We May Be In a Neurological Mismatch with Our Tech-Driven World

January 29, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Everyday on the news I hear stories about the disproportionately negative impact that some event, disease, or change in the weather has had on a particular group.

It’s social media’s disproportionate harming of teenage girls. How Covid-19 is more lethal for men in their 80’s than women. That communities of color bear more of the consequences of climate change, of poor health care or of having fewer engaged police.

I often have the radio on when I’m working, and these kinds of “slicing and dicing of injuries” are a fairly regular drumbeat, whatever “news outlet” I happen to be listening to.

Reporting like this almost always strikes me as “likely to be true”—but only up to a point. With some stories, it depends on the initial data the storyteller has consulted. For example, if you set out to prove that one group is more oppressed than another, you start your inquiry with data from the supposedly oppressed group. But I find myself asking more and more: what if the storyteller started out with broader data sets?

Is the real story that the coronovirus or climate change or disengaged police are more lethal to (pick your victims by age, race or gender) or that all of these harms impact poor people far more negatively than rich people, or people who live in rural communities more than in urban communities, or Albanians more than, say, Americans?

Other times, the class of sufferers has to do with whether there is enough data in the first place. Do more teenage girls (than say, boys) suffer from social media’s consequences, or does the singular focus on girls have more to do with it being easier for researchers to pin-point the onset of puberty (that first period) in girls than its onset in boys, and therefore a more precise way to measure the time-frame of suffering?

Given these variables, why insist upon picking out a select-few to be victims when, in truth, there are (as often as not) many more sufferers who are likely to be out there?

So when I’m listening to a news reporter or researcher or non-resident expert tell me about a new harm and exactly who’s suffering its consequences, I often talk back to the radio saying: Really? What about all these people, or those? Aren’t they negatively impacted too?

That’s what happened when I was listening to Matt Richtel being interviewed on Fresh Air recently. But given the extraordinary care he took in explaining how teenage girls are disproportionately suffering from mental distress, illness and suicidal ideation given the daily assaults on their still-developing brains, it seemed pretty clear that he didn’t have a political agenda behind his reporting. And while credentials are rarely dispositive they still make a difference to me. (Richtel is not only a long-time reporter for the New York Times on its technology and health beat, he has also won a Pulitizer Prize for some of that reporting.) Hearing him I also liked the way he chose his words and put himself behind them, so I was inclined to believe in what he was saying. Maybe he wasn’t trying to exclude teenage boys, or, for that matter, the rest of us from the scope of his reported concerns.

But throughout that lengthy interview—and in others of his that I’ve listened to since or in his other stories on this topic—I kept coming back to the broader impacts that seemed likely: So maybe teenage girls are more negatively impacted “by how things are today” than others (who are neither girls nor teenagers), but to some fairly significant extent, isn’t ALMOST EVERYBODY in the U.S (and certainly in other places too) suffering from at least some of the same mental distress, illness and suicidal ideation as the fairly circumscribed group of victims that you’ve examined?

In other words, while Richtel has clearly found a story in this subset of “more susceptible” young girls, isn’t there a bigger and more profound story that he’s not telling (and almost no one is telling) about how living today, amidst the assault of (let’s call it) “modern life,” damages almost all of us because none of our brains are wired to withstand the bombardments we’re confronting today?

_{Taking a day off from it all, in an alternate reality}.

This is where I should probably account for my own storytelling biases.

It’s January after all, the middle of winter here in Philly, grey on many days, chilly to cold on nearly all of them, and Spring’s bees and flowers are more than two months off.

I’ve also been “under the weather” for longer than I’d like with one of the bad bugs going around, from damage to the real estate here from all the freezing and thawing, and because Wally (the dog)’s been ailing from his own stubborn maladies, so maybe I’m more inclined than usual to see my world’s clouds than their rosier lining.

But at the same time, it also seems true that without “all the hard data” easily in hand, there’s no sad story being told today about the depressing state of almost everyone’s sanity, as the rest of us suffer from corrosion and damage that feels a lot like what Richtel describes.

Now I suppose that my disquiets and seasonal-affective-disorders could just be angling to give my misery more company (and maybe I am more susceptible to short circuits like these)—but then again, maybe not. . . .

