Jason Kehe
People have never been better, here in the Year of Our Simulation 2024, at hating the very forces underlying that simulation—at hating, in other words, digital technology itself. And good for them. These everywhere-active tech critics don’t just rely, for their on-trend position-taking, on vague, nostalgist, technophobic feelings anymore. Now they have research papers to back them up. They have bestsellers by the likes of Harari and Haidt. They have—picture their smugness—statistics. The kids, I don’t know if you’ve heard, are killing themselves by the classroomful.
None of this bothers me. Well, teen suicide obviously does, it's horrible, but it’s not hard to debunk arguments blaming technology. What is hard to debunk, and what does bother me, is the one exception, in my estimation, to this rule: the anti-tech argument offered by the modern-day philosopher.
By philosopher, I don’t mean some stats-spouting writer of glorified self-help. I mean a deepest-level, ridiculously learned overanalyzer, someone who breaks down problems into their relevant bits so that, when those bits are put back together, nothing looks quite the same. Descartes didn’t just blurt out “I think, therefore I am” off the top of his head. He had to go as far into his head as he humanly could, stripping away everything else, before he could arrive at his classic one-liner. (Plus God. People always seem to forget that Descartes, inventor of the so-called rational mind, couldn’t strip away God.)
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