Spelunking for Meaning
Back in May, I switched roles at my company. My previous team had been reorganized, and I was graciously offered an open position on a different team in business development. The initial transition was a little awkward as I was the only one starting at that time. We typically hire small groups of employees for sales roles. The first few weeks were ok, but then at the beginning of November I just hit a wall. I was miserable. And I couldn’t quite figure out why.
As someone who’s usually pretty pleased with their life, this struck me as odd. Why was I so upset with the transition? It wasn’t money (I had gotten a raise with the new position). It wasn’t the job itself (I actually liked the day-to-day). It wasn’t the people (my manager and team were great). Then it finally dawned on me.
For the first time in my career, I was alone.
Not alone in the sense that I wasn’t working around people. I had been working from home since March 16th like many others had. But I was alone in a temporal sense. I started by myself, so there was no connection to others and no shared path that I was walking. The feeling of disconnection was foreign, challenging, and uncomfortable.
Paul Graham wrote one of more interesting essays that I’ve read in some time called “The Refragmentation”. In the essay, Graham describes various forms of “fragmentations” that Western society has undergone in the past few decades. They include temporal, social, and economic. I’m going to focus on the temporal ones and their impact on our society.
Here’s a quick tl;dr of the essay:
At the start of the 20th century, society was far more united. The World Wars only helped unite us more. Following the wars, we had large corporations like Ford, GM, GE, IBM, etc. that most people worked for and the work day was largely the same. We were all on the same “clock” so to speak. Television was offered through a handful of major networks. Programming was largely the same. We were united in our beliefs, our work, and our leisure.
In the 21st century, that’s all gone to shit. We’re divided economically, politically, and temporally. Economic inequality runs rampant. Political polarization has accelerated since the end of the Cold War and the advent of social media. TV is on demand and the options for entertainment are endless. We’re lonelier than ever.
Time as our Guide
The invention of text put us in time. We knew that days turned into nights, but without text, there was no way of actually recording it and inserting ourselves as participants within this nebulous concept.
Text gave us accountability. We could write down what happened, what will happen, and what may happen. Media scholar Douglas Rushkoff asserts that accountability from text paved the way for religion based on accountability — a convenant, a contract with God. It helped spread religion beyond tribal enclaves. It gave us the idea of a messiah and a future. Calendars gave us a past, present, and future. We got progress. We got laws. We got the Sabbath.
The next leap forward came with the clock. We were in time, and now we could measure it. Clocks gave us structure and the ability to measure our day. They also gave us the concept of efficiency, and doing more in less. Interest-bearing currency was introduced and forever changed how wealth was accumulated. And most important of all, as we began to measure time, we gave it value. Our current time-is-money, efficiency-based system would not exist without the clock.
Digital time and media have changed all of that.
We no longer move through time in a linear fashion. Life used to be like a novel. It followed familiar linear arc of storytelling that we’re so used to seeing in various media forms.
With the advent of digital media, life plays more like a video game than a movie. We progress through each day following choice after choice; distraction to distraction, rather than a steady march forward.
We can see our new life reflected in our taste for media. Movie output has really taken a dive in recent decades. You either have Disney-backed megaprojects or Oscar-bait. There’s not really any middle ground any more. And motion picture comedies are toast.
Contrast this with TV shows. We are in the richest age of televised programming ever. The old model of Cable TV is now dead — the entertainment structure can’t compete.
Every month, streaming services release another incredibly deep, intricate, and intelligent program. Each of these programs plays out like a fantasy role-playing game — complex storylines and multiple character arcs marching towards one conclusion make for a deeper experience.
Linear History Disintegrates
Where we find meaning in the media we consume has profound cultural implications.
Think back 20 years ago.
Cable and satellite television were in full swing, but the programming still aired at the same time. Choice was beginning to become more varied, but temporal constraints were still the primary governance mechanism. The national newspaper or magazine that you had a subscription to said something about you. Were you a Wall Street Journal person? Did you get the New York Times and the New Yorker? Cosmopolitan? Vanity Fair? Vogue?
These media sources connected you to others in the same temporal space. Each publication relied on quality content to keep its revenue base strong. If they explored global issues, the coverage was nuanced and insightful, and the exclusive articles written by top-notch journalists were what sold you on being a subscriber.
With digital media, that all changed.
The unified narrative disappeared. History was no longer linear. Journalism in the attention economy became a constant feedback loop of confirmation bias for readers. Everything became shallow and political. Quality yielded to attention-grabbing headlines with shallow analysis. The pace of content accelerated tremendously, because rather than a steady, linear march on a path, the blinders got torn off and everyone went running wild in a digital meadow.
This is the battle being fought between old media and new media on the digital battleground: linear group order versus random individual chaos.
