From "Dark Flow" to Crossing Wendell’s Bridge

Disguised losses, the burden of self, and the next great division

Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing by Vincent van Gogh, 1888

My Swiss brother-in-law Manfred has hiked through the Israeli desert so many times that he knows the paths and rock formations by heart. As I write these words he’s trekking alone in Norway near the Arctic Circle, with an ultralight backpack and a satellite phone.

Manfred’s English is fluent, though it’s not his native language and he’s often at a loss for words to describe how he feels on his remote hikes. The one thing he often tells me is, “It’s so beautiful, so beautiful.”

What is the feeling exactly? What overcomes him when he’s striding along the fjord glories of Scandinavia or through the Negev desert with its barren vistas and 6000-year-old rock carvings like art treasures scattered around his dusty shoes?

I don’t think that feeling can be reduced to any one thing. But part of it is a “flow experience.” Manfred doesn’t call it that, but he knows what it is. It’s a feeling of being in total connection or engagement. It’s a feeling of effortlessness, even though you may be exerting effort. It’s a feeling of being more human, even though you feel like you’ve lost your sense of self. It’s a feeling of being more present, though in some odd sense you’re absent.

But there’s another kind of experience, not a positive flow, but a negative flow, a “dark flow” that is in many ways equally powerful, yet has an opposite effect. It’s an experience we need to recognize in ourselves, and in our children or loved ones, if we want to keep our natural minds strong in a Machine world.

“Losses Disguised as Wins”

In his book The World Beyond Your Head,

Matthew B. Crawford

describes how some heavy slot machine gamblers stand at their machines for eight to twelve hours and develop blood clots, or get so absorbed that when someone collapses from a heart attack they don’t get out of the way when the ambulance people come rushing into the casino. One woman wore dark clothes so she could keep playing her machine and soil herself without anybody noticing.

Psychologist Mike Dixon and colleagues have been doing research into “dark flow”, which is another experience that can afflict certain gamblers, although I’m going to suggest how it might apply beyond the gambling context.

According to Dixon, dark flow is a trance-like state of absorption that problem players can experience when playing slots. Some players call it the “slot machine zone”.

In the old days, you had to crank a pull handle to get a slot machine going, and then you had to wait for the symbols to line up to see if you might win. Nowadays, you just press a button, and you can win across multiple lines, which can be horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or zigzag. With all these combinations, it can be difficult for players to tell whether they’ve won or lost after the machine has finished spinning.

Something else happens too. People don’t just win or lose. There’s a third possibility: a “loss disguised as a win”. Let’s say a player bets a dollar on a slot machine and wins only $0.20. Even so, the machine still provides all kinds of reinforcing sights and joyful jingles and sounds, despite the fact the player has actually lost $0.80. The machine basically celebrates the fact that the player has lost.

Of course, losses disguised as wins are far more frequent than actual wins. That means players can end up with a feeling that they’re winning a lot more than they actually are. The flashing, jingling atmosphere of celebration seems to lull them to stay in the dark-flow zone and keep playing.

Dixon and colleagues don’t translate this to digital device use, but it’s worth considering. Our devices and apps aren’t designed for gambling (not primarily), but they can reward our thumb taps with a cheap jackpot of images, messages, likes, surprises, enticements.

In the extreme, our devices can be like mini-slot machines, filled with sound and celebration, yet signifying little or nothing. We know we’re wasting away the hours. We can spend years across a lifetime on social media alone. Sometimes a voice in our heads asks, “Why are you still doing this?” But the voice gets swept away by the sense that something worthwhile is happening—and if not just now, then with the next button press, the next swipe. We’re losing, yet we think we’re gaining. We’re seduced by the logic of “a loss disguised as a win”. Our devices make us liminal gamblers. Our addiction is the digital dark flow.

But the real darkness is happening below the surface of the celebration.

Digital Dark Flow

In gambling, the dark flow experience occurs when people enter into an immersive trance-like state, sustained not only by the sights and sounds or by a failure to appreciate all the losses disguised as wins, but because it makes them experience positive feelings.

As Dixon and colleagues point out, depressed people may be more susceptible to dark flow, as the (temporary) increase in positive feelings during gambling may be a form of emotional escape from their depression. It may also offer escape from other mental health issues. How might this apply outside of gambling to digital technology? Is there really such a thing as “digital dark flow”?

