A positive account of human flourishing would clarify the costs and risks of dependence on digital technology; provide a convincing alternative to digital experiences; and point towards actual benefits that technological development could be aimed at.
A global digital infrastructure is well under way: digital ID, central bank digital currencies, pervasive optical surveillance, on-line censorship, social credit systems, 15-minute cities and so on. There is little doubt about what this infrastructure puts at risk, politically and socially. It is presented as enhancing safety, convenience and economic efficiency, but seems designed for totalitarian surveillance and social control. If events do not go well, then reading articles about digital tyranny would be at best pointless; at worst it would be a seditious, punishable thought-crime. It is difficult to see that as a world worth living in.
Events going well would mean political and personal freedoms are preserved, or even enhanced. Events going well is usually presented as popular knowledge of what is happening; political defence of what is at risk; and political and legal safeguards and improved technology. The desired outcome being less repressive economic and political arrangements. However, economic activity and political freedom are not the only things in life. An account is required of the damage done by digitisation to everyday psychological experience; and of positive alternatives that complement a resistance based in political in fear and outrage.
Degraded personal experience is politically useful.
Digital technology is very effective at hollowing out the quality of human life, both individually and communally. It's not hard to come up with examples:
Anyone with a content streaming service is familiar with the feeling of being daunted, bored and somehow diminished by the amount of material to choose between.
Some pre-teen girls have no escape from schoolyard harassment and ostracism, even at home, due to social media.
Limitless pornography alters the reward centres of the brain. Hook-up apps, catfish filters and cost-free pornography skew young people's expectations of sex and relationships; this, plausibly, undermines development of the skills of actually forming relationships.
New types of dysfunctional behaviours become possible: "Women on internet forums are constantly encouraging one another to escalate small or nonexistent misdeeds into existential relationship threats. It's incredibly toxic"; "women are being psychologically destroyed by social media & there's basically zero upside. It's their porn."
A more diffuse example is the replacement of music made on physical instruments with digitally produced music. Making music has been crucial throughout history for knitting together the social fabric. Digitally produced music has much less of the rich social meanings of music making on physical instruments.
This hollowing out suits those who profit from the manipulation of economies. Since the Enlightenment, the public narratives justifying western societies have been based in a humanistic account; roughly, that human lives are the ultimate source of value, and are the ultimate good the societies exist to advance and protect. These narratives are rather at odds with historical events, which suggest that the revealed value of actual human lives is low; and that an instrumental, utilitarian account of monetised human assets is closer to the actual animating principles. The more individual everyday experience is hollowed out, the easier it is for population to be reduced to masses, interchangeable, monetised and disposable. For example, Yuval Noah Hariri, asked what will useless eaters do without labour to structure their time:
"With all these useless people, I don't think we have an economic model. For that my best guess .. is that food will not be a problem. With that kind of technology you will be able to produce food to feed everybody. The problem is more boredom, and what to do with them. How will they find some sense of meaning in life, when they are basically meaningless, worthless? My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games."
The character of the current digital infrastructure reflects this attitude, although presented otherwise. However, much of the rhetoric opposed to digital tyranny is within the paradigm of oppositional politics: the political threat is located in oppressive external institutions and forces; political activity is designed to destroy these institutions and replace them with virtuous ones. This is to accept the paradigm of the digital infrastructure. A kinder, gentler global digital infrastructure would not address the digital hollowing out.
Technological change is not spontaneous and inevitable, and not morally neutral.
Most accounts of technological change present it as inevitable, as the only practical choice and say it should therefore be embraced without reserve. This entirely leaves out the morality implicit in the development of the technology. For example, social media was initially presented as morally-neutral places where people could post content and connect with others. In reality, it was designed, with careful psychological research, to capture data and guide attention.
Also, this is why human-digital interfaces are being pursued so vigorously: as science fiction has been wondering about for the last century, it would eventually erase all differences between biological and digital experiences. Human meaning is inseparable from human biology; that is, primate, mammal biology. Advocates for transhumanism say that once biology is replaced with technology, a new and distinctive morality will emerge. Again, this is presented as somehow inevitable and utopian, although there are obvious risks. For example, if a person is dependent on proprietary technology, what rights do they have to it? Would the real-world equivalent of Blade Runner's Tyrrell Corporation own the new and distinctive morality?
There are no convincing accounts of what is so deficient in human biology that it has to be replaced. Rather, everyday experience shows that ordinary human biology, as fallible as it is, is perfectly sufficient for people to lead meaningful lives.
Non-digital human flourishing will be useful whether things go well or not, which is just as well. Most people will have no influence on how the global digital infrastructure develops, or the legal and political structures around it. They will just have to make the best of the conditions they find themselves in, as they always have. It makes sense to focus on making the most of what agency is possible, and how digital technology undermines this.
