“These days, our technology treats us as though we were objects and we get in the habit of objectifying one another as bits of data, profiles viewed. But only shared vulnerability and human empathy allow us to truly understand one another.”
Early internet → opportunities for psychosocial moratorium (Erik Erikson): important to identity development in adolescence— opportunity to try out a range of identities, personalities; get a sense of what fits
“But when I considered what I had accomplished, I was ashamed of my achievement because of how much I thought my effort showed.”
“To see your own culture, you have to make the natural unfamiliar.”
Dépaysement = “decountrifying,” making yourself a stranger in your environment to see it more clearly
Ideas = “objects to think with”
Differences in how men and women approach programming (top-down vs modular/trial-and-error) akin to different styles of writing (outline first vs write to find thesis)
Tool for research: people with awful global theories may still have hidden gems of ideas, and there’s no problem in using these!
David Shapiro → ways to understand her mother, and MIT engineers: “what looked like a lie was the fear of remembering something about herself she didn’t want to face,” “what looked like empathy was a fear of becoming flooded by emotion”
During grad school, developed idea that core ideas of psychoanalysis could deepen ethnographic practice
Respects that real life = thoughts and feelings together
Acknowledges feelings between interviewer (analyst, researcher) and interviewee (patient, subject)
Goal → pursue the intimate ethnography of contemporary life
Readings of contemporary French authors in grad school
Derrida → focused on how to create distance from the familiar— to fully understand “normal,” must look at what it suppresses
Foucault→ we are being shaped into restrictive societal roles by filling out bureaucratic forms, by the possibility that someone is watching → similar to how when we are online, “we perform a self because we always imagine ourselves seen.”
Riesman, in The Lonely Crowd: Americans becoming other-directed— seek identity in external validation → later manifested as “I share, therefore I am” psychology of social media
At MIT, had front row seat on shift from psychoanalytic → computer culture; from meaning to mechanism
Saw how both cultures existed in isolation, side by side (Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute and MIT Dept of Brain & Cognitive Sciences)
Expected people to be asking whether machines thought like humans; instead, computer users were wondering if humans had always thought like machines
Parallels between AI and psychoanalysis in the theme of the decentralized self: in the former, brain is built up from smaller circuits/neurons; in the latter, interactions btw ego of diff systems
Mission of research in new role at MIT: to study “is computers change not only what we do but who we are.”
“It helps to remember that not long ago, I was surrounded by cutting-edge researchers at MIT who were not sure how we would keep computers busy. Now it is clear that they keep us busy. We are their killer app.”
New work in studying the generation of children discover new computer toys for the first time → “philosophy of everyday life”
Shift in how kids learned about consciousness, learned to define what was alive (ex. digital objects can “think” but not feel, and are thus not alive)
Interacting with this kind of toy raised questions of whether they could cheat
View of people as “rational animals” shifting to people as “emotional machines”