The Lost Sense

The question I’m really asking, I realize now, is how to be human. When I write, or read, or paint, I am more of a human than I am a gadget. The words you are reading I first put down in longhand using a sharpened pencil. While I was writing, I did not check my email. At such moments, I feel I’m myself rather than a body attached to a buzzing phone... See more

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working f

... See more

The sensation is one of wandering aimlessly, picking up and putting down partly-interesting objects with a sense of generalized indifference. I started noticing something else, too: the impulses powering my behavior weren’t even articulated. The reason for checking and scrolling was rarely in response to an actual inquiry. The impulse to scroll rem... See more

The internet certainly played its part. As we spend increasing hours buried in our computers the very fact that food can't be consumed virtually gives it a special resonance. You can, of course, post pictures of what you’re eating - people do that by the millions - but that’s no substitute for the scent of onions caramelizing in butter, the sound o... See more

The texture of our experience is flattened out as a result.

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working fr... See more

My secret, cynical theory is that we are so completely numbed and overwhelmed by information these days that we simply don’t think in these more abstract terms anymore (and I think it’s that numbness that I want to capture in this piece somehow). Or maybe we still do, but it all gets lost in idle musings on Twitter or in group chats or messages to

... See more

Nonetheless, smartphones remain intensely skin-like on a metaphorical level: we stroke, and they are minutely responsive. Our fingertips enjoy the ultra-smoothness of their Gorilla Glass screens, velvety like a youthful cheek. Silicone cases add a body-equivalent degree of friction.‘From the classical (and even the cybernetic) viewpoint, technology... See more