I can’t point to one specific moment that motivated this book.
It’s been more of a collection of moments…
- finding myself doomscrolling when putting my kids to bed. Too exhausted to pay more attention
- looking forward to this moment of drifting off, when I wouldn’t have to pay attention anymore and could just give in to letting my mind wander and be guided by the algorithm
I also kind of like anaesthetics…maybe that’s weird, maybe it’s common. I have no idea. But at the times I did get a general anaesthetic, I always felt like this tension…on the one hand, of course I would rather not have surgery, not face the risk of the general anaesthetic. On the other hand, there was no more choice and nothing I could do or decide anymore. All I could do is let go along with the process. I also had this sensation when going bungee jumping, but that’s a different story, for another time.
And then…I thought about how if this is what it does to me, someone who loves reading, writing and thinking, what will this do to people who are less inclined? Who are more tired, more stressed, feel more pressure in the real world? Friends told us about their teenage kids dealing with social media pressures.
In my research work, I came across multiverse analyses and somehow, slowly this idea emerged about how much more powerful social media would be if the algorithm didn’t have to socially engineer actual engagement from real humans through clickbait, through reminders and notifications…why scrape the barrel of human attention, if you could synthetically engineer universes of attention, specifically created with laser-like precision each individual user? What if you applied multiverse analysis to maximise human attention?
And then there were other moments:
- going through Toronto airport years ago, I saw this family having lunch “together”, all on their phones. This image somehow haunted me
- seeing this play out on subways, trains and on streets again and again…people just swiping, watching, consuming
I think that’s where the ideas for this book came from. Plus I think I can guess how the executives in the social media companies think, how they manage this tension for themselves, probably keeping their own kids off screens, but getting other people’s kids and the kids’ parents hooked.