Hello again and Happy New Year to you all! I’m excited about 2022 and I hope you are too. There’s a sense of hopefulness in the air, and I think that it’s about more than just being happy to see 2021 in the rear-view mirror. 2021 was a hard year, no doubt, but it was a year in which many of us asked deeper questions than we have in years past … and we started to figure things out.
That’s certainly the case here at The RISK Rituals. We wrapped up 2021 with a much better understanding of our digital media world. Here’s how I would summarize it:
1) Anything that you see on a screen is a form of media.
2) The digital media world is built on data, statistics, and algorithms using the same math (and business model) as casinos.
3) The algorithms are optimized to create behaviors that, given the choice, we would not consciously choose for ourselves.
4) The anecdotal evidence suggests that the algorithms are based largely on the techniques and methods of propaganda and behavioral psychology.
5) We don’t get to see the algorithms, and therefore we don’t get to understand the (false) choices that we are being offered.
6) It’s our money and it’s our attention.
7) We can and should withhold our money and our attention from digital services that conceal their intent and have a track record of conscious deception (goodbye, Facebook and Robinhood).
At the simplest level, think about how many times a day you turn to a screen to do a simple thing, such as check the weather. Then, all of a sudden, you realize 10 minutes have passed and you have completely forgotten about your original intention of checking the weather.
You may not have even opened the weather app. Instead, your intention was diverted, and your attention was captured by some badge, banner, message, or email that took you down a winding road of hypertext transfers you never intended to go down.
Disturbing, isn’t it? Well, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Like millions of people, I thought I’d try the new Apple Watch that came out in the fall – a little pre-Christmas present to myself. I first rejected the Apple Watch nearly a decade ago after I took a private workshop with the now infamous BJ Fogg, who heads the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford. BJ is the guy who taught the Stanford course taken by all the young tech leaders who went on to use his behavior design methods to build platform empires that design our behaviors for us.
In spite of this dubious distinction, I know BJ to be a very sincere and powerful advocate for humane technology. BJ wasn’t the one who used so-called growth hacking to build the Google and Facebook empires. He did, however, show them how to do it.
When I was working with BJ, it was 2015 and the Apple Watch had just come out. BJ had excitedly tried it and then put it in his dresser drawer after a couple of weeks because it was constantly reminding him to do things like “stand up” when he was driving his car.
I thought maybe, six years later, the watch had improved, so I excitedly bought a new Apple Watch Series 7. It didn’t take even two weeks to figure out that nothing had changed other than the sophistication of the user experience. I completely agree with this author that, “The Apple Watch is the most anxiety-inducing device I’ve ever owned.”
It’s particularly disappointing and dismaying to see this because I really believe the technology that the Apple Watch represents has the potential to improve our lives if we could use it the way that we want to. But we can’t because Apple controls the algorithms that run the Apple Watch user experience and for some reason (or reasons), it benefits Apple for their watch to increase our anxiety instead of improving our lives.
Why would Apple benefit from increasing anxiety? Is it just a side effect or is it an intentional strategy? I think that it’s some of both.
Apple has a motivation to keep you in their ecosystem rather than truly liberating you with authentically valuable data and control. When you get an Apple Watch, they want that device to lead you back into your iPhone. That’s why they have the Apple Fitness app and the three circles that their algorithm “reminds” you to “close” every day.
I don’t think that Apple is intentionally trying to create more anxiety in users, but they are definitely working to keep you in their walled garden. If increased anxiety is a side effect of that, then so be it.
What I also know is that when we’re anxious, we tend to buy more stuff in our quest to resolve our anxiety. Anxious consumers are active consumers. We’re not content with what we have, and we’re constantly seeking the next magic bullet that will “fix” our nagging discontent.
It’s a vicious cycle, and I don’t mean to put all the blame on Apple as though Tim Cook is some kind of evil genius who’s greedily rubbing his hands together as he manipulates us behind the scenes. I actually think that Apple is taking some meaningful actions to address some of the worst aspects of the captive-customer economy. But they are far from innocent.
The biggest driver of our current conundrum is the fact that we are buying this stuff hand over fist! There’s only so long we can position ourselves as victims of the systems we’re living in. At some point we have to own it, because the only way change happens is when we own it.
Remember point #6 above? It’s our money and our attention.
