You Don't Need to Log off, You Need to Become Sensual
The digital world the wealthy are creating is designed to detach us from our bodies
There is something weird about Silicon Valley people.
This is not a new or unique observation. Whether it is attempting the mythologically ancient fool’s errand of cheating death, eating mostly protein slop, or having children without fucking or being pregnant, these people seem to resent and reject their person-ness whenever possible. There’s an obvious arrogance to all this, a sort of assertion that being of the body is something for lesser, poorer people. Their wealth and perceived technological superiority allow them to go through life as reverse-Midases, they get to have gold by not touching anything.
It’s not a new or novel observation that being rich usually makes you weird, but there is something uniquely weird about our era’s wealthy. This is most clearly seen in the rich and powerful people in the tech industry, but it extends to the homes of the Kardashians, the increasingly minimalist branding of companies, and the highly regimented and often acetic routines of influencers. At the center of all this something is clearly missing, yet is often overlooked: the sensual.
While sensuality at its base means anything pertaining to the senses, it is also a philosophy of life. One where the senses are the primary mechanism for creating and storing meaning, not the intellect. In The Spell of the Sensuous, Bill Abram uses the example of language to demonstrate that it is through the body, not the rational mind, that we first learn to make sense of the world.
“Communicative meaning is always, in its depths, affective; it remains rooted in the sensual dimension of experience, born of the body’s native capacity to resonate with other bodies and with the landscape as a whole. Linguistic meaning is not some ideal and bodiless essence that we arbitrarily assign to a physical sound or word and then toss out into the ‘external’ world. Rather, meaning sprouts in the very depths of the sensory world, in the heat of meeting, encounter, participation. We do not, as children, first enter into language by consciously studying the formalities of syntax and grammar or by memorizing the dictionary definitions of words, but rather by actively making sounds.”
Often written off as irrational, unpredictable, and unnecessary, the sensual and erotic are what connect us to our humanity. The ability to feel, and feel deeply, is not a bug but a feature of being a human, of being mortal. It is this fact that the ultra wealthy so despise. It is clear that they see the body as a gross, inefficient object that connects them to people they deem lower than them, that is, people in general. It makes sense, then that the world they seek to create for everyone is as removed from the corporeal and sensual as possible. Digital money, machines that make art, a robot that keeps track of your friends, a God that isn’t a god but a graphics processing unit.
What emerges is something like an upside down Gnosticism, a world designed to remove you from the sensual, and thereby rob you of community, autonomy, or self-knowledge. As Audre Lorde writes in her essential essay Uses of the Erotic:
“When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual's…in touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”
What people want to replace you with is what they think you already are. If companies, bosses, and boyfriends want to replace you with a robot or an AI model, that’s because they already see you and what you do as simply the workings of a machine with far too many bugs. When we buy into this framing, we lose half the battle. The way out is through the senses.
Monks, nuns, and mystics have long taken to removing themselves from society in order to bring themselves closer to God, to get in touch with a reality larger than themselves. This is echoed online today in frequent desires to retreat to some imagined cabin in the woods. Or, more simply, just logging off and throwing your phone in a large body of water. There is this common, not irrational, idea that a retreat from the world can bring one into closer communion with the self, and that outside of it. In today’s anti-sensual age, I would argue that a more fruitful and even radical retreat would not be removing yourself from the world, but diving deeper into it by embracing sensuality.
There are lots of guides, books, and videos on how to spend less time on your phone, or less time online in general. I don’t have an issue with those, and think many of them can be helpful and have good ideas. They do not, however, address what I think is actually a central issue with this particular brand of technology: the lack of sensuality.
Sight, and to a lesser extent sound, are the primary senses engaged online. Text only really means something if an image accompanies it. Even these senses have become dulled and tired due to overstimulation. Smell, touch, taste, and any spiritual dimension of sense is totally disregarded.
Spending time offline, setting aside time to be without a screen, is a good thing, but your effort to do so will become frustrated if you do not focus on this: it is not just that you are trying to get off of the internet, it is that you are trying to return to the sensual.
Reading before bed, eating without a screen in front of you, spending less time scrolling, trying to go for walks without your phone, if you have tried and failed at any or all of the above, it might be because you are simply denying yourself of something designed in a lab to give you dopamine, and are not replacing it with something sensuous. You need to lean back into the feelings of your body to escape the dehumanizing technology of the wealthy and their devices of control. Why do we touch grass? To touch grass.
In a way, I think there might be a doorway to something beautiful that is created in all the rejection, frustration, and hatred being felt right now towards things like AI, social media, the Cracker Barrel logo thing, and the general enshittification of the internet. It is important to not just hate this stuff, but to ask ourselves why we hate it. I think what we may find is that deep under all that anger, is a love of what is human. The messiness, the flaws, the seeming imperfections of being a body and not a machine.
The "upside down Gnosticism" is an interesting inversion, like a design to transcend the body but actually we're just fleeing the ground from which meaning emerges in the first place.
Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, says "I am the absolute source. My existence does not come from my antecedents, nor from my physical and social surroundings, it moves out toward them and sustains them. For I am the one who brings into being for myself - and thus into being in the only sense that the word could have for me." This is a comment on radical embodiment... "I am the absolute source" is his way of saying "my body is the zero-point from which any world becomes meaningful at all." Here the body is a place of orientation, a place of towardness that opens itself to the world for meaningful emergence. The body isn't some prison to escape, like it seems like much technology is designed for, but rather the condition through which world and self arise together in meaning - the "perceptual field" through which meaning emerges.
What I most worry about, as we continue to 'transcend the body' is that we'll move away from the sensuous world, as David Abram writes about, is that we'll literally be destroying the foundation of all meaning because we'll have severed ourselves from the bodily encounters that makes the world meaningful in the first place.
Abram talks about Merleau-Ponty a lot in Spell of the Sensuous, on page 57 he says "By asserting that perception, phenomenologically considered, is inherently participatory, we mean that perception always involves, at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives." Which leads me to a question of how, or, I guess, if we can even have an interplay of perceiving body and perceptive field if the perceptive field is entirely digital.
"I think what we may find is that deep under all that anger, is a love of what is human." This is my hope. It feels like a breaking point right now where the inherent humanity in all of us is begging for us to return to it. Thanks for this essay and allowing me to share a bit from my favorite phenomenologist!
As someone who was hoping in the earlier days of the Internet that tech would lead to a new kind of right-side-up Gnosticism (which sure felt like a common vibe in the counterculture of the time), seems like what we got instead was a fake higher reality with wealthy tech goons playing at being demiurges. Those who never had a good relationship with the embodied world got to have a taste of existing in a place for them, a digital world for the rejects and outcasts, and now it's gone to shit thanks to the digital world for the wealthy.