1984

Disconnecting

IMAGINE IF there were a law decreeing that every citizen had to carry a tracking device and check it five times an hour. This device was to be kept at hand at all times. The law also decreed that you needed to place this device on your bedside table at night, so that it was never more than two feet away from your body, and if you happened to wake up in the middle of the night, then you needed to check it. You had to check it during mealtimes, at sporting events, while watching television. You even needed to sneak a quick peek at it during plays and weddings and funerals. For those unwilling to check their devices at the plays, weddings, and funerals, exceptions would be made—so long as you kept your device on right up until the moment the play, wedding, or funeral was beginning and then turned it on again the second the event was over, checking it as you walked down the aisle toward the exit.

Imagine, too, that whenever you went to a concert you weren’t allowed to view the actual concert but instead had to view it through your device, as though every concert were a solar eclipse and you would go blind if you stared at the thing itself. Only if you were holding your device in front of your face and viewing the event on its small screen would you be allowed to experience heightened moments of artistry and life.

Such a law would be deemed an insane Orwellian intrusion into our daily freedom, and people would rebel—especially when the law went even further. Imagine that the law decreed that it wasn’t enough to check your machines; you needed to update the world on your activities on not one but several services, posting text, pictures, and links to let everyone know everywhere you went, and everything you ate, and everyone you saw. And when you weren’t posting, the device would be tracking your movements and recording on distant servers where you were, whom you called, and what information you searched for.

Of course, these laws aren’t necessary. We do this to ourselves.

So we now have to come up with elaborate ways to stop ourselves from engaging in this behavior. There are the restaurant dinners during which everyone puts their devices into the middle of the table, and the first person to reach for hers or his gets stuck with the bill for the whole crowd. There are programs you can buy that allow you to set a timer that keeps you from checking email or using apps or searching the Web for a certain period of time. One of these, in a truly Orwellian turn of phrase, is called Freedom. The thing that makes you free is the thing that constrains you.

It’s easy to point to the damage caused by this culture we’ve created but perhaps more important to try to figure out why we are behaving this way.

Just a few weeks ago, I remember thinking with a slight bit of annoyance about a friendly acquaintance. He posts constantly to Facebook. At times you feel, if you follow him, that you are living his life alongside him. Usually, I enjoy his posts—he’s smart and funny and accomplished, and writes with great style. He also has a lively group of friends, so you can count on his page to have interesting discussions. But this day, I was thinking: Enough. Enough of his friends, his dogs, his opinions.

Of course, no one was forcing me to read his posts—so I knew my irritation with him was irrational. But I was irritated. And clearly I wasn’t the only person. Someone must have responded critically, because the next post was heartbreaking. It said something along the lines of this: “If you wonder why I post so often, it’s because I’m lonely.”

We check our smartphones constantly because we are lonely.

That’s not the only reason, of course. But it’s one.

We also check them too much because we are addicted to them, because we are impatient and they offer everything in an instant: from something to read to a listing of what’s going on, to information about where to go, to a map to get us there. Checking them causes little bursts of pleasure hormones to fire in our brain—in anticipation of news, or something to laugh at, or something that will happily aggravate us, or the knowledge that our “friends” are “liking” and commenting on what we’ve done and shared.

We check them because we feel the need. Most people no longer work nine to five. If you work in an office, you are on call twenty-four hours a day, with emails popping up constantly that seem to require action, not to mention ever-newer forms of group communication through which your colleagues are constantly chiming in. And if you don’t work in an office, you still need to be reachable at all times, too—perhaps because you are part of this new economy where we rent our time and talents and cars and homes and services to others in tiny increments.

We check them because we don’t want to miss out. On anything.

I am not a Luddite. (As it turns out the Luddites weren’t Luddites either—they weren’t so much against the machinery as they were against losing their jobs, which is perfectly understandable.) I find my little device incredibly seductive. It makes my life easier in myriad ways and also provides a constant source of tunes. I need to remember very little—it’s all there, my backup brain. I’m what a colleague used to call an early adapter, which is an early adopter who is perfectly willing to let the newest gadget show me how to run my life.

But I’m starting to believe that this is all madness and that we’re already in way over our heads.

I can’t help but think about my lonely Facebook friend, and I fear that the very thing he is doing to stave off loneliness may be exacerbating it. After each one of those tiny dopamine bursts comes a tiny dopamine hangover, a little bit of melancholy as the brain realizes that the thing we crave—to connect—hasn’t really happened at all. It’s like the feeling you get when you anticipate ordering something you love at a restaurant, and do so, and then are told that they just served the last one, and you will need to order something else. A little lift—they have lemon meringue pie—followed by a little fall: not for you. Our technology gives us the simulacrum of a connection but not the real thing.

George Orwell correctly predicted much about our world today.

In 1984, Orwell describes how our hero Winston is surrounded everywhere by Big Brother and his slogans: WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. “He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother.”

Winston lives in a world of constant surveillance but dares to keep a diary and to think for himself. Both crimes are punishable by death. Some of the monitoring is through telescreens. Orwell writes, “He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them.” Other monitors are the people around you. While sitting in his workplace cafeteria, Winston has “a pang of terror” when he notices a girl with dark hair looking at him. He’s seen her before. “Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about?” He tries to remember if she was already at her table when he arrived and debates whether she’s a member of the Thought Police or an amateur spy.

Orwell envisioned a world where all truth is what the government decides it is; where two plus two equals five, if that’s the line; where lotteries keep the masses docile as each person waits for her or his chance to become rich. But he did not envision one where we spy endlessly on ourselves. And unlike most of us, Orwell’s protagonist does everything in his power to escape the screens that surround him.

There’s a portion of 1984 where Winston and the girl he loves do manage to escape the surveillance, or believe they do, and that’s in a room above a secondhand shop in a “prole” part of town.

I first read 1984 in 1974. I was twelve, and the year 1984 seemed impossibly far in the future, as did the idea of ever being twenty-two years old. The novel fascinated me, even though I had no context for it. To me, it wasn’t about fascism and had nothing to do with the Spanish Civil War or any class politics that I could figure out. It was just super creepy. Telescreens and pneumatic tubes bringing history that needed to be rewritten, thoughtcrimes and newspeak, and a secret Brotherhood plotting the overthrow of a ruling party that controlled everything—this was cool stuff. The only passages I didn’t care for were the “lovey” ones, when Winston and Julia are together in their little room. I skimmed these.

Rereading the book as an adult, those were the passages that most captivated me. And one sentence in particular: “Winston became aware of silence, as one becomes aware of a new sound.”

How often do I hear silence? Between the buds in my ears when I’m out and the screens that are on when I’m in, the answer is simple: hardly ever. I miss it. It’s hard to remember what it sounds like and all the possibilities it allows.

Maybe that’s the real tyranny of the smartphones and all the little screens everywhere. They help us rob ourselves of silence.