The language of non digital human flourishing needs to develop.
There is nothing mysterious about non-digital human flourishing: it is anything that enables living more fully, with more agency, in the evolved bodies and minds we have, in a digitally-controlled environment. For example, there is no shortage of science-fiction in which beleaguered protagonists struggle in a technocratic dystopia. Roughly, everything these protagonists do to maintain a life worth living are the same activities with which people have pursued meaningful lives throughout history. It is explicitly based in its biological foundations and in long established practices. A positive account of it would clarify the costs and risks of dependence on digital technology, provide a convincing alternative to digital experiences, and point towards actual benefits that technological development could be aimed at.
It would be good to have a concise descriptive term, as the language around human virtues in a digital environment has yet to evolve. None of the current terms is exactly right: "The offline world" is like journalistic jargon, and analogue (rather than digital) sounds like a technology issue; "the material world" and "the physical world" sound like geology or physics; "evolutionary biology space" and "the biological world" is like natural history; "the world of living and dying" sounds something like Buddhism; "Meat space" is reductive and slightly revolting; and "real life" and "human life" are vague and not descriptive.
A useful term would include the relevant aspects of all of these, but focus on the material, biological and psychological basis of non-digital human flourishing. It might also be useful to have neologisms for entities such as "a digital experience that is worse than a real-world experience it replaces"; "the crushing of an illusion of a fulfilling on-line life by real-world poverty.", "the final, total replacement of a biological or real world option by a commercially-owned technological option", and so on. The last century of science fiction could well be a source of these situations and ideas.
Working against the negative effects of the digital infrastructure would benefit from being as psychologically sophisticated as the creators of social media. Knowing that other approaches have been proven to work provides a stronger basis for resisting digital social control. An independent person with agency in their own lives is a much stronger refutation of the "useless eater" characterisation than someone dependent on digital technology and state services.
Practical approaches.
It is difficult to make practical suggestions that are appropriate to everyone: suggesting someone gets more exercise, spends more time outside and more time with people they care about sounds rather lame. However, there are a few approaches that act as a place to start:
Notice the thinness of digital experiences, and the richness of real world experiences.
For all their power and convenience, digital experiences do not engage all aspects of the human animal. They are thin or hollow in comparison with real world experiences. This is why the traditional sources are more meaningful; for example, watching sports on TV rather than being at the match, or listening to a symphony on headphones compared to being next to the orchestra; or conversations on Zoom. A place to start is to pay attention to prosaic activities that are psychologically richer than their digital equivalents. For example, why is reading paper books nicer than an e-reader?
Be clear about the damage done by, and the hidden costs of, digital experiences
Digital infrastructure is sold as convenience, but there are plenty of hidden costs: surveillance and collection of personal data; use of surveillance data for social control, general or targeted; edging out of physical world options; centralised control of functions essential to modern life. Being able to express these costs and risks succinctly makes it easier to avoid them, and convince other people.
Replace passive entertainments with more active, cognitively challenging pursuits.
Passive technology-based entertainments are cognitively cheap but ultimately unfulfilling. An analogy is with drugs that give a fantasy of an interesting life, but no actual meaningful experiences to look back on. More demanding activities are harder but provide actual meaningful life. For example, it might be a challenge to knit booties for someone else's baby, but is guaranteed to be more meaningful and memorable than the same time watching TV dramas. Jordan Peterson's most convincing position was (roughly) that modern life was hollowed out by consumerism and neoliberal politics; and that anyone could be re-moralise their own life with character and virtue, and by pursuing fulfilment and achievement over pleasure and status.
Keep alive the experience of individual and social life outside of digital control.
Currently there are people who can remember a world without the internet, who are in a good position to see what is being lost. This will be different for subsequent generations. It will only take a couple of decades until there is no-one alive who can remember life before the internet. It is experience to hang onto. For example, old novels, old films give a vicarious experience of a world not controlled by technology. It is worth developing and passing on the skills and wisdom of a life not controlled by technology.
Human flourishing in a digital world is a big subject, although it is more important to focus on actual practices than to compose a magnificent conceptual structure. In previous times, it might have been worth suggesting a university department for studying it. However, scholars and institutions have little defence against control by larger interests. The infrastructure for decentralised dissemination of information exists, so it probably makes sense to look to individuals, Youtubers, citizen journalists, civic activists and small media entrepreneurs rather than institutions to generate wisdom in this area.
It is hard to imagine a future world without a pervasive digital infrastructure. Perhaps a utopian aspiration would be for everyone to be able to participate fully in the power and convenience of the digital world, and also to have a life completely outside of it.
Human Flourishing in a Digital World.
The thought that I hang onto is that running the internet takes a LOT of energy.
Net zero will never sustain a pervasive digital infrastructure. So it's either one or the other.