Digital propinquity

My therapist hates Facebook. It can literally destroy lives, she says. I am weary of Facebook for similar reasons, in addition to other privacy-related concerns. Facebook is an old thing now, but the tech landscape is rapidly shifting toward a position that implicitly affirms, and on occasion explicitly supports, infidelity.

Is this a bad thing? The increasing availability of affair partners, the ubiquity of covert communication channels, and the expansive set of strictly-digital activities that are pleasurable — they all seem terrible for a monogamy-centric society. We should brace ourselves for a crisis.

No doubt that therapists have great job prospects. But I think we need to see past this as a crisis and think of it more as “creative destruction.” Technology is a means to an end. But it is the end that matters. Infidelity is the end and that is where we need to concentrate. We are moving from a world where some people want to have an affair, some people don’t, and those that do — they may or may not depending on circumstance. It is really only that last group (the ones that wants to but lack the opportunity) that is changing. C’est la vie.

Some argue this becomes problematic because it might turn out that there are no people who actually want fidelity. In other words, to de-genderize that Chris Rock quote, it might turn out that humans are ‘only as faithful as their options.’ So let us say that is true. So what? Then we evolve our notions of monogamy based on fact, not speculation. Isn’t all this worth knowing?

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