Psychological pollution

the sensory cacophony of the built world

This is a republication of an essay from April, 2024

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“♫Ding-dong!”

“If you have a frequent shopper card, please scan it now!”

“Please place the item in the bagging area!”

“♫Discordant chime! Please place the item in the bagging area!”

“Please select your payment method!”

“Do you have any coupons?”

“Do you have any un-scanned items on the bottom of your shopping cart?”

“How many store-provided bags did you use today? Please enter the number of store-provided bags and press done!”

“Please select payment method!”

“Follow the instructions on the pin pad!”

“♫New five-note chime! Please take your receipt!”

This is what a shopper faces trying to pay and leave Price Chopper. In New Normal Land, all retail stores where I live have cut their staff to the bare bones while deploying three to four times as many self check-outs as live, staffed registers. There are plenty of problems with this—lack of human interaction, frustration with algorithms—but those are for another essay.

What I want to focus on is the noise. The self check-out is just one example of the frivolous auditory noise that humans are putting out into the world. Everything beeps, chimes, and makes sound-effects at us. Everywhere. All the time. I remember a time when the only sound-effect a car made was a mechanical buzzer to remind you that you left the key in the ignition. Get in a modern car and start it. Most go through a sequence of chimes to “confirm” for you that the car is on while cycling through a series of flashing dashboard warning lights.

Put the car in reverse and it beeps the way only dump trucks used to do when they reversed. It has long annoyed me that my Toyota forces me to sit through BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP inside the car whenever I back out. But I’ve discovered something worse: I watched a brand new car back up in a parking lot the other day and the BEEP-BEEP-BEEP is now being pushed outside the car through a speaker. Now, everyone has to hear it, not just the driver.

It's not just auditory noise, it’s visual, too. The world around us has become so busy for the senses, and it increases every day. I can’t prove this, but if it were possible to send a videographer back in time to record an average day 30 years ago, I’m nearly certain my claim would be borne out. The world is much louder to the ears and the eyes than it ever has been.

We first-world humans have adjusted to a world filled with the noise of internal combustion engines, jet planes, and heavy construction equipment. But we’re now adding to the visual and auditory din voluntarily. It’s not enough that the machines themselves make noise in their operation; we have to add warnings and lights and bells and chimes and buzzers that note the fact that the machine is operating.

When I first started thinking about this phenomenon, I thought in terms of “visual pollution” and “auditory pollution,” and those are accurate descriptions. But I think it’s really psychological pollution. It’s litter in the mental landscape. It’s disorder and chaos that affects the mind, and we can’t avoid it if we want to be in public.

Being high-strung, it’s probable that the sensory overload unnerves me more than the average person. When I return home to the quiet spot outside town where I live, it takes a bit of time to unwind from the stimulation of the beeps and flashes of public life. But I suspect this modern sensory world is bothersome to most people too, even if some are more easily able to adapt or tune it out.

A tweet from David Zweig prompted me to write this. He describes riding the train from New York City to places in the suburbs, something that thousands of commuters do every day.

Zweig’s tweet contains a 9-second video showing the large screens that now blare ads and messages inside the train cars. Who wanted this? Who asked for it? None of the riders, of course. I don’t think there’s a large untapped market of people who want more instantiations of unescapable television-style noise in places they can’t easily exit. Aren’t the dentist’s offices and sports bars enough?

The reaction to Zweig’s tweet almost diverted my attention away from the real problem. Some people reacted by implying that Zweig was being petty or silly.

I’m too easily diverted by the negative, and online scoffers particularly bother me. You know the kind of people. No matter what you’re talking about they tell you that you don’t have a point, or that you’re being a baby, and they do it in a style that signals at least mild dismissive contempt. This kind of response grabs my attention because it pushes on very old buttons in my mind from memories of being told I didn’t see what I saw, and if I did, I didn’t understand it, and I shouldn’t care anyway, and caring indicates there’s something wrong with me.

