I stand in line at the grocery store, my jittery trigger-thumb summoning successive apparitions of image, sound, and text that stream incessantly into my downcast eyes. They excite, terrify, amuse, and deaden. The more information I take in, the more information I send out, which shapes, in turn, what comes in. I am caught in a cycle of action, reaction, and re-reaction; signal, response, re-signal, re-response. Through my actions, I gradually shape the digital world I inhabit—and more than just the digital world.
To the outside observer, I may seem like a singular organism acting of my own free will, making decisions moment by moment: scroll, stop, read, look, swipe, listen, scroll, read. But something much larger is going on than just the sovereign acts of an individual mind. Each spasmodic twitch of my thumb triggers signals that scurry to local cell towers, then to vast data centers in far-flung locations, which then send more data back to my phone. The massive network responds to my every move. I desire, I receive what I desire, I am offered more of what I desire, I am told what I desire; my desires contract, constrict, congeal into predictable patterns.
Who has the agency here? Who is the actor? Can I maintain my felt conviction that I am a single individual with free will, acting upon the world, or am I a node in a great mechanical system with far greater agency and intelligence, all bearing down upon me?
Perhaps it is no accident that the Sanskrit term for intentional action, karma, has become a familiar part of the English lexicon in this era when action and its consequences may require a thorough rethinking. Classical accounts of karma in Indian philosophy suggested a system of justice built in to the workings of the cosmos. Any morally significant act would produce similar consequences for good or ill.
One of the most sophisticated theories of karma, offered by the Yogācāra school of Buddhism, goes beyond just theorizing the consequences of good or bad acts. It posits that each action of mind, body, and speech a person takes creates a kind of seed or impression that is deposited into the “storehouse consciousness”—metaphorically speaking, a vast container or garden full of such seeds. This consciousness then creates dispositions that eventually ripen and bloom to shape future experiences and perceptions. Some scholars have interpreted it as an ancient theory of the unconscious mind. When actions are motivated by states of mind like hatred, greed, compassion, or joy, they serve to produce future experiences of similar character, shaping the person’s sense of self and world. The Yogācāra school also suggests the possibility of a “transformation of the basis,” i.e., a gradual revolution in the storehouse consciousness through meditation and ethical action, which plant virtuous seeds that eventually take over the karmic garden and transform one’s entire sense of oneself and the world.
This picture bears more than a passing resemblance to action in the online world. In the algorithmic matrix in which most of us live, our online activities are deposited into the immense network of disembodied information, which then feeds back more information that is shaped by our past digital acts. Our digital karma produces results in kind, which induces us to produce more digital karma, on and on and on. But the game is rigged. The algorithms dangle content to grab our attention and induce impulsive reactions in order to keep our eyes on the screen. These reactions, in turn, tell them what we like, what we hate, what we fear—which they instantly provide and promise more of, tightening the knot further. The unique psychic state of our era, the scrolling mind, is fashioned to keep the light of critical thought low and the wire of impulse hot. Countless shiny objects—cat videos, interesting articles, erotic images, political invective, socks—keep us voracious and dazed, hungry ghosts feeding on a constant stream of data, always beckoned to the next image. This tends to smother the faculties of reflection that might otherwise lead one to ask: Do I need this product? Is this a credible source? Is this how I want to spend my time? In its algorithmic preferences for alluring images, terrifying spectacles, and fake news, the internet feeds on what Buddhists call the three poisons: greed, hatred, and ignorance. There is a good case to be made that the digital world, while it has undoubtedly enriched many of our lives immensely, has exacerbated divisions, stoked fear and hatred around the world, and poisoned the political sphere.
The classical Buddhist wheel of samsara—the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—contains realms of languishing deities, animals, humans, hungry ghosts with large bellies and pencil-thin necks, contentious and power-hungry demi-gods, and residents of multiple levels of miserable hells. We cycle through these realms, spurred on by the driving power of the three poisons. Diverse Buddhist traditions have varying suggestions on what to do about this situation. Some say it’s best to exit samsara completely, leaving birth and death behind forever in favor of the ineffable bliss of nirvana beyond. Others say: stay in samsara indefinitely, work benevolently within the system, relentlessly bringing benefit to others through scattering seeds of infinite compassion and wisdom. Still others suggest that samsara is itself nirvana in disguise; that in the right light, the miseries of embodied life are really a paradisiacal pure land.
