When I was fourteen, my family went on a Caribbean cruise. I have always been allergic to the idea of going somewhere for the explicit purpose of “having a good time.” But that’s exactly what a cruise—at least this particular kind of cruise—is: a never-ending parade of convenient entertainment and diversion. Gorge yourself at breakfast; use the coupon in your welcome bag for a mid-morning massage; have lunch brought to your table at the pool; shop luxury brands on the promenade in the afternoon; go to a fancy dinner and a comedy show and max out that bar access card. On the days you actually alight on land, you’re met with a theme park version of Cozumel or San Juan, rigorously patrolled tourist markets selling souvenirs or even the cruise line’s private island devoted entirely to passengers’ seamless pleasure. (Royal Caribbean’s is called Perfect Day at CocoCay. To me, that feels like a threat—have a perfect day, or else.)
It’s all too easy, I remember thinking as I downed yet one more Shirley Temple. I couldn’t define it at the time, but I had the persistent feeling that I was being lied to. Surely such a quantity and variety of food doesn’t materialize from nothing; it’s prepared and served by people whose labor is carefully hidden from me, presumably because it would bum me out if it weren’t. One day, we disembarked in Mexico and saw police officers with machine guns guarding the limits of the tourist area. Something was being kept out—or in.
I was brought back to that week as I read Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, which evaluates the effects that apps, algorithms, social media, devices and other technologies have had on the way we encounter the world and relate to each other. Rosen claims that we have replaced true experiences—real encounters with the world—with simulations and cheap imitations (which I’ll refer to here as “experiences” for ease). Experiences are encounters with reality that lead us, as Rosen puts it, to become acquainted with the world as it is. The most fundamental of these—making friends, enjoying art, eating, having sex—characterize our way of being in the world and make us who we are.
“Experiences,” on the other hand, are false, controlled encounters with a pseudo-reality, which Rosen blames mostly on digital technology. More and more, Rosen writes, our “mediating technologies” are in the business not of enhancing our own senses to encounter the world better, but in replacing authentic experience with “experiences.” Take the Google Art Project, which offers tours of major museums with the ability to save, catalog and zoom in on art on the other side of the world, as well as to “build your own personalized gallery” and “share” it with friends. Google touts its ability to make art more accessible to people who can’t travel to the Uffizi or the Met, but Rosen argues that this technology imparts a subtler message: that “this way of experiencing art is better than the alternatives.” Google even brags about its “incredible zoom levels” that enable “the viewer to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond what is possible with the naked eye.” And while the cruise I took had nothing to do with “mediating technology,” I would categorize it as an “experience” too—an alternate reality designed by someone else to keep me entertained while denying me access to reality, with the goal of extracting something from me.
I picked up Rosen’s book hoping to learn more about what a true experience, rather than an “experience,” really is, but I found less clarity in The Extinction of Experience than I had hoped. Most of us would likely recognize Rosen’s description of what certain technologies do to our encounters with reality. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so eager to condemn “mediating technologies” as destroyers and distorters of experience, or so willing to limit our understanding of “experience” to only those encounters that tech enables. First, we might ask ourselves: When can mediation be a good thing? Why have we taken to adopting certain technologies and conveniences in the first place?
Should we prefer experience over “experience”? Rosen assumes so, but why that is the case is not at all obvious. Without an argument as to why reality is actually good and worth fighting to encounter—why it’s worth having “real” encounters with the world—it’s hard to defend our time against pressures to make our lives more efficient, databased or simulated.
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Rather than helping humans do their work or leisure better, Rosen argues, “mediating technologies” make us passive consumers of other people’s experiences. We watch someone skillfully craft a five-course meal on a cooking show while we sit at home shoveling cheap takeout into our mouths. Or we scroll through other people’s homesteading fantasies rather than learning how to garden. We are looking for “a brief glimpse of an authentic experience,” as she puts it, but we use technology to avoid all the hassle it would take to produce it ourselves.
