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Law in the Internet Society
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The Benefits of Boredom: Reclaiming agency in an attention economySurrounded by NoiseFollowing several in-class discussions touching on ever present digital advertisements, the modern currency of attention, and professor Moglen's refusal to carry a cell phone (albeit from reasons in addition to those discussed here) I slowly began to grow more cognizant of the torrent of audiovisual information I was processing on a daily basis. I realized that this change occurred gradually over the span of my lifetime; my first handheld phone was a middle school birthday gift, and its functionality was limited to calls and texting. I recall vividly my initial disdain for the technology, as it was essentially a means of my parents keeping track of me while outside the home. However, as time passed and I was upgraded to a smartphone in high school, my usage of social media progressively increased, coming to a head during my senior year of university, when staying secluded in my basement-apartment during COVID shutdowns drove me to seek out any facsimile of human connection. This predominantly took the form of Youtube and Instagram based content; cooking shows, news broadcasts, educational podcasts, anything that allowed me to hear another human voice and procrastinate the dreadfully boring highway interchange I was meant to design as my senior year capstone project. What began as an unfortunate compromise between the need to mitigate the spread of contagious disease and normal everyday human interaction however, continued to persist within my daily habits once the threat of coronavirus was summarily forgotten writ large. I began checking my phone more often, scrolling through social media feeds compulsively, and rarely spent a moment of my day without some kind of podcast or music playing in the background. My morning routine now invariably consists of promptly opening gmail on my phone, followed by pointless Instagram browsing that wastes 20 minutes on a good day. And as class discussion began to address the "engagement" centric design of social media, I was struck by the uniquely abnormal position society had placed cell phone users in as compared to all preceding generations; having for the first time endowed nearly every person with a device algorithmically engineered to produce a never ending stream of optimally entertaining content. Beyond my own subjective experience, preliminary research has indicated impacts of short format social media use are akin to addiction, findings that are unsurprising given my anecdotal experience.The Extraction Imperative and It's ConsequencesThese hardly unique yet still personal realizations mapped strongly onto concepts articulated in "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism". Zuboff dubs the clicking and browsing that has taken the place of the quiet separation I enjoyed from the digital world in middle school the "behavioral surplus"; user data gathered from the ordinary engagement with either social media, search engines, or advertisements that underpins the existence of targeted advertising, whose profitability in turn creates and subsidizes the imperative to extract further data from its user base. Time spent unengaged is inherently unprofitable, and the logical conclusion of the new attention economy is to maximize the expropriation of human experience; attempting to engulf as many hours of as many users' days as possible. What I personally experienced was, in retrospect, not only the expropriation of my experiences, but a dopamine fueled incentive structure to facilitate further collection, what Zuboff refers to as the elemental right to a future tense being stripped away when the proverbial hand of my attention fits within the glove of social media like a gambler at a slot machine. However, while Zuboff offers a robust historical analysis of how this particular tendril of the parasite with the mind of god came to be, and provides a foundation upon which a conversation regarding industrialism and behavioral modification may be constructed, she is unfortunately silent as to prospective means of individual and sociological resistance to the addictive effects of the modern attention-slot machines of social media. This is the particular question I am interested in; how ought we mitigate the known deleterious effects of experiential expropriation on a broad scale?Framing Expropriation Through the Lens of AddictionThe contextualization of the mechanisms of experience expropriation as addictive substances is only natural, given both their studied impacts and the fact that they were specifically created with "engagement" in mind; addiction is a feature, not a bug. This framing is further instructive in potential future remedies and the correct social attitude to adopt when engaging the issue of social media addiction; namely, one of treatment rather than vilification. The trope of the 50-something year-old parent disappointedly telling their teenage children that the root of all their woes is excessive phone use is a common punchline, but also reflects the relatively cavalier attitude we have adopted towards this new form of addiction because of its broad normalization and lack of comprehensive study. An AA program has 12 steps, not just one where we tell alcoholics to stop drinking, but none of the complexity or nuance with which we discuss other addictions is imparted to social media use; which is particularly disheartening given the vast majority of users are children and young adults. Even if nuance were introduced into the public discussion regarding excessive social media use, the root of the problem remains unaddressed. Few social programs exist that address the issue, and only address those whose everyday function is impaired because of use; leaving the majority who still feel the effects of behavioral modification unaddressed. And given the relatively poor state of policy relating to drug addiction in the United States, it appears unlikely that experience expropriation will receive much attention. Solutions therefore, must come individually; some early one take the form of application that block access to social media through a minimalist interface.First step is a hard edit. This draft is wordy snd often relies on cliche. You can get almost a quarter of the space back, which will be useful. The problem that so concerns you has an easy solution with which you begin the draft: don't use a smartassphone. Do your computing sitting still, using a good keyboard and a screen arranged to benefit your posture and eyesight, on a computer that isn't full of sensors directed to spy on you, driven by software you can't read or understand. You no longer produce much usable surplus (some care with your software and you produce none). Your computing habits and with them your mental life will improve. No additional charge. You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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