How has your work changed your relationship to technology?
I don't have a smartphone. My attention is one of the most important resources I have, and the smartphone is constantly trying to grab my attention. There's always something coming in.
I don't have a smartphone. My attention is one of the most important resources I have, and the smartphone is constantly trying to grab my attention. There's always something coming in.
I
try to be very careful about how I use technology and really make sure
that I'm using it for the purposes that I define instead of allowing it
to kind of shape my purposes for me. That sometimes happens when you
open the computer: you have a couple of minutes to spare, so you start
just randomly browsing through YouTube, and two hours later, you're
still there watching all types of funny cat videos, car accidents, and
whatever. You did not say to yourself, "Okay, I want to spend the next
two hours watching these videos." The technology kind of dictated to you
that this is what you're going to do by grabbing your attention in such
a forceful way that it can kind of manipulate you.
How has removing those attention-grabbing technologies changed your quality of life?
I have much more time. I think it makes a much more peaceful… I mean, it's not such a big secret. The way to grab people's attention is by exciting their emotions, either through things like fear and hatred and anger, or through things like greed and craving. If somebody [is] very afraid of immigrants and hates immigration, the algorithm will show him one story after the other about terrible things that immigrants are doing. Then somebody else maybe really, really doesn't like President Trump, so they spend hours watching all kinds of things that make them very, very angry. And it doesn't matter if it's true or not—they see this headline of “President Trump Said the World is Flat,” they feel this irresistible urge to click on it.
I have much more time. I think it makes a much more peaceful… I mean, it's not such a big secret. The way to grab people's attention is by exciting their emotions, either through things like fear and hatred and anger, or through things like greed and craving. If somebody [is] very afraid of immigrants and hates immigration, the algorithm will show him one story after the other about terrible things that immigrants are doing. Then somebody else maybe really, really doesn't like President Trump, so they spend hours watching all kinds of things that make them very, very angry. And it doesn't matter if it's true or not—they see this headline of “President Trump Said the World is Flat,” they feel this irresistible urge to click on it.
It grabs your attention because you already have
this weakness. But if you kind of sit there and just read infuriating
stories for an entire hour you are basically feeding your mind with
things that make you more angry and hateful. And this is especially bad
if many of these stories are just not true. Sometimes they are true,
quite often they're not. But the net result is that you now just spent
an hour feeding your hate and your fury.
It's
the same way with the other side of the coin, with greed. Because if
you really want something—the perfect body, the perfect car—and you
watch all these videos, you want it more and more. And if you don't have
it, then you feel worse and worse that you don't have this kind of
body, or you don't have this kind of car. So you just spent one hour
feeding your cravings and your greed, and it's really not good for you.
The
better you know yourself, the more protected you are from all these
algorithms trying to manipulate you. If we go back to the example of the
YouTube videos. If you know “I have this weakness, I tend to hate this
group of people,” or “I have a bit obsession to the way my hair looks,"
then you can be a little more protected from these kinds of
manipulations. Like with alcoholics or smokers, the first step is to
just recognize, “Yes, I have this bad habit and I need to be more
careful about it.”
So how do you get your news?
I rarely follow the kind of day-to-day news cycle. I tend to read long books about subjects that interest me. So instead of reading 100 short stories about the Chinese economy, I prefer to take one long book about the Chinese economy and read it from cover-to-cover. So I miss a lot of things, but I'm not a politician and I’m not a journalist, so I guess it's okay I don't follow every latest story.
via GQ
I rarely follow the kind of day-to-day news cycle. I tend to read long books about subjects that interest me. So instead of reading 100 short stories about the Chinese economy, I prefer to take one long book about the Chinese economy and read it from cover-to-cover. So I miss a lot of things, but I'm not a politician and I’m not a journalist, so I guess it's okay I don't follow every latest story.
via GQ
