‘These companies will never restrain themselves’ – Stolen Focus, Chapter 9 Notes

Posted on: June 12, 2022

Last Updated on: June 14th, 2022

Post Category: Book Notes

---

About #onepageonepoint

#onepageonepoint aims to summarise new ideas from books on personal and professional development – with (approximately) one point for each page. Read more about this project here.

Today for #onepageonepoint, we have summary notes for Stolen Focus – for chapter 9: ‘The First Glimpses of the Deeper Solution’.

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learn more about the book, click here.

Chapter 9: ‘The First Glimpses of the Deeper Solution’

• Aza suggested a ban could be made on surveillance capitalism i.e. a ban on any business model that tracks you and sells that data to the highest bidder. Tristan and Aza suggested that this may be possible because similar changes have happened in society – some of these include the ban on lead paints and the ban of CFCs, after society discovered their damaging effect on the human brain and the ozone layer respectively.

• Such a ban would shift these companies to find new funding sources, which may include subscription (where they would work for you instead of advertisers) or (being bought by the government or another entity and taken into) public ownership (where it is made an essential public utility).

• A shift like this will make attention-grabbing features redundant and bring out features that work for the users instead of against them e.g. sending a batch notification instead of notifications as messages come, removing the infinite scroll, recommending less polarising content, slowing down the app whenever your time on the app exceeds your chosen limit, and enforcing good habits by showing social groups you could join to reinforce them.

• Hari reflects on his interviews with Tristan, Aza and Nir: are we overstating the (attention) problem? He proposes (through a thought experiment) that if we recognise the harmful effects of technological distractions and decide to take collective action, there will be less invasion, advertising, less spending and less spying, and if we instead decide to just focus on our individual efforts to overcome these distractions, attention will shrink further and there will be more political extremism.

• During 2020, studies from Facebook (which was leaked to the Wall Street Journal) revealed that ‘their algorithms exploit[s] the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness and if left unchecked the site would continue to pump its users with more and more divisive content in an effect to gain user attention and increase time on the platform’ (Hari 2022, p. 157) – with ’64 percent of all the people joining extremist groups… finding their way to them because Facebook’s algorithm were directly recommending them’ (Hari 2022, p. 157).

• The results from this study and the power of Facebook’s algorithm in promoting extremism, nazism and fascism were dismissed by the Facebook executives and Mark Zuckerberg – who had ‘losing interest in the effort to recalibrate the platform in the name of social good’ (Hari 2022, p. 158).

• Political pessimism (the idea that the systems in place cannot change) keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions to large-scale problems. There needs to be a movement where people demand something better to counteract larger forces e.g. the feminist movement in fighting for equal rights for women.

• We are only at the start of surveillance capitalism; there is now a new technology called ‘style-transfer’ which can mimic how you respond to emails or learn the style of emails that you respond to well, and there is no law to protect you against that.

• In 2015, ‘Facebook… also filed a patent for technology that will be able to detect your emotions from cameras on your laptop and phone’ (Hari 2022, p. 162).

• ‘To one side there is the rapidly escalating power of invasive technologies, which are figuring out how we work and fracking our attention. On the other side, there needs to be a movement demanding that technology works for us, not against us’ (Hari 2022, p. 162).

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learn more about the book, click here.

Interested in reading more? See my notes for Chapter 10.