ActiveTech @ActiveTechOrg

Thanks for calling him out; sadly his sickness pervades most of the non-innovative business world, who are not only poor forecasters, but most often lack any vision to appreciate any type of business / idea value that is not precisely represented with historical data--you can't predict the performance of a new category with old category data, duh. I expect the same is true of business categories as is for event categories. These people only coddle us and themselves by editorializing out the gap in our complacency that prevented us from predicting the event after the fact by saying they knew it all along.

While Google has stripped us all of our anonymity, our right to be forgotten, and our right to forget, it uses own massive resources, technology, and lawyers to cover it's own digital trail. Read the NY Times article entitled: "How Google Spent 15 Years Creating a Culture of Concealment" Trying to avoid antitrust suits, Google systematically told employees to destroy messages, avoid certain words and copy the lawyers as often as possible.

We must recognize that passive digital technology use can be a destructive addiction Unplug solutions must integrate habit formation mechanics or they will fail to subvert addictions. Further, the social acceptability of digital addiction stops us from appreciating the systemic, acute, and existential nature of the problem. This also means no serious therapies exist beyond homegrown solutions. Problematically, the most intuitive solutions to digital addiction for instant-gratification junkies are speciously attractive quick-fixes that ultimately backfire. The seemingly innocuous nature retreat, as attention restoration therapy, while a crucial and effective first-step detox, is not a stand-in for holistic treatment. It requires a full course of medication, not just the first pill to cure sickness. Geographical isolation alone without internal discipline may force us to unplug, but all we’ve really done is to get temporary relief at the cost of reducing our addiction tolerance. Leaving rehab and re-immersing ourselves in our digital lives with no follow-through plan will almost certainly result in an addiction-deepening relapse. Products as simple as faraday bag for our mobile phone can nurture foundational habits upon which we can build a robust unplugging discipline that can help us in our modern digital metropolises.

@adhdjesse I find that "overwhelmed" feeling can often be attached to some behavioral addiction that is not being addressed effectively. x.com/ActiveTechOrg/…

ActiveTech @ActiveTechOrg

2 years ago

We can all sense something’s wrong with our digital routine. At one time or another, we’ve all deployed digital countermeasures: we deleted email, news, and social apps, used online time limiters, or killed our internet connection. But eventually, without a comprehensive plan

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@AuDHDExec I try to take time to unplug and remember that even if i failed once to keep trying to build up the discipline of my routine. x.com/ActiveTechOrg/…

ActiveTech @ActiveTechOrg

2 years ago

We can all sense something’s wrong with our digital routine. At one time or another, we’ve all deployed digital countermeasures: we deleted email, news, and social apps, used online time limiters, or killed our internet connection. But eventually, without a comprehensive plan

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@MindMatterr This is a fantastic list with unplugging tactics that actually work, especially when you couple them all together into a daily routine. x.com/ActiveTechOrg/…

ActiveTech @ActiveTechOrg

2 years ago

We can all sense something’s wrong with our digital routine. At one time or another, we’ve all deployed digital countermeasures: we deleted email, news, and social apps, used online time limiters, or killed our internet connection. But eventually, without a comprehensive plan

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We can all sense something’s wrong with our digital routine. At one time or another, we’ve all deployed digital countermeasures: we deleted email, news, and social apps, used online time limiters, or killed our internet connection. But eventually, without a comprehensive plan to address our cravings, our addiction subverts these restrictions. Digital addiction is a recalcitrant hydra because addiction is no glitch, but rather more like a feature of normal brain functioning. Plastic neural processes generate rigid behaviors (The Brain That Changes Itself, Doidge, 2007, pp. 208-209). Our repeated failures at unplugging and our relapses shouldn’t deter us—quitting just takes practice. Smokers fail to quit many times before finally succeeding. Continued attempts to cultivate a disciplined routine of unplugging despite failed attempts shows that we can recognize the problem, take control, and save ourselves. Image of Digital Hydra by Swedish sculptor Olav Lunde

@blightersort @kmanguward Yea but like if you don’t want to get your posts deboosted on x you need to say Elon’s is the biggest.

Microphone check.. 1, 2, 3. We're looking for our people. Let us know if you can hear us. @ThomasSowell @kmanguward @iamjohnmackey @SteveForbesCEO @radleybalko @feeonline @joldmcginn @JohnHospers @jeffreytucker @GovGaryJohnson @naitwit @LPNational

UK politician Paddy Ashdown said “Where power goes governance must follow” in a Ted talk about the greatest challenges humanity will face this century (Ashdown, @paddyashdown, 2011). Our unaddressed digital addictions demonstrate that neither governments nor technology providers are capable or willing to provide that governance on their own. Firstly, no government or watchdog has the skill or power to match the pace of technological innovation and accompanying exploitation. Secondly, techno-military-industrial complex theory points out that the mutual backscratchery between tech and government makes it impossible for them to break ranks. Technology, telecom, and internet service provider products are the tools of global market access, power projection, and mass surveillance. The indomitable allure of digital surveillance tools is a power vacuum that has sucked in consumers, businesses, and governments. Our digital addictions damage our ability to read, concentrate, and learn effectively (Carr, @roughtype, 2019, pp. 115-116). Social media, in particular, increases depression and suicidal ideation (McCluskey, 2021); these negative effects are worse for the most vulnerable amongst us (Peters & Brandom, @jaypeters, @russellbrandom, Slides 24-25). Children say neither law enforcement officers, nor teachers and social media sites can do as much as parents to protect them. (Pew Research Center, @pewresearch, @FactTank, @pewinternet, @pewjournalism, @pewglobal, 2022, p. 12). It’s on us—to assist government and technology providers—to protect our children. The democratization of technology demands the democratization of the technology resistance—where power goes self-governance must follow.

