Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World | Christine Rosen

In Episode 396 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/extinction-of-experience-being-human-in-a-disembodied-world-christine-rosen/ of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Christine Rosen about her book, "Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World," which explores the cultural and emotional shifts that accompany our embrace of technology and its effects on our experience of life as embodied human beings. Christine is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, and technology and human behavior. Rosen is also a monthly columnist for Commentary Magazine, one of the cohosts of the popular Commentary Podcast. Demetri and Christine spend the first hour of their conversation focused on the philosophical and moral questions that arise from our unreserved embrace of virtual realities and mediated experiences. They explore questions about the nature of reality, how embodiment shapes experience, and whether the virtualization of our lives is the natural progression of our interplay with technology or if it represents something fundamentally different and profoundly immoral about the world we are building. In the second hour, Kofinas and Rosen discuss the effect that these technologies and the logic that animates them have on our sense of self, agency, and freedom. They explore how time spent inside virtual spaces hosted on large tech platforms may be contributing to the rising levels of depression, anxiety, antisociality, and other mental and personality disorders that we may or may not recognize in each other and in ourselves. They also discuss what can and should be done, both at an individual and societal level, to begin to address the problem. You can subscribe to our premium content and access our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode of Hidden Forces, you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 | YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg | Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP | Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces | SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces | CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539 | RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Write us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ https://hiddenforces.io/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas http://www.demetrikofinas.com/ Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/ Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 12/17/2024

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up, everybody? My name is Dimitri Karafinis, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Christine Rosen. Christine is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, and technology and human behavior. She is also a monthly columnist for Commentary Magazine, one of the co-hosts of the very popular Commentary podcast, and the author of a phenomenal new book titled,

• 0:43Demetri Kofinas?

  "The Extinction of Experience", which investigates the cultural and emotional shifts that accompany our embrace of technology and its effects on our experience of life as embodied human beings. Christine and I spent the first hour of our conversation focused on the more philosophical and moral questions that arise from our unreserved embrace of virtual realities and mediated spaces. We explore questions about the nature of reality, how embodiment shapes experience, and whether the virtualization of our lives is the natural progression of our interplay with technology, or if it represents something fundamentally different and profoundly immoral about the world we are building. In the second hour, Christine and I discuss

• 1:27Demetri Kofinas?

  the effect that these technologies and the logic that animates them have on our sense of self, agency, and freedom. Is there a causal relationship that we can draw between time spent inside virtual spaces hosted on large tech platforms, and the rising levels of depression, anxiety, antisociality, and other mental and personality disorders that we may or may not recognize in each other and in ourselves? We also discuss what can and should be done, both at an individual and societal level, to begin to address the problem. If you want access to that part of the conversation and you're not already subscribed to Hidden Forces, you can join our premium feed and listen to the second hour of today's

• 2:10Demetri Kofinas?

  episode by going to hiddenforces.io/subscribe. All of our content tiers give you access to our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from

• 2:50Demetri Kofinas?

  our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly evocative and thoughtful conversation with my guest, Christine Rosen. Christine Rosen, welcome to Hidden Forces.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:09Demetri Kofinas?

  It's my pleasure having you, Christine. I was just telling you in the few minutes that we had to catch up before we started this call, how much I enjoyed your book and that it falls in a vein of authors' works like Shoshana Zuboff, Sherry Turkle, Cal Newport, who have been on the podcast. Actually, Cheryl hasn't been on the show. I had reached out to her back when she wrote her last book in 2013. I mean, we hadn't launched the show then, but I had read it and right before I started the Hidden Forces podcast. And that was one of the subjects I was really interested in. Actually, also Mark C. Taylor, who wrote a book called Speed Limits. Mark had been the third guest on the podcast. That book also came up in my mind when I was reading your book. And so, we're going to have a chance to talk about all this, and I'm very excited to do it. Before we get into this, I'm just

• 3:52Demetri Kofinas?

  curious to know a little bit more about you, your background. How did you get interested in this subject?

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Well, it was a sort of meandering journey. I was actually trained as a historian, got my PhD in American Intellectual History from Emory University, came to Washington and was doing a bunch of freelance writing, editing, ghostwriting, speechwriting, all kinds of writing, but the think tank world and ended up at a place called the Ethics and Public Policy Center. And there I met a kind of merry band of fellow travelers, including Yuval Levin and Eric Cohen and Adam Kuiper and others. And we decided to start a journal because we were very frustrated that when it came to issues of bioethics and technology and human behavior, there were wonderful academic and scholarly resources. There were some very good journalists writing about it in sort of daily news.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  And then there were the sort of industry boosting publications like Wired Magazine, which were more consumer oriented. But there was a space, we thought, for a place where you could write longer thoughtful essays about what it all meant. What did it mean when a new bioethics issue was raised? Should the government get involved? Should it not? And so I started out writing more about bioethics, but along the way, things started happening on the internet, like the creation of MySpace and some other early social media networks, the very rapid evolution of personal technologies like the cellphone, the early cellphones, which then morphed, as we know, into the smartphone. And I just became fascinated with the question of how and whether it changes human behavior. So my wonderful colleagues would, we'd sit in these editorial meetings and they would

• 5:25Speaker 01

  hear me going on and on about these early online dating sites and how fascinating it was and I wanted to write about it. And God bless them, they let me do it. So really, a lot of this early fascination started almost 20 years ago with these early consumer oriented technologies and platforms, pre-Facebook, pre-smartphone. And I just got hooked thinking about the ways in which our use of these devices, particularly in our private worlds, transform who we are. So that's sort of the short. I then jumped to, did a stint as the managing editor of the Weekly Standard and then now I have, very happily for the last few years, made my home at the American Enterprise Institute here in Washington.

• 6:02Demetri Kofinas?

