Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about people and individuality. I’ve been going through some personal stuff about loneliness and people; I miss my friends. I’ve been thinking about how it’s become easier for me to stay in touch with them asynchronously through the Internet. Its advancements, even tiny ones like a new emoji, let me express myself better and stay as close as possible to the people I love. This is utility; technology offers me utility, and how great the world would have been if people had just stuck to providing utility when necessary and making profits out of it. Not creating illusions of necessity and profiting from them. The human mind, as I keep saying, works in mysterious ways.
In school, I learned that humans have three basic needs: food, clothing, and shelter. We created everything else we currently have for utility and survival to help us rule over the earth. But its progression has led to a place where I’m afraid that we might have become the ruled. In the industrial age, when we invented machines and stuff, there was so much skepticism and fear that these machines would make manpower obsolete, but we still rely on manpower, and we will continue to do so. There is a lot of research going on AI that can take ownership and work independently; I saw self-driving cars on the streets with my own eyes (I still haven’t recovered from this). Still, behind these cars, there is always a group of people monitoring them and ready to take over quickly if something wrong happens. As far as I’m aware, significant research is being conducted in human-AI collaboration, and researchers still need to improve to increase human trust in AI systems and figure out ways to repair trust. There is so much left to be done before manpower is replaced by machines, and I hope this will lead to a future when a man can be free from physical burden to pursue artistic and intellectual pursuits ( a big dream indeed).
But this progress has led to a much graver concern: losing an individual’s essence. Philosophers have debated so much in the past millennium about what makes us human. Is it our mind, thoughts, or soul, or something more profound and more sacred? As a technologist, I follow the school that says we are what our thoughts make us. It is what offers us perspective, individuality, and identity; our thoughts are where we get our uniqueness from. Of course, we get these thoughts from others through learning and conversations. But it becomes our own when it joins the neural map and is interlinked with existing knowledge, forming abstracts, concepts, beliefs, and values. Our thoughts make us; some of them are others’, and most of them are ours. In an age just a couple of decades ago, we were clearly able to discern which of these thoughts are ours and which aren’t, but today, we’re in an age when most of our thoughts aren’t ours. Most of our beliefs, likes, dislikes, importances, feuds, and values are someone else’s. We hold onto these like breath, yet we do not know why. An individual in a digital age has become and is becoming less and less of himself and more and more of others, like a river that’s constantly polluted because of the numerous creeks and inlets it allows to fill it.
Technology and digital devices ( every device connected to the Internet and can influence you in some way) have disrupted an individual identity to its fundamental core and needs. There is a theory called the ‘Self Determination Theory’ that has numerous ideas about human motivation and determination to achieve something; for our understanding, let’s focus on its definition of three basic psychological needs humans have that motivate them to do anything. I concentrate on this theory primarily because my goal with Intntion is to let people reach where they want to be: this requires motivation and determination. SDT states that intrinsic motivation is more important than external rewards, and that’s where I want to get to. SDT aligns with my goals about Intntion. According to SDT, the following are the three primary psychological needs of humans to achieve something:
-
Autonomy: Feeling like you have a choice and willingly endorsing your behaviour
-
Competence: Experiencing mastery and being effective in your activity
-
Relatedness: Feeling a sense of belongingness and connection with others
SDT proposes that we feel fulfilled or determined to achieve something when we have all three of these. These needs are deeply rooted in the human mind and come from ages of survival learning.
The current state of the digital world disrupts all three to extremes. It provides an illusion of autonomy veiled in personalization and disguised rewards and guilt. It provides competence to the levels where the original skill of any field is so coveted. It raises belongingness and competence to such high levels that it is a deep question whether this is good or bad.
Autonomy is feeling like you have a choice to do things, willingly do something because you need something from it or feel like doing it. Now imagine how many things of this sort you did today; you might have looked at your phone for a while; did you do it because you wanted to do it or just did it out of habit and because you didn’t know what else to do. Personal autonomy has become a myth these days; most of the things you do on the Internet are because you’re being led to do it. Surveillance capitalism and platform capitalism ensure that every step on the Internet is planned so that you feel like you’re in dreamland and every wish of yours is being fulfilled. Did you think about getting a haircut and googled places to go to? You’ll find fantastic deals for haircuts the next time you go online ( it happened to me). Did you think of watching a movie and found your Netflix home page full of stuff you like? Incredible! How many movies did you watch that day? Do you see the pattern here?