Where power goes self-governance must follow Follow this thread 🧵to see exactly what I mean. “Every technology is an expression of the human will [to] expand our power and control over our circumstances—over nature, over time and distance [and] over one another” (What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Carr (@roughtype), 2019, p. 45). The history of technology is the story of wills to power, a repeating cycle of profitable exploitation. 👇

@KnightCamila, and @stevenbjohnson I enjoyed building this interesting argument based on inspiration from both of your areas work. I summarize my argument flow below: 1. Expect regulatory slippage around new tech amounting to exploitation potential 2. Likely mirrors innovation curve 3. If we see "superlinear scaling" in tech innovations made possible by massive global networks unprecedented in history 4. We may expect "superlinear scaling" in at very least the potential for exploitation (One could argue for the same scaling in regulatory tools, but I think a base assumption of the argument is that that governments will be slower to catch up to the speed of private tech co innovations). Would be grateful to know what you think of the argument, does it hold water, and if it needs additional supports please advise what data would help.

“Technological advancement plays a key role in fostering the prevalence of modern slavery…. Today, contemporary forms of slavery have been heightened due to the advancement of technology and widespread, highly unregulated social networking platforms.” (The impact of technology on contemporary slavery in the 21st century, Camillah Agak Knight, @KnightCamila, 2020) We can likely expect a degree of slippage in protections from exploitation as new technologies that are not well understood by regulators enter the market. It is therefore reasonable to expect that a degree of exploitation will always mirror the technological innovation curve. Furthermore, the rate of technological innovation exhibits ‘superlinear scaling’ making larger cities orders of magnitude more innovative than smaller ones (Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson, @stevenbjohnson, 2010, p. 10). Therefore, if the effects of innovation are compounded by historically unprecedented global networks creating supermassive innovation communities, this may amount to similarly unprecedented 'superlinear scaling' to both regulatory slippage and exploitation potential. The diagram below from Where Good Ideas Come From demonstrates how innovation scales most rapidly in openly networked environments.

Make time to unplug every day Our best defense against the digital addictions that make us vulnerable to technology providers who profit from our personal data is to cultivate a personal discipline of unplugging. Unplugging is a necessary low-tech counterpart to high-tech data privacy solutions. Hi-tech countermeasures to the Goliath of well-capitalized technology providers who pilfer our data are unreliable as a standalone solution. This is firstly because both the key benefit and vulnerability of any network is open-connectivity. “If computer security is inadequate or personnel are untrustworthy, there is no hope for privacy (Neumann, 1932, p. 189).” The first response of technology providers who have been hacked is to double down and deploy more technology. The sickening and hypocritical part is that very often the hacked firm, desperate to re-establish trust with customers, has the audacity to use their own data breach as a marketing campaign appeal, proving the very real data-security dangers, as they ask to deepen the customer relationship. These recent customer data breaches should undermine our trust in some of the most trusted providers of advanced technology: · Fortinet, “Global leader in cybersecurity”—12 September 2024 · Okta, provider of “seamless and secure identity services and authentication“—19 October 2024 · US Government Department of Transport—12 May 2024 · Western Digital data storage provider—3 April 2024 · Slack, “Enterprise-grade data Security solutions” provider—31 December 2023 · LastPass password manager who promises to “protect your digital and work life across every device, from anywhere” –1 December 2023 · LastPass, earlier hack—25 Aug 2022 😊 --Data from techco breach list. Hi-tech countermeasures are only as trustworthy as their networks. Secondly, high-tech external resources are subject to scarcity—availability is not guaranteed. Technology that is expensive or hard to operate and repair is beyond the reach of average users (Dennett, 2017). Just as software with lower system requirements lowers entry-barriers paving the way for a larger user install base, a low-tech unplug movement can be always-on and accessible to everyone anytime, anywhere. Caption: Attention Restoration Theory (ART) is the theory that people can learn to concentrate better (or restore their concentration abilities) by spending time in Nature or in a natural environment, or even by only looking at Nature scenery.

Passive technology use backseats our personal agenda. “Every technology is an expression of the human will [to] expand our power and control over our circumstances—over nature, over time and distance [and] over one another” (Carr (@roughtype), 2019, p. 45). While there are good distractions, passive digital addictions can become parasitic exploitations rather than mutually beneficial relationships. You needn’t believe in subliminal advertising to acknowledge that the only true objective of digital marketing is to change perceptions (Orlowski (@jefforlowski, @tristanharris, @shoshanazuboff, @jeffseibert, @Moonalice, @aza, @cynthiamw, @tkendall, @rosenstein, @mathbabedotorg, @Randima_F. @gchaslot, @noUpside, @aroetter@JonHaidt), 14:18-14:59). The concept of "neural mirroring as a model for attention paying” demonstrates how "the subject of our focus reshapes our brain to its point of view” (Goldhaber (@mgoldh), 2006). Long before neuroscience could prove it, poets, playwrights, and hypnotists throughout history mastered storytelling’s art of lulling the mind’s conscious watchguard to sleep so that they may whisper directly to our subconscious. Just because an attention experience is top-down doesn’t imply we’re in total control of our learning, but clearly when streaming bottom-up content we’re not steering the ship (Heath, 2012, p. 56). Passive addictions amount to the loss of self-control and agency. They lead to the low-intensity erosion of personal freedoms. A pervasive surveillance marketing culture makes us so addicted and dependent on automation that we can never unplug 24/7 is an overt assault on our autonomy.