The Epidemic of Excarnation: What We Lose When We Forget Our Flesh

Camus wrote, “A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.”

Christine Rosen, author of The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World (2024), updates Camus this way: “He fornicated and checked his phone.” But actually, if Rosen is correct, she should have gone one step further in her revision: “(Post)Modern man rarely fornicated, but instead used his phone to look at porn.”

We’re experiencing an epidemic of “excarnation”, says Rosen, which is an estrangement from our real, fleshy bodies and the real, fleshy bodies of other people as we increasingly embrace “mediated” forms of disembodied, technological existence. No more sex with a real human being, which can be clumsy and awkward and require practice, communication, and compromise. Instead, we have a smorgasbord of pixelated pornstars ready to cater to our most idiosyncratic kinks or pliant Chatbot girlfriends who send us AI-generated NSFW pictures directly to the phone in our palms, which leaves one hand free for—well, you know what.

But this book is not only about sex. Rosen argues that as a culture, we’ve naively embraced every new form of technology bestowed upon us by our Silicon Valley overlords, gullibly accepting their gauzy platitudes of “connection” that mask their predatory profit motive. Our humanity is the cost of such exchanges.

We’ve accepted the premise of technology that everything “frictionless,” “seamless,” and more convenient is better. What we’ve discovered is that the source of much “friction” in social life is other people in their messy, awkward, unpredictable quirkiness. Almost overnight, we came to accept the idea that people should deliver our food to our doorstep, send us a photo of our bagged burritos, and disappear back into their cars before we are assaulted by their presence or inconvenienced by the pleasantries of small talk. And it’s not just DoorDash. A dozen innovations in recent decades, like AirPod headphones or self-checkout in grocery stores, serve the many of us who feel it should be an inalienable right to be insulated from face-to-face interaction with other people.

People are spending enormous amounts of time in virtual spaces. Some people, finding their own (real) lives lacking, pour their energies into creating an ersatz one on platforms like Second Life. But if you find this disconcerting, you’re liable to be shot down as a naive and backward-looking Luddite. Some have even gone so far as to argue that any preference for the real, flesh-and-blood material reality over virtual ones is mere prejudice. In a hilarious co-opting of the language of DEI, some technocrats have even claimed that such prejudice is merely “Reality Privilege.” Only some very privileged realities are rich and varied enough to compete with the abundance of virtual worlds, the argument goes. For most people, reality is dull, beige, and boring. And so, as one technocrat Rosen quotes puts it,  “Who is to say that a virtual life that is better than one’s physical life is a bad thing?” 

This mass “excarnation” of society—this estrangement from our own and others’ real, physical bodies—has serious consequences. We’re losing specific skills that make us human: the skills of reading others’ facial cues, of inferring others’ emotions, of understanding our own emotions, of navigating or orienting ourselves in a physical landscape, of appreciating the slow pleasures of art, of handwriting, of physical play, of daydreaming, of having sex. Almost all of these skills are being outsourced to technology, including those skills that seem most personal and most immune to technological encroachment. Consider, for example, the understanding of one’s own emotions. Certainly, nobody can understand our emotions better than ourselves! But some wearable technology companies promise to interpret your biometric data for you, such that your own messy interior emotional lives become simple and legible. No more difficult self-reflection necessary! 

Before Rosen, Yuval Harari predicted in his 2018 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow that algorithms will become so powerful and knowledgeable that we will consult them in making all of our decisions. In one of my favorite hypothetical examples, Harari imagines a woman consulting algorithms to help her decide between two suitors. She asks Google, do I marry John or Jerry? Google says something like, “Well, I’ve read all of your e-mails and text messages you’ve sent to John and Jerry and the messages they sent to you. I’ve analyzed their syntax and diction and have determined that you have better communication and romantic connection with John. A cross-reference of your wearable technologies confirms this—your heart rate and perspiration are greater when in John’s company than Jerry’s. Considering the relationships in your past, your family history, and John’s past and family history, I give you an 85% chance of a successful relationship with John. I know this upsets you—because Jerry is more handsome, and you value the social capital his handsomeness provides. But trust me. Your biological evolution puts too high a premium on good looks—but good looks have low correlation to long-term relationship success.” To Harari, this is a good thing. Algorithms will eliminate the biases and prejudices of human beings so that they can cut through the psychic smog and make the decisions that would actually result in the greatest happiness.

Harari’s mistake, however, is to assume that Google would have a disinterested objective to pair you with the most legitimately compatible mate rather than with someone who would make you more economically valuable to their stockholders. Google might instead pair you with someone who transforms you into the consumer they want you to be: a partner who encourages you to prioritize status symbols, indulge in luxury experiences, and keep your spending habits aligned with their advertisers’ interests. To her credit, Rosen is much more skeptical than Harari of the benevolence of these tech companies and regularly reminds readers that despite their stated high ideals, these companies’ real objective is to turn your life, your emotions, your love, your pictures, and your communications into dollar bills. 

