Taking back control (part 5): the tentacles of the attention industry

Almost three years ago, I decided to write a manifesto detailing how I did – and didn’t – want to use technology. Thus began a series of blog posts; by Part 3 a rosy picture was being painted of how well I was doing. Part 4, the most recent, detailed the biggest remaining pain point as I perceived it (interoperability of messaging systems), and how I had decided to resolve it. That was two years ago¹, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that the story was basically over, and nothing remaining was worth writing a blog post about.

That is not what happened.

To a first approximation I have one device that breaks the manifesto, with its collection of vices, and that is my old Android smartphone, nicknamed “Mind Flayer”, complete with the full set of attention-stealing dopamine-driven apps: Reddit (and its open-source clone Lemmy), YouTube, Instagram, etc. You might remember that in Part 3, I claimed to have switched to a mainline-Linux-based phone, nicknamed “Flumph”, and while that was technically true, Mind Flayer has continued to stick around alongside it, unshakeable in it’s ability to steal my attention, particularly when I have been stressed or otherwise vulnerable. The name “Mind Flayer”, then, after the tentacled monster of Dungeons and Dragons that psychically enslaves people, is more apt than I could ever have imagined when I named the device.

The state of mind this constant attention stealing puts people in is described well by Skye:

I have an itch now to reach for my phone when I hear a notification ding, when I’m stuck on a programming task, when I don’t want to do a chore or worse the hobbies I really enjoy. Because it provides short term satisfication whilst my life (I feel) gets filled with screen time or angst.

Of course, this state is not particularly new. All the way back in 2008, Mark Fisher wrote in his seminal book “Capitalist Realism” about what he called “depressive hedonia”, a state of mind

constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.

But while Fisher’s thesis that depressive hedonia is primarily caused by a rampantly individualistic, consumerist, fatalistic and yet ironically detached society is still true, today’s enablers of depressive hedonia are far more sophisticated in their attention theft than the “Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana” of 2008. Modern attention-stealing mechanisms can learn – and they do so effectively – to do whatever maximises “engagement”, leaving you bored but still paying attention, unable to leave without missing out on what everyone else is seeing, placated but never satisfied.

There is a sense now, too, that just as anti-capitalists must still earn and spend money to eat, those against YouTube (for instance) must still post their video essays on YouTube if they want to reach anyone. Some try, many do reach people, but the power of a platform is that even those against the system work within it and prop it up – just as t-shirts of Che Guevara are made in sweatshops and sold on Amazon.²

But back to the main point of this post, over the past few years and in particular the past few months, I’ve been contemplating how I’d feel if I lost Mind Flayer, or broke it, or otherwise stopped being able to use it. And the more I think, the more I realise that there is one emotion that would dominate all the rest.

Relief. Relief that I would finally be free from its tentacles.

So why don’t I just throw it in the River Cam?

Maria Farrell likens our use of smartphones to an abusive relationship:

They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact – ‘user engagement’ – that keeps their hold on us strong. […] They tell us the onus is on us to manage their behavior. It’s our job to tiptoe around them and limit their harms. Spending too much time on a literally-designed-to-be-behaviorally-addictive phone? […] We just need to use willpower. We just need to be good enough to deserve them.

And look around. Everyone has a smartphone. So it’s probably not so bad, and anyway, that’s just how things work. Right?

The simple fact is that these systems I have been trying to pull away from haven’t let me. Not because of technical limitations, not because of interoperability, not even because the useful parts of their functionality can’t be replaced by other tools. No. Simply because attention stealing systems have brain-invading tentacles specifically designed to be hard to get rid of.

The maddening thing is that there are just one or two things that I do need Mind Flayer for. But having it around in order to do those infrequent things goes about as well as giving a heroin addict unsupervised access to the back room of a pharmacy in case they need some paracetamol.

I have spoken to many people who downplay the threat that surveillance capitalism and these increasingly powerful attention algorithms pose. But I challenge anyone who regularly uses attention stealing platforms: I’m sure you think you can stop any time you want. But really try to go cold turkey. See how easy it is. I’ve seen countless people try and fail, most of all myself.

Many of the posts on this blog are tongue-in-cheek, but when I say this I am deadly serious: attention algorithms are already a threat to our cognitive freedom, and this situation is likely to get orders of magnitude worse in the coming decades.

When I wrote the first draft of this post, I planned to end it with this paragraph:

I would love to throw Mind Flayer in the River Cam. I won’t, because that would be environmentally hazardous littering, but I’ve done what I hope is the next best thing – wiped it clean, and put it at the bottom of a deep drawer where maybe it will finally die.

I wrote those lines before actually taking that step, assuming that in a couple weeks I’d figure out how to export all the data from Mind Flayer, wipe it, and then post this post.

It has now been six months.

I still haven’t wiped it. A full export of the data isn’t as easy as it should be. The tentacles whisper in my ear, telling me I’ll regret it, I need it. Am I stuck in a gothic horror book?

But at last, a stroke of luck, Mind Flayer has partially broken on it’s own. It’s broken in a very convenient way, too – it’s still usable, but only awkwardly: the touchscreen doesn’t work, so i have to plug in a mouse to do anything. This should be enough incentive to stop using it (without losing all the data), but simultaneously, I partially broke Flumph at the software level and have now spent several days in total failing to fix it.

Perhaps it’s not a gothic horror I’m stuck in after all, but a tragicomedy?

Still, although I still use Mind Flayer somewhat, the killing blow has been dealt; its tentacles writhe feebly, unable to keep their hold on my brain, cursed to limp on forever, a parasite without a host.

Hopefully Part 6 won’t take another two years.