I’ve been thinking lately about one impact of technology that may have been overlooked.
Nowadays if someone has a free moment, they have their phone to occupy their mind. I lived in a time before phones. What did we used to do with free moments? Sometimes we had reading material available. Sometimes we would day dream. Sometimes we would just think and introspect about ourselves. Sometimes we would carefully observe the world around us looking for anything interesting.
And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
lordnacho · 5h ago
Serendipity has been lost. If you aren't at least open to talk to randoms, you are stuck in your own network. People you know from school or work, and people they know, that's it.
You won't be approachable when you are paying attention to a phone.
And it's valuable. There's a lot of people you'll find interesting, but they happen to not be within 2 hops of you. If you want to put a number on it, look at what people pay (opportunity cost) for educational or work opportunities. The social network you'll get is often touted as one of the main benefits of private school, for instance.
Despite being a bit of an introvert, I often reach out to randoms. Just to see what's there. It's been a great strategy thus far.
supriyo-biswas · 5h ago
Theoretically, the serendipity part of it could be replicated online (see Omegle etc.) but I feel that the current regulatory regimes in most countries have a preference for building social media that simply serves up anodyne engagement porn, etc.
the_snooze · 5h ago
The internet is a low-trust environment. Any scammer can reach you from anywhere in the world and try to take advantage of that desire for serendipity. You mention Omegle specifically, which was a hunting ground for sexual predators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegle#Child_sexual_abuse
It's the things that don't scale and instead have high barriers to entry that are most likely to produce actual healthy human connection.
scarface_74 · 4h ago
Every online place to randomly meet people ends up having dick picts.
I live in a vacation area upstairs from a bar frequented by tourists. I’m friends with the bartender. I’ll go down there when it’s not too busy sit at the bar talk to the bartender and whoever else comes around and is interested in talking. Mostly other guys or couples.
I usually avoid talking to women because I’m obviously married wearing my ring and no matter what, it might come across as creepy and women usually have their guard up and are probably there with spouses somewhere around.
lotsofpulp · 5h ago
Those are unknown to you, but not completely random. They are at least rich enough to go on vacation, and outgoing enough to go to a bar (and either have friends to go on vacation with or be coupled up), and the bartender is helping you screen them.
Many people typically want to chat with people unknown to them, but not completely random either (especially for women).
scarface_74 · 3h ago
There are certain environments where you can randomly talk to people and it’s considered a social norm and certain environments you can’t.
Sitting at the bar is one of those places. I usually go, get one drink and sip on soda the rest of the time and just talk. The bartender doesn’t mind because we are friends and I bring him a lot more business just from other people hanging around and ordering drinks.
On the other hand, the gym is usually not a place where people want to talk and especially where women don’t want to be approached by men. I use to teach group fitness part time in another life and the exception was as one of the few straight men (and at the time single), women naturally came up and spoke to me or I could start conversations with them and thier guard would be down.
Also airports, planes and other public transportation are places I generally don’t strike up random conversations.
LostMyLogin · 5h ago
> And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
Two days ago I was in Best Buy looking for a DAC for my headphones. They have a section of gaming keyboards and headphones where a kid in his mid to late 20's started to strike up a conversation with me. It went from whether I play video games, to if I live in town, to his story on dropping out of college.
The entire time all I could process was the question of why this kid was talking to me and I kept giving him short bland responses. Not that long ago I would have sat there for an hour talking with this guy and loved every second of it. Then I would have come home and annoyed my wife by telling her all about it.
I know it's cliche to say but something changed in me over the initial COVID lock-downs where I went from socializing being a necessity in my life to just wanting to be home and not dealing with people. A point that bums me out the more I think about it.
pseudocomposer · 6h ago
I think the “cure” to this is fostering curiosity within ourselves, and learning to balance our curiosity in real world objects, locations, people, activities, etc. in a way that’s balanced with digital information. And understanding that all digital information is really just an approximation of these real-world things.
Put another way… you have to let yourself be curious about, say, the garden in the park, rather than looking at your phone. And when it comes to people - talking to a stranger rather than looking at your phone - you have to not only let yourself be curious, but also be vulnerable enough to make that curiosity known (a secondary skill, that I think can be built on a foundation of curiosity).
iknowSFR · 6h ago
I often think about this as well. If you have a problem to solve, it’s easiest to use the internet and find threads or videos to solve that problem. But in the “before times” you would need to seek out someone with experience and have a full conversation. While having the information at our fingertips is much more convenient and helps bridge gaps in communities that would lack experienced experts, it does cut the opportunity to socialize but at least 1 conversation per problem.
tbrownaw · 6h ago
> And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
Turns out that making it too easy to avoid the hell that is other people has some less than great side effects.
williamdclt · 6h ago
Not sure about "overlooked"? It's one of the most common refrain of the past ~20y that smartphones have existed: "people don't talk or pay attention to anything anymore now they're all on their smartphone all the time", it's one of the most criticisms of smartphones
dfxm12 · 5h ago
This is not necessarily tech driven. People are extroverted or introverted. Pre smartphone, when I was alone on the bus or subway, I always had my nose in a paper or a book. Now it's my phone or a Kobo. I didn't like and wasn't good at making small talk back then, and I don't think that has changed much. I feel like there are a lot of Seinfeld subplots built around avoiding social interaction that I really identified with.
On the other hand, I feel a lot of media is pushing us to ignore, suspect or otherwise be scared of strangers. I don't know that this is uniquely tech driven though.
em-bee · 4h ago
yes, but only the real introverts carry a book. everyone carries a phone enabling more people to exhibit introverted behavior.
i used to be one of those with a book. now i listen to audio books which incidentally allows me to appear more extroverted because i can make eye contact and i guess people assume i am just listening to music and am therefore approachable.
> And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I think this is the core reason for so much video arcade machine related nostalgia. Those that experienced this the first time around will know about stacking coins on the machines, playing against those you didn't know and so on. Now that is back to table football etc. but an entire category came and went in the space of 30 years.
ryukoposting · 6h ago
I accidentally left home without my phone the other day. I got a coffee, read a book, and people-watched. It was nice.
cmilton · 1h ago
Imagine how much more time is on the toilet. I’m sure we have some book readers, but I remember reading the label of random items within arms reach.
smokel · 6h ago
Do you remember television?
unFou · 5h ago
back in the day, TVs were a bit less portable...
