by Roger Blumberg
George Ainslie remarked that the ultimate scarce resource in contemporary life is the attention of others. Is this why God created Facebook? @bfrav, February 12, 2010
PSYCHIATRIST: What my colleague Ainslie said in fact was that the ultimate scarce resource in life was the willingness of other people to pay attention to us.
G-D: Nevertheless, I created Facebook, and Twitter as well, to address this.
PSYCHIATRIST: But this is ersatz attention, isn’t it? The so-called friendships on Facebook are wildly impoverished versions of true, healthy, and sustaining friendship.
G-D: We should do the best we can with what we have.
PSYCHIATRIST: (smiling) Are you saying you can’t work miracles?
G-D: This isn’t the realm that requires miracles. My favorite line from Ainslie is this:
“… a society that has largely satisfied its physical wants spends most of its effort on obtaining emotional experience. Emotional rewards of one kind or another seem to be a large part of most people’s day-to-day incentives. We may decide to climb mountains, or become an object of envy, or achieve moral purity, or accomplish any number of other feats that aren’t necessary for our physical comfort. We could ignore these tests without any obvious penalty; but we somehow become committed to them, occasionally to the point of dying for them.”
PSYCHIATRIST: That’s from Picoeconomics?
G-D: It’s from Breakdown of Will, an even better book, page 164.
PSYCHIATRIST: You’ve read both his books?
G-D: I read everything.
PSYCHIATRIST: But Facebook merely gives people a false sense of being attended to, doesn’t it? Are you saying it doesn’t matter so long as they feel attended to?
G-D: I expect it doesn’t matter to everyone, but I don’t think about these things. And for those to whom it does matter, I expect that they’ll find it unsatisfying and give it up eventually. All these techniques and technologies are just stopgap measures. Some are popular for longer than others and, so long as they don’t kill anyone, this is about all I understand in saying that some are more significant than others.
PSYCHIATRIST: This is the luxury of the big picture, the luxury of ” It will all work itself out in the end.” Maybe that’s true, but I have to see patients every day and …
G-D: But now we’re quite a ways away from Facebook and the rest, aren’t we?
PSYCHIATRIST: I’m not sure about that. When a person is most satisfied by his friendships on Facebook, or by the device-mediated connections he has with other people generally, there would seem to be a kind of impoverishment of experience that isn’t so easily undone.
G-D: But long ago I invented Gresham’s Law for just this purpose.
PSYCHIATRIST: “Bad money drives good money out”?
G-D: It’s not just about money! It’s about everything: culture, politics, and in fact every realm of human experience. I gave it to Aristophanes, to Copernicus, and yes to Thomas Gresham as well, but centuries ago no one worried about emotional experience the way you do, and frankly I still don’t find it very important. But the concept is enough to allow people to recover from exactly the sort of emotional ruts you’re worried about.
PSYCHIATRIST: How would that work?
G-D: New generations come along and stumble on the evidence and traces of the experiences that got replaced a couple generations ago, and some members of that new generation think: this is neat; and maybe this was better. So long as mankind can be worried, and has some well-formed reasons to think that maybe what they have now may be the product of deterioration rather than improvement, everything but death can be undone. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook helps a later generation to value true friendship, true conversation, true cooperation more properly than their elders.
PSYCHIATRIST: (laughs) You’re an optimist!
G-D: (irritated) Another word that doesn’t mean very much to me.