The Problem:

Our Dysfunctional Distraction

Blinded by the fascinating possibilities of modern technology, we have allowed ourselves to become slaves of our own inventions. The tight grip and control that technology has on our minds and behavior is now almost fully accomplished. We are willingly letting computers, algorithms, and artificial intelligence run our lives leaving us with only the illusion of personal freedom.

With the launch of the internet and social media to connect everybody, humans were expected to become smarter as a species. With access to all the information in the world within seconds, one could only imagine the potential for intelligent progress our species could have. Now, nearly 30 years after the public launch of the internet, we would be expected to have overcome our lack of knowledge, intelligence, and collaborative skills to face the challenges on Earth lying ahead. Does this seem to be the case? Unlikely!

The digital world did, as expected, only become an add-on to the existing capitalist system. Consequently, creative digital projects were rapidly transformed into profit-optimized tools to reach humans, users, consumers. Large companies grew larger and more powerful and bought up and either assimilated or closed down the inventions of others. Today nearly all connected humans use only the services of just a handful of companies.

Those companies are exceptionally good at selling to each of us the illusion of freedom and connectedness. In exchange of these illusions, we willingly give them our personal data and privacy. In reality they are selling us distraction and robbing from us the only truly valuable phenomenon we have in our lives: time!

Let’s put our collective time into perspective. A child is born today. By the time he or she reaches the age of 19, humanity has collectively spent as much time on their mobile phones as it takes for the universe to develop from the Big Bang into its current form. Every day we are collectively spending what amounts to 1 million years on social media. 131 million people that have viewed a 15 seconds video of a “dancing” cat have collectively spent 23,148 days or 63 years of human time on it. 1 billion videos are being viewed every day on just one platform. Quantity matters to the world of capital. In fact, in the end, it is the only thing that matters to it. And you are a number, a digit, in that world.

Oh, just to throw one more number into the game: 7. That is the amount of years it takes you to have spent 1 entire year on your mobile phone. In other words, humans will in a lifetime spend at least 10 entire years of their time on a mobile phone. What did you do during those 10 years of your life?

In this vast ocean of self-indulgence and superficiality, the single user will drown while craving for popularity, to get noticed, to get likes and followers. But among billions of photos and videos in an algorithmic system that is optimized to create viral trends that connect users with advertisers, our sense of uniqueness disappears into quantitative numbers. We are just following along with everyone else, copying and pasting their behavior.

We become worker ants. One single ant has no significance for the colony. But together they make up a whole that matters. It is this entirety of single entities which is hijacked by a few like-minded players. Being able to decide the rules of the game by being in charge of this entirety of individuals makes them psychologically in charge of the minds of every single entity: you and me.

Since advertisement was made a default always-switched-on feature of human life, you can only escape it by paying your way out of it. You are in fact paying for the advertisement delivery boy to NOT deliver the ads at your door. Ads that are driven by the inexhaustible desire to constantly expand the sales of things we don’t need in order to increase the number of digits on a bank account. And to hire more low-paid workers to do the real work of the machinery in an unnecessary sector that only puts more resource pressure on our biosphere.

Using addictive dopamine-releasing algorithms to steal our continuous interest and focus on meaningless content, they are making humans into franticly swiping zombies that are constantly served with the “blood” they need to function. With never satisfied needs for increasingly higher doses of visual dopamine, we lose our ability to focus, reflect, analyze, immerse into meaningfulness, and think critically and independently at a higher cognitive level than that of mere opinions and emotions. We are becoming blind passive functions in a life we have no control over.

We have been convinced to give away our personal data and the usage of our precious time on Earth to servers that have you and your personal life stored as consumer #1876276378. This is necessary because big tech sold out to capital and their share holders own you. Not physically or as a property. But psychologically and emotionally.

Young generations of today have been hijacked by algorithmic distraction that offers nothing but a short-lived escapism from real life. A real life that only serves them a future of blind consumerism, unaffordable housing, ludicrous education fees, expensive health care, expensive food and energy on a degrading planet and in an insecure world order driven by fear, greed, and hatred.

By tapping into the human psychology and its love for visual indulgence and social belonging, social psychological mechanisms are used by the elites and authoritarian humans as normative tools for social control, subordinance, and conformity embedded into cultural discourse. The Great Distraction is used by despots to solidify their grip of social control over the masses through emotional manipulation and information control that favours their version of truth and reality.

Consequently, humans are getting lost in reality and are no longer capable of differentiating between real and unreal, between facts and lies, between right and wrong. Not because we lack access to information, but because we don’t have any useful tools for making rationally sense of it all.

Social media are serving us fragments of realities of real life wars and human suffering alongside video clips of girls dancing and lip-syncing followed by ads of vacuum cleaners. This vast ocean of visual dopamine makes us numb and lost in a world that seems more and more absurd and surreal.

30 years into the internet, humans are barely scratching the surface of our intelligence potential. We have, in fact, dived even deeper downwards into the darkness of ignorance, noise, and distraction, by letting ourselves become even more enslaved to the system of capital and profit-first.

We. Want. To. Change. That.

We still believe in the extraordinary potential of our species. But it can only be achieved if we decide to regain control over our own lives and pull our minds together and start collaborating around meaningful phenomena. Therefore we need to go back to what it truly means to be human – and to apply the tools and properties that evolution has given us: the most advanced and complex phenomenon on Earth: our brain!

With a change in our beliefs, our focus, and our behavior, we can go from more to better. From quantity to quality. From escapism to immersion. From Humanity 2.0 to Humanity 3.0.

The Solution:

Empower the Synergy of our Minds

A first step towards unleashing our potential as an intelligent species is to explore, identify and capture the synergy produced through our interaction and collaboration around meaningful phenomena. We focus on what we consider the core feature and property of our species as evolved through evolution: the power of our brain to learn and share knowledge and skills in complex social environments. We then add a layer of focus into the human networks of interaction, like a sieve that separates useful and synergetic elements from noise.

Humans learn and teach knowledge through social and emotional intelligence. The one crucial property that humans possess, as compared to machines, is phenomenal consciousness. The personal qualia through which we all perceive, interpret, understand, and project reality in our minds is a highly complex and particular feature of biological life.

All the information in the world is useless unless it is processed, understood, and used by humans in a fruitful manner. Google gives us access to the information, but it is of no use to us unless we have the right tools and mechanisms to collectively make sense of it all. Being intelligent is not only about having knowledge or access to knowledge. It is even more about being able to process, understand, and use knowledge intelligently. Likewise, the knowledge of one individual is of no use, unless it can be shared with the world and further developed and used in collaboration with others.

In order for this to happen, we need to develop new spaces and platforms that are stripped from capital-centred motives and quick-fix dopamine algorithms. Consequently, Mindfy has decided to develop platforms that open up new enabling spaces for the creation and sharing of meaningful knowledge, creativity and skills with the collaborative component at the centre. In addition to these, we also can’t help but launching some stand-alone projects that trigger and provoke our established “truths” and perceptions of the world – with the aim of getting ourselves out of our distractions.

With such a big chunk of our lives that we spend on the internet, on our mobile phones, on social media: let’s spend it wisely! We don’t get another chance.