In the 1990s, William Shatner, of all people, co-created a series of books called Tekworld. Nine novels, a comic series, a television series and a computer game followed, now pretty much lost to time. The series revolved around a computer simulation through virtual reality, which was also a highly addictive drug, or “tek.” This tek was outlawed for some reason and the series was basically a drug-busting detective story. Or, as Shatner put it, a cross between Star Trek and T.J. Hooker. Er, whatever. What’s interesting here is how the 1990s feared the additive qualities of cyberspace and the virtual. And in the ethics of the 1990s, cyberaddiction was still a moral question. Sort of how our parents used to warn us about hurting our eyes if we sat too close to the tv and how it would rot our brains, that’s the kind of now quaint ethical hesitation that hung over the 1900s nascent internet. The irony is that cyberaddiction turns out to not even be a word that would catch on. The last thing society wants to do is pathologize the internet or false realities. Instead, it trades in simulacrum as a means of social control. Addiction is its very trade, the hunger fueling the clicks, the clicks fueling the net wealth of the Silicon Valley titans. Monopoly capitalism has in essense been revivified by the internet, and it does this by flooding the entire culture with voluminous content. The more addictive and click-baity the better.
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Tantalizing news segments promising another hit of endorphins, the addictive rage machine. Keep clicking, keep tuning in. Same for facebook and it’s keep the good times scrolling mentality. The more you hate, the more you click, the more you click, the more they know about you, the more they get you to hate. It’s an insidious pattern.
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I’ve noticed too that the same is true with streaming. Netflix is promoting something like 600 television programs a year internationally. Not films, television series. This is their strategy – throw us everything in the world and something will stick, something will land and gobble up our time. And the new model of series is built on advanced analytics to keep a catered audience watching. The term binging is apt, having likeness to a drinking habit.
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The electric games industry is the same. No longer can you pick up a video game and get a quick result, you have to have a subscription, indulge in micro transactions, side quests, fetch quests, gather trophies, share achievements, just keep clicking, keep playing. The hallmark of last year’s big game, Red Dead Redemption II is that its world was so big, so detailed, so beautiful, so complete, taking thousands of people many years to complete it rivaled the Great Wall of China in man hours. Is it all too much? Too much game? We don’t need to know that a pretend horse’s nuts shrink in the cold. We don’t need any of this.
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As seductive as these binge shows and micro transactions and clicks are, in quiet moments, I feel the pull. One that marks me not just as a consumer but the consumed. Consumed by whatever I’m focused on. The pull is FOMO, fear of missing out. The wired life has become like Pac-Man, running a maze, eating data, chased by ghosts of fear and desire, lost lives and lost time.
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So I made a choice. I’m cutting back. And cutting back hard from the whole click world and binge-watching lifesuck. I’m not doing online commenting entrapment. I’m not watching all those certified fresh must-watch shows that clog up my impossibly long watch list. Not because I don’t want to but because they’d have to be earth-shatteringly good to really get my attention. I’ve seen it all before. Most aren’t really that good. But most of all because I resent these shows insisting on themselves. I resent having to click to the next episode, being asked to keep watching, keep clicking. I want to be able to watch a single story in one sitting. So I prefer – vastly prefer – movies. The acting, writing, directing, production – all superior. Classic, rare, foreign, indie, big event movie, whatever. Average of two hours and one whole story is done. I don’t need a second episode. I don’t need a sequel to tell me a secondary character’s back story or spin off into areas it didn’t need to go.
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Philosophy professor Rick Roderick said the mass machine can do anything you want, fulfill any desire, any need, except tell you how to turn it off. And to unplug altogether, this is indeed an option, but at the risk of not knowing what the hell is going on. Well tell you what, the world is now so saturated with shows and information and omnipresent infotainment that no one still knows anything. No two people watch the same show any more, or even the same news. The problem isn’t the lack of information, it’s the problem of too much information and too little of a coherent thread holding it together.
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Besides, one cannot know what’s going on in the world from the television. In fact, I credibly believe that those who watch television news know less about facts in the real world than someone who doesn’t watch at all. Reading the news on the other hand, and reading news from actual credible resources, invites critical thinking about material.
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Not watching television at all has the added benefit of being totally ignorant of commercials. I still feel my mind full of commercial jingles from the 1980s. It’s absolutely of no use. Pure twaddle and bullocks invading my brain. I don’t need these word viruses worming their way through my synapses working over my unconscious coercing my behavior.
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And isn’t that what it is? A digital-cybernetic-human loop of coerced behavior turning us from apes to apps? It does as long as it bypasses our frontal lobes and gets a hook in the fear/desire centers of the midbrain, drawing us into its world wide web, prepping us for cyber-drainage. Cyberspace can be an encrypted, anonymous world where people indulge a soup of repressed desires and impulses. Twenty-four hour porn, impulse shopping, impulse voyeurism, hot take memes, flame wars, constant distractibility, constant clicking. Feeding into the cybernetic feedback loop, getting that little feel good bump from a feel good click. Followers of pop psychology, back when the internet was novel, rightfully warned that cyberspace could be an addiction. The more we clicked, the more we fed the system.
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We thought were googling, but it was us who are bamgoogled. We are not the customers of these internet giants. The advertisers are the customers. We are merely the capital. Our clicking is actually the work, our actual contributions to the surveillance economy. They are the hunters, we the hunted. The mandarins of Silicon Valley are on safari and they want your tusk. Each click lines the pockets of Sheryl Sandberg and Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos and their pals a little more.
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Shoshanna Zuboff’s massive book on Surveillance Capitalism unmasks the mechanisms of the new capital. Behavioral capital, profiles Silicon Valley has on us all, sharing office space with the NSA. They mapped our world, both in the streets and in our behaviors. Not only overseeing our behavior, but then predicting and shaping. Eventually predictive analytics made its way to electoral politics. Cambridge Analytica, international troll farms. In the past, capital was created by absorbing nature as real estate. Now real estate has gone virtual, into the cyberaddicted minds of everyone. Facebook makes a fortune by staking claims in our brains.
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Like solving the Riddle of Rumpelstiltskin, the first step a human can do to withstand this onslaught on human freedom is to name it. Zuboff suggests that we have to transcend our assumption that this system is inevitable, synonymous with progress or technology. We’ve conflated our worship of progress and technology with what really is a monopoly capitalist system of wealth extraction. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google – these are the conquistadors who’ve landed on the beaches of our autonomy. They’ve come to take everything they can.
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This system is not invincible. In fact, there is much evidence to point to how dissonant the online world is from the real one. It’s hard to see a positive endgame in this cyber world. The best we can do is shield ourselves from the most negative aspects. The most radical punk thing you can do these days is have a private moment and don’t tell anyone. Take a walk, make your own breakfast, take a bath, go to sleep, pet the dog. Do all your favorite things. But don’t tell anyone. Don’t Instagram it, don’t tweet it, don’t IM. And don’t bring any attention to it in any way. If you have to use the internet, do it purposefully and mindfully. Reclaim cyberspace as a tool for your use, not a system which would seek to exploit you.
A Fragile Dignity 