/philosophy

A few years ago, on the way out of a conference whose name I've already forgotten, someone called me a cynic. I had just said, without much conviction, that the talk we'd both sat through was a piece of marketing with seating. The guy smiled like someone delivering a diagnosis. Cynic. I chewed on it all the way to the subway, and not because I was offended. It was because he was wrong, and wrong in a way that felt important. Because I had gone to that conference wanting to like it. That's what that smile never gets. The cynic, as I understand him, is someone who has already closed the books. He has decided nothing is worth it and everybody is selling something, and from then on the world can't hurt him, because he expected the worst and the worst merely confirms itself. It's a comfortable state. I almost envy the emotional economy it implies. Anyone who describes everything that shows up in a funeral voice never gets caught off guard, never ends up with the face of someone who believed. The disillusioned person, on the other hand, is still doing the math, and that's why it hurts. The word says what it says: dis-illusion, the removal of an illusion. Someone pulled back the curtain and now you see the mechanism. But you still want the show, or at least the version of it that promised to be true. This sounds like a dictionary distinction and it isn't. It changes everything that follows: what you do with the anger, what you do with your time, whether there's still something left to build or only something left to criticize. An aside, since I'm here. The first time I understood what it was to be disillusioned, without having a word for it, was with a BBS that a neighbor of mine ran in 1996, in a tiny bedroom, with a modem that made that squeal of a crushed cat. There were maybe forty people on it, never more. Absurd things were argued over, DOS files were passed around, there was a permanent feud about text editors. Nobody made a cent and nobody was anyone's "audience." When the guy shut it down to go work at a bank, I didn't cry, obviously, I was fourteen, but I kept a notion that has never left me: there was a time when the thing and the point of the thing were the same thing. Now almost nothing is like that, and I suspect part of my irritation comes from there. It isn't nostalgia, or at least not only. Anyway. Let it go. Back to the cynic. What bothers me most about the cynic is that he's useful to whoever's in charge. Peter Sloterdijk has that idea, from the early eighties, that modern cynicism is an "enlightened false consciousness": we already know it's all rigged, and we do it anyway. We know the thing is a scheme, we know how the scheme works, and we keep pressing the button. The irony there is cruel. The cynic thinks he's above the system because he sees it clearly, and in practice he's the ideal user, the one who never rebels because he has already internalized that rebelling is naive. There's a line I repeat to myself a lot and I don't even know if it's from anyone: cynicism is the union of those who gave up, and the dues are paid with all your future chances. The disillusioned person is more inconvenient to the system, at least in theory. He still wants things. He still has standards. And a standard nobody meets is a commercial problem, because it forces you to promise more. Only I don't want to romanticize it too much. Being disillusioned is often an ugly in-between phase, where the person hasn't yet decided whether to turn bitter or do something with what they've seen. I've watched both endings. People who spent three years furious at social media and are now the kind of person with an "anti-algorithm" channel giving advice on how to win with the algorithm. People who ended up in a village in the interior and stayed there making cheese, convinced they'd escaped, when the cheese has an Instagram page. It's not mockery, or it's only a little. I've done worse. For example: for about two weeks, in November three years ago, I uninstalled everything. Phone wiped, only calls and messages, the watch on my wrist serving as a watch and nothing else. I wrote a note in a text file called "detox.txt" with rules that were, no exaggeration, almost religious. By day ten I was on the couch opening the phone's browser every four or five minutes, not quite knowing what I was looking for, navigating to sites I didn't even care about. The withdrawal wasn't from content, it was from belonging, from knowing whether anyone had reacted to anything. In other words: I understood the mechanism perfectly, I had spent my whole working life building it for others, and it worked on me anyway. I don't know a better proof that lucidity doesn't protect you. This goes against what I said earlier, I know. I said the disillusioned person sees clearly, and now I'm saying that seeing clearly isn't enough. I think both are true and I'd rather leave them in tension than settle it with a pretty sentence. Now, what I think almost nobody says out loud is this: disillusionment with modern culture is not, for the most part, disillusionment with technology. It's disillusionment with the conversion of everything into metrics. I spent years looking at analytics dashboards. A dashboard is an honest and treacherous thing at the same time, because it shows real numbers and then invites you to treat the number as the phenomenon. I remember looking at a real-time visitor counter, fourteen people in that minute, and feeling, for the first time, something I couldn't describe well: those fourteen people were fourteen people, and I was looking at them as if they were a blinking green light. You understand? It wasn't an epiphany, it was a small discomfort that I kept ignoring for months because the graph was going up. And it was going up because I had learned