Times have changed. No longer must the fidelity-challenged make do with lying on mainstream dating services; now, at last, they have a Web site of their own: AshleyMadison.com, which bills itself as the place to go if you’re married but want to get something going on the side. Prospective cheaters, in fact, have more than one choice online these days, and in addition to places like adultfriendfinder.com, which for a while was sending me regular e-mail alerts about potential partners nearby, individuals of any marital status can find a hookup on Craigslist, PlentyofFish, and other sites. Writing a book always entails sacrifices, and one of mine was having to explain to my wife that I was only exploring these places in the cause of advancing human knowledge. Just like Galileo or Madame Curie.
Ashley Madison is a tawdry place, but aside from its frank appeal to philanderers the most interesting thing about it is its motto—“Life is short. Have an affair.”—which for all its simplicity could hardly say more about the challenges of modern living. Take the first part, “Life is short.” The reality is that life has never been longer (life expectancy rises every year), yet this insistence on its brevity—as an excuse for infidelity, if nothing else—is characteristic and ubiquitous. It’s a notion that tends to collapse time and devalue the future, which is of uncertain duration and possibly even—you never know—brief enough to be ignored. Ashley Madison’s exhortation to have an affair, meanwhile, appeals to our most basic urges: not just for sex but also for novelty, admiration, and excitement. By offering such thrills beneath the cloak of anonymity, Ashley Madison positively exemplifies one of the most liberating—or perhaps just disinhibiting—developments of the Internet age. As the famous New Yorker cartoon put it, on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.
Why is self-control so difficult? We might as well start by looking at our own devices, which have made everything cheaper, faster, and easier. Someday somebody will invent technologies that can help us exercise more self-control. In that golden tomorrow, we’ll no doubt have new learning tools, commitment techniques, and even drugs that will promote the conquest of temptation and the living of a life more in keeping with the desires we desire. Meanwhile, unfortunately, technology is not the answer. Technology is the problem.
Cheaper
Technology spells trouble on the self-control front because it drives down the cost of nearly everything, stoking temptation by bombarding us with affordable novelty and enticement—in the process, democratizing consumption. That’s a wonderful thing. “The capitalist achievement,” as the economist Joseph Schumpeter reminds us, “does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens, but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.”
But technology also democratizes overconsumption. Advances in farming, food science, transportation, refrigeration, and the like have made food in this country wondrously cheap, as we have seen. (A single datapoint illustrates the change: from 1970 to 2005, the proportion of after-tax income Americans spent on food fell from 14 percent to just 10 percent—and forty cents of every food dollar went for eating out, the USDA says.) One result is that we are mostly better fed than we used to be. Another is that we are mostly fat.
Making things cheaper and more widely available can have enormous social consequences. Take something small—as small as a transistor. In the early days of radio, people listened to broadcasts through hulking receivers that cost a lot and required a lot of space. So most families had a single radio to which they listened as a group, in the living room. The family-oriented programming of the times reflected the way people consumed it as well as the values that the grown-ups wanted to share. But the rise of transistors changed all that. Soon everyone could have a personal radio—and listen to something different. It wasn’t long before youth-oriented programming began pouring from all those little radios—especially youth-oriented music, most of it sexy and subversive. Sales of this music, so irksome to parents, exploded because young listeners now had the power to choose it—and to listen out of earshot of Mom and Dad. The historically unprecedented youth culture that arose in mid-century was enabled by technology.
Faster
When it comes to self-control, speed kills, and technology undermines restraint by making everything happen faster. Counting to ten is a classic way to defuse anger, and governments sometimes impose waiting periods—for gun purchases or abortions—when a matter is considered grave enough that deliberation should be required.
But technology has accelerated our lives irrevocably, and while it’s nice to be able to fly across the Atlantic in a few hours or get news of the latest findings in microbiology in a few seconds, this acceleration is bad news on the self-mastery front. The collapse of delay between impulse and action, between offer and decision, inevitably privileges impulse over reflection and now over later. By undermining deliberation, speed weakens the habit of deferring gratification and leaves no chance for second thoughts. Fast times make urges easy to gratify; the lack of temporal distance between the craving for fried chicken and a piping hot bucket, however caloric, means we can’t be deterred anymore by the prospect of plucking, batter-dipping, deep-frying, and cleaning up— or acquiesce in the interim to second thoughts about the effect on our waistlines and arteries.
Want to buy something? Chances are that nearby stores are open (many Walmarts virtually never close), and with plastic in your pocket, you’ve got the wherewithal. A cop I once knew told me that crime is opportunity, and we are all more likely to succumb if the opportunity is present and the cost seems low. Picture what you eat for lunch on a typical day—not the occasional salad, but the burgers and fries, the meatball sub, whatever really is typical. Now imagine if you could decide a week in advance what you could eat—you’d make your choices in writing, and once made, no other food would be available. Would your lunches be healthier? Sure.
