Ramón del Castillo

🦔 A group of Princeton researchers is calling Big Tech's extraction of human attention "human fracking." The analogy: just as oil companies pump high-pressure chemicals into the ground to force out petroleum, tech companies pump endless streams of addictive content into our faces to force out attention, which they collect and sell. 70% of the world's population now has a smartphone. Globally, people spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens. Among young people in wealthy countries, the number is higher. The essay argues this is "a world-spanning land-grab into human consciousness, which big tech is treating as a vast, unclaimed territory, ripe for sacking and empire." The authors point out that environmental politics didn't exist in 1950. By 1970 it was a global force. They argue a similar shift is coming for attention. People across the political spectrum, left and right, all agree something is wrong with a world where everyone scrolls endlessly through algorithmic feeds while trillion-dollar corporations deploy military-grade technology to keep children hooked. My Take The fracking metaphor captures the extraction mindset. Oil frackers don't care what happens to the land after they've pulled out the oil. Tech companies don't care what happens to your attention span after they've monetized it. The externalities get dumped on individuals and society while the profits flow to shareholders. This connects to everything I've been posting. AI is supposed to deliver productivity gains and free up human time. Instead, the same companies are designing systems to capture as much of that time as possible. The product isn't AI. The product is us. Our attention is being fracked so that someone else can sell it. And just like with oil, we won't fully understand the damage until the landscape is already ruined. Hedgie🤗