Our crisis is not loneliness but human beings becoming invisible

Nowadays if someone has a free moment, they have their phone to occupy their mind. I lived in a time before phones. What did we used to do with free moments? Sometimes we had reading material available. Sometimes we would day dream. Sometimes we would just think and introspect about ourselves. Sometimes we would carefully observe the world around us looking for anything interesting.

And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.

I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.

there are four key things that "obliged" people to meet in the local area:

1) organised religion

2) organised fun, ie drinking, sports, location based hobbies

3) organised politics (social clubs dressed up as poltical movements, or vicaversa but crucially meeting regularly to do activities together)

4) work

In the UK at least there has been a strong but steady shift away from 1 & 3, to the point where they just don't really exist at any critical mass for people under 60. work is now more remote, which mean less concentration of people

Combine that with digital means to form your own virtual groups, You have less and less ties to your local area.

sprinkle on top that parents are utterly horrified by the idea that children might be left to wander, means that meeting your best mate (because there they are on the same street and the same age) becomes digital only.

In the UK is has (almost) never been safer to walk about in public https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand... yet we are paralysed by fear that young people are going to be mugged, drunk, mixed up in drugs.

There is also a massive decline in funded social venues, as council budgets have been slashed.

So whilst tech could be blamed for this, I strongly suspect that its only making it more bearable. The UK at least needs systematic cultural change.

We replaced branch offices with call centers, then outsourced them to people we will never see and cannot relate to in a foreign land. Then we replaced them with chatbots and TTS, anything to reduce support times and save more money for those at the top.

We built out infrastructure that met our needs and revolutionized how we worked. We did this on-site, with glorious rooms of consoles and equipment that, while fragile, were also impressive to behold. Then leadership got on a treadmill of “also needs”, bolting on new kit of questionable value, outsourcing expensive jobs abroad or to contracting firms. As internal knowledge dried up, it became easier to embrace the perpetual bullshit machine demanding you adopt ERP as a medium-sized business, demanding you hoard data, demanding you surrender sovereignty to “the cloud”, to embrace per-second billing over amortization schedules. Fewer humans in the loop, knowing the business, understanding its needs. Just some guy at the top slapping their name over a Gartner or Big Three report before sending it to the board.

And now in this “age of AI”, the attack continues at record pace. Gone are the people who know and understand your code, replaced by chatbots who can only predict what they’ve already seen. Gone are the developers, the engineers, the architects, replaced with armies of temps and contractors who aren’t allowed to engage with the workers or incentivized to solve a problem, but merely meet arbitrary KPIs decided by algorithms they had no say over.

Robots are meting out punishments to gig workers, our devices spy on us to send data to companies hostile to our existence as consumers, with products designed to break but never be repaired, sold by stores online with no human interaction for questions or to identify flaws.

We have allowed a system to be built that does nothing to improve the daily lives of the average human anymore. These “innovations” do not drive meaningful growth in a majority of businesses. New technologies are little more than checkboxes to be met rather than profound improvements in processes or automation to enable leisure.

We let this happen. We can also choose - at any time we want - to stop.

  > *‘Instead, customers just point and say: “OK, yeah, just put it over there,” and then I drop off the stuff, and they just tap it. I think they see it as more of an – I think they see it as automation. They see you as just a system.’*

A transactional exchange is not the right place to look for meaningful human connection.

In fact, if I COULD hire robots instead of humans to do things like drive me places or deliver my groceries, I WOULD. Robots are predictable and reliable, a random human may or may not be.

how to ease this cognitive load ? I imagine that it is very tempting to accidentally dehumanize others in the pursuit of looking after one's own burdens

Its like a fog, slow, suffocating, hard to grasp, hard to agree on where it starts or ends. But we agree its there, and agree its a problem.

And yet, more integrated into society weren't they. Rich or poor, you had your social clubs, your church scene, your neighbourhood contacts. You had to, since you didn't have TV or internet.

You are monsters who mistake luxury for bliss, money for agency, and power for love.

