Recently I’ve been thinking a lot of 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 its become easier for me to stay in touch with them asynchronously through the internet. Its advancements, even tiny ones like a new emoji lets 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 it people had just stuck to providing utility when necessary and making profits out of it. Not creating illusions of necessity and profiting off of it. Human mind, as I keep saying works in mysterious ways.
In school I learnt that humans have three basic needs: food, clothing and shelter. Everything else we currently have, we created it for utility and survival, to help us rule over the earth. But it’s 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 will make man power 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), but behind these cars there always a group of people monitoring them, and ready to take over quickly if something wrong happened. As far as I’m aware significant research is being conducted in Human AI collaboration and researchers are still struggling to increase human trust on AI systems and figuring out ways to repair trust. There is so much left to be done before man power is replaced by machines, and I hope this will lead to a future when 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, the loss of an individuals essence. Philosophers have debated so much in the past millennium about what makes us human, is it our mind, our thoughts or our soul or is it something deeper and more sacred. As a technologist I follow the school that says we are what our thoughts make us. I believe it is what offers us perspective, individuality and identity, our thoughts is where we get the uniqueness from. Of course we get these thoughts from others, through learnings and conversations. But it becomes our own when it joins the neural map and is interlinked with previous existing knowledge, forming into abstracts, concepts, beliefs and values. Our thoughts make us, some of it is others’ and most of it is 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 itself and 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 rivulets and inlets that it allows to fill it.
Technology and digital devices ( every device that is connected to the internet and has the ability to influence you in some way) have disrupted an individual identity to its fundamental core and needs. Psychology has a theory called the ‘Self Determination Theory’, it posits numerous ideas about human motivation and determination to do something, for our understanding lets just focus on its definition of three basic psychological needs that humans have that motivates 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 more than external rewards to accomplish this, intrinsic motivation is more important, and that’s sort of where I want to get too. SDT aligns with my goals with 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 when we have all three of these we feel fulfilled or determined to achieve something. These needs are deep rooted in to the human mind, it comes from ages of survival learnings.
The current state of the digital world disrupts all three to extremes. It provides an illusion of autonomy veiled in personalisation and disguised rewards and guilt. It provides competence to the levels where original skill of any field is so coveted. And 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 out of 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 is because you’re being led to do it. Surveillance capitalism and platform capitalism ensure your every step on the internet is planned so that you feel like you’re in a dream land and every wish of yours is being fulfilled. Did you think about getting a hair cut and googled places to go to, you’re going to find amazing deals for hair cuts the next time you go online ( it happened to me). Did you think of watching a movie and you found your Netflix home page full of stuff you like. Awesome how many movies did you watch that day? Do you see the pattern here?
You are making a choice 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 of the world are building the architecture and experiences of the internet so that you walk where they want you to, but 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? You’re answer would be it feels cool to connect with my friends everyday. User engagement in snapchat significantly increased since streaks were introduced and research shows that this form of gamification is psychologically affecting people, through phenomenon such as FOMO and security threats. The bottom line, personal autonomy is a myth these days, with the amount of internet footprint you have left through the years, you’re 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. I’ve seen a phenomenal growth in the number of self taught programmers, developers and writers in the recent years. I myself have learnt so much stuff online, but 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 to improve self esteem and collective growth, but for an individual, not so much. If everyone says they have so many projects online and can write business proposals expertly how do 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? While competence is increasing, so are the standards, the latter exponentially so. 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 differentiate yourself in an age of true expert supremacy
Coming to relatedness, my god! There’s so much good out of this, it really hurts me to criticise this development. I’m able to talk to my parents from the other side of the world and stay in touch with friends and other family. I can keep a track of what’s happening in their lives. Relatedness has been redefined in so many ways and in so many scales its fascinated 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 including cultural collectivism, solidarity for idiotic things and misinformation. The internet has so many opinions and often you’re exposed to so contrasting ones in such sincere tones, you will never know which to believe. I’m not saying the people of the internet rub their opinions on you. But as humans its 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 to.
