The Brooklyn Rail

The world is waiting for a definitive treatise on the effects of the cellphone on humans: that anxiety-causing, generation-destroying thing. Small reminders pop up, like how our pinkies are morphing through sustained phone use, or how decimated our attention spans have become when we try to, say, read. But the meaty truth of an online life, including warped cognition, ubiquitous disinformation, and an increasingly polarized country, might take years to understand.

Christine Rosen is the latest to seek to figure it out. The Extinction of Experience, her manifesto rife with warnings and scorn, demonstrates that technology is in our lives, but eschews from providing worthwhile treatments for our cultural condition. The book is full of complaints vis-à-vis “kids these days”; passages see Rosen irritated at phone-gazers in public, whether waiting in line or taking pictures of a rainbow. Her alarmist messaging—“Extinction is not inevitable. It is a choice,”—seems unwarranted and makes one feel parented, instead of informed.

Rosen’s seriousness can, of course, be a benefit; there’s no point in writing a book whose ideas you don’t wholly believe. But her theories often skew unrealistic, or, in the worst cases, like a Black Mirror episode. Rosen brings up SmileScan, a facial recognition software Rosen says has been adopted in Japan which analyzes workers’ faces before they clock in to ensure authentic grins. As Facebook integrates similar tech, she hypothesizes, “it is likely that we will soon be able to buy apps that will scan and ‘read’ a friend’s face so that we can know immediately if she is happy or sad, truthful or deceitful,” disregarding the invasive and humiliating process that SmileScan is already used for (in fact, she laments it’s not a human’s job).

Often, she’s quick to blame smartphones when more obvious answers await. Sarai Sierra was a hiker bludgeoned in Istanbul by a man high on paint thinner, and Rosen writes, “her friends and family were left … wondering if the technologies Sierra relied on to enhance her travel experience had fostered a mindset—a false sense of security—that might have inured her to the risks that face a woman traveling alone,” when most would agree the culprit was the man high on paint thinner, not a phone.

All of this leads to an authoritarian and doomed outlook. “We need to be more like the Amish in our approach to technology,” she declares, “cultivating a robust skepticism about each new device and app.” Questions we should ask include: “How will this impact our community? Is it good for families? Does it support or undermine our values?” It’s Instagram, not legislature.

Rosen probably isn’t the best candidate to analyze all this. Her quips are usually parental Facebook fodder (“Where we are doesn’t really matter unless we’re posting a vacation selfie to Instagram #tulumsunset #blessed”), and observes that “everyone from Rihanna to the Pope uses real-time social media,” which would have been interesting had it been written twelve years ago. Young people, she laments, are now spending their lives in “limitless space online,” rather than in their physical environment. “It matters less if you’re from rural Oklahoma or the swampy environs of southern Florida if you spend most of your time seeing, hearing, and speaking to these people through a screen,” she writes, without pausing to consider why a young teen might prefer the internet over one of the increasingly unsafe states she listed.

The Extinction of Experience’s retread of “perils” is surprising; as a columnist for Commentary, a right-wing magazine, Rosen’s gripes are much more timely. She complains about First Lady Jill Biden using the “Dr.” honorific (she is a Doctor of Education), says that pro-Palestinian protests are actually the ones calling for genocide, and raises an eyebrow at Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascent within the Democratic party this summer, donning a conspiracy theorist’s tone: “Were deals struck to protect the Biden family if Joe were to endorse Kamala?” She’s funny, whether she means to be or not—CBS News is a “Maoist DEI regime” for their handling of a Ta-Nehisi Coates interview in October; the media care more about Harris’s favorite snack (Doritos) than her plan for Israel (that one’s valid).

These are bold, plucky essays, and I disagree with all of them. But they are interesting to read, since one’s mind traverses unfamiliar terrain—what you know might be wrong. Since most agree the internet has negative consequences, Experience is ultimately a flat read.

Novelty’s absence means Rosen can wax poetic about Society, 2024 (The Dystopia Edition):

Now that travel is so rigorously well-documented, the bar is set quite high for calling something an adventure. Wandering around Tibet for months hoping for a glimpse of a snow leopard is too tame. To be a real adventurer, you must be the first American tween to kayak the Amazon or the first octogenarian librarian to summit K2 and you have to document the experience in real time on social media … Our relentless documentation leads us to a world where selfies at Machu Picchu are as ubiquitous on Instagram as McDonald’s is on American highway exits.

This might raise the counterargument: maybe to you. I, and many of the other people who read this book (and books in general), likely have a grasp on how much leeway we allow tech. I don’t let social media impose regulations on the way I vacation; I let it show me videos of cats. Then I turn it off.

If this is naive, consider the rigor at which Rosen demonstrates her point: that you are the problem and you need to look up from whatever screen you’re reading this on. “We often don’t notice [mainstream] technologies replace functions performed by a human being,” she writes, as if we have no preference chatting with a representative or robot. She says “common courtesy, patience, [and] eye contact are deteriorating,” like a wise elder. And “these new rituals of emotional expression clearly serve a social function,” she says of the “like” button, “but do they make us feel more connected to one another?”

For all of the dangers the phone presents, there’s no extrapolation. While she briefly notes that “a growing distrust of human judgment will further polarize our culture and politics,” she offers no discussion of the genuinely broken reality swirling around President-elect Trump’s punishing dismissal of the media in 2016. We can no longer agree on the truth, and that is very bad. Rosen says that January 6 signifies “confusion and mistrust about everyday experience” and that QAnon is an “outlier,” but that’s not true anymore. Fascist maniacs are very loud, very angry, and they hold public office. One will be our president next year. Rosen’s scope is limited, and she doesn’t touch on this again. The problem is you, not the Nazi next door.

Rosen does touch on some good anti-tech anecdotes that certainly feel slimy. You truly won’t get a feel of a vacation locale if you let Google Maps algorithms guide you; Netflix has been testing new “second screen” content, meaning shows to ignore while scrolling; sex and art depreciate when their digital counterparts (porn and, well, pictures of art) proliferate; Soylent is weird; it’s probably not a good idea to never be bored. An app called pplkpr (“people keeper”) boasts about removing stressful friends via heart-rate monitoring; it “determine[s] who should be auto-scheduled into your life and who should be removed,” which is so evil it borders on unsubtle satire.

But you can just delete an app, put your phone in your pocket, rendering most of the book’s arguments pointless. I don’t need to be told that technology can’t replace human connection. I’m a living, breathing person who has already figured that out myself.