I speak directly to the likes of Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, and all those who follow them. They are false prophets who deny us all our humanity. Monster is the perfect word for them.

Marxists have the theory of "alienation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation

They posit that people are alienated, estranged and invisible. "Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society" It's alienation that is the driving emotion behind people coming together (leading to things like socialism / communism).

Given that it's a core left wing idea, it's a bit strange to see only this applied to right wing populism. Possibly it's a signal of the authors own politics. Maybe the recent adoption of identity and group politics tends to keep people separated and increase alienation than towards a togetherness in a common shared struggle. Reducing alienation could lead to a weakening of certain political stances. Today's technology appears (falsely) to be apolitical, amoral and independent of the traditional things politics are about.

But its important to be fair, that was a tiny bit of the article and there's not much politics in this interesting piece which is really about technology and neither "Marx" nor "alienation" nor any old school theoretical background on the phenomena being observed is talked about.

So thinking about loneliness and alienation is really easy through the lenses of the hyperpositivity and the rise of narcissism. Suddenly these are all aspects of the focus on the individual and the "You can" ethos.

> too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being

It's really hard to feel seen when everybody only interacts with everybody else if it serves their own project of self improvement.

Liberal hyperindividualism understands human beings as atomized units that enter into transactional relationships only. (Collectivism commits the opposite error of atomism by dissolving the person into a tyrannical amorphous social soup, likewise rendering persons disposable, but for the "greater good of society" instead of the "greater good of the self".) But the problem is that human beings are social animals, and our humanity is realized and actualized in our relations with other persons. Atomism dehumanizes us.

This liberalism is what we sleepily embraced a couple of centuries ago in parts of the West, but the consequences of such choices can take decades if not centuries to fully materialize. So as liberalism has wound through the traditional social fabric and institutions of the world — like family and community life — it has, over time, eroded those institutions and brought the world more in line with what was always there in liberalism. The famous "neutrality" of liberalism is anything but, and this presumption of its neutrality and thus what's taken to be its obvious correctness is the source of its power to erode. When something enters into a disagreement with liberal postulates, then by definition, that something must give way to those liberal postulates. They quietly determine and police what is taken to be normal, and what's more, from this position of presumed neutrality, as contradictions emerge, it automatically "wins" and thus penetrates every more deeply into traditional institutions until those institutions have effectively withered away.

W.r.t. the first example given in the article, notice the delivery guy's desire for a personal connection with the person he's delivering to. What's that all about? Sure, in small towns where everyone knows everyone, we might know the mailman who's been making the same rounds for 30 years and he might know us, but in any polity of macroscopic size combined with the churn among delivery people and the residents moving in and out of neighborhoods, this is never going to happen. It's a weird expectation on those grounds alone. The world is too much in flux, too transitional.

Of course, some people may lack basic civility (the usual "hello, thank you, have a nice day", things I reflexively say when addressing those serving me in these kinds of jobs). What is the cause of this boorish lack of basic incivility? Either bad manners, or a lack of humanity on the person lacking them. But we're not talking about bad manners.

Boorish behavior and misplaced small village mentality aside, the reason it might bother the delivery person this much might just be that he lacks a social base himself and is looking for substitutes in all the wrong places. And that would make sense: why would this person be any different than the people he delivers to? The difference might be that people in relatively stable corporate jobs, for example, might find some kind of weak surrogate for social stability and community in their workplace.

Community needs a reason for its existence. There must be a reason for people to be together. A family has in this sense the strongest justified bonds of community, surviving all sorts of life events and changes. It is no mistake that it has been the basis for all the other forms of community we enter into, voluntary and intentional, or involuntary. That is why liberal hyperindividualism's final battle is with the family. It is the last remaining obstacle to the fully "liberated" atomic self. But liberalism's notions of what constitutes authentic freedom are flawed, and so we pursue with zeal our own misery. The answer to collectivist tyranny is not atomistic sterility.

PS: Please don't downvote, just because the idea of your lifes invisible infrastructure buckling makes you angry.