The End of Experience

Or, A Geneology of Digital Malaise

I’ve long found discussions of digital technology inadequate. Typically they fail to account for the conditions of technological adoption, and obsess over the most obvious present downsides and compare them to idealized images of the past or romanticized alternatives. Here I try to give a theoretical outline of a historical and philosophical trajectory that brings us to our moment.

—

On reflection, we tend to trace a series of modern ills to phone use, or more broadly, digital technology. Starting with an overview of statistics, such as rising youth suicide, reports of mental illness, drug abuse, overdoses and loneliness, we then identify the nearest and most obvious cause or influence. The cause is described as a condition that goes by different names, each of which captures a particular aspect of the total context: screen time, social media, use of apps, dependence on digital communication, remote work, remote recreation, the mediation of human relationships by devices.  

In short, people now suffer in a way that is specific to current forms of social organization, and these forms are understood as consequences of a recent change in the technological system, which goes back no farther than 2008 or 2009.  

The smartphone erases the difference between the internet and what was formerly called real life. For a brief period, the internet constituted its own sphere, with its own patterns, norms and effects. Early dial-up technology retained its ties to landlines, communication channels that also worked in distinction from everyday embodied interactions by transmitting the human voice across great distances. To get on the internet, a person had to station himself at a desktop computer and block access to the phone, redirect its long-range currents into the interactive surface of the screen and keyboard. Bridging distances and times occurred through the confinement of the body to a fixed node, a terminal.  

To talk to anyone in the world, a person had to bind themselves to a desk and a complicated technical object hooked up to the same electrical and communication channels as other devices in the home or workplace. Each member of a typical household had to share the computer.  

A sense of the difference between online and offline grows out of the physical and temporal limitations of online networks and the technical complexes that support them. But technical development has moved in the direction of increasing personalization and mobility, a reduction in the bulk and complexity of devices, and their increasing availability and range of operations, concentrating more and more faculties and acts into smaller devices with a minimum of technical know-how.  

Laptops mediate the passage between the desktop and the smartphone. The terminal is detached from the desk and removed from the room, intensifying the dematerialization of online access. With the laptop, the internet spreads out and blends different times and spaces, compressing environmental conditions of technical usage. The proliferation of mobile computers reconfigures public and private spaces to suit internet activity; establishments like coffee shops resemble offices, living rooms and home studies.  

But the laptop, for all its mobility, is still limited by its physical makeup. It requires a stable physical surface, an available power source and routed internet connections. Additionally, by its very name, a larger portion of the physical body is still assumed in the interplay between human and machine, the lap or lower half of the body implied in the circuit, signifying a stage of sedentary corporeality that would soon evolve into a more ghostly interfacing of the eyes and hands, or a kind of detachment of the lap/groin/rear into a floating position in front of the face. Roughly around the same time, early mobile phones condense the landline into a portable device, adding crude forms of text and recording.   

The smartphone then concentrates speech, text, recording and internet access in an object that bypasses all former spatial and temporal constraints, accomplishing the merger of online and offline that now stands as the new atomized social sphere in which we move and make a living.  

Social media then constructs a new set of platforms for exchange, replacing embodied interaction with digital communication. All the maladies of our age seem to arise from what is often viewed as addiction to the smartphone, accessible any time and place, programmed to capitalize on the instinctive need for belonging and status. 

The technical complex now works toward the complete translation of experience into simulation; infinite copying, storage and distribution of impressions. A person no longer adopts or owns his experience but must instead externalize himself into a token of circulation. The expropriation of the senses is preceded by an emptying, a long process of what Walter Benjamin first called an atrophying of experience, and then what Agamben termed a destruction, and what I’m now designating as an ending. 

For mass scale simulation to be possible, it’s not enough to possess the technical means in a particular moment. Rather experience must have already been drained of its content, deformed beyond recognition and rendered impossible or profoundly unfulfilling. And the end of experience that gives rise to social media addiction and smartphone domination comes about over a much longer phase of technical innovation, economic development, social transformation and religious and philosophical conflict. We should rather see the current technically determined social situation as a symptom, a midway cause that is itself an effect of movements on different planes that have been gathering strength and at the same time exhausting themselves. The focus should be on the nature and quality of experience itself, how it has been expressed and defined and how it has changed.  

