Power to the people: how breaking free of algorithmic chains is the only way to end our digital stupor

When Bob Dylan sang The Times They Are A-Changin way back in 1964, he had no idea how profound his lyrics would one day be. 

When people find the very breath they’re taking monitored and analysed without their knowledge, you know times are indeed changing. 

These revelations were reported in ProPublica in 2018 and describe how Americans with sleep apnoea discovered the CPAP breathing machines that helped them sleep at night were secretly sending usage data to health insurers who used it to decide insurance payments. 

Civilisation is in the middle of a transition from a 20th century analogue society to a 21st century digital one and what was once recognisable is now different to anything that’s gone before.

A major knowledge gap has arisen between those who know all about us – the technology giants – and the rest of us who know nothing about them. 

When knowledge is power, this is a frightening concept and one that formed the recent testimony to politicians on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law by former Google designer Tristan Harris.

One year on from his last appearance before Senators, the campaigner for the overhaul of digital technology and social media, outlined two dystopian paths ahead:

• One that will install a Chinese ‘Orwellian’ brain implant into society with authoritarian controls, censorship and mass behaviour modification.
• The other that will install a US/Western ‘Huxleyan’ societal brain implant that saturates us in distractions, outrage and trivia until we amuse ourselves to death.

Harris is at the forefront of a movement that claims technology is eroding the fundamental organs of society including journalism. 

The digital take over and smart devices have set the race for attention spinning out of control, a phenomenon summed up nicely by the CEO of Netflix who said his biggest competitors are Facebook, YouTube and… sleep.

The pernicious creep of the addiction business model 

While the mainstream news publishers are left floundering in advertising wilderness having lost to Google and Facebook, Harris says the real issue is not the advertising model but the entire design model of what Silicon Valley does.

Human attention has become a highly valued commodity but no one is monitoring the ‘race to the bottom of the brain stem’ inherent in the digital techniques used to trigger outrage and anger, the emotions necessary to attract eyeballs. 

This race involves scrutinising people’s online lives and predicting what they’ll do next so an algorithm can intervene and shepherd them towards a specific action, one that helps boost someone’s profit margin.

If this is allowed to continue unimpeded the very future of humanity is at stake. If that sounds alarming, it’s because it is. But while Harris’s projections are grim, he sets forth a number of solutions. 

First let’s look at what got us here:

• The digital takeover has taken place at a rapid speed 
• We have freely given away personal data and integrated social platforms so fully into our lives we can’t figure out how to break free 
• We hear how our data is being used to manipulate us and change our behaviour but we feel powerless at what to do about it.

‘We don’t find it radical to ban the sale of parts of ourselves like human organs,’ Harris says on his podcast Your Undivided Attention: Mr Harris Zooms to Washington. ‘We shouldn’t find it radical to ban the sale of human behaviour which is the business model of all of the attention companies: TikTok, Facebook, Google, Instagram. That business model is turning humans into a domesticated species that’s incompatible with a civilisation that can survive.’

A business model that preys on human attention means people are worth more as human beings when we’re addicted, outraged, polarised, tribal, anxious, narcissistic and disinformed. It means the model has been successful at steering our attention using automation. 

And while we’re busy feeling those emotions, we’re distracted from serious existential threats like misinformation, the rise of China and climate change. 

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