This essay was going to be about that phenomenon—scoffing—until I went back and looked at the thread. The scoffers were a very small minority; the majority of responses came from people who notice and are disturbed by similar phenomena. More responses were like these:

I suspect the majority of people are at least subliminally aware of the increasing noise level of society, and dislike it. Most, though, don’t talk or write about it out loud. One of the most common things people tell me in comments or in emails is that I’ve articulated something specific that’s been on their mind for years, but that they couldn’t figure out how to say. Or, they didn’t say anything because they thought it was “only me”, or they didn’t want to deal with scoffers.

Seems I’ve become a professional “noticer” and out-loud-sayer, so I’ll do it for all of us.

The problem of sensory cacophony comes from above, and from below. Corporate advertisements and the adoption by government of their ad-persuasion techniques and technologies are the “above.” The way we mortals comport ourselves in public—inflicting our music and phone conversations on passersby—is the “below.”

It’s being done to us, and we’re doing it to ourselves and to each other.

From above

This image from Business Insider gets it right.

Here is a list of the sensory impositions I can think of that have taken over public life. There are noticeably more of these today than there were a decade ago.

• Advertisements are everywhere. It’s not just billboards anymore. It’s buses, cabs, the sides of buildings. Yes, many of these have been around for a long time, but not with the breadth and depth we’re dealing with now. If you’re younger than 40, you might find it silly that I cite ads on buses, but that’s because you’re used to them. When I was a kid, city buses didn’t carry adverts. Instead of rolling your eyes, try to see this as an illustration of creeping change you were not aware of. You, too, will start to see the world a bit more as I do as you age and your memory is longer.

• Gas stations now have TV screens that blare ads at you the minute your presence at the bay is detected. The garish saturated colors are bad enough (think about how few directions are available to your gaze today that do not force you to look at an animated screen), but the blaring audio is too much.

• It used to be only heavy equipment like dump trucks that beep loudly when reversing (again, when I was little, they didn’t). We can make a safety argument for that with a 5-ton truck. But now cars are doing it. I expect to see many more models like the new car I wrote about above inflicting reverse-beeping onto passersby outside the car’s cabin.

• Neighborhood bars and sports bars have always had loud TVs playing games, because that’s what the guys go to those places for. But today it’s most restaurants. It amazes me that nearly every chain restaurant from fast casual to sit-down has music or TV cranked up to levels that only teenagers like. It’s as if they are unaware that some of their customers are 30 or older. Combined with the ugly modern industrial aesthetic of sheet metal walls and concrete floors, the echo makes it unbearable.

• More and more doctor’s offices, dentist’s offices, hair salons, and similar, force waiting patients and patrons to watch and listen to their preferred cable news channel. On, of course, a ridiculously sized television. (It’s not enough to say, “Just don’t look at it.” Human attention doesn’t work that way, and having to make a conscious effort “not to see” the big flashing thing is its own form of enervation and annoyance.)

• Big-city dwellers tell me that taxicabs now have TVs that force them to listen to ads from either the city or companies. No, you can’t “not listen.” The volume is turned up.

Vermont, where I live, bans billboard advertisements. I have conflicted feelings about this. My libertarian streak disapproves of government meddling in markets, but my nervous system is grateful for the un-polluted views of this beautiful state and its rolling mountains. I suspect this issue makes me an inconsistent hypocrite.

The preferred way to arrange society is through social customs and mores, in other words, through culture. Peer to peer, and citizen to citizen pressure and praise, is more powerful in shaping societal relations than the law. It is also necessary if we want the laws to do what laws are supposed to do. Put another way, we can have all the laws we want but if people don’t believe in them and enact them, they don’t really exist.

“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”—John Adams

We seem wholly inadequate to govern ourselves in the 2020s. The decline in manners, civility, and shared ways of doing things, is marked and extreme. Everyone notices it. The United States has been on a decades-long decline in formality and courtesies, but we can all see how that accelerated during the Covid years. What started in the 60s as refusing to call strangers or elders “sir” and “ma’am” (“That’s just. . what THE MAN wants you to do, dude!”) has resulted in a public life devoid of even the smallest courtesies. People do not make eye contact when you speak to them. They do not excuse themselves when they walk in front of you. Please and thank you are not commonly heard as they used to be.

