Social media algorithms keep us all hopelessly engaged. The data these platforms gather on us enable feeds to become fine-tuned to our exact interests, on top of turning our smartphones into glorified ad delivery devices. All this seems to be reaching its zenith with AI chatbots, which can masquerade as a close friend, therapist, doctor, and any subject matter expert all at once — keeping many users engaged in hours-long talks as they take the AI’s responses as personal gospel.
In sum, the advent of personal digital technologies, and our ensuing addiction to screens, means that nearly every aspect of our being can be codified, and therefore commodified. Now, one historian is calling this new way of extracting money from human beings “human fracking” — a term that aptly conjures the image of something that is wildly destructive and which works mainly by force-feeding.
“Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetizable black gold to the surface,” writes D Graham Burnett, a professor of history at Princeton University, in an essay for The Guardian, “human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market.”
According to Burnett, who writes with filmmaker Alyssa Loh and organizer Peter Schmidt, human fracking is a “world-spanning land-grab into human consciousness — which big tech is treating as a vast, unclaimed territory, ripe for sacking and empire.” In this empire, we are all “attentional subjects.”
Troves of research has delved into the nefarious effects that this digital war for control over our attention spans has on the brain. Much criticism has been directed towards the innovation of the infinite scroll used in apps, removing a natural stopping point for our minds and preying on our brain’s desire to seek out new information. It gave birth to the phenomenon of “doomscrolling,” and was not the result of an accident, but calculated decision making: an act of human fracking, if you will. Yet more research has uncovered social media’s effects on the brains of children, with a recent study linking screen time on these apps and ADHD. The rapid proliferation of AI-generated slop is almost certainly adding another horrific dimension to this mental health crisis that science is only beginning to sniff at.
How do we even begin to tackle this problem? The answer may not be obvious now, but as Burnett writes, “novel forms of exploitation produce novel forms of resistance,” writes Burnett. He notes how environmental politics didn’t exist a hundred years ago, and that it took a vast cultural shift “to establish the physical environment — the unity of land, water, and air that produces shared life — as a politically tractable object around which diverse groups could organize.” If we allow ourselves to be optimistic for a moment, that shift will also come in regards to human fracking.
More on tech: New Study Finds AI in Schools Is Undermining Kids’ Social and Intellectual Development
The post Tech Corporations Engaging in “Human Fracking” appeared first on Futurism.