This is, of course, an oversimplification. We also have to think about why so many of us prefer to order takeout than cook a meal, zoom in on art instead of going to the museum or take a cruise rather than a backpacking trip. One of those things is time. Pulling up a high-res version of an artwork is certainly more convenient than, say, flying to Florence or even driving across town. For a variety of reasons, we Americans lack leisure time compared to other wealthy countries, and that’s what’s needed to have real experiences—whether that’s appreciating or creating art, cooking a healthy meal for your loved ones or exploring the world. At the end of a long day of grinding away at work or taking care of kids or elderly parents, all we can often manage is that “brief glimpse” that our screens can provide us. In the moment, the choice is not between that and an authentic experience; it is between that and nothing.
The blame does not lie with those who engage in such “mediated” activities, as Rosen takes it, but rather those who are motivated to profit from people’s exhaustion and dulled curiosity. I know well the unnerving feeling she describes: that our technology has made reality too digestible—that feeling of being lied to. That food you just ordered on DoorDash, Uber Eats or, indeed, Seamless doesn’t emerge from the ether. All of the scaffolding of the app, your linked credit card and your delivery person’s anonymity trick you into thinking that the food that sustains you really was just that easy to grow, harvest, prepare and transport. We know it wasn’t, but the “experience” of ordering food insulates us from engaging with those realities.
Rosen doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions for escaping this predicament, aside from having less tech: logging off, deleting apps and spending less time on our smartphones. But this prescription feels inadequate, if not hopeless. There are many technological innovations Rosen has no quarrel with—cars, the printing press—that profoundly mediate our experience of the world, making our lives faster, easier and less onerous than they would otherwise be. “Experiences” surely existed long before the emergence of the technologies Rosen decries. Before there was Seamless, we picked up the phone to order food—a convenience that certainly obscured some of the reality of what food preparation entails. (As does, for that matter, ordering it in a restaurant!) Rosen talks as though there was a fundamentally stable “real world” of true experience before pesky technology came along and made everything depersonalized and detrimentally efficient. There wasn’t. There have always been people, companies and systems that have benefited from obscuring reality to make a profit—creating an “experience.”
The real danger, it seems, is that we’ve convinced ourselves that we need the seamlessness that comes with today’s technologies. And not only that, we now take it as axiomatic that we need to make reality better—to make our activities and encounters ever more efficient. This impulse to speedrun our enjoyment of things using technology also flattens our preferences: pleasure becomes, Rosen writes, “a more engineered experience, one that elevates control over risk, search over serendipity, algorithms over whim.”
But that’s not what we really want at all, according to Rosen. We want the friction, the seams, the inefficiencies—or at least some of them. This is perhaps easiest to see in our choice of leisure activities, hobbies like knitting and cooking and woodworking. There are easier ways to get a pair of mittens or penne alla carbonara, but the result isn’t the point; we enjoy and are revitalized by the activity itself, which requires time, attention and patience, and probably involves making some mistakes along the way. It’s likewise inefficient to spend our free time meeting up with a friend for a coffee or interacting with other human beings at all. We could retreat to the company of AI companions (Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested that those without many friends should try this option) or just stay home and watch TV. Rosen points out that to some degree, that is what we’re doing already. But it doesn’t leave us feeling good, not the way a real encounter does, because that friction is reality.
“Our technologies actively encourage us to view our world as something in need of transformation by the latest app or gadget so that we can enjoy the results of a personalized, convenient experience,” Rosen writes. She’s absolutely right, and I agree with her that many of the particular mediating technologies we use aren’t improving our relationship with reality. But given that we live in a system that squeezes and monetizes our time, defending the kind of authentic experiences that give us access to reality means doing more than railing against technology: it requires recognizing the inherent goodness of that reality.
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Rosen takes for granted that it is good to encounter reality as it is—to have experiences of it—and assumes the reader will agree with her. She references Robert Nozick’s famous “experience machine” thought experiment—if we could be hooked up to a machine that made us think that we were having good experiences while making us forget it wasn’t real, would we do it?—but she never actually makes the argument that we should prefer real life, with all of its risks, inefficiencies and suffering, to a perfect simulation.
