The Privilege of Not Paying Attention

The modern world is not about scarcity; it’s about how a person deals with plenty.

It is becoming a privilege to turn off distractions. Many earn their living through the various social media outlets. A business would be crazy not to have a website, forego social media accounts, and not ask for digital customer feedback.

I have talked to many business owners, entrepreneurs, corporate denizens, and those in the gig economy, and many of them want a break from the relentless email, Slack notifications, and social media interactions. They can’t stop because it’s a huge part of their jobs.

Digital Detox retreats exist to give people permission to turn off their devices. Think about this for a minute: people are willing to pay others to set up a space where technology’s influence is absent.

I read of Silicon Valley founders refusing their children screen time. Many of the founders of our digital world are refusing their children access to the world they have created.

In one of the most recent episodes of Black Mirror, “Smithereens,” a desperate and depressed man takes an intern hostage in order to demand a conversation with the social media platform’s founder. The platform, Smithereens, is based on Twitter. Ironically, the platform itself can’t be used to talk to him.

The founder is tracked down on a silent, digital detox retreat in the mountains of New Mexico. The hostage taker simply wants to tell the founder that the platform is addictive. The hostage taker acknowledges that he couldn’t control himself, but he wants the founder to know exactly how the platform affected him. The founder is remorseful and says,

“Gotta keep optimizing. Gotta keep people engaged, ‘till it [the platform] was more like a crackpipe, like some kind of Vegas casino where we sealed off all the f****** doors. We’ve got a department. All they do is tweak it like that on purpose. They’ve got dopamine targets, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

The economy of now and of the future revolves around money, for sure, but, more importantly, the economy of the internet is attention. Those who know how to maximize the algorithm to garner the most attention will be the winners. In addition, those who know how these algorithms manipulate the biology of their brains are able to transcend it, or at least mitigate it.

Let’s go back a bit.

For most of human history, the prevailing thought was that humans had a soul. Humans looked at their inner selves and saw a free will. I decide what I desire.

If I desire bad things, then that means my morality is out of whack. People were taught about right and wrong, making moral decisions, and disciplining one’s soul.

It is different now. With recent scientific findings, as well as the work of venerable anti-free will neuroscientist Sam Harris, the scientific community has taken a more deterministic view of human activity. Once scientists opened “the Sapiens black box,” as Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, they found “neither soul, nor free will, nor ‘self’ — but only genes, hormones and neurons” that determine a human’s desires.

If I desire bad things, then that means my genes or hormones or neurons are out of whack. This is the determinant of decision making,

I was shocked to learn of robo-rats while reading Harari. These rats have electrodes connected to their brains, and by stimulating the reward centers, scientists can “drive” the rat and get it to do almost anything.

Whether you believe that humans have souls or free will is irrelevant. This can be debated in multi-hour podcasts and over drinks. The important takeaway is that every human carries a brain altering device with them every day, and this device is being used to manipulate human behaviors in a similar fashion as the electrode is being used to manipulate the rats’ behaviors

Humanity is at an odd time in its history; we have entered the age of “human as God”, homo deus, as Harari terms it. The Gods of this age are those who know how to use the technology — the algorithm — to stimulate the reward centers in our brains and get us to behave a certain way.

I don’t think this is being done with nefarious intentions. There is no evil plot to brainwash the populace. Intelligent and driven people have found a way to use new technology in ways that earn them money.

At this point in time, the most intelligent people are using technology to make money under the guise of helping humanity. For evidence, look at the advertising of Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon.

What I think we, as humans, need to figure out, though, is the answer to this question: are we designing technology that uses neuroscience to better our lives or just to make money?