Push-Button Promises and (Not) Doing Hard Things
Although I linked to it in Friday's newsletter and even embedded the Instagram clip, I have not been able to stop thinking about Ocean Vuong's remarks on how social media has shaping students' thoughts about "effort." Vuong says that,
Our students… are more and more self-conscious of trying. There’s a kind of surveillance culture around social media. And they would say “I want to be a poet, I want to be a good writer but it’s a bit cringe.” Right? This “cringe culture” — “I don’t want to be perceived as trying and having an effortful attempt at my dreams.” And as a teacher that’s a horrifying report from the field. And so I think they are absolutely scared of judgment and so they perform cynicism because cynicism can be misread, as it often is, as intelligence. You are disaffected. You are too cool. You’ve seen it all. And so they pull back. But in fact they are deeply hungry for sincere, earnest effort. They often do it privately. They don’t want to admit to each other that they are trying really hard to do what they want to do. I think sincereity is something we deeply hunger for, particularly young people, but we are deeply embarassed when sincerity is in the room. The classroom is wonderful place to eradicate that, but it’s up to the teacher because you do have some sort of authority. You do have to set the tone and if you set the tone for your students – that you welcome them, that you don’t judge them, that they can be sincere and earnest, and they won’t be condemned or ridiculed for it, that they can try their best and it won’t be cringy... To do so, you liberate them towards their best selves.”
This is all a beautiful and deeply caring observation – no surprise, if you are familiar with Ocean Vuong's work. But it's also strikingly different from some of the other popular condemnations of social media – I'm thinking of the Moms for Liberty-ish activism that exists far too comfortably alongside Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation – much of which seems to be very concerned about what children and adolescents might see online. As Vuong notes, the fear that students have is of being seen – a hypervisibility that is so readily an utter misrecognition, misdiagnosis, misunderstanding.
And ah, "artificial intelligence" now promises perfect recognition, perfect diagnostics, perfect understanding. It promises push-button insights and push-button prose. It promises friendship without risk of conflict; it promises relationships without the burden of reciprocity; it promises frictionlessness in all things. Struggle and suffering are, of course, unavoidable – they are part the human condition. But "AI" promises technological transcendence: no one has to see you struggle, no one can judge your effort because the automation of your thinking and knowing and acting and being will all appear effortless, effortlessly.
