FACEBOOK’S Mark Zuckerberg is king of all he surveys in social media. His next horizon is near-mythical: techno-telepathy. Direct mind-to-mind contact is “the ultimate communications technology”, .

“You’ll think a text or update and send it,” affirmed his experimental tech director, Regina Dugan. The old Arthur C. Clarke line that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” seems evergreen in 2017.

Look around your streets – or better, a mall, lobby or campus – and you’ll see a generation of humans already deeply entangled in, and entranced by, their communication devices. As the next incessant blink, buzz or chirp pulls you towards the touchscreen yet again, haven’t you ever felt the urge – accompanied by a twinge of your carpal tunnel – to just respond, or receive, in a purely mental way?

Zuckerberg’s aspiration to go from iPhone to psy-phone seems more like a shift in degree than kind. Yet what Ray Kurzweil once called “the age of spiritual machines” sometimes has to deal with the sweaty, fleshy, emotional reality of human beings as they are, particularly younger ones budding through those (so far) unavoidable heaves and surges we know as adolescence and early adulthood.

Going by these two fascinating ethnographies, even the digitally naturalised Generation Z (the kids of Gen X) are hardly ready for the direct and pure mingling of minds. Not while there’s selfie-taking, sexting, cyberbullying or “Yik Yakking” to be done, day after day.

Yik Yak – a controversial Twitter-style app which shut down in April this year – provides Donna Freitas’s The Happiness Effect with its malevolent subtitle. Through hundreds of interviews with undergrads and graduates in 13 US colleges, Freitas lays out the regime of nervy identity construction through social media that occupies much of their emotional lives.

“Nervy identity construction via social media occupies much of students’ emotional lives”

Whether it’s due to their awareness that their timeline is a potential CV, or that their “likes” are an indicator of social status on campus, they are under pressure to display their best and most positive selves at all times. “Now you don’t have to wait for your 10-year high school reunion to show off how great your life is,” says junior student Brandy. “It’s like that every day.”

The anonymised Yik Yak app released a torrent of mutual abuse through some of Freitas’s campuses. Out from under the compulsion to display public happiness, the Repressed returned with a vengeance. “Yik Yak was like a bad soap opera,” said one. Another abandoned the service “because I was overwhelmed by the racism and homophobia that exists on my campus”.

So many of the tales here are about trying to establish some kind of autonomy over, or even just etiquette around, the endless connective demands of social media and smartphones. Ethics and mores are being established on the fly. Among Freitas’s students, the general attitude towards visually led dating apps – where you display your wares to engage in “hook-ups” – was an extended “eewwww”. For these febrile, nervy souls, steamy liaisons still need sociable encounters first.

Consistent with this reserve, the new ritual for courtly romance would seem to be the declaration that one’s new boy/girlfriend is now “Facebook official”. When a couple agree to change their relationship status on the platform, they are (in one male student’s words) “standing on top of a mountain and shouting it out to the world”.

So far, so sweet, so familiar. The ecstasies of online communication are tempered by recognisable real-world (and real-body) anxieties and modesties.

Freitas is obviously a good pastor and counsellor to these fluttery kids, even as she mines them for research. But her matronising tone does remind you that Facebook’s founding circumstance was as a campus social network, profiting from playing around with the status anxieties of Harvard University students.

The idea that the stifling managerialism behind Zuckerberg’s network is seeking to enter your intimate mental life, at some stage in the neurotech future, feels like something that would invite neo-Luddism, if not outright rebellion.

One might have a romantic notion – the agenda-setting SF novels of Cory Doctorow come to mind – that the kids from the wrong side of the tracks would be the ones who demanded something different, less managed, more edgy, from their communication platforms. (Freitas’s students are clearly attending prestigious universities, where pressures to succeed keeps things normative.)

Jacqueline Ryan Vickery’s book Worried About the Wrong Things has a cast of quirky, eccentric and talented young digital users, circulating in and around a working-class school near the Mexican border, with the pseudonym “Freeway High”. But the tale it tells is how, amid circumstances of socio-economic distress, education fails to be the haven that can generate possibilities and progress. And one predictor of school failure is whether it uses digital technology from a “harm-driven” rather than an “opportunity-driven” perspective.

The book has an intriguing tension. The author’s teacherly interests are evident – she promotes a “connected learning model” that imagines it can bring all the “learning moments” of a pupil, wherever and whenever they happen, into one educational framework.

