In some odd way it feels as though this is a piece I’ve been writing, or been struggling to, for 5 years or more at this point. I’ve recorded podcasts, some released some not, written extensively in private and typed out lengthy c++ introductions on this topic more times than I recall. While the world and the internet have been evolving and chugging along, I’ve seemingly been stuck figuring out where I am in all of this mess. As a young person I’ve had access to the better parts of the internet for most of my conscious life and have witnessed its iterations and attempts to keep itself running and growing. Through all the semi-Darwinistic, oddly regulated and generally bizarre circumstances, the internet has emerged into what seems to be a much more bureaucratic, less inventive and bright-eyed iteration of its former self. While this may not capture the whole expanse of what could be called “the internet” it does at least capture in some way, the mutations effecting the primary hubs and channels of consequence. While I am certainly too young and not well-read enough to generate a proper historical analysis of the internet beginning with its inception, I do hope to shine a light on some problem areas within the realm of my own experience and highlight areas where I think we might benefit from change. Introductions aside, let’s get in the water.
As a young child, many of my interactions with the internet were accompanied by large stacks of paper pertaining to blockbuster rented games that I printed out known as “walkthroughs” and watching low resolution, 6 or 7 minute clips of anime on youtube back in the days where every content creator had a theme song. In school, the ol’ “50 pound monitor” was used primarily for accessing 1 or 2 atrociously laid out .org sites where information needed for some assignment would often load slowly enough to take the whole study session. While these experiences are perhaps not uncommon for the time, the arc of my life growing up was apparently geared such that I noticed a stark shift as we moved into the era of smart phones and what we thought was just faster internet. Initially, computers started as large awkward devices you would use in the middle of your living room when you needed to complete a specific task. They acted as the usual sort of extended phenotypic creation, the internet being of little exception, where you would access information or “finish the job” and bring back the result into physical space. With things like the smart phone and the emergence of pocket computers and cheaper, less cumbersome devices comes a more integrated experience with the internet and technology. Of course I needn’t cover any of this, we were probably all there for most of this, but bringing attention to the concept of having the natural world replaced with a digital one, seems important as it’s a phenomenon we are still slowly noticing.
While the technology has been evolving and changing the way that people can interact with the internet and various services, so too have the models of the companies and service providers behind the curtains of our favorite digital experiences. With the coalition of psychologists, hypnotists, and magicians the masters of the mind and attention and the some of the brightest technologists and business folks, comes the engineering of an attention economy. Of course “attention economy” is more or less a buzzword at this point, but it serves as a nice mental image for monetization based around controlling what people look at, click on, and more disturbingly think about, who they vote for, what they wear, say or do and what have you. I’m not here to make any conspiratorial arguments or even to suggest that these companies are masterminded by the worst people, because I don’t actually think that. I think the incentives have perhaps unintentionally or coincidentally led companies, individuals and software alike to optimize for making money in ways often not aligned with human flourishing. Before any eye rolling I too am of an entrepreneurial mind and understand the beauty of the anti-regulateable and free flowing nature of technology, but this has its issues. It’s simply impractical for the 60 something regulators to pay attention long enough or become informed enough to actually pull the breaks before we hit a few things. Many people believe the set of issues discussed here to be overblown, but consider when was the last time you read a physical book to know something? What year might you have read something like this essay on actual paper with some regularity? How many times have you checked your phone for something that wasn’t actually important since you started reading this? We’ve all been signed up for a human experiment none of us could have been thoroughly informed about. The line between the organic world and the virtual has become hazy enough that we have little awareness about when we are in one or the other, or both.
I want to now take some time to go over some of the things that I am not saying or that are not motivating me to write this essay. One, no I don’t think we should all spend 1 hour per day on electronics or encourage throwing our cell phones in the ocean. Two, I don’t think Zuckerberg or Dorsey are actually bad people, or people with nefarious intentions, but rather that they, like all of us, are in over their heads in one way or another. Three, I do not claim to have the correct answers to the problems I think we face. Perhaps the most important worry I have is that it feels like we have few competent and influential people with differing viewpoints, that the current leading tech people actually listen to and have to take seriously, or that have their own incentives aligned graciously. We really need more than Tristan Harris and 3 people outside institutions, engineering competitive solutions to our current problems at the level of business models, and while some of it is private, I don’t see enough happening at the moment. It’s not enough to talk about how a model is flawed or dangerous if we don’t offer any working alternatives. While leaders may not be evil, the human brain has truly mastered rationalization and cognitive dissonance. The more brilliant among us are generally proportionally brilliant at convincing themselves that they are right, and convincing others to agree with them.
The last worthwhile thing to do in this piece, that serves really as an introduction to this topic, is to layout some of the things I think we need to address/change. From my point of view we need to create some alternative system that is aligned with what the user actually wants from an experience and work on many fronts to make this happen. This requires us to act on the technology and the software layer, the socio-cultural layer, and the political, economic and regulatory layers as far as I can tell. While I’ve been working on the concepts and preliminaries of such a model for a while, I’ll discuss that elsewhere when it’s more flushed out to avoid offering half-baked ideas. One thing that I do think is worth talking a little bit about however, is the importance of getting our philosophy around bias down to something more workable. We speak about bias as an essentially uncontrollable thing and then fail to notice that our attempts to “open up a broader conversation” are actually just us forcing our nice and neat biases on other people. Whatever bias we decide to have, being able to think critically about what it means to us and how we want to work around it is really important. Really bias, in my mind, is a more negative way of capturing the manifestation of values and knee-jerk reactions, without recognizing the humanity and inevitability as well as the virtuous side of certain biases. A bias towards thinking in probabilities and utilizing a data driven, scientific-method based approach to the world is probably a good bias. A bad bias that often accompanies the last, is foisting our conclusions onto others and forgetting that we can be wrong and even unpopular ideas may yet have value if taken seriously. While the list of areas to address could certainly turn this into its own book, I think I will instead leave my thoughts and analysis of those things for some other pieces.
Hopefully this was not merely redundant for those thinking about this stuff and provided some useful food for thought. Thank you for taking the time to indulge these ramblings.
Be Well,
Orion Aeneas Webster
Fourtheye author
FourthEye 
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