We begin with the scientific revolution, which is at the same time a philosophical revolution that establishes a new scale of values. Action is prized higher than contemplation. Science is applied to engineering for the purpose of improving material conditions.  

In premodern thought, knowledge is separate from but still related to experience. The intellect attains knowledge by rising above experience in contemplation of forms, both mathematical and discursive/conceptual, i.e. the notions of justice, beauty, the good, etc. Experience is the realm of shifting appearances, inconsistencies, corruption, vagaries of passion, degradation and deceit. 

(I should note the philosophies of ancient empiricism, skepticism, sophistry, nihilism and various Christian heresies which have generally stayed on the margins until their rehabilitation in the modern era.) 

Agamben notes how, prior to the modern revolution, experience coheres not into knowledge, but maxims and proverbs. Because experience itself doesn’t give certainty, those who stick to it must content themselves with skepticism and relativism. Agamben’s example of the high-water mark of experiential skepticism is Montaigne, the father of the essay and a forerunner of the properly modern individual, with his healthy ironic attitude toward dogma and revealed truth and his preference for biographical detail and ambiguous speculation.  

The attack on scholasticism and ancient thought demolishes the higher ground of knowledge. Contemplation of eternity is downgraded in importance and relevance and a new foundation is sought in experience, in the subject of experience, now recast as a subject of knowledge. And the way to knowledge must pass through doubt, negating all sensation and everything perceptible in the external world until the subject recognizes itself as a thinking and doubting being.  

The producer and product of methodical doubt is Descartes’ Cogito, the new general directing man’s battle with nature as commanded by Francis Bacon, with the primary intention of making life more pleasant, predictable and comfortable. The thinking subject is secured from doubt, but it leaves open the question of the origin and validity of its knowledge. The question centers on the status of ideas, their composition and source. Rationalism and empiricism lay competing foundations. Rationalism holds that ideas are innate, that they correspond to divine or transcendent design. Empiricism claims that all ideas are derived from experience. 

For empiricism, an idea is a product of the mental act of abstracting from regularly occurring sense impressions. Therefore all ideas must be referred to the impressions that compose them, and all ideas pointing beyond impressions are null.  

Kant then synthesizes rationalism and empiricism by defining experience as the application of concepts to sensations. Transcendent ideas regulate the order of the mind, space and time are forms through which we intuit sensations, and concepts provide the stamp of objectivity on what we sense by recognizing impressions in a standardized and repeatable fashion.  

The outcome of this resolution between empiricism and rationalism is a formalization of experience and the restriction of knowledge to what can be experienced through a spatio-temporal-conceptual grid. Another way of saying it: experience is a measure by which we verify our knowledge. Experience by itself doesn’t guarantee knowledge, but without experience nothing can be known. Outside of categorized impressions intuited through the forms of space and time, there’s only speculation and faith.  

After Kant, experience is the testing ground for knowledge, resulting in greater confidence in the application of mathematical physics to the subjugation of nature, as well as a void in the place of transcendent truth.  

This new critical philosophy neglects to investigate the source of our concepts by which we turn experience into knowledge. Hegel then tries to demonstrate that a world-historical soul, what he calls spirit, develops through attempted solutions to the contradictions not only of cognition but of peoples, cultures, civilizations. Philosophy doesn’t stand apart from history but rather issues from it; philosophical reflection arises from the conflict of ideas, classes, peoples and institutions. Established ways of knowing and living cancel themselves in trying to fully embody or exemplify their own principles, though their traces are carried forward by what follows in the wake of their destruction.  

With Hegel, philosophy gives way to history, politics and the idea of life as an irrepressible flowing energy underlying all forms and concepts. Spiritual progress sinks to the class struggle in Marx, where economic contradiction drives the development of productive forces and social relations, with thought and religion given off as rationalizing afterimages of material clashes. On the opposite end, existentialism is born in a rejection of a spiritual or theoretical reality that would relieve each person of the responsibility for the decisions they must make in directing their own lives.  

By the end of the 19^th century, knowledge was reformulated as a tool for practical advantage, limited by its time and place and destined for replacement by newer models and techniques, confined within experience instead of leading beyond it. Reflective habits became historical artifacts; treated as antiques by historians, playthings for philosophers, instruments for scientists and weapons for revolutionaries.  

