One of my favourite albums is Damien Jurado’s The Horizon Just Laughed. On the track Percy Faith he sings:
I am writing from the future, where the people never look you in the eye, and there is no need to talk… I know everything and yet no one at all
Well the future is here. The atomisation enabled by the smartphone, accelerated by the pandemic’s normalisation of distance and suspicion, has left our social fabric in tatters.
We can see it in worsening cinema and theatre etiquette. People being filmed in public without their consent, because someone’s TikTok matters more than another human being’s privacy; and the simple act of being on public transport together. Basic consideration for each other is in decline.
So, I’m writing this partly in the hope I’ll ruminate on it less; partly in the hope that things won’t slide further; and, yes, the hope that there’s a small chance we could nurse whatever’s left back to a healthier state.
This decline has become so undeniable that even Sean Duffy – ex-Fox Business host, diehard Trump supporter, now US Transportation Secretary – called out “a degradation of civility” ahead of the Thanksgiving travel rush. It’s an instance of breathtaking irony that a man whose past employers include Donald Trump and Fox Corporation is now pleading for more civility. But that doesn’t make him wrong.
The smartphone is the unspoken driver of this degradation. The personalised vehicle for every element of modern mass media; the enabler of a simultaneous ‘opting out’ of the collective commons with the ability to connect to anyone, anywhere, on one’s own terms.
It creates wholly different dynamics to, say, a carriageful of people all reading the newspaper. The smartphone is all absorbing, with the ability to intrude on the auditory commons with, well, anything. It is a device that’s atomising by design: everyone cycling between different apps, with different information surfaced depending on our preferences. The hardware and software looks the same, but there is little common ground in what’s being served up.
Is this feeling of unease, this invisible layer coated over visible decline, ultimately what Trump and Farage tap into so well? Is it what Starmer tried to capture with his well intentioned, but poorly framed, Rose Garden speech about the “deep rot in the heart of a structure”? Because things, after all, are not getting better.
Populists like Trump and Farage instinctively tap into this unease, proposing simplistic and ultimately dangerous solutions. But while the degradation of infrastructure like town centres and civil institutions is obvious; the degradation of our ‘ways of being’ in public is not. It’s not a coincidence that the past they promise to return us to is the pre-smartphone age.
So, can anything be done? After all, individual behaviour changes can’t solve the systemic problems: the attention economy, turbocharged individualism and the collapse of third spaces. Atomisation is a symptom of and accelerant of decline. But, on the individual level, what seem like fairly unremarkable acts in isolation start feeling like an act of rebellion when pieced together.
Not always having your phone on the table, not always wearing headphones in the supermarket (made harder by the Uber Eats alerts blasting from shop terminals) or public transport (made harder by the aforementioned auditory intrusions; and the deregulation of buses disincentivising fleet renewal) and – brace yourself – making small talk with strangers on a regular basis.
I don’t think this would feel like rebelling for, say, my nan and her generation. But, together, it feels akin to rebellion to me. After all, it’s no fun to just exist, rather than live, together. Milan Kundera – a man who raged against media ‘imagologists’ that “create systems… that people are supposed unthinkingly to follow” – would contest that ‘living’ isn’t even the answer. Might ‘being’ be the way through instead? The final words go to him:
Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
Thumbnail photo by Robin Worrall on Unsplash