I like to think that I have good judgement 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 how many stories there are of people doing dangerous things because they saw it on the internet. I once did worked on a project about how mass media influenced Indian Youth on romance standards. What I learnt was shocking, such unrealistic expectations are being set in mass media and without discerning the truth out of them people are blindly following it. 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 set of population that can discern which are good and bad.
- Self determination theory has three things that it states as the primary psychological needs for human:
- autonomy, competence, relatedness.
- feeling like you have a choice and willingly endorsing your behaviour
- Experiencing mastery and being effective in your activity
- Feeling a sense of belongingness and connection with others
- These needs are deep rooted into the human mind, it comes from ages or survival learnings
- The current state of the digital world disrupts all of this to extreme extents.
- autonomy is questionable at the best, people are being influenced in so many ways and for so many reasons. personal autonomy is becoming a myth due to surveillance capitalism, there are so many bad things coming out of it
- competence is moving so fast towards a positive end, it has become super easy to learn and master anything in the world, people are starting to become experts at so many things relying on AI and its powers. Cal Newport in his book deep work shares that only three kinds of people can survive in this age: list those. That is so true now-a-days
- belongingness and connection have also risen to phenomenal scales but it is debatable whether this is good or bad. stereotypes and internet collectivism has grown, in a few ways it is good, solidarity is good to act together, but at the same time, individuals experience negative effects of this on an equally large scale. FOMO, vulnerability, escapism have been seen to rise, cyber bullying, phishing, a lot of negative activity related to romantic activities on the internet have also seen phenomenal growth.
- with so many people always monitoring your behaviour and with so many of them having opinions on everything ( sometimes absurd ones), self-expression and freedom of speech are becoming scarce. Every word you say can be over analysed and it is always wrong with someone.
- internet has become a shitty place to exist.
- the things that are motivating us to survive and achieve have been disrupted on such fundamental levels.
- This is the typical existence of an individual in the digital world.
- In that paper they define what personal autonomy is and emphasise on the facts that increasingly technical systems are making it possible to determine what users prefer and customising it as such. Organisations that are in the surveillance and platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism focusses on collecting data and using it to manipulate and influence human behaviour and platform capitalism is forcing more and more users to rely on specific platforms.
- A typical user creates an account for a service or gets onto the internet and scrolls through specific apps or websites, every aspect of that scroll is monitored and stored. Everything done on the internet is stored and then modelled using exceptionally intelligent models to predict things. This knowledge is then applied to change your behaviour, you are shown things that you like, might engage with or might purchase. It’s really smart and simple, but insanely powerful.
- And the important is that we cannot remove these completely, because these are necessary for our survival. These things have utility and abstaining from these things will be similar to taking an oath of non-violence in the Paleolithic age. You’ll not die or perish, but you’ll stay where you are and maybe even move backwards. Every aspect of life is tied to one of these things and its 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 important to recognise your behaviour and analyse 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 of these are unnecessary and disguised. All of these are made such that there is very minimal friction in entertaining them, a single click is all that’s needed and you’re down a hole. My roommate the other day told me that he did not know what happened to an hour, all he wanted to do was watch Instagram for 5 mins before sleeping. I had a good laugh.
- Engaging in such behaviour without thinking or looking forward is the surest way detriment. You’re hardwired to go after the largest and bright looking fruit due to your ancestors, but in this digital age, that would result in not only the loss of time, but also a damage to your cognition, memory, intelligence and you will also add a few points to the addiction scoreboard.
- So, what should an individual do in the digital world? Be intentional about what they do!
As I said the fundamental psychological needs of humans are disrupted in such fundamental ways, it is time for caution and awareness. And the important thing is that we cannot remove these completely, because these are necessary for our survival. These things have utility and abstaining from these things will be similar to taking an oath of non-violence in the Paleolithic age. You’ll not die or perish, but you’ll stay where you are and maybe even move backwards. Every aspect of life is tied to one of these things and its 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 important to recognise your behaviour and analyse 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 of these are unnecessary and disguised. All of these are made such that there is very minimal friction in entertaining them, a single click is all that’s needed and you’re down a hole. We must learn to discern what is right and what is wrong, these are subjective and we must learn to define what is right and what is 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.