Over at Culture Study this week, one of the discussion topics was how folks, in the wake of Twitter’s collapse, find good stuff to read on the internet. Threads like that are always helpful: on the one hand, it’s nice to find resources that I might not have otherwise come across. On the other, it’s also a good way to check my own processes. I feel like I’ve done a fair job over the past year of gathering together many of the best aggregators—in a given weekspan, there’s very little (of the stuff I’m interested in reading, at least) that gets past the various nets I’ve set up.
One thing that has changed, though, is the speed at which I find, hear about, or read them. And that’s a real difference. This weekend, for instance, I learned that Daniel Kahneman passed away last week (on Wednesday), whereas at one point, I would have heard about it almost immediately. There’s still a small part of me that asks, “how could I not have heard this?!” Fortunately, it’s now counterbalanced by a much more sensible perspective. In the grand scheme of things, I’m a little surprised that it took a few days for me to hear, but really, so what? One of the really pernicious effects of social media platforms is the way that they condition us to invest ourselves in the constant, jittery, immediate deployment of our attention. Matt Webb had a really interesting post on Interconnected the other day, where he noted that “The underlying attribute of the app era has been FOMO.” And he speculates that the next phase of our burgeoning tech addiction will be the interjection of (creepy) neediness into our apps and platforms and devices. (He offers the crying owl of Duolingo as an example of this, but honestly, the first thing I thought about was Tamagotchi.)
I’ve written in this space before about Kahneman, but what I haven’t made entirely clear is how much influence Thinking, Fast and Slow had on the development of the ideas that I’m working on for my own project. That book outlines two different models of thought (Systems 1 and 2) that correspond to the fast and slow of his title, and his discussion helped me think through the relationship between metonymy and synecdoche. I cited his account of System 1 in my earlier post:
The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval. As these links are formed and strengthened, the pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and it determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectations of the future.
That emphasis on associations is mine, and it’s where I see a link to metonymy. His discussion of System 2 is a little bit more piecemeal in the book. He writes early on that the two systems are more accurately characterized as “automatic” and “effortful” (the numbers are a shorthand convenience). So while System 1 functions automatically, “System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.” Kahneman explains that we tend to identify ourselves with System 2 thinking, the conscious and reasoning work that we do to engage the world thoughtfully. In System 2, we make a conscious effort to assign our attention, and those operations “are disrupted when attention is drawn away.”
The fit with synecdoche is a little bit looser, to be honest. There’s an asymmetry to Kahneman’s systems—even things that are the result of effortful thinking can, when done often enough, slide into System 1 processes for us. Finding and driving to a place that we’ve never been before (System 2) can turn into mindless habit (System 1) once it’s repeated often enough, for instance. (“As you become skilled in a task, its demand for energy diminishes.”) So while I would (and will) argue that synecdochal thinking requires us to negotiate different scales and contexts (and thus necessitates effort), it’s not the only way that System 2 manifests. Our working minds “can follow rules, compare objects or several attributes, and make deliberate choices between options,” and these features go well beyond the operation of a single rhetorical trope.
As I’m trying to imply, then, there’s no bright line separating the two systems (nor the two tropes, for that matter)—it’s more a conceptual distinction than a pragmatic one, to the extent that I’m not sure that we ever find ourselves existing in one to the complete exclusion of the other. We are always capable of bringing our conscious minds to bear upon habits or practices that we tend to leave over to System 1, and eventually, even the most complicated things we do can themselves become automatic to a certain degree. (Dannagal Young likened “need for affect” and “need for cognition” to Kaheman’s Systems, for example, suggesting that we think of them more in terms of varied ratios than as free-standing attributes.)
Kahneman’s systems give us a way of thinking about the phenomena that started this post. The fact that it took me a few days to learn of his passing tells me something encouraging about my own habits—I’ve worked to push my social media consumption practices from System 1 to System 2. I only check in on those platforms occasionally, and I almost always do so in short, mindful bursts of effort. And I’ve disabled most of my notifications—the ubiquitous “red dot” (which Webb calls the distilled form of FOMO) conditions us to respond by encouraging us to imagine that we’re missing out on something important. But Webb wonders about the next phase of things, where even that minimally effortful choice (respond to the notification or not) is folded into the apps themselves:
Will apps need to be cajoled and reassured that you love them, if you neglect them for a few days? Will your email app be sluggish and drag its heels when you get back from your vacation?
What does a home screen full of these little needy agents look like, all competing for our affection?
While we’re all taken with the potentials and pitfalls of genAI/LLMs and their ability to perform System 2 activities, it’s worth considering the degree to which we’re also currently training (through AI conversation and companion apps) the next generation of advertising, objects, and applications.
Or, to put it in the terms from Kornbluh, we might also think of System 1 and 2 as immediate and mediated thinking respectively. And that’s a thread that you can trace back through my writing here to a number of other writers as well (Han, O’Dell, Jacobs, Sacasas, Young, et al.). As Kornbluh herself notes in Immediacy, that pattern has a great deal in common with the tech industry’s emphasis on transferring our social and cultural mediation over to apps and hiding that fact behind the illusion of convenience (and the realities of extraction and enshittification).
So, even though some folks have found Kahneman’s work somewhat problematic, I’ve found it to be a pretty useful heuristic for thinking about the big issues that my own work bumps up against. And that’s all I really set out to say today. More soon.