Soon we will have nothing left to give away of ourselves
Pink Floyd's Wall and our active participation in the mass degradation of society
Prelude
Most people these days will tell you the pandemic is over. That things may never be the same again, but at least we're past the fear, danger, and existential threat of that scary time. That's the good news, I suppose, and thank god for it. The bad news, however, is that covid-19 wasn't the real pandemic. Yes, it was a horrifying virus that spread like wildfire around the world and killed millions by attacking our bodies. But, the bigger, far more dangerous pandemic I’m talking about is still out there right now robbing our souls.
Soulless
The dissonance of contradictory reality is everywhere you look. In pop culture, Walter White is a violent and murderous crime lord who maintains an image of a moral family man. Dexter Morgan is a vicious serial killer who only targets other killers. Gollum is a creature tormented by his conflicting desires to both help Frodo and betray him in order to reclaim the Ring.
We see it in real life too. Think of the last time you sat in Starbucks, hung out at the cafe in Barnes & Noble, or walked around a department store. What do you hear? NOTHING! It's very quiet. Gone is the effervescent chatter, lap-slapping ribbing, and nostalgic storytelling of college kids, teenage boys, and groups of adults. This strange anti-sound isn't silence either. It's more like an eerily, quiet hum in place of words, shrieks, and laughter. The other thing you notice is that no one else seems to notice. Why? Nauseatingly, we've become so used to it that we don’t even think about it anymore. Everyone — families, groups of friends, co-workers, and pure strangers — is staring down hypnotically at the glowing rectangle in their hand. Their frozen faces illuminated by an unnatural glow as they swipe and tap and type, rapturously. Click, Click, Click, Whoosh, Ding. WTF is going in here? No one looks around. No one talks. Gone are the shy smiles, sideways glances, and furtive flirtations. My god, just 7, 10, 15 years ago, you’d think you landed on another planet. You haven't. In the blink of an eye, all that playfulness has CEASED. All that serendipity is GONE. All that soulfulness is LOST.
And, if we don't find it again VERY SOON, it's likely to be lost forever!
Warning
Maria Popova, the brilliant mind behind The Marginalian newsletter, has an annual tradition of sharing her most resonant insight from that year. In 2019, she offered this ominous warning:
As a people and as a society coaxed along by both the active manipulations of today's technology and the false promises of modern society, we have become active participants in the mass degradation of our individual physical health and mental health. We actively, even proactively, shy away from alone time, quiet time, unplanned time, long walks, minute-long versions of slight boredom, and (most importantly, we now know) even our sleep. Soon we will have nothing left to give away of ourselves. We're like a collective mass Stockholm Syndrome case. After having been taken hostage not just once, or twice, or even three times, but over and over again like a kind of Russian doll collection of hostage victimization, one on top of another on top of a third, rather than subsequent takings and releases. First, it was modernity, then materialism, then consumerism, and finally, there we are right now, handcuffed in the back room of buy-ism, stuff-ism, have-ism, get-more-ism, do-more-ism, stay-connected-longer-ism. When will it occur to any of us that enough is enough especially now that we know we've been lab rats for Big Tech and the unassuming subjects of decades-long psychological lab experiment that has rendered us sick and tired and sleepless and divided and more angry and more depressed and more anxious then ever?
Allow me to be blunt — this quote blew my fucking mind. Why? Because THIS IS OLD SCHOOL TRUTH-TELLING — hard and raw and real. Popova's words are a hard-hitting, gut punch that instantly reminded me of Pink Floyd‘s brilliant and haunting 1979 music video for their hit song, Another Brick in the Wall. Both the quote and video scream about the dangers of willing conformity, but Popova's message cuts way deeper. Despite our reflexive temptation to applaud Popova for shining a sneering spotlight on Big Tech, her real target here is us — you and me, the victims, witting accomplices, and accessories to an unprecedented calamity taking shape right here, right now, before our very eyes.
The collective WE need to wake up FAST.
Parallel
If you've never seen the Pink Floyd video, or if it's been a while since you have, it's worth watching again. You can find it here. STEADY YOURSELVES.
In the video, hordes of glassy-eyed schoolchildren are transported through a dark, soulless factory on an industrial-sized conveyor belt — others walk willingly under their own power — where upon reaching the end of the line, they drop, one by one, into a massive, industrial meat grinder below while the song's chorus plays on…
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
Though I was just a kid when I saw it for the first time in the summer of 1981, the video's searing critique of conformity and institutional control jumped off the screen at me. What I didn't understand at the time was the context, the why of it. Today, that same video, along with Popova's scorching words, are an eerily prescient metaphor for our current relationship with technology.