“Petty and futile constraints on classroom tech use sets a tone of defeatism and alienation”

Yet the stories that unfold when she talks to the Freeway High students are pretty difficult to assimilate into any inclusive teaching system. In complete contrast to the compulsive communicators of Freitas’s book, two sensitive young Latino high-school film-makers (Sergio and Javier) often chose not to post their material on YouTube because they are insecure about its quality, and worried it might harm their career prospects, precarious and tentative as they are.

Freeway High has a classic teacher-liberator of the Dead Poets Society type – a Mr Lopez who runs evening Cinematic Art Projects and Digital Media Clubs for the pupils. But, as Vickery charts in great and persuasive detail, the school’s prevailing “harm-driven” view of social media muffles and excludes the digital creativity that already thrums through these kids’ lives. Petty and futile constraints on classroom tech use, and on the kind of digital material that children can bring in from their own enthusiasms, sets a tone of defeatism and alienation among some of the Freeway High kids.

The author has an obvious favourite pupil, a disruptive, deprived but poetic girl called Selena, with whom she spends considerable time. But she hears later that Selena has dropped out of school in the midst of her college preparations, and now has no connection with her. The book is strewn with tales of exclusion and struggle, in which parental backgrounds are chaotic and the demands of care, commuting and finding a place to live bear down too heavily on digitally ambitious youth.

Across both studies, and no matter the social positioning of each set of users, these young people evidently know they have a new kind of tangible social machinery in their hands (and minds): a machinery made of devices, networks and digital information, with which they can make a mark, pooling their knowledge and consciousness.

As responsible pedagogues, Vickery and Freitas are institutionalised (and institutionalising). And with Mark Zuckerberg – as with any Silicon Valley visionary mogul – you have to follow the profit-driven interest, not just gawp at the transhuman ambition.

Somewhere between the caring educators and the corporate disruptor, Generation Z is forging its own new society out of a digital revolution still in its early days. The streets will have their uses. And young, yearning bodies won’t be ignored, either.

Donna Freitas
Oxford University Press

Jacqueline Ryan Vickery
MIT Press

This article appeared in print under the headline “Best behaviour?”

Gameful world

Freedom to play

Rehearsal for reality

AS THE daily turbulence of politics, economics, environmental change and religion rages around us, there is an understandable marketplace for books that look at the bigger picture. Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct does just that, joining the dots between points in history and culture, identifying echoes and consiliences across the natural and social sciences.

This is more than a scholastic exercise. Our planetary predicament demands the broadest and deepest perspectives, not just to enable masterful armchair contemplation, but also to guide our actions in the middle of what would otherwise be an enervating horror show.

The cover of Lent’s intellectual epic shows a line drawing of networks, the dots ostentatiously joined. No doubt this expresses the author’s fundamentalism, derived from his scientific and religious readings, about the power of connectedness.

But on the way to a somewhat familiar end point, Lent provides a useful and massively referenced road map of the most enduring structures of meaning in human history.

Humanity’s first world-encompassing idea, says Lent, was the hunter-gatherer belief that “everything is connected”. There followed an agricultural era during which humanity lived under the “hierarchy of the gods”. He then charts what he calls “the divergence”.

Lent’s shorthand for this pattern is “split cosmos, split human”: the assumption that our physical reality, personal or objective, can be controlled by transcendent powers. Whether we call those powers “divine” or “rational” is, to Lent, neither here nor there. The two developed in lockstep: you couldn’t have conceived one without the other.

Articulated first by the philosophers of Ancient Greece, this “Western pattern” of meaning gathered force under the rise of Christianity and the innovations of the Enlightenment and continues to hold sway under today’s scientific industrialism.

“This idea could produce a split humanity, one species enhanced and exploring, the other barely surviving”

Lent traces his splitting thesis all the way to the thrumming fortresses of Silicon Valley. Here, Plato’s fantasy – a rational soul subjecting the animalistic body to its will – is not just a moral compass, it’s become techno-scientific mission.

Are you extending our cognitive abilities by creating devices that mimic and mesh with our thinking? Are you influencing people’s emotions through mood-altering drugs? Are you engineering our bodies to the optimum with gene editing? Then you are in the grip of an ancient idea: that pure rationality stands sovereign over the biological world.

This idea has the potential, already half-realised, Lent says, to produce a split humanity, “one species, genetically and technologically enhanced, exploring entirely new ways of being human; the other species, genetically akin to us, barely surviving within its collapsed infrastructure.”

