Computers

In an era that claims to value the authentic, the direct and the natural, the word "processed" has negative connotations, as in “processed” food. Nevertheless, it describes exactly how perhaps nine-tenths of the human race — including, I imagine, the lost Indian tribes of the Amazonian wilderness — experience reality these days, which is to say processed through electronic media, social media and the oxymoronic smartphone.

Several years ago — long before Elon renamed it X, restricted most features behind a paywall and made it altogether less pleasant to use — I uninstalled Twitter from my phone. Then, on my laptop, I set the Minimal Twitter extension to hide all interaction counts. I still have no idea how many followers I have.  I wasn’t hopelessly addicted to the site, nor was it enraging me on a frequent basis. Put simply, though a Twitter-using liberal, I was not a “triggered lib.” But whenever I wasn’t doing something else, or waiting in line, or walking to make some coffee, I flicked through it. When I should have let the silence breath, I pulled out my phone and refreshed my feed.

The way I see it, there are two options for the future: a transplanetary society or a transhuman one. What got me thinking about this was right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel’s recent interview with Mary Harrington, which she wrote up in UnHerd. As Harrington puts it, Thiel’s diagnosis of modern social ills is not that “progress is inevitably self-destructive,” but that we’ve been making the wrong kind of progress. "We’ve had continued progress in the world of computers, bits, internet, mobile internet, but it’s a narrow zone of progress. And it’s been more interior, atomizing and inward-focused,” Thiel said. Meanwhile, “there’s been limited progress in the world of atoms.” So far, so good. But then the interview took a strange turn.