From below

• People blame modern discourtesy on technology, but it is really our fault. Phones and other portable computers have capabilities, but we are the ones who decide whether, when, or how, to use them. It is we humans who have failed.

• There’s a scene in the 1984 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in which Captain Kirk and Spock are riding a San Francisco city bus. A mohawked punk rocker cranks up the volume on his boom box blaring thrash music loudly. Spock applies the Vulcan nerve pinch and makes the rude rider pass out. Fellow riders cheer.
  
  That scene illustrates something that has slipped away. It assumes as universally agreed upon that such behavior is intensely rude and that it is right and proper to correct the person who deploys it. That assumption is no longer universally shared. Yes, it’s true that in 2024, it’s dangerous to even ask someone to turn their music down on the bus. We know that the kind of person who would behave this way is highly likely to be the kind of person who will hurt or kill you for “disrespecting” them by reminding them of their obligation to behave with manners.
  
  But it’s not just fear that stop us. We wouldn’t have so many people playing their music out loud on bluetooth speakers if we still had a cohesive society with a shared etiquette. We do not. More and more young people don’t believe that it is rude to subject others to their electronic noise. Because of this, we’ve lost the subtle, indirect social pressure that discourages that behavior. Now our only choice is to endure it or risk assault if we complain.

• Public phone conversations have become New Normal. People from all walks of life routinely stroll through stores or down public streets holding their phones out like a platter while they discuss their grocery list or pregnancy test results.

• By default, smart phones are set up to give every auditory and visual “confirmation” of a function out loud. We have to manually, and tediously, quiet these functions on a phone. Because most of us are lazy (and also mere humans who can’t divine every bloody custom software setting), the phone’s default behavior is what we experience in public. Beeps, chimes, alerts, buzzes, and annoying “jingles” are everywhere.
  

Visual blight

Advertisements are not the only visual manifestation of increasing psychological pollution: blight is catching up. Over the past five years I have watched as Burlington, Vermont, declines into something that looks like a small version of San Francisco.

If you’ve never been to Vermont, the best way to describe is to say that it looks exactly like the postcards of Vermont you’ve seen all your life. It really is a Victorian confection of colonial and late 19th century main streets, commodious houses, and well-worn forested mountains.

But it’s fraying, and nowhere worse than Burlington. With our progressive government in power, criminals are coddled, attempted murderers are released without bail, prostitutes are never stopped by police, drug deals happen out in the open in formerly upscale shopping districts. It is now common to see once pretty parks and neighborhood lawns littered with hypodermic needles, and feces.

Streets that were well-kept five years ago now look exactly like New York City did in the 1970s.

This was Bove’s Restaurant in 2015. It was a local landmark in downtown Burlington, a black-and-white-tiled no-nonsense homestyle Italian restaurant straight out of the 1940s. People lined up to get a table.

This is Bove’s today:

Bove’s is just one example; the blight is all through Burlington. Businesses that go under are covered in graffiti within weeks; many of them then fall into worse decay as flop houses, or they collapse. Any building that does not have a permanent on-site business or attentive landlord is targeted by taggers and vandals. The downtown YMCA building and auditorium (I saw David Sedaris there 15 years ago) closed, and it’s a spray-tagged, broken-windowed ruin, a moldering visual counterpart to the Beaux Arts Carnegie-built library across the street. I wonder how long the library will survive.

I don’t believe that humans can thrive in a landscape with this level of psychological pollution. We can survive, yes, but we cannot thrive. And I’m not sure how long we can even survive if this doesn’t turn around. No, I don’t think we’re infinitely adaptable, though we are the most adaptable of the mammals.

There will be those who will say, “Oh, you’re just getting old and you don’t like change. It doesn’t bother me.” I am getting old, and I don’t like change, but the rate of change and the kind of change we’re experiencing is new, is alarming, and is of a wholly different character than the organic turnover of styles that comes with generational churn. Put another way, it’s not “just me.” And I think it does bother you, even if you don’t know it yet.

The late philosopher Roger Scruton spent his life examining beauty and arguing that humans need beauty. Symmetry, aspiration, glorification, and visual harmony are not mere add-ons or extras you can get for an up-charge. They feed inborn human needs.

We’re beginning to starve.

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