To hear Rosen tell it, the encroachment of technology into these most intimate parts of our lives has happened because we’ve uncritically accepted the myth of progress: the idea that human history is defined by a steady, linear improvement in knowledge, technology, morality, and overall quality of life. This myth, which assumes that change is inherently good and that modernity is intrinsically superior to the past, has blinded us to the costs and consequences of our innovations. In Rosen’s account, the myth lulls us into a kind of passivity, leaving us unaware and uncritical as technology encroaches upon our lives.

While this is surely part of the story, I think Rosen misses a deeper, more personal dimension of our uncritical embrace of technological “solutions.” One of the most valuable insights of existentialists like Camus, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky is that most human beings experience freedom as a kind of burden and, in fact, one they are often anxious to give away. The staggering array of choices available to us today and the accompanying realization that we are wholly responsible for those choices produces what Kierkegaard called “angst.” Dostoyevsky observed that people are willing to relinquish their freedom to paternalistic authority figures in exchange for security and simplicity. And he was right; we are not merely passive victims of the myth of progress. Rather, we have actively sought out technological “solutions” to outsource the existential risk of making choices for ourselves, even in matters as profound as love and marriage. Today’s Grand Inquisitor isn’t a religious figure, it’s Mark Zuckerberg.

But even if you are someone who would never consult Google about such questions of the heart, we must concede that, to some extent, we’ve all become accustomed to the “frictionless” experience. But we also have a sneaking suspicion despite all of this convenience we’re losing something valuable. For one, Rosen says, the experience of “serendipity” is on the brink of extinction. Serendipitous experiences like stumbling into a new restaurant, following only the cues of your nose, are increasingly unlikely because algorithms relentlessly nudge us in particular directions. We research Yelp reviews before trying a restaurant, scouring hundreds of photos of dishes and scrutinizing hundreds of customer reviews. In this way, we allow the aggregate mass of people to determine which restaurants we try, with no allowance that our own idiosyncratic tastes might differ from those of the many. When we go to a new city, there’s little chance we “lose ourselves” in the city’s nooks and crannies, alleys, or stores. Our GPS-enabled phones mean that we know exactly where we are at all times, and algorithms will send you personally tailored “push” notifications when you’re nearing your favorite, familiar haunts. The music and movies we enjoy are also algorithmically determined; no longer can we stumble into a record store or Blockbuster and have the coincidental experience of taking home something truly novel, something completely outside our usual patterns of consumption. The “Recommended For You” features on Netflix and Amazon narrow the scope of our possible experiences and make serendipitous surprises less likely.

In recognition that these algorithms have disturbed the “fun” of chance encounters, some tech folks have tried to “design serendipity” or re-introduce its possibility back into the algorithm. Tech critic Nicholas Carr memorably called this effort to manufacture serendipity  “the industrialization of the ineffable.” In other words, there are no ineffable experiences like love, serendipity, or spirituality that companies will not try to industrialize, standardize, or capitalize on by turning them into predictable, measurable, and manipulatable processes. There is nothing too human, nothing too sacred, that cannot be reduced to the binary language of the algorithm.

According to Rosen, we need to be more skeptical about technology. More than a century ago, Thoreau wrote, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” We need to think more like Thoreau: when we use technology, how does it use us in turn? 

We need to remember that, despite all of our technological sophistication, we are human beings with human bodies. As Ecclesiastes put it, “You who do not know how the mind is joined to the body know nothing of the works of God.” Or, as Montaigne put it more humorously: “And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still about our arses.”

We need to take account of the qualitative losses suffered on account of our uncritical adoption of technological “solutions” to human “problems”.  As Rosen writes at the close of her book, 

Accounting for what we have lost is also the beginning of the process of reclaiming it. Despite what Silicon Valley marketing messages insist, history is not always a steady march toward progress, and not every new thing is an improvement on the old. If we are to reclaim human virtues and save our most deeply rooted human experiences from extinction, we must be willing to place limits on the more extreme transformative projects proposed by our techno-enthusiasts, not as a means of stifling innovation but as a commitment to our shared humanity. Only then can we live freely as the embodied, quirky, contradictory, resilient, creative human beings we are.

During the Renaissance, humanists like Pico della Mirandola celebrated the unique place of human beings on the Great Chain of Being. Unlike animals, whose natures were fixed, human beings possessed a malleable nature: they could choose to rise to the divine heights of the angels or degrade themselves to the level of beasts. For Renaissance humanists, this capacity for transformation was a glorious privilege. But today, rather than becoming angels or beasts, as Pico Della Mirandola imagined, human beings are becoming machines. Or, more accurately, we are outsourcing our experiences of being human—thinking, feeling, connecting—to our machines, as if they could live for us. Rosen’s book is a call for a new humanism—one that rejects this abdication and embraces the messy, wondrous glory of embodiment, emotion, and connection.