  It's amazing because I didn't know your relationship to the New Atlantis. I didn't know that you were the co-founders. I think it's also fascinating that you have this experience founding the New Atlantis, which is so human focused on technology. There's a lot of influence of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman. And then you were at the Weekly Standard, which is just something I think of much more in terms of conservative policy and stuff like this. And I'm a huge fan of the New Atlantis, and Ari knows this, Ari Shulman, the editor, knows how much I am a fan of it, and many of the authors have been on the podcast, folks like John Askinus or Tara Isabella Burton, whose more recent book on the making of the self comes up also, again, in your work, a lot of those themes are similar. Before we get into all that, I'm just, one more question about your background, so, or

• 6:47Demetri Kofinas?

  maybe a couple more questions. Am I correct in understanding that you grew up in a fundamentalist home? And if that's right, how does that influence sort of your perspective here? Because we also had Megan O'Giblin on the podcast to talk about her work, which, again, also in a similar area. She also had a similar upbringing in a fundamentalist home. So I'm just curious how that influenced you.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Well, yes, I was raised in Florida, South Florida, and I went to very restrictive fundamentalist Christian schools, K through 12. You know, I was taught creation science. I was taught very Manichean ways of looking at the world. This is right, this is wrong. But I also got a kind of a form of a classical education as well. We only used the King James Version Bible. We did a lot of memorization, a lot of classical literature and poetry. So in an odd way, I got a, I got a very analog, traditional education, but packaged in a, in a religious faith that was fairly unyielding when it came to question raising. So as I got older, I did leave that. I went on to a secular undergraduate experience at the University of South Florida, and then on to academic work.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  I think people who were raised in those households, I emerged from it thankfully, because my parents were somewhat skeptical, not quite as hardcore as the educational institutions we went to were. And I, we were encouraged to debate and discuss things at home, which a lot of my friends were not. I think it gives you a healthy skepticism about new things. And if you can escape without bitterness and anger, which I know can be difficult for people, I was lucky in that I, I didn't have a lot of bitterness and anger. I went back and revisited those schools later as an adult and tried to find the usefulness in some of what they taught us. But I think it gives you a healthy skepticism about new things and an understanding that the newest thing isn't always an improvement.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  And a respect for tradition and a respect for some of the old ways of doing things, at least that's what it did for me, and a respect for just how flawed human nature is and that promises that we can transform human nature for the good should, again, be greeted with healthy skepticism.

• 8:51Demetri Kofinas?

  So I'll have a chance, hopefully, to read this quote from Callie Newport's book on digital minimalism that I pulled from the rundown from years ago when he was on the podcast. But there's a section in which he quotes a philosopher Friedrich Gero, who describes Thoreau's New Economics. And he talks explicitly about this sense of what exactly do I gain or lose, this weighing of each individual decision. And I learned in that conversation as well, a bit about the culture in Amish communities and how they go through this deliberate process of sort of understanding that with every single choice, something is gained and something is lost. And we have to account for what is lost, which is something that you talk about in your book. Last biographical question, Christine, before we start discussing the book. And that has to do with the

• 9:35Demetri Kofinas?

  fact that you don't have a social media account. And from what I understand, you've never had one, even when you were studying MySpace, it sounds like you didn't actually, did you create a dummy account? Were you lurking at all or nothing? So I'm fascinated by this. So I'm curious to understand how you think this has influenced your perspective? And has it allowed you to see, to step back in a sense, and to see the society and the changes that have taken place over the last 20 years as a result of social media in a way that, let's say, your colleagues who are actually embedded on these platforms have had a harder time seeing?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's helped me be more objective than they are. I made it first, it was first a personal choice in that I understood that I know myself well enough that if I were to have those accounts, I would either get fired or waste a lot of my time. So I just, for me, it was a sort of self-discipline, active self-discipline. But then I did start to see people who, particularly in the field of journalism, people putting opinions out there that made me question whether it was possible for them to be objective about the things they reported on. Everybody has their private opinions, but I saw very rapidly that these platforms, particularly for people who work in the world of ideas, could perhaps undermine their ability To be skeptical and to check their own prior convictions when they needed to.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Whenever I studied a particular social media platform, I would basically observe the use of someone who I knew who was active on the site. So, you know, I have, I had a young niece, she would show me what, what all everybody did. I had friends and family and colleagues who would do the same for me. It was deeply annoying for them, I'm sure, as it still is when everybody's organizing something on Instagram and I'm not on Instagram. But for me personally, it was a deliberate choice that sometimes I think had professional consequences. I'm not out there tweeting everything I write. I have very kind readers who will sometimes link to my pieces. So I probably did sacrifice some publicity of my own work. But for me, that was a perfectly legitimate trade off for the amount of time I knew I would spend on those sites.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  And again, the habits of mind, they encourage particularly writers and opinion writers to form, which is to be very reactionary and in the moment, rather than to sit and let ideas simmer for a while until we see what rises to the top.

• 11:43Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, so much to contemplate there. Maybe we'll, again, we'll have a chance later in the episode to talk about. So let's talk about the book. I love this book. I think it's excellent. I highly recommend it to everyone. It's Christmas time. If you want to give people a gift, this could be a great gift for them to have. It seems to me that there are two separate concerns that are expressed in this book. One of them dominates the focus of the book and the other one is sort of there in the background. And to what degree, I mean, it's clearly important to you, but we'll have a chance to talk about and understand sort of how, how important it is. One of them has to do with this argument, I think, that basically mediated experiences are necessarily less authentic, natural and good in a moral sense than actual in-world experiences.

• 12:26Demetri Kofinas?

