I never expected to find myself at the center of technology’s perfect storm, where I have been for the past couple of decades, and expect to be for the rest of my life.

About 30-to 40 years ago, I wandered into the world of online communities, where I could present any aspect of myself, young, old, male, female, nice, mean.

I was experiencing a dying way of life, where almost all human contact was real; there was no face we could put on us but our own.

With mobile connectivity, writes Sherry Turkle in her new memoir, “The Empath Diaries,” there is really no longer any distinction between the virtual and the “real.” We accept what happens on our screens as real enough.

In fact, many  Americans accept what they see on their screens as the only things that are real.

On many of the online communities I inhabited, I was actually very much alone but could instantly access and create the illusion of being together.

My most ambitious social experiment involved creating a Creative Community online, something I hoped would be a utopian laboratory for sometimes alone creatives like myself.

It was a disaster, exclusive cliques, instant factions, paranoia, suspicion, cruelty, conspiracy, sniping, rudeness, anger, and confusion, much of it from me. Our inability to look each other in the eye and talk through our problems destroyed the group and washed away my fantasies about an online community of support and encouragement.

Even in my chaotic time on TV, I never saw so much anger and hostility. When trouble came, some smartest and most creative people were the first to run out the door; no one wanted to talk it out—a life lesson for me.

I always felt that we could have quickly resolved so many disagreements if we met in person instead of online. In our online community, we lost our humanity.

In most ways, and however valuable, the online community is mostly an illusion that should never be confused with reality. It is just not the same as the real thing.

There is, in fact, a vast difference between reality and virtual reality. The country as a whole is now experiencing what I encountered in the group. We are all living in the center of technology’s perfect storm.

This often hits close to home. In my real world of real humans, I am obsessively polite, reserved, and temperament. Everyone tells me how nice I am.

I dread conflict and avoid it at all costs.  It’s different online. People online scold me to tell me that I can be vicious and heartless with people who criticize me.

Cruelty and rage are the online community’s currency; I wonder if I don’t just unconsciously ride the wave, it so often washes over me.

I do not recognize this person they describe; the reason I think is that it isn’t really in the sense of being of flesh, bone, and spirit. It is not who I wish to be. Online, we learn we can be anything we choose; I get so many more nasty comments than I give.

Online, I face people I forget are human. Online, I face people who forget that I am human. It makes for a wicked brew.

There is growing evidence that this new world of online communities is chewing away at our democracy, enabling the distortion and obliteration of truth and leaving us more alone than we have ever been.

It turned out that the computer had offered the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship, or as Social Scientist Turkle put it, “you could interact but never feel vulnerable to another person.”

New technologies suggested they would minimize social friction and the things that caused emotional stress; we early Internet writers believed naively that the Internet would promote free-thinking and democracy.

It has to some degree, but it has also made possible the very opposite of free-thinking and democracy. It can turn human beings into intellectual zombies, unable to tell the truth from lies or care, and train them to live in rage and grievance.

Technology is not as wise as the experienced middle school teacher. It isn’t wise at all.

It promised one thing, but life teaches us another. We can always make ourselves look better than we are on Facebook or Twitter, or even our blogs, but behind our screens, we are just as often frightened and angry or succumbing to fantasies and rage.

We are as alone as ever, even more so.

Turkle calls this the cost of our tethered lives.

When she wrote in her book, she spoke to my heart that it has never been more important to defend the human – not digital –  ability to show empathy of an authentic kind.

If you look at our current political discourse and even briefly scan the many sites devoted to politics, civics, and human interaction, there is one thing missing from almost all of them: empathy. 

Empathy is one thing those smart machines and online communities can’t teach because it’s something they can’t feel. President Biden exudes empathy when he speaks about the victims of the Covid-19. It is striking.

Empathy would have saved us from Donald Trump and the predations of the Republican Party. Empathy would have spared us the vicious Capitol Insurrection. No human being who has ever felt empathy could poke the eye out of a policeman with a pole used for waving the American flag.

I understand this struggle and live it every day.

But I’ve learned other things as well: it is quite possible to retain my humanity and still function, even thrive, in the new world of online communities.

In a sense, my blog has become just that, ironically – the online community I always wanted to join and tried unsuccessfully to create. We are a tribe based on empathy; that is our particular connection.

Not one of us could ever get elected to public office. Sadly, that makes me proud.

What do we lose in this new circle of technology and community? Attention to others. Attention to oneself.

Online, I chose to celebrate humanity rather than technology.

Offline, I turned to love, friends, reading, meditation, animals, and the natural world to pay attention to myself.

When we are anxious or lonely, we turn to the screen for comfort and connection. But the screen can’t give that to us. To do that, we have to alone.

I chose work – the elderly, the refugees, perhaps even the Amish (thank you, Mr. Trump), writing, picture taking,  to force me to pay attention to people and empathize with them.

I also found solitude as the path that helped me learn who I was and wanted to be and what it meant to think of other people.

Sherry Turkle writes that the capacity for solitude without stimulation is where empathy is born.

Our solitude capacity is undermined as soon as we turn on a screen and sit in front of it. Screens distract us and often anger us, but they also enable us to look to others for a sense of self rather than ourselves.

They are where we go to find our labels, and then, we never have to think again.

When we speak face-to-face, writes Turkle, we attend to more than the content of the conversation. We also attend to one another. I believe that 2020, the year of Trump and the Pandemic, drove this lesson home to anyone still capable of listening or paying attention.

The social media business model ended up selling our privacy in ways that fractured and fragmented our intimacy and democracy.

It’s not too late, not for me and many good people that I know.

But even after most people could see the truth of what technology was doing to us, nobody really wants to talk about it or do anything about it.

We had a love affair with technology that was magical, mystical, fascinating, and transformative. That era is ending.

We have allowed ourselves to become dependent on technology. It doesn’t serve us; we serve it and react to it.

The Capitalist Warriors have made it their own and recast it into their own image.

The people who think too much and ask too many questions have been ostracized and demonized, pushed to the edge, kept in their cages: socialists, communists, radicals, leftists, fearful women, and people color.

No need to listen to them.

Like all magic, technology tricked us into paying attention to only one thing and failing to see what was really happening.

It seems the question that Turkle ends her book by raising is the question before all of us right now and before the people, we choose to lead us:

“How much do we care about one another?”