Hooves, Headsets, and Hedonism

How do we recapture the "grassy fields" of our past? Or should we be making something entirely new? Bottom line: how do we deal with the rapidly changing world?

I- On the Generation of Artificial Meaning

It’s possible that this image encompasses, in their entireties, both the present crisis and the present opportunity.

I came across this unusual picture in a recent newsletter from

Michael Lindsey

. It depicts:

…the recent practice of fitting factory farmed cattle with VR headsets that simulate a grassy field, which reduces the animal’s anxiety and yields higher quality milk. 

Lindsay uses it as a metaphor for those who wish to invent new religions:

The human animal, in his artificial enclosure, will not yield what he does in his natural setting, so we must fit him with some simulation of it.

This “optimised” religion is a sham like the grassland on the screen of the headset, placed there to delude the subject that his world has meaning enough to provide what the machine wants of him.

For our purposes, religious invention is just a jumping off point for a larger discussion, but as it’s an interesting phenomenon in its own right it’s worth spending a minute to discuss it. 

Lindsey’s post was directed at Malcolm and Simone Collins who are engaged in just such an effort, but they’re not the only ones. Many recognize both the value of religion and the value of progress and feel that they can extract the important bits of both and recombine them in a way that allows them to create something better than either.

Speaking of the Collinses, see my review of their book The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion and Lindsey’s original discussion if you want a deeper dive into exactly what such their effort consists of. As a specific example of what this entails: the Collinses are very pro-natalist, and religion does appear to increase fertility among its adherents. But on the other hand religions are often uncomfortable with, or actively forbid certain fertility-increasing technologies like freezing embryos or surrogacy. If you can combine the two, as the Collinses are attempting to do, then you could have a structure that has higher fertility than either alternative. And, as demographics are destiny, this constructed religion would eventually be a very important, worldwide force.

The Collinses mention that up until recently the Mormons had a very high fertility, but that lately, like nearly everyone else, the Mormons total fertility rate (TFR) had fallen to near replacement level (if not lower). In my review of their book, I pointed out that if you imagine TFR as being similar to the need for a car, it makes way more sense to resurrect the one sitting in the driveway that was running up until just a few months ago than to 3D print a car from scratch. 

But, artificial religions are just a jumping off point. This metaphor can, and should be extended much further. The headsets don’t just represent an attempt to generate ersatz meaning; they represent any and all technology that attempts to paper over some gap between us and our “nature”. Factory farmed cows are penned in a small enclosure, but would (per their nature) rather wander about in a grassy field. 

What are we penned in by?

What would we rather be doing? 

How has technology been used to mitigate both our restrictions and our unfulfilled longings?

II- Evolution and Culture

What is our metaphorical grassy field? There’s a danger in asking a question like that. It can easily end up being far too broad to be useful, while also being nothing more than a just-so story. Nevertheless, we can assert that humans evolved in such a way that we prefer some things while disliking others. And much of this evolution, though not all, happened before technology arrived on the scene. 

Of course it’s difficult to say exactly when technology “arrived”. Chimps use sticks to “fish” for termites, has technology arrived for them? By some definitions yes, but we’re interested in technology as a pervasive force versus a mere useful tool. 

The canonical example of technology dramatically altering human society is agriculture, which people like Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, have called the “Worst mistake in the history of the human race.” There are many reasons for this assertion. Among other things, Diamond mentions a decline in health, a rise in inequality, and environmental degradation. That’s all well and good, but how does technology fit into our headset metaphor? Lindsey says that the headset gives the cow “meaning enough to provide what the machine wants”. Beautiful vistas in exchange for better milk. In the case of agriculture it gave humans food enough to provide what the machine wanted of them: larger armies, grander cities, and vast empires.

At this point it’s premature to get into a debate about the negative connotations of the word “machine”. Or to argue whether pre-agricultural societies were as Edenic as Diamond and others claim. Diamond’s more general point is the important one. We had evolved to prefer one style of living, and agriculture enabled another style. This style of living was better for some purposes, but worse for others. Also, whatever the harms wrought by a large-scale transition to agriculture, it didn’t freeze evolution in place. Given this, it’s possible—even likely—that we have adapted to some of the changes brought on by agriculture. As such, despite Diamond’s lamentations, we are more adapted to the changes brought by agriculture. Our metaphorical “grassy field” was one thing 7,000 years ago, and it’s another thing now. 

For example, there’s good evidence that we developed a greater resistance to disease as a result of the crowding brought on by agriculture. (Though a lot of people had to die to get this resistance.) It’s also possible we developed traits that led us to enjoy big cities. I recently heard a story of a woman from New York who loved everything about Utah, but despite her husband’s entreaties, eventually decided that she couldn’t bear to leave “The City”. This is exactly the sort of trivial, overly-broad story I warned about, but you get the point, it’s very likely that some adaptation has taken place. And that’s if we’re talking about genetic evolution. Our cultures, which are another way of adapting to change, and which also evolve, have undergone numerous changes. 