  So going for coffee is better than watching someone on a video having coffee. The other argument that is, I said, kind of a background argument in the book, or a concern maybe, is that mediated experiences also yield themselves or are, make people more susceptible to being controlled or manipulated. Now, that second concern happens to be my primary concern, and I think it's one that's just a much easier argument to make. The second one, I'm actually inclined to agree with you. I have had people on the show, for example, David Chalmers, whose work was really influential to me when I was a young man, who developed The Hard Problem of Consciousness, who has now seemed to come around and feel that, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but

• 13:08Demetri Kofinas?

  it was my impression, having him on the podcast, to talk about his last book about simulated reality, that he seemed to agree with younger kids who kind of feel like, you know, what's the difference between a simulated reality and a real reality? Since the former argument, the one about real world embodied experiences versus simulated ones, is more central, let's talk about that. But I do want to, you know, keep that in mind about talking about manipulated reality and, because it's so relevant to the world we live in today with social media and algorithms. So, the book's title, Christine, is The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. What were you trying to convey with that title? Because there's a lot to untangle there.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Yes, so the title itself, The Extinction of Experience, I stumbled across this phrase when I was reading the work of a naturalist named Robert Michael Pyle. He's very focused on how you teach each new generation to appreciate the natural world, to become stewards of that world, and to understand how that world works. And there's been lots of interesting work in ecology about that idea, but it stuck with me in part because I was thinking about it outside the terms of just fostering appreciation for nature and understanding of ecology. Because we now live in the physical world, but spend so much time mediating it, that I wondered, okay, well, were those same sorts of habits of mind, that same sort of recognition

• 14:34Speaker 01

  of what's important and what's not, have we dulled that by mediating and escaping into screens, even when we're standing in the physical world? And that prompted me to start thinking about that as a title. One argument he makes that I think I do embrace, in a broader sense, with regard to technology, is this idea that if you mediate so many experiences, if this becomes your daily reality, if living in a virtual space becomes more the norm than the exception, you choose it because it's easier, more convenient, it's seamless. Efficient, it's all these things where promised our technologies can be and often are, then you don't know what you're missing because you never did experience the old thing. So I'm Gen X, I'm in that weird hybrid place where I grew up without a lot of this stuff.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  And then as a young and then, you know, middle aged adult had to adjust to them. And that does concern me because I think there are ways of being in the world that we know work for people and allow for human flourishing. And there are ways of being in the world that we know do not allow for that. So my question is, what we're choosing now, how much of a choice is it? Because a lot of this becomes compulsory if you're a student or you're an employee. That's a separate question. That speaks more to the other question of surveillance and control. But just in our daily lives, are we cultivating habits of mind? Are we cultivating ways of thinking about the world that no longer have any grounding in old ways? And so that's where I am a small C conservative on a lot of things.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Because we have made these choices, I think, without thinking about what we're giving up. There are opportunity costs for everything we choose. Some of those are worth it. I love GPS. I know it makes me worse at reading maps, but I also grew up reading a paper map and can still do that. I have that skill if I need it. What happens when you have an entire generation that has never even held a paper map? And their GPS goes out? So those sorts of questions, although I'm framing that in a slightly hyperbolic way, every single day, there are experiences like that in the lives of young people in particular, where they don't even know what they're missing. So that's where the extinction of experience came. And the subtitle comes from just questioning whether have we actually achieved the promise that a lot of our technologists have given us over the years, which is

• 16:43Speaker 01

  your physical body really doesn't matter because you can live in your mind, in virtual space, in ways that are so much more improved over the difficult realities of a finite flawed physical form. My answer to that is no, and that there are real costs to trying to deny our physical embodied reality. But there are many, many people on the other side who would argue the opposite.

• 17:05Demetri Kofinas?

  So I hope our listeners will forgive me if I'm not as tight with my questions here because there are so many areas I want to wander with you. And it's actually a conversation I wish I was having offline first than online. So let's just, let's dig a little bit more into this being human in a disembodied world. So you talked a little bit about this sense of being disembodied. I feel like also, and this, I guess this is sort of a question statement thing. We're obviously very different today. I always, I often wonder like whether if you took someone from 1750 and you brought them today, could they live? Would they fall into depression? You have many cases across North and South America of native tribes whose entire worlds came undone, not just because many were conquered and enslaved, but because their landscapes

• 17:49Demetri Kofinas?

  were so altered that they were no longer able to exist in the manner that they had been accustomed to for their entire cultural histories. So I wonder how much of this is just part of the inevitable progression of humanity away from the natural world that we've experienced since we left our lives as hunter-gatherers? Or is it something fundamentally different because of the informational aspects that alter our communal landscapes in ways that even the move from hunter-gatherer toward agricultural ways of living or more industrial urban lifestyles did not? Because unlike those transitions from one form of community

• 18:27Demetri Kofinas?

  to another, the changes today are from communal ways of being toward more individuated experiences, curated by algorithms optimized to predict and increasingly steer our behavior based on what they think they know about us, which arguably stunts our ability to evolve and grow through serendipity and exposure to the very sort of randomness that has been a core driver of human evolution, both biologically and culturally. So how much of this is just the next stage of human evolution? How much of it is something fundamentally different? And how much of it is actually really about the pace of change, that we're changing so

• 19:09Demetri Kofinas?

  fast that it's creating distress in society? Because many people who are in their 30s or 40s, and certainly older, are finding it difficult to adjust to the pace of change because these changes are coming so quickly.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Of course it is, and it sometimes frustrates me because these conversations, and I'm sure you know this, have often start with, "Well, you wouldn't have liked the printing press, and you would have been against this or that technological development." Maybe I would have, I don't know, I can't put myself in the mindset of someone from that era. What I can do, though, is look at some of the physical realities and some of the technologists' promises, and compare and contrast what they're promising versus what our limitations truly are. And by that I mean, we are hardwired evolutionarily, a very slow process, in which it's only in the very, very recent past, if you're thinking from an evolutionary standpoint, that we even did handwriting, or reading, or any of these things that now we think of as our whole arc of human history. These are fairly