Knowledge no longer endures apart from experience. The standards by which knowledge serves experience are torn down and rebuilt without underlying order. Life determines knowledge by measuring what is most useful to its wants and needs, demanding that cognition should act in the interests of the knower and produce a more equitable social and economic reality.  

-- 

The framing of digital experience as a cause of assorted pathologies obscures its wider sociohistorical context. It must be pointed out that digital mediation of society is now total; there’s no longer contact among people without satellite triangulation or coordination by industrialized intermediaries. Everyone uses a phone. Or a laptop. Or sits in front of a tv. Sometimes all three at once, a few extra screens and keyboards thrown in. 

The weakest interactions still revolve around screens. All encounters are filtered by digital selection criteria. Energy that would run through the face-to-face exchange is transferred to the machine, which carries it off for storage and commodification. 

The handheld device not only controls group scheduling, but it also eases the tension of in-person gatherings. Two people can’t come together without a phone, and without a phone they can’t stand each other. The experience of the other person has faded to such an extent we must give ourselves electrical shocks to stay interested in them.  

(On the other side, it could be said that it’s not a fading but a monstrous looming of the other spurring us to maintain a technologically mediated distance or disavowal. The screen in all its forms blocks out the threatening inscrutability of the other, the other of our time of whom we can assume nothing.) 

In the next turn, what’s true of the self’s relation to another is true of the self’s relation to itself. The steady electrical stimulation that throws up dulled interpersonal images for easy communication applies to the isolated self in its self-comprehension. Just as there’s no touching the other without the phone, there’s no touching the self. The person loses inner contact and must be shocked back into self-relation.  

What is the sense of a self in the age of psychoprosthetics? The experience of a unified self occurs through the digital device, through participation on its platforms and the feedback generated from digitally mediated interactions. But the unity under discussion is simulated, imaginary, projected onto screens across multiple channels of communication, circulated through loosely related networks. Underneath the texts and images there are acts of recognition and synthesis, acts of association and dissociation. The digital self is a series of simulated acts that expand out from and contract back into profiles which are also dynamic, elliptical and fractured, circulating coins or representatives of an abstract identity.  

When someone says I, they mean two things: what they see on the screen, the texted and recorded self on display, infinitely distributed and available on the networks, as well as the invisible self which arranges its texts and images, a negative of the photo albums, video streams and journal entries. An empty point of reference that then produces and trades signs of status, value and substance.  

What happens to someone, what they do and what’s done to them, all the events that begin as autonomous acts or as reactions to the acts of others, are increasingly incomprehensible, unmanageable, nerve-wracking or unimpressive unless they’re reformatted into a simulation, unless they become digital reproductions through text, image or video that are then recognized, validated, passed around, debated and denied by a swarm of other simulated selves, other simulations that secure their own consistency through rapid-fire consumption and evaluation of simulated events, episodes and communicative acts.  

The question that should concern us is how does this happen? How do we arrive at a condition where experience tends compulsively toward digital reproduction?   

-- 

The course of the 19^th century shows a complimentary or mutually reinforcing pair of developments, one material, economic and social and the other religious and philosophical. On the material side, we see explosive growth and innovation. Increasing wealth, population size, population density and urbanization; new technologies in science and industry, new techniques in government and new principles in political and social organization.  

On the philosophical side, we see an outpouring of criticism of philosophy as it was traditionally understood, rejection of religion, repudiation of transcendence, denial of eternity. Naturalization and reduction of spiritual reality, redefinition of abstraction and thought as expedients and tools, a rising sense of the arbitrary and unfounded and contingent, the critical dissection of myth, illusion and fiction, and subversion of authority, unmasking of ideals. 

As 19^th century civilization quickly adapted to new industrial conditions and mass-scale social organizations, the predominant theoretical and philosophical themes reflect an intensifying focus on adaptation, technological innovation, economic laws, progress, and life as accidental and precarious yet charged with a seemingly boundless potential; life determined by environment and fitted for expression and conflict but without essential links to a transcendent dimension or immutable source of value and truth.  

Various movements and figures and schools of thought broadly group themselves into what can be termed Vitalism, with existentialism as a related offshoot which also overlaps with different versions of scientific materialism and Marxism. What becomes more pronounced in all these branches of thought is an emphasis on life without recourse to higher principles or terms. Rather the tendency is to move downward, to flatten what was once thought beyond into what’s underneath, what surges forth from below. 

