Johann Hari book reveals our internet-driven attention problem: Bird Lovegod

Where do they come from? They’re not mine.

Had I filled my mind with the opinions, prejudices, perspectives and pointless diatribes of hundreds, no thousands, of people, now coating it like a film of slime?

My mind felt dirty, handled by multitudes, and I knew I needed a mental detox, and part of that process is the understanding of what it was I was toxified by. Of course, the answer was, the internet.

Designed to maximise ‘engagement’. Platforms designed to steal the very time of our lives, designed to prevent us from knowing it and designed to make it very hard for us to stop.

As Hari’s book explains, the business model is deeply cynical and manipulative. It plays upon hardwired aspects of the human condition, our response to stress, our response to bad news, it uses our own minds against us.

I could feel it, and it disgusted me, both on a personal level, and as outrage at the way it has changed the very fabric of human society. And I think it’s changing humanity, has changed humanity, and is making people less intelligent, less able to think deeply and clearly and for sustained periods. It’s making humans superficial, dumb. We have been Kardashionated.

The tech companies acknowledge there is a problem, but rather than change themselves, they have the attitude that individuals are the ones who must take responsibility. We need to be more mindful. We need to switch off. This is a lot like a drug manufacturer striving to make ever more addictive narcotics, flooding the market with them, then telling everyone to Just Say No.

It’s like Big Oil continuously ramping up exploration and production of fossil fuels, grinding the price of them to record profit making levels, then persuading the individuals of the world to take responsibility for climate change by washing our clothes in cold water. LOL.

By the first half dozen pages of the book, and I do recommend you buy a copy, a paper one, and read it, I was so incensed I deleted every unnecessary app from my phone. I even switched it off, and told myself to only switch it on when I specifically wanted to do something rather than compulsively checking it dozens of times a day. That didn’t last, but I have become aware of my usage, rather than the unconscious behavior of the blindly addicted.

I’ve never allowed notifications for almost anything on my phone, and tend to despise most social media anyway, but there’s hundreds of millions of people for whom it is now completely ordinary to welcome the constant interruptions.

Our modern obsession with speed and quick info and bite sized snippets endlessly scrolled does nothing to enable us to actually think. It actually damages our ability to think deeply about anything. And because we can’t think deeply we accept surface level fake solutions to real and even existential problems.

We are being fragmented, as individuals and as societies and at the deepest level, the level of our attention, of where we focus and place our conscious awareness.

And even as I write this, Chess.com, my only permitted notifier, tells me it’s my move. And thus our peace is taken.

Bird Lovegod is MD of Ethical Much