We Know…

Not the phones. Not the platforms. Not China. Not capitalism. Us…

We Know…

There is a thing in the room with us that we are not naming. It has been in the room the entire time we have been having this conversation. It is in the room every time the conversation gets had, in print, in person, at dinner tables, in late night phone calls between old friends who actually still talk on the phone. We circle it. We talk around it. We blame founders and platforms and algorithms and the Russians and the Chinese and the algorithm again. We will say almost anything to avoid saying the thing in the room.

The thing in the room is that we know.

Everyone knows. The mother who hands the iPad to her toddler at the restaurant knows. The teenager who has done the private math on her own anxiety against her own scroll time knows. The executive at the platform company who sends his own kids to the screen free Waldorf school knows. The founder who limits his own children’s exposure to the product he is selling to everyone else’s children knows. The senator who reads the briefings and then takes the meeting with the lobbyist knows. The user who deletes the app on Sunday night and reinstalls it Monday morning knows. I know. You know. The person reading this on the device that is the subject of this writing knows.

We know.

And we cannot stop.

That is the visceral fact that every piece of analysis we produce has been carefully organized around not naming. We can write essay after essay about the founders, the markets, the dissolution of meaning, the collapse of constraint, the deep history of the autonomous self, the five centuries of intellectual development that delivered us to this hour. The analysis is real. The analysis is even useful. But the analysis is also a hiding place. As long as we are explaining how it happened, we do not have to admit what is happening right now, in our hand, in our body, in the precise present tense of this sentence.

What is happening right now is that we are choosing it. Continuously. Knowingly. With our eyes open. The phone is not being held to our heads. The app is not being installed against our will. The platform is not coercing us. We are not victims of these technologies in the way an exploited factory worker is a victim of a boss. We are something stranger and more troubling. We are coauthors of our own undoing, and the coauthorship feels good, and the feeling good is part of what makes the undoing possible.

That is the thing we will not say out loud.

We like it.

We like the dopamine. We like the dissolution. We like not having to be present with our spouses at dinner. We like not having to face the boredom of a checkout line. We like not having to think a thought all the way through. We like not having to feel a feeling all the way down. We like the curated reality. We like the version of ourselves we get to perform. We like the constant low grade hum of stimulation that drowns out the question of what our life is actually for. The hum is the point. The hum is what we are paying for. The hum is what we cannot give up.

The body knows this. The body has been telling us. The body knows what it feels like when the phone dies. The body knows what silence sounds like in a forest with no signal. The body knows the strange peace of a power outage. The body remembers, even now, even after twenty years of training to forget, what it was to be present in a room with another human being and nothing else. The body has been screaming all along. We have been very good at not listening.

The reason we cannot listen is that listening would require something we have spent our whole adult lives being trained to refuse. It would require admitting there is something we want, something we genuinely need, that we cannot get for ourselves. We need someone to take it away from us. We need a constraint we did not choose. We need an outside authority strong enough to refuse our consent. We need exactly the thing the entire intellectual project of the last five hundred years has taught us to call oppression. We need it visibly and viscerally. And we cannot say so, because the saying would unmake the version of ourselves we have agreed to be.

So instead we produce more analysis. We write articles like this one. We are even capable of writing them with the help of the very technology under indictment, in dialogue with a machine that is itself the next chapter of the thing we are describing, and the machine helps us see clearly, and the clarity is real, and the clarity is also a trap, because the clarity does not produce the stopping. We see and we keep going. We diagnose and we keep going. We grieve and we keep going. We tell each other the truth in private and we are back on the feed in the morning. The knowing has been completely severed from the doing. That severing is what dying looks like when you are still walking around in it.

The eyes are the part I think we should sit with. We meet each other’s eyes. The parent at the restaurant glances at another parent who has also handed the iPad over. They see each other. They both know. Neither says anything. The executive who limits her own children’s screen time meets the eyes of another executive at the same dinner who does the same. They both know. Neither says anything. The user who is on hour three of a scroll she did not intend to start meets her own eyes in the dark mirror of the phone when the screen briefly goes black between videos. She sees herself. She knows. She does not stop. She keeps scrolling. The face in the mirror vanishes and the next video begins.

This is the thing. The mutual recognition that does not become refusal. The shared knowledge that does not become solidarity. The seeing without the stopping. The collective awareness of harm at civilizational scale that has not produced even a serious attempt at collective response. That is what we are not naming. That is the visceral profound thing in the room with all of us. We are all looking at each other. We all know what we are looking at. And nobody is calling it.

Why we are not calling it is the question that should occupy whatever is left of our remaining attention. I think it is because calling it would force the next move, and the next move would require admitting that we do not actually believe in the framework we have been operating in for the entirety of our lives as moderns. Calling it would mean saying out loud that the autonomous sovereign self, the chooser, the consumer, the citizen as preference holder, the version of being human we have spent five hundred years constructing and another two hundred years celebrating, has run its experiment and the experiment has produced this. A species that knows it is killing itself and likes the killing too much to stop.

That is not a sentence anyone wants to say. So we do not say it. We say everything around it. We say it is the founders. We say it is the algorithms. We say it is capitalism. We say it is China. We say it is the Russians. We say it is regulation, or the lack of regulation, or the wrong kind of regulation. We say things that are partly true and that conveniently leave us inside the framework that makes the saying of the actual thing impossible.

The actual thing is that we are doing this to ourselves, we know we are doing it, we like doing it, we cannot stop, and we are watching each other not stop and pretending we do not see what we are watching.

That is what is in the room.

That is what no one is saying.

We know.