Being human in a digitally disembodied world – Washington Examiner

Clubbing on a Monday night — that’s the image that came into my mind as I was reading the great new book by Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for Commentary magazine. She is one of America’s best writers and thinkers.

The Extinction of Experience explores the way the digital revolution and the rise of the internet, the smartphone, and AI have altered our lives. Rosen appreciates the miracles of modern technology, which are useful and “fun.” She defines “technology” as “computers, smartphones, smart speakers, wearable sensors, and, in our likely future, implantable objects, as well as software, algorithms, etc.”

However, the bigger picture is that our gadgets have become obstacles to the spiritual, mental, and psychological flourishing of human beings. 

“Many of our current technologies seem to view people as the problem to which devices and platforms and algorithms provide a necessary solution,” Rosen writes. “If earlier technologies were an extension of our senses, today’s technologies train us to mistrust our own senses and rely instead on technology.” 

The results of this are bad, as we can no longer tolerate boredom or contemplation. We can’t experience a concert, conversation, or romantic pleasure without digital mediation. 

“The extinction of fundamental human experiences creates a world where our sense of shared reality and purpose is further frayed, and where a growing distrust of human judgment will further polarize our culture and politics,” she writes. “Technological change of the sort we have experienced in the last 20 years has not ushered in either greater social stability or moral evolution. In fact, many of our sophisticated technological inventions and platforms have been engineered to bring out the worst of human nature.”

The contrast to this is the image that came into my mind as I was reading her book: dancing in a club on a Monday night in the pre-digital world. When I was in my 20s, back in the 1980s and before the digital revolution, I would sometimes go out clubbing and bar-hopping on weeknights. I worked at a restaurant in Georgetown in Washington, D.C., and for many of us in that business, our weekends were Mondays and Tuesdays. 

On Monday, I would go out and hit a few favorite night spots. The crowds were small and the city quiet. You could have time with bartenders and DJs you knew to share some conversation. It was contemplative, friendly, sometimes even boring. You’d think about your life, your loves, your goals. You would talk to God. You’d dance with someone you had just met, and actually see the smile on their face. It was like an urban nightlife version of Huck Finn and Jim drifting down the Mississippi River.

That experience came to me while reading The Extinction of Experience because it touched on so many things that Rosen argues are necessary for human flourishing. 

She writes, “Certain types of experience — some rooted deeply in our evolutionary history, such as face-to-face interaction and various forms of pleasure-seeking; others more recent and reflective of cultural norms, such as patience and our sense of public space and place — are fading from our lives. Many of these experiences are what, historically, have helped us form and nurture a shared reality as human beings. Mediating technologies have been a significant force behind these changes.”

Rosen devotes the entire first chapter of her book to the importance of the human face. For thousands of years, we have used our subtle and complex reading of the human face to make friends and discover a spouse, to detect danger, to lift our spirits, to laugh and cry. That primal ability is being lost as faces are now glued to cellphones. Just as young people are forgetting how to write cursive, they are losing the ability to read the human face.

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I can still remember in detail the faces of all the bartenders, DJs, and a few girls I danced with 40 years ago. Today’s young digital addicts can’t remember who they met an hour ago. As Rosen notes, we marvel at “the rarity of finding someone in public space who is not immersed in a smartphone.” We suffer from a “waning ability to experience human pleasure without mediation.” 

Spending a quiet Monday night in the clubs of Washington, D.C., all those decades ago gave me something I remember to this day. It gave me a fully human experience. 

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.