For some reason, this also seems the right time to say a few words about the photos this week and my rationale for including them, depicting as they do a ritual I previously knew nothing about.

Silvesterklaus are masked revelers who take part in Saint Sylvester’s Day festivities in the hamlets of Appenzell, Switzerland on the last day of each passing year. These New Year’s mummers (no doubt an inspiration for our annual celebrants here) put on strange costumes, with huge ringing bells, before walking from house to house, “singing a very slow yodel,” and wishing their neighbors the best in the coming year. (The last two pictures appearing here come to you care of photographer Markus Bollmann. I don’t know who snapped the one up top.)

In addition to occurring just before our current month got underway, the Silvesterklausen tradition is also (clearly) a form of escape into an alternative reality, which is something I’d often like to do when confronted with the apparent mismatch between my neurological wiring and the assaultive realities being inflicted upon it. So these pictures seemed apt today.

That mismatch is the breakdown Matt Richtel is about to tell us more about and that perhaps should be diagnosed in many more of us as we move deeper into the perils of 2023.

_{Horns and tusks (and whatever that is on the nose and cheeks) may be required.}

Over the past year, Richtel has been interviewing American teens, their families and health care providers (usually overwhelmed and under-qualified pediatricians) about the mental health crisis impacting those teens as well as drawing conclusions from what he’s discovered. His reporting has been gathered by the Times under an umbrella that Richtel and his newspaper calls “The Inner Pandemic.”

Instead of blaming the usual culprit—social media—he includes it as a subset of a greater environmental challenge that’s overwhelming teenage brains at a time when they’re hungry for more social information (to discover their places in the world), but also at a time when their brains are simply not developed enough to be able to process the volume and velocity of inputs that are coming their way.

It’s really a much broader technological shift that delivers information not just directly to the kids, but to the kids through their parents, who are also on media all the time. Their parents may be talking about the state of the world, or what they heard, or academic competition, [or] what’s happening well beyond the walls of their community. So this is a much broader shift into a technologically fast-paced environment. That’s the environmental side that we’re all in.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the damage to teenage mental health coincides with the increasing availability of smartphones and other devices that only fairly recently have become widely available and integral parts of our daily lives. Says Richtel:

If you look at, say, an episode of major depression [among teens], it has risen 60% since 2007. The suicide rate, which had been stable from 2000 to 2007, goes up 60% after 2007 to 2018. And among Black adolescents, we see suicide attempts leaping 80%, outpacing every other ethnic group.

(In my counseling work with local pre-teens who’d lost their caregivers I’ve seen several of these meltdowns and felt some of the pain that even younger kids in this City have been buffeted by.) But the parts of young brains that can make at least some sense out of this information barrage have simply not developed at the pace that our tech-driven environments are confronting them with new and often destabilizing information. This is the “mismatch” that Richtel identifies.

The best explanation I’ve heard – and it is hypothesized, not proven but based on some really good science – is that young people are grappling with a neurological mismatch between what their brains are capable of right now and the level of information and the noisy environment they confront. …The part of their brains that makes sense of all this information is still moving at the pace it always has [when they were younger. So while] they’re awake to [this new firehose of] information, they’re not able to make sense of it.

To make matters worse, the mental health system (as it was in 2007 and remains today) is ill-equipped to handle the volume of teenage distress, depression and suicidal behaviors that it’s confronting. To the extent there are any frontline first-responders to this crisis, they tend to be pediatricians who are rarely trained to provide their patients with mental health care. Moreover, the drug treatment therapies that are available are often ineffective and frequently harmful. “The Inner Pandemic” is both the rise in casualties and the lack of a health care system that’s equipped to treat them.

Interestingly, to help his listeners and readers understand the new categories of harms that are visiting young people, Richtel mentions the stresses that also impact the rest of us these days.

So I know that for me, when things get overwhelming, I can feel paralyzed at times. I can feel really profound anxiety. Which of these difficult choices am I going to make when there’s job issues? Where should the family live? Where should the kids go to school? Now take that level of complexity and choice and layer it onto a brain that is reaching puberty early, is awake to all this stuff, [but] can’t make sense of it.

