Digital Depression and Lonely Masses
Our society is evolving at a record pace towards a digital cosmos – a society in which life is largely digital. In the digital society of the future – in some respects, the near future – people work, party, play and make love online, and even eat digitally printed food.
The latest developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are slowly preparing us to go even further. Not only are we replacing human interactions with digital ones; we are replacing humanity itself. The doctor, the teacher, the coach, the psychologist, and so on – they can all be replaced by a computer.
Is there a difference between a real and a digital conversation? Is there a difference between a conversation with a human being and a conversation with a sophisticated computer? I have spent fifteen years conducting research into (real) conversations between therapists and patients. It has shown me how subtle and sublime real conversations are. To give just one example: if one person stops talking, the other will typically take over in fewer than 0.2 seconds – even if the first person stops speaking in the middle of a sentence. By way of comparison: in traffic, the reaction time is approximately one second (so five times longer).
In real conversations, people's bodies constantly resonate with each other. The facial and body muscles of the listener contract in the same way as those of the speaker, and the same areas of the brain are activated. When people speak with each other, they form a supra-organism on a psychic and subtle-physical level. They are connected by a psychic membrane that imperceptibly transmits the most subtle emotions from one person to another. In this way a kind of spontaneous empathy occurs in the interlocutor (unless the ego structure is extremely developed, as in psychopathy).
Every (real) conversation thus satisfies the first and foremost primal need of man – resonance with the Other. In a digital conversation, this resonance is compromised, due to the limitations of technology: small delays in the signal transmission, restrictions on the freedom of perspective, seeing the other person only partially, and so on. Precisely because of this, long-term digital communication often leaves us with a dull and exhausted feeling. Our bodies exhaust themselves in fruitless and constant attempts to connect with the body of the other person – a phenomenon that some refer to digital depression. It remains to be seen whether replacing a real psychologist with an AI version will provide an effective therapy for that kind of digital depression.
The gradual replacement of real social situations by artificial ones in recent centuries and decades – through the industrialization and mechanization of labor, through the introduction of radio, television, telephone and internet – has taken an insidious toll. It is responsible for the most destructive psychosocial phenomenon of the Enlightenment: it "atomizes" the human being, disconnecting us from our social and natural environment and plunging us into solitude.
Loneliness reached a peak in the early 21st century. Studies from immediately prior to the corona crisis report as much as 40% of the world's population feeling lonely. The situation has become so dire that in 2018, former British Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a Minister of Loneliness. Much more recently, in the United States, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on the dangers of loneliness combined with a new “National Strategy to Advance Social Connection.” But we don't need to resort to statistics to feel the seriousness of the problem. Get on the train – hardly any words are exchanged between people anymore. Our minds are tethered to a tiny screen – digital connection has replaced the human bond. If you casually greet a passer-by – a once-obvious way of affirming the human bond with no other intention – you will immediately sense the problem and, possibly, an unpleasant reaction in return (an unspoken question of: “What does this idiot want of me?”).
Loneliness and atomization is not just a problem, it is a problem with enormous social consequence. Isolated, atomized subjects tend, especially under the influence of media and social media narratives, to suddenly coalesce into a new kind of group: a mass. This kind of group formation makes people radically incapable of thinking critically about the stories presented to them, willing to radically sacrifice everything they hold dear, and deeply intolerant of any voice that deviates of what the masses believe in.
The masses of yesteryear (i.e. the crusades, the witch hunts, etc.) were physical masses – the masses consisted of a group of people physically coming together. The current masses, on the other hand, consist of individuals who, each in digital solitude, are infused by the mass media with similar representations and stories. It is this lonely mass that, together with its leaders, forms the backbone of the ultimate symptom of our rationalistic society: the totalitarian state. The big question we have to answer as a culture is therefore this: what can transform the lonely masses into a society in the true sense of the word – a group of people connected from person to person; where the collective does not destroy the individual, but guarantees a space in which it can flourish as a singular being.