 After Hegel the predominating theoretical trends take as their point of departure a blind or chaotic substratum that generates an inhibiting or transfixing appearance of sense, truth and order. Critical thought focuses on exposing everyday appearances and their ideal forms as mystifications of material processes and social relations of domination for the purpose of unleashing productive forces and equalizing power differences.  

Psychoanalysis gains traction as a science by basing its investigations on the idea of the unconscious and the role of sexual energy in shaping motive and behavior. Under psychoanalysis, the mind is a kind of machine that leverages sexual energy and manages stimulation; what we experience is a distorted representation of external impressions and internal urges.  

From the cultural absorption of psychoanalysis comes the formulation of what Foucault called the repressive hypothesis, which roughly holds that civilization and its spiritual/cultural structures bind sexual energy and channel it into socially productive activity at a high cost to individuals, mutilating their impulses and causing the formation of neurotic symptoms.  

The clearing away of tradition, religion and morality, which was happening by sheer force of technological and scientific advancements, was also corroborated by the spread of ideologies and worldviews articulating themselves as refusals of old standards, religious institutions, long-standing images of man and his place in the world. Iconoclasts of varying sorts and degrees.  

Time and change center themselves in thought. Revolution becomes not a definite event but a dynamic principle, not only a reaction to an order deemed unjust by overarching standards, but a prescription for all actually existing things by virtue of their existence. What exists must be transformed, not because it happens to be illegitimate, but because it exists in time and must make way for replacements and improvements.  

Evolution emerges as the scientifically couched self-consciousness of the unending war of mutants fighting over the worthless perpetuation of newer mutations that will inevitably end in annihilation. The habit of putting the stress of evolution on the growing, adaptive, dynamic, continuous and progressive side masks its iron law, which is extinction. Evolution sounds like endless creativity and flourishing, but it’s a ticket to death, with a sideshow of carnage and torture on the short trip there.  

The 19^th century hurtles into the 20^th  with mass-scale reorganization of social behavior and a new dominance of time, history and science over religion and philosophy. Industry and commerce install themselves as directives and set new standards of behavior. The scope of earthly possibilities expands while the supernatural disappears or shrinks into a private matter. 

A mass mercantile society considers its members interchangeable economic actors with selfish impulses. Early on, these commercially minded actors refer to shared history, culture and geography, and cohere into nations that then act as individuals with selfish interests. The world wars mark the catastrophic climax of industrial buildup and imperial aggression, after which technologically advanced societies disciplined or neutered their expansionist tendencies and deconstructed their ideologies.  

(Of course, The US and Soviet empires continued their aggressive campaigns, but increasingly in the guise of universal aspirations, the establishment of peace, democracy and equality. And today, with the US as the sole superpower, the discourse of human rights and democracy isn’t a mere cynical ploy of domination, but a necessary justification of all mass-scale endeavors, a point which reflects a genuine shift in ethos.) 

Philosophy pivots to the exploration and promotion of contingency, uncertainty, relativity, language, the plurality of lifeworlds and cultural practices and the importance of respect and recognition for all human types regardless of their background or values.  

The postwar period produces explanations of human subjectivity as effects of structured material processes, followed by a more radical reduction of these material processes to illusions cast by the groundless interplay of signs, letters, texts, discourses. Mass media comes into being on the strength of advances in the new field of cybernetics, based on military research on anti-aircraft weaponry. Cybernetics revolutionizes communication technology and launches the idea of information, setting the stage for the complete translation of reality, consciously lived or otherwise, into a program. Manipulation of codes brings new possibilities of control.  

Mass media allows for an unprecedented synchronization of consciousness, a rewiring of impulse towards passive reception and vicariousness. Debord’s society of the spectacle describes the encroachment of industrialized fantasy production onto social relations. Increasingly, gestures and identities enter a feedback loop with media representations; real life and television reflect each other, and advertising assumes growing importance in enforcing tastes and aspirations. Second wave feminism dovetails with other countercultural and technological currents and flows into the sexual revolution, which promotes free sexuality as both a subversive tool and an end in itself, one of the goals of an egalitarian society.  

Deindustrialization then undermines the manufacturing base of a productive economy and transitions the developed world into a service economy, in which a growing portion of unskilled and low-paid workers provide goods and entertainment to leisure and managerial classes with inflated interests in diversion.  

