When and How to Ignore
On learning the art of silence in the age of total information
I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
…we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.
—Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Once you’ve learned how to read, you can no longer choose not to read. I mean, of course you can decide not to curl up with a paperback on a Sunday afternoon. But if someone holds a sign in front of you, you cannot choose not to make sense of the inscription. Your mind deciphers it automatically.
Today information comes at us from all around. It’s not just text, of course, but also sound and imagery. To put this another way, our information environment is richer than it’s ever been, and to some extent we can’t ignore it.
In the future, I wonder if our information environment will get even more replete, or if we’ll soon have hit a maximum. Already the word rich doesn’t quite feel right to describe the situation, as sometimes it’s more like oppression than wealth. When you get a text or email, etiquette dictates that you must reply within a certain timeframe. We’re still riding a golden age for television where there’s always more to watch (and strikes notwithstanding); and unread books pile up. And that’s to say nothing of the web.
In a world of total information, it becomes urgent to consider when we can or should ignore information, to provide people with the tools to do so, and then to cultivate such a sensibility within ourselves.
Duties and Rights to Ignore
In a brief passage, the philosopher Luciano Floridi mentions that in some situations we have a duty to ignore certain information. His example (which I think is hilarious to find in a philosophy book) is when you’re at the urinal and someone’s using the urinal next to you, you have a duty to ignore what’s going on down and to the left. Nowadays we’re familiar with another example: When someone shares their screen in a Zoom meeting and accidentally shows you something they shouldn’t—private email or financial information, say—you should ignore whatever you saw.
There are more situations, perhaps, in which we have a right to ignore—that is, a right to not be exposed to certain information. We have a right to quiet at night, for instance, and so the police will come at your call to shut down the party next door. We have the National Do Not Call Registry, and laws against indecent exposure. We can decide not to have our genes sequenced and therefore not learn about potential health risks in our future. These and other examples can all be interpreted under the rubric of the right to ignore.
Ignoring in the Digital Age
Digital technology—and now especially generative AI—poses a challenge to the right to ignore. It may make it impossible. At the very least it raises a number of impossible questions.
The philosopher Rafael Capurro has observed that information technologies are inherently loquacious. Blabbing is their whole reason for being. And today, with our billions of computers all over the place, we have too much information. Too much factual, oughta-be-useful information, that is—which is to say nothing about all the advertising, puffery and propaganda (in the end, these things may not really be information). No one can read it all. (Maybe you’re not even reading this.)
This raises a question for me: Is there certain information that nobody has a right to ignore? When? Why? If we broadly have a right to ignore information that we don’t want to be exposed to, then what argument could be made in response to election denial, climate change denial, vaccine efficacy denial, and so on? It may be that indeed we have a duty to be informed about certain things—but finding a satisfying line between our right to ignore and our duty to be informed seems impossible.
With generative AI, our technologies become all the more loquacious. As Renée DiResta put it in a 2020 Atlantic article, “the supply of misinformation will soon be infinite.” If there’s already too much information when it all has to be made by hand, so to speak, how much will there be when the cost to create it falls to zero? Consider spam: We get more spam email than physical junk mail because it costs nothing to send an email.
Besides our individual psyches, total information may harm broader elements of society. Consider lawsuits and government processes, for example. In the days of yore, filing a lawsuit took effort and time. Now, filing a lawsuit is soon to be free, but it’s not free to review and process that lawsuit. (Which makes me think that maybe the only way to fight fire in this case is with fire.) Anybody who objects to a corporate merger, an urban zoning request, a liquor license application, and so on, can easily gum up the works.
In a world where busybodies can generate infinite complaints, do governments have a right to ignore their citizens? Before generative AI, the answer to me was obviously no. Now I’m not so sure.
Learning the Art of Silence
There are big questions here that we do not yet have answers to. Addressing them will take coordination beyond the scope of any particular person. And yet in these posts I try to reflect on what you or any single person could do.
One way forward is to put more stock in silence. In Capurro’s words, that’s what we must do in the face of our loquacious technologies: learn the art of silence.
As Floridi notes, “silence is hugely undervalued in today’s world.” And it’s certainly rare. Noise pollution is such a problem that organizations like Noise Free America in the United States and Right to Quiet Society in Canada have sprung up. In the United States, already 1 in 10 people are exposed daily to harmful levels of noise. Across the population noise also damages the endocrine and nervous systems, leading to widespread sleep deprivation, fatigue, cognitive impairment and aggression.
And that’s just physical noise. We could say many of the same things for the metaphorical noise that comes at us from the web. Think of the widespread movements against social media over the past five or so years. It’s all a reaction against unhealthy noise.
Fortunately, there are all sorts of ways to practice the art of silence. Just like if you live in a noisy place you might put on earplugs or noise-canceling headphones, in the face of informational noise you might institute no-screen days, spend more time in places that don’t get cell reception, get one of those boxes to lock up your phone for a few hours, go on a meditation retreat, visit a library or museum, and on and on.
Even in our world of total information, opportunities for silence are all around us. We just have to learn to see them.
Ports of Call
Doing Great Work: The podcast Founders goes through books and essays by illustrious creators of all kinds, and a recent episode reviews Paul Graham’s wonderful essay “How to Do Great Work.” A must listen for anyone who wants to do just that.
What Would Socrates Do?: A nice short essay in Time this week giving a Socratic response to ChatGPT and other large language model tech. Is it wise?
Local Running Drama: A famous scene in Rocky II shows the eponymous boxer running throughout Philadelphia and ending at the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2013, a local runner inaugurated the first fun run retracing Rocky’s steps—which just happened to equate to a 50 kilometer route, one of the canonical ultramarathon distances. The Rocky 50K has gone on every December since. A few years back the race was threatened with a cease and desist when some company wanted to start a Rocky Run 5k and half marathon. And now a running influencer claims to have invented the route in a sponsored social media event. Anyway, this is the very definition of Kardashian-level drama that doesn’t matter, but it has made me commit to running the 50K again this December—it’s been a few years.