This is the second entry in a series of letters between myself and
. You can (and should) read his first entry here. You can also read our introductory entries here and here.Many years ago, I met a man by the name of McLane on the island of Maui. He was a bus driver for Cruiser Phil's Volcano Rides, shuttling tourists from fancy beach hotels to attractions all over the island. Sixty-five, he had two artificial hips that kept him from getting any sleep on planes. He rarely traveled away from the islands. Even so, he'd recently made a pilgrimage to Dohert Castle in Ireland. You could tell it was a highlight of his whole life, just from hearing him talk about it. Five generations on Maui, and he'd made it through with the last name McLane.
He didn't have a cell phone and wouldn't have much use for one even if he did. His whole world revolved around the same handful of social connections. The same stool at the same bar every night, the same Sunday morning telephone call, an entire life inside Dunbar's smallest numbers. He was the type of guy that could get along with anyone, who could deal with everyone. His superiors at Cruiser Phil's mocked him, his old man shorts, his bushy mustache. The simple pride with which he talked about his only child getting into Berkley. But he was above them, ascending not by his excesses, but rather by his lack.
As I sat on the bus listening to McLane's stories, I couldn't help but wonder how his life would have been different if he had grown up in the age of social media. His world was not defined by new followers and requests to connect, but instead by the few genuine connections he'd built over his lifetime. In the age of social networks, it seems our worth is now determined by the number of virtual connections we have.
In 1980 Robert Metcalfe proposed that the value created by a network would scale quadratically with new users. At time he was talking about fax machines or home phones, but at the turn of the century it was clear that networks could be much more. The whole world was once a place much like McLane's Maui. Fast communication was limited to who in the room with you; now everyone exists on the other side of the little black portal in your pocket.
So what do we do with this network of near-infinite value that defines our present age? How about when we realize the 'value' is just incomprehensibility, a deluge formed by the cancerous addition of node after node?
They say that figuring out who you are is a simple function of averaging those you interact with most. In our networked world you might interact with a dozen completely new personas before you get off the toilet in the morning. The network that defines you is constantly under attack, new nodes flowing in deluge, excess enabled by the norms and technology of today. If we believe Dunbar and subscribe to the idea our monkey brains are limited to maintaining connections with only the most primeval tribal size, it follows that the existing nodes at the edges of our network are in constant churn if we can't turn down the flow. Of course, we don't have a good way of doing that. The mechanisms for constraint aren't there. Metcalfe and Dunbar beat us into unrecognizable pulp with the emotionless ferocity of auto-sophisticating machine runaway.
It doesn't stop there. Even if we retreat from the network that defines the ego, we're then awash in excess of other kinds. The supermarketization of sense-experience has developed in earnest during our digital age. Like
has said before, if the supermarket has made us incredibly obese, the supersensorium has made us impossibly numb. We cannot escape becoming what we consume, whether it's saturated fats or Instagram Reels. But the easy sources of consumption are unbalanced against us, and we've entered a new era of machine-enabled content. What is there to do?I think of the human individual as default good, and the human collective as default bad. When you smooth out the edge cases, the psychopaths and sadists that command a mindshare really amount to rounding errors when we're talking about all human individuals. We are basically good, but we're easily warped by the in-group. You spoke about individual's insatiable appetites, but I think there is a point of satiation, a point where most of us begin to feel worn at the edges under the constant deluge of network and content. We have the wherewithal to complain about it, and I think we're not all that far from the norm.
The individual will take time to sort it all out, to wrangle the worst of the collectives into submission. I'm not comfortable waiting around for the day when we figure out how to curb our unhealthy digital cravings in the ways we've curbed some of our physical ones. As it stands, excess is at the foundation of human failure. We've known this forever. Even when humanity seemingly had no excesses to abuse, we still developed ideological immune systems against excess. The original Epicureans -- at first blush the patriarchs of the indulgent culture of today -- knew there was pleasure to be had out of abstinence.
Abstinence is a virtue, however, and a basis for virtue is something we lack. With no religion to rely on, with no grand narrative of divine right, no great struggle for Truth, no immediate darkness upon which we can base a contemporary enlightenment, we have no bedrock to anchor virtue to. And thus, abstinence is no virtue. Indulgence and consumption have no moral antidotes. Maybe MacIntyre is right and we've lost the ability to structure a comprehensible system of virtue, doomed to spin our wheels into oblivion.
Can we reorient? Is there a way to staunch the inflow of content, curb the carcinogenic growth and decay of the Network of I?
No clue. Perhaps the Dimes Square crowd are on to something. An abrupt one-eighty to embrace a ready-made social network filter seems enticing, Enlightenment be damned. For those of us that struggle to make that leap of faith, hopefully there's another route.
For me, excess is at the crux of everything. As a friend said recently, "It turns out that groups make great consumers, and their appetites are insatiable, for in the wake of individualism, people will be left with individual-sized holes they are eager to fill." They go on to suggest that hole will be filled by the unstoppable onward march of neoliberalism, the eradication of the individual in favor of the consumer-focus-group-as-a-tribe. I want to be more positive. Like I said before, we feel the fray, and we can't be the only ones.
I think we'll build an immune system to excess. I'm not sure what it will end up looking like in its final form, but already there are hints. The easiest way to curb consumption is to be a snob; it's hard to get fat on caviar. Appetite for digital content seems boundless now, but the reality is that filters aren't hard, they're just not the default. The era of human-curated content is right around the corner, out of necessity.
Cutting the excess from our social networks is similarly simple in principle: just be crazy. The Dimes Square people are the example I have top of mind, but their strategy isn't limited to resurrecting Abrahamic worship. When you're crazy along some vector, it's easy to limit your in-group to the fellow crazies. I think Substack is a great example of this. There are lots of little islands of insanity dotting the edges of the map, each with its own group of wayward tourists and salted navigators. Private Discords, Telegram groups, whatever is going on in the web3 space, perhaps it's all part of a bigger zeitgeist determined to find the smaller, quieter spaces.
Upon those calmer shores, perhaps we can reclaim a bit of sanity among the crazy snobs.
—Austin
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