The all-around acceleration of life has also made us less willing to invest in such time-consuming (but subsequently rewarding) tasks as learning a foreign language or studying engineering or walking when we might drive. Technology and ever more efficient markets discourage this kind of thing by providing easy alternatives and rewarding extreme specialization. When cheap, immediate pleasures (like TV) are readily at hand, longer-term satisfactions requiring patience and diligence become comparatively more expensive—and more likely to be shunned.
It almost goes without saying that television is an inducer of self-control problems—particularly with respect to watching TV. Despite the Internet, Americans still average around five hours of TV daily, and there are good reasons for wanting to cut down. People who watch more TV tend to be less happy, for example, even after taking account of differences in income, education, and the like. Perhaps this is because the heavy TV watchers, research has shown, feel less safe, trust others less, are more materialistic, and less satisfied with their lives. They are also more likely to be fat. Many of these people, in fact, wish they watched less, meaning they have a self-control problem, and many of them know it. In Gallup polls during the 1990s, 40 percent of adults and 70 percent of teens said they spent too much time watching, while other surveys found that about 10 percent of adults considered themselves addicted to TV.
“TV doesn’t really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,” says University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson, who is known for his studies of how people use their time. “It’s more passive and may provide escape—especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise.”
The automobile was just as transformative a technology as television, and probably played a bigger role in the acceleration of daily life. At first, cars were only for the rich, but by 1930 there were 23 million on the road in the United States. By 1960, the number had rocketed to 62 million.
Every one of them was a getaway car. The automobile overthrew age-old community arrangements and the social ties that went with them, inventing a new, spread-out and more anonymous society in place of the village life that previously constrained the desires of so many Americans. Cars meant freedom and privacy, and when young people got behind the wheel, they would help transform courtship. (Think of Meat Loaf’s operatic “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” in which former New York Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto narrates the circuit of a sweaty automotive lothario around the sexual bases.)
One big change for which we can thank the automobile is that the eyes of our neighbors are no longer upon us. Despite a good deal of hand-wringing over electronic data security and the like, most of us in America enjoy an unprecedented degree of personal physical privacy, and the car helped make that happen. Universal driving led to freestanding houses in sprawling suburbs where, for the most part, nobody has any idea when you come and go, what your destination is, or what you do when you get there. If you could earn a scarlet letter today, it would have to go on your license plate.
It was the car that gave Americans something like a magic carpet, waiting at their beck and call to whisk them instantly (and invisibly) almost anywhere. Having a car meant getting places and doing things almost as soon as you thought of them. And with a car you could buy a lot more stuff and still get it home. Americans found ways to afford cars—though they were expensive, they seemed cheap to drive, especially to motorists who never thought about depreciation—which took the walking out of everyday life for people of all ages, reducing their calorie needs though not their intake of food. And the car created the fast food nation so familiar along Hamburger Alleys from coast to coast.
Easier
If life in America resembles a giant all-you-can-eat buffet, we might have invented the Internet to supply home delivery. It’s a major force in driving down the price of practically everything, and it eradicates the kind of frictional costs that might otherwise constrain us. Pornography, for instance, can be consumed without a humiliating and time-consuming trip to some sleazy store, where porn would cost you money as well as embarrassment. For students, the temptation to cheat is surely greater; the Internet excels at bringing together buyers and sellers, after all, and nowadays it’s easy for someone in need of a term paper to find someone else who will write it. The same is true of sex, available now almost literally on demand, at least for gay men trolling Craigslist, where an assignation can be had on something like a moment’s notice.
Internet gambling, despite attempts to crack down in this country, stubbornly persists offshore, beckoning to risk takers worldwide even in their pajamas. Internet shopping is of course well established as a killer of both time and budgets. No more diabolical means of procrastination than the Internet has ever been created, since its delights and distractions come to us through the same machine we use for work.
It’s thanks to the Internet that temptation has carried its war on rectitude right into the office, where nowadays life’s riot is just a mouse click away at Web sites specializing in shopping, baseball, sex, and every other delicious sort of distraction. Mainly because of the Internet, Americans on the job waste two working hours every day, according to a survey conducted in 2005 by Salary.com and AOL. Although the survey doesn’t sound very scientific (respondents in effect chose themselves, which means the most diligent of us might simply have been too busy), the amazing thing is that two hours is all people owned up to.
For Internet users ready to admit they’re in the grip of a higher power, there is Covenant Eyes, a little piece of software that will keep track of all the Web sites you visit—and e-mail this potentially incriminating list to an “accountability partner” of your choosing. That could be your boss, your spouse, your pastor, perhaps even your mother. Covenant Eyes rates Web sites on a kind of taboo scale, so that your chosen overseer can tell at a glance whether you’ve been poring over market research online or taking in a peepshow. The interesting thing about Covenant Eyes is that you install it yourself and designate your own accountability partner (who is notified if you turn it off ). The purpose, of course, is not to shock some third party with the tawdry record of your online time wasting and depravity. The purpose is to give you a fearsome weapon you can use against yourself in the battle for self-control. (Consider the force of a Post-it on your monitor with the reminder, “What would Mom think?”)
