In this 1/3/25 NYT article MSNBC’s Chris Hayes discusses how corporations monetize user attention, and the lengths they will go to to get it. He finds that tension between attention and boredom is an entertainment goldmine. Overtly, we are psychologically manipulated for profit. It’s legal and profitable, but it’s not ethical.
Hayes talks about how to avoid being used this way, mostly by cutting time online to let the mind calm down — how to avoiding getting all stressed out like the Bisy Backson in Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh Our culture has been practicing hyperactivity for a long time. Technology takes it hyper-hyper 😏.
Screens being deadly to kids, many schools have banned phones in the classroom, embracing the age-old principle of quieting the mind and focusing extended attention. Opening the mind in order to deeplay absorb material and relationships. See Jonathan Haidts work on Phone Free Schools for a deep dive.
From the frontspiece of Stand Out of Our Light by James Williams, “Liberating human attention from the forces of intelligent persuasion may therefore be the defining moral and political task of the Information Age.” Facebook is not helping kids to meditate and live more quietly inside their heads! Tragic really.
Our current, overridingly profit-driven incentives are wrong. Financial vs. ethical again. The two are so often at odds, one wonders if capitalism and humanism are fundamentally incompatible — leading inevitably to ethical conflict (and often outright slaughter, e.g., for land and oil). But if not avaricious self interest, then what? If everyone drives that way in traffic, it’s kill or be killed.
Meanwhile, non-profit human service agencies struggle to be band aids while government funding goes to for-profit insurance. Here’s another post on the Steward for-profit health care catastrophe.
Whate are alternative, stakeholder-centered social contracts for the 21st century?
Not fascism, not communism, not beurocratic and ineffecient socialism, not oligarchy, corrupt democracy, military rule, or anarchy.
Seriously, what are practical and peaceful changes we could make to our thinking that might channel each human’s existential drive for self-preservation into cooperation and peace? How do we move toward authentic liberal pluralism — freedom of speech, movement, and belief, all while navigating the American stew of clashing cultures? How do we take steps now toward dialog, trust, and collaboration?