Here goes the tale of two internets. One that fosters connection and community. Another, a battlefield of infinite scroll. Big Tech as its master puppeteer. Holding your attention hostage.
Author, designer, and commentator Tobias Rose-Stockwell believes the dark side is winning. It has been for a long time now. Hollowing our brains out. Our focus in shambles. Dodging the daily onslaught of apps and news feeds. Our empathy and anger at a hair-trigger, spilling over in online shouting matches.
His book Outrage Machine laments tech’s corrosive effects. The cover sums up our predicament – “How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy – And What We Can Do About It”. Stockwell’s personal story is a painful modern parable. Traced back to an innocuous starting point – the purchase of his first smartphone. “I had no idea that it would change my relationship with my brain,” he writes.
In simpler times, focusing our mind was easy. Like crossing an empty street. Stockwell soon noticed that the street was getting very crowded. “I spent thousands of hours caught within the smartphone-enabled dopamine trap attached to my body. I could feel my daily ability to focus narrowed, excised, dissolved, and diminished…”
Years of confusion and distress. Then came the diagnosis – ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder). Studies across the world hint at links between excessive smartphone usage and attention issues. There’s other suggestive evidence. Rise of digital detox. Productivity timers. Sleep sound apps.
Attention is a “non-renewable moment of our finite existence lost,” says Stockwell. And it fell under siege, not by happenstance but design. Between 2009 and 2012, tech companies adopted a slew of features prioritising engagement. More eyeballs for bigger ad dollars. The algorithmic feed. One-click share – a booster shot for viral content. Visible social metrics – likes, retweets, reposts. Suddenly, less birthday posts and brunch selfies. More politics, gossip, viral memes and targeted ads. Every new post inclined to push buttons, trigger the extremes of joy and despair.
The reverberations were not just individual but collective. Conspiracy theories over facts. Misinformation over nuance. Political polarisation over bipartisanship. Cancel culture over compassion. “We see a world under threat: a constant moral assault on our values, a poisonous political landscape, and an abrupt narrowing of our capacity for empathy. These new tools are fracturing our ability to make sense, cohere, and cooperate around the deepest challenges facing our species,” says Stockwell. Now add AI to this boiler room. We get society on a powder keg.
Stockwell remembers the good internet. In his 20s, he backpacked across Asia, stopping to help a village in Cambodia rebuild a reservoir. He emailed his friends across the world. The email went viral and resources poured in. A world before tech used behaviour economics to exploit our darkest impulses. Stockwell joins a chorus of other names – former Googler Tristan Harris, writers Johann Hari and Jonathan Haidt – in calling for a reset of how social networks infiltrate our lives. Echoing Harris, Stockwell writes that our attention comes at a steep cost. “These costs include degrees of human agency – our literal free will.”
On the opposite end are pundits like Nir Eyal. Who contend that the agency is all ours. Tech can never dominate us unless we let it do so. Stockwell thinks this public hashing out is important. The more we peek behind the online curtain, the better we see the traps set for us. “The internet, in its current form, is built for fast thinking, fast responses.” Recognising its conceit can restore us back to a “high agency state”. And begin to repair everything it broke.
Tobias Rose-Stockwell’s takedown of our digital environment comes to SYNAPSE, asking critical questions. What happens when our brains are controlled by black screens? Can tech platforms tame their destructive instincts? What is the cascading fallout of this collective loss of focus – to societies, to economies, to democracies? And how can we reclaim this non-renewable asset, to reorder our minds and our republics?