On one hand, old media was beneficial for us. It provided a sustainable pace of content. It provided us time for pause and reflection. There was a proper system of information governance. We all knew what was happening in the world thanks to regular news subscriptions. A steady feed of similar information united us during our linear journey through time.
Old media wasn’t foolproof, though. The elites who controlled the media still controlled the narrative. We did have a lot more trust in the media back then, but each publication still had an owner and board of directors who guided its overarching narrative. Small town newspapers were slowly absorbed into largely corporate machines, erasing many critical stories that now never get told. The need for egalitarianism with our media, coincided with the spread of the internet, gave rise to digital media.
The elites who controlled old media didn’t want to yield control. It’s not as if this hasn’t happened before. After the printing press was released, the old guard’s sentiment was best captured by the following:
“every man thinks what he lists, speaks what he thinks, writes what he speaks, and prints what he writes…carried on by a kind of frantick Figgary.”
The above quote was in relation to the spread of newspapers in the — as historian Dror Wahrman terms it — “Print 2.0” era of the late 17th and 18th centuries. The newspapers and magazines that made our current old media elites so influential were in their early forms at this stage, rapidly gaining popularity. 1990 was peak newspaper.
We’re seeing Print 3.0 now.
The New Marketplace
Legislation around free speech and the First Amendment was built around a more controlled, linear access to information. The concept of a “marketplace of ideas” emerged from Enlightenment thinkers like John Milton or John Stuart Mill. The premise was that, in a public marketplace of ideas, the truth would emerge from competing ideas.
This was all well and good back in the 19th century, because Milton and Mill did not create this concept when the internet was present. As Nabitha Syed explores in her excellent essay on fake news and platform governance, the marketplace theory for ideas doesn’t hold ground anymore. How content is filtered, the bottom-up nature of content production, the mechanisms which amplify content, the speed at which content can spread, and profit motives of platforms hosting content all contribute to throwing off the balance that was so critical to the marketplace of ideas axiom.
The egalitarianism of the internet is both its greatest strength and weakness. It’s great that rank amateurs like me can publish their thoughts online and share them for the whole world to see. It’s also quite problematic that I can publish unfiltered, unedited essays and throw them out into the void on platforms like Medium to give them a sense of legitimacy.
Even actual publications with paid writers and editors are guilty of this. Look at what happened to Gawker Media. The attention-based business model of digital media encourages this behavior. As a result we have a deluge of mostly shallow content sent out into the world.
But here’s where things get interesting.
The combination of our aimless journey through time and shallow media present during that journey gradually pushed us to seek out meaning in the world due to temporal fragmentation. We had already been growing increasingly polarized as a society. The economic and political seeds had already been sewn.
Spelunking for Meaning
In the pre-social media days of Web 2.0 (starting in around 2002), we started to see a rise in the popularity of online forums. These communities were built around niche interests. They ranged in everything from bodybuilding to video games to relationships. Some websites were based around one interest while others, like 4chan, were platforms that offered countless discussion topics. These online forums gave roost for the first internet subcultures.
When social media came along, it allowed these subcultures to proliferate. The architecture of the internet was fundamentally changed forever. As Louise Druhle explains in her fantastic project, “the Atlas of the Internet”, the old architecture of internet was more evenly distributed and far smoother. But today, the internet is a perilous place full of a few wide, deep chasms that we often find ourselves stuck in.
The key concept here is depth. With a lack of deep content being produced by the Old media to orient us in real life, we went searching for depth and meaning online. Social media gave internet subcultures a place to proliferate and spread at incredible rates, and the final defining feature was that internet architecture became user based. As Druhle states:
“There are as many Internet architectures as there are users.”
Let that sink in for a second.
My experience on the internet is entirely unique to me, as yours is to you. When I open up Google and search for something or when I browse social media, I’m going to get a different view — a different frame of reference for the world — than you.
Every click, every like, and every action that we take on the internet is another brick in the wall of our own personal internet architecture. The image above is a generic representation, but every user will have their own internet relativity model. Think back to that incredible scene in Inception when the world started to change around Dom and Ariadne. That’s what happens to internet architecture every time you discover a new YouTube channel, subreddit, or influencer on social media.
Back to subcultures and depth.
Our desire for meaning and direction combined with shallow media content drove us to seek out internet subcultures. As Aaron Lewis points out, these internet subcultures “are building grand narratives and meme worlds that help people feel their way through the chaos that’s currently unfolding. These stories cut deep, down to the most foundational questions of race and religion and destiny. We shouldn’t be too surprised that complex conspiracy theories, intergenerational trauma, and age-old religious fervor are coming to the fore — in a contest of narrative memes, deep history is a serious competitive advantage”.
