Writing as Self-Alienation

A Highly Subjective, Probably Incorrect History

As someone who straddles the AI-startup and tech policy worlds, it can be be difficult to think deeply about the world we live in. This is my attempt to step back and try to tease out from the noise and separate what I think is [at least one of] the fundamental shifts in modernity from what is simply a continuation of existing trends. Some disclaimers up front though:

• I would be shocked if no one has ever expressed the ideas I have written here and would be very grateful if someone provided a reference or pointer to similar ideas by those who have thought about it more than me

• I’m borrowing from my amateurish understanding of political theory and even weaker understanding of media studies to craft a narrative of change to explain certain phenomena today. These ideas are not aimed towards historical accuracy, but rather to draw out new perspectives about the world around us.

Previously I shared about my own experience with reading and writing. I’ll periodically reference this throughout so you (I?) can see how my personal experiences have shaped my ideas.

On Reading and Writing: A Personal Journey

The Before-Times: Oral Culture

In the before-times of history, most people lived in small, semi-agrarian communities. Almost no one traveled more than 20 miles away from where they were born [citation needed].

And in this pre-literate community, your word was all you had. In these contextually-rich social environments, speech was never separate from the speaker, but always interpreted based on who was speaking.¹ And similarly, speech was never superfluous or transient but continously contributed to the existing social tapestry of the speaker’s character and personhood.²

This understanding of speech and person as intimately connected is also how theories of legal authority developed [citation needed]. For instance, messengers who would announce themselves “in the name of the king” are signalling that for a brief moment, the words coming out of their mouth are not connected to themself, but to the person and authority of the king (and hence why falsehood in this area was punished so severely). The seriousness with which these theories considered personhood and speech are perhaps difficult to understand from the modern perspective of “free speech” but I think the emphasis that the “before-times” placed on such ideas hints at the deep connection between personhood and speech that we have now lost (and how radical the idea of free speech was when it was first introduced).

There is also much work on how credit and currency developed within communal practices of interdependence and trust, before the existence of institutionalized trust (e.g. Graeber’s work on Debt). Currency came into existence to solve this very problem of trust in relationships, to allow for scalable transactions even if you didn’t know where this person lived, whether they had much sheep, or their reputation for drunkeness. We might think of currency as the first medium which facilitated particular kinds of speech e.g. “I can pay for this drink”, in the absence of social bonds.

This particular understanding of speech and personhood is only possible in small, mostly immobile communities. It is conveniant that the rate of transportation was, for a long period of time, limited to the speed of walking, just as the rate of communication was limited to the loudness of your voice. In other words, these were slower times, moving at social scales comprehensible to humans and facilitated by interpersonal relationships.³

Living in the Shadow of the Printing Press

The Message in a Medium

What is the fundamental change introduced by the printing press [and digital technology]? It is that our words, our speech, are no longer tied to our person. The message is no longer tied to the messenger, but is now a medium, an abstract interface between the messenger and the receiver.

In my previous post, I wrote this about writing:

“Writing is a powerful technology to crystallize thinking and promote clarity of thought. It is a way to paint your inner thoughts onto a canvas, step back, and examine if what came out really makes sense. Once imprinted, it becomes a memory device to encapsulate and timestamp a particular time and setting, a mental snapshot of where you were and what you were doing.”

What this is really describing is an act of alienation. I am alienating a part of myself and embedding it into an external artifact. When we write, we create horcrux’s that are detached from our personhood, from ourself. Our word is no longer “enfleshed” or embodied in our personhood and all the social contexts that accompanies it; instead it lives apart from us in whatever disembodied medium we have chosen e.g. a journal entry, a substack, a tweet.

And I would argue that this is the fundamental change of modernity. Disembodied alienation is the essence of the sea change we live in, starting from the printing press. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, they are simply digital packaging for us to chop up ever smaller pieces of ourselves to ship off to the rest of the world. The UI has changed, the rate and ease of transmission has changed, but these are merely quantitative upgrades, not ontological shifts. ⁴

The Explanatory Power of Alienation

I have found that thinking of writing [and digital communication] as alienation is a useful construct that helps explain many of my experiences reading offline and living online:

• Because a piece of text is alienated from the author, it is no longer tied to the person’s history or context, hence why “misinformation” or low-quality information influencers are able to spread, because we as readers are not connected relationally to their personal context and history. As an example, I previously wrote this, which serves a good example of how beguiling the written word is and how easily it scales to avoid social understanding of the writer themself:
  “I’m slightly ashamed to admit that in high school, I considered the words of Malcolm Gladwell and Robert Greene to be gospel truth, unimpeachable and authoritative. There was a time when I was subscribed to Scott Galloway’s newsletter.”

• Writing as alienation is also a helpful way to explain the prevalence of cyberbullying. Not to say that people are not mean irl or that bullying is a new phenomena, but my guess is that cyberbullying happens online with different audiences than irl. Its prevalence is because cyberbullies or posters of toxic comments do not view themselves as actually hurting a person, they are attacking an artifact, a mirage of a person. Because these fragments are interacting outside of any social context that ties the two people together i.e. their speech is alienated from their person, there are also no social repercussions for speech. When we are online, we are wandering about naked, stripped of any social context. We are not a “different person” online, we are not really a person at all, simply an alienated fragment of ourself interacting with other disembodied fragments.

