Over time, the physical environment recedes from our awareness. It becomes so familiar that we can barely imagine life otherwise.

For example, I write this at a coffee shop, where customers are seated on stools and chairs. Of the twelve people here, eight have laptops open in front of them. All have smartphones within arm’s reach. Some divvy their attention between laptop and phone. My hardcover notebook is alone, and only one other person is paying attention to words printed on paper; she appears to be a student cramming for a test.

Many cultural critics have remarked on the effects of screen culture, but I particularly relished a recent observation by Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society newsletter. Sacasas notes that digital culture is always material culture. After all, our digital lives require a material access point: the screen. However, like a chair, the screen recedes from awareness, and we forget ourselves.

Some people sit for the majority of their waking hours, never aware of contact between butt and chair. Similarly, the screen dweller orients toward the screen unconsciously. Even when not physically facing the screen, he lives in anticipation of the next notification, of his next finger flick through the infinite scroll.

One way to think of technology is as a way to achieve a goal, and in the search for efficiency, some technologies displace others. Because new technologies quickly become invisible, their effects are difficult to perceive. Over time, layers of technology are buried deep, like sediment below the ground.

Technological utopians argue that we can mitigate the harmful effects of new technologies. I’m no Luddite, but I somewhat doubt this. After all, we barely understand the effects of “old” technologies.

Consider the skyscraper

By the standards of a smartphone user, the invention of the skyscraper occurred in ancient times. Travel to any metropolis, and you’ll find at least one structure reaching forty stories into the sky. Such buildings are common enough to be unremarkable. But the ubiquitous skyscraper is novel, all things considered. And it relies on other, relatively novel technologies.

To make a skyscraper affordable, you need inexpensive steel and glass, obviously. But you also need cranes. You need electrification and elevators. You need seismic isolation to fortify the tower against earthquakes. You need corner softening, tapering and setbacks to reduce the impact of wind. And, ideally, you want software to simulate the safety of your design, so you don’t make a multimillion dollar mistake or cause a mass casualty collapse.

The skyscraper, itself a result of material innovation, causes its own ripples through material culture. It increases residential density by an order of magnitude. It reconfigures working arrangements. And it literally shifts the perspectives of its occupants: A city observed from a penthouse suite is not the same as that city observed from the street.

This is only a brief survey of the skyscraper, but it suffices. The skyscraper is a confluence of technologies we take for granted, and it affects material culture below the level of conscious awareness. We take the skyscraper for granted and live in its shadow.

A madman’s ethnography

Naive students of anthropology think, “how strange those people are!” The more advanced student realizes that we, as humans, are always weird. We slavishly adopt customs and patterns of behavior and rarely notice how odd they are, how truly strange we are.

As it comes to encompass all the patterns of life, our shared material culture begins to resemble a totalitarian state or theocracy. Its foundational assumptions, its dogmas, cannot be questioned. Why do we sit so much? Why do we fill our rooms with chairs? Why do we have rooms at all?

The task of the cultural critic is to surface these assumptions, to ask unsettling questions. But the critic should be treated with suspicion, as she cannot fully escape her position within culture. Her perspective is indelibly shaped by what surrounds her, no matter how strange she may seem to society at large.

If the cultural critic were truly a stranger, she would be unintelligible. It’s not a coincidence that the most trenchant critiques of culture are scrawled on cardboard, strapped to the shopping carts of the homeless. A broken clock is right twice a day. The madman is correct more often, though equally disregarded.

Is this casual dismissal wrong? Tug on one thread long enough, and you might unravel the whole tapestry. Give the madman his due, and we may need to revise all human relations.

Seduction and destruction

The clean-cut madman (sometimes called prophet, guru or sage) is seductive. He calls attention to what lies beneath the surface. His diagnosis of dysfunction is convincing, comprehensive. If only we walked more! If only we dispensed with the screen and spoke face to face! If only we abandoned our Babel towers and returned to human scale design!

However, the madman’s longing for utopia shades quickly into a desire for destruction. Burn the chairs! Smash the screens! Tear down the tower!

This is perhaps the most damning critique of the madman. He cannot fit into the world. He cannot conform to the pattern of life provided. He will neither bend nor bow before the authority of social order. To be crude, he doesn’t like playing Monopoly. His solution is to flip the game board, so to speak.

We should be wary of the madman, for in the supposed depth of his reflection, he often dives too deep. He cannot see how each thing connects to each other thing. Of course he can’t, for he perceives himself to be cut off from all else. In his feigned aloofness, he suggests that the sea can be divided, that it is not, in fact, one formless motion, subject only to friction, gravity and perhaps the whims of the moon.

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