Business Meetings at the Urinal

A lament on the enclosure of public space

Last year around this time, I published a Substack post that proved to be one of my most-read ever: Narcissus in Public. In it, I reflected on an experience over the holidays at a downtown DC skating rink where an arena for family fun had been turned into Instagram glamour-shot backdrop. The episode exemplified two themes that have preoccupied my thinking about technology: (1) the ways in which our digital lives have increasingly come to colonize and privatize formerly public spaces in the physical world, and (2) the cascade effects of these actions, as one person’s decisions quickly reshape the choice architecture for those around them, creating feedback loops and social contagions.

Last month, I found myself struck by another example of the same phenomenon, only this time in the rather different environment of an airport men’s room. Standing in an uncommonly long line that snaked out the exit, I soon became aware of a man next to me speaking loudly into the air in front of us. Of course, I haven’t been living in a hole for the last five years, so I divined almost immediately that no, he wasn’t crazy; he was just on a phone call on his AirPods. But then, I thought again—of course he was crazy! After all, who has a full-volume private business phone call standing in a dense crowd at the entrance of a men’s room? I watched curiously to see whether he would pause the conversation once his turn came for the urinal...but of course he did not, instead shouting cheerfully to the wall about how they could reel the client in with their next presentation. Here was the very model of a modern multi-tasker: taking care of two kinds of business at the same time.

Now, I am curmudgeonly enough to remember the first time, a decade or so ago, when I first saw people walking down the street with those weird little white polyps protruding out of their ears, and thought, “this fad can never last.” And I remember not long after, when I was mystified to notice people for the first time talking to thin air in public before realizing that they were in fact talking to their little white polyps, and said to myself, “I’ll never be one of those people.” But of course, now I am, and almost certainly you are too. Who doesn’t have AirPods, or the Beats or Bose or Google equivalent? And if you’re a busy person like me, you probably make the most of the walking part of your commute to get in a phone call or two.

In the early days of the AirPod, I think we all instinctively tended to keep such conversations outdoors only. While of course we had long since erased the taboo against having private phone calls in public, one could always maintain some modicum of privacy and politeness by clutching the phone close to one’s cheek and dropping one’s voice to a low tone. AirPods were another matter, creating the irresistible visual impression that you were talking to whoever was in front of you, and also tending to do away with volume modulation. On the other end of the same plane trip, I’d been embarrassed to share a boarding area with a middle-aged woman engaged in what sounded like a violent break-up through her phone...but at least she had the sense to end the call just as we were entering the jet bridge, much to the relief of the uncomfortably shifting passengers around her. With this urinal AirPoddery, though, I couldn’t help but thinking that the last taboo had been violated, the last boundary between public and private space erased.

The New Enclosure Movement

This encounter, I realized, was simply the auditory (and infinitely less glamorous) equivalent of the visual trespass at the skating rink last year. Both were perfect examples of how we radically underestimate digital technology if we think of it as primarily reshaping only our online lives, leaving us for most purposes free to go about our embodied lives as usual. On the contrary, digital technology has evinced a remarkable power to colonize our physical environments, alter our physical habits, and privatize formerly public physical spaces. As Adam Kotsko recently wrote, observing similar trends,

“Part of this is obviously the diffusion of social media behaviors into everyday life. That is clearly where people get the idea of a space that is public and yet which exists solely for self-display and self-expression. . . . Social media habituates us to think of our fellow human beings as a passive audience, whose responses we get to pick and choose based on the degree to which they please or affirm us.”

Indeed, we might say that this represents a sort of new enclosure movement, recapitulating the original sin of capitalism whereby greedy English aristocrats “enclosed” land that till then had been held in common by local villagers, its use regulated by custom. Until recently, though, even spaces that were formally private property could still function as a kind of commons, as we respectfully shared one another’s presence and sometimes engaged in polite conversation with strangers, or at least acknowledged one another with glances and gestures.

Today, however, we are absent even when we are present—or at least absent-minded. The fact is that while we may pretend that everyone around us does not exist while we talk to the air or pose for imagined admirer, it is not as easy for them to pretend that we do not exist. When I break off a conversation at dinner with relatives to type out some texts on my phone, my attention temporarily a thousand miles away, it sucks some life out of the room; the conversation falters and people exchange irritated or anxious glances. Our actions, in short, are not our own, whatever we may have been told by a thousand banal slogans of liberal capitalism for the past hundred years. They almost always have what economists call “externalities”—which is to say hidden costs that we offload on unconsenting others while seeking to maximize our own utility.

Of course, there is always one thing we can do to escape those externalities: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. We all do it a dozen times a week, sometimes consciously, sometimes by reflex. If someone in the coffee shop next to you is privatizing the public space by having a loud conversation on their AirPods, time to pull out your own pair and escape into your own private world. If someone at the dinner table decides their texts are more interesting than your anecdote, you may suddenly remember that you have someone important to text as well. Pretty soon the whole table is looking down at their laps, or the whole cafe humming along with their private DJ. In other words, these technologies create feedback loops or social contagions, whereby a few individuals’ decision to use the technology starts to create an almost irresistible pressure on others to join them. Indeed, this clearly drives much of the initial adoption of such technologies in the first place. You might not have wanted to get AirPods; you might’ve been one of those weirdos who likes to actually soak up your surroundings, have serendipitous conversations with strangers, and, when you do need to make a phone call, huddle in a corner with your phone pressed to your ear. But once you found that everyone else on your commute and in your your coffee shop was retreating into their private cocoons, or colonizing the space with their private conversations, there wasn’t much reason to keep holding out. The technology, in short, takes on a kind of life of its own, and we dutifully clamber aboard the train of “progress,” whether or not we enjoy the ride.