Subcultures, and memes produced as artefacts of them, provide us with far more meaning than traditional media now.
Think about your media diet.
How do you start your day?
You likely wake up, open your phone, and open up Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or LinkedIn. Or, if you’re a masochist, you check your work email.
Your custom internet architecture feeds you the content that comforts you. It’s interesting because you have self-selected for content that you want to read. It’s comforting in the sense that it reaffirms your beliefs and values system. It’s reassuring because it reminds you that there are others out there who think like you. It helps you navigate the world from the very moment you wake up. Everyone’s experience is similar in patterns, but the devil is in the details.
As the rest of your day unfolds, you likely spend about 3 hours on your phone. Because of how tailored each of our experiences in digital media is, that’s about 3 hours of engagement each day with our preferred framework for navigating the world. Our experience with the internet today can be better compared to spelunking than it can to surfing. People wander their unique field of digital chasms. Spelunking for meaning provides us the comfort we need in life, as temporal fragmentation has isolated us.
The Language Framework
Language and epistemology play a key role in our depth of experience on the Internet and how subcultures take shape. Part of what makes internet subcultures so deep is the vernacular formed within each. Surf around Reddit and you’ll encounter a staggering depth of acronyms, glossaries, and worldviews throughout an endless number of subreddits. Whether you’re interested in a particular video game, knitting, or an obscure genre of writing, there’s a community for you. And part of the initiation process is learning the language and customs of that tribe.
David Foster Wallace warned us of television’s adoption of irony back in 1994. The proliferation of ironic and satirical tones in our culture, particularly in the form of memes, is also a symptom of how lost people feel in the current temporal landscape. Even the rules of the English language have changed to reflect how unserious people want to appear, because reasons. Millennials and Gen Z’ers often layer on irony and absurdism as a form of speech coding to signal belonging to various online communities. Meming gives people meaning.
If stereotypical Millennials on the internet use irony and new language rules to identify as a rebellious underclass, then the use of advanced, clear language is a sign of one’s elite status. Gillian Tett surmised that in America, people become elite by mastering language marked as elite. Academics, journalists, executives, and politicians all share one trait: they have mastered the art of communication. And the enterprises these individuals all belong to — media, government, and higher education — all attempt to exercise control over epistemology.
In North America, we abhor control. We value independence and authenticity above all else. Just like countercultures of the past, most internet subcultures have been borne out of the resistance. These subcultures associate with the values of being anti-elite, regardless of their home on the political spectrum.
Many modern conservative voters unite on the values that they dislike politically correct/liberal rhetoric, elites patronizing them due to their perceived stupidity, and their feeling of alienation as an underclass.
Many liberal voters dislike the persecution they feel from big government or corporations, and feel that they’re under threat from Neo Nazis. The ongoing Antifa/ProudBoys conflict is an example of these subcultures emerging from cyberspace into real world skirmishes.
Other subcultures could revolve around similar values but place their unity closer to issues surrounding race (white supremacists), relationships (incels), or government conspiracy (InfoWars).
Whatever your subculture of choice, complete adoption of language and belief systems are required for survival. Some subcultures are deeper than others — influenced by the number of users, the amount of lore associated with that subculture, and that subculture’s distance from the center of political spectrum (in other words, how wacky they are). The deeper the subculture, the harsher the penalties for expulsion.
For example, let’s say that you identified more with liberal values in your 20s, but gradually shifted towards adopting some conservative values in your 30s. Your social media feed would shift from Occupy Democrats, Being Liberal, and The Other 98% to more FoxNews, National Review, or The DailyWire.
It wouldn’t negatively impact you that much in the grand scheme of things. Political affiliations are not particularly deep subcultures, but the chasms are quite wide due to their reach. Your views on the world would gradually shift, but you could still hold a conversation with most people, and family gatherings wouldn’t be any less painful or awkward than they already are.
Now let’s contrast that with a different experience.
Let’s say that you believe in a few conspiracy theories related to fear of large organizations. Let’s say you’re an anti-vaxxer, you think Bill Gates is trying to control the world’s population, and you believe the QAnon child abduction canon to be true.
Conspiracy theories like this would appear narrow but deep on a 3D map. The net is smaller, but once you’re caught, it’s very difficult to escape. As part of your descent into the chasm, you’ve likely alienated friends and family who do not share your very specific, very peculiar views. There is an entire subreddit dedicated to people who have had their relationship with a partner or their family ruined by QAnon.
Once ensnared, the only real connection you feel is with those who share your views. Everyone else is viewed as unenlightened — a “normie, an NPC (non-player character), or “blue pill”.
