This is Part 1 of a subscriber-only preview of my upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. We will release the first six chapters through the end of the year.
David Bowie: I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.
BBC: It’s just a tool though, isn’t it?
Bowie: No, it’s not. No, it’s an alien lifeform.David Bowie, from a 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight
David Bowie was right.
On the surface, Bowie’s internet prediction doesn't seem all that impressive. His famous BBC interview took place in 1999, when Bowie was an entrepreneur promoting his own internet service provider. BowieNet. The world was mere months away from being pitched on internet shopping for squeak toys by a sock puppet dog during the Super Bowl. Stockbrokers around the country were buying vacation houses with commissions from every doctor, dentist and lawyer looking to join the Dotcom mania. When we watched late ‘90s David Bowie predict that the internet would be big, we weren’t exactly watching Ziggy Stardust prophesying Tim Berners-Lee's hypertext project at CERN from a green room in Nagoya in 1973.
Still, in a moment when our imagination about the internet was dominated by prospective commercial applications, Bowie saw something that most people missed. Where others saw a tool, he saw an alien. Bowie called this alien ‘the internet,’ but that is only because he lacked a better term. The alien force he described was one that would transform the relationship between those who transmitted ideas and symbols and art, and those who received and consumed and interpreted them. Bowie’s alien was not the internet after all. It was social networking.
In this context there is a certain peril to use of the term alien, since the probability that David Bowie might mean literal aliens is always low but never zero. Thankfully, he goes on to present the entirely terrestrial argument that social networks would not simply extend, improve, or modify the communication of human ideas and invention through present media. Instead, social networks would transform how human ideas and invention were communicated into an entirely new and unfamiliar thing with unpredictable consequences. Something we could never truly understand until we saw it.
Many technologies seem alien to us at first, of course. No one steps on an airplane for the first time and says to himself, ‘This is just like riding in a horse-drawn wagon - but faster!’ No 16th century soldier responded to his first volley of musket fire by remarking to his fellow over the din, ‘This reminds me of arrows, except they travel rather more quickly and deliver killing blows with greater emphasis on penetration and traumatic impact than on severing and cutting.’ On some dimensions the more prosaic descriptions might be technically accurate. That is, they were still describable in continuous terms with their technological predecessors. We would talk about a musket ball in many of the same terms we would use to talk about an arrow. But in our subjective experience, these technologies would have represented a difference in kind and not in magnitude.
The alienness of social networks is a different kind of different. I will argue in this book that it has only three analogs in human history: the emergence of symbolic communication, spoken language, and written language. These developments are not only alien because they are unfamiliar; they are alien because they are alienating. They create distance between the versions of ourselves that existed before and after them. When humanity adopts a new mode of transforming thought into language, it changes something fundamental about what it means to be human. It changes how we tell and understand stories. It changes how we think. It changes how much of our thought is truly our own.
The basic idea is intuitive. When we are with our friends around a campfire with more than a little wine or whisky, we tell and understand stories in a particular way. When we are at a desk and writing an essay for public consumption, or a document for our employer, or even a friendly email, we tell and understand stories in another way. When we are drafting a post to one social media platform or another, we tell and understand stories in yet another way entirely.
And yet, the alien is not the medium through which we communicate as individuals. The alien is the modality through which we communicate as a species. When we all start telling stories by writing them down, and when we know that everyone else is doing the same, we cannot be the oral storyteller and storyseeker we were before. I don’t just mean in the way you or I might change our tone when we tell a tipsy story at the campfire from the tone of a professional email to our boss. I mean that a change in the dominant modality of human communication necessarily changes the very structure and source of the thoughts that lead to any communication. When that changes, it cannot help but to also affect thinking that never escapes our lips, hands, pens, or keyboards. Once humanity knows writing, it doesn’t abandon the spoken word. But it can never structure its thoughts or behave the way it did before, even when telling a story aloud. Once you are part of a writing society, you can never again think as someone who only knows the spoken word. Once you are part of a networked society, you can never again think as someone who only knows the written word.
In writing about the adoption of written language in Orality and Literacy, the late Jesuit priest and philosopher Walter Ong described this as ‘restructuring human consciousness[i]’. Relative to a prevailing oral tradition, writing orients thought toward planning more complex ideas. Writing isn’t required to babysit an audience’s fleeting short-term memories, so it can be less redundant. Writing fixes in place what certain ideas and traditions mean. It shifts the source of cultural and intellectual authority. Importantly, writing also creates a source of memory outside of our brains. With writing, we don’t have to go through the process of thinking clearly or remembering faithfully every time we want to refer to an idea. This, the most powerful and alienating feature of each such transformation in human consciousness, is the engine for the steady march toward the externalization of human consciousness.
