Microaggressions of the Machine

What's making our minds malfunction?

Covid. Long covid. Legal weed. Systemic racism. Xenoestrogens. All these and more are blamed for America’s obvious general cognitive decline, visible in the way all of us are simply ever more scatterbrained, forgetful, dazed, confused, low energy, unmotivated, exhausted, on break, at capacity, etc., etc. Is something missing from this list? Something we’re missing because it’s having this effect on us?

We, still, hear so much about the greedy white male capitalists hacking our brains so we give them all our attention in exchange for more money than anyone needs. As I like to remind people, there are evil and malignant people at every level of society, so it would be no surprise to see them at that level of the tech stack.

But this is trivially true insofar as it doesn’t tell us anything about the attention-getting machines themselves, namely, what we want from them that causes us to plow ahead voluntarily into what’s ostensibly such a dystopian, servile future. Some say the answer is as simple as dopamine, and on this model, the problem with us for which we must take responsibility is simply that we ourselves are machines, lower-level, in fact — already! — than our own, still doubtless quite primitive, artificial automated attention aggregation hubs (AAAAH!).

BEYOND MEAT

What kind of answers do we get, though, when we cling stubbornly to the persistent (albeit besieged) reality of our human being? If you insist that, while not quite reducible to mechanics, we are still just biological beings, you’re going to miss what’s in plain sight. (And you’re going to be backed into the corner of accepting that, well, I guess biology really is just electrical engineering by other means, and in the end we’re all just cortexes with accessories.) If, however, you accept that to be human is to be spiritual as well as biological, your search for answers will be swiftly narrowed by Christ’s well-known teaching that the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Now that is characteristically and wisely used to remind us that even sincere and repentant spiritual striving for cleansing of passions and crucifixion of the will often results in humiliating failure, for which the proper response is humble repentance, prayer for mercy, and picking yourself up and beginning again.

But there is another teaching within, too, that our will is willful, so much so that it places corrupt, confused, and harmful demands on our flesh, even in excess of what we carnally desire and experience strong appetites for. Still more, both our flesh and our will are themselves in turn weak relative to the spiritual strength of the demons.

MICRODEMONIUM

There is a lot going on here — more than we can handle mentally on our own or even with a decent support system of family, friends, professionals, etc. etc. It is just too difficult to sort it all out and deal with it instant to instant and moment to moment and hour to hour and over the long stretches of time where our mortal memories and other faculties jumble things together and lose perspective and context.

All before we even so much as introduce the manifold sensory extending technologies encompassing the televisual and telepathic tech bundled together in the digital medium. Add these things in and it’s clear that straight out of the gate we are already always physically overwhelmed by an incorporeal admixture of appetite, desire, and will, some from parts of ourselves, some from other people, some from unseen and unclean powers.

From here it is easier to see that, yes, even as we often seek after the proper spiritual life only to fail in embodying it in the flesh, so too are we always constantly inclined to place improper or mistaken spiritual demands on our flesh which the flesh, try as it might, cannot satisfy.

The result of course is varying kinds and degrees of self-hatred, but even worse, violent conflict within the self. The body rebels, the mind revenges, soul and spirit fragment into mirrored shards; mental illness, spiritual sickness, and all the tolls they exact on the given body, spiral and swirl together, a microcosm of pandemonium.

POWER TRIP

So back to the top. What invisible thing that we so badly desire and will do we seek by forcing our incarnate selves to try to extract from our hardware and software? Let’s call it empowerment. The key to the meaning of power in the popular imagination can be seen in our relentless emphasis on two distinct things: who “has a choice” on the one hand and who, on the other, “gets to” do such and such things.

On first glance these two aspects of power seem unrelated. One is a property present within the self, a product of our given free will — the other, a property granted, a privilege from without. A closer look, however, shows that both are involved in decision. It doesn’t matter much if one “gets to” wield power of a certain kind if one doesn’t “get to” decide to wield it, “at a time and place of our choosing” as the military people say. Nor is a choice much of a choice if it isn’t a proper decision. Interestingly, while the Latin root decidere means literally to cut off, in the popular imagination of the satisfactions of power to decide is to add to, to add to one’s power by selecting something powerful for the specific increase of power it brings to oneself.

It only follows that “the decider,” as George W. Bush colorfully called himself, is the powerful person — he who not only decides but decides characteristically is the empowered and self-empowering one. He who consistently, habitually, continuously decides is farming power. What better application of attention, on or offline? And what purer means of access to, or reflection of, the power of digital technology, which is the action of interoperable entities constantly and continuously making and executing on infinite, infinitesimal decisions?

SPENT

All this awaits our discovery and rediscovery beneath the phenomenon of mass exhaustion we struggle with each day both online and off. What we are dealing with is a tremendous working-over of our inner and outer lives, of our spirit and our flesh, by a planetary swarm of perpetual microdecisions.

The effective governance framework or organizational principle of the online “net” or swarm is that of multiplying and scaling microdecisions — a system that, of its own accord but in accordance with our desires, is making everyone suffer each day from a permanent daily fatigue that is specifically decision fatigue.

The consequence of this microdecision fatigue at mass scale, amassing itself into a regime all its own, is, as we know so well, more and more of us giving up, abdicating, in short saying “eff it” — not just rationally, in the sense of “I conclude I should abandon this effort,” or emotionally, in the sense of “I’m done, I’m spent”, but spiritually… and not just in the sense of spiritual exhaustion or enervation associated with the infamous “noontime demon” of accedia.

No, we are discovering now an active longing, a spiritual yearning, that whatever is going to happen just go ahead and happen, that the perpetual logjam at last begin to break, that the overload at last trigger the avalanche.

Truly, a different kind of accelerationism from what’s offered and demanded by the tech-worshipping /acc crowd. They may think their accelerationism is apt to control this other kind, but they would think that. I suspect the reality is already showing itself to be much different.