Plenty has been written about how smartphones, social media and short video addiction or some such slop is resulting in human degeneracy.
“In the last 15 years, a linked series of unprecedented technologies have changed the experience of personhood across most of the world. It is estimated that nearly 70% of the human population of the Earth currently possesses a smartphone, and these devices constitute about 95% of internet access-points on the planet. Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that.”
Yet there hasn’t been a clear solution to this. Digital detox techniques and devices have been ineffective. Few governments are actively using policy to address it – Australia recently banned social media for kids under the age of 16, although there is scepticism around the efficacy of the same. The authors of this piece for the Guardian argue for a more radical approach – a movement of sorts.
“D Graham Burnett is professor of history at Princeton University. Alyssa Loh is a film-maker. Peter Schmidt is a writer and organiser. The authors are members of the Friends of Attention coalition, and co-editors of ATTENSITY! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Particular)”
They compare what big tech companies are doing to get us addicted to screens and in turn monetise our eyeballs to how big oil’s ‘fracking’ wrecks the environment:
“Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market.
Fracking (of the Earth and of our minds) produces tectonic instability, toxicity and the despoliation of our landscapes, natural and social. We now know that the heedless exploitation of our external environment has been so relentless and irresponsible that human survival on Earth has been placed in actual jeopardy. The new “gold rush” into the inner environment of the human psyche is well on its way to effecting parallel, if even more insidious destruction.”
Hence their proposal for a movement draws from the experience of how a movement was required to fight the abuse of our environment: “Precious few do-gooders devoted themselves to environmental politics in 1925. That’s because “environmental politics” wasn’t even a thing. It took a cultural shift (and the work of advocates such as Rachel Carson) across the mid-20th century to establish the physical environment – the unity of land, water, and air that produces shared life – as a politically tractable object around which diverse groups could organise. This is to say that the very structures of politics, not just our beliefs and hopes, are themselves emergent forms. New things come into being, and old things pass away.
Where attention is concerned, there are mounting signs that we are reaching an inflection point. People of all sorts, Maga Republicans and Mamdani progressives, hipsters in Portland and evangelicals in Arkansas – people who don’t agree about anything – all actually do agree that something is totally wrong with a world in which everyone spends nearly all their time scrolling endlessly through the algorithmic feeds of their social media, a world where military-grade technology and trillion-dollar corporations take aim at children, and feed them whatever it takes to keep them hooked.
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