“On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.”
—John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 8 February 1996

In a recent New York Times op-ed, the columnist David Brooks notes with concern the widening happiness gap between those who feel love and those who don’t. Throughout the past 50 years, lots of us living in the West have progressively chosen personal autonomy over partnerships, preferring the independence that social detachment brings to the interdependence that accompanies, say, a spouse or children.

Since the 1960s, family ties have gradually come to represent an outdated and unfashionable lifestyle, as the more implicitly contemporary values of career advancement, financial stability, and self-determination increasingly replaced traditional life goals.

Nevertheless, our modern autonomy has led to alarming levels of disparity in self-reported happiness, Brooks finds. The University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox wrote in an email to Brooks claiming that those who were married with children were 30 percent more likely than unmarried and childless people to report that life was enjoyable most of the time — a significant and remarkable difference.

This statistical inconsistency is counterintuitive to many of us for whom the term ‘family values’ was synonymous with oppressive conformity. Shouldn’t liberated people be happier? What once might have been considered a trap paradoxically sets us free, believes Brooks.

Attachments signify interdependence. And yet, forging loving attachments is not the example that major world powers are setting for us on a daily basis. Russia, for example, is not pursuing loving attachments with its neighbours by colonizing Ukraine. The United States is deliberately destroying loving attachments by instigating trade wars with its closest allies and illegally attacking its perceived adversaries.

Therefore, the message that we receive at the quotidian level is that attachments, loving or otherwise, are a luxury to be selected or rejected for the already comfortably independent. Love doesn’t motivate the cultivation or annihilation of attachments today. Power does. And power is based upon dependence, not interdependence.

As an observer of technology, I find metaphors in our technological interfaces and the actual physical connections between our devices. In my research into the history of MIDI, aka the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, I discovered an anomaly in the world of digital connectivity in which a standard protocol for literal attachment amongst digital devices defied obsolescence for more than 40 years. Was this because MIDI was the best interface? No. Was it more likely because a consortium of musical instrument manufacturers convinced an industry to accept a compromise that benefited all of them? Yes.

MIDI provides one model that might correspond to Brooks’ pragmatic argument about loving attachments. That is, stick with the traditional convention, flawed as it may be.

The other more common model is the planned, rapid, and frequently accelerated obsolescence of connective ports. For nearly a century, RCA cables have remained the standard for wiring hi-fi equipment. In the digital world, though, it is rare that any cable survives the obsolescence cycle for more than a few years. How many dead old dongles do we have in our junk drawers, these intermittent connectors that we buy and just as quickly discard when their periods of usefulness expire? The narrowing window of compatibility for technical standards must on some level reflect the deteriorating criteria for compatibility between people.

Is it any wonder that we tend to treat human relationships, so-called loving attachments, just as disposably? There will always be a new connection with the promise of enhanced compatibility and the sheen of novelty just around the corner.

Of course, the logical conclusion of the interconnectivity wars is to have no physical connections, to be networked wirelessly to everything all the time. Ultimately, this type of connectivity is exclusively vulnerable to control. It is just as easy to connect as it is to disconnect digital devices and thus disenfranchise the people who use them from this vast web if we don’t submit to the protocols of attachment. No love lost.

Again, this kind of model indicates dependence and not interdependence. If you want to attach headphones with your new iPhone, but there is no more headphone jack, then you have to submit to another form of loving attachment.

The internet was conceived as a space independent of traditional governance just as post-modern social space was conceived as independent of traditional family constraints. “Our identities have no bodies,” John Perry Barlow announced in his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.”

We now understand, however, that matter alone undergirds the virtual world — think of the 1.46 square kilometre Apple Park in Cupertino, California, or the vast water-cooled A.I. server farms that are hastening the demise of the world’s most precious natural resource. We would do well to attend less to the myth of immateriality and more to the attachments that matter — those between us.

Over the holidays, I experienced the most meaningful connections not through technology but at two consecutive live events that required no technological connectivity whatsoever.

The first was the OSM’s presentation of Le traditionnel conte des Fêtes with the Quebec raconteur Fred Pellerin. In this performance, Pellerin quixotically unfurls his signature yarn about the fantastic history of his hometown, Saint-Élie-de-Caxton. The story is recounted in dialogue with romantic Classical interludes that underscore the vitality of storytelling as a musical form, and music as a form of storytelling. And although there were technical aspects to the spectacle — lighting and scenography cues that likely require constellations of technologies — the show relied solely upon the human connections between performers and audience.

I was even more heartened the following evening by the Glenn Miller Orchestra’s performance at Maison Symphonique. Comprised entirely of wind, brass, strings, percussion, and voice, this orchestra has performed together in some configuration since 1938 — no amplification required, no obsolete cables necessary. Just the loving attachments of the musicians onstage who clearly enjoy their jobs and each other’s company enough to perform upwards of 200 concerts per year.

Likely I attend that many shows annually in my capacity as a journalist and was not expecting to be so astonished by this one. But I had not felt as present or connected all year as I did that night. These events were about cherishing relationships, appreciating family, and enduring attachments.

Despite their potential for connection across space and time, nothing makes me feel more isolated than digital interfaces. If you aim to create distance between us sitting in the same room, just insert a screen. Should you desire to destroy a sense of unity and community, nothing works better than some device that is predestined to become obsolete. Cyberspace was, is, and always will be the space that divides.

“If you want to lead a fulfilling life,” David Brooks argues, “fill it with loving attachments.” These emotional ecosystems indeed constitute the necessary path forward toward more rewarding lives. But our attachments must be independent of the power dynamics that technology under capital impose.

To reconnect, unplug. To love, reattach.◼︎

_{Cover image: Fred Pellerin and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal conducted by Kent Nagano perform at Maison Symphonique, 20 December 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.}