Month: June 2021

From critic Roger Ebert’s 1997 review of the science fiction movie Gattaca, released in the same year, whose plot involves the use of genetic engineering to create designer humans:

When parents can order “perfect” babies, will they? Would you take your chances on a throw of the genetic dice, or order up the make and model you wanted? How many people are prepared to buy a car at random from the universe of all available cars? That’s how many, I suspect, would opt to have natural children.

Everybody will live longer, look better and be healthier in the Gattacan world. But will it be as much fun? Will parents order children who are rebellious, ungainly, eccentric, creative, or a lot smarter than their parents are? There’s a concert pianist in “Gattaca” who has 12 fingers. Don’t you sometimes have the feeling you were born just in time?

Quoted in The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

The neurologist Oliver Sacks, in a posthumously published piece, describes what he sees as the damage wrought by smartphones:

I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see… by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale… I dare to hope that, despite everything, human life and its richness of cultures will survive, even on a ravaged earth.

I understand how the technology and electronics industry spends unimaginably large amounts of money and manpower to keep us in a state of perpetual distraction, a state in which they can leech data and serve ads throughout the day. We have examined this both on this site and on Reclaim Attention.

At the same time, I don’t think it’s a problem for people to spend their time in multiple online and ‘real-life’ spaces simultaneously. In fact, we are often different people in different spaces at the same time.

Dr. Sacks termed this a neurological catastrophe. I think this rapid rewiring of our brains is a neurological revolution. The young don’t retain facts, phone numbers, commitments because the internet and their devices do. And that’s ok. As is the fact that "a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort."

It’s also why I think the high-level assumptions underlying the design of features like Apple’s Screen Time and its Android equivalent are fundamentally flawed: the amount of time spent on one’s devices is not inherently inversely correlated with mental health, and I suspect the younger you are the more obvious this is.

As I’ve written earlier, our online lives are an escape from the dreariness of our daily lives – even when in school. They’re safe spaces for marginalised people. They’re stages on which to express our talents, however well or poorly. They’re rabbit-holes down which we indulge our curiosities. They’re 24×7 telegraph and long-distance lines over which to sustain and deepen relationships with people no longer a few streets away.

I think we’re only now realising that globalisation is as true for human attention as it was for goods.

The writer Ryan Holiday, in a post titled “The Definition of Success Is Autonomy”

Today, I don’t define success the way that I did when I was younger. I don’t measure it in copies sold or dollars earned. I measure it in what my days look like and the quality of my creative expression: Do I have time to write? Can I say what I think? Do I direct my schedule or does my schedule direct me? Is my life enjoyable or is it a chore? In a word: autonomy. Do I have autonomy over what I do and think? Am I free?

For my entire career, I’ve made decisions based on what I now call optimising for optionality, the ability to pick and choose what I want to spend time, money, attention on.

That means avoiding and eliminating long-term commitments, thinking very carefully about what to commit to, but then committing to those fully.

This means disappointing people, not least myself, and letting go of relationships. But I’m in control of my time most of the time, which is what’s important to me.

And autonomy is optionality by a different name. It’s why I get instinctively what Holiday’s talking about.

I’d recommend having a solid optimisation function for your life. And revisit it every year.

(via Jeannette)

Towards the end of a truly long, revealing and upsetting journey through the world of TikTok influencers:

One thing that is so reliably upsetting about spending time with these social-media influencers is that they are all so garrulous and kind that for a minute you can’t help feel that they actually like you and enjoy having you around. The boys continue to refer to me by my on-court cognomen, Beanie Barrett, and they punctuate this endearment by enlisting me in several complicated handshakes, which makes me feel like a high school freshman.

But it’s especially discomfiting to realize that the influencers have a tendency to treat virtually everyone in their social orbit with the same kind of backslapping effervescence with which they have treated me, and that this stems from their inexorable online habit of entreating their viewers to like and leave comments on all their social-media posts, not because they’re sincerely interested in what their followers have to say, but because this kind of “engagement” with their content is the sole barometer by which brands—i.e., their employers—determine their online relevance.

… I watched a group of computer engineers hold a meeting in a drab hotel on Edgware Road, London, which discussed whether or not to introduce new internet protocols to counter hacks on western utilities such as energy systems.

For hours, they debated an anti-hacking protocol with the unwieldy name “draft-rhrd-tls-tls13-visibility-01”. Then came the moment of truth: a white-bearded engineer named Sean Turner solemnly addressed the crowd: “Please hum now if you support adoption [of this tool].”

A collective hum, like a Tibetan chant, erupted, and then Turner asked those who opposed the move to hum as well. A second — far louder — sound erupted. “So at this point there is no consensus to adopt this,” he declared. The protocol was put on ice.

This might seem odd; after all, the Internet Engineering Task Force is the group that built the internet and computer geeks appear to live in a “rational”, maths-based world. But the IETF has embraced this “fuzzy” ritual in recent years because the techies like being able to sense the mood of the entire group via humming — and get the type of multidimensional information that simple “yes-no” votes cannot reveal.

Indeed, these engineers are so attached to this ritual that they were very upset when they lost the ability to hum together during the Covid-19 lockdown — and although they tried to replicate what they liked about group humming with computer code, they realised it was impossible.

– The human factor — why data is not enough to understand the world