On social media distancing

In one of the most haunting novels of the 20th century, “The God of Small Things” (1997), the Indian essayist Arundhati Roy highlights the centrality of the seemingly trivial and socially marginal in shaping the course of human destiny.

It’s a tale of forbidden love pulsating against the grain of oppressive tradition, a defiant celebration of the little joys of life and everyday acts of kindness despite the horrors of history, and a sonorous yearning for belonging in a deeply flawed, even cruel world.

The low-caste protagonist, Velutha, a man of immense talent set against the infinite prejudice of tradition, would choose to embrace the most primal desire of a man’s heart with heroic fatalism. His dilemma was beyond tragic, for he “could do only one thing at a time…If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win.”

In those heady nights under the silence of shimmering moonlight, when he could have her, Ammu, all to himself, Velutha knew that this “was all they could ask of each other. The only thing. Ever. They both knew that.”

Before the cruel hammer of history shattered these fragile souls into pieces, they tried to make the most out of each moment together, embracing the eternity of presence “[l]ike the sharp edge of a knife. When history had slipped up.” “Each time they parted, they extracted only one small promise from each other.” Velutha asked if they can meet anew tomorrow and she “turned to say it once again: ‘Naaley.’ Tomorrow.”

Theirs was a love that defied, with passionate fatalism, the tentacles of tradition, colonialism, and entrenched social injustice. It marked the victory of “small” people and “small” moments of affection against the vast impersonal forces of history.

A month into a lingering lockdown, many have come to appreciate the “small” moments of quietude—the affectionate embrace of loved ones, the countless expressions of support and solidarity in one of the darkest times in recent memory.

Torn from our families and forced into complete solitude, it’s memories and hopes for love that have kept our sanity intact. But soulful gratitude demands one to own his own mind, to have the requisite attention and tender mindfulness to muster gratitude for the eternal presence.

And here comes the indispensability of not only social distancing, but also “social media distancing,” if we are going to come out of this crisis with a renewed sense of purposefulness.

With the de facto shutdown of public life, a growing share of humanity has switched to the virtual world, where a simulacrum of words, symbols, images, and sound has come to replace human touch. While social media can provide a semblance of succor to our exiled hearts, it also deprives us of the most vital elements of human life: time and attention.

As Shoshana Zuboff explains in her groundbreaking “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” (2018), the social media czars are extracting maximum profit by trying to “organize, herd, and tune society” at the expense of “extinguishing the felt reality and social function of an individualized existence.”

Through algorithmic manipulation, social media and other related products undermine our “ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future,” which are the “essential condition of free will and, more poignantly, of the inner resources from which we draw the will to will,” warns the Harvard academic.

Meanwhile, in “Digital Minimalism” (2019), Georgetown professor Cal Newport exposes how social media companies spend billions of dollars to lure you into virtual rabbit holes by “deploy[ing] attention engineering to overwhelm you with integrated options, trying to keep you engaging with their service well beyond your original purpose.”

In the words of Silicon Valley whistleblower Tristan Harris, social media is designed like a “slot machine,” where “[t]here’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used [by technology companies] to get you using the product for as long as possible.”

We may not be able to change the world, as decades of globalization crumble before a mighty plague that has precipitated the greatest planetary crisis in the past century. But with willful mindfulness, we may learn to appreciate “small” but infinitely meaningful moments while trapped in exile—away from the tentacles of corporate social media.

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