TUCKER CARLSON AND THE DIGITAL AGE
Posted on by scrivvy
Tucker Carlson admitted the other day that to differentiate friend from foe he follows his nose like some kind of wild animal.
“Things that you can smell—those are the things that you can trust…. Your spouse, your dogs, your children.” He said at a Heritage Foundation gala.
His enemies will gloat: “Ah! Yet more evidence that Carlson is the great uncivilized beast of cable news…or formerly of cable news.”
But whatever you think of Tuck, I think he might be on to something here. He mentioned the smell thing while discussing the informational vacuum that the social-media age has, perhaps surprisingly, ushered in.
And it got me thinking:
The most sophisticated AI and CGI can replicate and manipulate our visual world with impressive convincingness, but the digital world knows nothing, can convey nothing of smells. The digital binary of ones and zeros has no aroma.
This might at first seem like a trivial factoid barely worth mentioning. But the more our smartphones become the great hegemon hermeneutic, mediating our impressions of the world, the more our olfactory reality gets elided, hived off, consigned to the oubliette. And the informational vacuum that this has placed on people has yet to be widely realized or even vaguely discussed.
Think of the information you get from your nose. It tells you when meat is rotten and will spoil your gut. It tells you if there is a dead body or a giant squid in the closet.
There is something subtle and subliminal, but ultimately powerful when I have my children nestled up to me at night and I smell their hair and their skin and their breath and their farts and I recognize them as extensions of me; I recognize them as me and instinctively feel nurturing and protective of them. And I’m sure they, for their part, smelling me even subconsciously, feel protected and secure knowing that they are with someone who shares similar chemistry.
Our sleeping minds are oblivious to sensory data from the eye, but the nose keeps on working through the night, waking us to dangers should it sniff out a house fire or that giant squid in our closet.
Smell is the calling card that humans and other animals have used for millions of years to help determine the presence of kinfolk and predators alike. So it is rather ironic—or perhaps telling— that our “informational age” ignores it.
Unsmelly digital media is the Trojan horse that gets into our brain like an occupying force, sneaking past the nasal receptors typically tasked with identifying hostile actors.
This is where it’s heading: our future will embrace us in its sensory deprivation pods, where all scary organic stinks will get vanquished by trusty ol’ Febreze™ and Axe Body Spray™ and Clorox Wipes.™ Otherwise, our eyes will tell us everything that the phones in our hand tell us about the world beyond our pod.
And the part of the brain formerly responsible for processing incoming smells, for interpreting complex pheromones, will wither and die. And with it will die one of our body’s oldest evolutionary means of raising a red flag to signal danger.
Likewise, or conversely, fewer synapses will be devoted to recognizing or savoring the faint musk of our spouses or our children—which we of course will no longer be having, so I guess this won’t matter.
But if we did have them, in a profound sense, we would hardly recognize them. We will have literally entered an alien world.
I fight against these tendencies in the real world in weird ways, like in my habit of buying actual old books and smelling them.
I try to close my eyes a lot and smell the world around me. The smell of rain, pine trees, the sea, soil. Sometimes I fall into a half-sleep state where such smells trigger profound half dreams that seem ancestrally old.
The visual is only giving you the reflective surface of things. Smell allows you to go deep, beyond the surface understanding, to a deeper understanding.
And I really shouldn’t be telling you this…But it might be the case that I don’t exactly use deodorant on a regular basis…For ideological reasons. Special occasions only.
Ahem. It is worth wondering even more about what is happening to our brains with this influx of eye stimuli and absence of nose info.
Clearly, the “news feed” you get is only ever feeding your eyes as your other senses starve. You think being plugged-in to the global hivemind makes you a big-brained intellectual omnivore but you’re actually a starving monovore.
Moreover, your poor eyes are being catered to with ever more absurdly decorated cakes: with so many content creators vying for your optic nerves’ attention, your feed will be increasingly sensationalized; your eyes will be sensationalized—i.e., acclimated and thus addicted to the optic opiate of the never ending digital stream.
In the future, the last smelly organic swamp molecule or vestigial strand of musk will be housed in a museum like an extinct Aurochs. It will be visited by field-tripping third graders.
Their robot teacher will explain to them that there used to be these things called smells, and we had a part in our caveman brain that could detect them.
But the kids will not be paying attention. Their retinal stream will be too delicious to look away from, even for a moment.
A pulsating chartreuse laserbeam braindisco.
Scrivner's Pyre 