but now it was stuck and scared.
Eventually we told a staff member who got a ladder and thick cloth and the cat was rescued. But in the meantime a lady, on her way to the bathroom, came along and immediately started recording. She was no longer looking at the kitten, but at the kitten in the phone.
For about 2.5 million years, humans and our ancestors saw this world directly, but since 23 years ago, when sharing media with phones became easy, everything is now seen in the phone.
The idea of not capturing an engaging moment is unthinkable!
But this begs the question, now that that moment is captured in the phone and can be replayed later, are you experiencing the moment at all?
Around the world, average screen time from tweens to middle age easily spills over the 7 hour mark. Extrapolating for a full life that’s at least 24 years spent scrolling.
And what’s alarming, is that our brains take 10-20 seconds to form a memory, so, when that time is spent tiktoking, our memory trace decays almost instantly - which is why you don’t remember what you just watched.
All that time without experience - gone. Forever.
Not all of the 24 years will be spent on the small tiktok screen of course.
Many years will be spent on the medium screen for work, with evenings capping off the day spent staring at the large screen for that relaxing long form consumption called watching TV or movies.
Work and play have merged. We scroll to rest from scrolling.
We call this techno age: progress.
But should we?
The Simulacra of Connection
We bow our heads down to absorb the artificial glow rather than face the blinding sun of reality.
Technology has been sold to us with the promise of freedom, connection and efficiency.
It has never been easier to travel across the world, to chat with anyone, or to deliver anything to anywhere. The world has shrunk.
And yet, it has also never been easier to live a life stagnant, alone, and as a cog in someone else’s machine.
We live in the most peaceful time in human history, but if you looked at the news any day of the week it wouldn’t seem like it.
Why? Because our brains evolved to look for danger to keep us safe, but in a world where a sabretooth wont enter our cave, the media generates feelings of sadness and helplessness to feed off our morbid curiosity.
So on paper we are more connected than ever, but what everyone really feels is record levels of loneliness and isolation.
Living vicariously through the screen. Attention is the new commodity.
And we have paid dearly for it. According to the world health organisation, there are more than 1 billion people living with mental health disorders like depression and anxiety today - a skyrocketing proportion compared with the last century. And is it that surprising when screen addictions are the norm?
It takes zero activation energy to start doom scrolling and couple this with autoplay, endless scroll, algorithmic feeds and constant short bursts of novelty - it’s so easy to rot in bed while being blasted with the full range of human emotions.
The hit you get from tiktok resets your brain’s baseline level of dopamine tolerance. This makes it impossible for what feels good today, to feel as good tomorrow; till you’re scrolling in an anhedonic spiral of chasing that tiktok that originally made you laugh.
Heroin works the same way. We are hooked on the illusion of connection.
The Stimulus Feed
When you think about it, it’s odd that everyone has a phone.
The average person is not in a position where they need to be notified of emergencies immediately, like a doctor would for example.
But around 60% of the world’s population have smartphones now.
ping, ping, ping goes the slop machine.
All of human knowledge right there in our hands, but it isn’t being used for creativity, it’s being used for mind-numbing consumption.
(I recommend listening to this Jreg song with headphones for the full experience)
Before the printing press you would only receive news about the area and people you knew. Newspapers coming about in the 1440s meant you could read about distant events for the first time. This was of course very fascinating for the social animals we humans are.
But at the same time, the industry trying to make a profit from it also learnt that the more sensationalist a piece, the better it would sell.
Radio took off in the 1920s because the news could come faster. Now you could hear people from far away and that felt more personal. Distant tragedies were now spoken aloud in your living room, shifting your mood as you sat in the same place.
In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Neil Postman argues that all public discourse is now entertainment.
It is all a show.
As the medium switched from a print culture to TV in the 1940s, the way the average person processed information changed. From complex ideas that needed sustained, analytical thinking, to a screen where passive involvement was the only requirement to consume it [ref: wiki].
Changing until all we wanted was a quick dopamine cycle.
He writes:
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell‘s dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World. […] What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
He believed we were living in Huxley’s Brave New World, where everyone is drowning in entertaining information and it distracts us from thinking deeply.
And for all of our history, one thing humans had, was a lot of time to think.
And that naturally led to imagination and creativity.
The brain loves creating. Put someone into a sensory deprivation tank and they’ll start to see visions.
Today, it is normal for a moment of boredom to mean take out your phone and watch the simulation. A moment to let your mind wander, now distracted before it could take the first step.
With creating as one of the driving acts that brings you closer to feeling alive, the introduction of screens make it so easy to pass the time consuming. We forget to create, to progress at all.
In Numb at Burning Man (100% recommend reading by the way) Sam Kriss remarks:
I know it’s the reason we can’t stop looking at our phones. That’s what sustains the whole stupid tech industry, the fact that a glowing screen looks a little like a glowing fire, and it’s good to look at fire. The only thing in the external world that resembles the subjective experience of having a mind.
And I agree, the bright colourful screen is a lot like the fire that is so foundational to our history - possibly the reason behind what makes us human in the first place.
A fire meant warmth from a harsh night, a barbequed meal, a hearth to share stories with a lifelong community - a time to sit and rest.
I imagine it was easy to enter a trance of staring into the beauty of a blazing fire and lose track of time.
Our new flame is the absence of all of that. It’s stimulating without substance.
This techno age has given us marvelous tools, but its progress has made us uncomfortably comfortable.
An individual can 10x their productivity but it doesn’t mean much if their attention is being yanked in all directions.
The path we are heading down is only filled with a larger flood of mindless entertainment.
It is going to get harder and harder to break the surface we are already drowning in.
But it is in this tempestuous sea that we must find focus once again to keep creativity alive.