All The World Is a Digital Playground

If you’ve been feeling there’s no place for you, you may not be wrong.

Photo credit: John B. Arnold

I’ve been taking ferry rides recently, one of the last free or low-cost services provided in Manhattan, before winter’s biting winds close in. The East River fascinates me. It’s not a river at all, but a drowned valley carved out by a massive glacier that pushed eastward 11,000 years ago. It’s also a watery grave for hundreds of cars, washing machines, murder weapons, and, yes, Mob hits.

The air on the river is pure dog-breath. You feel it against your face as the ferry goes chugging along. It makes glorious mischief with your hair. The city looms, slightly menacing, from the shoreline, but you are a thing apart. On the ferry, you are observing the city from the outside in. It’s also observing you.

Lately, it seems, a lot of people over the age of fifty feel as though they’re observing the world from the outside in. This world no longer has a place for them. Career prospects that were dwindling before the pandemic are now being wholly outsourced to India, AI, or younger generations. Creative scenes in most major cities are a copy of a copy of a copy, in ever-increasing degrees of faintness. A new generation is rising through the ranks, fueled by the kind of hunger, aggression, and tech-savvy most of us just can’t muster anymore.

These young people are always on their way somewhere, thumbs hovering over their cellphone screens, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. They halt on the sidewalk in front of you, scrolling. They miss their subway stops, scrolling. Yesterday on the 14D, a woman who was transfixed by an Instagram post stopped at the door of the city bus, preventing my boyfriend from exiting. He locked eyes with another passenger over fifty who recognized his frustration and said, “Yes, I know.”

Photo credit: Stacey Eskelin

The East River ferry dumps out at Pier 11. Once past the carnival-colored ice cream kiosks, it is pure Edward Hopper, a canvas of picturesque American desolation. You are lost in a maze of spectral-eyed skyscrapers with cathedral-sized lobbies that go silent after five p.m. The streets are mostly empty; nothing rids them of the stink of money.

For an introvert like me, it’s a relief to find myself alone in a city where I’m normally fighting for sidewalk space. I wander. I marvel. Every two or three blocks, I pass an under-thirty finance bro hurrying to meet his Tinder date, eyes glued to the screen in his hand. There’s one world out here for us and another world, a virtual one, in there for them. I see the bright rectangle of his social media feed reflected in his glasses, and it sends a chill up my spine.

We fifty-plussers don’t belong to that virtual world. Not really. We were the second-to-last generation to enjoy an analog youth, even if we did have to adapt to digital adulthood. An argument could be made that we are all addicted to those tiny screens, regardless of age, but probably not everybody, and probably not to the same degree.

This addiction to screens—social media in particular—has not only shaped the character of Gen Z (12- to 27- year olds), it has compelled them to perform their lives for an invisible audience. Social media is the architect of their souls; the body, in particular the female body, its territory of struggle and contention. Their worth in their own eyes and the eyes of others is reduced to likes, views, comments, and ad sponsors eager to capitalize on multiplatform documentaries of these young lives.

Managing your identity as a brand forces you to see yourself in the third-person. It’s pure dissociation. No longer are you an “I.” You are a she, a he, an it, a them, a they. Every gender reveal baby shower, every wedding, every disappointing date or amusing kitchen mishap becomes something to share with your followers online. Not only do you perform your life, you anxiously compare it to the millions of other lives that are being simultaneously performed for you.

We scan our phones for evidence that we exist in the eyes of others. We present ourselves as lifestyle vloggers, comedians, social media influencers. We absorb the virtual messaging—“You, too, can enjoy ‘hot girl summer’ with this juice cleanse.” “You’re never too young for Botox.” “Drop out of school and become a beauty influencer”—because the “realness” of the people we see makes their messaging seem less like an ad and more like a helpful suggestion from a friend.

Never mind that this messaging is coming at us at a speed we are cognitively unable to handle. TikTok, Instagram, all social media apps, it’s ten seconds of this, ten seconds of that, as we drag our eyes and our brains from one video to the next, hoovering it in. When you’re a young person whose critical thinking faculties are not yet fully developed, nearly every message is some version of the same thing: You are not good enough, and here’s what you need to do, or buy, or be in order to fix it.

Unless you’re part of that culture, it’s hard to comprehend how powerful that network is—or how toxic.

To be clear, I am not criticizing Zoomers for their addiction to virtual reality. They are victims, not protagonists. I am merely sounding the alarm for those of us who doggedly choose to live in this reality. We have no idea what’s going on or the degree to which it is reshaping the world we live in.

Photo credit: John B. Arnold

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Writers are shameless eavesdroppers. It’s how we craft dialogue. I am a writer; therefore, I eavesdrop. The other night at Delancy and Essex, I turned my ears to a conversation between two twenty-something women walking ahead of me. One was complaining to the other about a modeling assignment she’d done at Washington Square Park.

“The fashion designer kept telling me about her cheating husband,” she said. “Like, who cares? What made her think she could put her trauma on me?”

“Totally,” the second woman said. “How dare she put her trauma on you.”