• 20:09Speaker 01

  recent developments. Do you know how we used to communicate? We'd look at each other, we'd see each other's faces, we'd see bodily gestures, we lived in small communities and were quite violent about not allowing new people in unless they gained trust. There are all kinds of things we know without knowing why we know them, that are hardwired into our physical bodies through this extensive evolutionary history. Now, culture and transformational social change has always been with us as well, and that's why we have cultural differences. Like, in certain countries, people stand closer to you in public, and if you're not from that country, it can seem unnerving. Those are cultural differences, but the physical reality of interacting with each other remains constant because we're all human beings.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  So, in the sense that I'm reacting to rapid change, yes, because I believe there is such a thing as human nature, and we are hardwired to react in certain ways to other people and into the size and shape and form and rules of our communities. When those change dramatically, we flail as humans. And my concern is that the answer to that in previous historical eras of great change has been to say, "We have to figure this out. Let's figure out how to adapt," while still maintaining the virtues of the communities and the human values that we cherish. The difference in our age now is that because the change is rapid, and because the culture is dominated by a very techno-utopian vision of human nature, those questions never even get asked anymore. And I think we should be asking those questions.

• 21:34Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think this is why this book's really important, because you're asking these questions. And there does seem to be a hurry in our society to get somewhere, without really asking the question of where are we going? And is this even a place that we want to be at? And like, deep philosophical questions about what does it mean to live a good life? Or what does a good life look like? Aren't being asked. And I wonder, you know, when we talk about like this idea of like embodied life, and like, what does it mean to be a human being? So, in your view, what does it mean to be a human being? For someone who says like, well, I feel very human when I'm online with my friends and we're chatting for five hours.

• 22:16Demetri Kofinas?

  I still feel very human. This is just a new version of humanity. I'm evolving. What would be your counterargument to that? Why is that less of a human experience?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  So that's, it's a very good question. And I'm glad you phrased it that way. The experiences we have online, emotional experiences are authentic. Those are real feelings we have when we communicate with each other online or via text or in all the ways that you're describing. So that, in that sense, when people say, oh, you're saying everything online is inauthentic. I am not. I have many authentic feelings when I look on FaceTime with a loved one who lives on the other side of the country. That is a genuine human emotion I'm experiencing. My concern is that the ease of experiencing those feelings by just tapping a button or swiping right or left on my phone cannot and should not replace the hardship of having to leave my house and go try to see those people who I care about and love

• 23:09Speaker 01

  and who might need my help and be with them in person as often as possible. It is not possible to do that all the time. But my, I feel like there's a moment where we're starting to, and we're in it now. If you're in a younger generation, you're in it. I think it's less the case with older folks. But we're choosing the mediated experience over the in-person one, not because we don't have the option, but because we do. And by that, I mean, it's much, much easier to have total control over your interaction with someone. So for example, if you got really angry at me during the course of this conversation, you could press a button and I will disappear. And it's like it never happened. If we were in the same room together, we'd probably have to work it out. Or there's more incentive because you're physically sharing the space.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  So in the sense that we are allowing, the problem isn't that we're having authentic emotions. In some ways, the problem is that the designers of some of these platforms and technologies are so knowledgeable about how to push our buttons and to elicit emotional and responses like anger, fear, anxiety, as well as happiness and love, that A, they can be manipulated. And B, we start to mistrust the much more challenging experience of doing that in person, where we have less control over the other person. We have less control over the circumstances. You can't just push a button if someone's annoying you in a, in a meeting where you're all face to face. You can fake a Zoom emergency and, you know, turn off your camera and, you know, run into the other room.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  So the ease and the, I think, false sense of control it gives us about our human relationships is worrisome. That was a very long-winded way of answering your, your very good question.

• 24:43Demetri Kofinas?

  Much better than my long-winded, meandering questions. So I don't have the words to describe this. This is, this is also part of the challenge of like trying to speak to the divine, to the mystery. It does feel like there is a fundamental assumption built into people's belief systems who adopt certain transhumanist views of people living their future out in the cloud or in virtual spaces. And that, that assumption that's embedded is that somehow there's nothing else. That basically everything is just the neuronal connections in your brain. And that that is just as real as this embodied experience of the world. But I think that if someone were to actually try to maybe do some research here, I bet,

• 25:28Demetri Kofinas?

  and you've done a ton of research in your book, but this specific sort of example I'm thinking of is like people that are in isolation, in prison, for a prolonged period of times, lose their mind.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:40Demetri Kofinas?

  Whereas we have a saying, many people are used to, even the, the most sort of fervent adopters of technology, which is go touch grass. And there's something grounding about being out in the world, being in a meditative state, being around nature, it can calm you down. And there might be even something more to that. That people are missing, how much of this is also about the departure? So we're talking about the move away from nature, but also how much of it is the loss of connection to this realm of reality of some people call spirituality, some people call God, some people call the mystery, like where does that fall in terms of explaining what's happening to people today?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  I think it explains a lot, in fact. What you're describing is something that I think has been present in in modern post industrial revolution culture for some time, which is the disappearance of certainly mystery, but awe. Awe is something that we, I think, used to be a more regular experience and nature was often the point at which people could experience awe. They would see a mountain, they would see a rushing river. These were also integrated into their daily lives in ways that, I mean, for the, I live in a city, I don't, I don't see mountains all the time, but I do seek them out in part because I want to experience that sense of awesomeness and that sense of actually groundedness, but also how small and meaningless I am in the larger scheme of the universe, which