The Future of Absentee Presence

Lest we think that we have already more or less settled into a new equilibrium, irritating but bearable, I’m afraid that this particular train has much further to go. A week or two after the airport men’s room experience, I was at an optician with my son for a routine vision test. While we were waiting, he pointed out to me a new product being advertised with flashy posters: “Nuance Audio” glasses. These were a kind of smart eyeglasses that also functioned as a kind of hearing aid: little microphones on the front of the glasses picked up sound from whatever you were looking at and then amplified it into your ears through little speakers near the back of the frames. The idea was that you could essentially screen out background noise and focus all of your hearing on one conversation. Like most such gizmos, this was presented and marketed as a therapeutic device, a manifestation of compassion for those suffering hearing loss, who often struggle in noisy environments. But since we know that nearly all medical supplements go on to become mass consumer substitutes, it’s worth attending to the logic of this technology, and its likely future uses.

At first glance, this looks like an encouraging turn back to physical presence: here is a technology that allows you to more fully attend to the person right in front of you. Well yes, but only by at the same time screening out everyone and everything else that you don’t want to hear. You are present, yes, but no longer in a location in the ordinary sense, a space where you receive and submit to the sights and sounds and smells of your environment. You are no more there than if you were 1,000 miles away, talking to the person in the cafe via Zoom (which has gotten exceptionally good at cancelling out background noise). At the same time, the same technology can allow you to listen in on conversations that you were not invited to. Is it overly creepy to imagine the Nuance glasses (or a more powerful, less ethical successor of them) allowing me to eavesdrop on the quiet conversation of a couple on the other side of busy restaurant by amplifying only their words and drowning out all else? Essentially, we have a technology that is the real-world equivalent of Harry Potter’s “Extendable Ears” and muffliato charm at the same time. And unlike AirPods, it’s all but invisible—no one else ever need know that you aren’t just wearing a pair of glasses.

What such technologies do is to profoundly change the relationship of our senses, will, and environment. To be sure, there is always a complex interplay between these three. God has designed us so that we can choose what to look at or listen to, and our senses are extraordinarily good at filtering out peripheral sights and sounds that are irrelevant to the object of our focus. Good, but far from perfect. We may focus and filter for a time, but our senses are still passive enough that they can easily be distracted by bright colors or loud sounds, breaking the spell of our attention and redirecting it to something in our surroundings. In other words, will and world remain in a dynamic dance, each imposing itself in some measure on the other. What technology promises is to disrupt this dance and change this power dynamic, rendering the world wholly subject to our will, so that we can be present in a location only ever on our own terms—precisely as much as we want to be, and no more.

Technology both responds to and intensifies this desire. Consider: digital technology has already catechized use in such a relationship to our wills--when we are scrolling on our phones, we have the power to call up exactly the sights and sounds that we want, and then banish them the moment they are no longer desired. We are wholly in the driver’s seat; reality is at our beck and call. Till now, the analog world has stubbornly resisted this logic, pushing back on us in uncomfortable ways and reminding us that we aren’t quite boss. Is it any wonder, then, that we should seek to extend the logic of the digital into the physical world, so that even as I navigate three-dimensional space, I do so only on my own terms, inside my own private engineered reality? I think many of us are still alert enough to recognize the pathology when it presents itself in full-fledged form (like Meta’s super-creepy smart glasses). But when it comes to us wrapped in compassion, as a way to help the hard of hearing, we won’t hesitate to embrace it. And why not? We have already accepted the dissolution of our common world, so what is to be gained by being the last holdout, the only person in the cafe still using your own unaided eyes and ears to gaze around at a room full of people who are digitally elsewhere, who can’t see you and can’t hear you?

Be Present Where You Are

Here, as so often, the way of repentance demands the hard work of becoming an individual, but also takes a village (if I may synthesize Soren Kierkegaard and Hillary Clinton). On the one hand, we must each begin by simply observing and naming our own tendency to go with the flow and accelerate the feedback loop; and instead, stand against it and practice being fully present and attentive. You’ll be surprised to discover how many interesting things and behaviors there are to observe in your immediate surroundings. (One side benefit, as I can tell you from personal experience, is that you’ll come up with loads of good material for Substacking!) But ultimately, although it’s always good to start by “being the change you want to see in the world,” this isn’t a battle any of us can win on our own. These are collective action problems, and must be tackled accordingly. What would it look like if our institutions grew backbones again, and schools, churches, and public libraries began to say, “I’m sorry, ma’am, you can’t have that conversation here”; “I’m sorry, sir, you’ll need to take that device outside”? Thankfully, many public schools across the country have at last begun to do so, putting to shame the hundreds of thousands of churches that allow their congregants to tap away on their devices in the pew (or downright encourage them to do so!).

This is a hard ask for authority figures who will be glared at as officious busybodies, but what is the alternative? As Kotsko remarks, “you cannot run a society full of people who are not simply thoughtless or inconsiderate but refuse on principle to take others into account, who find it offensive to think they owe anything to anyone.” Here as so often, the first step is the hardest: people may roll their eyes and complain, but pretty soon, they’ll rediscover everything they’ve been missing the past five or ten years: the hum of background conversation, the facial expressions of the people around them, the endless delight of watching toddlers trying to make eye contact with everyone in the rows behind them.

Once, I was asked to give my best word of advice to a room of elite undergraduates, hoping for careers in public life. I think they were expecting some shrewd vocational tips. I didn’t have any, so I said simply, “Learn to be present where you are. You may feel like the only one, but you won’t regret it.”