In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche described what he called “The Last Men”. These are human beings who have overcome all the difficulties of life but as a result live dull, docile lives. “They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth […] They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.”
The producers of the BBC radio series The Digital Human wondered whether this dystopian future is being created right now by the techno-optimists attempting to build a “frictionless society”. I got a call a few weeks ago to talk about these issue for the programme, which goes out this week.
It was interesting to gather my thoughts for the interview, but I know from experience that only a small fraction will be used in the final edit. The most absurd example of this was when a women’s magazine talked to me about a feature on charity shops and the only quote that made it into the piece was the banal comment in passing from “philosopher Julian Baggini” that “charity shops sell more than just secondhand clothes”.
It seems to me that there is nothing inevitable about the rise of the last men. As with all technology, it is a matter of how we use it. However, I think that people are perhaps too quick to assume that technology will free us to focus on what is really important and develop our individuality and not conscious enough of the ways in which it tends towards Nietzsche’s nightmare of docility.
One trap is that in seeking for life to be made as easy and as comfortable as possible, we lose sight of the fact that much of what we find most valuable and life-enhancing requires effort and difficulty. I think people sense this lack, which is one reason why as day-to-day life becomes easier people seem to be taking on more voluntary “challenges”, such as long hikes, runs, bike rides or “extreme sports”. But although these all require effort, few carry real risks. The hikes are well-organised and supported, the extreme sports usually safer than driving down a motorway. Both allow us to act out adventure and risk without really having to test ourselves. In contrast, trying to make it as an artist, learn a new language or acquire a difficult new skill requires effort that has no guarantee of reward. These are all more genuine challenges with more real risks.
Another trap is that we are seduced into acting on the crude utilitarian assumption that we should always seek the minimum input of energy and maximise output. But often it is precisely the putting in of energy that creates most satisfying outcome. Achieving a personal best because you’ve been training for months is very different from doing so by taking a pill. Cooking and preparing a dinner makes for a better evening than ripping off the foil top of a prepared meal and putting it in the microwave, even if the food itself tastes identical in a blind test. The way we experience pleasures changes depending on the context in which they have emerged.
Also, the aim of life is not always an outcome: a lot of the time process is at least as important. Cooking isn’t just a means to an end of eating, it is engaging in its own right, which is why some enjoy cooking meals for others that they don’t themselves eat.
Nor am I convinced by the argument that technology tends to result in us expressing our individuality more. When technology removes friction it reduces choices by taking us straight to what the algorithms “know” we’d prefer. The risk is that we become trapped in the version of ourselves that we first started feeding the algorithms. To grow we need to encounter new things and that is helped by randomness, hindered when everything has been pre-selected.
Nor can we trust that these algorithms are impartial. They are often manipulated to give us what the providers want to give us. When choice becomes easy, we stop putting thought into it and behave more like automatons, less like deliberating, rational agents. Far from freeing up individualism, we end up pursuing pretty the same goals as everyone else. In Silicon Valley, most people are all driving same electric cars, using the same phone, drinking the same kind of coffee, shopping at the same stores.
Another deleterious effect of a frictionless society is that it makes us too used to getting what we want, when we want it. There is no gap between the desire and satisfying the desire, saying what I want and having what I want. One small sign of this is the increasing normality of people without specific medical or ethical needs to give their dinner hosts a list of things they will and will not eat. But part of becoming an adult is learning that you can’t always get what you want, often because that would require things from other people that we have no right to demand, people whose preferences might differ from our own.
I think that increased intolerance for this is linked with the rise of populism, which is a kind of ultra-consumerism in politics, telling people that they can have what they demand and that political elites who say otherwise are lying. But politics is all about balancing different interests and desires. The idea that it is simply about enacting the “will of people” is a pernicious myth.
When everything becomes quick, easy and cheap it spills over to other domains in life. Opinions also become quick, easy and cheap. People think they not only have a right to have an opinion, but the right to express it forcefully, critiquing others who don’s share it, without any obligation to make sure it is well-founded.
The question we have to keep asking ourselves is what end is all this technology serving? You can get all your nutrition needs (apparently) in a single shake, but for what purpose? Sometimes it seems as though all this efficiency is just keeping us stronger and fitter for some heaven on earth to come when mortality has been abolished. But what would happen then? At some point have to start living in the here and now, to live rather than day. Techno-optimists risk being transfixed by a promise of a utopia to come ignoring the imperfect but wonderful world we already have.
I don’t know how much of this will end up in The Digital Human. But it will be worth a listen anyway. The subject is fascinating and I’m looking forward to hearing what others have to say about it.
- I’ll be talking at events this week in Bath (Tuesday) and Hay-on-Wye (over the weekend)
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