In The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens identifies two defining features of modern life: disembedding and expert systems.
By disembedding, Giddens is capturing the ability for modernity to more easily (and pervasively) disassociate our sense of time and place from a localized context.
For example, when you go to the grocery store, you are “lifted out” of your particular location as you are exposed to food products that largely come from some distant location (national and international).
Your sense of time is also lifted—you can access produce that simply can’t grow in your region, or can’t grow in the season of the year you find yourself in. As the commercials have made famous, I can buy avocados from Mexico during winter in Virginia.
But I'm not thinking about Mexico. I'm not thinking about the warehouse workers, the truck drivers, the cold storage facilities. They're there—somewhere—but blurred into background noise.
Similar to disembedding, this same grocery store trip carries with it an encounter with expert systems. There is a tacit understanding as you pass through the aisles, that there are arrays of dependencies to make this experience possible: an electrical grid to power the store, supply chain operations, marketing agencies, a customer support number—somewhere, developers for the mobile app and website, vendors for the kiosks, etc.
Both encounters, disembedding and contact with expert systems, are circumferential experientially—we sense that we are surrounded by dependencies beyond us, but it is a distance sense, a low-level noise of impersonality that we habitually tune out.
The internet, social media, artificial intelligence, and other mediations of “tech” obviously rapidly accelerate these disembedding mechanisms and encounters.
A friend once observed: In the age of the automobile, our memories are filled with images of trees rapidly blurring past—not the experience of actually living somewhere, but the strange experience of always passing through. This is very different than actually living out your existence in a place than in the blurry touring of cities and towns you pass on the highway.
It is an incredibly common experience—distant somewhere in memorial images—but if we place this phenomenon in the limelight, it is rather strange and almost haunting.
This visual is a perfect illustration for the experientially encounter with disembedding mechanisms and the circumferential exposure to expert systems. They are all around us. We encounter them all the time. Yet, they are distant and cold: I’m at Kroger, and should something go awry in my shopping, there’s a customer survey number out there somewhere, listen to clunky automatic message to route me to George—from who knows where, suppress the underlying annoyance of it all, and then have an unsatisfactory satisfaction of completing a task I didn’t have on my todo list.
Kroger—been there many a times. A simple trip for tonight’s meal. Blurring trees (disembedding expert systems) fading around me every for an ever-so-subtly haunt in the depth of my imagination.
This low-grade noise—or better, blur effect—is far yet near, activated yet dormant.
If this experientially real, then what its long term effect upon us? Charles Taylor and others have carried this question to great lengths. Here, I present a musing that threads the blur effect with the prevalence of ADHD.
However, I’m also doing more than a typical: “Yes, smartphones and other tech has exploded ADHD diagnoses.” Rather, I’m questioning if ADHD is even the right framing if the where grasping at the effects of a specific phenomenological cause.
Nearly everyone is aware that ADHD has to do with difficulty with attention. Experts geek out in neuroscience to explain what is happening; therapists obsess other the environmental and traumatic to interject an explanation; and sociologists rush forward with a tsunami of statistics—but what is actually happening according to our common experience, if we make it explicit!
Let me throw myself forward as an example patient—not letting the wave of “but everyone is different” in the sea of “neurodivergence.”
My experience tells me that I excel at work that requires deep, intellectual focus—this has been made clear in my work in software engineering, philosophy/theology, and organizational systems thinking alike. I am constantly thinking—I go to sleep thinking about some musing. I actively practice leisure—true leisure of silence and immersive work that stimulates contemplation (gardening), but the rest comes precisely from focused thought without distraction.
And yet, seemingly trivial tasks—like taking my vitamin D and fish oil every day—blur past me like those trees along the interstate. I get them done, but it does not come as easy—even when I know that I need to do it, how to do it, why it’s important, all of the ADHD manifestations in my family history, and how this all blur effect!
None of the expert system explanations provide a satisfactory answer: The ADHD in my family history is more an anxious energy than the lost-in-thought-ness; I’m highly conscious of all the possible environmental and traumatic influences (granting their grammar); I hear the charge “coping mechanism” in my ear; I am quite low-tech and leverage many analog systems to have minimal screen time; if I chalk it up to neuroscience, I’m immediately haunted by “prefrontal cortex” jargon that I immediately tune out.
So what's the ADHD actually about? If I can sustain deep thought for hours, why can't I remember to take vitamins>
An alternative explanation: What if ADHD is precisely connected with the blur effect that is connected to disembedding and expert systems? The haunting background noise of potential dehumanizing customer service calls, possible global contingencies if my car breaks down, the whispering regurgitation of statistics, “trauma,” “prefrontal cortex,” “allergens,” etc. whenever I reflect upon any modern phenomenon.
If we are constantly lifted onto a sort of highway with trees blurring around us, could this not habituate us to more easily drown out more immediate things (like vitamin D and fish oil) that are equally circumferential?
Another alternative explanation: It was 7th or 8th grade, and I was sitting in the desk at my private Catholic school as my teacher was writing the Fruits of the Spirit on the chalkboard. I can visualize the teacher down to the level of clothing. I see the yellow chalk on the chalkboard—Fruits of the Spirit, I remember—but I wasn't thinking about the lesson. I was clearly paying attention! Yet, I recall retreating into the depths of my own mind trying to visualize non-being: “Wait? If there was no God, then there wouldn’t be me—there wouldn’t be anything! What is nothing? But, I wouldn’t be able to see “nothing” because there would be nothing!” Somehow, unlike the tacit, circumferential expert system encounters, this didn’t feel like a haunt—but an awakening. This awakened existential questions has never stopped.
These memories have flooded to me as I write, but they were not there vividly before. More times than not, the blur of a thought of “ADHD —> struggle with attention” masks what I suspect to be an enchanted habit of my mind that’s been present since my youth. Perhaps the “ADHD” has just been, granting Augustine’s system, the presence of prevenient grace? A heavenly gift to steward and follow.
Perhaps disembedding mechanisms and expert systems haunt precisely through their disenchantment—immediately bringing the expressions of our soul to the realm of human expertise—to the shadows instead of the light.
Perhaps this is the real reason, the Screwtapian reason, for the emergence of ADHD—a truly haunting thought indeed!