Basic Info
Title How Capitalism Is Killing Our Attention Spans Author Current Affairs Original Link https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/03/how-capitalism-is-killing-our-attention-spans/ Date Last Highlighted 2023-04-30 Date Published 2023-03-11 Type articles Source reader Generated Summary Johann Hari, author of ‘Stolen Focus,’ discusses the many ways in which tech companies are siphoning our attention for profit.
Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims Not yet Related Lenses Processing Related Questions Not yet Output Not yet
Highlights
id518487526
Professor Earl Miller at MIT. And he said to me, “You’ve got to understand one thing about the human brain: more than anything else, you can only consciously think about one or two things at a time.” That’s it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain.
id518487238
Hewlett Packard, the printer company, got a scientist to study their workers, and split them into two groups: the first group was told to get on with their task, whatever it is, and not be interrupted; the second group is told to get on with their task, whatever it is, but at the same time have to answer a heavy load of emails and phone calls—pretty much how most of us live now. At the end of it, the scientists tested the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored 10 IQ points higher than the group that was interrupted. To give you a sense of how big the effect is, if we got stoned together, our IQs would go down, in the short term, by five points. So, in the short term, being chronically interrupted is twice as bad for your IQ as getting stoned. You’d be better off sitting at your desk doing one thing at a time and smoking a spliff than you would be not smoking a spliff and being constantly interrupted.
id518494518
All these companies care about, and all their design is about, is to get you to open their apps as often as possible and scroll as long as possible.
id518494579
although this was not the intention of the people at any of these social media companies, they bumped into an underlying truth about human psychology has been known about for 90 years now: negativity bias. It’s very simple. Human beings will stare longer at things that make them angry or upset than they will at things that make them feel good. If you’ve ever seen a car crash on the highway, you know exactly what I mean: you stared longer at the car wreck than the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. This is very deep in human nature. Ten-week-old babies will stare longer at an angry face than a happy face. It’s probably for very good evolutionary reasons. Our ancestors who were not alert to angry faces probably got clubbed to death. So, you can see why this is deep in our nature.
✏️ Negativity bias + keep people on apps = doomscrolling and terrible times
id518494862
the nice sane people are muffled and the angry, hostile, crazy people are pushed to the front and amplified
id518496409
when leaded petrol was invented for commercial sale, in the 1920s there was an amazing scientist called Dr. Alice Hamilton who entirely predicted the disaster that was to come and was mansplained out of the room.
id518496435
he lead industry, for the next 50 to 60 years, funded completely denialist bullshit and fake science, claiming there was no harm from lead. But by the time you got to the 1970s, the evidence was just overwhelming. The exposure to lead was causing all sorts of terrible problems for children’s mental and psychological development. So, what happened was a group of ordinary moms, what were at the time called housewives, banded together and said, “Why the fuck are we allowing this? Why are we allowing these for-profit industries to screw up our kids brains?” And it’s important to notice what they didn’t say: They didn’t say, “let’s ban all cars and gasoline”—just like there’s a caricature of people making the critique I’m making, that we want to get rid of tech. It’s absurd; we don’t think that. No, what they said is: let’s ban the leaded gasoline and force the companies to move to a different business model that doesn’t poison our children. And what happened? It followed the classic pattern that Gandhi said of all successful political movements: first they ignored them, then they laughed at them, then they fought them, then they won.
id518496556
at the moment, it’s like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day, and then leaning forward and saying, “Hey, buddy, you should learn to meditate, then you wouldn’t scratch so much.” You respond, “Fuck you! I’ll learn to meditate, that’s valuable, but you need to stop pouring this damn itching power over me.”
id518499063
the most effective form of individual agency on most of these issues is to band together with your fellow citizens and achieve a collective change
id518499245
Every worker in France now has something called the right to disconnect. Very simple: It says every worker needs to have their work hours laid out and written down in their contract, and when your work hours are over, you don’t have to check your phone or email. That’s it.
✏️ Individual agency combined with collective efforts to enact change
id518502884
“You’ve got to ban the current business model. You’ve got to say that a business model based on secretly tracking you in order to figure out the weaknesses in your attention, hack it, and keep you scrolling, is just inhuman.” Like lead in the paint, we don’t tolerate it. We don’t allow it, it’s banned.
id518505831
One business model is subscription, and we all know how that works: you pay a certain amount to Netflix or HBO, and in return, you get access.
id518506604
if you become the subscriber, suddenly, you are the customer. Suddenly, they’re not asking, “How do we hack and invade Nathan?” Instead, they’re asking, “What does Nathan want?” But, it turns out, Nathan wants to be able to pay attention and feels good when he meets up with his friends offline. “Okay, let’s design our app to maximize offline contact rather than doom scrolling.”
✏️ in contrast to the current model where you’re the product, not the customer. The customer is the advertiser.
id519197257
We have a capitalist system that makes us unable to focus, fucked over, depressed, and miserable. And then it says, “Great news, I got a solution: buy the following 20 things, and you’ll be able to focus and won’t be depressed anymore,” rather than dealing with the underlying problems.