REVIEW: ‘The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World’ by Christine Rosen
As I was nearing the end of Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience and starting to think about the focus of this review, I woke up one morning having strained the trapezius muscle in my upper back. It was probably some combination of weightlifting, toddler-transporting, and hunching over my devices that did it. (Being an old man in a young man’s body is a contradiction with a shelf life.) Whatever the cause, I was thrust into a state of heightened consciousness of my own embodiment. Turning my head suddenly became a whole production. Typing these words on my laptop is fraught with regrettable awareness of the discomfort in my neck.
There is nothing quite like feeling persistent pain as you scroll on your iPhone at night to remind you that no matter how much of our lives occur in the digital realm, we are, at the end of the day, living in bodies, not in cyberspace but in "meatspace," as one dyspeptic podcaster has put it. We are, as Rosen brilliantly provokes her readers to recognize and dilate on, embodied creatures. If we are going to thrive as a species living through a digital revolution—rather than only learning from inevitable injuries that come from diving into novelty headfirst—we will have to think carefully about what it means to be irreducibly embodied.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Free Beacon
______________________
Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was a 2023 Sapir Fellow.
Photo by Svitlana Unuchko/Getty Images