I can’t remember the first time I heard the familiar drumbeat that we live in an individualized age, that modern life atomizes us and fragments us, destroying our communities, severing human ties, and makes each of us utterly alone in the world. I also can’t quite remember the last time I heard this assertion, only that it was fairly recent and I can expect the same old argument—that technology and capitalism have completely cut us off from one another—to be trotted out at any moment by the next person who wants to sound wise on the Internet without having to contribute any actual original insight.
Forsooth, Individualism gets a bad rap these days, and all too often by Leftists, who should know better. The unique individual is the foundation of all life, all morals, and all existence. The community means nothing without him, and is only virtuous insofar as it serves her needs for self-creation and expression. And yet I see so many collectivists and self-styled communitarians demeaning the individual, trampling them underfoot, and branding dissenters as worshipping at the filthy cult of the Self. After all, the Self is to be hated and defeated, not emancipated, and the Revolution is not to benefit the individual, but to dissolve everyone into a sea of Tang so that we might persist in a mindless condition of utter bliss—presumably because, being a liquid, we can’t really aspire to anything else.
I can’t help but recall Voltairine de Cleyre’s observation that communist anarchists tend to be communists first and anarchists second, but those anarchists who tend towards anti-individualism today aren’t even really being communist in any meaningful sense of the word. Communism is just the principle that proper role of “society” is to meet human need. Anti-individualists are Collectivists in the ontological sense: they might oppose the present apparatus of the State, but they worship its essence and wish to be dominated by its “true,” “good,” and “ideal” form. In practice, anti-individualist anarchists are usually not perfectly so, concerning themselves at least with individual autonomy within the group, or opposing the ersatz individualism of capitalist society while promoting individuality itself. But in the former case, anti-individualism works at cross-purposes with their ideal by render sociability the limit, not the expression, of individuality, and in the latter they confuse their intentions by conflating individualism with heroic politics.
And this brings me to the true point of this little ran. For as much as I’d love to kvetch about the vagaries and hypocrisies of the broader Left, that isn’t why I set about writing this blog post, nor is it the most important point to be made about this story we tell about the evils of modern society. The most important point is that it isn’t true.
Ask yourself this: when, in this day and age, are you truly alone? I am writing this in my cousin’s basement. I ought to be in perfect solitude. But I’m not. I’m more alone than usual, because my phone is upstairs. But I can guarantee you that as soon as I step into that room and glance at that infernal device, I’ll see anywhere between half a dozen to half a million notifications from group chats, solicitors, apps, and scammers. If I open any instant messaging program on my computer, I’ll be inundated with the same. I can guarantee you that the server on which I’m writing this post is logging some of my activity, which a sufficiently skilled hacker might be able to acquire (in which case, I’m wasting my money on my ISP). The government might subpoena it at any moment. My traffic is likely caught in the federal dragnet to some extent, ICE has recently been granted the authority to spy on anyone’s phone using stingrays, and there’s always that sneaking suspicion that Alexa or Facebook is always listening to what you say.
Let’s not also forget that, on YouTube, I can’t watch a video without the platform tracking what I do and do not watch, which will affect its recommendations (because the algorithm stands in silent judgment of me). And then there’s the comments beneath, all of which tell me how to feel about what I just watched, tempting me to read them even when I don’t want to care about what they say. And then there’s the fact that so much content online represents Let’s Plays and reaction videos, both of which revolve around not enjoying a clip or an experience but by having someone deliberately interpret how we’re supposed to feel about an experience. Between the effects of social media and mass surveillance, gone are the days I can actually be alone with my computer. Instead of obediently (or disobediently, as has always been the case) executing the instructions of the software I install, it serves as a vessel of social scrutiny and control. And thanks to Apple, I now carry one of them with me nearly all the time, like most people.
In theory I could dump my phone and hide in a woodland cabin, but since a text from a family member a few years ago saved them from a stroke I’m loathe to even mute my devices for too long. Internet access has become so integral to modern life that the United Nations lists it as a human right. Unplugging simply isn’t viable for most people.
The death of privacy, which I describe here, is well-documented and widely acknowledged. So is the atomization of modern human life. And yet these cannot exist together. How exactly can we be atomized individuals when we are, in fact, never alone, always watched, always wondering how our every action will be perceived by an invisible judge in our minds representing the reproach we expect from the crowd?
For myself, the greatest agony of the past several years has not been a lack of community, but a loss of self. Specfifically, somewhere between 2015 and today, I lost the capacity to enjoy my own company. When in public or around others, I usually feel a sense of shame, since I understand pretty well that nobody actually wants the people around them to behave authentically. My soul smarts at the erasure. But ever since I was a child, even when I was ostracized by the other boys, I have found great joy and solace in my solitude. I am at my happiest when I am truly alone, without any distraction from my inner life. And I am at my very happiest when I am capable of being alone when I please, but only a short walk stands between me and the nourishing company of real friends who appreciate my individuality.
I am a peculiar individual, and proudly so, but I doubt my eccentricity mutes the universality of this phenomenon. The real problem isn’t that we are atomized, isolated individuals, but that we are in constant and toxic company. All of us have come of age in a society conceived and executed as an instrument of rule, and our ability to imagine something else is so thoroughly stunted that we can’t help but reproduce it even when we yearn for something different. We guard our privacy not because the prevailing culture values it, but because the true self must be kept secret if it is to survive, and to reveal it is to cede social advantage. Privacy is a defence against society’s parasitic attempts to consume all that an individual is and spit out a compliant drone. Technology, in the hands of such a culture, serves only to erase those last corners in which the authentic, the mysterious, the transcendent, the particular, the esoteric, the individual, the ecstatic, the cosmic, the unique can persist.
There is no-one here in the basement but me, but I am not alone. An invisible crowd envelops me, and it envelops you. But in this crowd, we are alone—you and I—because in the crowd nobody is allowed to exist. The actual tragedy of the modern age is that we live in a society without any people in it. The wind howls with the unheeded laments of the individuals we were supposed to be.