The Age of Faster Horses

If you want things to improve, stop giving people what they want

The New Republic currently has an article titled "The Age of Stagnation", by Aaron Timms, reviewing recent publications that decry social media algorithms, while once again implying that everything can be blamed on the phone. The stagnation spoken of also implies that change and newness, summed up in the word "progress" is good for its own sake: newness for the sake of newness, change for the sake of change. Anything older than a few weeks is tired and boring. It's a cultural condition that we're used to because we live in a society that makes money by continually telling us we're inadequate unless we buy whatever someone is selling.

But the reductive argument that phones and the social media apps we use on them are to blame for the malaise of our times is either ignorant, or ignoring, the late 20th Century's cultural zeitgeist of post modern relativism. The ig there, in ignorant and ignore, is from the Latin ignota, meaning unknown. People without memories of those times are now looking back wistfully at the 1990s and it's evidently easy to say everything went to shit when people began carrying video-camera computers in their pockets, not knowing what the world was like before this change.

In the Hebrew ten commandments, God commanded no graven image, and this prohibition against images remains in Islam. This speaks to a very ancient understanding of the entrancing effect of images, and what seems to have happened over the last hundred years is that our civilization fell under their spell. Moving talking pictures and colour photography did what God cursed: we became worshipers of ghosts, confused by the nature of reality. Every movie and TV show is a simulation, and now some believe we're living in one.

This is a shade of what postmodern relativism described fifty years ago in the 1970s: a world by then entranced by a half century of cinema, and twenty years of TV, with computer networking on the visible horizon. People had begun to prefer the "form" of things rather than "the content": the shape and look of something while remaining ignorant of the authenticity that created those forms. Hence the current popularity of Plato's Cave, which comes up repeatedly these days, as people recognize the inauthentic and yearn for “the real”.

What would be an example of this? I think the plot-line within the 2001 movie Vanilla Sky documents how this had become understood by the end of the 1990s. Tom Cruise's character had suffered a disfiguring accident and committed himself to cryogenic storage after a controlled suicide, and during storage his mind was kept active as he lived out a dream of a life. He dreamed a romance that partially enacted the cover of a Bob Dylan album, a father figure inspired by Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, and love modeled by Jules & Jim. (YouTube).

An another example of the preference of form over content would be how painting devolved into abstract expressionism; by the 1950s, painting gave up on imagery ("content") in favour of just being about colours or paint itself. Thus Jackson Pollock could get a write up in Life magazine by critic Clement Greenberg and become the most famous painter in America overnight. Learning about this in the 1990s, I spoke to my friends about how that was no longer possible, because we understood the world of the 1950s as a monoculture with two prominent magazines (Time & Life) and three broadcast networks.

It is remarkable to me now that young people are imagining the 1990s as a monoculture existing before fragmentation brought on by the internet, while during the 90s we saw the time as already fragmented by cable television and a fad for magazine startups. Even worse, there is an argument made in Timms’ article - under the thesis that we live in cultural stagnation because of the phone and social media algorithms - that we now live in a monoculture dominated by Facebook/Instagram, Twitter/X, YouTube & TikTok.

When postmodernism began to be explained in the 1970s, it made coherent an awareness that the world of fifty years before (dominated by imperial nation-state politics in between world wars) had turned into a global civilization united by electronic media - Marshall McLuhan etc.

“Nah, none of that matters. I heard somebody on the radio talkin’ about what’s happenin’ in Haiti, you know? “We must be concerned about what’s happening in Haiti. We’re global people now.” And they’re gettin’ everybody in that frame of mind – like, we’re not just the United States anymore, we’re global. We’re thinkin’ in terms of the whole world because communications come right into your house. [...] Everything is computerized now, it’s all computers. I see that as the beginning of the end. You can see everything going global. There’s no nationality anymore, no I’m this or I’m that: “We’re all the ‘same, all workin’ for one peaceful world, blah, blah, blah.”- Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone, June 21 1984

The churning mediascape of the 1970s and 1980s entranced the cognoscenti and they began to speak of the hyper-real. When I was a child in the 1980s, we used the word "hyper" to described being energized, i.e. "bouncing off the walls". The dictionary tells me in that context it’s an abbreviation of "hyperactive", itself a word popularized in the 1940s, where the 'hyper' prefix meant "over or beyond". The Greek word "hyper" had become by the 20th Century an English prefix to describe the excessive of the post world war environment. The excessively active, the excessively real, and by the end of the century, the excessive text of the computer network.