Our desire for belonging and meaning, triggered by our temporal fragmentation and general lack of direction, has landed us in a bizarre place. Aaron Lewis describes it as a “Garden of Forking Memes”, inspired by the short story The Garden of Forking Paths. The current state of digital media is best reflected by the following passage from the story:
“Each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pen, he chooses — simultaneously — all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork”.
Essentially, digital media has afforded us infinite histories and worldviews, and that number continues to multiply as the architecture of the internet continues to be user-constructed. Our culture has become constructed from the bottom up, not from the top-down as before. As a result, we have become more disconnected from reality and each other than ever before — whether you believe in conspiracy theories or not.
Connections
Participation in organized religion and overall civic engagement has steadily declined since the last quarter of the 20th century. Robert Putnam made that abundantly clear. Society has shifted to reflect a more individualist value system. These two factors are not unrelated. People have largely replaced religion built on groups with individualist dogma that promotes a self-centered view of the world. We are social animals, so the need for community and group belonging holds strong.
Organized religion used to provide a sense of community, and that has been replaced by internet subcultures. While religious groups are centered around a geographic membership base, internet subcultures are decoupled from land and community. There’s no direct physical connection to the world in which its members all live. And most importantly, when your community is online, there’s a distinct lack of accountability.
Wendell Berry warned of our disconnection from the land in 1977.
“The modern specialist and/or industrialist in his modern house can probably have no very clear sense of where he is. His sense of his whereabouts is abstract: he is in a certain “line” as signified by his profession, in a certain “bracket” as signified by his income, and in a certain crowd as signified by his house and his amusements. Where he is matters only in proportion to the number of other people’s effects he has to put up with. Geography is defined for him by his house, his office, his commuting route, and the interiors of shopping centers, restaurants, and places of amusement — which is to say that his geography is artificial; he could be anywhere, and he usually is.”
This was the state of America before the advent of digital time or media. If Berry thought we were disconnected then, I can only imagine his opinion of society today.
The Industrial Revolution was our the beginning of our disconnection from the land and an economy based around agriculture. The Digital Revolution was the beginning of our disconnection from time. And COVID has introduced a new wrinkle into the fabric: a disconnection from place.
As described in the above passage from Berry, or geography was defined by our home, our office, and our leisure time. The concept of place — first, second, and third places, specifically— puts a framework around how we interact with the world in our daily routine. That’s mostly gone now thanks to COVID.
For many of us, first (home) and second (work) place are the same, and third place has largely disappeared. This has further accelerated the disconnect we’re feeling from society and the communities in which we live. We spend more time online now than ever before. Compound that with the mental impacts of having to live through the weirdest part of history that almost any of us have ever experienced, and you can imagine how messed up this might make our lives.
So what can be done?
A few weeks ago, I noticed that my negative feeling towards work all but disappeared. It was because we had started group-based training and development sessions. The feeling of connection was the key. I was with others on a shared journey. We were temporally aligned, and that makes a huge difference for one’s mental well-being. My all-time low level of temporal connection with the world was repaired, but I, just like many of you, still have a long way to go.
Human connection, geographic connection, and of course temporal connection are key components that many of us were missing before COVID hit. The pandemic made people hyper-aware of this fact. Look at migration patterns in North America: major cities are hemorrhaging middle class citizens. People are fleeing to cities that are more affordable or choosing to live in small towns — either path motivated by quality of life and affordability.
One paradox that we are starting to see is that thanks to dematerialization, people living in one community may be working in another. I recall a conversation I had with an executive of a small insurance company based in a small Ohio town. He’s struggling to attract talent to the company.
Young, single people still want the big city experience and big city job. Couples want the small town life to raise a family, but they can also keep their big city jobs should they move. In other words, while the small Ohio town itself isn’t struggling to attract people, the company remains in a talent war. Companies have become decoupled from the cities and towns where their offices are located.
Ron Davison hypothesized that as part of the Fourth Economy, the title of dominant institution would be passed from the corporation to the individual. The entrepreneur would supplant the CEO as the dominant player. We are seeing that transition rapidly take place in the white collar world, as employees, not corporations, are now gaining more power than ever before.
This power shift holds promise for the future. As Paul Graham concluded in The Refragmentation, economic fragmentation is here to stay. We need major policy reform if that is to be undone. But in terms of autonomy, the power is very much in our hands. Rockefeller once claimed individualism is dead. He didn’t live long enough to see how wrong he was.
Our move to a dematerialized, digital workplace will require us to regain connections we have lost. Socially, more of us can choose to live in places where we can be free to interact with each other and not be stuck commuting. Temporally, we need to make an active effort to reconnect with each other and the land instead of restricting our activities to digital chasms. It’s time to get out of the chasms and into the meadow. A real one. Perhaps with a dog.