Covenant Eyes is a classic precommitment device, and a binding one. For someone who needs only a little help, there are programs like Freedom for Mac, which will keep you off the Internet until you reboot (not hard to do, but perhaps just enough of a hurdle), so you can’t waste half your day surfing celebrity gossip sites. There are also programs to limit access to certain specified sites or to restrict access during a given period of time or for a specified duration. The Firefox browser plug-in SelfControl, a free download, will warn you when you go on a time-wasting jag. It also lets you toggle the warnings off if you’re really determined not to work. These programs (especially the more restrictive ones) function like the parental control software we use to limit our kids on the Internet, except the parent controlling you would be—you.
In the future, more of us may need this sort of thing, because technology increasingly forces us to use a single device for everything we do, making concentration on any one thing that much more difficult. Once upon a time, before telephones and e-mail and whatnot could vie for our attention, it was relatively easy to lose yourself in a book. But in the near future, you are likely to read that book on an electronic device, like the Apple iPad, which will also be a computer, a telephone, a stereo, a game player, a movie screen, and a TV. That’s all great, but it will be a lot harder to focus on some boring metallurgical textbook in the face of such frantic yoo-hooing from all those other functions.
Technology also makes things easier by hiding their true costs. Spending money with a credit card is much less painful—or even noticeable—than reaching into your pocket for cash, with the result that some people overspend. All kinds of burgeoning payment technologies will have a similar effect. For example, thanks to the E-ZPass mounted on the windshield of my car, I can zoom relatively painlessly across the George Washington Bridge. But while I always used to know just what the toll was, I no longer do. The same is true for subway rides; now that I have a self-replenishing MetroCard for the New York City system, I no longer know what the fare is.
Spent
It was technology that nearly drove us over the edge in the recent financial crisis.
All the frenzied lending that led up to the crisis was facilitated by the rapid expansion of computing power since the 1960s. Panics have been a fact of financial life for centuries, of course. But disruptive technologies often play a role. This time around, one of the chief culprits was the digital revolution. In fact, the financial crisis is a superb demonstration of the way technology often gives us the illusion of control even as it magnifies risk.
First, ever more powerful computers have radically improved the efficiency of all sorts of financial operations, which is in itself a problem. Take mortgages. As interest rates commenced their long downward slide in the late 1990s, banks launched aggressive advertising campaigns to get consumers to refinance their home loans. Refinancings accordingly rose from a mere $14 billion in 1995 to nearly a quarter trillion dollars a decade later, and in most cases homeowners also took out some cash—all of which worked wonders in stimulating the economy.
This refinancing boom never could have reached such a massive scale were it not for automated credit scoring, computerized loan processing, and elaborately adjustable new loan products—a form of innovation in themselves—that required computers to calculate and track them. The digital revolution made it possible for customers to get thousands of dollars of credit in just seconds from a complete stranger at the local Home Depot—or drain equity out of a house with the help of a lender on the other side of the country, who was financed by capital from the other side of the world.
When lenders ran out of good borrowers, they started shoveling money at bad ones (subprime lending rose from $145 billion in 2001 to $625 billion in 2005), and technology made these excesses possible, too. Networked computers enabled the wholesale securitization of loans, which were packaged and then sliced and diced into a bewildering array of mystery-meat investments with opaque risk profiles. Computers also made it possible for lenders to sell these securities to investors worldwide, replenish their capital, and keep pushing loans out the door. Risk was supposedly under control; the big debt-rating agencies used sophisticated models to estimate the default risk on pools of complex commercial mortgages, and of course part of the point of all the packaging and slicing and dicing was to distribute (and presumably reduce) risk.
As it turned out, the innovations we relied on to reduce risk actually amplified it. Consider the rise of credit-default swaps—contracts whereby one big player (such as a bank) earns a fee by agreeing to insure the loans held by another. The sum covered by these swaps rose from $1 trillion in 2001 to $45 trillion in 2007. In theory, these things were great, allowing all sorts of diversification, risk reduction, and profit making. In reality, these derivatives were, as Warren Buffett said, “weapons of mass destruction,” for they multiplied risk, suffused the system with it, and hid it from view.
Financial engineering is strong stuff. These derivatives represented capitalism’s well-known powers of abstraction carried to a level beyond the comprehension of mere flesh and blood. The Greeks understood something about liquidity that we didn’t. They were wary of wealth in forms that could easily be spent because they had noticed that when estates became liquid, they tended to vanish—not just in the sense that they could no longer be seen (money, unlike olive trees, is kept hidden) but in that, having been made consumable, they were subject to squandering. Liquids, after all, evaporate.