At

After Babel

Jon Haidt has argued that devices and social media use over the past decade or so are responsible for the dramatic increase in depression and anxiety among youth. There could be various reasons why—social comparison, sedentary lifestyle, sleep disruption, etc.—and I’m going to add one more possibility, that applies equally to youth and adults: digital dark flow experiences can, in some cases, encourage people to avoid negative feelings, which in turn can worsen their emotional state.

Many of us have stress in our lives, and sometimes deep emotional struggles. It’s tempting to try and self-medicate our moods with our devices. But repeated efforts at escape by plunging back into digital dark flow might worsen the original problem, by trapping us in a vicious cycle in which we believe we’re gaining relief during dark flow—we feel we’re experiencing a “win”—when in fact we’re avoiding our real lives and challenges, resulting in an actual loss.

This tendency might be especially problematic for youth and children, who are still learning how to experience and communicate emotions in healthy ways—without acting out their anger or fear, for instance, and not just holding in their difficult emotions either. Excessive device use, in other words, may be depriving some youth of the experiences they need to be able to regulate their emotions optimally.

It also means we might expect an increasing tendency among youth—or the adults they eventually become—to react irrationally or hysterically, to even minor stresses.

Rod Dreher

recently recounted the story of Lexi Jordan, an American TikToker who ranted about how much effort it took to climb up to a lookout point on the Amalfi Coast. While Dreher wasn’t talking specifically about device/social media use, his point is still relevant:

It’s because the Lexi character is becoming normal among the young raised in the comforts and choices of late capitalism. They cannot bear even the slightest glitch in the matrix of experience without going to pieces. A Hungarian millennial friend told me once that her friends led lives of material abundance and freedom that were unknown to their parents’ generation, which lived under communism, but they were also constantly stressed out and unhappy. The slightest complication or discomfort in life unhorsed them. They had no resilience.

People can’t learn to be resilient if they’re too comfortable, as Dreher points out, or if they’ve been given too many options to avoid normal stress and emotional challenges by escaping into digital dark flow experiences, as I’m suggesting.

In my last post I described the Technopolis, or the potential city of the future and the “thin humans” who may live there. If the Technopolis represents the visible infrastructure of a Machine society—the way things look on the outside—then the digital dark flow experience reflects the emotional lives of some of the citizens who dwell there: lives that gravitate toward external sights, sounds, and stimulation, and whose relationship with their inner world is either weakened or dysfunctional.  

The flow gets deeper

I’m not suggesting all youth or adults are susceptible to digital dark flow. It will probably depend on each person’s predisposition for stress, addiction, and negative emotion, plus the degree to which their devices can offer a means of escape.

Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh computer back in 1984. It was a clunky grey box that looked like a cheap TV set, with a clunky mouse that looked like a doorstop. Jump ahead to 2007 and Jobs is introducing the iPhone. This thing isn’t clunky at all, seamlessly reacting to the touch of your finger. Seamless means you don’t notice. Seamless means you blend right into the experience.

Now it’s 2023. Jobs isn’t with us, but Apple is still here, now introducing Apple Vision Pro—a set of glasses that can immerse you in a high-resolution virtual world, or else augment (wallpaper) the real world with ghostly floating images and app icons. Think of it—our whole world haunted by the internet! Now we’re not limited by a tiny little display screen. Now the experience isn’t just seamless, but fully immersive, all around us. Now we can really flow.

What comes next? Elon Musk got FDA approval this year to implant microchips in human volunteers. The purpose is purely therapeutic, for now—to help people with actual brain injury or disease regain function. But Musk has also said that we’ll all need to get brain implants one day, if we want to keep up with AI. Other companies like Synchron and Blackrock Neurotech and Paradromics are also working on brain implants—again, for therapeutics.

And maybe it won’t go beyond therapeutics. But the pattern of tech development so far is clear: the potential for capturing human attention and for slot-machining the minds of ordinary people is becoming greater, which means, for those susceptible, digital dark flow experiences could become more accessible, absorbing, and destructive.

And the more seamless the connection between our minds and our devices, the easier it will be for all of us to get immersed in the sights and sounds and stimulation, and to avoid not only our emotions, but ourselves.

Virtual Self-Negation

There is a burden that comes from being a self-aware human being. This awareness of our inner life—feelings, thoughts, fantasies—can make us uncomfortable, or afraid, or lonely, or bored—the emotional demons come in many forms. We can feel the impulse to get away and do something to distract ourselves.

Which is natural, but not always good, especially if it becomes a pattern of avoidance. “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal wrote.