It’s not an idle question. Rosen discusses venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s accusation that worrying too much about the encroaching of virtual reality on reality itself is an instance of “reality privilege”:
A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.
It would be cruel for people who enjoy good lives, this argument goes, to force their outmoded obsession with “the real world” on people who don’t, depriving them of the enjoyment of a simulation. The philosopher Jennifer Frey interrogates this mindset in an essay for The Point critiquing the psychological, rather than philosophical, approach to having a happy life. To the psychological camp, she writes, happiness is entirely subjective; “Life is nothing more than a series of moments we might call good or bad depending on how they made us feel, and the good life one with more good than bad in the final tally.” When Frey visits Yale for a dialogue with a popular cognitive scientist, she finds that the professor is so committed to seeing happiness in these subjective terms that she would choose to enter the experience machine.
According to Rosen, Andreessen’s vision is dystopian because “it is one in which human choice is severely curtailed.” Giving up our experiences and our faculties to the builders of simulations is sacrificing our human freedom. That’s true, but that argument isn’t adequate to refute the claim that most people would be happier in the simulation. What if I designed the simulation myself? Then it would be all my choices, all the time. Why would reality be worth experiencing anyway? As Frey points out, religious and philosophical traditions from different times and places have all argued that choosing reality is desirable because reality is itself fundamentally, ontologically, intrinsically good. But to make that argument, you need metaphysics; you need to show why it is better to live in a flawed reality than a perfect simulation. If you don’t believe that reality is fundamentally worthwhile, then there’s no good reason to opt out of a simulation. Show me some high-res van Gogh and bring on that buffet.
As it happens, I do think that reality is fundamentally good, and I am glad that the whole of reality does not boil down to me and my preferences. Perhaps Andreessen is right that it is a privilege to be able to say that; pretty much all my needs are met, and lots of people’s aren’t. Still, there are lots of reasons for thinking that reality is fundamentally good. The Platonic metaphysicians, for example, concluded that everything that exists comes from a chain of causality, deriving at some point from an uncaused cause. An uncaused cause, something or someone that has no need to cause anything else, must have caused other things in a sort of overflow of itself—if we want to put in personal terms, out of generosity. This overflowing makes up the fundamental structure of reality as one that is good for things and provides the things all beings, including humans, need to live. We desire reality, then, because it is what we fundamentally need to be humans well. We should reject the experience machine, then, because any “experience” it would provide does not have the full sustaining power of an experience of reality, the thing we fundamentally need to exist.
Another reason to remain in reality is that the experience machine reduces who we are as humans to what happens to us rather than what we pursue. Aristotle was right to say that being a person well is an activity, that good habits create a life lived well. A good person is someone who reliably does good things, not necessarily one to whom good things happen. This is what Rosen is getting at when she says that entering a simulation curtails one’s freedom—“freedom” here meaning our ability to do the good things that are a necessary part of being a human. Passively accepting a seamless reality leaves no room for you to act and thus no room for you to act well. It forces you to act according to other people’s fabrications—in some cases, to literally buy into them—and accept lies about who is helped or hurt by such seamlessness.
Lately, I’m trying to have fewer opportunities to be lied to. This sometimes does involve putting away the screens and “touching grass,” as the phrase goes. More often, it involves reintroducing friction into my daily life in small ways. A few months ago, I started checking out CDs from the library instead of putting on yet another Spotify playlist. It’s not the most efficient way to go about finding new music. I don’t like everything I come across. I have to physically take it back to the library by the appointed date. But it’s way more enjoyable to experience music on its own terms rather than bending it to my preferences. It’s fun to be surprised, to let the world unfold rather than having someone else curate it. I’ve come to realize that the only way to defend reality in this technologically mediated age is to experience it ourselves. We can reclaim some small friction, chance encounter or inconvenient joy and see how it makes us feel. Without that conviction, we’ll keep scrambling to “improve” reality—and miss out on it entirely.
