Out of Touch: The Future of Intimacy
As millennials watch the next generation recreate their world through technology, just how open will they be to the possibilities of digital intimacy?
Recently, a friend was showing me some work shirts he had bought online. Modelling a particularly on-fleek fitted salmon number, he turned from the mirror and asked, “So, what do you think?” He looked downright debonair. With a good body and an even better eye, he’d found a slim-fit shirt that showed off both. Turning back to his reflection, he started telling me about the new intake of graduates at his office.
“Their shirts and pants are always so baggy,” he said, “I just think it looks unprofessional.” As he lamented the next generation’s lack of style, it hit me:
This is how it happens. This is how we become old and unfashionable. This is how we become out of touch.
In season one of the HBO/BBC 2019 sleeper hit Years and Years, 18-year-old Bethany can barely contain her excitement as she begs her mother to call her. Her mother – sitting directly across the table – is confused, but obliges. Bethany takes the call by lifting her hand to her ear, leaving her phone untouched on the table.
“Can you hear me?” she asks.
Ending the call with a flick of her hand, Bethany holds an open palm towards her mother.
“It’s me,” she explains. “I’m the phone.” A snaking series of black wires and speakers have been implanted within her body. They visibly pulse beneath her skin. Her mother stares in horror – this new form of being in touch with her daughter too much to bear.
Generally, when we speak of being in or out of touch with someone, we refer to our (in)frequency of communication with them in an abstract sense: through calls, messages, emails and the like. But the phrase ‘out of touch’ finds its etymological roots in 19th-century military drills, when marching soldiers were expected to keep their elbows connected with those on either side. The essence of being ‘out of touch’ is an absence of corporeal contact – of physical, intimate touch. But when we accuse those older than us of being out of touch, the thing which we insist they should retain connection with is amorphous. They are out of touch with an idea, with a sense of being in and of the world. As one generation passes its prime, another enters it.
Every generation experiences a different transition from youth to adulthood. The particular historical events, social phenomena, cultural influences and technological advancements shared by a generation bind them, while also serving to separate them from those who have come before and, in time, from those who come after them. This ‘generation gap’ is what pushes the older generations out of touch with the youth.
In general, this gap is at its most noticeable between parents and children, who are usually two generations removed. The boomers shocked the traditionalists with their Summer of Love approach to relationships, conspicuous consumption and nationalism. Gen X has long perplexed both their parents and their children with their cynicism and penchant for satire. Millennials – by many accounts the most educated generation, and the first generation of digital natives – have long defined themselves against their elders as a generation more open to and accepting of difference. They are, after all, the group known for mainstreaming identity politics and intersectionality.
But if the generation gap is at its most pronounced between parents and children, it is at its most interesting in the divide between the current and soon-to-be ‘in touch’ generations: between millennials and gen Z. As millennials age out of their ‘youth’ status, my thoughts turn to when and how millennials will lose contact with the pulse of the moment. What will make them noticeably out of touch? What will happen when millennials find themselves opposite the ‘woke’ side of history? What defining feature will shift the youth away from the youth, will sever touch, intimacy, and understanding between millennials and gen Z?
With the rise of robot influencers like Lil Miquela, increasingly sophisticated AI programs and the prevalence of online communication, perhaps the next place to look for significant difference will be in the relationships and intimacies we form with technology. Will the thing that divides millennials from gen Z be a relationship with technology that is not about the human connection it enables (say, across vast geographical distances), but about the technology itself? As the ageing generation watches true digital natives (re)create their world with and through machines, are millennials ready for and open to the possibilities of digital intimacy?
The idea of digital intimacy is a growing field of interest. It’s an academic discipline, a business development term, and an emerging buzzword in the op-ed sections of broadsheets and literary journals. Dr Emily van der Nagel is a lecturer in communications and media studies at Monash University. She writes in the ‘Digital Intimacies’ issue of The Lifted Brow that academic inquiry into digital intimacies encompasses “research on digital connections steeped in human feeling despite taking place on commercial platforms”. For example, a 2014 Pew Research Center survey of 2,252 American adults found that the use of technology was an increasingly common feature in couples’ interactions. For some, the additional avenues of communication made them feel closer to their partner (21 percent). For others, technology was simply a feature of home life, with 25 percent saying they had texted a partner from the same room. And for a small but growing number of respondents, technology had become a means to resolve arguments (9 percent).