It’s not just a philosophical concept. Dixon and colleagues observe that mind-wandering—those moments when our attention shifts away from the outside world, and instead focuses on our internal thoughts—occupies almost half of all our waking activity. Mind-wandering is also associated with negative feelings.

We can escape the self in many destructive ways: alcohol, drugs, gambling. Digital dark flow offers another possibility—and with the right technology, might become the most powerful escape of all. And what is the endpoint? What, when the tech gets so immersive that the flow of stimulation carries us into pleasant oblivion?

We might call it virtual self-negation.

And yet, even ordinary flow experiences—like what my brother-in-law Manfred describes while hiking—can allow us to escape the self. I regularly escape from myself, often during my writing, sometimes for hours. If both “flow” and “dark flow” lead to escape, are they any different? And how can we tell?

Summer in Fjord by Adelsteen Normann, 1918

Fjord Glories and Tea with Bedouins

Caroline Ross

has described (positive) flow as a feeling of coherence, arising out of a life lived mostly in accordance with the nature of things. Caroline writes from a Taoist perspective, but I think anyone, even Manfred—who follows the Christian faith—could grasp this.

“It’s so beautiful, so beautiful,” he always tells me, when recounting stories of his hikes in Israel and Norway. Sometimes it seems he experiences a deep and consuming flow, like a sustained peace of mind as he walks, and sometimes it seems lighter, like the soft fascination of gazing across a natural landscape with a sense of wonder.

But this feeling of coherence is not hyper-stimulating, nor hyper-focused. It’s mingled with other experiences, like the intense exertion of his body after four hours’ trekking. Like chatting with fellow hikers, or having tea in a Bedouin tent, or eating burgers with off-duty soldiers, or hitching a ride with an Arab family on a muddy road.

In other words, Manfred’s flow experiences engage his mind, activate his muscles, and connect him with real people. His flow experiences make him more human.

So, the coherence that arises from this kind of flow rests not just in the flow experience itself, but in drawing together different parts of life—cognitive, social, bodily, and so on—making the person as a whole more coherent.

Digital dark flow does the opposite. By shrinking our attention to a narrow and hyper-stimulating focus, it limits our mental activity and therefore weakens our minds. It deprives us of real people and real nature or else turns them into pixelated representations. It limits the use of our muscles and body, in effect dis-embodying us. Digital dark flow experiences make us less human. It creates a false coherence, by limiting the coherence to the flow experience itself, while dividing it from the rest of life.

Wendell’s Bridge

I’m not suggesting that all digital technology is bad. But there’s a curious lack of moral discussion about the dark side of tech, even a reflex denialism. People might point out that we’ve advanced in all sorts of ways through history, with little loss. Plato argued that the invention of writing would weaken memory, and in some ways it probably does, yet we’re all still here, still writing and still remembering. Much later, in 1841, Emerson observed:

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky.

Emerson lamented the coach, but now we have the automobile, and more people have died in car crashes since the year 2000 compared to World Wars I and II combined. That’s quite a cost. Is it enough to make us all stop driving? No. But it should give us pause for thought.

At what point does the cost outweigh the benefit? At what point is new tech a loss disguised as a win? Actually, the problem is more insidious, as tech makers, investors, and others have vested interests in pushing tech, which means losses might not only be disguised as wins, but deliberately disguised. There’s no conspiracy necessary for this, just ordinary self-interest.

We adapted to personal computers. We’re struggling a bit with smartphones. More immersive digital dark flow technology is on the way. I expect we’ll try to adapt again, but the idea that human beings can adapt endlessly is a fanciful assumption. We have mental and physical limits. Eventually, for many of us, the losses will pile up too high and overwhelm the wins.

It doesn’t have to be like this. We could do things differently. I may sound like a fool to hope for it, but the alternative is frightening.

Over twenty years ago Wendell Berry said that the next great division will be between people who want to live as creatures and people who want to live as machines. This division is looming closer. What lies between the two sides is a slender footbridge of choice. The day may come when we’re forced to decide whether to stay on one side of the bridge, or to hurry across those rickety planks.

How long we can just wait and watch is hard to say. But if the divide keeps growing, the footbridge might not always be there.

Postscript: Questions for Reflection

- Which of your devices/tech seem to encourage digital dark flow experiences?

- Do they come with losses disguised as wins?

- Which of your devices/tech seem to be of actual benefit—where the wins are greater than the losses?