• 27:03Speaker 01

  is a humbling feeling. I would say that's another, on the opposite end of not experiencing awe is that we lack humility as a result. Our technologies tell us quite a very different message, which is that you can control everything now. And if you don't like living in the real world with all its difficulties, you don't have to. You have this other alternative where you have much more control over what you experience, what you see, even what, any sort of criticism you have to hear. And we know what this has done to our politics, we see it every day, but it's also doing something to the way we understand ourselves as human beings and our obligations to each other, not just our own personal experiences. So that lack of a sense of wonder and awe coincides, obviously, with greater secularization, at least in the United States.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Fewer people who identify, the largest growing group in the country right now are nuns. No, not nuns, as in they wear habits and are Catholic, but people who have no religious affiliation at all. So a more secular society will search elsewhere for meaning and purpose. And a sense of wonder and awe because it's, I would argue, hardwired in human beings to seek that. That is in part what makes us human. And we used to talk about it in terms of the soul. But now we don't really have a new language. And I think that's part of why we so enthusiastically embrace a lot of these technological myths about what our devices can do for us. Because we are actually searching for meaning and purpose and awe and wonder. And we were promised that.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  If you, I mean, I read a lot of Apple advertisements for its products over the last 10 years. And it is astonishing how much is a, the sub rosa there is always, you know, isn't this amazing what you can do with this? And that has morphed over time into, isn't it amazing what these technologies do? It's the technology we're supposed to be in awe of. And in a way, we kind of are.

• 28:51Demetri Kofinas?

  Wow, so I don't want to spend any time on Apple right now because that's going to open up another can of worms. But it's just interesting to reflect on how that company, its culture, its messaging, its products, the heart and soul that went into them has changed when they went from the creator to the operator, from, from Jobs to Tim Cook. Maybe something we'll talk about. I want to mention again is that Tara Zabella's work, who also has written at the New Atlantis. She's been on the podcast before. As I said, I mentioned the one book she did on the, on the evolution of the self. She did another one on exactly this subject. It's called Strange Rights about people's search for the different aspects of, of humanity that religion speaks to in various forms, like Soul Cycle or Sleep No More,

• 29:35Demetri Kofinas?

  the Macbeth in real life theater experience. I feel like this, what you said about awe is just so important. And I really just want to sit with it for a moment. Because in your book, there's an anecdote that you tell about someone that went and saw the Grand Canyon after they had seen pictures of it and they were kind of underwhelmed by the experience. I'm even more interested to ask you about the opposite of that, which is, can someone find awe in a digital mediated experience? And I cannot think of a single example.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  So I think we're constantly looking to create that experience. So the big dome in Las Vegas, the sphere, whatever it's called, that is an effort to generate technological awe in the same way that, you know, when he was head of Google, Eric Schmidt was always constantly talking about manufacturing serendipity.

• 30:23Demetri Kofinas?

  But is that mediated? Is the sphere mediated? It doesn't feel mediated because you're actually getting a light show, just like when you go to Times Square, it doesn't feel mediated.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. The source of awe is actually on a screen versus you interacting directly with the real world, but you are sitting around next to other people. So in that sense, I would say it's kind of a happy medium, right? You're with other human beings, all experiencing the same thing at the same time, which is, again, another thing that we used to take for granted as human beings, but now is a deliberate choice you have to make to do that. But what you're seeing is a simulacrum of other things. It is a screen, and this is where I start ranting and raving and sounding like Neil Postman or McLuhan. Like, it is a very qualitatively different thing than going on a hike in a mountain and watching the sunrise, even if you're doing it with 20 people or alone. So again, the mediation changes the quality of the experience.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Now, does it make it worse? Not necessarily, but it is a change. And it's that change that I think we're fearful of acknowledging because we think it means we might have to give up our phones. It doesn't always, but in some cases, it probably should prompt us to do that.

• 31:30Demetri Kofinas?

  So speaking of simulations, in your book, you describe a thought experiment put forward by philosopher Robert Nozick in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, known as the Experience Machine or the Pleasure Machine. More people might be familiar with this thought experiment as it was presented to the character Cypher in the 1999 Matrix film, where he betrays his friends in return for the promise of being given the optimal simulated life. It was that scene where he was cutting into the steak, and Smith, Agent Smith, was asking him what he wanted to be. And he said, you know, "Make me an actor, somebody important." That mattered more to him than whether or not the experience was real. And this speaks exactly to what was shockingly conveyed to me by David Chalmers. It seemed that he was sort of suggesting the same

• 32:13Demetri Kofinas?

  thing. And actually, I watched an interview that was also very disturbing. This was all of a, why did I have to say, again, I'm actually grateful to read the books of people like you because I do find some kinship there and some sanity in what seems like an otherwise insane world. There was an interview that Keanu Reeves gave where he was describing a dinner he had at a fellow filmmaker's house, a director's house, where he was sitting with his family and his kids were there. And his kids hadn't seen The Matrix. And he was describing to them what it was. They said, well, you know, there's this guy and he realizes that the real world isn't really the world. The world is in isn't really the real world. So he goes to the real world and they try to like break people out. And they said, well, they're like, why does that matter? Like, what is that? You know, they didn't, they didn't understand the plot. They were suggesting like, it's, what does it matter if it's real

• 32:56Demetri Kofinas?

  or not? And he goes, you don't think it doesn't matter? He says, no, it doesn't matter. So this is something that I want to dig into again, in the form of this experience machine, because it seems that people's attitudes towards this thought experiment has also changed. So first of all, why don't you just tell our listeners, what is the, the experience machine or the pleasure machine? What are we talking about here? And then, how have people's attitudes towards this thought experiment changed in the last 50 years since Nozick developed it?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  So Nozick's experiment was meant to test the authenticity and the quality of human experience. And what the offer you're given, if you're part of this experiment, is you can be plugged into a machine where basically everything's great, but you know you're plugged into a machine. Like, you get everything you want in life. You can create a world, you know, basically a perfect simulation where you have a lot of control, but you know it's not real. You actually have that knowledge. Would you choose that? Or would you choose to live in the real world? Right? So it's, you can have a perfect existence, but you know it's not real. And when he was writing this, most people chose reality, because there was some sense of whether they thought it was pernicious to live in