Joseph Henrich, a strong advocate of cultural evolution, argues that it’s “the secret of our success”, in a book of the same name.¹ It does seem to be a very powerful tool for adapting to the new realities, including those created by technology. If someone invents a net that can be used to catch fish, then eventually a culture will emerge around using that net and fishing more broadly. The net will not only be used, it will be improved. People will develop a taste for fish. Sons will aspire to become fishermen like their father. Culture forms a bridge between technology and how we live. 

But of course there’s a sense in which cultural evolution is not only an adaptation to technology, but a technology itself; something we create to better adapt to our environment. “Civilization” could be viewed as just another headset, showing us what the “machine” wants us to see. To take but one example, many people, starting with Max Weber, have identified the integral role the culture of Protestantism played in the rise of modern capitalism. Over the years many people have identified this as a maladaptive trait, a “headset” that convinces us we’re doing things we want to do, when in reality it allows us to be exploited by the “machine” of capitalism. 

The point is that our categories drift. 

Things that start out in the “factory farming” bucket—new and awful—may eventually end up being in the “grassy field” bucket—old and comfortable. That is, we adapt to changes because adaptation is always happening. Nevertheless adaptation is slow, and while cultural evolution may be a form of technology, it’s very different from the rapid technological advances we’ve experienced recently. A dividing line can be drawn. Cultural evolution mostly isn’t a separate, detachable headset, it’s integral to our experience, and it evolves with us. But, increasingly, we’re dealing with a whole host of things that spring up fully formed and drastically change our world.

III- Our True Headsets

For something to truly act as a metaphorical headset there has to be a discontinuity—a line which demarcates our existence before from our existence after. One minute it’s not there and the next it is—like a headset being strapped onto a cow’s head.

This quality of (relative) suddenness is what makes adaptation difficult, if not impossible. There was a time when the pace of technological change was slow enough that genetic evolution was able to keep up with it. For example, in the million or so years that we’ve been using fire, hominids have evolved to take advantage of cooked food. However, at some point, perhaps with the rise of agriculture, genetic evolution started falling behind—many people argue we’re still not well-suited to a diet heavily composed of grains. But while genetic evolution was falling behind, cultural evolution picked up much of the slack (i.e. we’re better at living in large cities). We groped around in this fashion for thousands of years, until not too long ago, when technological progress finally began moving so rapidly that it outstripped even this fumbling. 

Perhaps this inflection point occurred with the invention of the steam engine and the start of the Industrial Revolution. 

Perhaps it happened during the amazing two-thirds of a century between 1903 and 1969, when we went from the invention of powered flight to walking on the moon. During this same period America also went from having a few thousand cars to hundreds of millions, from 1% of houses having indoor plumbing to 93% of houses. We also invented the TV, the digital computer, and the atom bomb. 

Or perhaps the true inflection point was the invention of the smartphone. When you see someone glued to their phone it’s not even a metaphorical headset, it’s a literal one. Okay, maybe it’s only 90% literal, but the full 100% is already on sale. It’s called the Apple Vision Pro (or the Meta Quest Pro) and it costs a lot of money. 

It’s not just the headset-adjacent nature of smartphones that makes me think we might have crossed the inflection point recently, it’s the very nature of the technology. Certainly lots of things have changed in the last 120 years since the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, but all those advances feel more like hats than headsets. Something which allowed us to shield ourselves from past annoyances—the difficulty of travel, going to the bathroom in an outhouse—in the same way a hat shields us from the sun. But they didn’t fundamentally alter our perception of reality. Or to come at it another way, we’ve made a lot of improvements to our factory farm, but it’s only recently that we’re able to pretend it doesn’t exist.

To be fair, television is probably something of a head set, a fact which Neil Postman pointed out back in 1985 in his seminal book Amusing Ourselves to Death.² Television was the original screen we were “glued to” so the process started quite a while ago, but it has definitely hastened in the last couple of decades. 

Clearly whatever the farmer is doing to the cow in that original picture is also being done to us, mostly by ourselves. This said, I have conveyed a negative valence to the discussion which is (as yet) undeserved. Beyond that, I may have actually made the discussion too literal. This isn’t just another in a long line of anti-smartphone rants, there’s actually a deeper discussion to be had. So let’s step back for a moment and return to viewing the situation metaphorically.

IV- What Might We Do?

In our initial bovine example, we all agree that the fake grassy field being projected through the headset is not as good as an actual grassy field, but might it nevertheless still be better than the actuality of factory farming? While it’s true that there’s something fraudulent about tricking the cow into thinking it’s somewhere better, might the illusion still be better than the alternative? 