Photo credit: Nina Westervelt for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Flickr, CC / BY 2.0)
When I was fourteen, my family went on a Caribbean cruise. I have always been allergic to the idea of going somewhere for the explicit purpose of “having a good time.” But that’s exactly what a cruise—at least this particular kind of cruise—is: a never-ending parade of convenient entertainment and diversion. Gorge yourself at breakfast; use the coupon in your welcome bag for a mid-morning massage; have lunch brought to your table at the pool; shop luxury brands on the promenade in the afternoon; go to a fancy dinner and a comedy show and max out that bar access card. On the days you actually alight on land, you’re met with a theme park version of Cozumel or San Juan, rigorously patrolled tourist markets selling souvenirs or even the cruise line’s private island devoted entirely to passengers’ seamless pleasure. (Royal Caribbean’s is called Perfect Day at CocoCay. To me, that feels like a threat—have a perfect day, or else.)
It’s all too easy, I remember thinking as I downed yet one more Shirley Temple. I couldn’t define it at the time, but I had the persistent feeling that I was being lied to. Surely such a quantity and variety of food doesn’t materialize from nothing; it’s prepared and served by people whose labor is carefully hidden from me, presumably because it would bum me out if it weren’t. One day, we disembarked in Mexico and saw police officers with machine guns guarding the limits of the tourist area. Something was being kept out—or in.
I was brought back to that week as I read Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, which evaluates the effects that apps, algorithms, social media, devices and other technologies have had on the way we encounter the world and relate to each other. Rosen claims that we have replaced true experiences—real encounters with the world—with simulations and cheap imitations (which I’ll refer to here as “experiences” for ease). Experiences are encounters with reality that lead us, as Rosen puts it, to become acquainted with the world as it is. The most fundamental of these—making friends, enjoying art, eating, having sex—characterize our way of being in the world and make us who we are.
“Experiences,” on the other hand, are false, controlled encounters with a pseudo-reality, which Rosen blames mostly on digital technology. More and more, Rosen writes, our “mediating technologies” are in the business not of enhancing our own senses to encounter the world better, but in replacing authentic experience with “experiences.” Take the Google Art Project, which offers tours of major museums with the ability to save, catalog and zoom in on art on the other side of the world, as well as to “build your own personalized gallery” and “share” it with friends. Google touts its ability to make art more accessible to people who can’t travel to the Uffizi or the Met, but Rosen argues that this technology imparts a subtler message: that “this way of experiencing art is better than the alternatives.” Google even brags about its “incredible zoom levels” that enable “the viewer to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond what is possible with the naked eye.” And while the cruise I took had nothing to do with “mediating technology,” I would categorize it as an “experience” too—an alternate reality designed by someone else to keep me entertained while denying me access to reality, with the goal of extracting something from me.
I picked up Rosen’s book hoping to learn more about what a true experience, rather than an “experience,” really is, but I found less clarity in The Extinction of Experience than I had hoped. Most of us would likely recognize Rosen’s description of what certain technologies do to our encounters with reality. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so eager to condemn “mediating technologies” as destroyers and distorters of experience, or so willing to limit our understanding of “experience” to only those encounters that tech enables. First, we might ask ourselves: When can mediation be a good thing? Why have we taken to adopting certain technologies and conveniences in the first place?
Should we prefer experience over “experience”? Rosen assumes so, but why that is the case is not at all obvious. Without an argument as to why reality is actually good and worth fighting to encounter—why it’s worth having “real” encounters with the world—it’s hard to defend our time against pressures to make our lives more efficient, databased or simulated.
●
Rather than helping humans do their work or leisure better, Rosen argues, “mediating technologies” make us passive consumers of other people’s experiences. We watch someone skillfully craft a five-course meal on a cooking show while we sit at home shoveling cheap takeout into our mouths. Or we scroll through other people’s homesteading fantasies rather than learning how to garden. We are looking for “a brief glimpse of an authentic experience,” as she puts it, but we use technology to avoid all the hassle it would take to produce it ourselves.