Many, if not all, of these responses would no doubt resonate with almost anyone alive today. Technology has fundamentally altered how we form, develop and maintain relationships across all age groups, genders and sexual preferences. It is increasingly fundamental to our social identities. A 2018 UK Safer Internet Centre survey of young people aged 8 to 17 found that the majority of its 2,000 respondents felt isolated if they were unable to contact their friends via technology. Another 39 percent said they had made friends online with people they would not otherwise have been able to connect with.
Studies like the Pew and Safer Internet surveys demonstrate the growing importance of digital intimacy. But they also reveal that our understanding of what constitutes intimacy remains within the confines of touch – of the human – in order to be recognised and valued as true connection. Our understanding of technology and intimacy is still predicated on a human heart, because we cannot fathom forming a meaningful connection with an entity that does not have consciousness. Yet our understanding of consciousness remains murky at best.
German-American neuroscientist Christof Koch, a pioneer of integrated information theory, argues that consciousness is more pervasive than we have hitherto believed; that it exists in animals, including insects, and that it is even to be found at the microphysical level. In his 2019 book The Feeling of Life Itself, Koch argues that consciousness is not a singular, static state but a continuum of subjectivities extending from “a tiny glow of experience”. Human experience may be defined by conscious perception, but our self-awareness does not preclude another organism’s non-perceptive consciousness. Externalist philosophers such as David Chalmers and Andy Clark argue that consciousness (defined by Koch, simply, as the feeling of being alive) does not exist within the human nervous system, but rather resides in the interaction between our bodies and the external objects we perceive. Consciousness becomes a collective act. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but in the look; taste is not in the tongue, but in the bite – and the delectable object bites back.
If this is true, then the possibility of digital intimacy becomes so much more than what we have limited it to thus far. Intimacy does not a priori require a human-like consciousness at the other end; it can be formed in the interaction between the perceptive self and the perceived digital space. Relationships with AI become a real, meaningful prospect as our consciousness reaches out to touch an algorithm that itself holds a glow of experience.
Uninhibited intimacy with the digital is perhaps unlikely for anyone born before the true Internet Age. In Years and Years, Bethany believes her parents are out of touch because they can’t understand her desire to become transhuman. The cause of her parents’ terror is that as she becomes less human and more bionic, they will lose contact, touch and intimacy with her. They view Bethany’s transition as a process of shutting off from the analogue world. But what they fail to see are the limitless connections this ‘enhanced Bethany’ is able to make. In episode five, Bethany-become-internet demonstrates how she can simultaneously hold a conversation with her parents, assess global weather patterns and appreciate a new music video uploaded by a user on the other side of the world. For Bethany, being beyond our physical world – being outside of touch – is what makes meaningful connections possible. For her parents, it is a divide too great to cross.
As millennials’ gen Z friends, family, colleagues and loved ones increasingly change technology – both what it is and how we relate to it – this divide will become a palpable space of misunderstanding and misrecognition. Like Bethany’s mother, those born between 1980 and 1995 might baulk at the notion of forming a sincere bond with a series of code, relegating the few outliers who do to the annals of clickbait, ‘did-you-hear?’ stories and subtly dystopian sci-fi such as Spike Jonze’s 2013 Her. Those with a Lacanian bent towards extimaté (understanding the self as the manifestation of its desire for the Other) may even accuse gen Z relatives who bring their AI partner home for Christmas of doing nothing more than engaging in fanciful masturbation at the dinner table.
As they watch gen Z redefine and reconfigure the present and the future, millennials – that self-proclaimed open and accepting generation – should remember how it felt the first time someone older dismissed their taste, preference, or notion of self. It will serve them well as they fall even further out of touch.