As Rainer Maria Rilke hints in his memorable poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” the object-turned-subject admonishes, “You must change your life.” Objects of attention not only prompt us to extend care where care is needed but, further, to transform ourselves. The other morally significant side of this recognition is that when we extend it, we ourselves are interrogated. An individual’s dignity does not impress us all on its own. This ontological promotion we occasionally extend to objects isn’t limited to the sphere of mere things, either it’s something we must do for human beings, too.
Smith wagers that your relationship with the characters in the novel, or even the novel itself, is more akin to that with a friend than with a fictional or inanimate object. Consider a favorite novel that, pre-Zuckerberg, you used to lavish with heaps of off-the-clock attention. Not only is it in some sense within my willed control, it plays a transformative role in how I appreciate and interact with objects and people-it makes them into genuine subjects. Or, on your part, the herculean effort it takes to read this review without lapsing into skim mode or taking a YouTube retreat.) The satisfaction of immediate desires does, however, offer significant chemical rewards, and, over time, these dopamine drops create brain ruts that make sustained progress on life’s more enduring (and, presumably, significant) projects all the harder.Īll this suggests that attention is more than a mere mental faculty it is also an ethical state. (I really need to finish writing this essay, but-look!-photos of Kendrick Lamar’s beachside estate. This activity, online flitting, thrives on baiting inclinations that rarely reflect our best selves. Most importantly, the power players in our online experience-the pillars of what Smith calls the “phenomenological Internet”-are financially invested, and deeply so, in training users to flit quickly and continuously from one hyperlinked stimulus to another. The intensity of our collective distraction is historically unprecedented, and for obvious reasons. Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, admits that these things undermine our well-being, but he focuses instead on the so-called crisis of attention: the idea that the Internet is ferociously adept at cultivating distraction. We might think about the proliferation of action-constraining algorithms and ubiquitous surveillance. The problem is straightforward: The Internet as we know and use it in our daily lives (the realm of Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.) significantly limits our capacity for freedom in all the various and complex senses of the term. Smith argues in his new book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is -thoroughly “anti-human.” Its raison d’être is not, as Mark Zuckerberg claims for his own corporation, to “strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” To the contrary, the Internet is a pernicious disease.
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