And that was the second or third time it hit me. While Richtel’s story is about one tragically challenged cohort—and there is no denying the enormity of the dilemma for teens—isn’t this story also about the rest of us as we struggle to respond to the same “noisy,” tech-amped environment? Even with our “fully-developed, adult brains” (whatever that means), how much less susceptible are the rest of us to the same kinds of neurological mismatch and distress?

In other words, aren’t all people (including you and me) at least somewhat susceptible to the damages caused by this brave new world that we suddenly find ourselves in?

Reading and hearing Richtel’s reportage over the past few weeks was not the first time that I’ve asked this question. Sometime “tech humanist” and long-time technology commentator Tristan Harris talked about the “misalignment” of our emotions, institutions and devices in an op-ed he wrote in 2019 called “Our Brains Are No Match for Our Technology,” and I worried about it at the time in a post called “Finding the Will to Protect Our Humanity.” In his essay, Harris noted that:

[O]ur Paleolithic brains aren’t build for omniscient awareness of the world’s suffering. Our online news feeds aggregate all the world’s pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn’t humane….Simply put, technology has outmatched our brains, diminishing our capacity to address the world’s most pressing challenges….[As a result,] the attention [and distraction] economy has turned us into a civilization [that is] maladapted for its own survival.

In other words, Harris argued that we’re so overwhelmed by “the world’s” 24/7 wars, genocide, oppression, environmental catastrophe and political chaos that we’re rendered “helpless” by the over-load, while, at the same time, the technology that brings it to us leaves us high-and-dry instead of providing us with the means (or “agency”) to feel that we could ever make a difference against even a fraction of what besets us. And as if that isn’t enough, don’t our adult brains also have to process all of the tech-driven peer pressures that teenagers do?

Matt Richtel and his examination of our “too loud and insistent” environment adds grist to Harris’s mill (albeit through his limited category of witnesses) while also advising us about the tragic range of the mental health meltdown they’re suffering and the equally tragic lack of a health care infrastructure to either stop or repair the resulting damage. By doing so, Richtel provides a kind of bridge between the “brain mismatch” that both he and Harris identify and Harris’s sobering conclusion that we may be finding ourselves “maladapted for our own survival” without a lot more insulation than we have now from the invasively harmful world we’ve created.

For all kinds of personal reasons—and maybe some less subjective ones too—I’m feeling their sense of futility too this week.

This post was adapted from my January 22, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Technology is Changing Us

February 4, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When we change our routines in a fundamental way—either because we need that change or the interruption is foisted upon us—we sometimes experience our world differently when we return.

Glimpses of those differences are possible after vacations, but they usually need to be long enough and far enough away. These differences in perspective also need to become realizations: our conscious efforts “to capture” what our time away “was really about” and consider its impacts “on what we do next.” At this point, the contrast between before and after might be bold enough to change our outlook going forward—like eat more pasta or dance everyday—but these realizations seldom change the basics about our living, our working or how we think about them. They’re more like souvenirs.

Clearer and longer breaks between departure and return generally have a greater impact because there’s more time to ponder the differences between this new place and the one we left behind. When we return to where we started, we are able to compare how it seemed before with how it seems to us now in light of the new perspectives that we’ve gained. As a result of these realizations, we sometimes do change our basic routines or broaden our rationales for doing them.

Insights about what-came-before, what-came-next and now-that-you’re-back can be even more profound if your physical or mental abilities changed during this interval. For example, you needed a new environment because you were injured in some way or found yourself facing an unfamiliar limitation. Only after time-away were you healed enough to return to the world you had left behind. Your judgments can be more nuanced when the changes to your body or spirit have also sharpened your awareness of where you’ve been and where you find yourself now.

Insights about before, next and now might be sharper still if changes in your perceptual abilities were behind your initial departure. If, say, you’d been partially blinded and had to rely on the heightened senses that remained to “map” the new environment where you retreated and the old one that you returned to “with new eyes.”

Finally, your insights might be at their sharpest and most valuable if the world you left had also changed in some fundamental way in the months or years before your return. The heightened awareness that you gained while away would be encountering this new topography for the first time. It is this final vantage point that Howard Axelrod brings to his new book, The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age.