All these momentous events and theoretical lines coalesce into broad and yet fragmentary imperatives that overload experience, crushing the solitary person, the free individual, under stimulation he can’t bear and assimilate, while at the same time upholding experience itself, in its present, individualized, mortal form, as the only thing that matters, that can be considered real and valuable.  

Deprived of traditional social patterns, recognizable and stable surroundings, practice in handcrafts and belief in transcendent sources of meaning, purpose and truth, the isolated person, left essentially indeterminate by the erosion of local community and religious heritage, must wring value, excitement, pleasure and fulfillment from the chaos of his experience, treating his own life as an improvised film in which his leading role matters mostly to himself, and only matters to others to the extent that he’s able to capitalize on his powers of enchantment. A kind of fevered star performance before other extras consuming themselves trying to burn as brightly as possible.  

-- 

Walter Benjamin called attention to the Baudelairian encounter with the crowd in a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing 19^th century. For Baudelaire, the city and its crowds have a shocking effect on the psyche. Along materialist or psychoanalytic lines, consciousness is a screen that absorbs shocks and processes novelties into recognizable forms that compose the elements of experience.  

Urban conditions, with their rushing crowds and clanging machines, overwhelm consciousness as a screen, which can no longer order experience, stand before what happens and then mold and incorporate it. Modern media organs, beginning with the printing press and culminating in portable, personal electronic devices, besiege the subject of experience with information that dislocates and disassociates. 

The long-range artillery bombardment of information proves devastating because the foregoing course of material and philosophical history has invested all its rationality and veracity in the waking subject of knowledge, the Cartesian Cogito critically refined by Kant into the transcendental unity of apperception, and this subject breaks down under the pressure to absorb, interpret and categorize an accelerating pace of events and an increasingly complex causal nexus.  

Here it is worthwhile to cite the work of Giorgio Agamben, who retraces the materialist degradation of experience from Baudelaire through Proust to Benjamin. In his Infancy and History, he describes a profound change in the status of imagination that has far-reaching effects on experience and desire. 

According to Agamben, the modern version of rationality purges dreams and imagination from the domain of knowledge, designating them as unreal, unpredictable and subjective, thereby destroying their ancient and medieval status as mediators between the subjective and objective, between experience and knowledge. Modern science quickly forgets or denies its foundational obverse in mysticism and Hermeticism and cuts its ties with traditional or primitive knowledge that wells up from dreams, visions and altered states.  

Desire becomes insatiable because its fantasies no longer mediate between the desiring subject and the desired object; when reality and knowledge are granted to imagination, fantasy joins the desiring subject with its desired object in the form of an image, through which possession and satisfaction are attainable.  

For the modern subject of knowledge, fantasy is an index of the absent, in that what is fantasized is registered as missing, unreachable. Though fantasies and dreams are strictly confined within the subject, they can’t be owned, because they’re not weighted with reality; out of this insatiable and haunting desire that can’t delight in its fantasy objects, Sadean perversion is born, a furious hatred, manipulation and consumption of the body of the other.  

The sadistic drive of modern sexuality follows from the way that fantasy stimulates desire without giving any satisfaction, because phantasmatic satisfaction has been discounted as unreal, and what can be given in reality is only a body for consumption. Sadean perversion tends to pass through two stages: the first is violent indulgence and the second is exhaustion. In consequence, the engines of desire, the dreaming and fantasizing faculties that weave together the subject, knowledge and experience, are expropriated by what Horkheimer and Adorno called the culture industries, by what is described in a slightly different vein as the society of the spectacle.  

A modern subject in shifting urban environments and technological systems can’t incorporate its experiences, nor can it own or find satisfaction in its desires; without conscious decision it outsources its imagination and knowledge and buys them back in the form of commodified spectacles produced by industrial media organs managed by experts staffing mass-scale governing bodies and scientific enterprises. 

If, for Baudelaire, the crowded urban conditions of the 19^th century overwhelm the screen of consciousness so that it can no longer assimilate its materials, and if fantasy is detached from knowledge and reality and externalized through industrial production as consumable objects, then the contemporary usage of digital devices takes on new meaning as the technologically reappropriated administration of shock effects for the purpose of reviving a deadened spirit. 

