Jacob Kramer-Duffield thinks

One of the best ongoing investigations of thought and the universe is Radiolab, a show produced at WNYC by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich (no small point of pride to me, both Oberlin grads). One of their very best and most mind-blowing episodes came a couple months back, called “Words.” I’d recommend you listen to the show in its entirety, and there are dozens of strands I could pull out and discuss all day. For now, I’d like to focus on the (intentionally) provocative claim made by Charles Fernyhough, a writer and psychologist at Durham University (UK):

“I don’t think very young children do think.”

Spinning this out in a later podcast led to (to my total delight) an in-depth discussion of L.S. Vygotsky’s theories of self and child development, especially on the internalization of speech – learning to refer to oneself as one refers to others.  The podcast focuses on non-normative variations in development – how sometimes, people internalize not just their voice but other voices as part of their internal monologue. Or dialogue. This can in its worst instantiations lead to things like schizophrenia, which is bad.

But I’d like to move one degree further, and think about how these issues relate to ideas of ourselves, and to our shifting media consumption and discussion habits.

Contra the much-discussed Death of Reading, the media landscape today in fact represents the apogee of reading in all of human history. More people are literate today than ever before, and they consume more written text than ever before. That they do not all do so through a printed medium called “book” or “newspaper” is beside the point, as is the fact that they also watch television. Words are being consumed and produced internally in simply staggering amounts, and a great deal of many people’s days – both in the developed world and less-developed countries – involves people, themselves, consuming and producing words internally.

What is the effect, then, of all these internal words on our own personal monologues? What is the effect, in particular, of the chatter of social media, where the voice is not our construction of anonymous authority (or not) from some Media Source but people that we know, whose actual – both written and spoken – voices we are familiar with?

One of to my mind the most elegant definitions of self (also referenced in “Words“) is that it is nothing more than a continuous story we tell: one thing happened, then another, then another, all in the same voice, and that’s how I’m me. Schizophrenia and similar disorders are so terrifying because that basic premise is violated – all of these voices are competing for attention, and it becomes impossible to determine what is real, or who you are.

Pulling all of these threads together, then, the question becomes: what happens to the story of ourselves becomes the story of ourselves? When the “I” is spending so much time with the “we” and the “they” inside our skulls? As a purely personal anecdote, I do know that while I know more specific and timely things than I used to, source attribution is often murky. Did I hear that on the radio, or when talking to a friend? Did I think it myself, or read a blog? Does it matter?

This is not a new question or problem, entirely – the tension between individualism and communitarianism stems from the same dynamic. But the scale of this shift in our internal voices is unprecedented, as is the breadth of effect in the day-to-day lives of people in our technologically-mediated culture. While I tend to eschew both Utopian and Dystopian readings of technology’s effects on us (the Internet being, like Soylent Green, made of people), I do think that it’s worth considering (agnostically) what the longer-term effects of a society-wide shift in the kinds of internal voices we maintain might entail. Probably a big deal.

“The world is changed… much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.”

I’ve lately had the sensation of living in the future – not the future of robots and flying cars (both in still-tragic short supply) but the future of my life, the future of something New and Different. This has caused me, in turn, to consider just what it is that is new or different, and just what is meant by Future, Past and Present.

We are all of us the epic heroes of our own tales, the centers of action and narrative direction, the most dramatis of personae. So it is fairly obvious to see why my internal libretticist would determine this to be a turning point in the action: some months of great preparation leading to a grande moment, followed by a change of scene and a journey into the unknown. The curtain falls, the screen fades to black, End of Book Two – resume in medias res some months or years along when sufficient interest and tension has built along my next act.

Human that I am, I look for patterns to justify this perception, and believe that I have found them. From where I stand now, the 2000s look like a migraine-filled interregnum – citizen of a country making awful decisions, resident of a planet trundling into irreparable change, confused twentysomething unsure of my place in the world or in myself. The Bush years, even while ongoing, always had the eerie unreality of a dream state. That they were succeeded by the election as President of a black man named Barack Hussein Obama was no less hallucinatory, even if I have the pictures on my cell phone to prove it.

And now awake, and the dream was more and less true for good and bad, but we must live with what was wrought through sleepwalkery. I am an adult (or something like it) in this world after kidhood in the pleasant-smelling 1990s, but even while history spins around again the wheel’s not quite the same for its rotation. Anti-government zealots were just as crazy and well-funded in the bad old days of the Arkansas Project and Tim McVeigh, but today’s wingnuts are self-consciously the stars of their own reality television shows and the media an ever-more-efficient conduit for that effluent.

But then there’s always authoritarians, aren’t there, no matter the names they use or the shirts they wear. My villains of copyright maximalization, seedbank patent-squatters and cynical political operatives sure seem to be wearing black hats: everyone does in silhouette.

I can’t really worry about that, though – can’t have access to more than one subjectivity, can’t have the cut-shot pan-over Cinemascope wide angle. Acting As If is the best I can manage.

So for me, right now, I’ve arrived in the future. Things change always, but a period of flux is over and a new dynamic will be the setting for our action over the next little while. It’s a world where the benefits of communications technology accrue in innumerable ways to increasingly huge numbers of the world’s people, but where material economic growth will remain stagnant for the forseeable future – especially for those of us who already have more than our fair share (but not those with way, way, way more than their fair share). It’s a world where despite these unmistakable improvements to our everyday lives (all of us: next year or the one after, more than half of the citizens of Earth will be able to call each other on the phone; soon after, two out of three, and we haven’t even begun to think about How This Changes Everything), the main task of my professional career and political life will be fighting a rearguard action against Know-Nothings who reject a rationalist worldview: people for whom evidence is bias or proof of its opposite. It’s a world where the institutions – national and international – that have done such a good job getting us Here (for good and for ill), are terribly ill-suited to getting us to some better definition of There. Some of those will get better: many will get worse.

But here we are, innit? And what is my role in this world, this Future? I’ll greatly enjoy figuring that out.