Apreche · 4h ago
And also communal. The family would watch together on the only screen they had.
bamboozled · 6h ago
Sounds like a myth to me, I remember life before "devices" and laptops, I had newspapers, books, magazines, board games and card games, walkmans, audiobooks, idk...maybe you're talking like a thousand years ago?
Not to say the phones aren't having an impact of some sort, but yeah, I always knew how to distract myself.
HelloUsername · 6h ago
With your smartphone you can do all the things you just listed, and more..
KaiserPro · 6h ago
Tech has played a big part in the shift that has caused lonleyness, but its at best a sideffect.
there are four key things that "obliged" people to meet in the local area:
1) organised religion
2) organised fun, ie drinking, sports, location based hobbies
3) organised politics (social clubs dressed up as poltical movements, or vicaversa but crucially meeting regularly to do activities together)
4) work
In the UK at least there has been a strong but steady shift away from 1 & 3, to the point where they just don't really exist at any critical mass for people under 60. work is now more remote, which mean less concentration of people
Combine that with digital means to form your own virtual groups, You have less and less ties to your local area.
sprinkle on top that parents are utterly horrified by the idea that children might be left to wander, means that meeting your best mate (because there they are on the same street and the same age) becomes digital only.
There is also a massive decline in funded social venues, as council budgets have been slashed.
So whilst tech could be blamed for this, I strongly suspect that its only making it more bearable. The UK at least needs systematic cultural change.
stego-tech · 6h ago
This is something I absolutely loathe about modern technology and its uses. We have grand power and potential to solve so many societal ills, and yet our grandest achievements are repeatedly used not to better humanity, but to enrich a monied minority that views humans as disposably inconvenient, human interaction a luxury to be savored rather than a baseline expectation.
We replaced branch offices with call centers, then outsourced them to people we will never see and cannot relate to in a foreign land. Then we replaced them with chatbots and TTS, anything to reduce support times and save more money for those at the top.
We built out infrastructure that met our needs and revolutionized how we worked. We did this on-site, with glorious rooms of consoles and equipment that, while fragile, were also impressive to behold. Then leadership got on a treadmill of “also needs”, bolting on new kit of questionable value, outsourcing expensive jobs abroad or to contracting firms. As internal knowledge dried up, it became easier to embrace the perpetual bullshit machine demanding you adopt ERP as a medium-sized business, demanding you hoard data, demanding you surrender sovereignty to “the cloud”, to embrace per-second billing over amortization schedules. Fewer humans in the loop, knowing the business, understanding its needs. Just some guy at the top slapping their name over a Gartner or Big Three report before sending it to the board.
And now in this “age of AI”, the attack continues at record pace. Gone are the people who know and understand your code, replaced by chatbots who can only predict what they’ve already seen. Gone are the developers, the engineers, the architects, replaced with armies of temps and contractors who aren’t allowed to engage with the workers or incentivized to solve a problem, but merely meet arbitrary KPIs decided by algorithms they had no say over.
Robots are meting out punishments to gig workers, our devices spy on us to send data to companies hostile to our existence as consumers, with products designed to break but never be repaired, sold by stores online with no human interaction for questions or to identify flaws.
We have allowed a system to be built that does nothing to improve the daily lives of the average human anymore. These “innovations” do not drive meaningful growth in a majority of businesses. New technologies are little more than checkboxes to be met rather than profound improvements in processes or automation to enable leisure.
We let this happen. We can also choose - at any time we want - to stop.
FuriouslyAdrift · 6h ago
I keep thinking back to the book, Manna, by Marshall Brain...
"All Our Representatives are Assisting Other Customers"
jleyank · 7h ago
If you want to learn about invisibility, grow old. Servile occupations are also good vehicles for such education. Just remember that the invisible people vote and know what’s going down.
lapcat · 6h ago
> Just remember that the invisible people vote
Some do, but 36% of the eligible population did not vote in 2024. I don't think there's any evidence that "invisible" workers disproportionately vote.
I think the article makes a very questionable—and unnecessary—connection to electoral politics: "A sense of feeling invisible clearly animates working-class rage in many countries, and may have powered Donald Trump to victory in the US presidential election last fall." Note the weasel words "may have", as well as the vague, unsupported "clearly animates" claim, which I would dispute. Although Trump did try to appeal to the working class in several ways, I don't recall him ever discussing the issue of depersonalization, the subject of the article. What do immigration and tariffs, for example, have to do with depersonalization?
supriyo-biswas · 6h ago
Steelmanning the argument, it may be that depersonalization amplifies the resentment that people face as they feel (or are) displaced through job replacement that occurs through immigration and globalization.
lapcat · 5h ago
It may be. Or it may not be. At this point, it's pure unsubstantiated speculation.
In any case, that seems to contradict "and know what’s going down." It would be misplaced resentment to blame depersonalization on immigration, for example. It's possible that immigrants are depersonalized more than any other group. And ironically, Trump has aligned himself with a number of tech lords who are at the forefront of depersonalization.
grumpycamel · 2h ago
I feel the severely increased number of things in our lives -- social connections (former workplaces, schools, kids, church, neighbors, etc), work demands, parenting demands, caring for parents, interests (hobbies, tv shows, ...), modern living (commute, finances, adulting, exercise, property maintenance, ...), etc -- has created so much cognitive load that the only way to "scale" the mind and participate is to leverage tech (social media, online, apps, etc)
how to ease this cognitive load ? I imagine that it is very tempting to accidentally dehumanize others in the pursuit of looking after one's own burdens
coffeecat · 6h ago
After spending some time prompting LLMs and then talking to actual people, I've once or twice been tempted to phrase questions along the lines of "Comment on x, with an emphasis on y; do not mention z."
