Delight Springs

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Delete your accounts?

 Today in CoPhi, we read of James on habit. Here's an old post...and one from Maria Popova concluding with James's encouraging words for anxious students:

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation...

I'm not sure how many of us can honestly claim to "keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day," but anyway maybe that was always a bit of preening Victorian overstatement. The odd hour of slacking shouldn't permanently sabotage anyone's quest for eventual and enlightened grown-up competence. Do your homework and show up, that's at least 90% of success in most endeavors. A little time out for recreation and renewal isn't "slacking," it's r&r. It's a moral holiday, when you "let the world wag in its own way"-not that any of us could ever entirely wag the world our own way.

In Environmental Ethics we get a timely reminder from KSR's Ministry: "Simply talking was the strongest social media of all..." That's what I was talking about yesterday, what Jaron Lanier was talking about Sunday. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now he says "what might once have been called advertizing must now be understood as continuous behavior modification" that's stripping us of free will and turning us into trained dogs, lab rats, robots... 

I like dogs and I like the idea of robots, but am even more partial to the idea of retaining our humanity. When that's irretrievably gone there'll be for us "no civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth."  That sounds not far removed from our present state of dysfunction, on this day of the anticipated announcement of another dreary Trump campaign. 

"The more important question now is whether anyone's criticism will matter." So long as we think we might still possess a modicum of free will, we have to think it can. Well, if we really are free we don't have to. But it would be defeatist and fatalistic to think otherwise. 

Will I delete my accounts? Not yet. Thinking about it. Maybe there's an algorithm to help me decide. Maybe I'll take a moral holiday and see which way the robot dog's mechanical tail wags.


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