July 2, 2008

Two Anti-Stupid Strategies: Foiled?

By: James Poulos

Ross asks if the iPhone is making us stupid.

[Walter] Mossberg delivered this assessment [at the Aspen Ideas Festival] with a strong note of techno-pessimism woven in: A lot of his talk had to do with the issues constant connectivity raises for deep knowledge (“people hate iPhone users,” he remarked, “because you can never have an argument about facts without them whipping out the phone and looking up the answer” – a description that I’m afraid I resemble, even though I have a Blackberry and not an iPhone) and deep reflection (in the future, Mossberg noted, we may never be free of “that subtle feeling that maybe you need to check Slate, or Facebook”), and he echoed some of the points that Nicholas Carr makes in his Atlantic essay on how the internet may be changing the way we think, and not necessarily for the better.

Tellingly, nearly all the questions that followed had to do with how the attendees could get their internet service to work more cheaply and smoothly – especially in Aspen.

Gah. Sounds discouraging. Here are two possible countermoronic strategies to save us from becoming tubeslaves.

(1) Care less about facts. Factual data — both granular and large-n — is highly privileged in our contemporary world. We want to know all the exceptions to the rules and then we want to know the bigger meta-rule that makes all those exceptions comprehensible, classifiable, and categorizable again. We want to settle arguments with facts and citations. Sure, facts and citations are important. But there are plenty of important conversations to be had in which the arguments you field aren’t justified by brute facts.

Problem: our contemporary world seems to recognize this already — but when we aren’t arguing about factual data, we’re arguing about feelings and senses of things. How many classrooms contain listless yet earnest students, especially in college, who begin all in-class questions or comments with “I feel that…?” How alienated are we already from the world of facts that every other newscast involves anchor asking reporter “Can you gives us a sense of…?” And then there’s the old “I’m fe-e-e-eling a sense of…” that pervades our stereotypical shrink sessions and ironically self-referential social settings. Like a bowl of chunky mayonnaise, our life away from facts is a thick mush of nonjudgmentalism embedded with hard lumps of stridently incomprehensible subjectivities (“It’s a _____ thing — you wouldn’t understand.”).

Hmm. Perhaps strategy 2 is a better place to start.

(2) Care more about values. If we’re too concerned that our subjectivities get ridiculous and confrontational all on their own, perhaps we could turn to a deeper sense of values properly speaking — well-thought-out commitments to aesthetic or moral ways of looking at the world. One problem with this strategy, as critics of modernity love pointing out, is that it risks entering a Weberian world in which facts and values are considered completely separate things. This is bad, the argument runs, because values unmoored from facts become just out-of-control desires to which we enslave our reason. A few people think this is okay in a market economy with the rule of law, I guess because our desires become so domesticated and disenchanted that shopping at Brookstone satisfies our wildest dreams. But we’ve seen where the market pushes us. And indeed some of the best cultural libertarians want to publicly institutionalize what few morally questionable behaviors remain in the black or gray market.

So imagine we can actually reunite facts and values, recognizing that together they make up truths. (Just fire walk with me here for a minute.) Are we safe from the Scylla and Charybdis of our time — unimaginative overreliance on factual information on one side, and too-imaginative pursuit of egotistical desires on the other? So that if we put the crackberry down, we won’t run amok?

Problem: we’ll still be left with one particular union of fact and value that has plagued and defined regimes of free and equal citizens for a long time: public opinion. One good thing about public opinion is that it can free us from slavishly following experts. Often times a big group of people can generate better ideas than a small group of experts (consider Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’s ‘ask the audience’ feature, or Justice Scalia’s dig that a random group culled from the Boston phone book would make sounder legal pronouncements than the Supreme Court). But one bad thing about public opinion is that it obscures where people are getting their information from — which will probably in large part be public opinion itself, thereby compounding the significance of non-public-opinion sources. The problem of people winning arguments by getting the facts off their iPhone is dwarfed by the problem of people winning arguments by getting the ‘facts’ off Facebook — or Wikipedia, that mutant half-breed of expert and public opinion. Public opinion pushes us toward having conversations only about things about which the public has an opinion.

And how are we supposed to know what those are? How are we supposed to know what public opinion, after all, is? How can we laugh at metaphysics as obsolete philosophy, yet believe in and interact with this vast floating disembodied object called public opinion? The unsettling thing about the problem Ross and Mossberg identify is not that the iPhone is making public opinion stupider, but that it’s making us individuals stupider, i.e. less intellectually self-reliant. Surely there’s a sweet spot in there somewhere; the challenge is to figure out how we can convince ourselves of where it is. Maybe one provisional strategy — now that (1) and (2) have been knocked out — is to turn to the Great Grid of Knowledge only when you remember that you remember some detail but can’t remember it.

Example: last week I was in a conversation about Mongolia. (A number of us had just seen Mongol [recommended, mostly for its one-liners]). I asked a trivia question about the one modern-day Mongolian nation-state that was not Mongolia. Shrugs all around. Denials that such a nation-state existed. “Tannu Tuva!” I declared, to blank stares. Well. I had to back this gibberish up with facts. And I knew I was in the right — I had the memories to ‘prove’ it — but I couldn’t muster the level of detail that the group required to believe me. (Also, only moments ago I had told a long, and entirely false, origin myth about the figure of speech ‘balls to the wall.’ I had a certain credibility gap to close.) Out comes the blackberry, up pops Wikipedia, and — yes, there’s Tannu Tuva, complete with flag, name of anthem, and nutshell history.

Rather than getting dumber, both I and the group got smarter. I will always look back on that episode as a paradigm case of using ‘net knowledge responsibly. I’m a big symp when it comes to criticisms of modernity, but I insist upon our ability to behave ourselves even in a thoroughly (late) modern context. I’m also highly sympathetic to criticisms of postmodernity, too, however, meaning I for one do not welcome chipping our medullas and downloading ourselves into the digital bath. Ultimately, avoiding stupidity after Web 2.0 involves a strategy that’s remarkably similar to the one that worked before Web 2.0: not being intellectually lazy. We might try to repress our guilt at being so damn lazy, but the guilt will out.