HK-NC · 5h ago
Isn't this just part of living in overcrowded cities? I have lived in several small villages and everyone greets one another in passing, neighbours get familiar, strangers you see around make an effort to get to know the person they keep seeing. In the city I might walk past the same person every day on the way to work for 4 years but a smile and eye contact would be received as enthusiastically as a leaflet from a Mormon.
riskable · 5h ago
No. If you live in an apartment building and you stop by the coffee shop on the first floor on your way to work every day you get to know the people that work there. Or rather, you would get to know the people that work there if the corporation that owned the franchise paid/cared enough to retain people.
It's the same story everywhere—regardless of whether or not you live in a big city or a small town: It's "jobs", not people.
huem0n · 6h ago
"Gray Death" is what I think we should call it, because yes it is much more than loneliness.
Its like a fog, slow, suffocating, hard to grasp, hard to agree on where it starts or ends. But we agree its there, and agree its a problem.
Spooky23 · 6h ago
When people harken back to the good old days of factory work - this is what they want.
bandrami · 6h ago
In the good old days factory workers were so invisible that if one was crushed by the machine press they brought somebody else in to replace him by the time the mess was cleaned up.
gavinray · 6h ago
> *‘Instead, customers just point and say: “OK, yeah, just put it over there,” and then I drop off the stuff, and they just tap it. I think they see it as more of an – I think they see it as automation. They see you as just a system.’*
If I pay someone to perform a task for me, that's all I desire out of them. Do the job, do it right, collect your payment, and leave.
A transactional exchange is not the right place to look for meaningful human connection.
In fact, if I COULD hire robots instead of humans to do things like drive me places or deliver my groceries, I WOULD. Robots are predictable and reliable, a random human may or may not be.
ksynwa · 6h ago
How are robots reliable when they aren't even capable yet of doing this job that you want them to do?
gavinray · 2h ago
The driverless taxis I've been in have done a pretty good job.
In some places, Amazon has delivery drones.
Ordering at Kiosks at fast-food places is immeasurably better than ordering from a cashier, especially if you make a lot of customizations to your food items.
huem0n · 5h ago
I'm glad you're telling us it should be socially acceptable to treat you like a robot at your job. I hope every customer coworker and business partner honors your wish by pretending you are a lifeless chunk of metal with no purpose other than satisfying the agreed upon transaction. If insulting you feels good to them, I hope they will berate you endlessless for things that are not your fault (a robot wouldn't care). After all, whether its reliability or the desire for a verbal punching bag, the customer is always right regardless of anything the employee may feel.
When you are old and gray, I hope strangers continue to honor your wish by seeing you as a worthless husk because you no longer capable of offering any services they care about.
Old people I know that treat employees like robots don't have many friends or family they care about them. Maybe, if you coincidentally end up in that position too, you can pay robots to keep you company. I hear they're very reliable and predictable.
gavinray · 2h ago
I subscribe to the "No Hello" philosophy, for what it's worth:
They posit that people are alienated, estranged and invisible. "Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society" It's alienation that is the driving emotion behind people coming together (leading to things like socialism / communism).
Given that it's a core left wing idea, it's a bit strange to see only this applied to right wing populism. Possibly it's a signal of the authors own politics. Maybe the recent adoption of identity and group politics tends to keep people separated and increase alienation than towards a togetherness in a common shared struggle. Reducing alienation could lead to a weakening of certain political stances. Today's technology appears (falsely) to be apolitical, amoral and independent of the traditional things politics are about.
But its important to be fair, that was a tiny bit of the article and there's not much politics in this interesting piece which is really about technology and neither "Marx" nor "alienation" nor any old school theoretical background on the phenomena being observed is talked about.
jmyeet · 5h ago
The article not talking about alienation is either a failing from shallow analysis or a political statement in and of itself not to criticize capitalism. To blame this solely on technology is somewhat of a Luddite take. That's a symptom.
The very fact that you have free time, weekends, paid leave, enough money to enjoy these things (until the last few decades anyway), etc are the result of anti-capitalist collective action. People quite literally died so you can have these things.
It's no accident the society is so hyper-individualistic now. That's be design by the capital-owning class to destroy any form of collectivism because it's a threat to the economic order.
So things like "third spaces" disappearing can't be viewed in a vacuum. It's a foreseeable consequence of hoarding property (ie ever-increasing housing prices). The powers-that-be love that. You're not forming bonds with your fellow human beings. You're also not "wasting" time on recreation instead of working a third job you hate just to make ends meet and make somebody else more money.
A key part of Marx's alienation is the alienation of labor. This is where you're not paid enough to afford the goods or services you produce. We see this in the developing world: literal children being paid pennies to make clothes they can't possibly afford. We are increasingly seeing the alienation of labor in the developed world.
MarkusWandel · 6h ago
Once upon a time - an era that was already ending when I was young - there were also a lot of service workers. The mailman, the milkman, the ice man, the coal delivery man (not being sexist here, these were the terms then in use), the newspaper boy, it goes on and on. Were they treated any differently by their customers?
And yet, more integrated into society weren't they. Rich or poor, you had your social clubs, your church scene, your neighbourhood contacts. You had to, since you didn't have TV or internet.
pjc50 · 6h ago
> Were they treated any differently by their customers?
Yes, you'd be far more likely to have a chat with them. But that's because they didn't have micromanagement of delivery times and the person they were delivering to was often a housewife.
Dusseldorf · 3h ago
I was thinking about this last night while walking the dog around our neighborhood. We're frequently hanging out in our front yard during the day in the summer, so it's not unusual to chat for a bit with the mail carrier as they're dropping stuff in the mailbox at our front door. Just one street over, the houses were built about 20 years after ours, and instead of having mailboxes on the houses themselves, they're out at the curb. The mail carrier just drops the mail in right from the mail truck, and keeps driving. It's probably a small thing, but it's yet another little human interaction that has been "optimized" away for the folks living on that street.
Same deal with the self checkouts at the grocery store. I know people love to hate on small talk or chit chat, but I think those little interactions can really help build community cohesiveness and reinforce the idea that the world is made up of humans, rather than uncaring automatons.