Whatever can be said about the benefits of feeding illusions to cows ought to be even more true for us. We don’t have to play a VR grassy field on our headset, we can play whatever image we want. We’re not trapped by the whim of the farmer, we can use technology to fulfill any number of desires. We’ve created cars, flush toilets, airplanes, cruise ships, and satellites. 

In addition to all of the wonders just listed, there’s every reason to think that we can go beyond accessorizing technology and “hack the cow itself.". Why should we be limited by built-in evolutionary preferences that are hundreds of thousands years old? Why should we be limited to liking grassy fields? Why should we be tied down by a culture that’s centuries old? Could not technology allow us to be whatever we dream of? Rather than cows being fed the illusion of a grassy field, could we not be cyborgs bestriding the heavens in an ever expanding galactic empire?

Such is the promise of transhumanism. Anyone who’s read much science fiction, or even watched any Star Trek, will see the appeal of this aspiration. It’s ambitious, bold, and a vision of limitless potential. I’m sympathetic to the many people who see our rapid technological advancement as a path to a future better than we could possibly imagine. However, it does not seem to be the direction we’re headed.

V- What Have We Done With Our “Headsets”?

While one can imagine all sorts of positive reality hacks for our metaphorical headsets—amazing games, fantastic entertainment, transhuman augmentations—it turns out to be far easier to implement negative hacks—to dial up our cravings rather than awaken our best impulses. 

This can be illustrated most clearly by talking about food. You might already know where I’m headed—hyperpalatable ultra processed food—but even if you do it’s worth digging into the explanation. We’ve talked quite a bit about the adaptations that have already taken place, first via the methodology of evolution and then through the methodology of culture. One of the earliest adaptations, long predating humanity itself, are adaptations for dealing with scarcity. If something is scarce and valuable we are “programmed” to desire it. For millions of years high calorie food (i.e. fat and sugar) has fit into this category, and our appetite for these things runs very deep. On the other side of the equation constraints for dealing with abundance were unnecessary—it rarely occurred and never lasted.

Consequently we have a surfeit of desire and a paucity of restraint. This desire extends to things which only rarely occur in nature, such as a potent combination of sugar and fat. In fact we desire such a combination even more than things actually occuring in nature. These artificial constructs and combinations are called supernormal stimuli.³ Technology allows us to exceed the natural “quantity” of some useful resource, pushing it into a realm where it becomes harmful. And not only do we lack natural immunity to this harm, our built-in desires make us crave the excessive quantities even more. Many of the things currently obsessing people—many of the “headsets” we choose to put on—probably fall into this category.

In other words, we do not use technology to simulate a past we’ve left behind, the headset is not showing us a grassy field, or the life of a hunter gatherer from thousands of years ago. Instead we’re using technology to create an environment which never existed, full of things we’ve always longed for, but in fantastic combinations only recently made possible by technology. I’ve harped on this subject enough over the years, but pornography is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. But less overt versions of the same stimuli are happening with food, gambling and video games. 

Certainly, if we want to put on our anti-capitalist hat, there is a “machine” behind these simulations. We are not placed in tiny pens, our only value being the milk we produce, but neither is our condition entirely dissimilar. We are sometimes closer to being cattle than we like to admit. And even if we ignore our often dreary work, and our commodifying jobs, there is still a Hostess making Twinkies, a TikTok doing everything they can to “engage” us, and a PornHub flooding the world with sexual imagery undreamt of by even the most decadent ancient ruler. 

There’s also a Purdue Pharma manufacturing oxycontin.⁴ This would seem to be a special class of the phenomenon we’ve been discussing. Opioids aren’t exactly supernormal stimuli. And while most of the things I’ve mentioned are legal ways of mediating reality, opioids span the border from widely available with a prescription (Vicodin) to the worst thing ever (street fentanyl). But I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the idea of wireheading. This term comes from experiments conducted on rats in the 50’s where scientists were able to simulate pleasure by attaching electrodes to the rat’s brain. Some people noted that this cuts out the middleman—why engage in some activity which might bring you pleasure when you can just induce pleasure directly? The linkage between this and our discussion of headsets should be obvious. And the idea of doing this on humans has a certain amount of currency in the transhumanist community.

It’s easy to blame these companies, or the invisible hand of capitalism, but we’re all in this together. We’re the ones buying twinkies, scrolling on TikTok, and demanding the doctor prescribe us oxycontin. This particular headset, the one that hacks our evolutionary impulses, is easy to craft, straightforward to configure, and pleasurable to wear. What sort of headset would actually bring out our noblest impulses rather than our deepest cravings? It would certainly be hard to craft, and difficult to configure. Nor does everyone agree on what nobility really is. Given all this, should we be getting rid of headsets all together?