how to make it go up. Titles with a number, the promise in the very first line, the hook, the ending that forces the click. Every one of those techniques works, and that's what makes them so hard to drop. If something works, abandoning it feels irresponsible. The cost never shows up on the dashboard: it shows up when you realize you're writing for a reader who doesn't exist, an average reader, impatient, who arrives from a search engine and leaves in 4.2 seconds if you don't please him. Writing for that reader transforms you slowly. It's not that you become a worse person, it's that you become narrower. There are sentences you stop allowing yourself. There are ideas that don't pass the internal "will this hold attention?" test and stay in the notebook, rotting. That's a second-order effect that rarely gets discussed. Everyone talks about what platform culture does to consumers, the fragmented attention, the anxiety, those worn-out things. Much less is said about what it does to those who produce. It creates a generation of people who write, record and draw with the audience internalized as a censor. And the censor doesn't forbid anything explicitly, it just shrinks what you can imagine. Third order, if we want to go there: when everyone produces with the censor inside, everything starts to look alike, and the public, which isn't stupid, notices. Hence the fatigue. Hence that diffuse feeling, which I've heard in so many conversations, that "everything is the same," that a new film is the previous film with different lighting, that the song of the moment was designed for its first fifteen seconds. What people describe as "culture got worse" is, often, culture optimized for a goal that was never theirs. And people feel the difference even without knowing how to explain it. Mark Fisher called it "capitalist realism," the feeling that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. It's a good formula, but I think he went as far as he had to and that today the thing is finer-grained. It's not just that we can't imagine an alternative. It's that dissatisfaction itself has been absorbed as a market. Tired? There's a product for tiredness. Sick of consuming? There's a book about minimalism, with a beautiful cover, for you to consume. Disillusionment, like spontaneity, has become a genre. Which brings me to the point where I think disillusioned people go wrong most, and where I went wrong myself: believing the way out is individual. Leave, disconnect, simplify, go back to analog, buy the turntable. I understand the impulse. I was part of it. But the turntable is a lovely object and the idea that it solves anything is a fantasy of scale. The culture that tires us isn't an environment you can escape, it's an infrastructure. You can stop using the road, but the city keeps being built around it and your friends still live on the other side. (Note that this is not an argument against trying. I still think reducing the noise helps, and I know people who came out genuinely more whole. I just distrust the heroic narrative.) There's one thing where I'm less fair and I won't pretend otherwise. The "digital balance" discourse that's going around, the one about mindful breaks and healthy routines, seems to me, for the most part, a polite way of blaming the user. A system designed by entire teams, with A/B tests running in the hundreds, to maximize screen time, and the official answer is "have discipline." It reminds me of when the tobacco industry talked about personal choice. Yes, there's choice. But if a person of average willpower systematically loses against a machine tuned by thousands of experiments, the problem isn't the person's willpower. That said, and here I hesitate, I also don't want to land in that comfortable position of thinking it's all their fault. I was "them." I wrote code that served to retain people. I tweaked a notification once, and the return rate went up by something like 11.6% in a week, and my immediate reaction was pride, and only after a bad night's sleep did the rest arrive. Nobody is clean. Anyone who worked inside this knows that decisions that look monstrous from outside are, from inside, a succession of small reasonable adjustments. Nobody decides to do harm. You decide to improve a number, and the harm happens as a byproduct, without an author. That, by the way, is perhaps the hardest thing to accept for someone disillusioned with modern culture: there's no villain. I wish there were. It would be handy, it would give us a narrative, it would give us someone to point at. But what exists is a system of incentives where each participant, individually, does what's rational, and the aggregate result is a culture that almost nobody, in good conscience, would choose. When someone explains this to me with a diagram, it seems obvious. When I live it, I forget. So what do disillusioned people who don't turn cynical actually do? I've seen some things that seem to work, and others that don't. What seems to work are small spaces without scale. Not the "small in order to grow" ones, those are another trap, the really small ones, which accept being small. A message group with nine people who've known each other for years. A niche forum, badly designed, with moderation that's just one person looking after something they love. A newsletter that twenty-odd people read and nobody tries to monetize. The particular thing about these places is that they have memory, people remember what you said six months ago, and that creates accountability in a way no reputation system can imitate. Karma, stars, followers, all of it tries to manufacture artificially what a small community has for free: someone who knows you and who cares, or doesn't care, and you know which of the two. What doesn't seem to work is irony as armor. I've