MarkusWandel · 2h ago
By having a dog, you're already way ahead of the curve! I had to take care of one for a month or two, long ago in a past life. And walking the dog gets you chatting with all the other dog people.
And yeah, the rushed gig schedule. These days, a package delivery is left on the stoop, proof-of-delivery photo taken and by the time I notice (they don't usually even ring the doorbell) they've already driven off again. And of course "community mailboxes" means the regular mail carrier doesn't walk the neighbourhood any more either.
card_zero · 5h ago
You reminded me of G.K. Chesterton's story (1911 or so) about being socially invisible, "The invisible man":
I think the best reading on the fundamental afflictions that affect society is in Han's Burnout Society.
So thinking about loneliness and alienation is really easy through the lenses of the hyperpositivity and the rise of narcissism. Suddenly these are all aspects of the focus on the individual and the "You can" ethos.
> too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being
It's really hard to feel seen when everybody only interacts with everybody else if it serves their own project of self improvement.
zingababba · 3h ago
I encourage everyone to stop doing stimulants for awhile and see how it effects their habits in this area. I stopped drinking caffeine and literally became a different person in terms of being able to just randomly start conversations and keep them going.
jagger27 · 6h ago
I feel such vindication in my disdain for this work, and the people who continue to automate human experience away.
You are monsters who mistake luxury for bliss, money for agency, and power for love.
I speak directly to the likes of Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, and all those who follow them. They are false prophets who deny us all our humanity. Monster is the perfect word for them.
lo_zamoyski · 4h ago
"Loneliness" and "invisibility" focus on effects rather than causes.
Liberal hyperindividualism understands human beings as atomized units that enter into transactional relationships only. (Collectivism commits the opposite error of atomism by dissolving the person into a tyrannical amorphous social soup, likewise rendering persons disposable, but for the "greater good of society" instead of the "greater good of the self".) But the problem is that human beings are social animals, and our humanity is realized and actualized in our relations with other persons. Atomism dehumanizes us.
This liberalism is what we sleepily embraced a couple of centuries ago in parts of the West, but the consequences of such choices can take decades if not centuries to fully materialize. So as liberalism has wound through the traditional social fabric and institutions of the world — like family and community life — it has, over time, eroded those institutions and brought the world more in line with what was always there in liberalism. The famous "neutrality" of liberalism is anything but, and this presumption of its neutrality and thus what's taken to be its obvious correctness is the source of its power to erode. When something enters into a disagreement with liberal postulates, then by definition, that something must give way to those liberal postulates. They quietly determine and police what is taken to be normal, and what's more, from this position of presumed neutrality, as contradictions emerge, it automatically "wins" and thus penetrates every more deeply into traditional institutions until those institutions have effectively withered away.
W.r.t. the first example given in the article, notice the delivery guy's desire for a personal connection with the person he's delivering to. What's that all about? Sure, in small towns where everyone knows everyone, we might know the mailman who's been making the same rounds for 30 years and he might know us, but in any polity of macroscopic size combined with the churn among delivery people and the residents moving in and out of neighborhoods, this is never going to happen. It's a weird expectation on those grounds alone. The world is too much in flux, too transitional.
Of course, some people may lack basic civility (the usual "hello, thank you, have a nice day", things I reflexively say when addressing those serving me in these kinds of jobs). What is the cause of this boorish lack of basic incivility? Either bad manners, or a lack of humanity on the person lacking them. But we're not talking about bad manners.
Boorish behavior and misplaced small village mentality aside, the reason it might bother the delivery person this much might just be that he lacks a social base himself and is looking for substitutes in all the wrong places. And that would make sense: why would this person be any different than the people he delivers to? The difference might be that people in relatively stable corporate jobs, for example, might find some kind of weak surrogate for social stability and community in their workplace.
Community needs a reason for its existence. There must be a reason for people to be together. A family has in this sense the strongest justified bonds of community, surviving all sorts of life events and changes. It is no mistake that it has been the basis for all the other forms of community we enter into, voluntary and intentional, or involuntary. That is why liberal hyperindividualism's final battle is with the family. It is the last remaining obstacle to the fully "liberated" atomic self. But liberalism's notions of what constitutes authentic freedom are flawed, and so we pursue with zeal our own misery. The answer to collectivist tyranny is not atomistic sterility.
bobxmax · 6h ago
Humans become invisible when a society becomes entirely transactional and human worth is commoditized.
MichaelZuo · 6h ago
Hasn’t human worth always been commoditized?
Ever since the first two caveman began exchanging their time and effort. Like stone axes for mammoth meat.
huem0n · 5h ago
I long made the same mistake of assuming history. The answer is no, that kind of interaction wasn't transactional in a robotic way, it was highly trust-and-relationship building. Which is exactly what we are missing today.
Go to a farmers market week after week, buying and talking to people. It is completely different from a vending machine. I know the people at my market, if they asked for help I'd help them for nothing in return. And I have no doubt at all they would do the same for me.
The vending machine owner would get no such help from me, nor would I expect them to help me if I asked.
bobxmax · 5h ago
Correct. The rapid urbanization of society has crippled us - we are pack animals suddenly thrust into an environment with a constant nascent undertone of hostility.
The feeling of constantly being surrounded by people you can't trust is a foreign and debilitating one.
pjc50 · 6h ago
Someone making trades from time to time doesn't take over their life in quite the same way. Ultimately it's a question of richness, like having a variety of diet.
Pre-20th century people would have much stronger family ties, religious ties, and in many places some sort of feudal ties of varying levels of onerousness. But you can also find examples of people being extremely lonely, such as press ganged sailors separated from their families.
MichaelZuo · 6h ago
Sure it could only occupy a portion of their life… but how is the fractional size relevant?
hshdhdhj4444 · 6h ago
Just because humans traded doesn’t mean that “human worth was commoditized”.
I’m not sure what that means, actually, but it certainly doesn’t mean voluntary trading of time and goods.
scarface_74 · 5h ago
Human worth was literally commoditized and humans were bought and sold until the late 1800’s and legally segregated until the mid 1960’s
bobxmax · 4h ago
Industrial-scale slavery is a post-agricultural phenomenon and represents a very small percentage of overall human development.