• 34:04Speaker 01

  this fake world, or kind of a cop out, because they weren't actually earning it. I think that, when he was writing, the concern was that you're being given this perfect experience without having earned, put in any effort to achieve it. So your sense of enjoyment would be hollow in that you knew you hadn't done anything to earn it. Now, I think it's very different. And they, they've done various iterations of the experience machine experiment in more modern times. They've offered people a pill versus being plugged into an actual machine, like made it less obtrusive in their lives. And people are more likely now

• 34:38Speaker 01

  With a few caveats to say, yeah, that sounds good. So that tells us two things. One, perhaps people's dissatisfactions with how the real world works are increasing. And I think we can see that in a lot of measurements about trust, about loneliness, about anxiety, about our political culture. A lot of people feel like the real world doesn't work well and doesn't do the things it should for most of the people in it. That sense, then, by contrast, and the idea of living in a simulation where you don't have to deal with those problems, becomes more appealing. And now that the simulations are so captivating and sophisticated and absolutely individualized to the point of preemptively offering you things you didn't even know you wanted until

• 35:21Speaker 01

  you see them, and the sophistication of those tools makes that seem like less of a reach for people. What I worry about is the lack of concern over earning it. Like, this sense of, like, something is authentic because I worked at it. I set a goal, I worked at it, I achieved it or didn't. But I am invested and I have allegiance, not just to myself and my own pleasure, but to the world I live in, the community of people. And I have rights, but I also have responsibilities. And so that has transformed a lot just since Nozick's time. And that worries me in terms of, again, what our technologists want to promise us, which is a world that says, and maybe we'll get into this during this conversation, people like Marc Andreessen, who say, "Reality privilege."

• 36:06Speaker 01

  If reality, that's a privilege to have a nice reality, like he and other billionaires do. Most people's reality is terrible, so let's give them this wonderful alternative. It is a version of the experience machine experiment, completely stripped of any sense of morality, justice, and authenticity.

• 36:22Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, again, there's so many areas. I'm doing my best here to try and keep the conversation structured.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Sorry, I keep derailing it.

• 36:28Demetri Kofinas?

  No, no, you're not. There's so much to, there's so much to dig into. So let's focus a little bit on something that you intimated, which had to do with what Ted Kaczynski called "the power process," which was, I think, something inspired by Nietzsche's "will to power." And this idea that, like, there's something essential to what, where happiness derives from, through the struggle, through the process of overcoming and achieving. And there does seem to be a sort of resignation in society. In some cases, we've seen it explicitly, like the laying down movement in China. And I feel like that, that has something to do with these elevated levels of depression. Where people, it seems like we live in a time, so this is also a question, by the way, I'm just sort of throwing it out, but it seems to me like we're living in a time where people

• 37:12Demetri Kofinas?

  have expectations about being happy, or they have a lot of expectations in general, that their lives should look a certain way, they should feel a certain way, even if they don't exactly know what happiness is, because they're out there trying to grab it, which is not really how happiness works. So I mean, how much does that phenomenon sort of come into play here? How much of the rising rates of depression and loneliness derive from how we live in these increasingly mediated experiences of life, in these personalized experiences that are also inherently much more lonely?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  I think it has a huge amount to do with it. I'm personally a fan of like Oliver Berkman and others who are kind of cynics about happiness studies in general, but about the way that as a culture we have approached happiness, as you say, as this goal that we should achieve, rather than looking at the process itself, which generally in history has been yielded more fruitful guidance. So the day to day, if you think about your daily life, you are constantly bombarded, both directly and indirectly, and even subliminally in some cases, with reminders of your importance. So you get constant reminders on your phone from the people you know, you get advertisements, you go to pump gas, how was your experience? Please tell us your important opinion. You buy a book, what do you rank it? You get

• 38:31Speaker 01

  an order delivered, how did we do? Again, there's this cumulative process, which is both, first of all, we all get massive decision fatigue by 10 a.m. because you've been asked a gazillion questions about what you think by then in many people's daily lives. So that leads to anxiety and sort of a sense of, you know, ah, it's overwhelming, this amount of information and the amount of times I'm doing stuff. At the same time, we have to do more for ourselves through automation. So you're checking your own groceries out, and then you're being prompted later with an email about your experience or a text message. So there's a sort of, we're bombarded with constant reminders that we are at a center of a universe. And very few options emerge in daily life, except when we are out in public space together with strangers that remind

• 39:14Speaker 01

  It's not just about us. We live in a social world, or should, where there are other rules of behavior. And it doesn't matter if you have an important text message, if someone getting on the bus stumbled in front of you, you know what, you should help them. You should offer them your seat. You should notice the people around you in public space. And so when I complain about the decline of civility in public space, the lack of attention that people give each other, it's not just that we should be doing this, it's that by not doing it, we're not attending to these deeply felt human needs for healthy recognition. So when someone gets on an elevator and gives you that nod and you make eye contact, you're not just ensuring that both of you are safe and you're not going to attack each other, but also you're just like, oh, hey, fellow human being. And then you go back

• 39:57Speaker 01

  to doing what you want to do. When we eliminate those things and are only invested in the constant bombardment of our, you know, what do you think, what are you doing, what's next, you know, filling all those moments of our attention, we change. We become different sorts of human beings because habit forms character. What you do every day is who you become. And we have become the people who respond to how is your experience pumping gas at the gas pump? That's who we are.

