Plying the Mind

Sink or Stream? On Podcasts and Hyper-Synchronization

I.

I tried to create balance through a shifting succession of rules:

Each rule was quickly broken and discarded, often on the very same day, within the hour. Reaching for my earphones, an inner voice – my voice, I could hear it – would shout, “Stop!” What a relief it was to drown it out with other people's voices.

There are many kinds of podcasts, which offer different things, but their unifying promise is to occupy the mind while the body is busy with other tasks. Occupation is the point, to which the content is secondary. While cooking dinner, I might listen to a panel discussion of Virgil's Georgics, or I might just as easily listen to two comedians extol the virtues of energy healing and ceremonial-grade matcha. While brushing my teeth, I might listen to two minutes of a news report about an ongoing famine and stop the speaker mid-sentence as soon as my brushing is finished. Whatever conscious motivations lead me to these particular podcasts – the desire for education, for entertainment, to stay informed – they are, for my purposes, functionally interchangeable. The general pattern of my listening points to a single unconscious goal: to occupy the mind. To fill the gaps wherever thinking may occur.

Several years ago, I was stuck in the same pattern of rule-setting and rule-breaking, cycles of binge and bust, with social media. Like most people, I rarely posted, but frequently found myself caught in the feed, scrolling through content that elicited not envy, but contempt – first for others, then for myself, for my maddening weakness of will. My conscious mind was cut off from my activity, sequestered somehow, reduced to providing commentary rather than command. The inner soundtrack to my scrolling was made up of complaint and exhortations to stop. And whenever that voice won out, and I managed to close the app in a fitful act of escape, I'd often find, to my astonishment, that my thumb was already reaching to re-open it.

These automated processes, conditioned into the nervous system, constantly short-circuited my better judgment. Although the entire plane of my conscious mind called out for me to stop, some unconscious enjoyment sent me back again and again to the thing that made me suffer. So, after years of discontent and frustration, after so many self-imposed limits transgressed, and after cutting down the number of platforms I was using, I realized that the only way to break the addiction was to abstain completely. I took a deep breath and, with the thrill that comes from doing something irreversible, deleted the rest of my accounts.

This kind of addiction is so familiar, so widespread, that it barely bears describing, except, perhaps, as one more bid to work against its normalization. Virtually all of us lament our withered attention spans with a chuckle or a wince, depending on our mood. We profess to be worried about the psychological and socio-political effects of these addicting technologies. We pity the youth. Yet we do nothing to stop it, or next to nothing. At most, we set little limits (“No social media in the morning!”) and nebulous goals (“I'd like to read more!”) in an attempt to offset the negative effects of the poison we continue to take. When I stopped taking this particular poison, I felt unadulterated relief and perhaps, eventually, over the years, a private, slight sense of superiority.

But meanwhile, a new addiction was forming, or maybe just intensifying, expanding to fill every moment freed from scrolling. By this time, I had already been listening to podcasts since 2014, when I first discovered the form through Serial. I can still remember sitting on the sofa then, rapt in a near-dark room, intently listening. It felt both quaint and exciting to discover the pleasures of an older form re-invented for our time, a seemingly healthier form, a potentially more serious form, which invited us to put down our screens and return to a more concentrated kind of attention.

Serial was the gateway that led many of us to a growing, diverse array of podcasts. Almost invariably, I listened to these podcasts while engaged in protracted but relatively mindless activities, such as driving, cooking, and cleaning. Podcasts made this time feel more productive, or at least more enjoyable. In fact, I began to look forward to these boring activities simply because they provided me opportunities for listening. But, as a consequence, the rapt attention of my early listening experiences very quickly gave way to an habitual mode of half-attention. My mind registered the words enough to follow their meaning, but my attention was intermittent, my own thoughts ducking in and out of the stream.

The cycles of mundane anxiety I felt in these years I attributed mostly to my social media use. But when I quit social media, around 2019, I found that listening soon replaced scrolling. Consequently, my listening became more frequent and more fragmented, with podcasts moving in to fill increasingly short intervals in my day: fifteen minutes as I fell asleep, ten minutes as I walked to the corner store, a couple minutes as I brushed my teeth, twenty seconds as I went to the toilet. Where social media had been, so podcasts came to be.

Consciously, I longed for silence, for the solitude of being left to my own thoughts. I was acutely aware of this longing, this need, even as I reached for my earphones. But my conscious longing made no difference. My better judgment was, once again, reduced to the feeble role of commentator while my body did what it willed. Worse still, as soon as I hit play, the podcast rushed in to stifle and drown out that inner protesting voice with its own stream of voices, further collapsing the critical distance between my consciousness and my consumption.