Even such slavery, modern western/catholic chattel-style slavery aside, wasn't entirely transactional in that way. Many Ottoman slaves had better lives than aristocrats, for instance, and had real agency and influence.
Western European/American/Catholic imperialist slavery was somewhat unique in how dehumanizing it was.
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lotsofpulp · 6h ago
There are only 24 hours in a day, and so many days in a lifetime. Everyone is always trading time, since there is a very limited amount of it.
Even in a leisure situation, such as a party, people are going to make choices about how much time to interact with (or not interact with) certain people. Or spending time pontificating on HN.
unFou · 5h ago
I wonder if your example is a different kind of trade. When we trade time in a leisure situation, we're trading something more immediate and tangible. Whereas the transactional nature of the grandparent comment is more describing something more distanced.
An example of this that was told to me is imagine you're going to dinner with the in-laws (or maybe your best friend's parents). What would their reaction be if you took out your wallet and offered to pay them cash for the meal? As opposed to offering to e.g. bring a bottle of wine or helping to set the table?
Offering to pay might be the "transactional" trade meant by the grandparent. While offering to contribute [food | labour | goodwill] is more of the trading time in a leisure situation.
lotsofpulp · 5h ago
Typically, in accounting contexts, tangible is used to refer to physical products, such as mammoth meat, or stone axes.
Intangibles would be the gain or maintenance of reputation from going to have a meal at your in laws and all that jazz.
Regardless, in this context, trade is trade, one entity giving up something for another. Simply spending the time to go to your in laws for a meal is a trade. And while many would not cough up cash to show the transactional nature, far more would simply not go to the dinner (or go less often) and opt to spend their time elsewhere.
Or, if the in laws have something you want, maybe you opt to spend more time with them.
I am not claiming one has to solely view every interaction through this lens, or should. But it is a component of most every interaction. You could strike up a conversation with a stranger with no ulterior motive and then it carries on too long and you start thinking I could spend my time better elsewhere.
h2zizzle · 6h ago
Nope. The flip side of commoditization is relationships. Racism, xenophobia, nepotism, etc. are all products of a paradigm where, "What can you do for me? I don't care who does it," is less important than, "Who you are is most important, we can figure out what you can do for me later." And obviously ranking human worth along those lines isn't alien to this era or the preceding ones.
Depersonalization is a double-edged sword. You're no longer persecuted as an individual with a particular identity, but you're no longer valued as one, either. Though obviously it's not so much a binary as a field that can be collapsed to a point on a sliding scale.
lapcat · 6h ago
There's no evidence that any such transactions ever took place. That's an anachronism. Hunter-gatherer groups are much more likely to share in everything, including work and the products of work, not engage in capitalistic ownership and economic isolationism. That's only possible in a situation of abundance and governmental enforcement of individual property rights.
How do you even get mammoth meat without having a stone axe?
MichaelZuo · 6h ago
Two neighboring cavemen, one doesn’t like going on mammoth hunts but is really good at sharpening stones.
lapcat · 6h ago
I can't believe you're doubling down on the anachronism.
There was no such thing as "neighboring cavemen," like you have neighbors living in personal, separate houses today. Perhaps you've been watching too much of the Flintstones. And it doesn't matter whether you "like" going on mammoth hunts. You hunt, and you gather, or you die. Again you're imposing a contemporary background of abundance on an ancient environment of scarcity.
MichaelZuo · 5h ago
You don’t believe that some opted out of mammoth hunts to do other activities…?
bobxmax · 4h ago
What other activities would you opt out of mammoth hunts to do, that wouldn't lead to the tribe exiling you?
MichaelZuo · 2h ago
Making stone axes for the tribe…
lapcat · 1h ago
You're missing the point. There's a fundamental difference between doing what you're good at for the benefit of the tribe and doing what you're good at for your own personal benefit, refusing to share with the tribe unless they agree to your terms.
The former is sharing, the latter is trading. And again, there's no evidence that trading ever occurred in that situation. As another commenter mentioned, in the life-or-death scarcity of hunter-gatherer communities, you'd be punished or exiled (which would mean death) for modern capitalist-style selfishness. There's no commodification.
Also, knowledge and skills were shared. There were no trade secrets, no patents. It would be have been extremely dangerous for one person to be the exclusive source of an essential good. Again, specialization is a luxury of abundance.
PicassoCTs · 7h ago
If the world sentences you to isolated confinement with hard labor- is it unreasonable to torch such a world to the ground, hoping for better things in the ruins?
PS: Please don't downvote, just because the idea of your lifes invisible infrastructure buckling makes you angry.
probably_wrong · 6h ago
I would argue that only the phoenix is guaranteed to raise from the ashes. Everything else may come out worse or not at all. Sometimes when you burn something to the ground it just remains burnt.
Stretching your analogy (perhaps too much): when you're in isolated confinement there is at least someone ensuring you get fed, clothed, receive at least some basic care and are kept somehow safe. When you're in the ruins of a city you may starve, get beaten to death, die from a preventable disease, etc. And nothing ensures that the labor will be any lighter.
One argument for why this is unreasonable is that you can assume there is a wide variety of would-be torchers with different and conflicting agendas for the ruins.
pjc50 · 6h ago
That makes the occurrence more likely, even if the outcome is less successful.
criddell · 6h ago
I think it is unreasonable and probably naive to think that the giant vacuum you create would attract good people with honorable motives aligned to your well being.
My life's infrastructure isn't all that invisible and I'm grateful for it.
DougN7 · 6h ago
These ideas interest me. How does this happen practically? All money is devalued? An end to ownership of everything? All infrastructure destroyed and if not, who would keep it running and why? After the fall of the Soviet Union are things now more fair?
Jgoauh · 6h ago
i can't tell if you're trolling or not but its crazy that we've been brainwashed into believing the the only possible worlds are "10 rich men control everything" and "all laws rules and structure is abolished"
mealkh · 7h ago
I find your wording very poignant.
dymk · 6h ago
I too remember when Aristotle said “please don’t downvote”
akoboldfrying · 6h ago
How can you be sure that the people you will be torching are not also victims?
