People who walk along the street with their heads down, staring at their phones, are enemies of society. They are narcissistic babies who have unilaterally derogated from the social contract that says you should look where you’re going to make sure you don’t bump into people. They implicitly believe that others should do that cognitive work for them while they shuffle along scrolling for porn or doom. If, however, a normal person bumps into them they will be enraged at the unpleasant reminder that other human beings exist outside their solipsistic bubble. Meanwhile, they are walking so slowly that everyone behind them, too, is inconvenienced; they are prime contributors to urban congestion and alienation and the general breakdown of the fabric of society.
All that is true enough, but The Extinction of Experience has a lot of other complaints about modern technology. Young folk these days can’t do joined-up handwriting, and taking lecture notes on laptops is worse for their understanding. People photograph their food in restaurants and themselves in tourist hotspots. People don’t stare into space while waiting any more. We are losing the knack for analogue, face-to-face communication.
As a civilised and scholarly writer, Christine Rosen is obliged to acknowledge that such critiques have accompanied technological change throughout recorded history. “In one sense this is nothing new,” she notes when talking about the mania for taking selfies: that’s just what Victorian enthusiasts of daguerreotypes did. The Sony Walkman was thought to encourage an antisocial disconnection from the urban commons. Socrates argued that the invention of writing itself was bound to make people lazy.
Less often does Rosen allow that modern tech might be a boon. For someone like me, who suffers from a total lack of what other people apparently enjoy as a “sense of direction”, the arrival of Google Maps was transformative. And some of Rosen’s worries already seem rather old-hat. Perhaps you too are old enough to remember when Mark Zuckerberg was going around saying that we would all soon be living in the Metaverse, a virtual-reality utopia delivered through plastic goggles. Zuckerberg even changed the name of his company to “Meta”; business writers obediently produced books about the metaverse, even though it didn’t exist. And then it turned out, after the launch of ChatGPT-4, that the real new thing was the coming wave of “artificial intelligence”.
Unfortunately that sea change seems to have happened too recently for this book to include – as would have been fitting – an analysis of how AI might contribute to the extinction of experience, for example in the way it encourages video game executives to fire artists, or college students to cheat on their essays, or everyone to cover the world in kitschy pictures of Trump and Elon Musk with improbable muscles.
There are still plenty of other ways, not mentioned here, in which people abuse technology to the detriment of those around them. The idiot at a gig who holds his phone up above his head to film the performance; the idiot in the cinema who constantly checks his phone, blinding his neighbours. But no one is forced to act in such morally disgusting ways simply by virtue of owning an iPhone.
The problem with the critique of technology’s effect on modern experience offered here, indeed, is that it assumes that such bad behaviour is technology’s fault, rather than entertaining the idea that perhaps tech is just enabling people to act out the selfishness that has been inculcated in them via decades of neoliberal propaganda, according to which human beings are no more than individual, atomised consumers in a merciless ambient marketplace. That thought, though, might not come so easily to an author who is a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a thinktank noted for its historical global-warming denial and free-market extremism. But then that is the irony of modern conservatism: it denounces the social changes that its own economic policies promoted.
• The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
