How can we defend ourselves from the new plague of “human fracking”? | technology

IIn the past fifteen years, an interconnected series of unprecedented technologies has changed the in-person experience in much of the world. It is estimated that approximately 70% of the Earth’s population currently owns a smartphone, and these devices make up approximately 95% of the Internet access points on the planet. Globally, on average, people seem to spend approx half their waking hours They look at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is much higher.

History teaches us that new technologies always make new forms of exploitation possible, and this basic truth has been strikingly embodied in the society-wide emergence of digital platforms. It was driven by a brilliant new way to extract money from humans: it was called “human fracking.” Just as oil frackers pump high-pressure, mass-produced cleaners into the ground to force a little black gold that can be liquefied to the surface, so human frackers pump high-pressure, mass-produced cleaners into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive waste and maximally destructive user-generated content), to force human interest to the surface, where they can collect it and transport it to market.

Fracking (of the Earth and our minds) leads to tectonic instability, toxicity, and the plundering of our natural and social landscapes. We now know that the reckless exploitation of our external environment has been so relentless and irresponsible that human survival on Earth is in actual danger. The new “gold rush” in internal The environment of the human psyche is on its way to causing a parallel, if more insidious, destruction.

The risks are existential. This is because our actual human “interest”, which is what the oil makers want, in the form of our eyes on their screens, is nothing less than our ability to care, our ability to think, our ability to give our minds and our time and our senses to ourselves, to the world and to each other. Commodifying this means commodifying our very beings. The problem is not “phones,” and it is not “social media.” The problem is human fracking, a globe-spanning land grab in human consciousness that Big Tech treats as a vast unclaimed territory, ripe for plunder and empire.

This is the bad news. the good The news is that new forms of exploitation produce new forms of resistance. What fills the coffers of the six largest companies on the planet is nothing but the stuff of our humanity. That is to say, this new struggle for our attention stands in a long line of clashes between those who are willing to reduce people (their labor, their eyeballs) to monetary value and those who insist on a higher vision of human flourishing. This history is long, complex, and often painful. But it tells us a lot: We can fight. In fact, we should.

So what should we do about this new kind of human exploitation that is harming us – harming children and adults, harming our deliberative politics and psychological well-being? Regulatory efforts are fragmented and actively thwarted by existing powerful interests. Psychopharmacological repairs to expanding damage only transform the devastation in a complementary way and make us more capable of undergoing conditions that are clearly incompatible with human flourishing. How do we confront a problem that is both indescribably intimate and unimaginably wide-ranging?

The answer is clear: we, the actual people on this planet, must come together in decisive solidarity; We must say no to human shale oil makers, and do so by insisting, in new ways, that human interest is human interest, it is ours, and we will use it to make the worlds we want to live in. In other words, we need to a movement.

Think this sounds fancy? Well, keep in mind that this is how actual change happens. It can happen quickly. The environmental movement as we know it did not exist in 1950, but by 1970 it had become a global force. In 1946, Reynolds Tobacco Company was using doctors to promote cigarettes. Less than twenty years later, the American Medical Association and the US Surgeon General publicly confirmed that smoking causes lung cancer.

And the changes become much greater. Few philanthropists devoted themselves to environmental policy in 1925. This is because “environmental policy” did not even exist. It took a cultural shift (and the work of advocates like Rachel Carson) across the mid-twentieth century to establish the physical environment—the unity of land, water, and air that produces common life—as a politically movable object around which diverse groups could organize themselves. This means that the structures of politics themselves, not just our beliefs and hopes, are themselves emergent forms. New things come into being, old things pass away.

In terms of interest, there is increasing evidence that we have reached an inflection point. People of all kinds, MAGA Republicans and MMD progressives, Portland hipsters and Arkansas evangelicals – People who do not agree with it anything In fact, everyone agrees that there is something quite wrong in a world where everyone spends almost all of their time endlessly scrolling through their social media algorithmic feeds, a world where military technology and trillion-dollar corporations target children, feeding them whatever it takes to keep them addicted.

You can only offend people so much, and then, eventually, they turn around, rise up, and stick with it Another thing. Politicians on the right and left have already begun to identify this issue as one that moves voters. In 30 years, we will look back, and it will be difficult to explain this era — the Wild West of the success of the tech princes in our hearts, souls, and relationships — to our grandchildren. “How did you all let this happen?” They will ask. And we have to say: “It’s hard to explain: it happened before we noticed it; it was very interesting, especially at first; it took us time to figure out what was happening…”

But we’re finding out. We write as representatives of a fast-growing and increasingly well-organized movement focused on confronting human shale oil makers and shaping a new politics of human concern. At the heart of our efforts? Form broad coalitions dedicated to the politics of human interest, practice diverse forms of study that call on the life-giving powers of the mind and senses, and foster safe spaces to protect and cultivate the kinds of interest that make life good. We call this action the activity of interest.

Our claim? We all already have the tools to resist fracking, because we all already have things to do and care about that put us beyond the reach of algorithms. We all know the deeper truth: true human concern not so Tap and swipe for screen time. True human interest is love, curiosity, daydreaming, and concern for ourselves and others.

Yes, new technologies give rise to new types of exploitation and resistance. But new forms of exploitation can give rise to new forms of politics. You cannot brutalize the industrial proletariat in front of the factory system. Steam engines set the conditions for this development. They were not themselves a “problem,” of course; They sparkled and were precise and powerful. Who can see them working without awe? But they also created a world where it was possible to collect and extract physical labor from human beings in a revolutionary way. And along the way, they created a new kind of political subject, Homo economicusa person who, in modernity’s calculations, has been reduced to the “value of labor.” Actual revolutions followed – and a new kind of politics was born that reflected a new world of industrial work and new forms of labor solidarity, such as unions and labor parties.

The new regime of human fracking turns us all into subjects of interest in a powerful new way. Homo atentus It is the end user of every network system – economic, political and transit. With this new form of life, as we discover, comes terrible new vulnerabilities. But we are about to understand the new power we have in the poor lands. We believe that a new kind of politics is on the horizon. What will it look like? It’s hard to say. There are reasons to be afraid. But if we, the people, can carry the banner of a new kind of freedom movement – a movement for the true freedom of caring itself, then what we call Sharpness And with a new understanding of the risks, we can challenge the shale makers and insist on creating a human world together.

Dr Graham Burnett He is a professor of history at Princeton University. Alyssa Loh He is a filmmaker. Peter Schmidt is a writer and organizer. The authors are members of the Friends of Concern Alliance, and co-editors of interest! Statement of the Concern Liberation Movement (private).

Further reading

The Anxious Generation: How Childhood Rewired Is Driving an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin, £10.99)

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (Melville House, £14.99)

Siren Call: How Concern Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes (UK author, £16.99)