used it a lot. Irony lets you be inside and outside at the same time, take part without committing, like something "ironically" so that nobody can accuse you of naivety. It's practical, and it slowly destroys the ability to say that something matters to you. A whole generation, mine included, got trained to hide enthusiasm behind three layers of distance. And then we're surprised we can't build anything in common, because building requires at least one person willing to say, without winking, that this is important. Speaking of which. I remember my grandfather, who repaired radios in a garage in Setúbal, in a way that now seems to me almost unbearably sincere. He had no irony whatsoever about the craft. He'd pick up a blown capacitor and look at it with a seriousness that none of us, screen in hand, can sustain for fifteen seconds. He used to say an appliance "has a temperament." I thought it was funny. Today I understand he was describing a relationship with objects and with work in which the thing and the gesture mattered in themselves, without an audience. I'm not saying it was better. It was probably poorer in many ways and he was stubborn to the point of foolishness. But there was something there that I'm missing. I have no idea why I'm telling this here. Leave it. The point is that seriousness has become suspect. Today, if someone shows real enthusiasm for something, there's a reflex, almost a social siren, asking what that person is selling. And the reflex has its reasons: we've been fooled enough times, by enthusiastic people who really were selling. But a reflex that fires every time ends up erasing the distinction between genuine enthusiasm and manufactured enthusiasm, and the result is that the genuine kind has to prove its innocence, which is an impossible and vaguely humiliating task. I've seen sincere people retreat because of this, go quiet, start having "only a mild interest" in things that used to sweep them away. The cost of that is enormous and it doesn't show up anywhere. There's an asymmetry here that really irritates me, and I may be unfair to those who disagree. Those who argue that "this is just the market working" and that people should adapt tend to be the ones who benefit most from the current arrangement, and they rarely bother to acknowledge that dissatisfaction is a data point and not a character flaw. Telling a disillusioned person that "it's just a phase" or that "it's always been like this" is a way of stripping the legitimacy from their discomfort. It has not always been like this. There were eras when the rhythm of culture was different, slower, more scattered, less audited. Not necessarily better, I repeat, but different, and the difference is real and perceptible. Whoever was born later may not feel the lack, and that's fine. Whoever does feel it has reasons. I promised myself I wouldn't make the usual gesture of ending with a recipe. But there's one thing I want to say about the upkeep of disillusionment, so to speak. Disillusionment can be maintained as an active state or left to degrade into cynicism, and degradation is the default option. It happens on its own, out of tiredness. Keeping the thing alive takes a small, constant effort: continuing to look for what's worth it, even knowing you'll find less than you'd like, and treating it well when you find it. Reading the book of someone who has no big publisher. Going to the concert with sixty people. Answering the person who wrote something you liked, instead of just hitting like. It sounds like little and it is little, and it's precisely because it's little that nobody does it consistently. A few months ago I tried a stupid experiment. I started writing to people, by email, whenever something I'd read moved me. Without asking for anything. About three times a week, when it came up. I didn't have high expectations and the response was, mostly, silence. But there were two or three cases where someone answered, in an almost astonished tone, to say thanks, and in one of those exchanges a conversation started that continues to this day. It's a miserable statistic and the most valuable thing that happened to me in terms of relationships that year. I draw no universal conclusion from it, but I'm left with the suspicion that scale is the enemy of the kind of thing I'm looking for. Which brings me back to the guy at the conference. I think he saw in my comment a sign that I was someone who no longer believed in anything. And maybe from outside it looks like that. Disillusionment and cynicism often use the same words: "it's all marketing," "nobody is authentic," "this is rotten." The difference is in what comes next. The cynic says that and goes home at ease. The disillusioned person says that and stays bothered, because the rot offends something he still defends. He's a person who still has a model of how things should be, and the distance between the model and reality hurts. Without the pain, there would be no disillusionment, only indifference. If there's one thing in all this that seems to me to have value, it's that pain. I don't want to romanticize it, it's unpleasant, it wears you out, it ruins dinners. But it's the sign that the person hasn't given up. That he still thinks a film can be more than a product, that a conversation can be more than engagement, that a community can be more than a user base. It's a stubborn and probably naive belief, and I prefer it to the alternative. I never quite knew how to answer that smile at the time. I stayed quiet, nodded, said something about coffee. If I caught him today I'd say, I think, that a cynic is someone who has stopped caring, and that I'm just very, very annoyed that I do. Maybe it's the same thing seen from different angles. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it.