Whenever I did take a stand and force myself into the quiet of a mindless activity – doing the dishes, for example – I often found myself thinking productively, drying off my hands to make a quick note. And it would occur to me then, with a sense of pity, how much thinking had been lost through the years to consumption. But this thought and my desire for solitude were not enough to interdict my reflexive reach for my earphones at the very next opportunity.

So, having wrested myself from the trap of social media, I found myself back in effectively the same struggle with a different media technology. In recurrent cycles, a low-grade anxiety would build within me over the weeks, the result, I understood, of saturating my mind with input, until I would reach a breaking point and set limits on my listening, which I would inevitably transgress. This is how I lived. And only after years of this struggle – this admittedly minor but continuous struggle that played out through my days, a common struggle, which may not often ruin lives but certainly degrades them – I once again summoned the same strength, if that is the word, and, with the same thrill and relief of decision, deleted my podcast app.

II.

The mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of himself) and his society. (Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964))

Imagine consciousness as a kind of stream. It flows from one moment to the next, a shifting composition of sensory perceptions, thoughts, feelings, desires, memories – the totality of your conscious experience. Like a stream, consciousness exists only as a flow, in the process of its unfolding, its continual production in and through time. When you fall unconscious, this stream comes to a halt.

Audio-visual media imitate the stream-form of consciousness: music, radio, podcasts, audiobooks, movies, TV shows, and videos exist only in their unfolding, in their flux. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler, following Husserl, referred to these media as temporal objects. To “consume” a temporal object is to synchronize the flow of one's consciousness with the flow of the object, to adopt the object's time as one's own. The stream floods the mind. As Georges Duhamel wrote, in 1930, when watching a film “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” When synchronized, consciousness is commandeered by an external power, made to follow in its wake. Social media provide a distilled version of this experience by whittling form down to function: users scroll through an endless stream of streams, a meta-stream of micro-streams selected just for them, the thumb mechanically flicking through the feed, hunting for hypnotic content to hijack consciousness.

But to what extent is synchronization unique to temporal objects? After all, even as you read this essay, something like synchronization is happening. You follow the linear flow of the text, the letters and words and sentences, which, though concretized in writing, only make sense as a sequence unfolding in your mind. My writing voice passes through your consciousness. (“My words echo / Thus, in your mind,” as Eliot writes.) However, a text is not a television. It does not produce its own objective time independent of the reader; it does not generate its own momentum, its own energy. You bring your time to the text, pulling its flow through your consciousness. Without your participation, the text lies inert, its powers unrealized. But even so, it remains the case that readers are always at risk of falling into the mindless consumption of text, without making it an object of critical attention.

This distinction is crucial for understanding the danger posed by synchronization. For consciousness is composed of not one, but two streams: the primary flow of experience – thoughts, feelings, desires, perceptions, memories, etc. – and a secondary flow, which the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt calls a “supervisory” register, comprised of a second order of thoughts, feelings, and desires through which we reflexively monitor, evaluate, and intervene in our experience. Without this reflexive capacity, which we develop through a process of training and education in the passage to maturity (what Kant calls Mündigkeit), we would be unable to reject or revise our thoughts, feelings, and desires as they occur to us – unable, for example, to correct an erroneous first judgment, or to quell misplaced anger, or to resist gratifying the desire to eat beyond our fill. Insofar as we are rational beings we identify with the activity of the second order, by which we actively supervise and synthesize this “raw psychic material” to form a more coherent self for which we bear more direct responsibility.

This higher self is never a settled achievement. We are always at risk of accepting the first thought, the first feeling, the first desire and, thereby, settling into a state of passivity, giving ourselves over to unconscious logics and rhythms that are not quite our own. And here the question of synchronization returns: the diachronic activity of the critical consciousness must be continually exercised, made to work upon the synchronic flow of primary experience that constitutes our present from moment to moment. Only through this interplay of synchrony and diachrony can we construct, maintain, and revise a mental architecture that holds open the space for a dynamic interiority, for an inner authority that rises above immediate experience to orient thought and action, creating a productive tension between self and world.

This tension slackens the more consciousness is deprived of the chance to develop and move in accordance with its own rhythms, its own thoughts, feelings, and desires – in other words, the more one tends to synchronize and fails to “diachronize,” to forge one's own unique time. Stiegler refers to this tendency as “hyper-synchronization.”

III.