The subject of the present has nothing other than electronic stimulation to substantialize it or spark its movements. It can only approximate ownership of its experiences by externalizing them in data banks and displaying them on social media platforms. The subject stokes its desire by producing and consuming digital images and generates a semblance of attention through the shocks of media instruments.  

Within a materialist perspective, consciousness performs a vital role of absorbing impressions. Consciousness is a screen, and what we experience is the part of reality we categorize as regular, habitual, average, expected. What shocks us is improperly experienced, recorded as traumatic and often disavowed or suppressed. For Baudelaire, the shock effect is characteristic of the modern age. Urbanization discredits experience through its barrage of novelty, through its exposure of the subject to the strange. The person undergoes progressive estrangement in mass society, even as a theoretical countermove is attempted, with experience itself upheld as the sole source of value. 

Recording and projecting technology, from cameras and televisions to smartphones, thereby work as technical supplements of consciousness, not only in an active or revelatory way, but defensively as well. The various screens that now surround us don’t simply or primarily open up new and distant worlds; at the same time their more essential task is to block out most of the stimuli of the mass-scale environment, which the individual consciousness can no longer confront and incorporate.  

The secondary point of using digital technology is to connect to people and places at a distance. More urgently, the primary point is to screen out what’s immediately threatening, unpleasant, disturbing and alien, everything that makes our present-day conditions dispiriting and exhausting.  

Social media and smartphones are blamed as the cause of a pervasive state of distraction, when they should rather be understood as effects, emergency means of combating or staving off the complete collapse of attention, experience and social cohesion initiated by the scientific and industrial revolution. 

-- 

A materialist analysis of degraded experience, however illuminating, is insufficient for understanding the despair and malaise of the present. To complete the picture, we must come to grips with theoretical and religious transformations that have occurred, all the decisions that have been made on the ideal plane, the shifts in values that have worked their way down from high culture to everyday life.  

The early modern scientific revolution was implicitly atheistic, and by the time The Enlightenment reached full force, the human project of conquering nature was aggressively anti-religious. Though a counter-enlightenment reasserted the importance of religion, the prevailing trend, backed by scientific and technical achievements, moved in the direction of secularization and disenchantment, carrying out a muscular and surgical attack on all forms of myth, faith and revealed truth.  

High culture reactions to Enlightenment Atheism varied considerably and often clashed with each other, but for the most part they based their criticism of the scientific revolution not on transcendent religion, or more specifically the European Christian tradition, but rather on anti-rational lines of argument that posited more fundamental or atmospheric determining influences on human behavior, such as instinct, history, culture and geography.  

In a process detailed exhaustively by Auguste Del Noce, many of the more forceful cultural figures adopted the assumption that a threshold had been crossed and that it was no longer possible to think and live as people did before. Civilization could no longer take religion for granted or rely on transcendent notions as explanations or justifications for any material or social conditions. Metaphysics had revealed its bankruptcy, and all subsequent scientific, philosophical and cultural efforts had to proceed without reference to transcendence or eternity.  

Thinkers sought new foundations and new frames. Though a simplification, a major break took place between continental European and Anglo-American thought. On the continental European side, philosophy tasked itself with interpreting the failures and limitations of metaphysics; focusing on deconstructive readings of the history of philosophy to expose gaps, blind spots, the unsaid, repressed otherness.  

Continental thought examined and prioritized various forms of pre-rational and preconceptual reality, often championing poetry, grammar and rhetoric as more primordially instructive than science, while Anglo-American thought turned to positivism, equating truth with what can be scientifically and empirically proven, disqualifying metaphysics and religion as nonsense.  

Even with all the tension and discord among the various outgrowths of the enlightenment, a cultural condition was establishing itself in broad enough outline that automatically dispensed with arguments, attitudes or practices founded on transcendence or any idea that pointed to a realm beyond experience or a higher destination of the soul. The order between eternity and time was flipped. Formerly, time was a mode of eternity. The human spirit in its mortal form passed through time, but it intimated and aspired to the infinite, and more importantly, oriented its outlook and behavior on the possibility, the hope and faith that it would ultimately ascend to the eternal.  