• Alienation is also about legibility. We rip a part of ourselves out of a rich, nuanced social context and project a lower-dimensional but far more legibile part of ourselves into the limited medium of text.
  This is what enables “cancel culture”, the ability to pass judgement on someone you don’t know at all - because while we don’t know anything about them, we can see a small part of them that they have made legible and compact for all to view.
  Previously, I wrote about my fear of someone encountering an artifact of myself and with no other context or relationship to me, using it to judge my person: “Fear of judgement is an external fear, driven by the probably unreasonably sized fear that someone, years later, will come across something I wrote online, and amplify it in a negative light. Someone from a different context, in a different time, who doesn’t know me…”

• We also see the connection between alienation and legibility in financial regulations. @patio11 writes this about know-your-customer regulations: “Particularly in white collar crime, establishing complicated chains of evidence about e.g. a corporate fraud, and mens rea of the responsible parties, is not straightforward. But then at some point in the caper comes a very simple question: ‘Were you completely honest with your bank?’ And the answer will frequently be ‘Well, no, I necessarily had to lie in writing.’”
  In this case, financial regulations force what is an opaque affair between trusted companions e.g. corporate fraud, to interact with something that requires them to put what they are doing into a very clear, legibile form. They are forced to give an account of themself, that can then be stored later and used against them. We see the reverse of this in the case of Donald Trump, someone who has put so much of himself out there, including his historical relationships, we might say that we know a fair amount about him as a person. But conversely, he has wisely avoided putting anything about his specific business transactions with people in writing, which has made prosecuting crimes very difficult, so long as the fabrics of trust (or coercion) remain between conspirators.

• Writing as alienation also explains the rise of substacks as knowledge centers and proof-of-work. I am indebted to the many substack writers who have taken the significant time and process of of making legible their hidden domains of expertise and non-fungible experiences. But this act of alienation of their experience from their professional or personal context is also a proof-of-work to those not in their field and why these people, out of all others in their field, often end up as “thought-leaders”. There is nothing inherently wrong with this process, but I think it is important to be aware that who is most visible is not necessarily on the basis of who is more qualified based on the judgement of their peers, but who has put more of themself “on-chain”, who has exposed and made legible their ideas and experiences. (one example of this might be someone like Michio Kaku)

• This disconnect between what we publically display as artifacts and who we are privately as full people is also why phenomena like “virtue signalling” exist. Because in the “before-times”, there was no medium to “signal” in, you were simply who you were, as known by the people around you. But when significant amounts of interactions are mediated through, well, mediums, suddenly there are opportunities for misdirection. We are no longer transparently and fully known by the people around us, rather we can construct a self-determined image on the basis of which parts of ourselves we alienate, by choosing the content of the artifacts we generate. ⁵

• I’m going to guess that these trends are related: the rise of an institutionalized Catholic Church during the first millenium which, according to Illich, criminalized sin; western political theory developing around social contract theory starting from atomized individuals with spheres of individual rights; the modern western legal framework around legible rule of law; and all this is in contrast with eastern/asian politics where the locus of political power is in competitive, opaque bureaucracies (c.f. my previous post on Japan’s political administration). If anyone has sources that explicate (or refute) this idea, I would very much appreciate you sharing them!⁶

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While writing this, I realized that the fundamental asssumption undergirding this perspective is a particular view of personhood. That to be a person is to be enmeshed in rich, social community and that to interact with others outside of those interpersonal relationships is actually, in terms of modes of perception, to not interact with a person at all.⁷ Our perception of one another is so fragile, that when we step outside of those human-scale interactions into mediums that transmit shallow perceptions of ourselves, we are actually not perceived as a person at all but as a fragment, an artifact.

This is definitely the roughest of my “Rough Drafts”. I would very much appreciate any feedback, comments, discussion, or better sources to refine my thinking!
Up next (if I don’t get distracted): I try to explore this perspective in light of ChatGPT and LLM’s without going on a rant about the discourse around “existential risk”

1. There’s probably some speech-act theory connection here…?

2. As an example of these before-times, the book of Proverbs talks severely about the importance of speech, in a way that probably seems foreign and unnecessary to us.

3. This coupling of communication and transportation rates is a technological development which poses interesting counterfactuals e.g. what would happen if you could communicate much faster than you could travel. And in fact we find that exact situation in space travel today, a future media-social environment that is still being explored in sci-fi series like the Expanse and the Dark Forest, which also have interesting commentaries on what it means to be perceived with the full weight of personhood (or as human) versus being Othered.

4. This essay obviously relates in some ways to McLuhan’s “the medium is the m[e]ssage”. I am arguing that messages in a medium are fundamentally different than messages that are “medium-less”, which travel along invisible social conduits, rather than technological intermediaries (technology here including the printing press). McLuhan is zooming in to find the qualitative differences between digital and analog technologies, while I am zooming out to find the ontological difference between technology-mediated communication and socially-embedded communication.

5. To momentarily step out of the idea of alienation, let me try presenting two other metaphors:
We can say that in the before-time, we were all interacting through a universal ether, a thick, universal medium that is appropriately scaled for human proportions. But now, we live in a cambrian explosion of diverse refractive mediums, which we can manipulate to distort and twist the image that others see. The speed of light, and hence the scale of our mode of perception, is constantly changing depending on which medium we use and the resulting images that we present of ourself are distorted and unbalanced.

manipulating light refraction to hide things

Or we can say that we are all high-dimensional beings. And in high dimensions, randomly drawn vectors are far more likely to be perpindicular i.e. unrelated. In other words, the fact that it is very easy to get lost in high dimensional space is analogous to how easy it is to feel lonely and unseen, because we were made for complex and nuanced relationships. The legibility that results from alienation of the self is like collapsing a part of yourself into a very familiar 2D space, where everyone is closer together and looks similarly oriented. But the reality is we were not meant to live amongst such simple comparisons and relationships and that human interaction is meant to be thick and relational, rather than flat and 2D.

6. I’m currently reading “Seeing like a State”, which I’m guessing has useful examples of this?

7. I think this explains a lot of party culture and why “so what do you do for fun” never really feels like a type of interaction that implies “I am being seen as a full person”