There are people who are trying to eliminate headsets, and you can find them if you look. I would start by googling “Amish”. However most people seem to have made peace with the fact that reality mediating technology is just part of the age we live in. Ideally we would be more intentional and cautious about what sorts of filters we create and use. But this is a very difficult task. Some filters have become so ingrained that they’re difficult to disentangle, we’ve become so used to the images of the field and the weight of our headsets that we forget they’re there. Who now can imagine a time before television, or an existence entirely free of computers? Certainly there are a few, but in a nation of 336 million people the fact that a few hundred thousand people choose this lifestyle is a curiosity, not a solution. 

V- What Should We Do with Our “Headsets”? 

When dairy farmers consider what to do with their cows, they have an advantage we don’t. They have a single metric they care about: milk production. We have many metrics: happiness, meaning, pleasure, connection, and dozens more depending on who you ask. The breadth of potential goals is not our only problem, we also suffer from a lack of definition. Who should we connect with? What constitutes meaning? How do we know if we’re happy? 

Throwing away our headsets is easier said than done, but even if it weren’t, the problems of definition remain. It’s certainly more real for us to experience the squalor of “factory farming” unmediated by artificial visions of “grassy fields”, but unless reality is our metric, this is not a step in the right direction. 

This would appear to be much of the problem: as our powers to mediate reality increase, our values become ever more important. But defining such values was never easy when our choices were limited. Now that our choices are plentiful it becomes even more difficult. 

In the past it was all a matter of survival, but survival hasn’t been an issue for the average person in the western world for quite a while. But perhaps that’s not a bad place to return to. Whatever our metrics and whatever our disagreements, we ought to be able to agree that any path which comes to an abrupt end was not the right path. Very much along these lines, the topic of collapsing fertility rates have been much discussed recently. I know this opinion is less widely held than I would expect, but for me it seems self-evident that any headset which leads to people having fewer children was the wrong headset, in the same way that the farmer would abandon any intervention that resulted in less milk. Though in this instance perhaps beef cattle are a better analogy. If you’re raising cattle for meat and they stop reproducing you’ll quickly be out of business. 

But here, just as in all the other examples, we touch on the madness of our time. It won’t be long before we can produce lab-grown meat, and when that comes to pass, cows and their preferences for grassy fields will matter not at all. 

Also this example perfectly illustrates the challenge we face. We are in the middle of a great transition. Its effects are larger and its onset more rapid than anything we have experienced in all the previous millenia of our existence.⁵ We can’t afford to screw it up. In the distant past our transitions happened gradually and we met the challenges they posed through evolution. (The fossil record is littered with species that didn’t meet the challenge.) Recently transitions began to happen more quickly and we met those challenges through culture. Often we were wrong, but if so the consequences were limited to a single nation or at most a continent. But now changes happen in a handful of years, and the impact is global.

Will some variety of metaphorical headsets allow us to make this transition? Convince us that we’re still comfortably ensconced in the 1980s or 1950s or even just 2010? In place of dealing with whatever craziness lies ahead of us. Or will they allow us to jump ahead to a better world, one we now only dimly imagine? Smoothing out the jump over the chasm that separates this world from the next? Or is the existence of “headsets” themselves the great transition, one we’re already in danger of failing at, because it’s just too easy to be lotus eaters and narcissists, rather than ascetic visionaries. 

But whatever happens, our grassy field has been left far behind, and rather than wandering through a bucolic landscape we’re stumbling through a hellscape of hyperstimulation and hyperdistraction, with no idea of our destination. Which is not to say we won’t argue about destinations, that’s practically all that we do. Some people argue that this chaos is the destination. Perhaps they’re right, but I think we’re still in the midst of an enormous transition, and we have yet to emerge on the other side. I hope that we do, and that we’re largely unscathed, but putting on a headset as we attempt to navigate is a great way to get irrevocably lost.

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It’s been more months than I care to count since I last did an essay like this. Hopefully it was worth the wait. (That seems unlikely, but stranger things have happened.) I’d appreciate comments, particularly criticisms. I’m feeling a little rusty and I probably need a blow or two to knock that rust off.

1. See all the times I’ve discussed Henrich here, which includes reviews of his books.

2. I discussed the book at some length in a previous post. Postman was ahead of his time.

3. For a deeper dive here’s a link to a previous post I did on the subject. The whole subject is fascinating.

4. Someone’s manufacturing it. I know Purdue declared bankruptcy, but I assume they’re still producing it, only with greater oversight?

5. Transitioning 100% to lab grown meat might be a bigger change than agriculture, and in a far shorter time, and that’s just speaking about humans. Its effect on cows would be mind-boggling, and depend a lot on how you feel about the mere addition paradox.