By the 20^th century, it had become much more commonplace to assume the reverse, to explain the idea of the eternal as an illusion of a temporal perspective. Heidegger represents an especially powerful distillation of this reversal in his description of the human as being toward death, determining finitude as our ultimate horizon. Instead of believing that time is a passage to what lies beyond, time is now the ground of being, a passage from nothing to nothing. An underlying sense of nothingness fills us with dread, and we either escape into the banality of everyday troubles and curiosities or we resolutely decide on courses of action in a void, knowing full well we’re caught up in an unfathomable process of appearing and disappearing.  

All atheistic existentialisms, all phenomenology, psychoanalysis, psychology and Marxist subschools, all the most powerful and influential cultural movements of the 19^th and 20^th century hold in common a primary denial of transcendence in a religious sense. Though they all vary widely in the degree of responsibility or importance they grant to the person, and though these strands of thought lead to conflicting political and social commitments, what they all tend to accent is one or another kind of immanence, a compression of reality into a single dimension, perfectly self-sufficient and encompassing and generative.  

Whether it’s class conflict for the Marxists, the drives for psychoanalysts, free decisions for existentialists, inherited patterns of the lifeworld for phenomenologists, the takeaway is that religious ideas and beliefs are derived from more fundamental and intraworldly processes, both individual and collective. Secularization in all its versions culminates in an attempted wholesale valorization of experience, filtered into a mass-culture promotion of self-realization in this one and only life.  

The overriding project of a person in a secular society is the therapeutic, scientific and consumerist optimizing of sensation, the pursuit of individually defined fulfillment in a market economy free from traditional limits on behavior. Experience is loaded with a potential value it can’t bear or deliver on its own, and the despair that this inadequacy breeds in the soul is denied through more frantic and compulsive technological and economic activity.  

A mood of anxious evaluation spreads through the social environment. All transcendence is shifted from the vertical dimension to the horizontal. Finitude can’t be defeated; death destroys us for all time, but within this one life we briefly live, all the old restrictions must be overcome. All moments and acts are vulnerable to corrosive judgement, and all experiences are haunted by the possibility of not having been felt or mined deeply enough.  

Maybe the most definitive pop culture expression of the desperate imperative to complete what is inherently incomplete and ephemeral is the phrase, you only live once. Such a refrain intends to inspire people to live more boldly and vividly, but it rings with an ominous overtone. You only live once empowers the person to go after thrilling and gratifying experiences at the cost of condemning them to eternal death. The trouble is that there’s no stable measure by which to determine the worth and beauty of experiences set against a backdrop of nothingness.  

Even what appears as superficially successful experience still buckles before the dread of not fully extracting all possible enjoyment, and the more obvious sorrows and frustrations become even more difficult to shoulder, as they can’t be redeemed by a higher power.  

Mortal life is incomplete because it is temporal; reducing the human spirit to its mortality puts undue pressure on experience, on the moment, to stand in for impossible immortality. The frustration, despair and restlessness that results from trying to force the incomplete to achieve fullness is then alleviated with digital technology and the production of simulations.  

From a spiritual standpoint, smartphone use protects people from despair. Even though social media exacerbates envy and depression, it does so while reinforcing the illusion that some possible set of earthly experiences could provide complete satisfaction. And at the very least, digital technology opens a much greater range of vicarious experiences and gives an ersatz eternity to our own corruptible and vanishing moments by preserving them in simulated casts.  

No longer watched over by the divine, and with no consistent standard by which to order and incorporate our experience, we offload our incongruous and unsatisfying episodes into a medium that seems to promise the last remaining means of verification and valorization.  

The end of experience: the conversion of dead impressions into quantified reactions, the translation of unlived life into a simulation to hide the truth that there’s nothing to hide, nothing awaiting us and nothing after us except the repetition of our spiritless copies.  

-- 

To the extent that we still dwell within a culture, our present-day heritage enjoins us to extract as much pleasure and power from earthly, mortal life as possible, with little to no regard for our ancestry or the destination of our souls. We tell ourselves there’s nothing to expect beyond what we can feel in the moment. The person’s prime goals are increasing vitality, creating an identity out of all available cultural and historical materials and securing a comfortable and enjoyable existence. 

Individualism converges with centuries of atheistic and immanentist strands of thought, ending in the atomization of the person, who refers to his own sensation as his ultimate guide to conduct, even though he depends on mass-scale institutions to set provisional standards and supply his vulnerable body and mind with necessities and diversions. The technological and social systems are placed at the disposal of the person, who employs various techniques and discourses to secure resources and status. 

