Notes on the Extinction of Experience

Finding Our Way Back to Place, Presence, and Each Other

Do we spend too much time looking at our screens and too little time looking into each others eyes?

In 1957, Max Frisch made a grimly prescient observation: “Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” Christine Rosen, in her powerful tract The Extinction of Experience, suggests that Frisch was not merely right, but that the world he warned about has now arrived.

The experiences we once endured, mundane, tactile, embodied, have been systematically engineered out of our lives. In their place: the shimmering, manipulative dreamscapes of algorithmic mediation. Once, we asked what a person had done, seen, endured. Now, it is common to know what they have clicked, streamed, or posted.

Rosen, trained as a historian but writing with the urgency of a cultural exile, argues that mediated technologies have not just altered our habits, they have colonized our ontology. The book begins with a quietly devastating thesis: that face-to-face interaction, serendipity, unquantified pleasure, and bodily experience are not being supplemented by technology; they are being replaced. The result is not a technotopia, but a confusion of simulacra. She writes,

“Our understanding of experience has become disordered, in ways large and small. More and more people mistrust their own experiences. More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus.”

That last line lands with the weight of a verdict. Rosen is especially furious at the tech titan Marc Andreessen who claims that for the vast majority of people the online digital world offers them a better life than their real, ‘poor’ life. She quotes Andreessen as stating:

“Their online world is or will be immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them” “The answer to the problem is not less digital, not more real experience, but more digital.”

As Rosen says Andreessen will reap great benefits from hooking people up with VR glasses and User experiences. You are left with a chatbot to talk to, not a fellow human for real life attention. She is livid at Andreessen and other tech leaders.

No Luddite

Her indictment is forensic in its specificity. She catalogs the subtle betrayals: the way GPS erodes our sense of navigation and place; how weather apps displace the human intuition for sky and smell; how children ask why one would ever read a book to know something when ChatGPT can tell us. In each case, she appeals to cognition. These are not losses of convenience, they are losses of consciousness.

One of the most affecting passages recounts her son's second-grade presentation on Benjamin Banneker. A classmate innocently asks why Banneker would put weather in a book. The teacher probes: “Where do you hear about the weather?” Television. The phone. Not the sky. Not the air. The weather, like everything else, has been abstracted.

Rosen is at her most precise when dismantling the marketing theology that underpins this shift. The great lie of the “experience economy,” she argues, is that it sells not experience but affective data. When Apple promises that what matters is how a product makes you feel, they are not invoking aesthetics but mining your affect for insights that can be resold. You are not the user. You are the product. The experience is not yours. It is theirs. She reminds us big tech is profit driven:

“Technology interposes itself between us and the world. It translates reality “for” us but also to its designers’ ends and extraordinary profit. It has transformed many human experiences not by banning them, but by making certain kinds of embodied experiences, such as face-to-face communication and other unmediated pleasures, less and less relevant to daily life.”

In one anecdote, she recalls being in New York, a chaotic, preternaturally physical city, and encountering three unmediated moments: asking about Jerusalem artichokes in a restaurant, making a bet over drinks about Keanu Reeves, and hailing a pedicab in rush hour. Each moment would have been cheaper, faster, and more predictable with Yelp, IMDb, and Uber. She says that would have made them less real. Less experienced.

The stakes of this argument grow with each chapter. In a culture awash in screens, we are trained to think of ourselves as Users. The word is not accidental. It is a term borrowed from addiction science. The “User Experience” that tech companies endlessly optimize is not designed to deepen our humanity, but to bypass it, to turn us from embodied persons into dopamine-seeking behavior loops, addicts. This is not mere critique. It is diagnosis.

The philosophical heart of the book lies in its revival of Robert Michael Pyle's phrase, “the extinction of experience.” Pyle used the term to describe children who grew up without touching nature, who thought of animals as digital avatars. Rosen adopts the phrase to encompass our entire human ecology: pleasures, conversations, friendships, memories, even our sense of death. Experience, she warns, has been outsourced to platforms. And platforms do not forget; they harvest.

When attention remains tethered to a screen for the greater part of a waking day, ten hours or more, by many accounts, the ‘real’ world, in its unmediated, sensory fullness, necessarily recedes. What ensues is not a benign supplementation but an increasingly stark replacement of lived experience with its virtual counterpart, a substitution that signals a profound and troubling diminishment. And, to my mind at least, this is a grave problem.

Rosen is not a Luddite, nor a moralist. She writes not from technophobia, but from the disorientation of someone who remembers another way of being. She grew up with network TV and Atari. Her children, in contrast, have AI-nudged YouTube suggestions and ambient surveillance. The loss is not just of privacy. It is of sovereignty.

Emoji Nations

Again and again, she returns to the face. Darwin, in his study of emotional expressions, knew that the face is not decorative. It is diagnostic. It reveals distress, joy, contempt, sympathy. Yet in Rosen's dystopia, the face is increasingly bypassed or flattened into an emoji. Relationships break up via text with a heartbreak or sad face emoji. Children learn emotions from reaction videos. Adults post selfies with suicidal strangers hanging over bridges. The face is no longer a human interface. It is a marketing surface.