When I think about big problems like this, I see them in terms of systems. That should be no surprise since my PhD is in systems science.
Today’s consumer technology system is broken. It no longer suits our contemporary needs. It’s actually a sub-problem of a larger systems problem, which is the mass-production factory model that has been the basis of economic growth for the last 250 years.
As much as our technocrats would like to deny it, every individual person is unique. One-size-fits-all, mass-produced solutions are economic juggernauts, but they completely disregard the nuances of individual situations. These solutions also consolidate economic power in the hands of a few.
At this point our industrial and technological infrastructure has advanced sufficiently far that we can start to move away from the highly centralized one-size-fits-all economic paradigm we’re living under but that change isn’t going to come from those who hold that centralized economic power.
That change starts with us … and it all starts with each of us taking the time to create a space in which we can formulate our own intentions and then direct our attention to the things that will help us realize those intentions. This has to happen outside of technology.
We need to reconnect with values, purpose, and qualities. Those connections arise from things like family, relationships, education, parenting, mindfulness, prayer, religion, nature, gardening, conscious breathing, physical disciplines, and, yes, entrepreneurship.
Technology is never going to make us whole. In fact, it has an economic interest in making sure that we are as agitated and discontent as possible. We have to seek wholeness elsewhere.
When we approach technology from a place of contentment and wholeness, we understand that technology is a tool we can use for our own intentions. And we can be more mindful of how today’s technology is constantly disrupting our intention, capturing our attention, and modifying our behavior.
I was in the grocery store over the holidays, and my shopping cart offered me a promise from Apple in exchange for buying an Apple gift card:
Sorry, but no. Apple is serving up a lot of things, but endless joy isn’t one of them – let alone “endless joy for all.” Anyone who’s buying into the promise that Apple offers endless joy is going to be paying Apple a lot of money for a long time. Endless joy cannot be found in Apple’s technology or in any other technology.
We must remember that technology is a tool. It’s like a hammer. A hammer is a really useful tool, but would any hammer maker ever claim that their hammers offer “endless joy for all”?
This notion which Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg would like us to believe – that their consumer technology somehow represents an entirely new world where we can and will happily live out our new lives free from all the constraints that our ancestors had to live with for millennia – is an extremely dangerous marketing campaign.
Seriously, does anyone really want to live in Zuck’s metaverse? (And does anyone really believe that Cook and Zuck are somehow polar opposites, whose future worlds we must choose between?)
Technology today is a classic risk-reward decision. As we learn more about the associated risks, we have to weigh them against the potential rewards, and we have to do our best to minimize the risks while maximizing the rewards. Sound familiar?
It’s up to us to change the trajectory of today’s technology and mass-produced solutions that don’t unlock the full value of the innovations we are privileged to live amongst. Here are some of the things that I’m doing to minimize the risks of technology:
- Not investing in big tech – they’re big enough already.
- Turning off push notifications and badges on my devices.
- Spending time away from all devices and screens.
- Investing in startups that are developing more human-centric technology – here are a couple of great startups that I’ve invested in: One Creation and Digi.me.
- Developing new wealth-tech that doesn’t require captive customers to create economic value.
- Writing this newsletter.
I use technology heavily every day. I love it. I don’t want to get rid of it. I want to get more from it by using it on my terms instead of it using me on its terms.
Again, it’s not an “us against them” problem. It’s a systems problem, and I increasingly see how the current processes and systems of capital formation are deeply entrenched in the captive customer and mass-production business models of the industrial era. (Thanks, Doc and Joyce Searls!)
Moreover, I think the search for new and better models of capital formation is a big part of the impetus behind cryptocurrencies and DeFi in general. We need to move some economic power from the center to the edge.
I also think that we’re coming to understand that capital is about more than just currencies. Time, attention, and data are also forms of capital in the digital world, and we increasingly need to make intelligent risk-reward allocation decisions with these resources.
So, here’s to an intention-fueled 2022 with the rallying cry, “It’s our capital.”
P.S. Another ding against the Apple Watch I discovered is that there is no way to turn off its EMFs. I turned off everything I could. I even put it in airplane mode … and it still emitted EMFs at the rate of about 2000 mV/m. For context, my microwave running on high produces about 30,000 mV/m. So, an Apple Watch is like having a miniature always-on microwave attached to your body 24/7. That doesn’t sound like good health to me.