Call me unempathetic, but how would this be any different in a non-digital era? You’ll still have a market (albeit significantly smaller, IE: lets say a small locale or village). But you could have easily said the same thing in a non-digital age, with just more rudimentary metrics and a market that is a community that either values or doesn’t value your work. Much like the proverbial school playground (which could also be analogous to a market).
It’s like the author is blaming technology for illustrating the truth in a highly efficient way.
She may as well have complained about the printing press being problematic.
I think this is actually the answer: the word "just" is doing a lot more heavy lifting here than first meets the eye.
The digital era has brought a lot more quantifiable data, and with that has come a much easier (and in many cases automated) comparison, value-attribution, calculation of the probability of success, etc. The article speaks to this in the second half.
Previously this was largely impossible outside of government and other organisations with dedicated statistic collection. The author talks about how even sales numbers for authors were very imprecise and easy to exaggerate or fudge.
You could argue that the Digital Era has turned some of "life" (or at some of "art") into one big Goodhartian[1] parody.
That said, it does feel like the author has stopped believing that art has intrinsic value - and that its value might be different for different people, including the author. That is pretty much the mental step you need to take to end up in the parody to begin with.
> how would this be any different in a non-digital era? You’ll still have a market (albeit significantly smaller
you answered it yourself.
What's harder, to become the best tennis player of your neighborhood or the best tennis player on the planet? What if you base your self on something that's fringe at a global scale, but acceptable in your local culture? What if all your human interactions are on the internet (with millions of strangers that tend to treat you badly, because people are way more rude online than in real life) vs on your local community (where people treat you better simply to avoid getting punched in the nose, but you might think they like you)?
_Everything_ is different online (and that obviously impacts people's psychologies)
> What's harder, to become the best tennis player of your neighborhood or the best tennis player on the planet?
>> When I was twelve, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours [...] One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating [...] Soon after, I stopped skating.
Seems like the author struggled with comparison before the internet, like the grandfather comment said.
In one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books, he talks about the emotional impact of looking at one's portfolio performance. If you do it rarely, like quarterly or annually, it'll generally be a positive experience. If you do it day by day, you'll have quite a lot of negative experiences. Because we're wired for loss aversion, we'll weight those negative experiences more highly. The same facts, presented differently, have very different impacts.
If I'm doing my own thing, like the author was with roller skating, my basis for comparison is me. There will be ups and downs, but more of the former, because we can't help but learn. But as you say, the bigger group I rank myself against, the more those experiences will be negative. I also think the bigger groups discourage camaraderie, because the declining chance of future interaction means smaller rewards for collaboration and support.
I think your notion of "the truth" is heavily influenced by exactly the context she's pointing at. Google and Meta's algorithmic rankings aren't "the truth", and "the truth" doesn't change on each regular parameter rebalancing. Those algorithms were built by a relatively small number of people from a narrow set of backgrounds who were focused on maximizing usage and revenue, and the bulk of "the truth" they contain is about that.
One thing importantly different about our age is context collapse. With communication costs and marginal costs near zero, a global service is easier and cheaper to build than local ones with equivalent coverage. It's as if we've taken every ecosystem in the world and dumped it onto the San Francisco peninsula to fight it out to discover "the truth" about what plants and animals are "best".
What's different about those small locales and villages is that each one of them naturally had its own values. Skills and tastes co-evolved. Schools of thought were born and elaborated. Communication and movement between locales gave useful exchange and inspiration, but generally weren't enough to swamp variation.
In the pre-web era, the question of, say, whether Irish music was better than Spanish music would be seen as kind of a dumb question to take any more seriously than for an entertaining argument. But having put everything in Meta's global blender and reduced it to counting updoots, the ever-present metrics purport to provide "the truth" to questions like that.
They don't, of course. But they do place a much larger burden on us to recognize that not everything that goes up and to the right is an unalloyed good.
> how would this be any different in a non-digital era
I would argue that the scale and the ease that comes with the digitalization and algorithmization is what makes the difference: eg. only literary critics can publish review of your book in a newspaper vs. everyone on the internet can post one.
While I agree with the main point you're making, I have to note that likening school playgrounds to markets is a questionable analogy. Schools are far closer to prisons than markets - in fact, I can't come up with a single way that school playgrounds are similar to markets other than the fact that they both involve humans.
Kids can’t switch their own school because they’re not their own legal guardians until they’re 18. You can’t switch nationalities just because you want to. That doesn’t make your country a penal colony.
You can OBVIOUSLY it be in school. No country on earth forces kids to join any school (let alone to attend it).
Most people didn’t choose to be at their jobs and hate it, the main way out is waiting for retirement.
Maybe this varies by ___location but at least in the UK, adults can usually leave the grounds of their place of work during a lunch break. Not true for school kids. And the difference in population density between schools and offices is usually stark.
It's not different, it's just worse. Online there are more people, interacting more shallowly (and therefore judging more superficially and less empathetically), and presenting a more fake version of their own self for you to compare yourself to, and we spend more time wading in it.
It's always been going on. But it has changed, not in kind, but in degree, and it does more damage.
Technology amplifies this, greatly. In a non-digital era our field of view was narrow, expanding either to our immediate physical surroundings or, when we went beyond them, limited by what we could read in a newspaper or see on TV. When I was little, I didn't know who was the most skilled person at my hobby or how popular it was or whether beautiful people online also happened to excel at it, while my teenage hormones wreaked havoc on both my personality and looks. Every single child in the civilized world nowadays is subjected to exactly that. You may be an aspiring dancer and there will be a million like you right there on your phone. It's hard for them to formulate self-worth when that is the case.
Does that mean the internet and digital advances are bad? No, it just means we were unprepared for them in a very meaningful way.
There is no fundamental force of the universal that makes it so, if that's what you're asking. There is however a tremendous amount of psychology that predisposes people to seeking the admiration and respect of others. If you want a deeper reason, it is likely due to a cultural understanding that these things are actually advantageous, and some amount of deeper evolutionary biology
That is understood… but why do you think such a child would have received more ‘admiration and respect of others’ 300 years ago in some tiny peasant village?
Because the stakes and standards were lower. So long as you did what your father did before you, and him before he, then you will get admiration and respect. You will get a family, you will have your job, you will be the shoe cobbler. Or the baker. Or the farmer. That's you, who you are, and we need you.
Things are complicated today. Doing what's always been done is not enough, you need to do better. Having a job is not enough, we no longer view jobs as purpose.
This is looking at the past with extremely rose tinted glasses, in reality life was very nasty and usually short for anyone below the lower gentry. (>90% of the population)
Especially in tiny peasant villages in pretty much every country, except maybe Switzerland and some Polynesian islands.
> She may as well have complained about the printing press being problematic.
Technology isn't always fractal, but you seem to be assuming it is. The internet is not just "a really efficient printing press", in the same way that New York is City is not "a little town or village made bigger".
If you can convince yourself that your problems are caused by modern novelties, then you don’t need to address the tricky problem of what’s actually causing them (it’s probably yourself). Any sort of scapegoating like this is going to have a lot of popular appeal.
It’s like the author is blaming technology for illustrating the truth in a highly efficient way.
She may as well have complained about the printing press being problematic.