The Modern Man is Buddha Watching Himself on TV

The smartphone is the medium through which we process everything about ourselves.

In 1967, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every medium is an extension of some human faculty, mental or physical. The wheel was an extension of the foot, the book an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin. Electronic communication is an extension of the central nervous system. A notification on your smartphone is injected straight into your nerves.

The smartphone is the medium through which we process everything about the world, but more importantly, everything about ourselves.

TV Buddha by Nam June Paik

You weren’t meant to look at your own face so much. The mirror in the 16th century and front-facing smartphone cameras in the 21st century revealed and increased people’s obsession with their own faces. The same applies to other trackers of yourself: people maniacally refresh their own LinkedIn pages, Instagram profiles, Robinhood balances, and Apple Health dashboards. The story people care about the most is their own life. Self-monitoring is addictive.

Just like financial analysts sit in front of a Bloomberg terminal parsing stock tickers, we sit in front of our smartphones analyzing every detail about ourselves.

In The Transparency Society, Byung-Chul-Han writes that when you make a domain fully transparent, you don’t just know more about that domain, you transform the domain itself. By making ordinary aspects of our life transparent to us, we transform ourselves. Nowhere is this clearer than our own faces. By providing 24/7 access to portable, high-resolution front-facing cameras through smartphones, we have made the human face a never-ending project to be optimized with makeup, filters, and plastic surgery. Smartphones have transformed the human face forever.

You can now see a zoomed-in image of your nose, access your heart rate in real-time, refresh your net worth every hour, and track how many likes your latest post got. You receive periodic photo memories of things you’ve done over the years and annual Spotify Wrapped summaries of your most-listened-to music.

Social media can lead to performing for other people, but self-monitoring leads to performing for yourself. You are the audience of your performance, watching and judging your own actions through photos, metrics, notifications, and profiles. You’re always on, even when you’re alone. A former Spotify engineer told me that after they introduced Spotify Wrapped, their user behavior changed in December. People would listen to the funkiest things at the end of the year to compensate for eleven months of pop, just to make their taste look interesting.

If it shows up as a number on your smartphone, it’s true. If it doesn’t, it’s not. Did you have a good run? It doesn’t matter if you felt energized, all that counts are your Strava stats. Did you sleep well? It doesn’t matter how you felt after you woke up, all that counts is your sleep score. Sleep was the last frontier for rest and privacy, but now people are performing for their morning sleep scorecard. You don’t trust your body, but you accept metrics from your smartphone like the word of God.

You rate your Uber driver, your DoorDash delivery, your neighborhood restaurant, your Taskrabbit help. Everyone is rated out of five stars, so implicitly you are rated too, not just by others but by yourself, and your smartphone provides you with all the data to measure yourself.

When everything is comparable, nothing is uniquely precious, including yourself. In The Philosophy of Money (1900), a study of how modern life is structured through money and quantification, Georg Simmel argued that this environment produces a “blasé attitude”: a protective numbness in people born from constant comparison and overstimulation. The modern version is the cool, distant stoicism people adopt towards the world and their own lives.

I remember going on a date with a girl several years ago who said, “sorry I took so long to respond on Hinge, my top-of-funnel was crazy”. She had been on a few dates a week consistently for two years and was tired. No wonder she just called men who messaged her “top-of-funnel”, as a salesperson would clinically refer to customers they were prospecting. Your dating profile is a KPI that can be optimized to increase top-of-funnel conversion.

Sam Altman said that millennials think of ChatGPT as a Google replacement, but Gen Z thinks of it as a Meta replacement. Instead of an Instagram feed that makes you jealous, ChatGPT is your personal servant that understands your emotional needs, remembers everything about you, and boosts your ego. That’s one of the many reasons Zuck is spending billions of dollars to hire OpenAI engineers; the breakout consumer product of the last decade is a chat feed with a significantly smarter but more sycophantic version of yourself.

People have fewer friends, less sex, and fewer children. Like monks, we are spending more time by ourselves, but instead of looking inward to find answers about ourselves, we look toward our One Source of Truth. Reloading our screens every other minute to find some new update about our lives, analyzing ourselves till death.