If you could avoid hurting anyone out of proportion to their level of complicity, maybe you do have grounds. But I don't think you can. Because it's the entire world you'd be torching, you'd need to know at least a little about every person in it first, and how your actions would impact them, and I don't think that's realistic.
tropicalfruit · 6h ago
maybe they are also "experiencing a crisis,...of depersonalisation" and a need for "‘recognition’, ‘mattering’ or ‘being seen"
chasd00 · 6h ago
Aren’t those just other word for attention whoring? I think the main issue is people see social media celebs and want to be like them and so when they don’t get enough attention they cry out and claim “invisibility”.
Nowadays if someone has a free moment, they have their phone to occupy their mind. I lived in a time before phones. What did we used to do with free moments? Sometimes we had reading material available. Sometimes we would day dream. Sometimes we would just think and introspect about ourselves. Sometimes we would carefully observe the world around us looking for anything interesting.
And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
You won't be approachable when you are paying attention to a phone.
And it's valuable. There's a lot of people you'll find interesting, but they happen to not be within 2 hops of you. If you want to put a number on it, look at what people pay (opportunity cost) for educational or work opportunities. The social network you'll get is often touted as one of the main benefits of private school, for instance.
Despite being a bit of an introvert, I often reach out to randoms. Just to see what's there. It's been a great strategy thus far.
It's the things that don't scale and instead have high barriers to entry that are most likely to produce actual healthy human connection.
Or in Omegle’s case…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omegle
Ends up with alt right trolls.
I usually avoid talking to women because I’m obviously married wearing my ring and no matter what, it might come across as creepy and women usually have their guard up and are probably there with spouses somewhere around.
Many people typically want to chat with people unknown to them, but not completely random either (especially for women).
Sitting at the bar is one of those places. I usually go, get one drink and sip on soda the rest of the time and just talk. The bartender doesn’t mind because we are friends and I bring him a lot more business just from other people hanging around and ordering drinks.
On the other hand, the gym is usually not a place where people want to talk and especially where women don’t want to be approached by men. I use to teach group fitness part time in another life and the exception was as one of the few straight men (and at the time single), women naturally came up and spoke to me or I could start conversations with them and thier guard would be down.
Also airports, planes and other public transportation are places I generally don’t strike up random conversations.
Two days ago I was in Best Buy looking for a DAC for my headphones. They have a section of gaming keyboards and headphones where a kid in his mid to late 20's started to strike up a conversation with me. It went from whether I play video games, to if I live in town, to his story on dropping out of college.
The entire time all I could process was the question of why this kid was talking to me and I kept giving him short bland responses. Not that long ago I would have sat there for an hour talking with this guy and loved every second of it. Then I would have come home and annoyed my wife by telling her all about it.
I know it's cliche to say but something changed in me over the initial COVID lock-downs where I went from socializing being a necessity in my life to just wanting to be home and not dealing with people. A point that bums me out the more I think about it.
Put another way… you have to let yourself be curious about, say, the garden in the park, rather than looking at your phone. And when it comes to people - talking to a stranger rather than looking at your phone - you have to not only let yourself be curious, but also be vulnerable enough to make that curiosity known (a secondary skill, that I think can be built on a foundation of curiosity).
I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
Turns out that making it too easy to avoid the hell that is other people has some less than great side effects.
On the other hand, I feel a lot of media is pushing us to ignore, suspect or otherwise be scared of strangers. I don't know that this is uniquely tech driven though.
i used to be one of those with a book. now i listen to audio books which incidentally allows me to appear more extroverted because i can make eye contact and i guess people assume i am just listening to music and am therefore approachable.
There was an article about that a month or two ago: The Death of Daydreaming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43894305
I think this is the core reason for so much video arcade machine related nostalgia. Those that experienced this the first time around will know about stacking coins on the machines, playing against those you didn't know and so on. Now that is back to table football etc. but an entire category came and went in the space of 30 years.
Not to say the phones aren't having an impact of some sort, but yeah, I always knew how to distract myself.
there are four key things that "obliged" people to meet in the local area:
1) organised religion
2) organised fun, ie drinking, sports, location based hobbies
3) organised politics (social clubs dressed up as poltical movements, or vicaversa but crucially meeting regularly to do activities together)
4) work
In the UK at least there has been a strong but steady shift away from 1 & 3, to the point where they just don't really exist at any critical mass for people under 60. work is now more remote, which mean less concentration of people
Combine that with digital means to form your own virtual groups, You have less and less ties to your local area.
sprinkle on top that parents are utterly horrified by the idea that children might be left to wander, means that meeting your best mate (because there they are on the same street and the same age) becomes digital only.
In the UK is has (almost) never been safer to walk about in public https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand... yet we are paralysed by fear that young people are going to be mugged, drunk, mixed up in drugs.
There is also a massive decline in funded social venues, as council budgets have been slashed.
So whilst tech could be blamed for this, I strongly suspect that its only making it more bearable. The UK at least needs systematic cultural change.
We replaced branch offices with call centers, then outsourced them to people we will never see and cannot relate to in a foreign land. Then we replaced them with chatbots and TTS, anything to reduce support times and save more money for those at the top.
We built out infrastructure that met our needs and revolutionized how we worked. We did this on-site, with glorious rooms of consoles and equipment that, while fragile, were also impressive to behold. Then leadership got on a treadmill of “also needs”, bolting on new kit of questionable value, outsourcing expensive jobs abroad or to contracting firms. As internal knowledge dried up, it became easier to embrace the perpetual bullshit machine demanding you adopt ERP as a medium-sized business, demanding you hoard data, demanding you surrender sovereignty to “the cloud”, to embrace per-second billing over amortization schedules. Fewer humans in the loop, knowing the business, understanding its needs. Just some guy at the top slapping their name over a Gartner or Big Three report before sending it to the board.
And now in this “age of AI”, the attack continues at record pace. Gone are the people who know and understand your code, replaced by chatbots who can only predict what they’ve already seen. Gone are the developers, the engineers, the architects, replaced with armies of temps and contractors who aren’t allowed to engage with the workers or incentivized to solve a problem, but merely meet arbitrary KPIs decided by algorithms they had no say over.
