The Great Attention Heist, or: How Our Mind Was Hacked

Why do we need a new social network? Aren’t our current networks just fine? People spend hours on Facebook! Surely they’re that means they’re doing something right.

… right?

Before we discuss social networks, let’s examine this important question as it relates to games.

In this lecture, Jonathan Blow argues that game designers have found a way to “engineer around boredom”. This is not new — games have always acted as massive time sinks, with lifetimes dedicated to chess, gambling or even tennis. And while many of these games benefit us in all sorts of ways — humans have been playing games throughout history for their positive effects — many games today are developed as nothing more than boredom hacks. These are no more than ways of creating positive experiences and a sense of accomplishment for otherwise meaningless actions.

Freemium games have perfected the art of wasting the user’s time by making dull, repetitive tasks feel rewarding. However, unlike the anti-boredom mechanisms you may find in other games, the bells, whistles and points found in freemium games are not just there to generate a continuous stream of positive, re-affirming experiences, but to create a user journey that culminates in real-money purchases.

The animations, notifications and constantly-increasing numbers make you feel as if you’ve accomplished something, when in fact you’ve wasted your most precious assets: your time and attention. And the reason you were made to waste these is… monetization. Deepening someone else’s pocket.

How do these meaningless games prevent us from getting bored and stopping, then?

Blow claims that boredom is a technique for something like a simulated annealing function, to make sure you don’t get stuck in a local maximum. We get bored so we know when it is time to change things up and try something new, just in case there are better alternatives to our normal routines. In other words, we get bored to make sure that what we’re doing is valuable. Jonathan argues that game designers have found ways to systematically fool our boredom check, causing us to invest ourselves in games with a sense of purpose when in fact nothing whatsoever is getting accomplished. Engineering around boredom has disrupted our basic methods for making sure our activity is being put to good personal or social use.

Synereo’s Daniel Estrada has made the same argument about our social networks: we expect that our social labor will contribute to the well-being of our communities, and we expect the feedback we get from our communities to reflect the social value of our work. In fact, we’re spinning our wheels in the mud: our digital labor is exploited for corporate advertising revenue, and the structure of our communities reflects the value the financial economy places on our attention.

Our social behavior is being optimized for monetization by social networks that direct our attention without regards to real social benefit or to our well-being.

If our social networks are “to speak to the human condition”, we need a social network that can fill us with a sense of purpose and community identity that will give us what Mary Catherine Bateson calls a “sense of agency” — “a sense that they indeed can make a difference — and a sense of how different kinds of action interact for good or for ill.”

We’re building Synereo so that we can reclaim our sense of agency. So we can use our time and attention to benefit ourselves and our communities.

Help us take back these social spaces. Help us make a difference.

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Originally published at blog.synereo.com on November 14, 320.