In his 1861 essay “Utilitarianism,” John Stuart Mill famously said, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
In a world of virtual dependency, are we becoming fools satisfied?
Increasing reliance on social media continues to deprive college students of depth and friction. Social media companies engineer their platforms to keep users trapped in an endless scroll of media and curate the very existence philosophers warned us against: the comfortable and optimized life that leaves us empty.
There is a philosophical thought experiment called Nozick’s pleasure machine, which challenges the utilitarian claim that seeking pleasure is the chief good. The purpose of the problem is to understand that there may be other noteworthy things worth pursuing in one’s life that aren’t solely for the sake of happiness.
Nozick asks participants to imagine a machine that can give you any experience you desire. While plugged into this machine, you will live a life full of pleasures, happiness and fulfillment exactly as you choose. You would be unaware that the machine simulates experiences, understanding them as completely real. The only catch is that once in the machine, you cannot leave. Would you choose to enter?
In a 2020 PhilPapers survey, David Bourget and David Chalmers found that about 80% of participants said they would reject the machine.
This illustrates that people value reality, challenge and authenticity over easy lives online, yet we still scroll away.
Economic commentator Kyla Scanlon said that digital life increasingly removes friction from daily experience. This builds on the fact that there is so much friction and hardship in the real world: economic insecurity, political polarization, inequality, violence and so on. Of course, there are spectacles of global issues in our digital world too, but there is less friction than in the real world, and users can avoid them with a simple swipe.
“All you have to do is take out your phone to disappear into the frictionless universe of technology,” Scanlon said. “And companies definitely want you to!”
Of course, not everyone would agree; maybe reducing friction is not emptying life out, but expanding it.
Before we had such access to digital platforms, geography constrained communities, participation in education and politics required physical presence and publishing anything to a wide audience was a long process. Now information is immediate, voices support causes instantly and organization has never been more efficient. The removal of this friction can empower people whose voices have been silenced and reduce the barriers to knowledge, leveling the playing field.
This is the typical argument for the internet and does not account for the abuse of power that comes along with access. We are continuing to overwhelm ourselves in a state of excessive comfort that comes from online culture. It’s simply just easier to be online. You can create this curated experience with no effort. The algorithm does it for you, and the more you swipe, the easier it becomes. It’s not even an option of willpower; algorithms pile us into echo chambers, giving us an escape to a place where we don’t have to consider the hard things.
Unlike the hypothetical happiness-machine, we’ve actually stepped inside this modern version. We scroll, like and engage in ways that keep us immersed, and in doing so, we seem to be as close as ever to becoming the “fools satisfied” that Mill warned against.