The world is too small

Where is the space for real connection?

It hit me maybe two hours from Havana. I had just landed in Cuba, and although I’d paid for a local sim card, the wonderful thought leaders at Apple have now made it impossible to switch sims in the latest iPhone models. So I couldn’t make calls, text, or do anything on my phone. Thankfully I rode along with a more tech-savvy friend, but I found myself as disconnected and unplugged as I’d been in a decade or more. I was blissfully cut off from the world. And then, on that bumpy car ride, something beautiful happened – the world suddenly felt big again.

I’ve been fortunate to travel a bit, and over the past several years I’ve increasingly been greeted with a text from my cell provider when I land informing me that I can make calls and send texts and maybe browse some slow internet wherever I land. It’s undeniably helpful, and nine times out of ten I’m glad to be able to use the maps on my phone. But I’ve also become increasingly convinced that we pay a price, a poorly understood price, for our infinite connection, for our short flights that take us to every corner of the globe, and for our instant communication with anyone, anywhere. I think we’ve shrunk the world.

The benefits are clear, to be sure. Far beyond tourism, the ability for people anywhere to access the massive resources of the world wide web, the ability to conduct meetings across the globe, and the ability to convey information instantaneously have obvious and profound benefits. In Cuba I got to talk with Palestinians studying medicine in Havana and we spoke about the landless workers movement in Brazil, the weakening of Israel, and the international workers movement on May Day. My friend and I had dinner with French sanitation workers who were radical unionists, traveling to build solidarity and speak to other union workers from around the world. The beauty of these connections, a beauty that was enabled by quick flights and the shrinking of the world, is undeniable.

Plenty of the people I met in Cuba would prefer much more connection, trade, and better wifi. Everyone would prefer the lifting of the immensely stifling and harmful U.S. blockade. Countless people around the world would prefer to keep shrinking the world, some because they are cut off from resources like the people of Cuba, and others simply because they want ever more ease and convenience. But that’s not the whole story. Silicon Valley and the whole ruling class have managed to convince us that endlessly being plugged in is wholly good, managed to make us unquestioningly believe that everything being a flight or a click away will only benefit us. So now it’s time to question; it’s time to ask if we should keep shrinking the world.

Photo by Spencer Everett on Unsplash

Once in a while the oligarchs tell us things they should’ve kept to themselves. Mark Zuckerberg has been on a possibly ill-advised podcast tour, exposing his awkwardness and sociopathy and telling us about his dystopian visions. The most recent Zuck interview moment that merits some discussion is recounted here by Victor Tangermann in Futurism: “When asked if AI chatbots can help fight the loneliness epidemic, the billionaire painted a dystopian vision of a future in which we spend more time talking to AIs than flesh-and-blood humans.”

To quote the third richest man on Earth directly: "There's the stat that I always think is crazy, the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it's like 15 friends or something, right?" Me personally? I like my human friends, although I’m not quite sure how many I ‘have demand’ for. Oddly enough I don’t exactly think of the people I care about in terms of supply and demand, and I’m certainly not interested in augmenting my social life with Meta AI. But this is the grand vision: the ruling class has built a world where we are alienated and isolated, and they’ve found a potentially profitable way to pretend to fix that problem.

It’s worth backing up here and thinking for a moment about how they created this problem, because the world wasn’t always like this. For our ancestors, the world was massive, largely unknown, and when they explored those trips were measured in months and years, not hours and days. But then came engines and machines that collapsed distances, particularly the automobile. Not only did cars allow people to cover much more ground in much less time, they also came with a massive overhaul infrastructure overhaul as our built environment was shaped around them. Contrary to popular belief this process gave us a more disconnected world in many ways. We have our freedom of movement, but the price we had to pay was the destruction of countless communities, increased isolation, and apparently fewer friends per capita.

Cars didn’t just give us freedom of movement, they also shrunk the world. Sure, the suburbs might be further away from work than your grandpa lived, but we can get there quickly (if traffic is good), or at least people could when this initial deal with the devil was negotiated. The thing is, we don’t really measure distance in miles, do we? It doesn’t matter if you live twenty miles from work, what matters is if it takes 20 minutes to get there, or 45. Hell, in New York a lot of my friends live just five miles from work, but it takes an hour to get there in the morning. Time is the real precious resource, the real measurement of distance. And this world we live in is smaller because everything has grown quicker, not because distances have truly shrunk.

Now oligarchs are promising more of the same. It might look shiny and new, to some, but Zuckerberg’s idea would collapse the distance in our social world even further. With his AI friends our communities can finally be tiny enough to fit in the palm of our hand. Then we can interact from the couch instantaneously, never leave the house, sit back and have relationships without friction. We can be satisfied with nothing, with meaninglessness, unmoving and unmoved.

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

I hope this scene frightens you as it frightens me. But I also hope we both see it as an extension of the path we’re already on, not an aberration. We’ve been systematically isolated, by cars and capitalism and the computers in our hands and more. Of course we each play some part, we each make choices, but a mature reckoning with our reality must also lead us to acknowledge that some choices are also made for us. We all react to our built environment and the tidal waves started by Robber Barons and their massive flows of capital (like those that destroyed public transportation and forced us into cars) are virtually impossible to swim against.

The only way to swim upstream is together. I will never willingly download AI friends, but some people will. And each download will pull that lonely person further away from community, further into their couch, further into this painfully small world that briefly feels like relief. These choices, themselves shaped by a world of alienation, will further isolate people and weaken the communal bonds that help all of us. And fighting back isn’t easy. It takes deliberate decision making, deliberate community building, and deliberate investment in relationships with all the time and effort that requires.

More than any one choice on our part, building the capacity to resist even more disconnection takes reshaping this world. My suspicion is that making the world bigger will, paradoxically, help us connect infinitely more than shrinking our lives and our relationships into our phones. A bigger world moves slower, a bigger world means we have more time. A bigger world would be one with more distance between us, but I think that space might actually be where we’re able to connect.

Photo by john elfes on Unsplash

As we drove further from Havana last week the road got worse. Traffic became sparse. For miles and miles we saw nothing but fields and trees on either side and a handful of fellow travelers. Finally, after four hours, we arrived in the smaller city of Santa Clara. We were staying near the central square, and at what seemed like any hour of the day or night dozens of groups would be there, eating and talking and just passing the time. Vendors roamed, couples sat on benches, and groups of young people strolled and laughed.

Almost everywhere I’ve been outside the U.S. these public spaces are filled with the sight of endless conversations and milling masses of people simply enjoying one another’s company. It’s a far cry from the vision of Mark Zuckerberg, and it feels infinitely closer to what we really, organically have a ‘demand’ for. Community, operating at the pace of human connection. It requires a slower world, it requires us to unload our obsession with productivity, and it requires a world where distances aren’t so compressed and compacted. It runs counter to what we think we know, but we might need this world to grow a little bigger once again.