“We’re all lab animals now.”
— Jaron Lanier, in ‘Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now’
Although it was a beautifully sunny December afternoon, my friend Kate looked irritated.
“I feel like I’m a lab animal,” she confessed, as we sat drinking chai tea on her back porch.
“Drinking chai makes you feel like a lab animal?” I asked, innocently.
“Ha. Very funny.”
I wasn’t trying to be funny, however. That’s a problem I have. People think I’m being funny, when I’m perfectly serious.
“No, Louis… drinking chai doesn’t make me feel like a lab animal,” Kate scoffed. “I feel like we’re all lab animals now. And this is the experiment.”
When she said, “this”, she pointed to her iPhone, sitting on the little glass-topped table. “It’s like we’ve allowed ourselves to be locked up in wire cages, and the wires are made out of social media posts.”
I considered this somewhat confounding concept for a moment… making a mental note that Kate’s iPhone was wireless, so it was really more like a ‘wireless’ cage, which — to a reasonable person — shouldn’t really be considered a cage at all. Since it has no wires.
But I didn’t say this, because she might have thought I was trying to be funny. So I just let her continue her rant.
“But we’re sort of in separate cages,” she continued.
“All the animals in this cage over here,” — she waved her extended right arm at the imaginary cage — “are talking about how we’re being duped by the government and losing our freedoms and forced to get vaccinated and had the election stolen. And the lab animals in this other cage,” — she motioned to her left, holding her cup of chai tea — “they’re all feeling smug because they’ve got their booster shots, but they’re fearful, because the rest of us haven’t been vaccinated at all, which will mean an unending series of variant viruses, and no, the elections weren’t stolen, but our world is going to burn up from climate change.
“Everybody is trapped in a state of anxiety… but we keep picking up our phones and checking the latest fake news and misinformation shared by our Facebook friends. It’s a big experiment, and we’re the lab animals.”
She set down her cup on the little table and picked up her phone.
“Excuse me, I just remembered I forgot to respond to Ellie’s post this morning. Just take me a second.”
I sipped my tea and watched Kate’s thumbs beating lightly on the phone. A couple of ravens came sailing over the yard, doing some kind of coordinated aerial dance, and then flew off. The thought entered my mind, that they were the exact opposite of lab animals.
“Sorry about that,” Kate apologized. “Ellie posted this morning about the dangers of eating tofu, and I just had to respond. We’re both part of a vegan club, and she sometimes goes off the deep end. There is so much misinformation about tofu getting shared on social media. It’s really frightening how easy it is to mislead people.”
“I know what you mean,” I agreed. But, in fact, I hadn’t yet done any extensive research into dangerous tofu dishes, so I didn’t actually know what she meant.
Kate took a thoughtful sip of tea. “I don’t even know why I remain friends with Ellie. We can’t agree on anything. But half of the vegan club swallows her every word, like it’s the Gospel truth.
“That’s what I mean by ‘lab animals’,” she frowned. “The club members get fed lies and conspiracy theories, and then share them endlessly, without thinking what they’re doing. It’s no wonder America has so many chronic diseases; we’re living on a diet of deceit.”
For some reason, I was, just then, forming a mental image of what Kate’s vegan club meetings might look like, living on a diet of deceit. It was not a pleasant image.
I guess Kate could tell I was starting to feel uncomfortable, because she changed the subject.
“So, what do you think of the chai?”
“Very good,” I smiled. “Probably too good… for a lab animal like me.”
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.