halos

The LA Review of Books recently published an essay by Stephen Marche called, “The Crisis of Intimacy in the Age of Digital Connectivity” — its title, structure and motifs all derived from the more famous essays of Walter Benjamin. There's an “angel of the future,” twelve theses, and talk of “secret names.” I loved reading it. It felt true.

In summary: human intimacy has been transformed and distorted because of a technological medium that now connects most of the planet. And we don't know how to fix it.

When you live your life on computers, it is exactly what isn’t computable, what isn’t formulaic, what isn’t algorithmic, that is human.

I wrote not long ago about how my relationship with music has been changed, and I phrase it that way deliberately. It's not something I decided to change. In fact, I never made any decision about it. It seemed to have happened while I wasn't looking, or while I was looking at something else, but there it is nonetheless. A world in which my tastes are increasingly dictated by algorithms.

All plans for fixing the internet are a misunderstanding of the fundamental vision of connection that makes the whole thing possible. Nothing any digital technology company could do, other than to stop making digital technology, would assuage the inescapable brokenness of our condition. The connections of the internet are originally and inherently “without regard to a path,” and mere human beings, on screen or off, are in infinite need of paths.

Marche's piece does little to propose solutions. For myself, I can only hold onto the idea that every terminal has an operator. There's a face on the other side of the screen, and a voice on the other end of the line. If we can attend to faces and voices, we can maybe be not so lost. We can find a path that brings me back to you.

—https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/crisis-intimacy-age-digital-connectivity/