• 40:23Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, again, too much to talk about here. One, I mean, I totally feel like this makes people much more narcissistic, much more bloated sense of self-importance, and this idea that they should have opinions. I mean, Twitter itself as a platform encourages you to form an opinion, even if you don't have one. And also, the ad model is such that it monetizes really dumb ideas or opinions is because what really matters is engagement. And can you get engagement up? And that also leads to a lot of awful effects for our communal living situation and our politics. So that maybe is another operative question to ask, which is, it seems to me, and this bleeds into a conversation about manipulation and

• 41:05Demetri Kofinas?

  control, and this is also very important because these platforms aren't neutral. They're controlled by a handful of private corporations, those corporations themselves controlled by a small number of individuals. These experiences aren't happening in the cloud. The cloud is a metaphor. They're happening on a private database that's controlled by a private company. And so there's that issue. But there's also the issue of, again, when we talk about these personalized experiences, how is a liberal democracy supposed to function? A democracy which requires the active thoughtful participation of, at the very least, a marginal group of people. We don't need everybody to participate, but we need some portion of the population to participate.

• 41:50Demetri Kofinas?

  As more and more people become individuated in their experiences and less and less of a consensus reality forms from which we can sort of derive the common good, how is democracy supposed to function?

• 42:05Speaker 01

  It doesn't, and it can't. And this is where, actually, our friend John Iskonos is doing a series of essays in The New Atlantis about this sense of a lack of a shared reality. We do not have a shared reality anymore. But interestingly, it's not something that happened by design. I think it's happened as a result of how much time we spend in these mediated environments. So you have these platforms that, as you say, they reward engagement. So what most engages people? Fear, anger, anxiety. Not happiness, unfortunately. We are not, again, this is a remnant of our evolutionary history where those were the things that kept you alive. And they still are the things that give you the most rapid response and keep people coming back. Intermittent rewards. We don't know when that text message is going to come in, or when that next like on Instagram

• 42:50Speaker 01

  is going to come up. We don't know what the next reel is going to be. So we just keep coming back. Now, in controlled environments, like, say, a casino, we actually choose this. There are no windows, there are no clocks, there are machine-designed slot machines to keep us playing and playing and playing. But we can walk out, unless you have a gambling addiction, in which case that makes it much harder. But we choose to put ourselves sometimes in these situations. What I think we've done as a political culture is wandered into this casino, not realizing we're in a casino, and then we look around, we're like, what time is it? Is it daylight? Is it nighttime? Wait, everybody over here is screaming, yelling at this slot machine, but the people at the blackjack table are doing that. And everybody has... Gotten themselves to this place and now we're trying to unwind it. Because I think everyone recognizes regardless of their political persuasion that a lot of

• 43:35Speaker 01

  things aren't working. And my colleague Yuval Levin has written about how our democracy was meant to have people shaped by their institutions. Now, because of the power of social media in particular, even our politicians are preaching to their followers, not their constituents. They use it as a platform rather than being shaped by the institution of Congress, for example. So these have been very detrimental forces in a large, holistic democracy. Culturally, it has also made us incapable of long-term thinking, incapable of compromise. It becomes very difficult for impatient people who are used to having things on demand to listen to their elected officials say, well, this long-term infrastructure project's going to take 20 years, or social security is going to go bankrupt. We have to fix this now, but you won't see any results. Maybe your kids or grandkids will.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  It's always been a challenge for human societies to organize around long-term thinking. I think it's much, much harder when the habits of mind in the citizenry are in the opposite direction, which is on-demand, instant gratification. You know, I want answers now and I'm going to be rewarded for having the strongest feeling, regardless of whether that feeling is based in any sort of facts.

• 44:40Demetri Kofinas?

  There's also a question of whether or not this type of technology, or the logic, it's really the logic that animates the technology.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:49Demetri Kofinas?

  If this leads us further and further away from solutions, because again, when you think about what's good for ad dollars and engagement, it isn't conversations about how to fix problems. It's invectives and assaults on what you perceive to be the problem, or the speculation about the source of the problem, which leads to all sorts of various theories about what's actually going on. I mean, I think, not that this is a perfect opportunity to bring it up, but we're dealing in the moment with this drones, this appearance of all these drones in New Jersey that are also bleeding over into Connecticut and New York. The government has been totally inept, and the federal government has been totally inept

• 45:32Demetri Kofinas?

  in how they've handled the communication of this, not just with the public, with state and local officials. You have all sorts of different people hyperventilating, and I'm not saying that pejoratively, I'm saying it objectively. Whether or not they're justified in doing so, I don't know, but they're certainly justified in doing so in the sense that we're not getting clear answers. And so there's also this other thing, Christine, which is that there seems to be a vacuum. In this, when we talk about asking this is, you know, what's happened to consensus reality? Again, he had been on the podcast and we talked about that and I highly recommend that conversation. In this, in the absence of this sort of consensus reality, and also in the absence of trust, which again, there are reasons to distrust a little government. There always have been. Maybe there are even more reasons now. I don't know. But maybe

• 46:14Demetri Kofinas?

  because they're also highlighted, the nature of the platforms. I mean, like, so is there something also like dangerously anarchic, this sort of anarchic vortex of the world that we're building, whereas we spend more and more time on these platforms in this disembodied way, outside of communities where we can touch grass, see people face to face, and build trusting relationships, that we basically spiral out of control? And that are literally our social contract, or our systems of government in Western liberal democracies, simply cannot exist in this type of a world? Is that a fair argument to make?

