The Future of Feeling

When I used my Prime First Reads option on this book, I thought I was picking an insightful, conversational piece about how social media and anonymity affect human empathy. I wanted personal insights into cancel culture, online bullying, and ways we might combat such things without having to stop using social media entirely or rely on hypothetical technology with often-horrific ethical implications. More than that, I expected the author to pick a side and stick to it, not provide a teeter-totter of conflicting studies and “professional” opinions from varied sources. And to exercise the empathy she preaches.

Unfortunately, the most interesting and attractive thing about this book is its cover.

The writing is dry and boring; often, I found myself reading without absorbing because the words on the page were meaningless and repetitive filler. Some of the “study findings” and opinions are grossly generalized and therefore highly inaccurate of the human condition. For example, this book makes the claim that empathetic people are “happier, more self-aware, self-motivated, and optimistic” and “cope better with stress, assert themselves when it is required, and are comfortable expressing their feelings.” That's a dangerously specific claim, and completely inaccurate of myself and everyone else I know with high levels of empathy. (But hey, nice to know we're meaningless and being labelled as unempathetic just because we're insecure or introverted...?) This isn't the only instance of the author or those she cites being decidedly thoughtless, cruel, or lacking in empathy while trying to preach the importance of being empathetic, either.

Mark Zuckerberg is accused of lacking empathy simply because he once stood for freedom of speech (by my understanding, he's more keen on censoring Facebook these days). His willingness to show empathy for the rights of even the people he despises or disagrees with is portrayed as a sign he lacks empathy for “victims” of his platform. (How a person can be “victimized” by a website they have full control to block people on or stop logging into is anyone's guess.) Likewise, at one point it's directly implied that a man whose facial recognition AI lacked empathy simply because he let it learn via the internet and as a result it had a higher concentration of popular and white characters/people in the database without including Uhura from Star Trek (who is a black woman). The discovery of this oversight is referred to as “calling him out” - one of the very mentalities indicative of dehumanizing instead of empathizing with others online! Shortly after, it's also basically stated that any accidental oversight in an AI which relates to social justice issues is caused by a lack of empathy or the developers not being good enough people. Yikes! This is the exact opposite of the “we need to treat each other better and give the benefit of the doubt when we're upset” moral I expected from the book based on its premise!

The 2016 election and this one time a guy on Facebook was rude to her are also mentioned far more than they should be and most of the interesting information is provided in brief glimpses or hindered by annoying filler about this, that, and the other study - often including repetition of things already covered. For the political stuff, I wouldn't mind if it were mentioned a few times, but it's frequent enough to make several chapters feel more like a collection of outdated, boring political-tech articles than part of a recently-published book. Yes, we get it, people were little curses to each other more than ever on social media in 2016. No, it's not when trolling and doxxing and other such practices began and, no, it hasn't gotten any better since then. How are we supposed to look to the future when so firmly focused on the past?

When the focus isn't so blatantly political or biased, however, there are some interesting tidbits. The author shares tales about robot companions, AI projects, VR methods used to aid everyone from veterans to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and the interesting psychological nature behind bonding with Siri and Alexa. I want to make sure I credit her for that, because these things are genuinely fascinating. The trouble is: these are fleeting moments between boring filler and, quite often, some of the most potentially interesting bits are only given a cursory mention before diving into more annoying statistics. I want more of the cool psychological explanations and less of the “in this article, in that study, during the one interview” bits (seriously, the bibliography stretches from 86% to 100% in the kindle version).

Overall, this book has no sense of direction - it meanders in spirals, more or less - and suffers from severe overload of statistical data. It feels at times like a fence sitter trying to figure out where they stand... or a student with no strong opinion grudgingly trudging through an assigned paper when they'd rather be doing something they actually care about instead. That clearly isn't the case, given how much love the author seems to hold for this project when naming a chatbot pal after the then-in-progress book and reaching out to contact all the people she encountered in person, so I'm not entirely sure what went wrong or where. I just know that I don't feel the passion. I, instead, feel dull and boring “technical” writing.

Well, somewhat technical. Despite the dry and semi-professional tone, the author frequently (and annoyingly) refers to herself as a millennial despite being at the oldest end of that spectrum and far from what the generation is normally used to describe, uses annoying made-up words like “phubbing” (‘snubbing' someone to pay attention to a phone instead) and iGen (Generation Z), and relies too strongly on the meaning closer to ‘compassion and sympathy' when referring to empathy. It feels at times like reading a “Hello, fellow kids” meme come to life or watching someone struggle to connect unrelated things by stretching the definition of their supposed common thread (empathy) until they sort of vaguely seem similar.

I had such high hopes, but ultimately this book left me feeling disappointed and underwhelmed. I'm glad I read it, for the few intriguing pieces and small selection of new knowledge I've gained, but also I'm mentally exhausted after trudging through such densely uninteresting writing.