You are choosing to do things, but you’re not thinking it through; you’re just clicking the button; the other hundred steps that lead to the creation of that button have already been decided for you. Some of the brightest minds in the world are building the architecture and experiences of the Internet so that you walk where they want you to. Still, you feel you have the autonomy to step out. Every experience is being made friction-free and as easy as possible. And on top of it, gamification is fucking with you up and down. What’s your largest snap streak, and why do you maintain it? Your answer would be that it feels cool to connect with my friends every day, or all of my friends do it. User engagement in Snapchat significantly increased since streaks were introduced, and research shows that this form of gamification is psychologically affecting people through phenomena such as FOMO and security threats. The bottom line is that personal autonomy is a myth these days; with the amount of internet footprint you have left through the years, your patterns and interests can be perfectly predicted. You think you have a choice, you act like you have a choice, but even your choices are predefined and placed for you.
Let’s move on to competence. In recent years, I’ve seen phenomenal growth in the number of self-taught programmers, developers, and writers. I have learned so much online, but do you know where this is leading? It is extremely difficult these days to differentiate between true expertise and assisted expertise ( a term I came up with to define the abilities of people who can do anything as long as they are assisted, especially by AI agents). This is great for improving self-esteem and collective growth, but for an individual, it is not so much. If everyone says they have so many projects online and can write business proposals expertly, how can you differentiate yourself from the crowd? I personally think this is why so many people have trouble finding jobs. True experts are still getting hired, making good money and getting to places. Assisted experts on the other hand, there are so many of them, how do you rate them and how do know which one at least can tell head from tail on their own? While competence is increasing, so are the standards, the latter exponentially. I don’t have a solution to this or a lot on this subject, but there are other experts you can look into if you’re looking to differentiate yourself in an age of true supremacy importance.
Coming to relatedness, my god! There’s so much good out of this; it really hurts me to criticize this development. I can talk to my parents from the other side of the world and stay in touch with friends and other family. I can keep track of what’s happening in their lives. Relatedness has been redefined in so many ways and on so many scales; it’s fascinating and scary. Let’s just see how it’s fucking with us before I feel too guilty. Social media and digital devices have not only made it easy to stay in touch with family but also all the other people in the world. There’s this whole set of people we call influencers, and rightly so, cause they have both direct and indirect effects on us. Beginning from social comparisons, body standards, personal opinions, and achievements, the list goes on to include cultural collectivism, solidarity for idiotic things, and misinformation. The Internet has so many views, and you’re often exposed to such contrasting ones in such sincere tones that you will never know which to believe. I’m not saying the people of the Internet rub their opinions on you. But as humans, it’s impossible to listen to something without pondering or considering it even for a little while. Sometimes, I feel so disgusted with the Internet about where it can go.
I like to think that I have good judgment and choose my influences carefully; that’s because I work on this stuff and have read literature about it. But what about the vulnerable population? What would happen if someone in rural Alaska is exposed to unfair body standards, tries to do something about it, and is adversely affected. Do you know how many stories there are of people doing dangerous things because they saw them on the Internet? I once worked on a project about how mass media influenced Indian Youth on romance standards. What I learned was shocking; such unrealistic expectations are being set in mass media, and people blindly follow them without discerning the truth. I think this is where eve teasing, teenage suicides due to “love failure,” and attacks on women who rightfully refused advances come from when people do not know what influences to follow and what not to. And I don’t even want to step into the psychological effects these mass influences have on self-esteem, respect, identity, individuality, belongingness, bullying, goal setting, and so many aspects of life. The Internet is full of influences, but there is only a very secluded small population that can discern good and bad.
As I said, the fundamental psychological needs of humans are disrupted in such fundamental ways that it is time for caution and awareness. And the important thing is that we cannot remove these completely because they are necessary for our survival. These things have utility, and abstaining from them will be similar to taking an oath of non-violence in the Paleolithic age. You’ll not die or perish but stay where you are and maybe even move backward. Every aspect of life is tied to one of these things, and it’s imperative to use them; it’s important for us to engage and walk with progress. But with caution. It is important to see where you’re going and what you’re doing. It’s essential to recognize your behavior and analyze it. That’s how we grow higher in the digital world.
An individual in the digital age is bombarded with distractions and rewards from the moment they wake up. Some of these are necessary for progress and survival, but most are unnecessary and disguised. All of these are made so that there is minimal friction in entertaining them; a single click is all needed, and you’re down a hole. We must learn to discern what is right and wrong; these are subjective, and we must learn to define what is right and wrong for us in that specific context. When we have so many things to choose from, we are hardwired to go after the brightest and the most rewarding fruit. But to survive and grow in a digital age, it is important to restrain and rely on intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic instantaneous gratification. We must decide what we need, what we follow, and what we retain in life.
So, what should an individual do in such a distracting digital world?? Be intentional about what they do!
References:
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2013). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Springer Science & Business Media.
You can also read the need for intentionality.