Reality
Watching masses of entranced schoolchildren willingly walk off a plank to a certain death bears a striking resemblance to Popova's charge that we are all now active participants in the mass degradation of our individual physical health and mental health and, as such, that we have become like a collective mass stockholm syndrome case. Popova's stockholm metaphor isn't just clever wordplay. Stockholm syndrome is a paradoxical human response to captivity where hostages develop warm feelings for their captors. For them I get it — it's about SURVIVAL. So what the hell, I need to ask, is our excuse?
Everyday, as we mindlessly scroll through endless social media feeds, compulsively check for 'likes' and ♥️s, reflexively respond to hundreds of notifications — dings and clinks and claps all freaking day long — and willingly acquiesce to having our lives and work and play time constantly distracted and disrupted by calls and texts 24x7, all while obsessively curating our digital personas, we are actively separating ourselves from our humanity. But why are we doing this? By now, every last one of us knows that our attention has been purposely hijacked and manipulated for profit, power, and popularity. And yet, incredibly, shockingly, and despairingly, despite this, we still act like a herd of lemmings, mindlessly racing each other to the end of the plank. The sheer lunacy and abject absurdity of this self-destructive behavior defies comprehension. The chilling statistics below only serve to confirm our rapid devolution into a tech-addicted suicide cult, hellbent on our own annihilation.
-We check our phones, on average, 100 times a day
-We spend 50% of our waking life looking at a screen
-We sleep less hours than we ever have in recorded history
-Our attention span has shrunk to less than that of a goldfish
-We spend less time with our friends & family than ever before
-Anxiety, depression, drug addiction, and suicide rates are skyrocketing
Irony
Why, despite everything we know, do we continue to participate in this humanity-sized lab experiment? Why do we so freely capitulate to the well-known corrosions and cynical manipulations of Big Tech? Why are we still actively running away from everything that makes us human, practically begging to be assimilated into the Borg-like collective of buy-more, scroll-more, like-more madness?
This isn't some future sci-fi plot or Luddite fever dream; this is all happening right here, right now — an unprecedented, real-time tragedy unfolding before our eyes, streaming directly into the hollows of our minds where solitude and self-reflection once resided. Popova isn't just warning us, she's holding up a black mirror and forcing us to confront the ghosts of our former selves—those quaint creatures who once knew how to play, how to love, how to read, how to wander, how to be alone, how to be bored, and simply, how to be.
The scandalous irony of all this is palpably infuriating and deeply disconcerting. The time has come for us to wake up and face the truth. And the truth is that we're no different than those school-aged children in the video singing an activist chorus while being willingly hauled off to an industrial-sized, dystopian hellscape. Think about it — all the nonstop virtue signaling about mindfulness and meditation while our mental health deteriorates at record levels, tweeting day and night about the importance of real-world connections while ignoring the person sitting right next to us, arguing IRL about facts and truths that were knowingly and willingly twisted into lies by online trolls we refuse to ignore, and all the while, joking about our addiction to social media and mobile phones while knowingly succumbing to treatment no less or more humane than that of lab rats.
Yes, I'm angry. And I hope you are, too.
Even worse, every one of us knows that these technologies have been specifically designed to manipulate our deepest vulnerabilities by tapping into our deepest needs for connection, validation, and a sense of belonging. Like any skilled captor who promises and delivers on the things that matter to us now — instant gratification, endless entertainment, performative virtue signaling and status signaling — the tech gods have manipulated us into believing we need them to survive, even as life expectancy in the US falls for the first time in centuries.
Choice
Popova's words, like Pink Floyd's video, is as stark a warning as we're likely to get. WE EITHER WAKE UP OR WE ARE SCREWED! LIKE REALLY SCREWED! We don't have to wait until we're another brick in the wall or body on the conveyor belt. We certainly don't need to continue to willingly participate in service of our own demise. The clock is ticking. With every passing week, month, year we risk our essence being further and further consumed by the very technologies we once believed would connect us.
We still have a choice, but it demands vigilance, hard decisions, and immediate, collective action. If we fail to act soon, our humanity will be dissolved away into a sea of glassy-eyed, digital nothingness. And once that happens, we will have nothing left to give away of ourselves.
If this hasn't been enough to shake you awake and at least get you thinking, maybe these breathtaking words from author and cultural critic, Chuck Palahniuk, will do the trick ...
Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.