Axelrod’s short story is that he was accidentally blinded in one eye during a college basketball game, took the next 5 years to graduate and recover physically, and spent the two years that followed living off the grid and reorienting himself with his natural environment in the woods of northeastern Vermont. After his time away, he began a teaching career at two urban universities.

Between his partial loss of sight and his return to civilization, smartphones had not only become ubiquitous, but in startling contrast to his back-woods life, these “stars in our pockets” seemed to be changing “how we navigated the world” right in front of him. It was an insight that might not have been possible if the contrasts between the world he’d departed, the one he retreated to and the one he re-entered had been less stark, or the realizations that he took from his experiences had been less acute.

In the “cognitive environment” of northern Vermont, Axelrod deepened his sense perceptions, made lucky discoveries as he wandered in the outdoors, and cultivated a sense of curiosity and patience that had been commonplace for much of human history. He learned to pay attention to the weather, the seasonal changes, the time of day, the life of the forest around him, and realized that doing so reinforced a particular kind of “mental map” that enabled his understanding of the world and how he could find his way through it. When Axelrod returned to urban life, he realized that the smartphones people were now holding as they walked down the street or sat across from one another at lunch were changing how almost everyone—including him—understood and experienced the world. In other words, the mental map that a smartphone enables is fundamentally different from the mental map he’d been using to navigate during his time off the grid.

The message in Axelrod’s book is not that one map is better than the other. His writing is more “meditation” (as he calls it) than argument or indictment. Instead, he wants to highlight some of the complications that can arise when you alternate between how humans have always navigated their lives and work and the new ways of doing so that mediating devices like our smartphones have enabled. In a recent interview and from postings on his website, Axelrod wants to convey what happens when adapting to a new environment means “losing traits that you valued” in your first one.

Just as we’re losing diversity of plant and animal species due to the environmental crisis, so too are we losing the diversity and range of our minds due to changes in our cognitive environment.

Several of these losses are worth our noticing with him. For example,:

–Tech tools may replace natural aptitudes and weaken the memories that they depend upon. Axelrod suggests that relying on GPS to navigate undermines not only the serendipity that often comes “when you’re finding your own way,” but also your reliance on innate navigational memories so that you don’t get lost. Axelrod says:

Our memory is tied inextricably to place. In our brains, the memory center, the hippocampus, is the same center for cognitive mapping — figuring out the route you’re going to take. If we’re no longer using our brains to navigate [and] coming up with these cognitive maps, studies show that we start to have problems with other kinds of memory.

–External prompts change our attention spans. As we grow more accustomed to on-line suggestions before taking the next step, autonomous actions—including immersing yourself in an activity and entering into what psychologists call productive “flow states”—become more difficult.

What [American philosopher William] James [once] said is that an attention span is made of curiosity. It’s the ability to ask subtly different questions. Whether you’re talking about intellectual attention, or sensorial attention, if you’re looking at a tree or watching a bird. Are you asking subtly different questions? Can you ask a question about one facet and then another? It feels like you’re paying attention steadily, but you’re really paying attention to a lot of different things, driven by your curiosity.
Online, there’s always something prompting your attention. It’s like a pseudo-curiosity. It comes in and will give you the next thing to purchase, the next article to read, the next video clip to watch. You don’t have to ask the next question — it’s provided for you. Your attention span will shorten because you don’t need to ask those questions, you don’t need to drive your own attention.

–Rapid-fire “likes” on-line also requires much less involvement from us than empathy requires off-line. Axelrod notes how disorienting it can be as we shuttle between our tech-enabled environments and the rest of our lives and work, where we often need to come to what he describes as “slower” understandings of one another:

[W]hen you’re on social media, part of what’s being called for is attention that can shift really rapidly from one post to another post. And also what’s being called for is a kind of judgment: Do you like this? Do you love this? Do you retweet this? Whereas in real life, what’s called for is a slower attention, where you’re able to listen, be patient while the person is pausing, thinking, not quite sure what they’re saying. And also what’s called for is to defer judgment, or not judge at all. To have empathy. Those are very different traits, depending on which environment you’re in.

–It is hard to reconcile or internalize the different, competing ways that we use to navigate our on-line and off-line realities. Moreover, the world we experience behind the screen can become a substitute for (or even replace) the frameworks that come from navigating in the off-line world. What we risk losing, says Axelrod, are:

our connection to something larger than ourselves, our sense of perspective, our sense of what came before us or what will come after, our sense of being a part of the natural world — that doesn’t really show up anywhere on the maps on our phones.

