Have I written about this topic too many times? Oh, but I must be entitled to have another go at it.

Because there's a new New Yorker article : "The Case Against Travel." 

The new article — subtitled — "It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best" — is by the philosopher Agnes Callard.

A few of my old efforts: 

• "What if Americans stopped believing the travel propaganda?" 

• "'Travel isn’t just framed as a cure-all for what ails us...'" 

• "Of course, I'm reading 'If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?'" 

• "The philosophy of travel... the psychology of travel..." 

• "'I learned about post-tourism, which is just research jargon for traveling hipsters...'" 

• "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?"

I'll take a few excerpts from Callard, and certainly some of this is new (and all of it is well expressed):

"Their marriage had ended up being more asymmetrical than they had expected."

"'Your entire philosophical career is a discussion of our marriage, in one way or another,' Arnold said. Agnes agreed. If their marriage was a kind of play, she was the central character, and the author, too...."

Writes Rachel Aviv in "Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds/The philosopher, who lives with her husband and her ex-husband, searches for what one human can be to another human" (The New Yorker).

"Social media has enabled the Great Control Swap.... The first baby step toward the Great Swap was the shift from phone calls to texts."

"A phone interaction requires participants to be 'on the same time,' which entails negotiations over entrance into and exit from the conversation. Consider all the time we spend first on, 'Is this a bad time to call? Can you talk?' And then later on, 'O.K., gotta go, talk to you soon, see you later, good talking to you … '... [If you tweet about your children, they] can’t control whether you laugh at it, or what tone you use when you do.... But we live in a world that is starting to allow us to satisfy [the desire for human connection] without feeling the common-sense moral strictures that have traditionally governed human relationships. We can engage without obligation, without boredom and, most importantly, without subjecting our attention to the command of another.... The immense appeal of this free-form socializing lies in the way it makes one a master of one’s own time — but it cannot happen without a place. All that data has to sit somewhere so that people can freely access it whenever they wish.... When we alienate our identities as text data, and put that data 'out there' to be read by anyone who wanders by, we are putting ourselves into the interpretive hands of those who have no bonds or obligations or agreements with us.... People we cannot trust. The Great Control Swap buys us control over the logistics of our interactions at the cost of interpretive control over the content of those interactions. Our words have lost their wings, and fallen to the ground as data."

From "The Real Cost of Tweeting About My Kids/When I’ve told you what my son said, it’s not 'his data' anymore" by Agnes Callard (NYT). Callard is a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago.

As is even more clear if you read the entire column, Callard mixes 2 topics:

1. Creating permanent text that is stored beyond your control where it can be used by others for their purposes. There's the businesslike monetization done by whatever social media platform you use. And there is the infinite human potential to use whatever has been written down for whatever new purposes arise at any point in the future. There's too much evidence in written form, lying there, discoverable, to be used against you, out of context, by anybody, any time for the rest of you life.

2. The escape from the time constraints involved in conversations — whether in person or by telephone. There is freedom in not having to get and stay in the same time frame with another person, but you miss the ongoing feedback about how the other person is responding, and there's more distance, room for interpretation, and exposure to people whose emotions and intentions are far beyond your knowledge and control.

This essay would work better if the subject of websites monetizing data were left out. The topic of control in personal relationships is enough and even too much. The headline writer teased us with an even smaller topic, mothers writing about their children and appropriating their lives for their transitory narcissistic pleasure. We do (ironically) hear some details about her sons, but Callard is writing about human relationships more generally, and she doesn't have the space to really get into that topic.

Callard doesn't go back into the history of adopting the telephone and whatever havoc that caused. Before that, people spoke in person or wrote letters. What about "The Great Control Swap" that happened when we all got telephones? Fewer letters and less knowledge about what people who were speaking to you were actually doing and feeling and where they were and who they were with.

I'm not buying "Our words have lost their wings, and fallen to the ground as data." Yes, there's data in the sense of our manufacturing a product that some business can sell, but the words still have wings in the sense that they are read by real human beings who understand and interpret and do things of their own with those words. Are the words more dangerous to the person who creates them because they are written down? If they're dangerous, it's not because they've "fallen to the ground" but because they are still in action and the writer has lost control. But the words you speak also escape your control, and because there is no text record, you're at the mercy of the the person who heard or misheard and remembered or misremembers and repeats or misrepeats whatever you said.

"When I’m alone late at night on a deserted road, I like to walk on the double yellow lines. One time I decided to stop and lie down..."

"... right there in the middle of the road. I kept myself narrow, arms pinned, so cars could pass on either side. But I wasn’t invisible, and I alarmed a kind policeman who happened to drive by me. After determining that I was not dead, drunk or high, he concluded I was suicidal. We had a long talk. It didn’t help for me to explain that if I had wanted to be run over I would’ve moved several feet in one direction or the other. And picked a busier road. He wanted to know, why, if I didn’t want to be run over, was I lying in the middle of the road? There were so many reasons. I wanted to see the night sky from the perspective of the road; I wanted to be in this secret spot that always got passed by and never occupied..."

From "Unruliness" by Agnes Callard, a 2018 blog post, which is discussed in a new New Yorker article by Paul Bloom, "The Strange Appeal of Perverse Actions/Why do we enjoy doing things for no good reason?" Callard is a philosopher, Bloom a psychology professor.

Bloom writes:

Callard is careful to distinguish unruliness from rebellion. By lying down in the road, she wasn’t critiquing the status quo or sticking it to the Man. Unruly people might flatter themselves as rebels, but unruliness is nothing so determinate—it’s just an unwillingness to play by the rules. It’s a near-neighbor, therefore, to perversity, a topic long central to theology and philosophy...

Perverse actors—I won’t call them “perverts,” since that word evokes distracting connotations—can also be creative or funny.... The blogger Scott Alexander points out that four per cent of Americans tell pollsters that they think reptilian aliens rule the Earth....

Unruliness, perversity, pigheadedness—psychologists have long been interested in this bestiary of paradoxical thought and action. Perversity is a puzzle. It’s hard to explain, scientifically, what Edgar Allan Poe described as “the imp of the perverse.”...

A friend of mine tells how his family made him a pie on his birthday, as a surprise. His young niece was repeatedly instructed not to reveal the secret, and she solemnly agreed. But, when he came into the house, she suddenly screamed, “There is no pie!”...

Much more to this article — I'm skipping over a lot of good stuff — but it, perversely/harmoniously, ends with pie:

It’s said that a waitress once asked [the Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser] what he wanted for dessert—apple pie or blueberry pie. He chose the apple pie. Then she returned with news: there was also cherry pie. “In that case,” Morgenbesser said, “I’ll have the blueberry.”