• 46:48Speaker 01

  I think it is, unfortunately, and the drone example is only the most recent of many, but it, I think, throws into stark relief what you're describing. When you have, we are rapidly becoming a low-trust society. People do not only mistrust their government, they mistrust the media. There's increasingly higher rates of mistrust of things like the military and other, other institutions that used to have a pretty steady respect and healthy trust variables for the people who were asked about them. So when you have a low-trust society, and you have institutions that, as you say, including the federal government, that have lied to people, and you're coming out of a pandemic where they were told one thing by public health officials, and then the next week that was flip-flopped to something

• 47:29Speaker 01

  else, with no accountability. That's, I think, what we're talking about. So where can they go to, A, find information about what's actually happening, B, have other people tell them, yeah, I believe this too. So there's a community that can instantly form, and C, they can amplify that message to lots of other people. That's a social media platform. And so if you have mistrust in the media, the legacy media institutions, you have government that has actively lied to citizens about things, and then no one who lied was ever held accountable. Even our elections, which are our main source of accountability for elected officials, I think people are frustrated by the pace of change. Change, particularly the federal government, then of course, something weird appears in the sky. Let's go back just a few months. There were Chinese spy balloons over this country.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  And for days, people were pointing to them going, what's that? That looks bad. It's flying over a nuclear reactor. And our government said, eh, it's no, no big deal. No big deal. And only later did they acknowledge that, oh, well, this was actually, you know, we're monitoring it. We're doing this or that. The reassurance now comes at a pace that's very 20th century. The information and the images in particular, spread at the 21st century pace. And many of them now are also AI generated. And you can't even tell if what you're seeing is real or not, or they're manipulated in a way to exacerbate fear and anxiety so that they will spread. So in that situation, you do need elected officials, and you do need the heads of institutions to know how to respond and to say, to be more weirdly, more honest and say, we have no idea what these are. We are finding out,

• 48:58Speaker 01

  here are the steps we're taking. We're working with local officials. We're working with law enforcement. We're doing this. They have said nothing. And so what fills the void? Anything you can find online. And so I have a lot of sympathy these days for conspiracy theorists. They're not crazy to come up with theories. You know why? Because the people in charge aren't telling us what's happening in many of these cases, or they're only giving us partial information, or telling us, in the case of public health officials, a kind of big lie, because they think it's what's best for us, because we can't handle the truth, sort of thing. Now, I sound like a conspiracy theorist, and I get wound up about this because I do some work on the misinformation, disinformation world, where a lot of this comes home to roost. You have legacy institutions that think the vast majority of people are too dumb to understand what's going on. And they act on that sensibility

• 49:43Speaker 01

  all the time. And the rest of us are going, we just want to know what's happening. It's not because we're ignorant, it's because we're asking for answers and we don't get them.

• 49:51Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah. Also, a lot of those legacy people are really dumb, ignorant.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  You said it, not me.

• 49:56Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, I mean, they are. They're, they're, some of them are shockingly.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Often an error, never in doubt, right? That's

• 50:02Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, exactly. But guess what? That makes sense. Because being often an error is not really important. What matters is, don't be in doubt, be a confidence man. Inspire confidence in your listeners. And that works with clicks, because again, the social media algorithms drive also increasingly, there's a feedback loop between mainstream media and has been, between mainstream media and the algorithms, and what is good for one is good for the other. I want to really drive this point home, Kristina, and then I'm going to move us to the second hour, and I'll let listeners know where I'd like to steer this conversation. To me, it is plainly obvious that democracy, republican, constitutional, majoritarian

• 50:42Demetri Kofinas?

  democracy that protects minority rights, is by definition, a consensus building project. If you cannot build consensus, you cannot operate a democracy. And my proposal, in many previous conversations with guests who may agree with me in spirit, but who have this, I think, very rigid or strict interpretation of how speech operates on mediated platforms, has been that, in conjunction with some of the things that we can do, and that you've advocated for on an individual level in your book, there are things we can and should also do on a societal level. And I've made the argument before, that if there, people would have no problem, if there was a company that was polluting the esteroids at a local town, and all the kids were developing

• 51:27Demetri Kofinas?

  brain tumors, people have no problem at all, drawing a line of causality, between what the private company was doing, to externalize its costs, and the effect on their children. People would have no problem with that. But in today's world, even with kids, we struggle to get consensus around federal government regulations, to put boundaries around the very evil use of this technology in the lives of our children. And by the way, in the lives of all of us, this gets back to the problem of consensus building, because people also have lost the understanding, that government can work for them, that government doesn't have to be the three-letter agencies. The federal government can actually be the regulatory bodies, the constitutional bodies,

• 52:12Demetri Kofinas?

  the legislative processes that create the structures that have given us FOIA, for example. Our ability to actually investigate the government comes from the government, and people seem to have lost that sense. So that's just something I really wanted to mention because when we get into the second hour, we can talk a bit about solutions. There are also some additional things and some current affairs questions that I want to ask you. One has to do with this guy Luigi Mangione, the shooter who killed the United Healthcare CEO. I'm interested because, you know, he also read a little bit of Ted Kaczynski. I'm curious if you see any of this in him, but also more importantly, how much of this do you see in the reaction of people who have condoned the murder of a man who had a wife, an ex-wife, and children, whose children now have to mourn their father as they listen

• 52:56Demetri Kofinas?

  to millions of people online justify his murder in this sort of callous way. And I wonder how much of that lack of empathy, separate from the argument of whether healthcare companies are bad or, you know, pernicious, that's a separate question of empathy. So that's something I want to ask you about. I want to also, I'm curious like if you follow any of this right to die stuff and the abuse of right to die and how much that speaks to the issue of resignation. And then we'll see how many we, how much we can get into, but there's really interesting arguments in the book about the difference between place and space and the digital world. And also, I don't know if you're familiar with Mark Fisher's argument about the slow cancellation of the future, but that also came up for me when I was reading your book. So maybe we'll have a chance to talk about that. For anyone who is new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept

• 53:41Demetri Kofinas?

  advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Christine, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device, using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Christine, stick around. We're going to move the rest of our conversation onto the premium feed.

• 54:16Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter @Kofinas and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.