As we adapt to a virtual world, we’re often disoriented because its cognitive maps are so different and “we’re effectively living in two places at once.” But our adaptations change how our minds work too. In what Axelrod calls “neural Darwinism,” a kind of “natural selection” also happens “on both sides of your eyes” as we adapt to living and working through our screens. “[C]ertain populations of neurons get selected and their connections grow stronger, while others go the way of the dodo bird.” In other words, the faculties that we exercise on-line grow stronger, while those from the off-line world that we rely upon less frequently weaken from disuse.

These losses are tangible: Remembering how to navigate the world without on-line short-cuts. The longer attention spans that we need for concentration. The slower attention spans we need for empathy. Perspectives that extend from the past and into the future. Feelings that we are a part of the natural world.

Our smartphones and other virtual companions are changing our capabilities in each of these ways, but like that frog in water coming to a slow boil, too many of us may be lulled into complacency by the warmth of their star-power.

Axelrod returned from the Vermont woods when the rest of us were already caught up in their magic. With the heightened sense of being human that came from his own particular odyssey, he could see more clearly not only what we’d been gaining while he was away but also might be losing as we gradually moved off our old navigational maps and started our pell-mell quest to adapt to very different ones.

The map at the top of this post illustrates how navigation, weather, visibility, air pollution—a dozen different variables—might change in light of the fires that have recently burned through much of the western US. A poor attempt at metaphor (perhaps), but many of the fires on this map also originated in northern California, where many of the technologies behind our smartphones originated.

These “stars in our pockets” with their shortcuts, search engines and diversions are causing us to adapt to the navigational demands of an entirely new environment, where the potential costs of doing so include the loss of deep-seated memory, the ability to make our own choices, and discomfort with the “slow art” of interacting with others. Because we don’t exercise these aptitudes when navigating our new mental maps, we risk losing them as we attempt to navigate the old maps of our parallel, off-line worlds.

In a December post, I shared Tristan Harris’s theory that our brains may simply not be able to handle the challenges posed by these tech-driven interfaces. Harris went on to argue that the overwhelming information they provide also produces a kind of learned helplessness in us that’s not so different from where the frog, coming to a slow boil, finds herself.

The trick, I think, is making a deliberate effort to exercise the human capabilities that enabled us to navigate the world before these awesome devices came along—not letting them atrophy—even if we have to spend some equivalent of Howard Axelrod’s time in the northern Vermont woods to come to that realization.

We may need the sharpness, the clarity, of something like his departure and return to notice that much seems to be going awry before we resolve to do something about it.

This post was adapted from my February 2, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them are later posted here. If you’d like to receive a weekly newsletter, you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Finding the Will to Protect Our Humanity

December 16, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I want to share with you a short, jarring essay I read in the New York Times this week, but first a little background.

For some time now, I’ve been worrying about how tech companies (and the technologies they employ) harm us when they exploit the very qualities that make us human, like our curiosity and pleasure-seeking. Of course, one of the outrages here is that companies like Google and Facebook are also monetizing our data while they’re addicting us to their platforms. But it’s the addiction-end of this unfortunate deal (and not the property we’re giving away) that bothers me most, because it cuts so close to the bone. When they exploit us, these companies are reducing our autonomy–or the freedom to act that each of us embodies.

Today, it’s advertising dollars from our clicking on their ads, but tomorrow, it’s mind-control or distraction addiction: the alternate (and equally terrible) futures that George Orwell and Aldous Huxley were worried about 80 years ago in the cartoon essay I shared with you a couple of weeks ago.

In “These Tech Platforms Threaten Our Freedom,” a post from exactly a year ago, I tried to argue that the price for exchanging our personal data for “free” search engines, social networks and home deliveries is giving up more and more control over our thoughts and willpower. Instead of responding “mindlessly” to tech company come-ons, we could pause, close our eyes, and re-think our knee-jerk reactions before clicking, scrolling, buying and losing track of what we should really want.

But is this mind-check even close to enough?