Taking our cues from Auguste Del Noce, we can trace the development of the atheistic enlightenment to Marxism as the triumph of historical materialism and scientism, with Marxism representing the collectivist, political and revolutionary wing of modern thought. When the revolutionary project fails, Marxism collapses into The Affluent Society, or a capitalist/socialist mixed consumerist economy that promises material wealth and recognition for all.  

Consumerism generates its own critical reaction, and in the sixties, a countermovement arises that castigates the more vulgar aspects of materialism. Instead of basing life on accumulation of objects and comforts, the counterculture prizes experience, its variety and intensity. For Auguste Del Noce, the apparently anti-consumerist post-war ethos necessarily promotes eroticism as the highest practice and standard. With all transcendent objects denied and all political projects focused on individual flourishing, the cultivation of sexual ability emerges as the defining preoccupation.  

The superficial rejection of materialism coinciding with the rise of recording technology unwittingly leads to the commodification of experience itself, in the sense that people seek out moments and sensations as if they were objects that signaled wealth, status and attractiveness. At the same time, impressions, thoughts, reflections and events are pressed into electronic and digital forms for storage, circulation and display. 

Experience now relies on industrial scale recording technology, with the result that the formal matrix by which experience is interpreted and catalogued, formerly an inherited artifact of specific cultures and histories, is externalized, objectified and valorized by the owners of the means of simulation, compressed into a generic interpretative schema without ties to place and time.  

The training and acculturation that occurred through organic social bonds have been replaced with electrochemical excitations, a kind of neo-behaviorist programming of the isolated organism to act in service to algorithms that drive advertising revenue. In the guise of individual empowerment, digital technology locks the person into a loop of dependence on stimulation that harvests and exploits brain chemistry and the nervous system. Bio-psychic monitoring systems engineered for private profit and government control penetrate the social body all the way down to the level of individual impulse.  

Declining civic engagement and family dissolution are precipitated by several concurrent economic and technological trends and then ideologically reinforced through mass media promotion of self-realization and individualism, as well as critical and skeptical attacks on religion and transcendence. If you gave a smartphone to a rural family at the turn of the 19^th century, they wouldn’t know what to do with it, they wouldn’t smoothly adopt its functions. For digital totalization there must be a meeting of technical infrastructure, social deterioration and religious decline.  

Experience as the moment-to-moment succession of individual impressions can’t support the spiritual or social needs of the human being, and the disappointment and frustration at the heart of a materialist and secular enterprise of maximizing vitality finds its release valve in the digital conversion of life into semblences of having lived.  

Baudelaire addressed his readers as distracted fragments of mass populations brought together through urbanization. His project aimed at transfiguring the lack of experience caused by the shock effect of the new social setting. The artist would establish a new common ground for atomized masses thrown into chaotic conditions. The lyric poet of the 19^th century, with his romantic attempt at expressing a deficiency of experience, becomes the 21^st century interchangeable individual, divested of lyricism but covered with electrocauterized vernacular and images, committed to aestheticizing a pointless existence.  

Even in the most socially nourishing environment, experience suffers from an incurable insufficiency, and inevitably points beyond itself. The soul longs for transcendence and redemption. Left to itself, experience either dissipates or tortures us with unfulfilled promises. Socio-religious structure stabilizes and depressurizes experience so that the moment can pass without desperate capitalization. Life aspires to what lies outside of life. The campaign of folding all longing within the temporal and material disfigures experience, hounding the spirit with despair that is then numbed by the consumption of entertainment.  

Through population churn and sensory overload, modern urban space becomes intolerable; people don’t notice their own profound unease because they dose themselves with digital anesthetics. Likewise, contemporary time is both crushing and vapid, filling us with a dysfunctional urgency and an apprehension of nothingness. In clearing away all the impediments to individual flourishing, our socio-cultural programs uphold experience as the foundation and objective of life; and thereby obliterate the reference points and support structures through which we make sense of ourselves.  

Experience solidifies by way of idealization and socialization. When the projection and investment mechanisms of religion and social belonging break down, the raw materials, the real goods, that supposedly underlie our illusions also dissolve into phantoms. Life surrenders to spectacle, a pale image of denied eternity.