Doomscrolling and Cognitive Sovereignty

De-buffered selves and escaping algorithmic formation

Last week I looked at tech VC Marc Andreessen’s war on “introspection” and advocacy of the “flat self”. I suggested that while he’s wrong, or (perhaps more likely) being provocative, when he asserts that humans don’t really have inner lives at all, he's pointing at a real failure mode for contemporary cultural accounts of “the self”. “Hamletising”, or in other words neurotic introspection to the point of self-sabotage, really does seem to have become more prevalent in the twentieth century, even if its vivid depiction by Shakespeare suggests it wasn’t unknown before Freud purportedly (at least according to Andreessen) invented it.

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So this failure mode is real, and really has become more pronounced. I speculated that this is connected to our exit from the print era, for what Marshall McLuhan called “electric simultaneity”. The more tribal and emotivist affordances of newer communications media seem to make this kind of introspection both more intense, and less fruitful. But pointing to Freud, or psychedelics, is to mistake an effect for a cause.

I ended by wondering if the era of radio and TV was an interregnum, during which “electric simultaneity” was held in check by the one-to-many nature of broadcast TV and radio. If so, this interregnum came decisively to an end with the digital revolution, and we’re now somewhere fundamentally new in which almost every constraint on the re-tribalising power of electric media has dissolved.

I ended by pondering whether this is also dissolving what Charles Taylor called the “buffered self”: an account of inner life severed from everything and everyone that surrounds us. On this model, your “true self” is imagined as a core that pre-exists interaction with the world, which is conceived of as “outside” you and separated by an impermeable barrier.

I suggested that part of what formed and normalised this model of selfhood was widespread literacy. This is because literacy fosters an experience of separation between “inside” and “outside”, both by reproducing “voices” in your mind and also dividing knkowledge transmission (silent reading) from discussion. By contrast, as I have argued, digital reading brings these two experiences back together.

For example I’ll often find myself toggling between print reading and photographing an excerpt, texting it to a group chat and folding any responses back into my reflections as I continue reading. That expansive, dialogic mode of interacting with texts becomes even more frictionless when your “book” is also on the screen.

Of course the trade-off is a more interrupted and less deep-concentration reading experience, which means overall I get through fewer books. But one of its more consequential side-effects is a less “buffered” experience of inner life. I know not everyone has an inner monologue, but I definitely do, and it’s shaped by whatever I read. To the extent that my reading happens in dialogue, my inner voice becomes more like a multi-way conversation.

I’m beginning to see evidence that, for some, this has softened or even dissolved the previously robust-seeming separation of “inside” and “outside”. Anecdata: a well-known podcaster recently grumbled to me that he’d invited a critic onto his show, to discuss their disagreement, only for this person then to publish the invitation message and poll her own followers on how she ought to respond. The podcaster was incensed at this breach of what he viewed as basic interpersonal privacy. But I was intrigued at how, for his interlocutor, the separation between “inside” and “outside” seemed not to exist - or to work differently. Her online audience appeared to be continuous with, and an important element in, her inner life and process of deliberation.

I think this has a bearing on how, and why, someone like Andreessen could argue apparently sincerely that “the mind is flat”. If “my” process of deliberation happens as much in my mentions, on my newsfeed, and in my chat notifications (or perhaps also partially in dialogue with an AI interface) in what sense do I even have an “inside” that’s distinct from the “outside”?

But I don’t think anyone should jump so casually from the phenomenological experience of the “buffer” softening, to the notion that “self” therefore doesn’t exist. In particular, we might ask how and why it is that Andreessen’s instant decisions tend to produce profitable investments, while this is demonstrably not always the case for everyone who makes decisions seemingly on the spur of the moment?

For Andreessen just “moving forward” has made him rich. It’s probably more often the case, though, that people who live life via spur-of-the-moment decisions, without guilt or introspection, end up not with gazillions of dollars, but rather a string of broken relationships and perhaps some bad tattoos. Where does the difference lie, between the good version of unreflective action, and the self-destructive one? Is there anything we could say about what a “self” might be, or even (heaven forbid) any kind of mental formation we might undertake, that could direct more people toward the beneficial than the self-destructive kind of instincts? Or is it all just introspection, which is bad?

Anyone who pauses to think will realise that not all “instincts” are equally spontaneous, or equally good. Some, indeed, are better off carefully disciplined, while others may be just as carefully cultivated. An analogy might help clarify: imagine two friends walking along, one trained in judo, the other not. They both trip over the same tree root. The judo guy falls, rolls, and stands up uninjured. The other guy falls awkwardly, and fractures his wrist. What’s the difference? Training.

One guy has learned to fall without injury, to the point where it’s so automatic as to appear instinctive. Getting there was anything but instinctive - on the contrary, it took years of intentional effort - but now this guy can talk casually about how there’s no need to think. You just roll.