After considering the addictive properties of on-line games (particularly for adolescent boys) in a post last March, the reply was a pretty emphatic “No!” Games like Fortnite are using the behavioral information they syphon from young players to reduce their ability to exit the game and start eating, sleeping, doing homework, going outside or interacting (live and in person) with friends and family.

But until this week, I never thought that maybe our human brains aren’t wired to resist the distracting, addicting and autonomy-sapping power of these technologies.

Maybe we’re at the tipping point where our “fight or flight” instincts are finally over-matched.

Maybe we are already inhabiting Orwell’s and Huxley’s science fiction.

(Like with global warming, I guess I still believed that there was time for us to avoid technology’s harshest consequences.)

When I read Tristan Harris’s essay “Our Brains Are No Match for Our Technology” this week, I wanted to know the science, instead of the science fiction, behind its title. But Harris begins with more of a conclusion than a proof, quoting one of the late 20^th Century’s most creative minds, Edward O. Wilson. When asked a decade ago whether the human race would be able to overcome the crises that will confront us over the next hundred years, Wilson said:

Yes, if we are honest and smart. [But] the real problem of humanity is [that] we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.

Somehow, we have to find a way to reduce this three-part dissonance, Harris argues. But in the meantime, we need to acknowledge that “the natural capacities of our brains are being overwhelmed” by technologies like smartphones and social networks.

Even if we could solve the data privacy problem, humanity will still be reduced to distraction by encouraging our self-centered pleasures and stoking our fears. Echoing Huxley in Brave New World, Harris argues that “[o]ur addiction to social validation and bursts of ‘likes’ would continue to destroy our attention spans.” Echoing Orwell in Animal Farm, Harris is equally convinced that “[c]ontent algorithms would continue to drive us down rabbit holes toward extremism and conspiracy theories.”

While technology’s distractions reduce our ability to act as autonomous beings, its impact on our primitive brains also “compromises our ability to take collective action” with others.

[O]ur Paleolithic brains aren’t build for omniscient awareness of the world’s suffering. Our online news feeds aggregate all the world’s pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn’t humane….Simply put, technology has outmatched our brains, diminishing our capacity to address the world’s most pressing challenges….The attention [or distraction] economy has turned us into a civilization maladapted for its own survival.

Harris argues that we’re overwhelmed by 24/7 genocide, oppression, environmental catastrophe and political chaos; we feel “helpless” in the face of the over-load; and our technology leaves us high-and-dry instead of providing us with the means (or the “agency”) to feel that we could ever make a difference.

Harris’s essay describes technology’s assault on our autonomy—on our free will to act—but he never describes or provides scientific support for why our brain wiring is unable to resist that assault in the first place. It left me wondering: are all humans susceptible to distraction and manipulation from online technologies or just some of us, to some extent, some of the time?

Harris heads an organization called the Center for Humane Tech, but its website (“Our mission is to reverse human downgrading by realigning technology with our humanity”) only scratches the surface of that question.

For example, it links to a University of Chicago study involving the distraction that’s caused by smartphones we carry with us, even when they’re turned off. These particular researchers theorized that having these devices nearby “can reduce cognitive capacity by taxing the attentional resources that reside at the core of both working memory and fluid intelligence.” In other words, we’re so preoccupied when our smartphones are around that our brain’s ability to process information is reduced.

I couldn’t find additional research on the site, but I’m certain there was a broad body of knowledge fueling Edward O. Wilson’s concern, ten years ago, about the misalignment of our emotions, institutions and technology. It’s the state of today’s knowledge that could justify Harris’s alarm about what is happening when “our Paleolithic brains” confront “our godlike technologies,” and I’m sure he’s familiar with these findings. But that research needs to be mustered and conclusions drawn from it so we can understand, as an impacted community, the risks that “our brains” actually face, and then determine together how to protect ourselves from it.

To enable us to reach this capable place, science needs to rally (as it did in an open letter about artificial intelligence and has been doing on a daily basis to confront global warming) and make its best case about technology’s assault on human autonomy.

If our civilization is truly “maladapted to its own survival,” we need to find our “agency” now before any more of it is lost. But we can only move beyond resignation when our sense of urgency arises from a well-understood (and much chewed-upon) base of knowledge.

This post was adapted from my December 15, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.