Robots are meting out punishments to gig workers, our devices spy on us to send data to companies hostile to our existence as consumers, with products designed to break but never be repaired, sold by stores online with no human interaction for questions or to identify flaws.
We have allowed a system to be built that does nothing to improve the daily lives of the average human anymore. These “innovations” do not drive meaningful growth in a majority of businesses. New technologies are little more than checkboxes to be met rather than profound improvements in processes or automation to enable leisure.
We let this happen. We can also choose - at any time we want - to stop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
Some do, but 36% of the eligible population did not vote in 2024. I don't think there's any evidence that "invisible" workers disproportionately vote.
I think the article makes a very questionable—and unnecessary—connection to electoral politics: "A sense of feeling invisible clearly animates working-class rage in many countries, and may have powered Donald Trump to victory in the US presidential election last fall." Note the weasel words "may have", as well as the vague, unsupported "clearly animates" claim, which I would dispute. Although Trump did try to appeal to the working class in several ways, I don't recall him ever discussing the issue of depersonalization, the subject of the article. What do immigration and tariffs, for example, have to do with depersonalization?
In any case, that seems to contradict "and know what’s going down." It would be misplaced resentment to blame depersonalization on immigration, for example. It's possible that immigrants are depersonalized more than any other group. And ironically, Trump has aligned himself with a number of tech lords who are at the forefront of depersonalization.
how to ease this cognitive load ? I imagine that it is very tempting to accidentally dehumanize others in the pursuit of looking after one's own burdens
It's the same story everywhere—regardless of whether or not you live in a big city or a small town: It's "jobs", not people.
Its like a fog, slow, suffocating, hard to grasp, hard to agree on where it starts or ends. But we agree its there, and agree its a problem.
A transactional exchange is not the right place to look for meaningful human connection.
In fact, if I COULD hire robots instead of humans to do things like drive me places or deliver my groceries, I WOULD. Robots are predictable and reliable, a random human may or may not be.
In some places, Amazon has delivery drones.
Ordering at Kiosks at fast-food places is immeasurably better than ordering from a cashier, especially if you make a lot of customizations to your food items.
When you are old and gray, I hope strangers continue to honor your wish by seeing you as a worthless husk because you no longer capable of offering any services they care about.
Old people I know that treat employees like robots don't have many friends or family they care about them. Maybe, if you coincidentally end up in that position too, you can pay robots to keep you company. I hear they're very reliable and predictable.
https://nohello.net/en/
Marxists have the theory of "alienation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
They posit that people are alienated, estranged and invisible. "Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society" It's alienation that is the driving emotion behind people coming together (leading to things like socialism / communism).
Given that it's a core left wing idea, it's a bit strange to see only this applied to right wing populism. Possibly it's a signal of the authors own politics. Maybe the recent adoption of identity and group politics tends to keep people separated and increase alienation than towards a togetherness in a common shared struggle. Reducing alienation could lead to a weakening of certain political stances. Today's technology appears (falsely) to be apolitical, amoral and independent of the traditional things politics are about.
But its important to be fair, that was a tiny bit of the article and there's not much politics in this interesting piece which is really about technology and neither "Marx" nor "alienation" nor any old school theoretical background on the phenomena being observed is talked about.
The very fact that you have free time, weekends, paid leave, enough money to enjoy these things (until the last few decades anyway), etc are the result of anti-capitalist collective action. People quite literally died so you can have these things.
It's no accident the society is so hyper-individualistic now. That's be design by the capital-owning class to destroy any form of collectivism because it's a threat to the economic order.
So things like "third spaces" disappearing can't be viewed in a vacuum. It's a foreseeable consequence of hoarding property (ie ever-increasing housing prices). The powers-that-be love that. You're not forming bonds with your fellow human beings. You're also not "wasting" time on recreation instead of working a third job you hate just to make ends meet and make somebody else more money.
A key part of Marx's alienation is the alienation of labor. This is where you're not paid enough to afford the goods or services you produce. We see this in the developing world: literal children being paid pennies to make clothes they can't possibly afford. We are increasingly seeing the alienation of labor in the developed world.
And yet, more integrated into society weren't they. Rich or poor, you had your social clubs, your church scene, your neighbourhood contacts. You had to, since you didn't have TV or internet.
Yes, you'd be far more likely to have a chat with them. But that's because they didn't have micromanagement of delivery times and the person they were delivering to was often a housewife.
Same deal with the self checkouts at the grocery store. I know people love to hate on small talk or chit chat, but I think those little interactions can really help build community cohesiveness and reinforce the idea that the world is made up of humans, rather than uncaring automatons.
And yeah, the rushed gig schedule. These days, a package delivery is left on the stoop, proof-of-delivery photo taken and by the time I notice (they don't usually even ring the doorbell) they've already driven off again. And of course "community mailboxes" means the regular mail carrier doesn't walk the neighbourhood any more either.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/204/204-h/204-h.htm#chap05
So thinking about loneliness and alienation is really easy through the lenses of the hyperpositivity and the rise of narcissism. Suddenly these are all aspects of the focus on the individual and the "You can" ethos.
> too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being
It's really hard to feel seen when everybody only interacts with everybody else if it serves their own project of self improvement.
You are monsters who mistake luxury for bliss, money for agency, and power for love.
I speak directly to the likes of Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, and all those who follow them. They are false prophets who deny us all our humanity. Monster is the perfect word for them.
Liberal hyperindividualism understands human beings as atomized units that enter into transactional relationships only. (Collectivism commits the opposite error of atomism by dissolving the person into a tyrannical amorphous social soup, likewise rendering persons disposable, but for the "greater good of society" instead of the "greater good of the self".) But the problem is that human beings are social animals, and our humanity is realized and actualized in our relations with other persons. Atomism dehumanizes us.