Now, you might be thinking, what on earth are they talking about? Since when does some poor heartbroken woman complaining about her cheating husband constitute “trauma” for the listener? Well, log on to TikTok or Instagram, and you will find at least 10,000 microbloggers deconstructing “toxic people” and how even listening to them can keep you from living your best life. It’s the energy, you see. Negative energy is bad for you. It’s something you can opt into or out of depending on how “other people’s trauma” averse you are.

We have an entire generation—more than one—turning to Instagram, TikTok, and other social media apps to learn who they are, how they compare to everyone else, and what to think about the world. That’s alarming for a thousand reasons, but foremost among them is just how addicted young people are to their phones.

The cycle of addiction works like this:

1.     We experience an uncomfortable feeling, however slight, such as boredom, loneliness, or the desperation of being forced to sit in one place because we’re at our jobs or school, and our livelihood depends on it.

2.     We are consciously or even just dimly aware of this uncomfortable feeling, and we want to get rid of it.

3.     We do what we can to block the uncomfortable feeling. This can take many forms: drugs, alcohol, mindless consumption of television. Ceaseless scrolling through news apps (my poison), social media apps, dating apps, or games. Altruistic activity, such as volunteering or doing charity work, as noble as it is, can sometimes be a socially acceptable way to distract ourselves from our own discomfort.

No one can tell us these things. We have to discover them for ourselves, and it’s not always comfortable, and we’re not always willing. We naked apes are good at exactly two things: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. What are the chances we will come to terms with our own levels of discomfort in order to break an addiction we won’t even acknowledge is there?

The very algorithms that social media companies use to keep our eyes on their platforms are proprietary. Due to the bravery of whistleblowers, we know those algorithms are configured to be as addictive as possible. So is fast food, another byproduct of our profit-before-people economy. McDonald’s fries are, by design, the ultimate trifecta of salt, sugar, and fat. It’s called the “bliss point,” and it took millions of dollars to perfect.

Never mind that fast food is wreaking havoc with people’s health and waistlines. Even if such products came with a warning label, most people don’t think they’re addicted—just as they wrongly believe advertising has no effect on them and their smartphones aren’t upending their lives.

So, the question you might be asking yourself at this point is, how do we save them? How do we make the world “right” again?

That ship, my friends, has sailed.

Photo credit: Stacey Eskelin

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There are many reasons why people over the age of fifty are feeling marginalized. The merging of the virtual world with the real world is only one of them, but it’s both pervasive and invisible. What we’re seeing in real time is a coup of social engineering and the rise of technofeudalism. Even our old capitalist economic system is being strip-mined by technofeudalism, and we are its unwitting slaves.

In this new social- and economic- paradigm, manufacturing is now the least effective way to make money. Like Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, we must own the virtual real estate (i.e., server farms) where products are offered to consumers. Bezos makes only a few dollars per transaction—a few from the seller and a few from the buyer—but clearly those dollars add up because he’s one of the richest men in the world.

Under technofeudalism, we don’t need to own the means of production, which is outsourced to countries like China; instead, we own the virtual bazaar. Think: Amazon, Airbnb, Spotify, Pornhub, Uber, Apple, Tindr, Meta, YouTube, Google, Etsy. We do the hard work of providing them with free content—videos, memes, posts, selfies, pornos. They do the less-hard work of selling our personal data to third parties who use it to create psychological profiles on each of us. This information determines what ads we see—you know, those ads you are in no way influenced by.

And if this isn’t the Matrix, I don’t know what is. We aren’t interacting with what’s “out there.” We’re interacting with the world on our phones, a reality that is customized to each viewer. That’s reality now, not the slow, dull, laborious world of human interaction that aren’t performed in front of an audience.

Photo credit: Stacey Eskelin

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When I’m on the ferry, I don’t only watch the shoreline, I watch the people. Many of the younger ones are on their phones. Even with the sights all around us—a massive bridge, a barnacle-covered trawler, the swirling eddies of gray-green water—there they are, scroll-scroll-scrolling away. It’s not their fault that they’re addicted, but it is our problem. We don’t know the long-term effects of cellphone use. We don’t know the long-term effects of amassing enormous wealth in the hands of a very few technofeudalists, except that millions of people will inevitably suffer.

I do find myself wondering how we’ll suffer. Smartphones are the modern equivalent of bread and circuses. We are, as the late great sociologist Neil Postman called it, “amusing ourselves to death.” It might take something dramatic, like a widespread attack of foreign- or domestic- terrorism to blow up the grid and break the spell, but who knows? Perhaps the human animal is its most contented under the thrall of something bigger than itself, whether a despot or a god. Perhaps the whole point is to give up and not fight it anymore.

I don’t think we will fight. I don’t say this cynically, but because I have spent my entire life trying to understand myself and others. Tech has hacked us. It has hacked our brains and our needs, then cyber-optically connected us to the means of satisfying those needs.

That’s a hard thing to leave behind, especially when we’ve created friend communities online, when reaching for that phone makes us feel a little less troubled and alone. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be that dramatic, that either/or. But addictions are just that: addictions. They are as individual as a fingerprint.

It’s the soft chains that are the most difficult to break, especially the chains you don’t even see.

Copyright © 2024 Stacey Eskelin