The Digital Damage
Wisdom Letter #25 | The One About Our Dystopian Present
What is the first thing you do after waking up every morning?
Think about it, take your time.
Okay, got it.
Now.
What is the last thing you do before going to sleep every night?
Yeah, thought so. Me Too.
We are all in this together. We are all addicted to the cold rectangular slabs of glass in our pockets that we like to call our ‘smart’-phones.
We love the apps installed on our phones. Apps with their endless feeds and ever popping notification messages. The dopamine high we get from them is no less than crack cocaine. No wonder we find ourselves reaching out to unlock our phones at every waking moment throughout the day, many a times more than 100 times a day. And its often without any preconceived intent, so we act almost like zoned out zombies who suddenly gain consciousness in the middle of a 10 minute scrolling session that we never remember starting.
It’s our reptilian brain controlling our hands, and eyes and thumbs. Our prefrontal cortex is often not even aware of these actions. As digital marketing genius Nir Eyal would like to say, we are ‘Hooked’.
Its cliche to attribute our reducing attention spans to the advent of technology and social media. It’s common knowledge now, and we even have plenty of awareness being spread about the problem, as well as work being done to remedy the effects.
But the problem is deeper than just the falling attention span, and there are more sinister powers at play here than just the smart silicon valley kids in hoodies wanting to “change the world”.
Our minds are malleable entities, run by deep seated emotions of fear and anger. They are prone to the simplest of persuasion tactics. Our mind can believe anything that appeals to our tribal instincts, even if its something absurd or irrational.
Marketers have always known this and have utilized this to their agenda. And historically that agenda has been to sell us something harmless like Febreze. Or sometimes, something harmful like Cigarettes.
But with the advent of technology and the ability to gather large amounts of data about our daily mundane interactions on the internet, the malleability of our minds is being used to control what we think and how we think, who we hate, love, and most of all, who we vote for.
The very flexibility and adaptability of mind that helped us in our evolutionary journey and made us into the most dominant species on the planet, is now being used to turn us against each other and break the very fabric of unity and collaboration that defines us as human beings.
We live in a post-truth world where facts don’t matter. We believe what we want to believe, we are truth agnostic in that sense. We accept ideas and opinions which already conform to our own preconceived notions, and we reject ideas that don’t.
And the echo chambers that our favorite apps create for us only harden our belief systems. We are essentially rewiring our brains to forego the most important skill we have learned over 5000 years — Adaptability.
The dystopian future we were scared of a couple of generations ago has arrived. It’s here now and has become our lived present and past. Another instance of the boiling frog syndrome we keep harping on about here every other week.
Today, we talk about the dystopian realities that engulf us, and what we can do to keep our sanity amidst the chaos.
You are the average of the 5 types of content you consume most online.
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