In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1996, on the publication of his novel Infinite Jest, the late writer David Foster Wallace voiced some ideas about technology that seem increasingly prescient with every year that passes.
He began by talking about television, which was one of the major subjects of his work, representing as it did a nexus of many of its central themes: technology, addiction, pleasure, loneliness and the all-consuming presence of corporations in contemporary American life.
Wallace, who struggled with substance abuse throughout his life, often spoke of television as his original addiction.
(Infinite Jest, which itself seems to be increasing in relevance, partly centres around a piece of film, known as “the Entertainment”, that is so endlessly compelling that its viewers forego all human contact and bodily sustenance in order to never stop watching it. They eventually die of starvation and neglect.)
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Television was powerfully seductive, he said, because it answered some basic human social needs – for company, for entertainment, for stimulation, for talk – without requiring anything of the viewer in return.
There was none of the risk, none of the potential for unpleasantness or awkwardness or pain, inherent in human relationships. This was why it was so seductive, and also why it led, after long periods of watching, to feelings of profound emptiness.
And then, unprompted, he began to talk about the internet, a technology which in 1996 was still in a prelapsarian state of dial-up innocence – no social media, no YouTube, no Google even – but with whose darker potentials Wallace had long been preoccupied.
“The technology,” he said, “is just gonna get better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.”
Alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but who want our money. It would be hard to identify a darker premonition of our own time or a more unsettlingly accurate one.
The average American has fewer than three friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, like 15 friends
— Mark Zuckerberg
I thought of Wallace last week, and of this remark in particular, when I heard Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta is investing tens of billions of US dollars in developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology, speaking on a podcast about his vision for the near future.
Having touched on the way people will use AI for internet search, and for information processing tasks, he addresses what seems likely to be the primary use for the technology in Meta’s case, given the company’s foundation in monetising human interactions and its recent movement toward more passive content-consumption.
“I think as the personalisation loop kicks in, and the AI gets to know you better and better, I think that will be really compelling,” he said. “There’s this stat that I always think is crazy, which is that the average American has fewer than three friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, like 15 friends.”
The reality, he said, is that people don’t feel the kind of connection to the world that they would like, and they are more alone than they would like. The implication here – and the implication of all that investment in AI – is that this technology, with its personalisation loops and its improving ability to pass for a human intelligence, will answer that need.
It barely needs to be pointed out here that Zuckerberg – who does not love you, and who wants your money – is as responsible as anyone on earth for the increased atomisation of technologically advanced western societies, for the swelling tide of loneliness and isolation he himself invokes.
(I’m guessing that America is, if not exactly a special case, an outlier in terms of the friendship statistics he’s talking about. We Irish – and Europeans more generally – are by no means immune to these trends, but I think it’s fair to say we have a healthier social environment than work-obsessed Americans.)
That Zuckerberg is now addressing himself to that problem and that the solution he is proposing is, in effect, chatbots – well, it’s like a tobacco company addressing the problem of smoking-related illness and death by suggesting that people smoke more.
Idea that a cure for these ills might be found in technology designed to replace the need for other humans is troubling, absurd
Like almost everyone I know, I use Zuckerberg’s products. I haven’t used Facebook in years – has anyone? – but I do use Instagram. One aspect that’s become unignorable about the experience of using Instagram in recent years is that though you probably joined it to see photos of your friends, and to interact with them, that’s not really what it’s for any more.
Instagram, largely in response to the transformative success of TikTok, has become a place where you consume content, most importantly advertising. You can still interact with your friends there, of course, but you are almost certainly doing it less and less, as their posts – to the extent that your friends are even still posting – are overwhelmed by influencer content, personally targeted advertisements and random AI slop.
It has become a place, in other words, where you are alone with images on a screen. It has become a more addictive, and generally more toxic, form of television. It has become “the Entertainment”.
It is inarguably true that the internet and social media have – along with all the other baleful and related effects like the erosion of social trust, the cultivation of conspiracy theories, the growth of political extremism – made people more lonely and isolated.
The idea that a cure for these ills might be found in an even more sophisticated technology, one designed to replace the need for other humans, is as troubling as it is absurd.
Machine lovers, machine therapists, machine friends. The cure is the disease itself. It’s a solution that can only lead to a deeper emptiness, and to a lonelier and less human world.
