What Friend misses is not knowledge (it has the Internet) but intimacy, in all its complex form, in its disagreements, its hiccups, its letdowns and its compromises. It has text but no texture.

As Merleau-Ponty writes in Phenomenology of Perception , “The body is our general medium for having a world.” To flatten these moments into language is already to lose something: the texture, the weight, the sensation of being in the world. Friend seems to forget that experience is not just textual, it is highly highly highly sensual.

But experience is much more. The philosophical discipline of phenomenology is helpful here, especially in the tradition of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who reminds us that perception precedes articulation, or, in other words, that we do not merely think our way through the world, we live it through our bodies. The body is the very condition of... See more

This is the promise, and perhaps the tyranny, of the language age: that all experience can be rendered as text. First we had text, then hypertext, and now megatext , if you will. That’s the world large language models operate in. Everything must be made legible to the machine. And legibility, here, is evidently linguistic.

There is an interesting implication in the design of the user experience. It assumes a text-first approach to “relationships”. I can understand how the designers came to that conclusion. Most young people predominantly communicate through text, and if we’re only communicating through text, we begin to understand human relationships in that same... See more