maraoz.comTexting While Driving
I.
The world is texting while driving and nobody seems to care. I don’t mean it literally (although that’s also true). It seems like everyone’s continuously living with half of their brain-power away on something else.
Damn. Another “old man yelling at cloud” post. Fuck it.
I have to write this.
II.
Recently, a very special group of friends of mine turned 10. I proposed an anniversary trip. Fearful of indifference, I wrote the following and sent it to the group:
“Friends! We live in fragmented times. Our attention, activities, and beliefs are constantly buffeted by algorithms and an accelerated world. Today, it’s especially important to consciously anchor ourselves to our families & friends via synthetic rituals. Without these foundations, the super-fluidity of the world disarticulates us and leaves us a bit lost (or at least that’s how I feel). I found that by making a small effort to nurture structures, the return on investment is immense.
That’s why I ask you to:
(1) Take literally 20 seconds to think about what you value about our group in your lives.
(2) Decide if you want to invest in nurturing what we were lucky to find.
(3) If yes, I challenge you to think of this 10-year event of our group as a ritual about consolidating paths and learnings. This will involve a small effort (in organization, flexibility, travel, time, openness, etc.). I think it will be very worth it.
… (continued)
“
(translated from the original which was in Spanish)
My fear was that some high-frequency information volatility (lk-99, war in Israel, crypto drama, etc.) would muffle the importance of maintaining long-term group unity. The goal of the message was to get my friends to engage their “system 2” (alert conscious awareness) and to get them to invest attention into making the gathering happen.
The friendly get-together happened. 15 of the 16 members made it. It was a fantastic 4 days of in-person conversations, great food, and sharing life learnings. Afterwards, I kept thinking about why the event felt like such a rare gift.
Why was it so surprising to get 15 friends together to talk about deeper topics? In the following weeks, my thoughts coalesced.
III.
Our increasingly digital social lives require new rules of engagement. We don’t relate to each other in the old ways when online. New interaction mechanics bring new social dynamics. We’ve been learning this over the years of Internet growth.
One example is online trolls. In the 90s, many of us were surprised by the extreme aggressiveness of pseudonymous commentators. With time, it became clear that hiding behind a screen with no social consequences brings out the worst of some people. We learned to ignore trolls.
Most readers would agree that online interactions are nothing like face-to-face ones. There’s something about a group of people chatting in person that hasn’t been replicated virtually yet. In person, feedback loops form between all the brains. The sum is greater than the parts. A “scenius” can emerge. I haven’t seen this ever happen virtually, but I have been part of it in the physical world.
A common answer to this is: “Yes, BUT… it’s only a matter of time until the digital world catches up.” “Zoom calls suck, but wait for truly immersive VR.” “Digital social lives get better every year” I agree with all this, in the long run. I even helped create Decentraland (an open metaverse) because I think we’ll spend more and more time in virtual worlds!
What I’m noticing, however, is a transition problem. While we learn to polish our online interactions, we’re “forgetting” what worked for us for millenia. The know-how of in-person social dynamics is fading out.
IV.
Etiquette, rules of conversation, status games, tone and posture and other in-person non-verbal communication are all social technologies. They evolved as coordination mechanisms in the context of physical-world mechanics. They are “wise”—battle tested by millions of years and robustly fit for many situations. They contain deep knowledge of what works. Additionally, our brains co-evolved with them. We build meaning, connection and motivation by engaging successfully in these dynamics.
Digital life completely upends these evolutionary stable systems. The mechanics of interaction on the Internet do adapt, but (1) much slower and (2) as designed by other humans, usually optimizing for ad revenue.
In my personal life, I’m noticing certain social dynamics disappearing. It used to be common for a group to “shame” someone who had confirmed for a gathering and then canceled last minute. Now, the default is indifference. Same with someone checking their phone in the middle of a conversation.
We spend increasingly more time online. This drives attention and human hours away from good old in-person human mechanics. We’re losing practice! History teaches us that humanity can forget technologies (see: roman cement, watermills, or how to build a bridge for less than $1B USD in a western country).
The more hours we spend interacting online, the more we forget how to meet in person! Digital life is so great that it’s hard to fight it. I’m personally making a huge conscious effort to retain my in-person social abilities. We’re at war! Drastic times require drastic measures.
V.
But the ruins of the digital attentional vortex are not restricted to our social life. Social media is making us more anxious, depressed and distracted. Saying this is almost a cliche at this point. Lately, however, I’m noticing some other, subtler effects. I have no data to back these up, but I do have an intuitive sense of a trend:
(a) unforced blunders: I hear more often of completely avoidable huge mistakes. Many seem to be skipping basic catastrophic loss avoidance strategies.
(b) failure to achieve simple goals: I’m increasingly noticing people failing at basic life tasks. Either achieving life goals is getting harder or we’re getting worse because we can’t maintain focus long enough to complete them.
(c) increase in victim attitude: “life is getting too chaotic.” “It’s impossible to find time to read books with my busy schedule!” It’s becoming the default response, more than ever.
All of this points to increasingly distracted living—and makes sense if you look at the data of social media growth and add 2 plus 2.
This all reminds me of how people drive while texting. Or text while driving (it’s unclear which one is the main action).
The car swings between lanes. Which, if you’ve spent any meaningful time on roads post-2007 (the year of the first iPhone™), you’ll recognize as the telltale signature of what insurance actuaries now classify as “distracted driving”. Just someone typing “omw” or “k” or the crying-laughing emoji into a palm-sized black rectangle that commands more attention than the actual 2-ton death machine they’re piloting through space at 120 km/h.
That’s how I feel more and more people are living today. I have nothing but anecdotal evidence. I’m writing about it because I feel it’s important to get the conversation started. Hopefully, we’ll see these trends confirmed by data or reversed by our actions in the next few years.
The default of the universe is entropy. What doesn’t get attention fades into nothingness. We’ll need a huge conscious effort to retain what matters to us. Unless your digital life truly matters to you (I doubt it), burn it. If you wait another year, your attention might have withered away irreversibly by then. I repeat: we’re at war. Take drastic measures.
Thanks for reading. Congratulations on having an attention span longer than 5 minutes! :)
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to deadpine, Lemu, Lucas & Voltaire members for conversations that inspired this post. Cover photo by MidJourney