She writes at length about the decline of face-to-face interaction, grounding it not in sentiment but in biology. The human capacity for trust, empathy, and even physical health, she explains, is undergirded by face-to-face cues. Loss of eye contact, the erosion of small rituals of civil attention, these degrade what Barbara Fredrickson calls our “vagal tone,” a physiological marker of social connection. We outsource emotion to platforms, but the result is less intimacy, not more. The “text shrug,” as one commentator in Rosen’s book calls it, is emblematic of a generation that cannot meet a gaze or negotiate tone, only emojis.

But the hands, too, are implicated in this disappearance. Rosen devotes a chapter to the loss of manual labor and handwriting, noting how embodied cognition is inextricable from tactile interaction. “Hand to mouse” is not just a technological gesture, it is a civilizational pivot away from the messy, the imprecise, and the human. The stylus yields to the touchscreen, the pencil to the tap. What is lost, she argues, is not mere skill, but a mode of thinking through doing. De-skilling becomes de-sensing.

Even waiting, perhaps the most maligned human state, has not survived this extinction. Rosen devotes a subtle chapter to the erasure of boredom, arguing that our obsession with efficiency has turned every pause into a moment for monetizable engagement. She writes of the “Disneyfication” of waiting: how lines, once a shared experience of time's passage, are now infused with screens and distractions. But waiting, she insists, is fertile. Psychologists link it to “creative incubation” and “autobiographical planning.” In our crusade against downtime, we have amputated reflection.

Being Present

Harvard University art historian Jennifer L. Roberts incisively notes,

“Just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean you have seen it”.

To cultivate true seeing, she makes her students spend three hours examining a single painting or work of art before they attempt to analyze it. This practice often leaves skeptical students “astonished” by how much is revealed when they invest time in patiently looking. Roberts believes that such patience is crucial for navigating the modern world, arguing it has transformed in meaning:

“Where patience once indicated a lack of control, now it is a form of control over the tempo of contemporary life that otherwise controls us. Patience no longer connotes disempowerment,” she says. “Perhaps now patience is power”.

This deep, patient engagement with art offers a powerful form of time unmoored from the demands of the present moment, where interstitial moments are often filled by turning to smartphones to alleviate micro-boredom. As critic Holland Cotter writes, the difference in experience is palpable:

“From a digital distance, you see an image. In person, in a gallery, you feel that image breathing”.

This connection fosters a state of reverie, a pleasant, almost dreamlike calm where the hurried, anxious sense of time passing quickly is lost. Great poetry, music, and art are often described as evoking such a state, leaving the viewer and listener with a sense that time has been ever so briefly suspended.

And still, pleasure remains. Or does it? Rosen's chapter on mediated pleasures is perhaps her most subversive. She describes a world where travel is posted, not lived; where food is consumed through the lens of Instagram; where sex is commodified into algorithmically sorted fantasy. She calls this the “delethalization” of experience: the reconfiguration of pleasure as risk-free, quantifiable, and ultimately hollow. In museums, the “photo-impairment effect” reduces aesthetic experience to documentation. In bedrooms, porn rewires desire into stimulus-response abstraction.

Everywhere, the real is in retreat. Third places, the cafes, churches, and libraries that once served as crucibles of chance encounter, are now filled with laptop glare and noise-canceling isolation. Rosen mourns this transition from “place” to “space”: from an architecture of encounter to an architecture of avoidance. Algorithmic “serendipity” offers convenience but no surprise. We are never truly alone, and yet never truly with.

Attention

This vanishing of the real has political consequences, too. When Rosen writes, “We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus,” she is not indulging in abstraction. She documents how conspiracy movements like QAnon flourish in a landscape where online immersion becomes primary reality. Rosen cites how some individuals immersed in digital worlds report that their offline experiences feel surreal or cinematic. The pseudo-real becomes the real. Consensus fragments. Delusion metastasizes.

And yet, Rosen is not without hope. While she resists the palliative impulse, she gestures toward a “humanist resistance.” She urges the reintroduction of friction, of discernment, of active choice. She calls for us to be more like the Amish, not in dress or doctrine, but in deliberation. To ask not merely what a technology enables, but what it displaces. She believes in boundaries. She insists that extinction is not fate, but surrender.

The real, she implies, must be fought for. Its enemies are not malevolent, merely efficient. Its defense lies not in grand declarations but in daily acts of presence: a conversation unrecorded, a meal unposted, a face regarded. As she quotes Thomas Merton, “It does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it.”

This is the book’s hidden optimism, that to reclaim experience, we must first remember that it exists. That boredom, awkwardness, friction, and delay are not bugs in the system. They are the system. They are how we grow attention, grace, and memory.

Rosen closes not with panic, but with moral urgency. The extinction of experience is not inevitable. It is a choice. And choices, unlike algorithms, require us to be present.

Stay curious

Colin

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