As a major topic in your book Mattias, I think about this issue a lot while I go about my "fully remote" job day to day. I recently re-read The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt (one of my favorite texts from college) and it was shocking to review how prescient she was. I don't disagree with her, but she basically says the simplest way to not only destroy democracy but our shared humanity at scale is to isolate people. Said differently, an isolated society is by default totalitarian in Arendtian terms. Oh! And she even addresses artificial intelligence automation and its implications, "Nothing could be worse" as she says. Keep in mind that she wrote this book in 1958, amazing, right?
Furthermore, she goes on to explain how an isolated person is not human (philosophically speaking) but just a subsisting animal of sorts, as a "slave" would be regarded during antiquity. Slaves were not allowed "to appear amongst the plurality" of citizens; as Aristotle goes: "What appears to all, we call Being." Livin' la vida screentime however is to be invisible and apart from Being – even weighing in on Substack is of course an illusion of plurality, I'm sorry to say.
But there is a meaningful distinction made between mere isolation and solitude, the latter of which can be "vita activa" and fully human, but as Arendt and others point out: solitude depends on both the public realm and the private realm, which have effectively collapsed in the 21st century. She even talks about how the "rise of the social" facilitated this collapse; she saw it coming alright.
All in all, I half-jokingly tell friends that if the "Great Reset" is slated for 2030, then unambiguously, what we experienced in 2020 could be called the "little reset" – a prototype for the full blown digital dystopia. Think about it: since the shamdemic most people now sit at home (in the "laptop class") doing meaningless digital "work", magically receiving paychecks that reinforces their "WFH" house arrest. "Work" and "job" are no longer the appropriate terms – I'm not convinced we live in a jobholding society anymore. "Professional" jobs no longer facilitate sociality, rather they require social de-contextualizing, the erosion of sociality. Said bluntly, when jobs require isolation, we no longer live in a jobholding society. A fully-remote working society is a contradiction in terms (on at least two levels).
So there's the aforementioned isolating aspect of it, and then there's the "teleological" aspect of it: what is this "WFH" fully remote digital work for the sake of? The "office exodus" is almost like a private-sector prototype of UBI in a sense: get paid to do nothing. What people overlook with something like UBI (or a fully-remote job society) is that if you are paid to do nothing, YOU ARE THEN *OBLIGATED* TO DO NOTHING. There is a faustian contract here, however subtle, but the fully-remote worker (or Great Reset UBI recipient) is not at liberty to use their "credits" (i.e. a remote salary) to socialize or contribute to the human phenomenon in any meaningful way, rather, they have to stay at home and forfeit their humanity.
The costs of living in a digital/developed society have never been higher – the cost is mandatory isolation. We're living in (mandatorily) insane times, which is to say at risk of hyperbole: you have to be insane (isolated, lonely, depressed, dehumanized) now just 'to be', just to persist. Yet again, that's a contradiction in terms, of course, but such infernal paradoxes increasing characterize our current times.
If you haven't already (speaking to fellow subscribers here) I recommend reading some Arendt lol!
There are some excellent points to this article, but at the same time my direct experience tells me there's might be a counter-revolution to this digital atomization going on. I'm living in the third largest city in Sweden and bars, restaurants, concert venues etc. have never been more packed. Same in neighboring Denmark. People are out socializing in every corner. Of course people here are locked into to the digital life as much as anywhere else, but they also seem less glued to the phones. Mind you, this country isn't exactly famous for being overly social, but I feel there is now a deep need for people to connect, to sort of unconsciously revolt against this digital tyranny. I have this theory that we've been sort of living in this mechanistic, technocratic neo-liberal world for far too long, and the Covid experience was the crescendo of it all. Now it's time for something else, and future developments are always unpredictable. Things can definitely go in the wrong direction, but they can also go to a better place. Don't discard the human spirit just yet.
(My experience might not be representative globally, and it looks like the situation is perhaps a bit more dire in the US and the anglosphere. I just wanted to bring some optimism to the table)