The Virtual Metropolis, or what a 121-year-old essay can tell us about the internet

Screens and minds #3

This is the third in a loose series exploring the relationship between screens and our thoughts, behaviours and emotions. You can read the rationale behind the series in the second half of this post and the previous (standalone) instalments here and here.

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If you think about it, the internet is a bit like a city. Search engines are its highways; social media are its gathering places; the dark web is its seedy underbelly. It has shops and adverts; historic relics and sites of cultural interest; elite residents and anti-social behaviour. It’s a place of learning, of work, of entertainment, and it caters to all niches, tribes and scenes. It links people together via a vast and complex network of connections, the sum of which goes far and away beyond what any one of us can personally experience.

‘The relationships and concerns of the typical metropolitan resident are so manifold and complex,’ wrote the German sociologist Georg Simmel in 1903, ‘that […] their relationships and activities intertwine with one another into a many-membered organism.’ That’s a quote from his most famous essay, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, and I like it because it so perfectly describes the internet, too.

‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ was written at a time of cultural and social upheaval, early-ish in the trajectory by which cities evolved from large towns into vast, ever-growing megalopolises. It considers the impact of urban life on the human psyche by comparison with that of life in villages and small towns, and spoiler alert: the difference is considerable. The city, according to Simmel, didn’t just change people’s experience; it changed their psychology.

I revisited Simmel’s essay this week, years after I first taught it as a graduate teaching assistant during my PhD, and what struck me this time was how much of his argument about urban life is eerily prescient of current conversations about digital life.

In an extremely reductive nutshell, Simmel thinks cities are hotbeds of capitalism that give rise to a number of social phenomena, one or two of them okay-ish, but most of them quite depressingly bad. Cities quantify and commodify everything. They make their inhabitants blasé and unemotional. They give people the freedom to be themselves, but in the process they encourage disconnection, if not active hostility, between individuals. They make it easier for people to lean into their own individuality, but harder to make that individuality noticeable, causing them to go to great pains to stand out. At the same time, cities create an enormous, impersonal body of culture that sweeps a person up and carries them along, irrespective of their own preferences and interests.

All of which are things that can be said quite uncontroversially about the internet, too. Let’s break it down:

• The internet is a hotbed of capitalism. Yes. Tick.

• The internet quantifies and commodifies everything by attributing value based on likes, follower and subscriber numbers, ratings, traffic and so on, and using this as a way of generating revenue.

• The internet makes its users blasé and unemotional. Think of the numb state that descends during a lengthy, unplanned stint of scrolling (especially the ‘late-night disassociation scroll’, as

  Emily Wick
  terms the kind of scrolling you do when you’re putting off going to bed). Think of all the times you’ve skimmed past something distressingly newsworthy without emotionally engaging with it.

• The internet gives people the freedom to be themselves (there’s a niche on here for everyone) but in the process it encourages disconnection, if not active hostility, between individuals. The same mechanisms that give us a degree of freedom we might not have in real life — an increased number of interactions, physical distance from the people we’re interacting with, the possibility of developing an internet persona or remaining anonymous — also make it all too easy for us to dehumanise other internet users. Hostility gets hot-housed when it would otherwise be kept in check. Imagine if Twitter/X really was a ‘town square’. It would be carnage. There would be blood.

• The internet makes it easier for people to lean into their own individuality, but harder to make that individuality noticeable, causing them to go to great pains to stand out. When everyone is out there expressing themselves, individual acts of self-expression get swallowed up in the collective self-expressive tide. Hence the rise in importance of the ‘personal brand’, with everyone taking to their digital platform of choice to shout — explicitly or implicitly — about their own uniqueness. (A recent Vox article eviscerates this trend brilliantly.)

• The internet creates an enormous, impersonal body of culture that sweeps a person up and carries them along. How much of what you read, watch, or listen to is suggested to you by an algorithm, whether because it thinks you’ll like it or because it knows lots of other people like it? Either way, it takes away a chunk of your autonomous decision-making power. As Simmel argues:

‘From one angle life is made infinitely more easy in the sense that stimulations, interests, and the taking up of time and attention, present themselves from all sides and carry it in a stream which scarcely requires any individual efforts for its ongoing. But from another angle, life is composed more and more of these impersonal cultural elements […] which seek to suppress peculiar personal interests and incomparabilities.’

Spooky, no?

The thing is, while Simmel’s writing feels incredibly prophetic when you map it onto digital life, when you consider it in terms of urban life — ie. what he’s actually talking about — it can all sound a bit hokey and melodramatic. He writes, for example, that the overabundance of sensory stimuli in an urban environment ‘force[s] the nerves to make such violent responses, tear[s] them about so brutally that they exhaust their last reserves of strength.’ This results in the blasé outlook typical among city-dwellers, who perceive the things around them ‘in a homogeneous, flat and grey colour with no one of them worthy of being preferred to another.’

I live in a big city and I can be a little blasé sometimes, unamazed by things that would surprise or please a visitor. But if you told me my nerves were being torn about so brutally as to turn me into some sort of dehumanised, hollowed-out shell of a person who experiences everything as an emotional greyscape, I’d laugh at you.

Then again, if you could compare my mental and emotional experience with that of a German villager at the turn of the 20th century, perhaps you’d find that that’s exactly what I am. We can’t know what it was like, psychologically, to have been alive in Simmel’s time, when only 15% of the world’s population lived in cities. Today, that figure is 56% and growing, and inevitably, aspects of urban life that might once have seemed profoundly unnatural have come to be accepted as normal. And yet here we all are: still human, still just about functioning.

We devote a lot of energy to fretting about digital life. We worry about how it affects our minds, our relationships, our politics, our emotional and mental health. What, I wonder, does ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ suggest about these anxieties? Is it that in the long run, they’ll read like conservative pearl-clutching? People have always been suspicious of and discomfited by profound change, and history often makes their suspicions look unfounded. If you told me my phone was turning me into a hollowed-out shell of a person, I’d think: shit. Yeah. Could be. But if you tell someone the same thing in the year 2145, when pre-digital life is beyond living memory, maybe they’ll just laugh.

Or, alternatively, maybe Simmel’s essay suggests we’re right to worry. Perhaps ‘digital psychology’ is the product of a lineage that began with urban psychology. Are we internet-dwellers the psychological heirs of his city-dwellers? If so, what comes next? How far can we continue down this path?

There’s a struggle that plays out in every era, Simmel says: ‘namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.’ Presumably in every version of this struggle there’s a sense that it might be lost — that people fear they might be the ones to get ‘swallowed up’. Let’s all hope Silicon Valley doesn’t make those fears come true.

Yours with plenty more questions and absolutely no answers,

Kx

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