Our beautiful brains are hacked away. What shall we do?
We have excluded humanities for decades and now it is hitting us back.
I am a passionate participant in the Voicelunch. I believe this is how movements evolve. And we have been waiting for its rise for long enough. We, the Voicepeople, I consider us the lucky ones, who have woken up to gather. That’s what you have to do if you want to do things together, you need to gather. Thanks to Michal Stanislawek and Karol Stryja we meet and speak to eachother (not just to our Voice Assistants).
This gathering gives me a place to think, discuss evolve just like at university. Just that it’s always too short! We should never stop doing this. We need to use our minds if we can. This is a privilege. Privilege comes along with an obligation. Towards whom or what? Towards humankind.
Let me formulate a few theses that I have been thinking about for a while.
The more human aspects tech incorporates, the more dehumanizing it becomes.
Let’s talk about dehumanizing technology, how to gain our data back — how to get our context back — questions and thoughts that lead me now to the thought: it is time for a new ethical paradigm that can confront the challenges technology is opposing on us, challenges we are just about to grasp with our 8 bit of consciousness per moment. This is not a little! But it is quickly lost if you are scrolling your wake day away on social media, then spend the night digesting this mental bs.
We should consider it when we design tech. We need good people in tech. Not good in what they are doing but good in the sense that they create things that make the world worth living. Good humans that would not only give the products they build to their children but also have done everything they could to find out whether its global collective societal impact is what we wish for the world to become. Too often people have failed in being just this. Did you know Steve Jobs — as much as he took arts into account when developing stuff — he did not take into account Anthropology and Ethics, the Amygdala, Corpus callosum, and the weakness of the human brain, so easily hackable, to get it addicted. A kid in an adult’s body on the lose in his fury. Yes, genius, ok but for what cost? We have an ethical debt. For me, there is a parallel and too often we don’t look at who that person was to others that lived with them. Sure some of it might not be our business — but taking this person as a whole, why do we content ourselves with things they say and with that little credibility and poor integrity? You might be building a bot for health care solving a problem with loneliness (here is a podcast where I discuss this). You are solving one problem but do not see, even more — you are not interested in seeing what other problems will arise with your solution. Then the problem is you. If you say others are in charge of finding regulations and think about the ethical aspects of your product then I am not sure you see your responsibility and the privileged position you are in. But I am not blaming you — I am calling out to everyone.
If we refuse our accountability, these questions will be answered for us, not by us, before we knew there were any to ask in the first place. We will get bulldozed.
They will be answered by big tech and the collective impact of inventions and products developed by nerds left without adult supervision.
We do not question those answers and are prone to do it less and less. As long as we get promised tech is there, and because it’s there, it’s for the better for humankind. We let ourselves getting fooled. We do not connect the dots between the fact that we and our brains are vulnerable and tech is hacking us.
For decades ways and measures to protect our natural vulnerability have been neglected. And here we are now: Screen-zombies. Or does your kid not play video games 8h a day? And spend the rest on twitch and TikTok? Old news. (You can bet Steve Job’s kid did not and he knew why.) In the movie “The Social Dilemma” those who fabricated the algorithms some time ago voice their regret today. They had no idea what the cause would be on the bigger social level. If you are working on projects like that you should ask yourself — would I want to expose my kid to that? And if the answer is “no” then try to reconsider your choices, especially if you are a product owner at a tech company or in some other role making decisions.
From an evolutionary point of view, our brain is old and hackable. If advertisers and gadget producers put all their efforts into seducing us to mindless consumption, no wonder our free will has succumbed. We are even getting rewarded with dopamine. We did not just agree to the terms and conditions of these applications we never read but also to exposing us to the high probability that we will die scrolling lonely in our bed rather than on a party dancing until we drop dead happy from physical fatigue. The worst thing: no one told us. Instead:
We are getting our brain hacked away, and we seek modern redemption in mindfulness again.
Funny huh? We are also so used to do multitasking. Now Alexa finally lets us add things to the shopping list when our hands are covered in the dough as if that would have been a problem before. And then, the next thing we order is Thich Nhat Hanh’s book about how to learn doing nothing again. Just breathe. Just sit. Humans! If there is a Goddess she must be peeing her panties of laughter. That’s also why this flood of thoughts, it is glacial melting. Calling our Voicelunch an ice breaker would be an insulting underestimation. Ok, let me paddle back now.
So when, as I mentioned, you have polluted a big part of your few bits of capacity to connect consciously with reality, you are not thinking “slowly” anymore but thinking “fast”. (Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow)
I would say this is associative thinking, I am close to saying it is reactive thinking, it is twice as fast as logical thinking. Which can be good when you need to survive and there’s no time to think “how high are my chances of surviving the approaching hungry tiger?” You gotta run. See the tiger on the horizon — run. Stimulus — Reaction. Look, people, we run on this mode a lot of time during our day. Without the Tiger or any other danger.
They are stimulating our natural attention unnaturally, and the worst of all — they are rewarding us with dopamine.
The physical world becomes less attractive because the stimuli don’t come at such density per time.
We can’t stand the silence. We are used to a constant information overload. To the detriment of who we are or who we used to be. Cause it becomes us. You surely did hear about the sentence — where you direct your attention is where you will go, is ultimately who you will become? It is not that we live in the digital world. Or that algorithms offer me products and ads. It is that I gave them my consciousness in exchange to place their rubbish in my brain, which is no win, but I don’t notice. I am seduced and sedated by dopamine I get without any effort exceeding moving my finger on a screen.
Brian Roemmele once said in one of our Voicelunches:
“Developers those days were nerds left without adult supervision.”
I like that because I often think that we should not think lost in fascination what tech can do — but ask what it will do, question whether the fact that things become doable is already justifying that it is good to do it.
Once I worked in a company that helped businesses to compensate for the carbon footprint they were leaving when creating their products. An ecological compensation. You could think now I would opt for humanities compensation — for examples big tech companies should compensate by founding and sponsoring forest kindergardens where children learn to play in the woods insted in front of screens. In German there is a saying — “das Kind ist in den Brunnen gefallen” (litteraly it means: “the child has fallen into the wells” in English we say: “The horse has already left the barn.”). Compensating for the damage is one thing. How about taking an attitude that allows you to work on the cause instead of producing the damage and giving yourself a crown for “curing the symptoms”? This is the definition of hypocrisy. We can only leave this immature state through education, discussing with eachother, thinking, reflecting opon what we do. The science is easy. The hard part is trying allow ourselves to build the things we want to see in the world.
So, what do you want to see in the world? What vision can you afford?
