our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Luke Burgis argues that smartphones have made acedia, the ancient restlessness that pulls us away from the present, socially contagious. Luke Burgis is a veteran entrepreneur and author. He’s the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship in Washington, DC, and the founder of Fourth Wall Ventures, an incubator[…] Luke Burgis is a veteran entrepreneur and author.
The hard part of belonging begins after you’ve found your people A philosophy that says God is everything that could ever exist What separates the living from the inert has little to do with its material The trick that offloads intrusive thoughts so your brain can actually work Sean Carroll: The past, present, and future exist simultaneously The real reason you’re always thinking about what other people think The most important question to ask yourself about your life’s purpose Rome’s triumph was the ancient world’s most effective piece of propaganda In the deserts of fourth-century Egypt, monks described a strange affliction: a restless urge to be anywhere but where they were, attending to any reality but the one in front of them. Luke Burgis, author of _Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life_, argues that our phones have made it socially contagious. Jack Dorsey mentioned that perhaps we talk a lot about free speech and it’s acting as a cover up for the real problem.
I think the real debate should be about about free will. We’re being programmed based on what we say we’re interested in and we are told uh through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting and as we engage and interact with this content the algorithm continues to build more and more of this bias.” I think what Dorsey means is that we are losing the ability to make our will our own. You know, we are carrying out the desires of other people and that we should be talking more about free will because free speech is really just the outward expression of free will.
And perhaps we should focus on the way that the will is formed and shaped by the crowd and by modern technologies so that when we do speak we are speaking as ourselves and not just uh a a member of of a crowd. This new power that Gustave Le Bon had recognized as important in the late 19th century, the power of the crowd and the dynamics of the crowd to actually uh make a person’s will um get lost into the power dynamics of the crowd. The studies of Murray Bowen who realized that within a family the emotional system is so strong that we can get bound up with it to the point of losing a sense of self and a separation between our emotions and other emotions, our ideas and other ideas.
And the thinker René Girard who realized that mimesis um this unconscious power of imitation causes things to spread very quickly between people where we imitate things uh in a knee-jerk way not in an intentional way. All of these things are really talking about the same phenomenon which we see in our world today in incredibly powerful ways due to the accelerant that technology is and that is social contagion. Bowen thought that it was incredibly difficult to behave and act as a differentiated self even within a small family.
You know, it was the work of 18 years, sometimes a lifetime, learning how to be a differentiated person with a solid sense of self in a family without smartphones. It was hard without the technology. How much harder is it today in a world where we are bombarded with expectations um of other people sometimes thousands of people in this world um of social contagion where it’s incredibly difficult to actually know where we end and other people begin.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