Similar to Yuval Noah Harari’s recent, and equally expansive, Homo Deus, Lent’s book seeks some perspective on our modern juggernaut of radical innovation and global polarisation. To do so, it reaches towards Asian wisdom traditions – an “Eastern pattern” that Lent calls “the harmonic web of life”.

But while Harari’s no-self Buddhism comes close to exulting in the way humankind will be overtaken by intelligent algorithms, Lent finds a place for connecting, meaning-seeking humans in this complex future.

To carve out this space for ourselves, Lent says we must recast the deep metaphors structuring our attitudes to nature and other humans.

Neo-Confucianism is the candidate that Lent favours to lead this metaphorical revolution. Its core concept is an understanding of the universe as the interrelation of qi (spoken as “chi”) and li. Qi is the raw material of the universe – but li is “the ever-moving, ever-present set of patterns that flow through everything in nature and in all our perceptions of the world, including our consciousness”.

Like his mentor Fritjof Capra, who provides an introduction for the book, Lent seeks corroboration for this spiritual insight in what were once called the “new”, non-deterministic sciences – the study of complex adaptive systems in physics and biology, which find curious analogues in certain branches of mathematics.

Lent shows how the tenets of Neo-Confucian thought are homologous with maths, neuroscience and climatology, particularly when those disciplines identify “a complex of dynamical systems that remain valid across the entire natural world, from systems as vast as global climate to as small as a living cell”.

Like Capra, Lent wants to fuse spiritual tradition and the “new” sciences in service of a less rapacious and divisive world. If we could grasp what Lent calls elsewhere “liology”, we would attribute our ultimate sources of value not to “a transcendent realm”, or to our “moral rationality”, but to “humanity’s intrinsic connection with the natural world”.

There’s an obvious, real-world refutation available, of course. It’s not hard to find a regime that loudly deploys Confucian values in a modern setting. But does China, which recorded its highest ever figures for coal-fired electricity this April, provide the best exemplar? Lent himself delicately “refrains from making direct inferences regarding modern China” in his study of Neo-Confucianism. He should entertain a little more hope. Although China is producing more energy from coal in absolute terms, .

Since 2007, Beijing elites have been hyping East Asia as a land mass uniquely placed to bring about an “ecological civilisation”, underpinned by the Confucian belief in harmony with nature. Meanwhile the administrations of US president Donald Trump and UK prime minister Theresa May have each rubbished climate change action and research. They have handed China a golden opportunity: to make good on its soft-power rhetoric and create a sustainable model that, sooner or later, the rest of the world will have to emulate.

Lent uses what he calls “cognitive history” and “archaeology of the mind” to show how such massive shifts in underlying world view can happen, and they involve an evolutionary account of the brain. Again like Harari, Lent dates the advent of our capacity for advanced cognition to a point about 70,000 years ago, when our prefrontal cortex began to expand.

Lent describes the “executive function” of the prefrontal cortex well. “It mediates our ability to plan, conceptualise, symbolise, make rules, and impose meaning on things. It controls our physiological drives and turns our basic feelings into complex emotions. It enables us to be aware of ourselves and others as separate beings, and to turn the past and the future into one narrative.” This is the locus of the “patterning instinct”.

In many of the neurology-informed history epics, authors are often studiedly neutral about the raw mental ability of humans to forge new paradigms. Few of them dare to connect our cognitive flexibility to any necessary idea of progress, or human flourishing. This is perhaps understandable given what’s involved is often a survey of historical carnage. Lent himself is unsparing in his descriptions of the cruelty and brutality meted out by righteous monotheists and dualists, their meaning-patterns justifying colonialism and empire.

“Cultures shape values, and those values shape history. Our values will shape our future”

Given all this, you have to admire the way Lent sticks his neck out on behalf of Neo-Confucianism. He goes so far as to propose that its concept of “heart-mind”, which seeks to integrate emotion and reason, is analogous to the prefrontal cortex when it functions at its best. And he has a point, citing research that shows that a healthy prefrontal cortex is not about “repressing or overriding emotional states”, but about “integrating them into appropriate decisions and actions
 our cognition takes place not in the brain but in the felt sensation of the entire body.”

The Patterning Instinct, oblivious to the science-deniers currently occupying high executive office, ends with a statement of simple confidence: “Cultures shape values, and those values shape history. By the same token, our values will shape our future.” One way to equip yourself for this heroic task will be to read this enormous, learned, yet garrulous and helpful book.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Mind is where the heart is”

“Ever tried to leave IKEA quickly? That endless, furniture-strewn path to the exit is no accident“