Atomization of Our Age

We must reestablish contact in an increasingly disconnected world.

Ernst van Zyl is the Head of Public Relations at AfriForum and a documentary filmmaker.

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it,” Jesus states in Matthew 7:13-14

Within The Psychology of Totalitarianism, in which Mattias Desmet dismantles the mechanical ideology that has taken hold of our age, I found a challenge and a call to action. We need to rehumanise the world and inject life back into it again. We must counteract the forces that make it cold, sterile, fake, and inhuman. We must replace mechanical thinking with organic thinking.

Desmet identifies mechanical thinking and ideology as one of the main sources of the man-made horrors manifesting themselves in our world, especially in recent years. He sees a clear connection between modern man’s fragile existence full of fear, uncertainty, confusion, frustration, anxiety and depression, and the mechanical, artificial world of modernity.

One of the nine circles of hell of life in the digital age is getting stuck in a futile email loop with an automated customer service bot. My most recent tussle with such an automated response system ended with the machine simply replying repeatedly to confirm that I do indeed have the problem that I am seeking to resolve.

This interaction got me thinking about how customer service used to work in the not-so-distant past; a more human past. When customer service entailed an in-person conversation with the local grocer. Here, face-to-face human interaction was the primary context within which problem-solving occurred.

Many of us have heard it expressed or even experienced ourselves the desperate need to just be connected to a human being on the other side of the customer support line. According to a survey by customer support software company Zendesk, 54% of customers indicated that their primary frustration with chatbots is the number of questions they have to answer before being transferred to a human.

The first major widening of the distance between the customer and the service provider happened with customer service being at first partly and later exclusively conducted over the telephone. Later, faxes and email were added as additional routes of distance communication.

Now some companies have started removing phone numbers from their websites and email addresses may soon follow. Many of the customer service emails still in use are now increasingly operated by automated responses, and will likely soon be delegated to more sophisticated large language model artificial intelligence (AI).

The fact remains that human communication, even on the most impersonal level, does not merely consist of a binary exchange of information, facts, and statistics. It contains many integral and emotional aspects we often miss or take for granted. Tone, minute inflections, body language, pace, emphasis, humour, metaphor, and much more are all part of it.

I remain unconvinced that future improvements in AI will necessarily guarantee an elimination of the aversion most people experience when speaking to a robot instead of a human. It might eventually remove a certain level of frustration as far as utilitarian customer service is concerned, but in many other avenues of communication, a feeling of dissatisfaction is likely to remain. In the same way a junk food snack can briefly fill you up, but quickly leave you feeling empty again.

As our world becomes increasingly automated, mechanical and inhuman, let us not lose sight of the human element we are removing in the process. The potential for sympathy and empathy is an example of an integral element of human interaction, which automation removes from the equation. In close knit communities, special plans were often made, and rules and norms were sometimes bent, by the local butcher, baker or barkeeper, for members of their community in a bind.

An example would be a home-grown policeman, opposed to one deployed from a far-away central command, letting a first-time minor offender off the hook with a warning. Or the baker who allows a regular customer experiencing temporary financial trouble to pay them back later for a loaf of bread. This communal past, which is still alive in some small towns today, seems distant and alien in our increasingly disconnected, atomized, low-trust world where every service is accompanied by a ludicrously long list of terms-and-conditions.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila remarked, “Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.” Tightly knit communities do not need a laundry list of complex laws and regulations to combat transgressions and dubious behavior. In such communities undesirable conduct is managed through organic, social means.

If the butcher scams his customers, he will soon be out of business — financially, and potentially even socially, marginalized. Today, massive multi-national corporations do not care if they lose you as a customer. There are thousands of new consumers coming online across the global marketplace every day to replace you.

After the Covid-19 lockdowns, we are more atomized and distant from each other than ever. You would be hard-pressed to think of a term that more aptly encapsulates the destructive, immoral policies of that time than “social distancing.” Today, many work from home, get their food delivered to their doorstep and talk on a screen to their friends and family who live around the corner.

Even at the southern tip of Africa, children are developing American accents, with shallow role models in the form of online streamers with whom they’ve formed parasocial relationships. Even arguing with another human over a customer service line seems quaint and organic when compared to banging your head against a virtual wall with an automated response email mindlessly reading the company policy back to you on why it cannot assist you with your particular problem, just to almost mockingly end its correspondence with a “warm regards.”

To counter the atomization of our age, we must go out of our way to re-establish and develop the healthy, organic social bonds we need to thrive. Spend time with your family. Get involved with local organisations which revolve around in-person activities. Value and preserve friendships. Whenever possible, always prioritise an in-person interaction over a virtual one. Artificial social interactions over screens or over text are only imitations of the real thing.

We have traded in warm personal social interaction for a cold convenient imitation thereof. When you talk over the phone or a computer, you don’t hear the other person’s real voice, only a machine imitating it. You do not see them in person in front of you; only a collection of pixels that copy their image. This technology produces soulless, mechanical and empty abstractions of something important and real; something human.

As Duncan Reyburn has observed, “Being is relation. To be is to be with. It is to witness withness.” The years since 2020 have been a period of radical normalisation of remote work and remote communication. We should tread carefully, since convenience has proven to be one of the devil’s favorite temptations.

Social media has provided us with formidable new means of information dissemination and political and community organization. We can and should use some of the empowering technology at our disposal, but we must be careful not to start living in it. Online discourse and activity must primarily serve as means to real-world ends, and not degenerate into the ends themselves.

One of the critical questions of our time has become which technology should we embrace, and which technology should we reject? I have not come close to a definitive answer. My proposal would be the following: humans are by nature technology-using beings. Let us therefore use the technology that enriches our lives, facilitates concrete action, and which enables us to escape back into reality, while avoiding the technology which entraps us in unreality. As G.K. Chesterton warned, “As for our own society, if it proceeds at its present rate of progress and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all.”

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