We are faced with similar dilemmas in digital samsara. There is always the Luddite option: refuse all silicon chips, make a clean exit, decline to leave our karmic footprints, and spurn the algorithmic cycle. But just as most Buddhists now favor gaining karmic merit for a good rebirth or living a rich, ethical, and mindful life in this world over transcending samsara altogether, the majority of us don’t have the desire or wherewithal to pull off even a benign version of Ted Kaczynski’s rustic retreat in the woods. We are inevitably embedded in the network, which, for all its faults, supports the personal, social, professional, political, and creative projects that make life meaningful. There are, indeed, joys and wonders in digital samsara.
So, if we choose to abide this digital churn of beauty, chaos, hatred, hunger, and love, what kind of actions—karma—do we take and refuse in order to survive and thrive? The banal binary of social/political action versus personal cultivation is too often presented as mutually exclusive. Either fight to change the system or focus on your own peace of mind. In fact, today, these options are inextricably intertwined. At the moment, the possibilities for reforming and regulating the digital system may seem dim. The spectacle of the American tech oligarchy on stage at the inauguration of a flagrantly authoritarian president augurs ill for sensible regulation and much-needed reform of the digital sphere. Yet, as the alien intelligence of AI pervades more and more of life and the systems that maintain it—from commerce to art to medicine to the military—humans must keep a hand on the wheel of digital samsara. Indeed, it might take monumental efforts to secure even modest regulations and reforms of this new power let loose in the world in order to nudge it toward becoming a humane force rather than a means of fracking our attention for the financial benefit of a handful of digital robber barons. A substantial “transformation of the basis” seems unlikely in our lifetime. But try we must, and that will require an active, indeed activist, agenda.
Living in digital samsara will require more than reforming it, though. Some measure of self-cultivation is necessary to intelligently confront the digital world with its content aimed directly at our primal centers of desire and aversion. Because these algorithms work on the basic mechanisms of attention, exploiting our natural weaknesses for getting sucked into the lovely and horrific, the sensual and fearful, the banal and repetitive, it is imperative to develop the capacity to wrest attention back. The same people who came up with ancient karmic theories also developed sophisticated methods of harnessing attention and using it intentionally to curb the three poisons.
A world in which a vast, multi-trillion-dollar industry is dedicated to capturing attention for profit necessitates becoming more familiar with ways to assert some control over our own minds in the midst of the digital storm. Yes, this might involve non-judgmental mindfulness and acceptance of the present moment in order to get a clearer view of what is going on in our consciousness. But it also demands the cultivation of mindful discernment—an explicitly judgmental awareness that is tuned to the ethical and political realities of the times and knows what to accept and what to resist in the present moment. Meditation may provide moments of calm from our otherwise frenetic activity. As Buddhists have always insisted, however, it is also meant for directing the mind toward the best course of action—that is, the most ethical and intelligent karmic activity to guide one through samsara, digital or otherwise.
Buddhist texts refer to the distracted, impulsive, frenetic state that we’re often in as “monkey mind.” Today, the algorithmic hijacking of our minds has supercharged this simian condition. In this odd time, it takes great effort to allow ourselves to be bored—to stand in the grocery store line and raise one’s gaze to the fluorescent lights, the garish magazine covers, the miraculous abundance of food. In crafting a way of resistance, it is tempting to fashion a narrative of the heroically mindful individual wresting herself from control by the oppressive digital forces that threaten to subsume her into the matrix. Buddhist thought is likely right, however, that there is in fact no fixed, independent self—that we are all streams of events hurtling forward and conditioned by innumerable causes and conditions, some of which are our own actions (karma). It also insists that through skillful intention and attention, we can gradually assert some agency over the quality and character of the stream of experience, while at the same time benefitting others. This is a matter of personal control—cultivating the power to do what we actually want, and feel we ought, to do—but also a matter of politics and culture.
To assert agency over my half-conscious, thumb-driven activity in the grocery store line takes an approach to action—karma—that encompasses both the personal and the systemic in ways that Buddhist thought has perhaps not previously grappled with. It requires confronting barely submerged impulses in my mind as well as the implicit Silicon-Valley ideologies that seep into our limbic systems, our visual cortices, our thumbs, our legislatures, and our legal codes. Karma, as Buddhists and scholars have pointed out, is both individual and collective.