I listened to Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones, with Ezra Klein on a long drive recently, and had to restrain myself from pulling over to make notes and transcribe quotes. Thankfully, The New York Times has an abridged transcript (which is a subscription, but the podcast version is free, and they’ve added it to YouTube as well). 

Here are some of the most intelligent, honest, vulnerable and realistic points that hit me as I drove.

Early on (and sadly not in the transcript), Zadie wonderfully expresses the reality that intelligence is completely relative…

What we define as intelligence, we define so partially. I am so aware without trying to sound falsely humble, that I am a complete idiot about so many things and yet I have this particular intelligence in a very extremely narrow area which has allowed me to make the life I have made. But if you ask me the most basic facts of the universe… basic maths, geography, I mean there are just acres of ignorance in my life. No matter practical knowledge, to do things with your hands to make things… it’s endless, the things that I’m not good at. There are many many contexts in the world that I can go into and be a true fool. Truly lost. And, that’s important to know when you move thought the world, that this thing that you call intellect, this thing that you value, which may even be the basis of some sort of meritocratic existence, has limited use. 

On truth and facts, and the faux-intellectual strap line “The facts don’t care about my feelings”…

“The facts don’t care about my feelings” is a truly fascistic sentence, to be honest. We are creatures of feeling, in part. So to deny that is to deny a part of the kind of animal we are in the world… Even in the hardest sciences, emotion plays some role, instinct plays some role. And it also dismisses huge areas of people’s human experience — the entirety of religious experience, almost the entirety of emotive experience, experience of the natural world, philosophical experience. So for me, that movement is — it’s just so distant from the way I think about humans and what they need.

On smartphones, social media and the power they hold over us…

…the facts of this [smartphones and social media] technology is that it was designed as, and is intended to be, a behaviour modification system. That is the right term for it.

When you wake up in the morning and you turn to your social app, you are being instructed on what issue of the day is what to be interested in… And I don’t think anyone of my age who knows anyone they knew in 2008 thinks that that person has not been seriously modified… 

And that’s OK. All mediums modify you. Books modify you, TV modifies you, radio modifies you. The social life of a 16th-century village modifies you. But the question becomes: Who do you want to be modified by, and to what degree? That’s my only question.

And when I look at the people who have designed these things — what they want, what their aims are, what they think a human being is or should be — the humans I know and love, this machinery is not worthy of them. That’s the best way I can put it.

And I speak as someone who grew up as an entirely TV-addicted human. I love TV. I love reading. Modification is my bread and butter. And when the internet came, I was like, hallelujah. Finally, we’ve got a medium which isn’t made by the man or centralised. We’re just going to be talking to each other, hanging out with each other, peer to peer. It’s going to be amazing. That is not the internet that we have. That is not what occurred.

In reference to Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman…

I think Neil Postman is a prophet and a genius, and I give that book to everybody all the time. It blew my mind.

It’s about capture. All mediums in the past have had partial capture. What blows my mind and what I think is the paradigm shift is, this is total. When I get on a train in the morning and I look down a carriage, there isn’t a single person who is looking up from their phones. So that was my question: What happens when it’s everybody? And it’s not just a medium, but it’s also the way you work, live. What happens when you enter into the medium and that’s how your life is structured?

Zadie reveals that she doesn’t have a smart phone, but rather than being all holy or better than thou about it, she explains how it’s to effectively restrain herself. From that ‘behaviour modification system’ she explains…  

I had one for three months in 2008, when it came out. Other people’s opinions matter to me, as I’m sure they matter to everybody. The thought of being exposed to those opinions every second of every day, of having to present my life to other people in some other form than it exists every day, like a media presentation — I cannot imagine what my mind would be, what my books would be, what my relationships would be, what my relationship with my children would be.

Apart from anything else, I am an addictive person, so I would be on that thing nine hours a day. Easy. I watched TV nine hours a day throughout the whole of the ’80s. I would be what my kids call brain rot…

…people I love, I see them online, and I’m like, who are you? This is not the same person I hang out with. This is a different person. But it’s really important to take the responsibility and the blame off individuals. It’s a behaviour modification system. It’s meant to do that. It’s really well designed. People aren’t terrible. The system is terrible. You want to lift that off people, that sense of guilt or shame, and make it more about anger — anger toward the people who created this.

…Technologies aren’t neutral. They are a philosophy and an ideology.  

And on loneliness…

…I think it’s existential. I think it’s a feeling of being lost in the world sometimes. I think people are super frightened of it and anything to avoid feeling it.

The phone is obviously one of the great comforts in that moment. You can pick it up, pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. And I use books in exactly that way. My family will often say to me, you know, even if I have a 30-second waiting period for something, the train’s coming down the track, I’ve still got a book open. So that kind of avoidance, I’m absolutely a part of. I wish I could meditate, and I wish I could be present in a way that people are always recommending, particularly in New York, but I am also someone that needs constant mediation, so I know all about that loneliness on the other side of it. 

There’s even more in the whole thing worth hearing.