#digital isolation

Technology transforming family life in India is not a loud disruption. It doesn’t arrive with a single moment you can point to. It slips in quietly—between routines, inside habits, beneath attention—until one day, nothing looks broken, and yet something feels missing. The television is on, but no one is really watching. A familiar living room—someone scrolling, someone typing, someone tapping. A…

I remember back around 1990, when psychedelics philosopher Timothy Leary first read Stewart Brand’s book The Media Lab, about the new digital technology center MIT had created in its architecture department. Leary devoured the book cover to cover over the course of one long day. Around sunset, just as he was finishing, he threw it across the living room in disgust. “Look at the index,” he said, “of all the names, less than 3% are women. That’ll tell you something.”

He went on to explain his core problem with the Media Lab and the digital universe these technology pioneers were envisioning: “They want to recreate the womb.” As Leary the psychologist saw it, the boys building our digital future were developing technology to simulate the ideal woman — the one their mothers could never be. Unlike their human mothers, a predictive algorithm could anticipate their every need in advance and deliver it directly, removing every trace of friction and longing. These guys would be able to float in their virtual bubbles — what the Media Lab called “artificial ecology” — and never have to face the messy, harsh reality demanded of people living in a real world with women and people of color and even those with differing views.

A snippet from some correspondence with a dear friend:

Ooh, sounds like a blog post in the making – ‘digital isolation v digital exilein a digital world hurtling towards “technological Singularity”‘. Perhaps the government needs a change management plan…