This liberalism is what we sleepily embraced a couple of centuries ago in parts of the West, but the consequences of such choices can take decades if not centuries to fully materialize. So as liberalism has wound through the traditional social fabric and institutions of the world — like family and community life — it has, over time, eroded those institutions and brought the world more in line with what was always there in liberalism. The famous "neutrality" of liberalism is anything but, and this presumption of its neutrality and thus what's taken to be its obvious correctness is the source of its power to erode. When something enters into a disagreement with liberal postulates, then by definition, that something must give way to those liberal postulates. They quietly determine and police what is taken to be normal, and what's more, from this position of presumed neutrality, as contradictions emerge, it automatically "wins" and thus penetrates every more deeply into traditional institutions until those institutions have effectively withered away.
W.r.t. the first example given in the article, notice the delivery guy's desire for a personal connection with the person he's delivering to. What's that all about? Sure, in small towns where everyone knows everyone, we might know the mailman who's been making the same rounds for 30 years and he might know us, but in any polity of macroscopic size combined with the churn among delivery people and the residents moving in and out of neighborhoods, this is never going to happen. It's a weird expectation on those grounds alone. The world is too much in flux, too transitional.
Of course, some people may lack basic civility (the usual "hello, thank you, have a nice day", things I reflexively say when addressing those serving me in these kinds of jobs). What is the cause of this boorish lack of basic incivility? Either bad manners, or a lack of humanity on the person lacking them. But we're not talking about bad manners.
Boorish behavior and misplaced small village mentality aside, the reason it might bother the delivery person this much might just be that he lacks a social base himself and is looking for substitutes in all the wrong places. And that would make sense: why would this person be any different than the people he delivers to? The difference might be that people in relatively stable corporate jobs, for example, might find some kind of weak surrogate for social stability and community in their workplace.
Community needs a reason for its existence. There must be a reason for people to be together. A family has in this sense the strongest justified bonds of community, surviving all sorts of life events and changes. It is no mistake that it has been the basis for all the other forms of community we enter into, voluntary and intentional, or involuntary. That is why liberal hyperindividualism's final battle is with the family. It is the last remaining obstacle to the fully "liberated" atomic self. But liberalism's notions of what constitutes authentic freedom are flawed, and so we pursue with zeal our own misery. The answer to collectivist tyranny is not atomistic sterility.
Ever since the first two caveman began exchanging their time and effort. Like stone axes for mammoth meat.
Go to a farmers market week after week, buying and talking to people. It is completely different from a vending machine. I know the people at my market, if they asked for help I'd help them for nothing in return. And I have no doubt at all they would do the same for me.
The vending machine owner would get no such help from me, nor would I expect them to help me if I asked.
The feeling of constantly being surrounded by people you can't trust is a foreign and debilitating one.
Pre-20th century people would have much stronger family ties, religious ties, and in many places some sort of feudal ties of varying levels of onerousness. But you can also find examples of people being extremely lonely, such as press ganged sailors separated from their families.
I’m not sure what that means, actually, but it certainly doesn’t mean voluntary trading of time and goods.
Even such slavery, modern western/catholic chattel-style slavery aside, wasn't entirely transactional in that way. Many Ottoman slaves had better lives than aristocrats, for instance, and had real agency and influence.
Western European/American/Catholic imperialist slavery was somewhat unique in how dehumanizing it was.
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Even in a leisure situation, such as a party, people are going to make choices about how much time to interact with (or not interact with) certain people. Or spending time pontificating on HN.
An example of this that was told to me is imagine you're going to dinner with the in-laws (or maybe your best friend's parents). What would their reaction be if you took out your wallet and offered to pay them cash for the meal? As opposed to offering to e.g. bring a bottle of wine or helping to set the table?
Offering to pay might be the "transactional" trade meant by the grandparent. While offering to contribute [food | labour | goodwill] is more of the trading time in a leisure situation.
Intangibles would be the gain or maintenance of reputation from going to have a meal at your in laws and all that jazz.
Regardless, in this context, trade is trade, one entity giving up something for another. Simply spending the time to go to your in laws for a meal is a trade. And while many would not cough up cash to show the transactional nature, far more would simply not go to the dinner (or go less often) and opt to spend their time elsewhere.
Or, if the in laws have something you want, maybe you opt to spend more time with them.
I am not claiming one has to solely view every interaction through this lens, or should. But it is a component of most every interaction. You could strike up a conversation with a stranger with no ulterior motive and then it carries on too long and you start thinking I could spend my time better elsewhere.
Depersonalization is a double-edged sword. You're no longer persecuted as an individual with a particular identity, but you're no longer valued as one, either. Though obviously it's not so much a binary as a field that can be collapsed to a point on a sliding scale.
How do you even get mammoth meat without having a stone axe?
There was no such thing as "neighboring cavemen," like you have neighbors living in personal, separate houses today. Perhaps you've been watching too much of the Flintstones. And it doesn't matter whether you "like" going on mammoth hunts. You hunt, and you gather, or you die. Again you're imposing a contemporary background of abundance on an ancient environment of scarcity.
The former is sharing, the latter is trading. And again, there's no evidence that trading ever occurred in that situation. As another commenter mentioned, in the life-or-death scarcity of hunter-gatherer communities, you'd be punished or exiled (which would mean death) for modern capitalist-style selfishness. There's no commodification.
Also, knowledge and skills were shared. There were no trade secrets, no patents. It would be have been extremely dangerous for one person to be the exclusive source of an essential good. Again, specialization is a luxury of abundance.
PS: Please don't downvote, just because the idea of your lifes invisible infrastructure buckling makes you angry.
Stretching your analogy (perhaps too much): when you're in isolated confinement there is at least someone ensuring you get fed, clothed, receive at least some basic care and are kept somehow safe. When you're in the ruins of a city you may starve, get beaten to death, die from a preventable disease, etc. And nothing ensures that the labor will be any lighter.
For a more software-related argument, here's an essay on why rewriting Netscape from scratch was a mistake: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
My life's infrastructure isn't all that invisible and I'm grateful for it.
If you could avoid hurting anyone out of proportion to their level of complicity, maybe you do have grounds. But I don't think you can. Because it's the entire world you'd be torching, you'd need to know at least a little about every person in it first, and how your actions would impact them, and I don't think that's realistic.