Time is on your site - the journey continues
Free choice. Is it free? If it is, how free is it? How much control do we have over the choices we make and how much influence do others hold over our decisions. The line is fuzzy at best. We make our decisions on the best information we have but what happens when our information is poor or when it has been compromised, subverted by powers with their own agenda?
Most of us think that when we are sitting at our keyboard we are in control. We choose our path of inquiry and play. Keyboard warriors that Mad Max our way through the apocalyptic jungle that is the internet. We gather information and use it to learn what is correct and make the decisions that guide our actions. No one can trap us, we have seen it all and here we are, free.
The internet promised freedom. It promised connection. It promised opportunity. And it delivered. Just not to the average user. For the marketers, the governments, the media and the propaganda machines the internet delivered big time. An enormous audience, granular data, targetable sectors, enemy and ally compartmentalised and 24/7 availability to the audience. It granted near unlimited access to us, humanity. Our desires and habits, our questions and preferences all catalogued and ordered into a bundle that can be pulled apart and investigated, or sold for profit to the next group with an agenda. Our attention is the gateway and access to our information the commodity.
Each page is engineered by a team of psychologists, behavioural experts, UI designers and nudge experts all pouring through the data to find new ways to keep us on their platform, their app. Anything that can call more of our attention away, engage our eyes, minds and emotions. Every trick in the book is possible as in this arena, there are no international conventions, no war crime tribunals, no one keeping track of the detriment poured upon the audience, the harm to our world.
But of course there can't be, because to have so would require self-regulation as the providers and collectors themselves are the only ones with the access and capabilities to organise it. And why would they? they are in competition for our attention with the other players, slowing down, regulating, concerning themselves with our well-being will lose them ground, lose our attention as it is pulled by those that choose not to play fair. So, a continual ramping up of techniques, a nuclear style proliferation to secure our attention, a no holes barred drive to be the first to secure and the last standing.
And we don't see it as the information we get is passed through the same machines. The war machines that instead of land and natural resources, they fight for our time, our thoughts, our lives. They tempt us and polarise us, they gamify interactions and track our social connections. They instill themselves into our lives, make their values our own and then sell their wares. And we buy, we invest, we consume. Time is sunk deeper and deeper into a world designed with the express purpose of gaining more of our time. That is the metric, keep them entertained longer than the next. And whoever does this the best, wins.
But where does it lead?
Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]
This is an ongoing post that I aim to have each as a stand alone piece that will loosely fit with the next. I will not post these every day but as I work on them. Hopefully you will enjoy them and come on the journey and explore with me, if only out of morbid curiosity.