This is, of course, an oversimplification. We also have to think about why so many of us prefer to order takeout than cook a meal, zoom in on art instead of going to the museum or take a cruise rather than a backpacking trip. One of those things is time. Pulling up a high-res version of an artwork is certainly more convenient than, say, flying to Florence or even driving across town. For a variety of reasons, we Americans lack leisure time compared to other wealthy countries, and that’s what’s needed to have real experiences—whether that’s appreciating or creating art, cooking a healthy meal for your loved ones or exploring the world. At the end of a long day of grinding away at work or taking care of kids or elderly parents, all we can often manage is that “brief glimpse” that our screens can provide us. In the moment, the choice is not between that and an authentic experience; it is between that and nothing.
The blame does not lie with those who engage in such “mediated” activities, as Rosen takes it, but rather those who are motivated to profit from people’s exhaustion and dulled curiosity. I know well the unnerving feeling she describes: that our technology has made reality too digestible—that feeling of being lied to. That food you just ordered on DoorDash, Uber Eats or, indeed, Seamless doesn’t emerge from the ether. All of the scaffolding of the app, your linked credit card and your delivery person’s anonymity trick you into thinking that the food that sustains you really was just that easy to grow, harvest, prepare and transport. We know it wasn’t, but the “experience” of ordering food insulates us from engaging with those realities.
Rosen doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions for escaping this predicament, aside from having less tech: logging off, deleting apps and spending less time on our smartphones. But this prescription feels inadequate, if not hopeless. There are many technological innovations Rosen has no quarrel with—cars, the printing press—that profoundly mediate our experience of the world, making our lives faster, easier and less onerous than they would otherwise be. “Experiences” surely existed long before the emergence of the technologies Rosen decries. Before there was Seamless, we picked up the phone to order food—a convenience that certainly obscured some of the reality of what food preparation entails. (As does, for that matter, ordering it in a restaurant!) Rosen talks as though there was a fundamentally stable “real world” of true experience before pesky technology came along and made everything depersonalized and detrimentally efficient. There wasn’t. There have always been people, companies and systems that have benefited from obscuring reality to make a profit—creating an “experience.”
The real danger, it seems, is that we’ve convinced ourselves that we need the seamlessness that comes with today’s technologies. And not only that, we now take it as axiomatic that we need to make reality better—to make our activities and encounters ever more efficient. This impulse to speedrun our enjoyment of things using technology also flattens our preferences: pleasure becomes, Rosen writes, “a more engineered experience, one that elevates control over risk, search over serendipity, algorithms over whim.”
But that’s not what we really want at all, according to Rosen. We want the friction, the seams, the inefficiencies—or at least some of them. This is perhaps easiest to see in our choice of leisure activities, hobbies like knitting and cooking and woodworking. There are easier ways to get a pair of mittens or penne alla carbonara, but the result isn’t the point; we enjoy and are revitalized by the activity itself, which requires time, attention and patience, and probably involves making some mistakes along the way. It’s likewise inefficient to spend our free time meeting up with a friend for a coffee or interacting with other human beings at all. We could retreat to the company of AI companions (Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested that those without many friends should try this option) or just stay home and watch TV. Rosen points out that to some degree, that is what we’re doing already. But it doesn’t leave us feeling good, not the way a real encounter does, because that friction is reality.
“Our technologies actively encourage us to view our world as something in need of transformation by the latest app or gadget so that we can enjoy the results of a personalized, convenient experience,” Rosen writes. She’s absolutely right, and I agree with her that many of the particular mediating technologies we use aren’t improving our relationship with reality. But given that we live in a system that squeezes and monetizes our time, defending the kind of authentic experiences that give us access to reality means doing more than railing against technology: it requires recognizing the inherent goodness of that reality.
●
Rosen takes for granted that it is good to encounter reality as it is—to have experiences of it—and assumes the reader will agree with her. She references Robert Nozick’s famous “experience machine” thought experiment—if we could be hooked up to a machine that made us think that we were having good experiences while making us forget it wasn’t real, would we do it?—but she never actually makes the argument that we should prefer real life, with all of its risks, inefficiencies and suffering, to a perfect simulation.