Growing concern about the harmful effects of social media has distracted us from the more general problem of hyper-synchronization, which stems from the industrial production and distribution of audiovisual mass media beginning in the early 20th century: from cinema and radio in the 1920s, to network television in the 1950s, to 24/7 cable broadcasting in the 1980s, to the early internet of the 1990s, to the popular social media platforms and streaming services that began to emerge in the 2000s. Today, we take these media for granted as the unremarkable furniture of modern existence; but their rapid proliferation and integration into our lives marks a radical shift in human history, a shift toward near-constant media consumption.

The history of mass media is the history of the increasing entwinement of psychic and economic structures. To make sense of this history, it is necessary to bear in mind that the “content” we consume is almost comically ancillary to the main function of the industrial media system: to condition us to consume more. This is the explicit logic of its business model. Companies pay media producers and platforms for access to our attention, which they use to influence our consumption behavior through advertising, a $700 billion global industry. Consequently, media producers and platforms, competing for this ad revenue, make their products as addicting as possible for the simple reason that the more content we consume, the more of our attention they can sell to advertisers. Digital platforms and websites collect and sell our data in order to refine this process, to target us with ads that condition us more effectively. From radio “soap operas” to TikTok videos, the past century of media innovation has aimed, asymptotically, at the goal of frictionless consumption, making it easier to keep listening, to keep watching, to keep buying.

The smartphone is a key development in this history because it facilitates mass data-gathering and makes it possible to consume anytime, anywhere – or even all the time, everywhere: in the bathroom, in bed, in waiting rooms, in restaurants, at the grocery store, on the bus or metro. In the city where I live, I see children on the sidewalks, earphones in, holding their phones out horizontally before them, watching videos as they walk home from school. This is a predictable consequence of the industrial media system, which inundates us with streams designed to capture and disarm our attention, designed to addict.

Does anyone doubt that it's working? According to a recent Nielsen report, in 2024 the typical American spent more than 72 hours each week consuming digital media and television, an average of more than ten hours per day (without accounting for simultaneous usage, which constitutes its own problem). It is now commonplace to lament one's inability to read a book, or even to watch a movie without also scrolling. We require faster, flashier, more frenetic forms to hold our attention. People talk about “information overload,” but our minds are not filling to the brim; rather, the mesh of the mind is thinning, letting streams pass unhindered, without being taken up and metabolized by the critical activity of consciousness. The suffocating rush of synchrony disrupts and deters the diachronic activity required to forge a robust psychical foundation. All that remains is an hysterical emptiness, which people try, in vain, to evade through fanatical attachments to external signs, authorities, and identities ranging from fandoms to fascisms – from which, however, an “ironic distance” is maintained precisely because these objects and ideas are never adequately internalized, never really made their own.

As Roger Scruton once observed, in a prescient 2010 essay, “to a large extent, life on the screen is risk-free” because it enables us to maintain this distance and, thereby, retain some semblance of control. Twenty-first century egos are increasingly formed in and through personalized media environments, nurtured by algorithmically curated feeds that offer steady streams of affirmation and the solace of the infinite scroll. But there are no such ego supports offline, and no block button either. Every live encounter has the potential to undo the self, to impose upon and disrupt the fragile fantasies incubated on the internet. The ego becomes vulnerable, in danger of being punctured and deflated by others, susceptible to a widening array of traumas. The resulting anxiety can present as indignation, the rise of a blank self-righteousness, the inability to deal with others (“I can’t even”). For some, a particularly impotent rage: self-hatred gets projected onto those who provoke it, who turn into enemies. Consequently, social impulses, which once sent us out into the world, are re-channeled into private consumption, oriented toward screens and streams that shield us from the discomfort of co-presence, securing the absolute sovereignty of the self.

The more time we spend afloat in the stream, the more we forget how to swim. Consciousness atrophies. It comes to rely on external rhythms and energies to keep it in motion, to make it cohere. Without the locomotive force of the stream, the mind falls into stasis. It starts to sink. But even in the stream we are slowly immiserated. People, especially young people, are suffering from anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders at unprecedented rates. More and more are committing suicide. Yet we are systematically deprived of the will and critical imagination required to change the way we live. So, addiction and suffering are normalized and capitalized upon, made the object of new and expanding industries that offer more consumption as a cure – a therapeutic force, a soothing escape from what we prefer to think of as “boredom.”

What is this boredom if not the disquiet of feeling one's own mind fall flaccid in the absence of an occupying force? In even the shortest solitudes, the media-addicted consciousness diminishes, deflates, and returns to an anxious state of receptivity, stretching back toward the stream. We flee not the chaos, but the vacuity of the mind. The unbearable sound of static.