We can call the desire to copy and imitate the simulations we see in media simulacral memesis. (And here I evoke the work of Rene Girard in describing our attraction to copying others). What the internet has done is effectively propagate this desire. When the hyperreal met hypertext it created the influencer economy.

If we are in an era that feels stagnant, I would suggest it's because we're in a time of selling people faster horses. I'm referring to the famous quote by Henry Ford, who said if he’d asked people what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse. It's a quote that’s survived as a warning against excessive (hyper) research and polling. Innovation happened because what Ford was selling was something that had not existed before. The reason everyone has a pocket computer is because it is something that didn't exist in the 20th Century. People now complain phone innovation has stalled, while they’re being sold faster phones.

Circa 2005 Malcom Gladwell used to talk about "the story telling problem" exemplified by the Aeron chair. When it was first produced, people didn't like it, and it took a few years to become the best-seller and classic that it is today. Gladwell explained it was because people like (and can articulate) the familiar, but they are uncomfortable, (and have a hard time explaining), what is novel.

Our economy is dominated by appeals to the familiar and nostalgia, and hence the endless reboots of TV shows and movies, in addition to Hollywood's obsession over intellectual-property franchises. Because in their market research, they encounter people who can articulate very well why they like something they’ve been familiar with for years. Movies that I appreciate for their novelty, like Ad Astra (2019) or last year's The Creator, have terrible online reputations and I'd like to think it's because of the aforementioned explanation.

How much of what we call a stagnant culture, or a depressed, decadent, depraved culture, is simply because it is shaped by people who want to live in a way that's different from our ancestors? I live in Toronto, which a hundred years ago was called "Methodist Rome", known as "Toronto the Good". In today's language we would say the city had a moral self-righteous stick up its ass, but that's because those generations passed away and were replaced by people who did not believe in those things, and who use language like that. Each generation gets to choose how they want to live, and society inevitably begins to reflect those choices. In the transitional times, of course people are wistful for the familiar.

As I've already mentioned, there is a tendency now to blame society's problems on the introduction of smartphones around 2010. My argument against this is that the phones have made us smarter. To borrow hyper as discussed already, we are now hyper-human. I think about the videos we see of children or adults who have been given a prosthesis to enable them to hear or see and how when activated you can see their excitement. The brain is capable of processing an input and that input had been interrupted, and the prosthetic fixed that. The phone reflects Marshall McLuhan's analysis that the planetary electronic network is an extended nervous system. It’s not that we are addicted to our phones, its that the phones extend our minds into a global network. The phone enables a new sense.

To conclude, while I agree that we are suffering through stagnant and sclerotic times, I don't blame the phone, I blame market research that is selling people faster horses. "The phone" as a metonym however, will be the way out of this. We may have a population of hyperhumans shaping society into what they want it to be, but we don't yet have a culture that reflects that. In 1924, what we now call Modernism was just beginning, historians telling us that it was a reflection of the age of automobile and airplane. I think that despite the mass market appeal of nostalgia products, there must be stuff being produced that reflects the age of large language models and misinformation.

It just could be too new to be comfortable, like the musical group 100 gecs, which I learned about 18 months ago. When I listened to them it felt like I was listening to something authentic and unique to the current zeitgeist, music made on laptops with lyrics like a greentext from a 4chan board. The internet tells me their genre of music is … hyperpop.