It’s not an idle question. Rosen discusses venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s accusation that worrying too much about the encroaching of virtual reality on reality itself is an instance of “reality privilege”:
It would be cruel for people who enjoy good lives, this argument goes, to force their outmoded obsession with “the real world” on people who don’t, depriving them of the enjoyment of a simulation. The philosopher Jennifer Frey interrogates this mindset in an essay for The Point critiquing the psychological, rather than philosophical, approach to having a happy life. To the psychological camp, she writes, happiness is entirely subjective; “Life is nothing more than a series of moments we might call good or bad depending on how they made us feel, and the good life one with more good than bad in the final tally.” When Frey visits Yale for a dialogue with a popular cognitive scientist, she finds that the professor is so committed to seeing happiness in these subjective terms that she would choose to enter the experience machine.
According to Rosen, Andreessen’s vision is dystopian because “it is one in which human choice is severely curtailed.” Giving up our experiences and our faculties to the builders of simulations is sacrificing our human freedom. That’s true, but that argument isn’t adequate to refute the claim that most people would be happier in the simulation. What if I designed the simulation myself? Then it would be all my choices, all the time. Why would reality be worth experiencing anyway? As Frey points out, religious and philosophical traditions from different times and places have all argued that choosing reality is desirable because reality is itself fundamentally, ontologically, intrinsically good. But to make that argument, you need metaphysics; you need to show why it is better to live in a flawed reality than a perfect simulation. If you don’t believe that reality is fundamentally worthwhile, then there’s no good reason to opt out of a simulation. Show me some high-res van Gogh and bring on that buffet.
As it happens, I do think that reality is fundamentally good, and I am glad that the whole of reality does not boil down to me and my preferences. Perhaps Andreessen is right that it is a privilege to be able to say that; pretty much all my needs are met, and lots of people’s aren’t. Still, there are lots of reasons for thinking that reality is fundamentally good. The Platonic metaphysicians, for example, concluded that everything that exists comes from a chain of causality, deriving at some point from an uncaused cause. An uncaused cause, something or someone that has no need to cause anything else, must have caused other things in a sort of overflow of itself—if we want to put in personal terms, out of generosity. This overflowing makes up the fundamental structure of reality as one that is good for things and provides the things all beings, including humans, need to live. We desire reality, then, because it is what we fundamentally need to be humans well. We should reject the experience machine, then, because any “experience” it would provide does not have the full sustaining power of an experience of reality, the thing we fundamentally need to exist.
Another reason to remain in reality is that the experience machine reduces who we are as humans to what happens to us rather than what we pursue. Aristotle was right to say that being a person well is an activity, that good habits create a life lived well. A good person is someone who reliably does good things, not necessarily one to whom good things happen. This is what Rosen is getting at when she says that entering a simulation curtails one’s freedom—“freedom” here meaning our ability to do the good things that are a necessary part of being a human. Passively accepting a seamless reality leaves no room for you to act and thus no room for you to act well. It forces you to act according to other people’s fabrications—in some cases, to literally buy into them—and accept lies about who is helped or hurt by such seamlessness.
Lately, I’m trying to have fewer opportunities to be lied to. This sometimes does involve putting away the screens and “touching grass,” as the phrase goes. More often, it involves reintroducing friction into my daily life in small ways. A few months ago, I started checking out CDs from the library instead of putting on yet another Spotify playlist. It’s not the most efficient way to go about finding new music. I don’t like everything I come across. I have to physically take it back to the library by the appointed date. But it’s way more enjoyable to experience music on its own terms rather than bending it to my preferences. It’s fun to be surprised, to let the world unfold rather than having someone else curate it. I’ve come to realize that the only way to defend reality in this technologically mediated age is to experience it ourselves. We can reclaim some small friction, chance encounter or inconvenient joy and see how it makes us feel. Without that conviction, we’ll keep scrambling to “improve” reality—and miss out on it entirely.
Photo credit: Nina Westervelt for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Flickr, CC / BY 2.0)
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.