Help, I'm Being Controlled!

 

As a skill, attention has always been important. It's what helped our ancestors catch prey and spot predators. Getting attention is just as important to societies, since all societies are built on a form of communication. You can’t collaborate with someone if they don’t hear what you say. And they won’t hear what you say if they’re doing something else.

The attention economy has always been with us in some form, but the interconnectedness of the world-wide web has increased its importance dramatically. The internet is able to stimulate us faster than ever before. Since we spend so much time on it, we’re used to being stimulated fast and expect to be stimulated fast. Take this essay for example, I looked at my phone’s notifications or clicked on another tab every 30 seconds while writing it. And this is an assignment I’m having fun with! It's becoming harder and harder to hold people’s attention, so products and marketing become more stimulating more quickly, which makes us even more used to being stimulated, which makes us even less patient. Since attention is becoming scarcer, it's becoming more valuable, which is what has made attention one of the key aspects of our economy.

Commercials constantly intrude on our videos and music. Algorithms such as the one on youtube, are constantly providing us with stuff that’ll keep us going through the rabbit-hole. How often do we really think about them?

You may place trust in someone if they’ve demonstrated their good-will. You may even follow an untrustworthy person if you take precautions first. Critical thinking should never be surrendered to a different entity. Trust is something that must be consistently earned. People always change and they always reveal things you never thought you knew about them.

This becomes even more complicated when dealing with groups. While an individual can consistently demonstrate their trustworthiness, groups are constantly changing. Groups can have power-struggles, rebrandings, etc. People in high-ranking positions can be replaced by someone less ethical and you may not even know. DuckDuckGo may be the “privacy browser” now, but it'll have a different CEO, different staff members, different programs in 10 years. What guarantee do we have it won't end up like Google?

Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed. Algorithms will act as they will act. They’re not going back into Pandora’s jar anytime soon. They are a key part of our society, and if we’re going with the definition that an algorithm is “a list of unambiguous instructions for performing a specific task,” they’re nothing new. Algorithms have guided our actions for thousands of years. One could even argue that our instincts, and subconscious are algorithms themselves.

You can get lost in the flow of the internet, or you can analyze its tides and currents, riding it to your own destination. You’ll never be able to understand everything, but that’s no excuse for laziness. 

This is as much a confession and resolution as it is a manifesto. Technology controls my life to a large extent. I need to reverse this and it's becoming harder and harder to ignore. It’s time to, "Get busy living, or get busy dying."