Consciousness is a complicated and controversial term. It is also vulnerable to all manner of transcendental woo. So let me be as precise as it is possible to be about a topic that resists precision. When I use the term consciousness, I mean an emergent property of the individual human brain which represents the continuous synthesis of sensory inputs, memories, our capacity for abstract thought, and our subjective perception of our own identity and experiences to arrive at working theories about what we think to determine what we will do. In simpler terms, let us define consciousness as how our brains put together what we see, what we can imagine, what we remember, who we are, and how we feel to create an inner voice that tells a continuously changing story about our life and our world. Whether or not the self or mind itself emerges from this continuous synthesis, or is a thing which coexists with it, or is something entirely outside of it is a perfectly valid thing to consider. It just isn’t what this book will consider. What I mean by consciousness is simply the inner voice from which we derive the will to think, speak, and act.
When I say that these language modalities bring about the externalization of human consciousness, I mean that we take part of that inner voice and replace it with an outer voice. That is, we replace some of the stories our brain creates with the stories that other people tell us. This book is about how these stories change when humanity moves from symbols to speech to writing to networks, and about how they remain the same. This book is also about how deeply we abstract those stories, how discretely or continuously we tell them, to whom we can tell and from whom we may hear them, and their duration and accessibility. Most importantly, this book is about how social networks are creating a stable modality of deeply abstracted, continuous, omnidirectional, mass-distributed, infinitely accessible, and irresistibly human stories that live forever in an ever-present outer voice.
For much of human history, man would have contended with losing the knowledge of these stories with every generation. There was nowhere to write them and no efficient mechanism to share them. The evolutionary imperative to more quickly seek out and process the symbols from which those stories are constructed would have been intense. This book, then, must also be about how the evolution of the anatomically modern human brain makes us not only willing but eager to make that outer voice a more significant part of every decision, every calculation, every act of cognition, and every act of identity we undertake. It must also be about how human symbols, languages, and story have themselves evolved even more rapidly to suit the way the human brain learns and grows at various stages of our lives.
Even if stories were not so innately attractive to us, human society has engineered a trojan horse for this encroaching outer voice. We are told that the chief feature of social networking is its capacity to transform our inner voice into a louder, more influential voice that will become a helpful outer voice to others. I am convinced and will seek to convince you in this book that the opposite is true. The dominant feature of social networking is its transformation of an unrelenting outer voice into what we are hard-wired to perceive as a part of our inner voice. The result is that over time, ‘part of our inner voice’ is precisely what that outer voice becomes. Abstractions designed by others become things we are perfectly sure that we knew and believed all along. We imagine that they were our idea in the first place. It makes the process of thinking so much simpler. So much more efficient. So much less our own.
Social networks do not merely externalize consciousness. They outsource consciousness.
I recognize this is a departure from the usual book about social networks. This is not a story about how cool a billion dollars is and a million dollars isn’t. This is not a story about the democratization of content and influence, about how anyone with a webcam, an idea and a sense of the zeitgeist might contribute a verse to the powerful play. This is not a story about how connecting billions of human brains and creating infinitely accessible memory for their ideas might kick off a transhumanist revolution.
This is not a story about the engineering of a dopamine economy or the growing mistrust in news media. This is not a story about cancel culture. It is not a story about conspiracy theories, misinformation or the propaganda campaigns that masqueraded as collective action against that misinformation. It is not about the fragmentation of society, or the destruction of any imperative for in-person human interaction, or a pandemic of loneliness and alienation, or widespread depression among teenage girls, or algorithms serving up harmful content to minors, or state-sponsored spying on foreign nationals through a short-form video-sharing app. It is not about how most western societies needed less than a decade to branch into two completely different realities with two sets of incompatible facts.
Or else it is about all those things at once, I suppose. The story of the outsourcing of consciousness is the story of the upheaval of 70 millennia of the public square, about an alien force changing how we spoke, wrote, and communicated. How we formed ideas, attached ourselves to ideas, internalized the meaning of ideas, and acted based on those judgments. The story of the outsourcing of consciousness is about our relationships with words, ideas, and stories themselves. Therefore, it must be about loneliness and innovation, about alienation and connection, about unity and fragmentation.
It is not possible to tell you that all the goods or ills so often attributed to social networks are the result of this outsourcing of consciousness in any remotely scientific way. It is possible, however, to argue that there is a very logical causal path between the demonstrable features of this modality and practically every one of the stories about what social networks are ‘doing to us’ as a species. It is also possible to consider what individual human brains can do to recapture some of that autonomy of mind. Reshoring consciousness, if you will.
To do this we must explore several topics. We must understand how our brains evolved, how language emerged, and how stories organized themselves into patterns of their own. We must understand the distinctions between the evolutionary impulse to encode our consciousness into the stories we tell and to decode ideas from the stories we hear. We must understand how to distinguish between cognitive universals, locally powerful cultural stories, and culturally inert recurring narrative elements. We must understand what it is about symbolizing, speaking, writing, and networking that have the capacity to alter human consciousness in the first place. If we are to do all of this, then we should begin where any true story about storytelling must: dick jokes and Hamlet.
Continue with Part 2 here.
[i] Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Methuen.
